Unhappy Journalists Aren’t Productive Journalists

I hope to periodically use this blog to summarize recent academic research relevant to managing change in the newsroom. Today I picked up one of the Newspaper Research Journals that have been piling up on my desk, untouched, and spent a few minutes quickly reading through a study that found that one-third of copy [...]

New Advertising Model?

In a comment on my last post about “verification communities”, my good friend and very wise former journalist with 18 years of experience in the newspaper biz Doreen Marchionni mentioned a new strategy for online newspaper advertising that I wanted to take a moment to highlight because I think it makes some very interesting food [...]

Building “Verification Communities”

My mentor, friend, and former boss at the Committee of Concerned Journalists, Bill Kovach (this is he and I at my CCJ going away party in 2005), came to talk to a lunchtime gathering of the Missouri Journalism School today about the future of news. Nobody can articulate big thoughts about journalism the [...]

The Mullet Strategy

The New Yorker piece on the demise of the American newspaper by Eric Alterman has been buzzing about among most folks I know for quite awhile now, so I’m assuming that many people have read it.
My favorite part of the article — and maybe this is for no other intellectual reason aside from the [...]

Defending the Newseum

It saddens me that most of what I’ve heard about the new Newseum — from fellow journalists, no less — is negative.
Jon Fine of Business Week calls it an “eerie temple of yesterday’s news” and accuses it of being a fitting monument to journalistic “smugness, elitism, and undue self-importance,” yet another example of the [...]

Training to Mitigate Learning Anxiety, and Other Positive Signs at the LAT

I was encouraged to read in an internal memo printed in LA Observed that the Los Angeles Times plans to incorporate training in its newsroom transformation initiatives. Written by Russ Stanton, the memo says that the paper “will train all editorial employees in new skills in every medium in which we work (print/web/TV/mobile/radio).”

Training has [...]

The New “Press-Sphere”?

Jeff Jarvis of BuzzMachine wrote a post yesterday that I liked on what he calls the new “press-sphere” and wanted to call attention to for those that haven’t seen it.
As my previous posts suggest, I tend to be fundamentally and unapologetically a traditionalist who believes that (gasp) the majority of those who work in the [...]

Using the Media Choice Model

There is nothing so practical as a good theory.
I’ve long found the above statement pretty dubious. Yes, I’ve spent years, upon years, upon years, in school, prostrate to the higher mind, and all that, and now I depend on the Ivory Tower for a living. However, I can’t deny I’ve always had very [...]

Mizzou Students Offer Advice to News Organizations

Last week I got to step back into the classroom for the first time in almost a year to teach Principles of American Journalism for my friend Hans Ibold, who is off doing some interesting work on international media in Krzygstan.  Principles is an intro- level required course for freshman and sophomore students at Mizzou.  [...]

Long Live the Pulitzer

I’d like to offer a rejoinder to Jeff Jarvis, who called the Pulitzer Prizes a “circle-jerk of mutual self-love” among journalists and a “relic of past glory” that fail to reward innovation and fresh thinking, and to Nick Denton’s Gawker, which similarly describes them as “pernicious” because they distract newspapers from the real challenge, which [...]