Archive for April 2009
Facebook Politics: Hidden in Plain Sight
Surely some of you know more about this topic than I, but here are my thoughts the News & Observer’s Under the Dome blog.
Advice to Future Magazine Editors
Contrary to what seems to be popular opinion, magazines have a strong future online, I think. But their future depends completely on the leadership and innovation of publishers and editors, as I told the Carolina Association of Future Magazine Editors last night.
The audio of the talk is after the jump.
New Book: Reaching Audiences, 5th Edition
I’m happy to announce the new release of Reaching Audiences: A Guide to Media Writing. Jan Yopp and Katherine McAdams were kind enough to invite me to be a co-author on this edition and help update it with a lot of new information about online news, including a whole new chapter on the topic.
My portion of the royalties from all sales of new copies of this book at UNC Student Stores will be going to scholarships for journalism students here.
NCAA Basketball, the Tar Heel, and Citizen Media
The NCAA basketball game tonight in Detroit between the Tar Heels of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the Michigan State Spartans brings us a good illustration of the relative strengths of print and online news.
Does the WSJ’s Online Business Strategy Work for Local News?
Be niche. Have very high standards. And find some subscribers to buy it
Good advice for future journalists from Alan Murray, the editor of the Wall Street Journal’s Web site, who gave the Park Lecture at UNC’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication on Thursday night. His approach to online journalism certainly sounded right to me, but what I didn’t hear was any hard evidence that would help support my gut instinct.
The biggest question I still have: Is there any business model for high quality local public affairs journalism?
Survey of Online Journalists: They’re Young, White Copyeditors
Earlier this week, the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism came out with a survey about the attitudes of online journalists. I’m sad to say that the survey has limited use in charting a path for the future of news, but it did make me feel a lot better about the response rate in my recently completed national survey of online journalists.
Pew hired Princeton Survey Research Associations International to conduct its poll of 1,201 members of the Online News Association. They had a 24 percent response rate. I paid two grad students and an undergrad to help me survey 174 online journalists (mostly non-members of ONA). We had a 29 percent response rate.
But even more importantly, I think the survey we did here at UNC does a much better job showing us the future of news… which is bright if you dream of a future of inexperienced, homogeneous copyeditors shuffling text around a Web page.
