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Steve Outing

Journalist, consultant, entrepreneur ... Musings on digital media, Web 2.0, & news in the Internet era

Ads on the Times’ front page, oh my!Yesterday

No doubt you’ve heard the “big” news that the New York Times has added an advertising spot on the front page of its print edition. Shocking, eh? The New York Post in covering the news says in a graphic accompanying its story, “New York Times Publisher Arthur ‘Pinch’ Sulzberger is smashing the paper of record’s vaunted Chinese wall between news and advertising by peddling front-page space.”

Puleeze. First, kudos for NYT making a move that might bring in some badly needed serious money to its legacy business. Second, plenty of other papers do front page ads (including in the U.S., USA Today and the Wall Street Journal), though it’s more common outside the U.S. I don’t believe for a second that ads on the front page will have any effect on editorial content. The worst that can happen is some embarrassing juxtaposition of a page 1 ad for a company that’s covered on the front page for some wrongdoing. But I suspect the Times’ editorial and ad departments are both plenty smart enough to avoid that.

My point in writing this item is merely to remark on what a big deal some folks are making about this move. Unfortunately, this kind of move (”OMG! Ads on the front page!”) passes for radical innovation in much of the newspaper industry. Compare

E&P column: It’s about the moneyYesterday

My latest Editor & Publisher Online column is up: “Need to Make Profits Online? It CAN Be Done.”

It’s a follow-up to my previous E&P column, which advised newspaper CEOs on 11 key strategies to reinvent their enterprises. But since I didn’t focus so much on the money angle in that column, this time I tried to put my head around how the suggested adaptations by a newspaper company to survive in the digital age can be used to boost revenues.

There’s no silver-bullet solution (I only wish I was that smart), but I hope newspaper folks will find some useful ideas in the column.

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Sometimes the reporters get it firstYesterday

One of the great things about Twitter, of course, is that when a big breaking news event happens, there are often witnesses on the scene with a cell phone who will post some quick tweets about what’s going on, before any reporters can get there. (You’ll remember the Continental jet that went off a Denver runway recently and one of the survivors tweeted about his experience.)

An incident a few days ago proved that’s not always the case. I woke up on New Year’s day and looked at the news on my iPhone to see what was new in the world. Top story in a bunch of places was a crazy bombing threat that shut down much of the resort city of Aspen for much of New Years Eve. By the time I heard about it, the bomber had committed suicide and there was plenty of mainstream media coverage of the story.

But I was curious to see if Twitter was a decent source of news and eyewitness tidbits the evening before, when the craziness was going on and police were roping off city blocks and defusing bombs. I checked out several services (including Twitter’s own advanced search) and looked through tweets sent on New Years Eve by people in Aspen. I was a bit surprised to find not much. Plenty of chatter about sections of the city getting roped off, but nothing from the tweeting witnesses that shed much light on what was going on.

So the local Aspen newspapers got a bit of a break in being the ones getting breaking details onto their web

VC journalism: An outsider’s view of newsJanuary 5

One of my new favorite bloggers, Martin Langeveld, mentioned one of his favorite new bloggers, John Thornton and his Insomniactive, where the Texas venture capitalist spouts off smart opinion and analysis of the newspaper industry. Great stuff; add Insomniactive to your RSS reader if you care about newspapers.

I was wondering how Thornton’s blog could have escaped my radar, but it looks like he only started posting stuff on media and news topics in late December 2008. So I guess I can be forgiven.

Along with Alan Mutter’s Newsosaur blog, now you’ve got an excellent duo of bloggers documenting the financial side of the newspaper industry’s spiral downward. I think Thornton is clearly the most pessimistic, and seems to think that the newspaper industry is headed toward a future of non-profit journalism. Also:

“You see, the online news outlets of the future are shaping up to be -– and it grieves me to say this –- a bunch of grubby, cruddy, marginally profitable little businesses. …

“Can some of these things make a little money? Sure, why not? It’ll be sort of like a Mad Max movie, or Cormac McCarthy’s The Road -– after the nuclear holocaust, plenty of assorted post-armageddon, beady eyed-sole proprietors with shopping carts and

Do you know what year it is tomorrow? (Hint: check your copyright footer)December 31 2008

I’ve lost track of how many years I’ve blogged this, but it’s still good advice…

Sure, some systems are set to do this automatically, but MANY aren’t. I’m no longer shocked to see some website in June have the previous year’s copyright date published. (Actually, I occasionally spot some that haven’t been updated in years. It always makes me skeptical of a site’s content and quality when the bottom of the page says “©2005″.)

You’ve been reminded. I hope you have a great 2009. We have nowhere to go but up. Right?!

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