Interesting piece on Journalism.co.uk on the FIPP World Magazine Congress. Condé Nast International chairman (or CEO, depending on which story or paragraph you read) Jonathan Newhouse believes print has a bright future. “To those who believe that paper and print will disappear, I’ve only one word to pronounce – nonsense,” said Newhouse. It is true […]
This fascinating piece in Slate from early this year describes how newspaper publishers were actually ahead of the curve when it came to trying to handle the impact of digital media. One publisher, Knight Ridder, even tried out its own digital distribution service in 1980, though you had to buy a pricey digital terminal to […]
Sad news from Condé Nast as it closes Portfolio magazine. I discovered Portfolio late last year when I stumbled on a dissection of the Wall Street collapse by Liar’s Poker author Michael Lewis. It was riveting and very well written – as you would expect, I guess. The reason for the closure seems to be plummeting ad […]
I totally missed the news about the demise of Press Gazette. It’s kind of sad, given that it’s been around so long. And also because I worked a few shifts there back in the late ’90s. But does it matter? Many, many, journalists will, at this very moment, be jumping up and down, foaming gently […]
Apparently desk editors at the Independent are to take on subbing duties at the paper, according to a Guardian story from April 1. That’s the sort of thing that should be an April Fool’s Day joke – but I found out it wasn’t when I was unlucky enough to buy a copy of the Indie on Easter Saturday […]
Having watched as shovelfuls of public money has been heaped on bankers and, lately in the US, should-be bankrupt car makers, a production editor friend and I joked that it would be nice to see the government bail out the ailing publishing industry. Unbelievably, it seems that this is actually being talked about in La-La […]
Yes – a spectacular air crash in a north London suburb (Mill Hill, where I grew up) killed 28 people and demolished a local house. It should be all over the internet, right? It’s not. I wondered why. The story: a friend of mine asked me to research an air crash in London in the […]
As the news hits that the Seattle Post-Intelligencer goes web-only, one of its columnists blames bad management rather than, say, revolutionary social and technological change for the looming death of the American newspaper. Instead of using the Internet as a complement to its print product, the industry went chasing after the Web and offering its […]
Amusingly, thanks to Paul Bradshaw, I’ve just found out that my links to the Daily Mail in a couple of posts were against the paper’s terms and conditions. Apparently the papers have realised just how stupid (and unenforceable) that was and have recanted. Well done (though will it save them? Maybe not). But apparently many […]
In this magisterial post, web guru Clay Shirky (who once kindly responded to my interview request for a long-dead print magazine called, ironically, Internet Business), says it all: Round and round this goes, with the people committed to saving newspapers demanding to know “If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?” To […]