Jan
12
For your reading pleasure:
- It’s all doom and gloom for Canada’s media. Alfred Hermida rounds up recent news from the Canadian media scene. I fear there is much more to come in 2009.
- Update: Dallas Morning News, Fort Worth Star-Telegram to share sports coverage. What’s missing from this report about the two rivals combining coverage is what effect it will have on the size of the two newsrooms, a pretty fundamental piece of reporting that news media appear unwilling to apply to stories about themselves. Update: I’ve heard two Star-Telegram beat writers who are effected are being reassigned, likely within the department.
- Hearst may be remaking, not eliminating, The P-I. Speculation from Seattle’s online news site Crosscut, but interesting speculation nonetheless. Related: Sixty Days: Editor begins discussion on the P-I’s fate, editor David McCumber will be blogging what may be the last 60 days of the P-I.
- A pep talk for journalists. This is good. A sample: “But we cannot freeze in fear like the proverbial deer in the headlights of an oncoming truck. For if we do, we are sure to die, just like that deer. We must fight the instinct that tells us to give up, to hide under a blanket and cry or do only the bare minimum because we’re doomed anyway.”
- News site needs new, innovative user interfaces. Pat Thornton takes newspapers to task for their websites and wonders why the design model for the online newspaper is the print newspaper. It’s a long post, but one worth pondering. Related: News Web site user interfaces, Megan Taylor riffs on Pat’s post and gives details about why she (like many of us) rarely go to newspaper websites.
- Sigh. A very well-written, pointed response to the much-lauded feature on the NY Times’s digital “renegades,” an article I read and much enjoyed. From Elizabeth Spiers’s push-back: “The Times has one of the best newspaper sites out there, but it’s a tallest dwarf distinction.”
- Motown at 50 — Fifty videos by The Detroit Free Press. Oh, man, am I looking forward to this Detroit Free Press project.
- Twelve Major Media Brands Likely To Close In 2009. More predictions. Among the titles: Miami Herald, Entertainment Weekly and Playboy.
- Guest post – 8 things newspapers need to do right now to survive. Angela Connors follows up some great recent posts by turning her blog over to Rod Overton who has ideas for newspapers, some of which will not go down well.
- An iTunes for news? Dumb, dumb, dumb. Mathew Ingram, as he so often does, absolutely nails it. Memorize the last graf. Related: Scott Rosenberg’s Carr’s “iTunes for news” already exists.
- Twitter: Just start. Kirk Lapointe adds the perspective on Twitter and why it matters from inside the newsroom.
- the vehicle, the road or the voyage | o veículo, a estrada ou a viagem. An Alex Gamela post from last week that I have been remiss in not pointing to earlier. Newspapers, he writes, are “trying to save the vehicle when they haven’t still understood how the vehicle has evolved.”
