Wednesday, November 18th, 2009

Cutbacks at Haymarket Brand Media

Just spotted at FleetStreetBlues (via Jon Slattery) – Haymarket closes Media Week. Well, it’s going online only – but as FleetStreetBlues is so right to point out, the other two marketing titles that went online only this year have just been swallowed by Haymarket’s Brand Republic web portal. So they don’t really exist anymore. As […]

Wednesday, November 4th, 2009

Journalism and survival

Thanks to Greg Watts and FleetStreetBlues for weighing in on my Beyond Journalism essay. I used a comment by FleetStreetBlues on my media recession poll as a springboard for some ideas I have been developing on creativity and the way that we tend to put boundaries around the things we do in life. Though they […]

Friday, October 23rd, 2009

Journalism: "Please stop whining"

I really enjoyed this post from Business Insider editor Henry Blodget (really – someone is actually called that).  His argument: The debate is not about journalism but change.  The people moaning about the death of journalism are really moaning about the death of newspapers.   These are the people who stand to lose out in […]

Tuesday, September 8th, 2009

Should media owners ditch journalism altogether?

An interesting piece from Fast Company examines the idea that media owners such as the New York Times and AOL can tap into a “local-advertising pot of gold” by turning over their content infrastructure to hyper-local content producers. The New York Times launched a hyperlocal community offering – called The Local – in March. Its […]

Friday, August 28th, 2009

Where's the advertising going? Facebook, apparently

Need a job in the media? It seems Facebook is the place to go, as founder Mark Zuckerberg aims to double the company’s headcount to 2,000.  Of course, you’ll need to be an engineer or programmer, rather than, say, a journalist, which is the problem when advertising deserts its traditional media home for that new-fangled […]

Tuesday, August 25th, 2009

Why the advertising model for funding print publishing is broken

Following his recent comments on Freelance Unbound, Martin Cloake has a nice post here on the changing dynamics of magazine publishing.  His thesis (roughly) is that saturation in the market forced down individual title readerships, while a fixation on keeping advertisers happy made magazines so bland that this readership deserted the sector in droves. It’s […]

Monday, August 24th, 2009

Lessons from the superheroes: Marvel comics and mass media

There’s quite a bit of activity in the comment threads again today, as we wrestle with issues such as why newspapers (and TV) are struggling in the internet age. Martin Cloake makes some interesting points about the women’s mass market sector, which he says relies on cheap production, high sales and relatively few advertisements to make […]

Sunday, August 23rd, 2009

Why newspapers (and TV) are struggling in the internet age

The news that Gap has scrapped TV ads for social media should come as no surprise. And it’s bad news for those who think that the media’s focus should be on getting readers to pay for online content. The internet makes it easy for anyone to become a publisher of traditional-style media content at virtually […]

Thursday, August 20th, 2009

So farewell then, The London Paper…

Quite a few journalism bloggers have noted the news that London free evening paper The London Paper is to close.  It’s not the one I would have picked. I always found it had significantly higher distribution – at about three-to-one against rival London Lite, so I figured it would crowd out its rival. But then I […]

Thursday, August 20th, 2009

Yet another model to make online news pay

Thanks to Jessica for sending me the link to the new Journalism Online website – home of an effort to create a syndicate of paid-for newspaper content on the web [UPDATE: now rebranded]. This is the organisation that apparently has 170 daily papers on board already, though it hasn’t actually got around to telling us […]