Disrupting the News Industry: Media Concentration and Participatory Journalism, is a panel next Friday morning at the University of California at Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism. Admission is free. Panelists are: Neil Chase, managing editor of CBS MarketWatch. Dan Gillmor, columnist for…
In the printed and online editions, at the end of his opinion column about the North Korean nuclear weapons, The New York Times Nicholas D. Kristof adds: After my reports from Africa about ethnic cleansing in the Darfur region of Sudan, many…
Nielsen//Netratings reports that during March eight of the top 20 news Web sites or ‘groups’ in the U.S. were affiliated with newspapers. Yet isn’t this like reporting that eight of the top 20 dining spots were affiliated with restaurants? Why this news?…
My American compatriots still won’t believe me when I say that the best online publications are European. I’ve been telling them that for years, but their their national pride makes them think that whatever was invented in America is still made there.…
In the foreground, Tom Regan of the Christian Science Monitor, the turned head of an attendee we don’t know, , and Gordon Joseloff of WestportNow.com and formerly of CBS News and UPI. That’s me near the clock, commenting to the What is…
Bloggers attending the BoggerCon II conference Saturday at Harvard University’s Law School voted that forming a trade association of bloggers and also giving advertisers better usage statistics about blogs are the two best paths toward generating revenues from blogging. During a session…
On Saturday, I’ll be attending BloggerCon at Harvard University Law School. Nearly 400 other people have registered to attend. I look forward to this conference’s sessions on What is Journalism?, Blogging in Business, Shirky’s Power Law, and Blogging as a Business. For…
I’m today watching the live webcast from the University of Texas‘ 5th International Symposium on Online Journalism. The first panel, Online Journalism in Asia, Europe and Latin America What is different and how does it compare with the U.S.?, featured speakers from…
I’m glad to see that New York Times Digital‘s operating profit during the previous three months was (US) $8.4 million — an annualized yield of $34.6 million in profit. Why am I only now happy when NYTD has been reporting ‘profitability’ for…
A publishing sector that could greatly benefit by switching from print to online is corporate communications. I had an interesting discussion today with the corporate communications editor of Akzo Nobel in the Netherlands. This 64,500-person pharmaceutical & chemicals company will soon switch…
I’ve agreed to talk on Monday to the University of Missouri’s Online Journalism class. I spoke to them in person last October, but this time I’ll be video narrowcasting the talk from my office in Connecticut. A complication is that ‘Mizzou’ uses…
My thanks for three European articles this week that mentioned of my work: Eva Domínguez, writing in Barcelona’s La Vanguardia on the subject of an Observatorio de Prospective Technológica Industrial (OPTI) report about how new technology is going to affect Spanish media…
Transom.org, a showcase and workshop for channeling public radio through the Internet, has won a Peabody Award — the first Web site ever to win a major American journalism award. The annual George Foster Peabody Awards were first awarded in 1941 for…
Posted on Romensko’s media Memos page today was a copy of this: 4/7/2004 8:31:51 AM Memo from San Francisco Chronicle publisher Steve Falk TO: Management Staff/Digital Media Staff FROM: Steve Falk Under Robert Cauthorn’s guidance for the last three and one-half years,the…
John B. Evans, a man who influenced my entry into electronic publishing, died nine days ago at his home in New Jersey. His obituary appeared today in The New York Times. A Welshman, Evans received a law degree from Cambridge University, then…
I’m looking for a few publications for which I can write about subjects such as electronic publishing, e-mail, e-commerce, paid content, digital editions, and other phenomena of the Internet. I very much enjoyed my recent writing assignments for Online Journalism Review (on…
All traditional media companies now publish online and many of them are casting warry eyes at Google News, which is rising in the online ratings. Meanwhile, Google’s introduction of its GMail service this month has shaken up the e-mail application world and…
Google, the de facto search engine of the Internet, indexes the most popular Web sites for a keyword, not the most authoritative. Meanwhile, I believe that Clay Shirky has accurately applied the Power Curve to the phenomenon known as blogging. And blogging…
Jupiter Research analyst Niki Scevak, who covers advertising and media forecasting, seems perplex at how expenditures on newspaper advertising can grow while newspaper readership declines: A post by fellow Jup blogger David Card got me thinking more about advertising’s supposed axiom: the…
Many people (recently, Editor & Publisher Magazine columnist Steve Outing) have written about how news Web sites need better graphical layouts. Most of those layouts date back to the early days of the Web, when designers were attempting to replicate printed page…
The Guardian in the UK and The New York Times were among many English-language newspapers today publishing obituaries of Alistair Cooke. A cultural bridge across the Atlantic, he lucidly wrote for one and perceptively read the other. The Guardian‘s Media section today…
Fortunately, the Swiss also manufacture another version that a traveler can carry onto airliners.
Editor & Publisher features a story about Pulitzer Prize juror and Philadelphia Daily News Editor Zack Stalberg and how he was so impressed with the post-9/11 coverage of The Onion satirical week that he almost made it a Pulitzer Prize finalist. I’d…
Azeem Azhar pointed me to Terry Eagleton‘s essay about the importance of theory, which the Guardian published on Tuesday. Azhar writes: “… it’s a brilliant criticism of the critics of thinking, reason and principle. During my time working for large organisations there…
The other thing that I learned at the Cellular Telecommunications & Internet Assocation’s Wireless 2004 conference> in Atlanta is that when 70,000 members of the mobile telecommunications industry congregate at one place, it is awfully hard to get a mobile dial-tone.
