One of the unexpected surprises of Northern Voice, the Vancouver blogging conference, was the presence of Ken Rickard from Morris Media, owners of the innovative Bluffton Today. Ken gave a great presentation on what’s happening in Bluffton and how those lessons are going to be applied to the chain’s Savannah, Georgia daily when it’s reinvented later this spring.
He’s put the presentation, titled “Big Media Strikes Back: Bluffton Today and the Future of Print,” up at his blog, Second Goose, and it’s worth spending some time with. I’m not convinced by his suggestion that Bluffton today may be “the” answer for newspapers, but it’s a lot closer than a lot of of the other experiments out there.
TAGS: BLUFFTON TODAY, NORTHERNVOICE, JOURNALISM, NEWSPAPERS
Mark-
I tried (unsuccessfully?) to make clear that we didn’t have “the answer.” BT is am experiment that is working very well for us. I think we’re on the right track — especially for small community papers.
What is very uncertain is how this model will scale to larger communities.
Glad you liked it.
- Ken
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Mark, I agree with you that meeting Ken at Northern Voice was a great surprise. Now that I’ve checked out Bluffton Today, I’m more pleased. Some great thought and execution leadership in the newspaper biz. It seems that because they don’t have the inertia of a big operation they can experiment and be more nimble at embracing new ideas. Not that big operations are inhibited, they just think they are.
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While Bluffton Today might not be ‘the answer’ to a lot of the questions that we’re asking, I think that what I saw in Ken’s session at NV got closer to a plausible answer than most of what I’ve heard. There’s still plenty of room for working hacks, and BT’s approach takes a less naïve view to harnessing readers’ smarts; they’re smarter, but only for some questions, and simply becuase they have answers doesn’t mean that they can write the story.
To pick up on James’s point, I think that being a new operation with a ‘old media’ blood is a potent mix; the institutional knoledge of journalism and newspapering is still carried through. I think that beats the hubris and arrogance that’s often seen with pure new-media operations.
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I probably don’t say this often enough but any “new media” experiment that doesn’t build on the existing strengths of journalism and hard-working journalists probably won’t get far.
-mark
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[...] Mark Hamilton calls Ken Rickard from Morris Media (owner of Bluffton Today) one of the surprising voices at Northern Voice, Canada’s Blogging Confernece. [...]