Newspapers fall out of orbit

Late last year William Dean Singleton, the CEO of MediaNews, announced he had identified the problem behind years of steep decline in the news industry. “It’s a good old fashioned economic recession,” Singleton said. In the absence of motion, sooner or later the problem will be recession. Download the report (PDF) Dale PeskinDale is co-founder […]

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Travel to another dimension to serve man

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 […]

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Doh. I just laid off my business model

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 […]

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The Flickering Wick: CS Monitor drops print

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. Andrew NachisonAndrew Nachison is founder of We Media. […]

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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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The lost summer of newspapers

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 […]

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Jon Stewart and trust, for those who might have missed it

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 […]

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Chutzpah: Why Craig can’t save classifieds

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 […]

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