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Business
What Newspaper Cartoonists Can Learn from Web Comics
Earlier this month, Randall Munroe, creator of the hugely popular web comic xkcd, announced on his blog that he would be publishing a book collection of the strip. Given the number of six-figure book deals that major book publishers have thrust upon popular bloggers, there's little doubt that Munroe's millions of monthly readers could have easily garnered him a similar...
more »Social Media
Using 'Socratic Conversation' to Unlock a Community's Insight
How can you unlock the creativity and insights of your community? Well, you can give community members a blank canvas and hope they are inspired to paint it with ideas and contributions. You can also provide them with access to experts such as journalists or external sources for chats, discussions and other interactions. Both methods have their merits, but they...
more »New Mediation
The Great Debate on Micropayments and Paid Content, Part 2
In Part 1 of the great micropayments debate, David Carr tried valiantly to defend the idea of charging for heavy-hitting journalism online, while Mike Masnick disagreed vehemently, saying micropayments would seal the doom of newspaper companies. Can the two debaters be brought together to find some common ground? Read on for Part 2. Major Media Without Walls Mike Masnick: We...
more »Weblogs
Can Health Care Blogs Fill the Gap Left by Mainstream News Coverage?
Paul Testa recently checked his voicemail and listened to a message from a hospice worker who lives in a conservative district of Ohio. He'd never met or spoken to this person before, but the worker reached out because Testa seemed like the right person to receive some important, inside information about the health care system. Testa doesn't work for a...
more »NewspaperShift
The Five Habits of Highly Successful Community Managers
Talking about communities, and newspaper communities in particular, often leaves people with a warm and fuzzy feeling. It's true that being a community manager enables you to meet wonderful people, but the reality of daily community management can be difficult and unsettling. Every community manager has to deal with community politics (the online equivalent of office politics), disillusionment and a...
more »NewspaperShift
5 Ideas to Transform Newspaper Sites
I sometimes wonder whether we are held captive by old school thinking. At our newspapers at Mediafin, we are in the process of integrating web operations with the print publication, a move which I fully endorse. There's one major risk to this: that we might end up seeing the web as just another way to distribute newspaper articles rather than...
more »Weblogs
Newspapers Try Again with Local Blog Networks
Recently, those who visited the front page of the Miami Herald's website began seeing a sidebar item labeled simply "Your Blogs." If you clicked on the link it would take you to a page containing a series of headlines and little snippets of opening paragraphs in a news feed format. If you clicked on one of the links, it would...
more »Legal Drama
Criminal Cases Push Newspapers to Identify Anonymous Commenters
Anonymous comments on newspapers blogs are drawing attention from prosecutors seeking information about criminal matters, once again raising the issue of whether newspaper blog comments are protected under state press shield laws. Last fall, I wrote about two civil cases involving claims of defamation, where two separate courts refused to order newspapers to disclose information that would lead to the...
more »NewspaperShift
Laid Off Sportswriters Find New Life Online
Early last month, the Wall Street Journal reported on a dying breed of newspaper baseball beat journalists. "As newspapers cut budgets and payrolls, the press boxes at major league ballparks are becoming increasingly lonely places, signaling a future when some games may be chronicled only by wire services, house organs and Web writers watching the games on television," reported Russell...
more »NewspaperShift
QR Codes Connect Print to the Web
Point your phone at a printed page. Take a picture. Get taken to a website. That's the power of QR codes, codes embedded in print that can link cell phones to specific websites. They've been doing this for years in Japan, and now they are starting to do it in Europe. Sooner or later it will get to the States....
more »Guides
Your Guide to Local Watchdog News Sites
As each metro newspaper downsizes and cuts staff, those reporters are considering their next moves. These sites offer a temporary safe haven for reporters, a chance to not only continue to do reporting, but to do it online in new ways. Rather than write sparingly for the print newspaper, they can now blog more frequently about more subjects and write longer pieces. They might take photos and video to go along with their text stories.
more »Legal Drama
Coalinga Newspaper Not Liable for Running MySpace Rant
A post on a social networking site like MySpace could end up anywhere, and depending upon where it ends up, the result could be catastrophic. We've covered that territory before on MediaShift, discussing a case involving discipline of a teacher for conduct shown on a MySpace page. In Moreno v. Hanford Sentinel, a California appeals court considered a case...
more »NewspaperShift
Ohio Newspapers Share Content, But Don't Give Up Hope for AP
For many, last week's news that the Associated Press planned to begin to crack down on news aggregators that link and quote its content wasn't news at all. Media industry publications have long been reporting on the friction between the AP and aggregators -- a series of verbal swipes made at conferences and in news articles that perhaps reached an...
more »5Across
Everywhere you look there are dark signs for newspapers: bankruptcies, less print editions, the threat of closings in San Francisco and Boston, layoffs and pay cuts. But the journalism of newspapers will live on in digital form online. How will this after-life look? We brought together five people for the latest episode of 5Across who are working for newspapers...
more »NewspaperShift
Newspaper Cartoonists Engage Audiences (Including Haters) Online
I once worked for a daily newspaper, where there were two things guaranteed to generate letters to the editor: articles about cats and the comics section. Readers didn't have much to say about our coverage of local elections or big trials, but we were sure to receive letters if someone disagreed with the slant of an editorial cartoon or didn't...
more »Public Relations
PR People Must Heed Digital Reality as Newspapers Fold
Last Wednesday morning, as the sun rose over the West Coast, newspaper delivery people in Seattle dropped off the final edition of the Post Intelligencer, one of Seattle's two daily newspapers. The struggling P-I was 145 years old and, by coincidence, 145 newsroom employees were left without jobs. Hearst, which owns the news organization, announced that it will retain 20...
more »NewspaperShift
How Print Publications Can Help Hyper-Local Sites
The New York Times is going into the hyper-local news business, as reported by Zachary Seward at the NiemanJournalismLab. It is just one example of hyper-local -- also called community journalism, beat reporting, or representative journalism -- in action. Other instances include Kennesee State university Professor Leonard Witt's Representative Journalism in Georgia and community news site Patch.com. It's not clear...
more »4MR
4-Minute Roundup: Facebook Democracy; Newspaper Strife
This week, I'm soft-launching the new weekly 4-Minute Roundup -- or 4MR -- audio report from MediaShift. I will embed the audio here in a blog post, and will make it available via iTunes for you to subscribe. Each Friday, I'll look at the week's top stories, give an overview of what's been happening, answer one of your "burning questions"...
more »NewspaperShift
I am delighted to have the opportunity to be the new "print correspondent" for MediaShift. Every two weeks or so I will be reporting, discussing, opining and answering comments about how new print technology can help untangle some of the problems facing newspaper companies and the future of journalism. Newspaper companies are looking for ways to profit in a new...
more »Weblogs
Can 'The Printed Blog' Succeed with Blogs in Newspaper Form?
If the entire media industry is a river that is slowly but persistently moving toward the Internet, then one could picture Joshua Karp as a canoeist paddling against the current, trying to take the online realm and solidify it into print. I first heard of his new business venture, The Printed Blog, from a colleague of mine who runs a...
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