News isn’t free, and the faster we get to this realization as media companies, the better we will be as an industry. Covering the news of the day costs money. It takes resources to employ a professional reporter, buy equipment, maintain a printed paper and website, and basics like turning the lights on every day. This is why it perplexes me that news organizations are still under the delusion of being able to give their content away for free and…
The death of journalism has been coming for some time—just depends on who you ask. First it was radio, which would put newspapers into the ground. Then television was going to end the profession. Finally, the Internet would be a death blow, right? No, even if we have tried to speed our death along by giving away our content online, the Internet hasn’t meant death to newspapers, and I doubt it ever will. The death of journalism isn’t coming from…
John Oliver is just one of the funniest people on television now. I have slapped my knee many times during his “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver” show on HBO, and a segment about journalism had me both sad and laughing at the same time. I have said many times that the plight of large, daily newspapers isn’t comparable to what we do at small, community newspapers. Their overhead is much larger, but more importantly, their owners are usually investment…
I understand why publishers all over the country are scared to death about ad blocking software and what it is doing to their bottom lines. I am also completely unconcerned, personally. After 20 years of doing everything we could as an industry to build a presence online and sell advertising around content we gave away, it must be scary to hear that folks don’t want the annoying Flash ads that pop up randomly, the auto-play video ads, and the sort…
I often tell people to quit drinking the Kool-Aid and start reading things that challenge your way of thinking and how you run your news operation to see if you can grow from it. So this link is none of that… This is my jam. This is just preaching to the choir for me. I couldn’t resist reading this and just nodding my head in agreement all the way to the end. We practice many of these things with…
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 Join the newspaper disruption:
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…
