Andrew Beaujon
Apr. 16, 2013
12:35 pm
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Jeff Sonderman
Jan. 25, 2013
3:25 pm
Chicago Tribune
Abe Epton shares
what he likes about working for the Chicago Tribune's news apps team after five years at Google News:
I think people interested in code and civic society should really think about joining a newspaper -- yes, a newspaper (or any media outlet) -- in 2013.
... It’s comforting to know how hard it is to break something at Google, but it’s frustrating to wait forever before anyone ever uses your code. At the Tribune, I had some Javascript running in public by the end of my first week. And I barely know Javascript, but the demands of a continuous news cycle require a lot of flexibility, which also means a lot of variety in what you work on. (more...)
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Jeff Sonderman
Jan. 23, 2013
1:06 pm
The Boston Globe is giving iPads, projectors and free Boston Globe digital subscriptions to local public school classrooms in a digitally reimagined version of the Newspapers In Education program.
A major goal of longstanding NIE efforts has been to hook young readers on the print habit by dropping off free newspapers in schools and incorporating their content in lesson plans.
But that logic has faltered in recent years, the Globe's Robert Saurer told me.
"We kind of walked away from NIE a little bit -- we didn't know what to do with it. We didn't really believe that a 10- or 15-year-old reading print in school is going to continue on later to be a print reader in their 20s and 30s," said Saurer, who is director of customer experience and innovation. "But a digital Globe reader in schools today might, in fact, turn into a digital Globe reader in their 20s and 30s."
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Andrew Beaujon
Aug. 28, 2012
10:33 am
Pennlive |
Syracuse.com
The (Harrisburg, Pa.) Patriot-News, which
won a Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of the Penn State scandal, and The (Syracuse, N.Y.) Post-Standard are following their corporate siblings in
Alabama and
New Orleans to a reduced printing schedule.
Beginning in January 2013, the Patriot-News will print on Sundays and two other days that "will be determined after gathering input from readers and advertisers," an unbylined article reports. "Further details and how these changes will affect employees, readers and advertisers will be announced over the coming weeks and months,"
Syracuse's announcement reads.
Advance executive Randy Siegel tells Poynter in an email there's no word on layoffs yet:
Our local leadership is evaluating the needs of the two new organizations and will let employees know as soon as is possible. It is likely that there will be fewer employees at the new organizations than currently at The Patriot-News. However, our complement of reporters and content creators will be comparable in size to our current staff.
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Jeff Sonderman
Aug. 20, 2012
10:40 am
Recovering Journalist |
International Business Times |
American Legion Magazine
Mark Potts writes a what-might-have-been essay, tracing the rise and stall of
digital innovation at The Washington Post in the 1990s. It begins with a 1992 memo from then-Washington Post Managing Editor Robert G. Kaiser to Publisher Don Graham, after attending a conference of leading technologists in Silicon Valley.
The Kaiser memo, sent 20 years ago this month, forecast that computers would cause seismic changes in media and called for the Post to invent new forms of digital news:
Many at the conference talked about the way we tend to use new media first to replicate the products produced by old media -- so early TV consisted of visible radio shows, for example. With this in mind, our electronic Post should be thought of not as a newspaper on a screen, but (perhaps) as a computer game converted to a serious purpose. In other words, it should be a computer product.
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Jeff Sonderman
June 18, 2012
12:57 pm
Online Publishers Association
New research published today answers some key questions about what kinds of content tablet users consume, and what they're willing to buy.
The
survey, funded by the Online Publishers Association, finds that 61 percent of tablet users have purchased some form of digital content.
What kinds of media are they buying? Some magazines (39 percent) and e-books (35 percent), fewer newspapers (15 percent).
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Jeff Sonderman
June 13, 2012
1:06 pm
Does Tuesday's
massive layoff of 600 in a single day at four Advance Publications newspapers in New Orleans and Alabama earn a place in newspaper-layoff history?
Sadly, no.
News organizations have announced other job reductions of even larger or similar size in recent years. Here's a reminder of some of the biggest:
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Jeff Sonderman
May 30, 2012
2:26 pm
Scribd |
All Things D
Venture capitalist Mary Meeker presented her annual
analysis of Internet trends Wednesday at the D10 conference, and among the dozens of charts is this one showing the steep imbalance between where people spend their time and where advertisers spend their money:
Notice that print media captures much more than its fair share of ad spending, while the Internet and especially mobile are lagging. A print optimist might read this as a sign that newspapers and magazines remain a more appealing medium to advertisers despite shrinking audiences. But Meeker argues it's inevitable that ad dollars follow eyeballs, “
it just takes time.”
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Jeff Sonderman
Mar. 13, 2012
4:33 pm
Post-Gazette |
Brian Rossi
A clean, bright, color-coded design for post-gazette.com was
tested and honed over months of beta testing and public feedback, and on Tuesday it became official. What did the paper learn from its testing period?
Web designers listened to readers, who asked to see breaking news updates in chronological order. Reader requests for adjustment to type sizes, and easier navigation to classified listings and other PG products, including the PG electronic editions and PG+, the premium sports website, also were incorporated into the new design.
The P-G's lead designer, Brian Rossi,
blogs about the experience.
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