It is time for newspapers to reconsider the ultimate costs and consequences of free news, Walter E Hussman, publisher of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, argues in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece.
He presents a cogent case for not giving away news on the web but, I fear, it is too late to put the genie back [...]
Roy Greenslade has picked up on Telegraph editor Will Lewis’s opening address at the 6th International Newsroom Summit and thinks it implies that the Telegraph group is going to follow other mainstream publishers into battle against Google.
According to ifra, Lewis called on newspapers to welcome transformation as a friend. The traditional business model would be [...]
Maybe its the old hack in me but I still think exclusives are worth having. Jeff Jarvis does not. “The value of an exclusive today lasts about 30 seconds,” he says at Buzzmachine.
I find his reasoning rather hard to follow. It centres on CNN paying for a campus video of the Virginia shootings — long [...]
Newspapers and magazines have long understood the power of the relationship of text and photographs, one complementing the other to make the storytelling more powerful.
It looks as if the trick with video on the web will be to achieve the same sort of relationship. That means examining the grammar of television to find new ways [...]
Robert Freeman has an excellent take on the debate on the use of video on tradtional print news sites. He writes at MediaBizTech:
Rather than watching the news on TV and attempting to emulate the format, these publications should start by using video to illustrate better the stories they are already writing.
He provides a great [...]
I have a fantasy that human communications had developed differently — the oral tradition had advanced early with telephones, radio and then video so strongly that no one had seen the need to invent writing.
Then the internet was created with all voice commands. It worked pretty well with voice messages and comments allowing a high [...]
More evidence of the success of the BBC’s news web site comes in an American report which found “the classroom use of of non-US websites, such as the BBC’s, even exceeds the use of local TV or newspaper sites.”
The report from the Harvard-based Carnegie-Knight Task Force on the Future of Journalism Education, finds use of [...]
A link from the new blog of James Hatts who edits the London SE1 Community Website, drew me to visit his very local site. I had not seen it before and I loved the use of a Google map to pinpoint the stories in the area.
If you remember Ananova, the world’s first avatar newsreader, fondly, she seems to have changed her hair colour, put on glasses, called herself Miranda and found a new job at the Welwyn and Hatield Times. The synthesised voice is as irritating as Ananova’s was.
Ananova was launched by the Press Association with much drum-beating and fevered [...]
The idea that the future is local news is getting a lot of play in the papers today. Both Peter Preston in the Observer and Tim Luckhurst in the Independent on Sunday discuss the BBC licence fee settlement and consider what it means for plans for more local TV.
On the print/internet side Tim Robinson in [...]
