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Posts from ‘February, 2007’

Good Advice on Reader Comments

Rebecca Dube’s advice to readers who comment on the Toronto Globe & Mail includes: 1. Understand that an online discussion is not a free-for-all. Editors like me moderate online discussions for reasons of space, time and basic human decency. This will be difficult for some folks, unfortunately. (Disclosure: Dube’s husband, Jon, is a member of […]

Wall Street Banker to Newspapers: Abandon Hope?

Steven Rattner, in “Red All Over,” says: We’ve had experience in the past — the New York City subways come to mind — with businesses that began as conventional, for-profit corporations, and, for one reason or another, were later rendered unprofitable while still being viewed as essential services. It’s time to apply some creative thinking […]

Relentless Comment Spam

The slime who use blog comment systems to peddle their often-fraudulent crap are innundating this and other blogs with spam. Luckily, the Akismet spam filter traps most of them and you never have to worry about seeing this garbage. But the deluge is such that hundreds are now showing up in the filter each day. […]

Managing Harsh Change

IDG executive Colin Crawford, discussing the media company’s transformation, says: The brutal reality that we’re facing today is the costly process of dismantling and replacing legacy operations and cultures and business models with ones with new and yet to be fully proven business models. However, we face greater risks if we don’t transform our organization […]

CNN's Shallowness

I’m in an airport airline club where a big-screen TV is showing CNN. It’s a split screen. Half is devoted to some meaningless hearing in the Anna Nicole Smith case. The other features a private plane that may or may not be having trouble with landing gear. Last night and the night before I was […]

Directions in News 'Consumption'

Steve Outing collected some opinions for a piece in Editor & Publisher about where news habits are heading. Read them (including a brief comment from me) in “Where News Consumption Is Heading.”

Co-opt or Collaborate?

TV Technology: Corporations Co-opt Citizen Journalism. Aided by the Internet and low-cost digital media acquisition tools, there is no doubt that a handful of talented, dedicated independent media creators have and continue to innovatively challenge the world’s largest corporate media organizations.However, as with most good things, the big guys eventually tried to co-opt it for […]

News War Premieres Tonight

The PBS Frontline series starts in most places tonight. It looks extraordinary.

Interview with Jailed Blogger

Democracy Now has an interview of note: Imprisoned Journalist Josh Wolf Speaks Out From Jail After Over 170 Days Behind Bars. The Josh Wolf case is a disgrace in all kinds of ways, as we’ve noted before.

Citizen Media Distribution Deal

Lost Remote: AP jumps into citizen journalism with NowPublic deal. In effect, with AP’s broad distribution, this is the biggest development so far in the short history of citizen journalism, although Reuter’s recent citizen journalism deal with Yahoo’s You Witness News is a close second. This will be worth watching closely. A key question, plainly, […]