I would quit Facebook tomorrow if I didn’t think it would hinder my job and the relationships fostered because of it. I am just sick of it. Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat and the likes are a cancer on society. They allow for us to keep up with friends from a distance and share photos and things that genuinely are positive, but with all good things come people who will come and ruin it eventually. That time has come. Social media is…
It is time for us to start designing our print products the way readers want to see them. Media “experts” all over the world will tell you to ignore your print product or not invest much into it because the internet is going to take over soon anyway. Well, after 20-years of the newspaper industry still making a damn fine living (some better than others) off their print products I think the end is still far away. That leads me…
I am done with the next digital revolution, piece of crap, bull-shit that is peppering my e-mails and ringing into my cell phone. Enough already. We know what we are and we should have figured out after 20 years that the Internet isn’t going to put our print products into the ground, and we should have figured out it wasn’t going to be the next big revenue stream, too. Our newest disruption to the newspaper world is Newton Now. We…
The answer is yes. Newton Now has a slightly different model, but we built that newspaper with the same question in mind. Charging for our content is the best way to move forward with large scale journalism, unless you run a free paper like our Hillsboro Free Press product. Tulsa start-up is banking on the answer being yes
We have truly had a great run at the newspaper the last three years, and that was highlighted at this past weekend’s Kansas Press Association (KPA) Convention in Overland Park. It was a long week for me. I sit on the KPA Board of Directors, so a Thursday night meeting that was nearly three hours long started my convention, but I am not complaining, as we made progress on several goals. Just to throw a wrench in things (literally), I…
The only formal training I received in journalism was from this man. I think his thoughts here are very insightful and worth a few moments of your time.
As the news of the Hillsboro Wal-Mart closure became public, my phone started blowing up with messages of congratulations through text, e-mail and phone conversation. My opposition to the Wal-Mart locating in Hillsboro, its value to the community, and our refusal of advertising dollars from Wal-Mart has a lot of people thinking we were jumping for joy over in the Free Press office on Friday. While I do feel like Friday’s decision to close 270 big box stores throughout the…
I was interviewed along with our Marketing Dude, Bruce Behymer, by the local NPR station. They talked to us about launching our Newton Now newspaper. http://kmuw.org/post/kansas-newspapers-are-going-weekly-and-it-s-helping-them-survive
Oh, the things you will learn. Sometimes, with all the hustle and bustle of life and work, I get stuck in a rut of the same ol’ thing over and over again. This week was anything but that for Lindsey and I, though. We got out of our routine and drove to Columbia, Mo., for the International Society of Weekly Newspaper Editors Conference, where we heard from world-renowned journalists on a variety of subjects that ranged from investigative journalism to…
There is nothing quite as odd than being interviewed when you are used to being the one asking the questions. I just got off a Skype call with John Hatcher, Associate Professor of Journalism at the University of Minnesota Duluth, for a class he is teaching on community journalism. It was very humbling for me, as someone who worked his way up through the newspaper-ing world and not a college graduate, to be asked to speak to college students about…