Posts under ‘News Business’

Jack Shafer (Slate): After the staff cuts, will the newspapers of the future look like the newspapers from the past?

The paper laid off 31 more people in the newsroom, cutting the staff to approximately half the size of the 2000 peak, just before the first Internet bubble burst. So many good people are gone, and many remain. But the ones who are left can’t sustain the same excellent journalism that we once took so […]

Jack Shafer again nails the inane hypefest for the iPhone in “iPhone suck-up watch. Be sure to follow his link to Josh Quittner’s on-the-mark critique (though there’s a tinge of jealousy in the piece, as he didn’t get one of the phones for early review). Look, the iPhone does look like something of a breakthrough […]

Editor & Publisher’s headline is “Newspaper Legends Fire Away at Murdoch-Dow Jones Editorial Plan,” but it quotes at least one serious journalist saying people shouldn’t assume the worst. Assume the worst. Murdoch, who is now very likely to own Dow Jones, has a long and extremely clear history. The “agreement” he’s made to assure editorial […]

UPDATED NY Times: G.E. and Pearson Are Said to Study Bid for Dow Jones. The General Electric Company, the parent of NBC, and Pearson, the publisher of The Financial Times, are exploring a joint bid for Dow Jones & Company to rival an offer made by the News Corporation, people familiar with the talks said […]

I did an op-ed in the Chronicle today. It’s called “Journalism isn’t dying, it’s reviving.”

DigiDave asks, “Where’s the Money to Teach Journalists How to Code?” Why? Makes more sense to me that journalists should work with programmers.

NY Times: FCC rebuffed by court on indecency fines. The decision, by a divided panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in New York, was a sharp rebuke for the Federal Communications Commission and for the Bush administration. It was a major victory in a legal battle being waged by […]

Ventura (California) Star: Colleges keep turning out optimistic print journalists despite the newspaper industry crunch. While students focusing on public relations, advertising and broadcasting account for much of the increased journalism enrollment on most campuses, sizeable numbers still want print media careers and are determined to find newspaper jobs despite increasingly bleak employment prospects. This […]

A professor at UC-Berkeley, where I’ve been teaching part-time, bemoans “The decline of news” in an op-ed piece in today’s SF Chronicle. Needless to say, I think he’s way, way off the mark, and I’m working on a response that’s a lot more optimistic.