Month: August 2007

Today is my 5,000th day working full-time in new-media. Let me tell you what I’ve seen, and to restate why I’m in the news business.

I recommend Bill Moyers’ speech to the Association for Education in Journalism & Mass Communications conference last week. Moreover, is part of the problem in journalism schools that incoming students pre-decide that they want to be old media journalists?

Congratulations to Elan Lohmann of News24.com in South Africa, who will chair Ifra’s 15th World Digital Publishing Conference this year. On other topics: Traffic to newspaper web sites has declined this month; approximately 80 percent of the American consumers who use magazines’ websites don’t read the print editions; Veronis Suhler Stevenson says that American consumers last year used media less than in previous years, the first first time in recent memory that the amount of time consumers spend with media has declined; and The New York Times publishes a story about what happens when a company mistakenly tries to use a new medium as a mass medium.

The American Audit Bureau of Circulations’ attempt to combine print circulation and online traffic is sleight-of-hand; UK online journalist earn more money than their print compatriots; and Conde Nasté’s YouTube channels are laudable but examples of a changing media battlefield that the company is losing.

The San Francisco Chronicle’s decision to cut 100 of its 400 newsroom jobs is an act of suicide.

Geography disappears online, except for language and culture. More and more research indicates that one-third of the traffic to news sites based in Britain comes from America. Those sites had best advertise to this audience or else waste over one-third of their sites advertising potential.

Forget most financial reports from newspaper companies. The Dead Tree Digital Replacement Index calculates if a newspaper company’s digital revenue gains compensate for the company’s print edition revenue losses.

A parody of what Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal might be like; neither the current UPI nor Pan Am are real; funding doesn’t mean much except money; Abel Mutsakani is shot; and Reuter’s burning bad luck at the Tour de France.

Though Business Week’s Jon Fine speculates that some major newspapers will stop their presses and publish online only, that would only make their predicament worse and many will instead outsource their printing. Why stopping the presses would be financially devastating. About the mistaken presumptions about why all newspapers need to do in order to survive is publish online. And why the San Francisco Chronicle would be better off financially if it delivered cash rather than newspapers to its readers.