Earlier this year a Houston Press reporter drove 1,683 miles in Harris and its surrounding seven counties, visiting 63 school districts to test for compliance with the Texas Public Information Act, which is designed not just for reporters like me but for everyone. Here’s his story, called “Needling the Haystack.” Quite instructive.
Posts under ‘News Business’
Bringing the Pulitzers into the Web Era
Editor & Publisher: Incoming Pulitzer Chair Steiger Wants More Web In Awards. Paul Steiger, the incoming chair of the Pulitzer Prize Board, wants the prestigious awards to delve even more in to Web-based journalism, calling it “the biggest priority for us.” This is just common sense, but how they’ll do it will be interesting because […]
The New Media World According to Emerson
Chris Lydon: An Emersonian transformation under way. The Sage of Concord said: Forsake the authorities and follow the gleam of light flashing across your own mind from within! And now: Blog it! It is a great Emersonian transformation and liberation that’s under way in the public conversation. Or so it seems to one recovering child […]
Business Press, Blogs, Independence and Quality
I’m at the spring meeting of American Business Media, the major trade group for media organizations whose journalism is aimed at business audiences, notably the business-to-business crowd. The companies include giants like McGraw Hill, technology maven IDG and many others. This is an executive crowd, by and large, not the editorial folks. At today’s lunch, […]
Professional Journalists' Most Serious Competitive Issue
It’s not the competition from bloggers and citizen journalists, as I note in my new BBC column, “The changing mix of money and media,” but rather the way Internet companies are taking away the base of revenue that pays for the journalism.
Details of Bay Area Newspaper Deal Raise More Questions
Over on my Bay Area blog, I raise more questions about wheeling and dealing in the regional newspaper market.
Newspaper Faces Tomorrow by Retreating
NY Times: Microsoft, NYT partner on newspaper software. Aiming to offer newspapers a new digital publishing alternative, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates on Friday touted a software program that tries to make publications easier to read on a computer screen. Questions: Do very many people really want to read the paper’s journalism this way? How much […]
Newspapers and Blogs: Still a Good Idea
Robert Niles at Online Journalism Review asks, “Can newspapers do blogs right?” — and some prominent online journalists offer responses. As someone who wrote a newspaper blog for more than five years, I can assure you that the answer is Yes. The fact that newspapers sometimes screw it up is meaningless, or close to it. […]
Newspaper Wheeling, Dealing
Over at my Bay Area blog, here’s my comment on today’s news that McClatchy will sell the San Jose Mercury News and three other papers, in a differently structured deal that strikes me as a bit smelly.
Major BBC Web Change Adding Citizen Content
Guardian: BBC unveils radical revamp of website. The BBC today unveiled radical plans to rebuild its website around user-generated content, including blogs and home videos, with the aim of creating a public service version of MySpace.com. The proof will be in the doing, of course, but this will be a fantastic experiment to watch — […]