Friday, November 24, 2006

The turmoil in newspapers is matched by the turmoil in advertising. An interesting story on Poynter by Rick Edmonds talks about how ad agencies are scrambling to meet changing consumer habits: http://www.poynter.org/content/content_view.asp?id=113840

Advertising change will affect us more than anything else. Put on those seatbelts!

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The New York Times is beta testing a way to get the "paper" over the internet using a Microsoft program. See NYTimes Firstlook

This looks similar to Adobe's Digital Editions:
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/digitaleditions/

These multimedia pdf readers will rock our world when good electronic books, maybe with OLED screens, become available. I think this approach, which allows us to "publish" pages electronically with advertising like our current newsprint product, will be the future for newspapers.

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Gannett is changing all 89 of their local newsrooms to 24/7 online operations.
See this E&P story: info center

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The Washington Post is tossing their newsroom into a blender to try to get a new media staff out of the result. See this E&P story: Post restructure

The New York Times is moving in the same direction: Jill Abramson, managing editor, says this in her 'Talk to the Newsroom' blog entry: "We've had to make some sacrifices and postpone some hiring, and currently we are working on a project that will result in efficiencies across our different platforms, including NYTimes.com, the largest newspaper Web site, and the International Herald Tribune. Integrating our news operations across platforms not only makes budgetary sense, but also journalistic sense. It is about managing our news assets smartly for the future."

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Again from E&P, a very interesting story on a Columbia University discussion on the prognosis of old media: old media . The Wall Street Journal Online's Bill Grueskin is paraphrased thusly: "The revenue importance of unique page visits has forced editors to change the way they produce stories. A reader will not click on twenty stories, he said, but they might click on twenty pictures. "

Yeah, baby -- we photogs will be running the show soon!

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Here's a story from Digital Content Producer about the San Jose Mercury News' photo site. It says the site had 100,000 visitors "last month":
digitalcontentproducer.com

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