Author: admin

Congratulations to Rafat Ali!

Belden Associates’ research shows that the average age of online newspaper website users is aging as fast as the average printer newspaper reader and has been each years since 2001. The only difference is that the average age of the online edition user is 42 and the average age of the printed edition user is 55. If the newspaper industry is to reverse its declines in usership, it instead needs to have users whose average age is dcreasing, or at least increases more slowly than the calendar.

My presentation at Editor & Publisher and MEDIAWEEK magazines’ Interactive Media conference in Las Vegas last month.

Many thanks to friends who sent me best wishes when I was ill last month.

In 1998, media executives involved with new-media and new-media entrepreneurs were on roughly the same level of sophistication about technology and new-media theory. But most media executives are still at that 1998 level, while the entrepreneurs are now eight years’ more sophisticaled. This difference, as seen in two recent conferences, was so striking that I’m still in shock. This drives to the heart of why periodicals have failed to adapt to the Internet beyond about 1998.

The major problem with online content isn’t lack of a business model but lack of tagging.

We ask your patience as we redesign our website.

Pointers to stories about Reuters’ deal with Global Voices; PBS MarketShift’s interview with I Want Media Publisher & Editor Patrick Phillips; Brier Dudley’s apt Incan analogy; B-to-B publishers wrestling with change; and the site on which publishers and broadcasters can register their mobile phone services’ short codes.

At the root of most publishing and broadcasting companies problems understanding and adapting to the New Medium is they actually misunderstand what a medium is. I’ve long been reluctant to explain this misunderstanding because I’ll need a long post to do so. This is it, a new version of my 1998 essay What is New Media?. It’s long, but I consider it the most important thing I have ever written except for the original essay, and hope you’ll forebear its length. I need to have this new version online because I plan to refer to it in future postings, specifically those about what radical changes that media companies need to implement.

Excerpts from Bob Cauthorn’s speech to the Publish Asia 2006 conference yesterday in Kuala Lumpur.

Why the American newspaper industry is doomed unless it makes radical changes, including in its new-media efforts.

Why online news sites should devote a home page banner ad to World Press Freedom Day on May 3rd.

Six noteworthy events in the new-media industries next month.

Today’s Goodies: A webcast of Bob ‘Thorn in the Side of the Newspaper Industry’ Cauthorn; a Gordon Parks retrospective in The Digital Journalist; brilliant coverage by the Houston Chronicle and El País; Miami Herald Miami Herald Executive Editor Tom Fiedler’s memo to his staff; Heidi Cohen on what advertisers should do now that publishers of printed periodicals are finally getting serious about shifting their business online; The Tyndall Report on ABC, CBS, and NBC news; Eight Diagram’s interviews with photographers & writers; and my beta test of Google Content Blocker.

Why the print newspaper battle that began today in Baltimore is a test case for paid content and the relative value of newspaper news in the U.S., in print or online

My favorite news site designer this side of the Atlantic is Jay Small, He is director of online audience and operations for the newspaper division of E.W. Scripps Co. and also runs his own consulting firm. Jay today reviews NYTimes.com‘s new redesign.…

The conferences at which I’ll be speaking or attending this Spring.

“Free at last! free at last! thank God Almighty, we are free at last!” — old Negro spiritual. In my case, free of an unusual Non-Disclosure Agreement that expired April 1st. For the first time in a decade of full-time consulting, I…

Pulitzer Prize-winning humor columnist Dave Barry explains why he stopped writing a newspaper column, why he thinks newspapers are dead, and his opinion of newspaper podcasting.

eMarketer cites and verifies my speech to the World Association of Newspapers’ Advertising Conference.

Welcome to students of the University of Waikato’s Screen & Media Studies school in New Zealand who are using our 1998 ‘What is New Media?’ essay as the first tutorial assignment in their ‘SMST101-06A SCREEN STUDIES 1 – The Moving Image; course.

The World Association of Newspapers creates the Gebran Tueni Award, which will annually honor a newspaper publisher or editor in the Arab world who demonstrates the press freedom values upheld by Tueni.

British TV reviewer turned internet guru, John Naughton, foresees the end of traditional broadcasting and the rise of a new media ecology amid unending change. He names a few of its characteristics he foresees, in a Guardian essay (free registration required) that’s…

American printed newspaper staffing and expenses benchmarks

According to Time Warner Vice Chairman Don Logan, the number one problem for the magazine industry is the massive profileration of publications on newsstands.

