Journalism

Good News for Local Journalism — I Hope

January 13, 2013

This week what my local (Eugene, Oregon) newspaper is doing with an iPad app makes me feel better about the future of journalism in the new online age. I’ve got a newspaper habit. I begin my day with the local paper. While I make my coffee and gather a breakfast, a browse the headlines, and [...]

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Is Print Journalism Dead?

November 20, 2012

Is print journalism dead? I got the question overnight in email from a student working on a research paper. He’d seen this post on this blog about that. He asked me to answer these three questions.  So these are his questions with my answers.  1.) What are the factors that have led to falling sales? Start [...]

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Is Objective Journalism Doomed?

February 27, 2012

Do you ever wonder what happened to objective journalism? I have a thought about that. Until the web changed everything, we got our news from a very few sources: There was a newspaper or two in every city. There were three major networks, ABC, NBC, and CBS, offering television and radio news. There were a few [...]

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Who Should Decide What News Matters?

July 23, 2009

Back in the old days editors decided what was news. Not advertisers and not readers. There was this concept called “news values.” Full-time professionals laid out the front page. They tried to highlight important political, economic, and social trends, coverage deemed important, rather than celebrities, fashions, nudity, and violence. This was a long time ago. [...]

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Journalism, TechCrunch, Stolen Information

July 21, 2009

This — the TechCrunch publishes stolen information flap last week — is why I worry about the gradual disappearance of Journalism as newspapers and traditional advertising disappear. You may or may not have read about it. Somebody stole documents from Twitter’s computer and sent them to TechCrunch. They stole more than 300 memos, presentations, projections, [...]

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Is Journalism Dead, Dying, or Just Faking It?

May 19, 2009

I feel like I’m watching Journalism fall apart; watching with interest, horror, and dismay … but just watching, like watching a fire from far away, powerless. Like you do, I read about the newspapers folding, falling like trees in a rotting forest. Even the New York Times is in trouble. Many of the newspapers I [...]

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Does the News Business Die Along with Newspapers?

March 31, 2009

In the olden days, when I was a grad student in Journalism, for instance, or a night editor for UPI, the business model of the news business was fairly clear: News organizations sold advertisements. They needed news to get readers to be able to sell the ads. News needed credibility to get the readers. So [...]

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True Story: ‘A Reason Why Not’ Isn’t Good Enough

March 13, 2009

I can’t say I liked my first boss. But I learned a lot from him. Some of it worth sharing. He was bureau manager of United Press International in Mexico City in 1971. He was about 45 years old, just…

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