Archive for the ‘Random’ Category

Happy New Year

Just a quick note to let you know that I’m wishing you the most Happiest of New Years in 2010. And Happy New Decade, too. (Oh, and don’t forget to update the year in the footer on your websites.)

The Important Thing About Online News

There was a time when my daughter, little pistol that she is, would only let her mom read her bedtime stories. Eventually, because I wasn’t going to take “no” for an answer, I convinced her to let me read her one book. But only one book, she said. So after several months of taking turns […]

‘Monetizing the hate:’ could this really work?

Heather Armstrong, known to her 1.2 million followers on Twitter as Dooce, has an idea on how to turn hate mail into cash: “Internet, let me introduce you to Monetizing The Hate. Here I will be posting all the hate mail I get in my inbox and all the hateful anonymous and not-so-anonymous comments left […]

Gone fishin’: Taking a little blog break

Summer is here, my manuscript is submitted and I’m heading to Alaska for a few days of fishing with the guys. So I’m hitting the pause button on the blog and will resume later this month with more excerpts from my upcoming book and more observations on the evolution of local publishing and entrepreneurial journalism […]

What do we call this new form of journalism and media?

With so many digital news, information and community sites popping up all over the place, using blogs, Twitter, CoverItLive, podcasts, video, social media, mapping mash-ups, searchable databases and other shiny new objects, it seems prime time to introduce a new name for all this hubbub. The news industry calls it “new media” or “interactive media,” […]

I remember when A-Rod was just Pay-Rod

All this talk about Alex Rodriguez these days reminded me of one of the more quirky and fun online projects I once helped develop. (OK, it was my wife who reminded me about this.) The Pay-Rod Meter, which we built on The Herald’s web site in Everett in 2003, shortly after Rodriguez signed his historic […]

PR and journalism education don’t need a divorce

Journalism education needs more public relations and business emphasis, not less. That’s what immeditately occurs to me after reading 10 reasons Why Journalism Schools Should Get Rid of PR. Bob Conrad argues that moving PR programs out of J-schools and into business schools will improve the education for PR students.  He’s probably right. But such a […]

The gift that keeps on giving

How do you know you’re a hopeless case of online geekery? When you get your wife a domain name and set up a WordPress blog for her and call it a Christmas present. But wait, there’s more. I also gave my son and daughter domain names so they can have cool email addresses. And I […]

Spam attack

The spambots finally found this blog so I apologize if you saw any content vandalism here the past few days. I’ve turned off trackbacks and activated the Akismet plug-in in an attempt to keep it clean around here. Just wondering: how do you spend your day programming a spambot to spread the garbage I had […]

Instead of blogging the Online News Conference, I’m going to Twitter

Blogging a conference is so passe. And besides, Twitter is so much easier. If I’m quiet for a while, assume nothing interesting is happening. Or the newtowrking reception has started. Follow along: twitter.com/markbriggs