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 [...]
If you’re editing a news site, are you publishing what users want or what you have? Assuming you have what users want, are you organizing it the way your users would want it organized? Or is it organized based on some legacy notion like print sections? Or worse, is it displayed based on the org [...]
Tom Peters has been telling businesses, industries and organizations about innovation and evolution for more than 25 years. I came across a PDF deck on my hard drive that I downloaded a few years back and found it just as insightful and instructive today as it was the first time I encountered it. A couple [...]
Change is the theme of the day. Our president-elect made sure of that with his new web site. Change can mean innovation. Or it can mean desperation. Many businesses are changing fast, forced to cut jobs and restructure because of the mortgage crisis or general economic downturn. That’s desperation. Some businesses began the process of [...]
An article from the most recent issue of Fast Company, MTV’s Digital Makeover, featured several important lessons for mainstream news organizations. MTV, which had a nice business providing cable programming for two decades, has been disrupted by the new digital ecosystem just like everyone else. In response it is launching “dozens of new initiatives” to [...]
Recently, Scott Karp asked if algorithms will make human editors obsolete and replace them on the web. It is an excellent question in this age of emerging technology and dwindling human resources at most traditional news companies. The same group of editors who shuttered at the first look of Google News a few years ago [...]
In an era of dwindling resources, mainstream news organizations are more tempted than ever to retreat. On Friday, The News Tribune said goodbye to five journalists who spent more than a century (combined) covering their community. On Monday, I led a discussion on how to raise the level of quality for the user comments posted [...]
Previously I suggested that most local news organizations are not nearly local enough, especially considering the ample opportunity provided by the web. So is that opportunity lost? Not yet, but it’s pretty easy to see how it could be. LostRemote shows us how hyperlocal blogs are building audience and building a sustainable business in Seattle. [...]
For my money, the best session at last week’s ONA conference had to be “Mobilize your Audience!” Poynter’s Ellyn Angelotti led NowPublic’s Len Brody through an insightful analysis of the startup’s “crowd powered media” site based in Vancouver, B.C. Brody said lots of mainstream news organizations “think” they are doing this, but “it’s a façade.” [...]
In my last post, I urged newspaper staffs to pick up the pace. Since I’d like this blog to offer ideas at least as often as it points out problems (hopefully more often), here’s one thing every newspaper can do today to move forward and make some progress during these challenging times (at least on [...]
Mark Briggs 
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