My memory is vivid of the moment I realized newspapers – my vocation, my dream, my way of life – were fucked. I think it was the spring of 2008. Prices for oil and related commodities were spiking. To help write about it for the Albuquerque Journal, I’d signed up for UNM economics professor Jennifer …
Continue reading ‘Elephant Diaries Revisited: the end of McClatchy’ »
Heartbreaking words by Josh Brodesky inside the Arizona Daily Star newsroom last week as another round of layoffs came: The cuts filled the newsroom with an eerie stillness accented only by tears and typing. The next day’s paper still had to be put out. I think most staffers knew a day like Thursday would come, …
In a coda to my old Elephant Diaries series on the economics of news, a brief note from Dallas as the Morning News goes paywall: “Local newspaper websites are never going to scale to page view levels that make the math work,” he said. “The volume of traffic to these sites is inherently limited by …
I’d like to think the President of the United States has the best interests of America’s children in mind with this school address thing that has generated such a kerfuffle. But after reading the advance text, I’m not so sure: Every single one of you has something you’re good at. Every single one of you has …
Continue reading ‘Elephant Diaries: Career Advice From The President’ »
The New York Times story about hyperlocal news offers a reminder of the mistake we’ve been making in the news biz: And so far, they have had only limited success selling ads. Remember the railroad metaphor. The discussion suggests the continued mistake of thinking we’re in the news business. We’ve been extraordinarily successful in delivering …
Continue reading ‘Elephant Diaries: What Business Are We In?’ »
Via a tweet from Janet Stemwedel yesterday, a brilliant new business model has emerged. Here’s what she said: @jfleck Did you not get the memo? The internet is killing print media. (And, I presume, making it harder to wrap fish and line cages.) We’ve beent thinking about this all wrong. We’ve been mistakenly thinking we …
Regular readers will have noticed that I’m a fan of David Zetland, the water economist. He has a great blog that is widely read in the water wonk community. Reading it has helped me a great deal in understanding some key economic principles that underly water issues I follow. But there’s a problem. A guy …
From today’s NYTimes article about the San Francisco Chronicle: The Chronicle’s Web site, SFGate.com, draws an unusually large audience for a paper its size, three million to four million people monthly, according to Nielsen Online, but generates a fraction of the paper’s revenue. If serving readers on the Internet is your measure, the Chronicle has …
Continue reading ‘Elephant Diaries: Why solving “the Web problem” does not solve the problem’ »
One of the occupational hazards of being a journalist (at least the way I do it) is an embarassing lack of original ideas. My job is to entertain, understand, sort and pass judgment on the ideas of others, then explain the ones that meet some sort of preliminary test of usefulness and/or relevance. Ideas of …