Many Many North American media companies plans to deliver news via mobile phones, yet none are exhibiting or on the presentations program at CTIA Wireless 2004> in Atlanta, which with more than 70,000 attendees claims to be ‘the world’s largest conference of…
Here is a bad way in which the news media industry is different than other industries: It rejects innovations from a sector that so ably aids other major industries and moreover has conditioned that sector to be reticent to it. This ignored…
Ross Castle, Killarney, Ireland (Click to enlarge) © Vin Crosbie, 2002. I’ll be lecturing to — conversing with, is more accurate — a New Media masters class at Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications on Friday and then be at…
Many techies have told me that media companies would be wasting their time to produce a customized edition for each reader, that search engines or RSS already make this unnecessary. That amuses me. What they’re saying is ‘There’s no market for pre-built…
Although it doesn’t have a direct bearing upon online publishing, here is a revolutionary technology worth noting by media companies that use imagery or that report about technology: Philips Research has developed lenses that focus without mechanical moving parts. These lenses operate…
Camera phonesare revolutionizing is public adoption of Multimedia Message Systems (MMS) in the U.K. The Enpocket Mobile Media Monitor found that during the the past 3 months the number of consumers using MMS surged by 40%. That surge was driven by 18…
Afer studying long-term declines in newspaper circulation, Philip Meyer, the eminent professor of journalism at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, a few years ago calculated that the last American newspaper will be read in September 2043. Using that type…
My report and analysis about the Project for Excellence in Journalism‘s State of the News Media 2004 study is now available at Online Journalism Review. Also, Earl Wilkinson, executive director of the International Newspaper Marketing Association and one of the few visionaries…
Steve Outing has a good story today about most online newspapers’ woefully rigid and cluttered graphical user interfaces, the design equivalent of shovelware. He quotes Howard Finberg of the Poynter Institute (as is Outing) and the Digital Futurist consultancy and Nik Wilets…
Last week, I wrote about Topix.net, which spiders more than 3,000 other local news sites, then lets users enter their local ZIP codes and see a page showing all local news from all local media. The San Jose Mercury News quoted me:…
I’m having a busy Monday because the previous day one of the journalism reviews commissioned me to report about the Project for Excellence in Journalism‘s The State of the News Media 2004 study, specifically the section about US online journalism. The study,…
This week, I’ve been hearing a lot of traditional media executives say that if you allow consumers to customize their own media, then ‘each consumer will become isolated in his own world.’ Wake up! Each consumer has always been isolated in his…
There’s been some demand on this site today for my Publishing: Free to Fee columns about charging for online content. These 32 columns are at ClickZ.com, where they are chronologically organized in a roughly stratal order (i.e., the earliest ones primarily cover…
Last week, I said that I’d become radically dissident inside the newspaper industry. My friend, Steve Outing, commented about this in Poynter’s E-Media Tidbits: But “radically dissident”? Given the hype to this, I was expecting a far more radical view. I mostly…
Although we last week mentioned that some Knight Ridder newspaper executives told us that Knight Ridder Digital planned to to charge for site access once it had finished implementing consumer registration, KRD spokesperson Amy Dalton tell us this isn’t true, that KRD…
Aside my article this week at Online Journalism Review, someone has posted a comment that amuses me: Shameless Plug I find it more than a little coincidental that Vin’s prescription for online success involves using products quite similar to his PublishMail product,…
I’m now writing this blog solo, a change from the past two years when I’ve written perhaps two of every three postings. So, blame just me from now on. — Vin Crosbie
We’re watching the launch of Topix.net, news site whose robots scrape thousands of American news media sites and aggregate and categorize the content for easy browsing by locality. We were initially skeptical of the venture, but have been impressed by what we’ve…
He’s returned from across the pond, but this time continued across flyover country. Rafat Ali, editor & publisher of PaidContent.org, MocoNews.net, and European Digital Media Weekly, the commercial überblogger whose efforts makes Jason Calacanis’ look like a mom & pop shop, has…
E-mail publishing applications service provider CheetahMail has been purchased by credit reporting and business information corporation Experian. CheetahMail started in 1997 as a private spinoff of the newspaper industry’s failed New Century Network (NCN) consortium. CheetahMail initially specialized in providing e-mail publishing…
Time Warner’s Sports Illustrated Magazine will offer American and Canadian mobile phone users their choices of phone ‘wallpaper’ from the magazines annual Swimsuit edition. SI signed the deal with Summus of Raleigh, North Carolina, a mobile phone technologies applications service provider.
The San Diego band XFYA has produced what apparently is the world’s first music video shot entirely on a camera phone (right). Entitled Haber Get Down from the band’s upcoming album Late Night at Denny’s, the video is of the greatest quality,…
We’re hearing from executives at Knight Ridder newspapers that once Knight Ridder Digital has finished implementing consumer registration at their Web sites, KRD next plans to charge for site access. The newspaper executives we’ve spoken with say this is what they are…
“If people would dare to speak to one another unreservedly, there would be a good deal less sorrow in the world a hundred years hence.” — Samuel Butler, The Way of All Flesh (1903) “All faults may be forgiven of him who has…
“I prefer visions of the future to the entire history of the past.”— Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) “Those who do not remember the past are doomed to repeat it.” — George Santayana (1863-1952)