Who loves their media? NPRistas

NPR News in the US aims to double its online audience – in part by building a closer relationship with people who already love NPR. Dick Meyer, NPR Digital Media’s editorial director, calls them NPRistas. He says in the American Journalism Review: “Folks who listen to NPR think of themselves as NPR people … The […]

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What newspapers can learn from baseball

Photos: Creative Commons via Flickr from Bobster1985, lisatozzi, jeffpearce and Annie Mole. The practice of professional journalism is like the practice of professional sports. It’s physically demanding, dirty, and success requires a combination of skills, talent, experience and luck. But it’s different in one glaring respect. Sports fans love their teams, the players and the […]

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Creative? Or crossing the line?

PC pulls an advertisement in the guise of an editorial, called “Stop Switching to Mac”, from the sacrosanct news wall on today’s front page of NewYorkTimes.com. Washingtonpost.com, too. A godlike Mac watches and comments just below the nameplate. Dale PeskinDale is co-founder emeritus of We Media. www.wemedia.com

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What went wrong keeps going wrong for newspapers

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 […]

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Memo to ESPN: Take out the trash in baseball telecasts

To: ESPN broadcasters and producers: So I’m watching bonus coverage of the Yankees-Rangers game. There’s all this annoying stuff on the screen as Michael Young comes to the plate with two men on and Rangers trailing by two runs. In an instant, Young crushes a Joba Chamberlain fastball for a three-run homer. The Rangers take […]

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Failure is an option

Sometimes Internet startups have a business model. Sometimes they don’t – and the story typically boils down to “we’ll figure it out” or “we’ll sell.” For consumer media and information services, more often than not “figure it out” means build a large enough audience to sell advertising around it. For platforms and tools, founders aspire […]

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Social networking’s bubble grows. How to capitalize.

Social networking is the fastest-growing activity on the user-centric Internet. The idea is that most anyone can join a large, loosely connected network of “friends” to share personal or professional information, establish contacts, communicate, align social activities, establish a personality or brand, and vicariously act-out life online. You pass your profile to your friends, who […]

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