Posts tagged as:

newspapers

Nick Hornby, on writing. Thanks, PBS, for the non-embeddable clip. Skip to 5:30 to get the the good bits.

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What happened when the money dried up

by Tim Windsor on December 10, 2008

I’ve been passing around an odd little YouTube clip of a 2005 Christmas gift from Sam Zell. It shows an animated statue that features a recording of Sam extolling the virtures of an economy that’s throwing off cheap cash left and right, And then, there’s a song:

“We’re awash with cash to spend!”
It would just be [...]

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Can an InfoValet guide us to a business model?

by Tim Windsor on December 8, 2008

Martin Langeveld reports on a conference focused on the notion of an “InfoValet.” It sounds like attendees at the conference spent a lot of time thinking of ways to describe what they’re onto, but I’d put it this way, from a consumer perspective:
A universal logon system whereby users “pay” for access to information with (secure) [...]

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Winner, Most Prescient Post of 2008: Mark Potts

by Tim Windsor on December 7, 2008

It was just shy of one year ago today when Mark Potts swam against the Zellebratory news of the sale of Tribune, in a post entitled “Here Come The Death Eaters,” in which he typed these words:
Put that all together, and 2008 may be the year that the Death Eaters start coming for some of [...]

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And so it begins

by Tim Windsor on December 7, 2008

Both the Wall Street Journal and New York Times are reporting tonight that the Tribune company has hired an investment bank and a law firm for a potential bankruptcy filing as early as this week. This is definitely a long way down the road from a year ago when the arrival of Sam Zell was [...]

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I keep coming back to this: if the people, through their behavior, keep telling newspapers that they don’t want the paper part of the paper anymore AND the paper part of the paper is enormously expensive to create and distribute, then why doesn’t some market take a leap and try going all digital?
Yes, there will [...]

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Alan Mutter’s incredible shrinking newspaper

by Tim Windsor on December 2, 2008

Yesterday, Alan Mutter promised a detailing of just what newspapers might do when things turn really sour in Q1 of 2009. Today, he delivers. But the list – at least at the beginning -  sounds awfully familiar already:
The list of potential expense reductions includes squeezing staffing, shuttering bureaus, carving out layers of middle management, telescoping [...]

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The revenue slide gets steeper

by Tim Windsor on November 29, 2008

Alan Mutter was paying attention when The NAA tried to quietly dump its latest revenue numbers on the afternoon before Thanksgiving. And what he saw was grim, including continued falloff in all categories, and the second quarter in a row of declining interactive numbers.
The performance in the third quarter was affected only partially by the [...]

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Thanks to Journalism Iconoclast (Pat Thornton), I just found the “Don’t Let Newspapers Die” Facebook “cause” page.
My first thought, especially after reading point #3 (“Newspapers are cool!”) was that this was a big fat furry sock-puppet created by the NAA. But instead, it appears to be a genuine effort from an Indiana mom. Who loves [...]

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Print less to save the paper and the business

by Tim Windsor on November 18, 2008

This is just about the most challenging and possibly true sentence I’ve read in weeks:
Two fat newspapers each week and a robust web platform will have more impact than five or six skinny papers and a site that’s not foremost in the newsroom’s mind.
Martin Langeveld, who blogs at News After Newspapers, makes the case that [...]

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