We create the stories of the connected society

Dear Mr. Murdoch:
We’re so fortunate that we can entrust you with the future of the news business in the U.S. Such a shrewd business leader, too. Can you help a confused citizen understand your plan to save the news?

1. You’re going to charge people to read a story online that they won’t read, and [...]

Respectively submitted for your persusal: GM tanks. A plane falls out of the sky. The American president reaches out to the Muslim world. Newspapers slip-slide away. Every blogger has a better idea. Ashton Kutcher says he’s eclipsed CNN as media. 
Surreal? Apocalyptic? Prescient? After forty days and forty nights of downpours, biblical storms, and consequential events [...]

Each day brings another story that publishers are lurching to the business model that will save newspapers: charging for online content. Yet, each day brings news of additional buyouts and layoffs in newsrooms. Sometime soon, the publishers are going to figure out the next problem: they neither have enough good content that’s worth selling nor [...]

History may not repeat itself, but it sure does rhyme, observed Samuel Clemens. I was reminded of Clemens’ vision and failures amid this week’s hoopla over the new Kindle as well a Congressional hearing held today on the crisis in newspapers.
Clemens was a visionary who foresaw the age of invention. He wrote a glorious fable [...]

On Friday, the Hearst Corporation announced that it was putting the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, the older of Seattle’s two daily papers, up for sale.  If a buyer is not found within 60 days (57 and counting…) then the paper will cease its print production.  The prospects of finding a buyer, according to analysts, is slim and [...]

The arrest of Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich on corruption charges (including a claim that he tried to profit from the selection of a replacement for now President-Elect Obama’s Senate seat) is a huge story.
But, within this huge story there were two other huge stories from the standpoint of the media.
First, among the examples of how [...]

The 18.1 percent decline spanned all categories of revenue, including a 30.9 percent decline in classifieds and a 3 percent drop in online revenue. More from Advertising Age, the Newspaper Association of America and analysis from Alan Mutter.

Brian spotted an editorial in the Seattle Times published yesterday (Nov. 20, 2008), noting the dominance of Google in online advertising – and celebrating the failure of an advertising deal between Google and Yahoo! For Brian, the curiosity was a media company complaining publicly about Google. For me, the curiosity was that he read a [...]

Owned by a church but proudly agnostic in its reporting, The Christian Science Monitor will still have a web site and a weekend print edition. So: There will still be something left to cut when this 100-year-old candle burns out completely. More via Rick Edmonds at Poynter.org.

The magazine Editor & Publisher has long been the must-read trade rag for anyone in the U.S. newspaper business. Which is another way of saying: Like the industry it covers, Editor & Publisher in print has been fading for years. E&P in print switched from a weekly to monthly in 2004, while its web site [...]

Alan Mutter, an astute analyst who formerly served as editor of the San Francisco Chronicle, now puts the combined value of ten major news companies at only $3.6 billion. Mutter documents the $3.9 billion plunge in the value of newspaper stocks since the first of this month – a period marked by successive new lows [...]

Reporter: If you could’ve found out what Rosebud meant, I bet that would’ve explained everything.
Other reporter: No, I don’t think so; no. Mr. Kane was a man who got everything he wanted and then lost it. Maybe Rosebud was something he couldn’t get, or something he lost.
With the curse of memory, a current roundup [...]

Years after the rest of of us knew it, New York Times literary critic Michiko Kakutani coronates Jon Stewart as “a genuine cultural and political force.”  The three-page spread, nearly literary in scope, acknowledges the fake anchorman and his satirical The Daily Show as an important news source. Stop the presses.
“Is This The Most Trusted [...]

In an open letter to craigslist, Steve Outing asks its founders and operators to help save the newspaper industry from itself. My response:

Steve,
It takes real chutzpah to ask Craig Newmark and Jim Buckmaster of craigslist to help newspapers salvage their classifieds businesses and thus save democracy, or at least the part of it that newspapers [...]

The Orange County Register confirmed it will outsource copy editing and page layout to an editorial services company based outside New Delhi, India. So much for local knowledge and the sense of place that only local publishers can deliver.