The text of my speech last week to the World Association of Newspapers’ Advertising Conference in Paris.

What’s happening at the World Association of Newspapers’ Advertising Conference in Paris.

I’m in Paris where later this week I’ll be representing my friend Gordon Borrell‘s firm at the World Association of Newspapers’ Advertising Conference and be one of the conference’s speakers about online revenues. That’s one reason why I’ll be missing the Newspaper…

The New York Observer compares online usage data about the U.S. news networks’ websites and notes that CNN, though losing television audience to FoxNews, is trouncing FoxNews online. That’s particularly important, according to CNN.com senior vice president and general manager David Payne:…

If you’re attending one of the conferences that I am, say hello.

The World Association of Newspaper’s attempts to charge the search engines for indexing their news content is merely newspaper publishers searching for legal ways to stop the railroad because the gravy train has left them behind.

Why Identity 2.0 is the probable solution to today’s concerns about online privacy, anonymity, pseudonymity, tracking, and registration.

Here is the transcript of the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer‘s video interview with Washingtonpost.com Editor Jim Brady and BoingBoing.net Co-Editor Xeni Jardin about why Brady temporarily turned off PostBlog‘s comments function after receiving hundreds of abusive postings. The interview video is also…

ABC’s World News Now is the most popular news podcast.

Why news organization that operate anonymous and unmoderated discussion forums are being reckless and actually impede transparency. And how the news industry has fallen under the spell of a techno-utopian fallacy that says it can foster a renaissance in journalism, civic involvement, and comity simply by implementing new-media technologies.

My eulogy to Minolta cameras. They’ll stop being made this year.

I’m one of 23 Americans with a speech chosen for publication in the reference book ‘Representative American Speeches 2004-2005’. Its publishers chose my remarks from the ‘Reinventing the Local TV Station: Ground-Breaking Ideas from Innovative Thinkers’ panel during the Broadcast Education Association’s session at the National Association of Broadcasters annual conference last year.

Congratulations to Gary Kebbel (left) for being named Journalism Initiatives Program Officer for the the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, where he’s assigned to identify the people, processes and projects that will advance quality journalism in this century. Kebbel most…

The accomplished Mary Berner resigns from Fairchild Publications

Congratulations to my client Critical Mention Inc. for closing a $4 Million round of Series B financing last month! CIBC Capital Partners, Silicon Alley Venture Partners, Stonehenge Capital, plus other prior investors in Critical Mention, placed the money with the leading online…

“The people formerly known as the audience.” New York University Journalism Professor Jay Rosen, quoted in The New York Times about how new media has empowered people to correct traditional media.

I’m back at my desk for 2006. This will be a pivotal year for the news industry. The tipping point has been reached. Most news broadcasts and printed newspapers and news magazines finally realize that they are, if not yet dying, then dinosaurs in the tar pit. Meanwhile, the many upstarts who hope to replace those dinosaurs will this year be realizing that their solutions (such as just ‘citizen journalism’) are neither as functional or appropriate as they think. Stay tuned for an exciting year. Plus , I’m pleased to be entering my 27th year in the news industry.

Why and where I’ve been offline during the past week.

A known flaw in Windows 2000, plus a smashed backup PC, leaves me largely offline. I’m meanwhile trying to run the business from a wireless PDA.

Gibran Tueni, 48, publisher of al-Nahar daily newspaper, member of the Lebanese parliament, and the World Association of Newspaper’s board member for Middle East Affairs, was assassinated this morning in Beirut. An outspoken editorialist against Syrian involvement in his country, he had…

People e-mailed the BBC with more than 6,500 photos or mobile phone video clips of the inferno at the Buncefield oil depot explosion yesterday. According to MediaGuardian, this set a new record for emails sent to the BBC in the aftermath of…

Tawdry publications can now afford flying cameras of their own.

Pulitzer Prizes become open to online content.

Traveling too much during October and November, I am remiss in not yet congratulating, or even noting, the election on October 18th of David Carlson (pictured), the Cox/Palm Beach Post professor of new media journalism at the University of Florida, to president…

Digital Journalist online magazine has at least three good items this month: • Photographs and stories from the new book Unembedded. There has been much reporting on the war in Iraq by Western photographers who work ’embedded’ behind U.S. troops. However, photographers…