When I was trying to learn the craft of writing about the earth, a geologist who was serving as my guide said I had to read Walter Sullivan’s Continents in Motion. The book was a revelation to me – for the skill with which Sullivan explained the science of plate tectonics, but more importantly for …
Rocky Mountain News to close, publish final edition Friday
So bad that even fictional journalists are getting laid off: (Thanks to Emily for bringing this to my attention.)
The San Francisco Chronicle has been one of the newspaper industry’s great web successes. Its on line audience is among the largest in the country. By the end of the year, it could cease to exist. Just a reminder, this is not about figuring out how to get news delivery right on the web. The …
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h/t Nora
There’s a cliche that keeps popping up in the discussion of newspapers’ futures that links the fate of my business today with railroads of old. Railroads, the argument goes, lost out to the trucking industry because they thought they were in the railroad business, rather than the transportation business. Newspapers, by analogy, are failing because …
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Call newspapers dinosaurs if you like, but remember that dinosaurs roamed the Earth for millions of years. NYT Managing Editor Jill Abramson (h/t Tweets of the Times)
Alan Mutter argued yesterday that newspapers’ print products are central to driving traffic to their web sites – that a significant fraction of the web audience overlaps print, and that the loss of print “stripped of the advantages that formerly differentiated it from all other rivals, would become just one of thousands of URLs competing …
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If you’ll indulge me, a big Inkstain hug for hug for Bob Brewin: I’m a reluctant blogger and know that good reporting will always beat any blog, as this Albuquerque Journal story illustrates. The Journal is a privately owned, independent newspaper (a rare item in these times) and is struggling to survive in an environment …
Here’s the ticket to big time business success on the Internet. Find some way to put your ads next to content created by someone else. Keep all of the money. Profit! The beauty of the model of Google is the way they’ve they leveraged their investment in engineering talent to, at relatively small marginal cost, …