July 25th, 2009 | by grant | published in Grant’s Angle
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 […]
July 13th, 2009 | by grant | published in Grant’s Angle
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 […]
July 6th, 2009 | by grant | published in Grant’s Angle
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 […]
June 24th, 2009 | by grant | published in Grant’s Angle
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, […]
June 22nd, 2009 | by grant | published in Grant’s Angle
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 […]
June 12th, 2009 | by grant | published in Grant’s Angle
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 […]
June 11th, 2009 | by grant | published in Grant’s Angle
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 […]
June 3rd, 2009 | by grant | published in Grant’s Angle
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 […]
June 2nd, 2009 | by grant | published in Grant’s Angle
The CBS Evening News remains in third place, well behind both NBC and ABC. So you could argue it has less to lose in being adventurous. Maybe that’s part of the explanation for a smart move by the news division. But CBS news chief Sean McManus gets something that so many in traditional media still […]
May 21st, 2009 | by grant | published in Grant’s Angle
Speaking at the Sixth Conference on Innovation in Journalism at Stanford, Vin Cerf suggested that newspapers should figure out a way to charge for online content. Coming from the acknowledged “Father of the Internet,” this no doubt upset some “netopians” (my own term for “netizen” utopians who think everything should be free online, that anyone […]
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 […]
Preserve your independence of all demagogues and place-hunters and never submit to their dictation; write boldly and tell the truth fearlessly; criticize whatever is wrong, and denounced whatever is rotten in the administration of your local and state affairs, no matter how much it may offend the guilty or wound the would-be leaders of your party…— Joseph Medill
