Posts under ‘News Business’

The rumors were true. Infoworld, one of the seminal newsweeklies of the computer age, is folding the paper version “to focus on online and events. Steve Fox. the editor, writes: InfoWorld is not dead. We’re not going anywhere. We are merely embracing a more efficient delivery mechanism –the Web — at InfoWorld.com. You can still […]

Slowly but surely, some U.S. media companies are giving blogs to their audiences. The latest I’ve seen is from MyFoxDC, a Washington, D.C., TV station. As you’ll notice, staff blogs on the right side of the page are complemented with the audience blogs on the left. The quality, as always with such things, is extremely […]

Ad Age: TimesSelect Free for College Students — and Graduates? I assume that grads will do the honest thing and not abuse their .edu addresses, but I also wonder if this is a bit like Microsoft’s “Student & Teacher” editions of software that are way, way cheaper than the versions for everyone else — and […]

David Lazarus of the SF Chronicle, in “Pay-to-play is one way to help save newspapers,” says “it’s time for newspapers to start charging for — or at least controlling — use of our products online.” Lazarus, normally an excellent columnist, gets things almost precisely wrong in this piece. He raises the issue of charging and […]

The Project for Excellence in Journalism has issued its annual State of the News Media report. This year’s identifies seven major trends. (The report calls them new trends even though they are not new, but that’s a quibble.) The trends are: News organizations need to do more to think through the implications of this new […]

Project Red Stripe is a small team set up by The Economist Group, the parent company of the eponymous newspaper. Our mission is to develop truly innovative services online. I’ve met with several members of this team. These are serious, smart folks who have backing from a highly traditional organization — which produces the best […]

Len Witt: Journalists of the World Unite–and Innovate.

We’ve just posted “Frontiers of Innovation in Community Engagement” — a report that looks at how traditional media organizations are starting to involve their audiences in the journalism process. Lisa Williams of Placeblogger and H2otown fame did the heavy lifting for this report, which will evolve as we learn more. Here’s the executive summary: As […]

Washington Post: Buffett Pessimistic About Newspapers. “Simply put, if cable and satellite broadcasting, as well as the Internet, had come along first, newspapers as we know them probably would never have existed.” It’s a sobering assessment from the world’s most famous investor. Here’s his full letter to shareholders. (Note: I’m a Berkshire Hathaway shareholder, as […]

Jack Shafer, in “When bad financial news for newspapers is good news for journalism,” thinks the implosion in stock value of newspaper companies — and newspaper sales for well below what they’d have brought only a few years ago — is potentially good news for journalism. It pops the bubble that had carried newspaper valuation […]