Stop the presses:  there are a lot of crazy and/or angry people out there.  One of their current obsessions is their belief, based on absolutely zero evidence, that Obama was not born in this country.  The abundance and persistence of conspiracy theories - especially during times of change and challenge - is nothing new, of […]

Long-term planning has never been a strong suit for newspaper management.  To be fair, you could say short-term thinking is entirely understandable these days given that newspapers are in a day-to-day battle for survival.  Understandable, but still not the right approach.  “Short-termism” has led to, among other things, a narrow focus on cost-cutting to the […]

Over the past few days, it was easy to get depressed about the future of journalism between reading Katharine Weymouth’s disingenuous letter to Washington Post readers and Jeff Jarvis’ latest screed against the mainstream media.
First, Weymouth.  She apologizes for the proposed “new venture,” the walled-off sponsored conferences, that so embarrassed the Post.  But Weymouth still […]

The mainstream media is leaving the public in the dark by failing to explain basic information about the news, a new report has suggested.Audiences are being made to feel confused and excluded by reports they do not understand, according to the paper ‘Public Trust In The News’ by academics from Manchester and Leeds Universities, published […]

By Bruce Rosenstein
The club of laid off journalists is large and growing. We all have to decide the next direction of our careers. I believe we can learn a lot from the life and work of Peter Drucker, who died at the age of 95 in 2005. One major idea I received from him, […]

 Of course one doesn’t have to look very hard to find evidence on any given day that Fox News is a platform for some extremist views and that a significant part of its audience can be described as extremist.  (And if you have a problem with the term “extremist”, it’s like Justice Potter Stewart saying […]

Tom Grubisich in Online Journalism Review (highlighted as a feature story on this page) provides some needed perspective to counter the emergent conventional wisdom about hyper-local blogs replacing newspaper metro sections:
… The metros’ problem is they don’t know how to exploit their size. For all their cutbacks, surviving metros still have considerable staff and other […]

 The New York Times has enough problems without making dumb public relations moves.  Even with its stylish new headquarters as the backdrop, the Gray Lady has rarely looked as staid as it did in a very funny Daily Show segment on Wednesday.
Standing outside the New York Times building, The Daily Show’s Jason Jones stated with […]

Speculation that Alexander Lebedev is to buy the Independent and Independent on Sunday newspapers has been reignited with a report today that a deal could be finalised by the end of the month.
Read the Guardian story

If you just read the headline in Wednesday’s Guardian, you might not fully grasp why this story is such a big deal.  “Sunday Times plans standalone website” is the headline and the subhead reads “Sunday Times executives consider charging readers on new site.”  Yes, that development represents another example of the newly emerging experimentation with […]