OJR: The Online Journalism Review
November 20, 2009
By Robert Niles
5 comments | 
Archive Link
I've attended many journalism conferences over the years, but our industry offers nothing like the event I attended this week. As many of you might know, my primary job these days is running a theme park news website that I founded nearly a decade ago. So this week I drove up to Las Vegas for the theme park industry's largest annual event, the International Association of Amusement Parks and Attractions' Expo.
What does this have to do with journalism, you ask? Nothing.
Which is everything. (Hang with me, okay?)
Wednesday afternoon, a source I've had a good relationship with introduced me to several former Walt Disney Co. employees who are now legends within the theme park industry. Each worked with Walt Disney himself, and had gathered for a panel discussion about Walt's management style. The question they were to answer was... what could Walt Disney's approach toward management teach today's industry leaders?
Plenty. And not just in the amusement business. Walt Disney's management philosophy contrasts sharply with contemporary management practices in the news industry, especially within "legacy" media companies. Might I suggest that difference in long-standing management tradition helps explain the sharp contrast between the recent financial performance of the Walt Disney Company and the newspaper industry? Disney today enjoys a market capitalization of nearly $55 billion, and its share price is up 13% over the past five years.
How many newspaper companies can report that?
So let's look at how Walt did things, and compare that with how things are done in the news business.
Continue reading...
More about: entrepreneurial journalism, management
Comments (5) • 
Email to a friend
Responses via 
Technorati • 
Google Blog Search
Share on 
del.icio.us • 
Digg
November 17, 2009
By Brian McDermott
4 comments | Archive Link
The October 20 survey was depressing and unsurprising news. Approximately 1,820 Brits out of 2,000- that’s 91 percent- told Lightspeed Research that they would never pay for news online.
“Online it should be free,” said 19-year-old Shauna O’Brien, an economics major at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
In the fatalistic gloom of the news industry, Shauna’s words and the British survey reinforce what a long string of failures, from Times Select to Salon Premium, have shown anecdotally: people just won’t pay for web news. Paired with stubbornly low online ad revenues and a high demand for news online, many news organizations find themselves cornered into a budgetary free-fall. The conventional wisdom is that changing this equation is impossible.
Perhaps. But could there be a lesson from something Shauna O’Brien does pay for?
Shauna buys a five-dollar pack of bottled water every few weeks. “My family has been buying water forever,” she said. In that the O’Briens have a lot of company: bottled water is a 12 billion dollar per year industry in 2009, double its size in 2000. Tap water, of course, is free, and available almost universally in the U.S. In taste tests, people often can't tell the bottled brand from the tap.
So how are these companies making so much money? Does the bottled water industry have any lessons for online journalism?
Continue reading...
More about: paid content, revenue
Comments (4) • Email to a friend
Responses via Technorati • Google Blog Search
Share on del.icio.us • Digg
November 13, 2009
By Robert Niles
1 comment | Archive Link
Thank you to everyone who sent along comments about my last piece,
Starting your news website: A checklist for students and mid-career beginners. In response to a few comments, today I'm going more in-depth on how to most effectively use a promotional channel for a news website - specifically, how to get the most from Twitter.
A Twitter feed provides one more forum for you to show the best of your site's work to an audience. Ideally, the Twitter feed should encourage people to click to your website, as well as to use their Twitter feeds to spread the word about your feed (and your website and brand), to other readers you haven't attracted yet.
Again, these tips are designed for beginners to social media - journalism students or mid-career legacy media journalists who are making the switch to online publishing. If you are an online news veteran, well... click the comment button and share your best advice, too!
Continue reading...
More about: entrepreneurial journalism, social media, tools, Twitter
Comments (1) • Email to a friend
Responses via Technorati • Google Blog Search
Share on del.icio.us • Digg
November 10, 2009
By David Westphal
1 comment | Archive Link
At the recent
Harvard session on new business models for news, I offered an off-the-beaten-path idea to the question of who will pay for the news.
One answer, I said, was non-news organizations: NGOs, trade associations, businesses, governments and labor unions.
Yes, labor unions. There are indications of a back-to-the-future trend in labor funding for the news. Just in the last several months, two labor unions in southern California have provided six-figure funding for very different kinds of operations - Voice of Orange County, an independent news site working toward a January launch, and Accountable California, a direct arm of Local 721, Service Employees International Union.
The idea that legitimate journalism might flow from "special-interest" labor money would have seemed a non-starter to many of us not long ago. How could journalists provide fair and unfettered accounts when their paychecks were the product of an organization with a clear political agenda? In fact, though, Voice of Orange County and Accountable California are simply a revival of a kind of journalism that permeated American life in the late 19th and early 20th centuries - labor-backed newspapers.
Continue reading...
More about: news history, revenue
Comments (1) • Email to a friend
Responses via Technorati • Google Blog Search
Share on del.icio.us • Digg
November 6, 2009
By Dave Chase
1 comment | Archive Link
It is painful to watch the steady decline of newspapers. For some, I expect we're about to see the
dead cat bounce as the economy turns around. This will only delay the inevitable. The challenge they face at this late date is immense but surmountable.
Their near death experience is similar to what Digital Equipment Corp (DEC) and IBM faced. Only IBM remains a blue chip market leader. However, IBM completely reinvented itself from a "big iron" mainframe and minicomputer driven company to the market leader in I.T. related services. There were some valuable assets that they were able to leverage but it took an outsider like Lou Gerstner to make that wholesale change happen.
Meanwhile, the vanguard company of the minicomputer era (DEC) wasn't able to make that shift and sold at a deep discount to Compaq (who in turn was bought by HP). It's important to recognize that IBM and DEC were in highly competitive markets. DEC along with countless other mainframe and minicomputer companies were unable to transform themselves and are mere footnotes of history. In contrast, the newspapers have largely operated in non-competitive markets by comparison. It will take a true newspaper leader and visionary to make this happen as opposed to someone just milking the cash cow until it withers and dies.
Continue reading...
More about: management, news history
Comments (1) • Email to a friend
Responses via Technorati • Google Blog Search
Share on del.icio.us • Digg
RSS Feed
