http://burden.ca/blog Newspapers, their websites, and their future Sun, 06 Dec 2009 20:11:48 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en I haven't posted on my blog in over seven months, but I do not feel remiss. I've been busy, to begin with. During my prolonged absence, I helped organize a workshop on the future of news keynoted by Jeff Jarvis and featuring many local Toronto media personalities. Then (actually, concurrently) I ... http://burden.ca/blog/2009/12/was-i-missed/ Just got back from a talk by Mathew Ingram (@mathewi on Twitter) where he spoke to a small group of students in Ted Fairhurst's Journalism Law and Ethics course. I've seen this talk before, at PodCamp 2009. He has a slideshow here. I'm not going to go over the whole talk ... http://burden.ca/blog/2009/03/mathew-ingram-at-centennial/ I wrote a couple weeks ago of my desire to start a new, online-only news organization covering Toronto and the GTA. One that is nimble and debt-free. Debt-free? How can this be done? This is a response to Rohan Jayasekera, who commented on that post. You’d pay your journalists (”for money”)? So much ... http://burden.ca/blog/2009/03/the-five-pillars-of-a-debt-free-news-organization/ Yes, the title of this post paraphrases the title of an article by one David Carr, the NYT writer rapidly becoming the favourite whipping-boy of the pro-web, anti-paywall crowd. But I'm not here to pan paywalls. I did that already. Steve Yelvington did it again the other day, with much panache. ... http://burden.ca/blog/2009/03/united-journalists-may-stand/ A post by Yelvington yesterday sparked a little bit of a debate about what it is that newspapers actually sell. Yelvington claimed it is not print and not news. It's readership. "Your core product is a commercially relevant audience," he said in bold type. I chimed in on the comments at his blog: ...your ... http://burden.ca/blog/2009/03/core-product-of-newspapers/ I generally applaud efforts by news organizations to get seriously jiggy with the web. In particular, when news companies make APIs available for their content, it represents a real willingness by that company to make the ultimate sacrifice: to give up control of their content and their data and let ... http://burden.ca/blog/2009/03/new-guardian-api-quibble/ The Toronto Star has been doing some good work since I panned their website a year ago. Now they have comments, which is great (but why do they have "Alert a moderator" when all comments have to be approved by a moderator? And why don't they mention that a comment won't ... http://burden.ca/blog/2009/03/the-star-shines-with-toronto-neighbourhoods-map/ Revolution is in the air. No, I don't mean blood in the streets, anarchy, or a government coup. Or at least, I hope not. I mean wholesale changes are coming to the system that brings the news to your eyes and ears. Not just in Denver, or Seattle, or San Francisco. ... http://burden.ca/blog/2009/03/the-jpeople-will-rise/ Because I believe that advertising is the business model for news sites, it perhaps behooves me to throw some ideas into the ring. People say online display ads don't work, for any one of a few reasons: banner blindness, ad blockers, inventory glut, and low CTR chief among them. Yep, standard banner ... http://burden.ca/blog/2009/03/five-ideas-for-display-ads/ Newspapers have done a crappy job of getting and keeping an audience which it could then sell to advertisers. Newspapers could have had an easy time of it. Because they produce tons of text about their communities as part of daily operations, they had a leg up over everyone else in ... http://burden.ca/blog/2009/03/seo-still-job1-at-news-sites/