The April issue of Inc. magazine contains a fascinating interview with Jim Collins, author of Good to Great and Built to Last, two of the most famous and well-respected business books ever written. The title is “In times like these, you get a chance to show your strength.” As you might assume, the focus is […]
Archive for March, 2009
Mark Briggs 
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March 26th, 2009
Charging for news, but not for the money
My colleague at Serra Media, Scott Falconer, recently returned from the South by Southwest Interactive Conference with an interesting idea about paying for news, based on the Guy Kawasaki/Chris Anderson keynote. Using Photoshop as an example, Anderson said that a free web version of Photoshop would not seem as high of quality to users because […]
March 23rd, 2009
NPR: guiding light for big media houses
Big media houses should be paying attention to National Public Radio and the momentum it has right now. And I’m not talking about the non-profit, pledge-drive business model that gets tossed around as a possible panacea for newspapers’ revenue woes. I’m talking about audience growth. According to this profile in Fast Company, NPR’s audience grew 95.6% […]
March 19th, 2009
Live chat on entrepreneurial journalism today
Quick reminder that I’ll be doing a live chat for Poynter today titled: “Entrepreneurial Journalism: How Journalism Can Survive Beyond Legacy Institutions.” As a starter thought, consider two qualities essential to an entrepreneurial approach: risk and optimism. Turns out most journalists aren’t wired for either, and that’s been a huge problem during this painful transition […]
March 18th, 2009
ABC’s Gibson out of touch, sends college journalists wrong message
ABC World News Tonight anchor Charles Gibson entertained several hundred college journalists and their advisors in New York yesterday. He was witty, warm and engaging (see poor iPhone photo). Unfortunately, he was also dangerously out of touch. The sky is falling and it’s your fault, he told the audience. But you can still make up […]
March 16th, 2009
Web site wish list? Here’s a start
I’m in New York this week attending the College Media Advisers convention which brings together advisers and college journalists in the name of doing better journalism on campus. Yes, I feel very old. Yesterday I spoke on a panel about building a web site with open source technologies. I’ve been doing some consulting in this […]
March 14th, 2009
Independent journalists need legal protection, too
One of the issues that commonly arises in any discussion about independent journalism start-ups is liability. Working for a large news company, journalists feel protected against libel lawsuits since they corporate counsel on their side. But when you go it alone, you’re completely exposed. I appeared on a panel at a recent workshop in Seattle […]
March 12th, 2009
The votes are in, but the title search continues
Recently I put a call out for votes and suggestions on what my next book should be called. I want to thank everyone who responded and figured I owed you a look at the results. (I will let you know when we settle on a title, too.) I received 59 responses via my LinkedIn query […]
March 11th, 2009
Guest post: There is no rule book for online news
By Jason Preston, Eat Sleep Publish When you’re looking at making the transition from print (as a medium) to the internet (as a medium), one of the most important things that you can wrap your brain around is the concept of failure. Online, failure is not only common, it’s celebrated. Just recently the New York […]
March 10th, 2009
It’s time for newspapers to take ‘wild but focused risks’
I’ve spent a fair amount of time recently extolling the virtues of entrepreneurial thinking for journalists in today’s digitally disrupted world. At a newspaper conference in Las Vegas this week, I’m seeing some exciting examples of entrepreneurial approaches for the business side of online newspaper operations. Mostly, however, I’m hearing stories of the same organizational […]
