Entries Tagged as ‘Uncategorized’

June 25, 2008

Why Raines is Wrong About Romenesko

Busy dissertating, preparing to move to Memphis, getting ready to start a new job, and planning a wedding, I didn’t notice this article by Howell Raines until a journalist friend of mine sent it to me.
Apparently Raines thinks that Romeneko’s “gossip” site “inadvertently ushered in the era of fact-free journalism.”
Huh?
Does anybody else find it a [...]

June 9, 2008

Back. Back Again.

Sorry for the brief blog hiatus! Er. Well, that’s assuming that anybody actually misses my pontifications, which is probably unlikely. Anyway. The past couple of weeks have been pretty crazy. Last week I headed down to Memphis, where I will be an assistant professor of journalism starting this fall, to [...]

May 14, 2008

Disruptive Innovation: It’s All About Process, Baby

I’m reading a book (when I have time, which is clearly not very often) called The Innovator’s Dilemma by Clayton M. Christensen of Harvard Business School.  It was recommended to me by my very smart friend and colleague Jonathan Groves.  I’m not very far along, but thought I would share a bit of what I’ve [...]

May 13, 2008

Revving Up that News Engine and Taking on TV

I’m finding myself wondering what a new spirit of competition will mean for local news.
My research shows that it is finally dawning on newspapers that they can rev up that news engine that invariably is the biggest one in town and, with an increased focus on immediacy, compete with local TV news and radio at [...]

April 30, 2008

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 [...]

April 22, 2008

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 [...]

April 10, 2008

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 [...]

March 21, 2008

Good news

Finally!
I’m too tired to do much more work today, so I’m reading the State of the Media report (full disclosure, if you will:  I used to work with many of the folks that produce the report.)  I alluded this briefly in an earlier post, but this is pretty cool.
We all know that newspaper circulation has [...]

March 21, 2008

Niiice

How much do you love the cool banner that my friend Tresa Undem made for this blog? Woot!

March 11, 2008

Why should I care about “managing change?”

Can’t we just get to the business of DOING IT, already?
The wired world has plenty of pundits who will tell you that if newspapers would just get with the program and truly embrace the Web they could reverse their staggering recent declines and find a way to make money.  If they would just open themselves up to greater [...]