After two years of trying and failing to make a buck on its hyperlocal website LoudounExtra.com, the Washington Post will close the site next month. Rafat Ali has the story at PaidContent.org, while former LoudounExtra blogger Tammi Marcoullier posts a few thoughts on the site’s demise. As Rafat points out, the closure stands in interesting […]
Category Archives: Newspapers
Globe & Mail flattens structure, adds digital staff
J-Source has posted a memo from the Globe & Mail’s recently promoted Editor-in-Chief John Stackhouse outlining a reshuffle of senior managers. There will be no deputy editor. Three masthead editors will take expanded responsibility for News and Sports (David Walmsley), Features (Jill Borra) and Business (Elena Cherney). Commentary and Custom Content remain under their current […]
Stylish new newsroom for Wall St Journal
The Wall St Journal moved into new premises in June, and Chris O’Brien at Next Newsroom published the above photos. Find more info and photos on The Next Newsroom Project
This newspaper owner is doing OK
Times may be tough for some newspaper owners, but Santa Barbara News-Press co-publisher Wendy McCaw appears to be getting by just fine. Her helicopter-toting 193-foot motoryacht Calixe is in Toronto, drawing plenty of admiring looks. Ms McCaw and her fiancé, Arthur von Wiesenberger, are co-publishers of the News-Press, a newspaper she purchased in 2000 from […]
Five trends in the reinvention of news
The Cato Institute’s Cato Unbound website this month features essays on the future of journalism. Clay Shirky kicked things off on Monday reiterating a theme on which he blogged a few months ago – that this is a time of upheaval for traditional news media, with no single clear path to future sustainability. Today, another […]
NY Times challenges to readers to become reporters
Neighbourhood website The Local, a project of the New York Times in Fort Greene and Clinton Hill, will launch a virtual assignment desk next week. Readers are invited to propose assignments – and to carry them out, starting with this one: We’re looking for someone to go to the 88th Precinct Community Council meeting next […]
Charting the change in classified advertising
These charts, from the Pew Internet and American Life Project, really need no commentary and certainly won’t come as a surprise. Of course “classifieds ads websites” is another way of saying Craigslist, which had 42.2 million unique visitors in March 2009, compared with 53.8 million total unique visitors to classified sites. For an equally dramatic […]
American Press Institute endorses paid content
It’s feeling a lot like 2005 again, as newspapers prepare to leap aboard the online user-pays bandwagon. The only thing that’s changed is the level of desperation. Rick Edmonds, at the Poynter Institute, reports that a new whitepaper from the American Press Institute espouses five “doctrines” to help publishers gain more revenue from their content. […]
Cute, but short on insight
This is a nicely done video, even if it adds little to our understanding of the problems facing newspapers (repeating the old saw that newspapers shouldn’t have offered their content online free of charge and accusing them of doing too little with video to compete against television).
Digital is focus for new editor at Globe & Mail
Yesterday’s executive changes at the Globe and Mail are being described as “part of a broader set of changes to expand the newspaper’s digital strategy.” Few hints of what that might mean are being made public at this stage, but statements by publisher Phillip Crawley make it clear that he wants changes to happen quickly. […]