Don’t dump your email account for Facebook — yet

Versión en español aquí. I was suprised and delighted to read today that the New York Times studied its readers’ habits for sharing articles and found that they prefer email over social networks. The implication for web designers is that they should make email sharing a prominent tool on their websites or they might miss a […]

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How to decide whether to offer podcasts on your site

Versión en español aquí. At the moment I am leading a course for Latin American journalists who have created their own digital news media (blog for the course in Spanish is here).We just analyzed the multimedia aspects of a number of websites and a question arose about the value of offering podcasts. The simple answer […]

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The three key roles in a digital media operation

The biggest mistake that journalists make when they start an online news operation is that they don’t include marketing and technical people from the beginning.Journalists are pretty good at figuring out how to tell stories online but they haven’t a clue about how to generate enough income to survive. They don’t know how to sell […]

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Murdoch was Bubble Boy with Myspace purchase

If ever there were an example of what happens in a bubble economy it is News Corp.’s purchase of Myspace for $580 million in 2005. Now the social network that was a media sweetheart has been sold for $35 million to Specific Media, an advertising network. In other words, it lost 94% of its market […]

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Digital-first gets another advocate: UK Guardian CEO

John Paton, CEO of the Journal Register Co., has been generating a lot of buzz for his revolutionary pronouncements to newspaper editors that they need to put digital first, print last. (Here are his 10 Tweets to transform newspapers.) Now he has something of an ally in the UK.  In an interview with Paid Content, Guardian […]

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African news service thrives as cooperative

Justin Arenstein never really wanted to work for a big corporation, but that is how he started out in journalism. He was a reporter working on contract covering one of the desperately poor shantytowns of his native South Africa. He and his colleagues ran afoul of corporate management by covering the death squads that were […]

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News organizations have attracted $187 million in grants since 2005

The new ecosystem of small news organizations continues to evolve at breathtaking speed. When you consider that it has been only four years since the news industry’s business model went into free fall, the number of new organizations and their quality are impressive.  Also impressive is the financial support that they have attracted. J-Lab has […]

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