D-Day for news publishers?

We’ve forecast the inevitability of The News Wars as news providers continue to lose audience and revenue to online aggregaters who redistribute content that others produce, frequently at great expense. Owing to parochialism and intransigence, newspaper publishers have been unable to either mount a united front or to develop meaningful innovation to compete against the […]

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Death by newspaper

It was an emotional morning at the Lake Anne Coffee House where I get my start-of-the-day latte and early take on the day’s current events. Retirees Tom and Bill were at their usual table talking leisurely over cheese Danish. Each wore their Redskins baseball caps, maroon faded by years of sunlight and memories. Young men […]

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Fade to Black

AP reports that disgraced Conrad Black is seeking a new trial for swindling hundreds of millions through his international media empire. Just in time: the 2004 documentary Citizen Black by Canadian film makers Debbie Melnyk and Rick Caine is marking the rounds on the Sundance Channel. Aside from several self-conscious moments by writer/director Melnyk, a […]

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Being and nothingness

washingtonpost.com’s “On Being” project is simply stunning: real stories from real people based on the simple notion that “we should get to know one another a little better.” An elegant design and interface, enhanced by professional video production standards, bring to life the musings and passions of ordinary extraordinary people. This is how journalism from […]

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A mighty wind

You have to admire the chutzpah of any group that seeks to save journalism from itself by blowing with the wind. But inspired by native forces, the goo-goos at Journalism That Matters gathered in “open space” at a George Washington University cafeteria to agonize over the ill-winds of change. All the right people – which, […]

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Duck, duck, goose

If the Next Newsroom sounds familiar, it is. It borrows language from Newspaper Next (request the report; don’t republish), the “transformation project” financed by newspaper publishers. Both projects owe to Harvard business professor Clayton Christensen’s broadly applicable, 1997 book The Innovator’s Dilemma. The difference: the American Press Institute paid Christensen’s consulting company $2.5 million to […]

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Before Web 2.0, a little Web 101

A friend at a relatively large media corporation recently asked me to evaluate one of that company’s newspaper web sites. I removed any references to the specific paper/company not so much because I’m avoiding picking on them, but because most of the things I list I’ve seen elsewhere and I want more people at more […]

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It’s the product, stupid

Newspapers are failing, and my friend and advisor Alan Webber knows why: the problem isn’t technology, shifting business models, the rise of social networks or all the other excuses newspaper executives like to talk about. The problem is lousy products. From Alan’s Nov. 13, 2006 post: What’s happened, I think, is that newspapers have stopped […]

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