Another “Village Soup” site in Wareham, MA

I just added WarehamVillageSoup.com to the growing list of niche news sites and networks on Jurnos Wik. Anne Eisenmenger, founder and publisher of one of the affiliates of the Village Soup network, sends this info in a 7/12/10 email: “The first out-of-Maine licensee of Village Soup, we have simultaneously worked to “reinvent” the community newspaper. [...]

Talkin’ about….WellCommons

For the last year, I’ve been head-down in development. My (poor neglected) blog, Facebook and Twitter accounts have seen few words, photos, graphs or video. However, now my head’s finally up, and it’s time to talk about what much of that last year has been about: WellCommons, the new local health site that we at [...]

Journalism, journalists, j-schools and the new era

At LJWorld.com, we’ve created a new health site called WellCommons. It’s a very different way for a news organization to serve its community, because it uses the tools of the Web to integrate community and journalism. More on this in another post. How our community will change the structure and function of WellCommons, and, by [...]

Explaining targeted ads

One of my favorite columnists is Steve Smith, who shares duties on MediaPost’s Behavioral Insider with Laurie Sullivan. Today, Smith provided some great clarity about targeted advertising, also known as digital ad targeting. It’s important for jurnos to wrap their heads around this, because it’s a useful technology, if not abused. (Oh how often have [...]

Newspapers need to grok online advertising, too

Newspapers’ Online Strategies Failed in 2009 — in yesterday’s MediaDailyNews, Eric Sass pointed out that newspapers’ online revenues have been falling along with their print revenues. The reasons, he says, are that online revenues were concentrated in online classifieds, and those never became independent from print classifieds. As print continued to plummet, they took online [...]

Sputters and Launches

While 24/7WallSt lists the top 10 newspapers that are likely to close or go entirely online, a newly laid-off journalist is a week into the launch of another niche site. On Feb. 23, Greg Hernandez was laid off from the LA Daily News, where he’d been doing the Out in Hollywood blog. Seven days later, [...]

Making a Living with QuincyNews.org

When Bob Gough lost his job as news director at a Quincy, IL, TV station in October 2007, he had a choice: Move to another city or figure out another way to stay in the journalism biz in Quincy. He didn’t want to move — Quincy was his home. He had a wife with a [...]

A Modest Proposal, Part Two (for the Jurnos on the Sidewalk)

The Rocky Mountain News published for the last time today. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer is next, with its last day likely to be sometime early in March. The Hearst Corporation is threatening closure of the San Francisco Chronicle if it can’t shrink that news organization to zombie status. (Definition of a zombie newspaper: a skeleton staff [...]

The New Metros

Dollars to donuts, sometime in the next 12 months, residents of a metropolitan area will wake up one day, go to their doorsteps, and wonder why they don’t see their newspaper. They’ll check the metro’s Web site, and it won’t be there. Or, there might be one that’s so pared down that only tatters remain: [...]

WestSeattleBlog — Don’t Call Them ‘Bloggers’

Just because they’re using a blog format, says WestSeattleBlog co-founder Tracy Record, it doesn’t mean they’re “bloggers.” (Unfortunately, that’s still a perjorative term in the journalism community. That’s too bad, since the blogging format is the Web “story” format.) Tracy and hubby Patrick Sand started blogging about their West Seattle neighborhood in January 2006 while [...]

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