Zombie Journalism

When Reuters released its new social media policy last week, their competition had to be salivating. The wire service stipulates that its reporters are not to use Twitter to break news – and thus are digging their own grave.

Cincinnati Enquirer editor Tom Callinan has a column in Sunday’s paper (online now) about the Enquirer’s evolving First in Print initiative.
He also gives a shout-out to ZJ and its commenters. Check it out.

I wrote first last week about my employer, The Cincinnati Enquirer, experimenting with a print-only strategy for certain stories to boost Sunday single-copy sales.
Not long afterward, I was in a meeting where we decided on the next course of this ever-evolving experiment – and came up with a conclusion web readers should find a bit [...]

Recently, The Cincinnati Enquirer has been making some stories print-only with the intent of boosting single-copy sales of the Sunday newspaper. Will it work?

If even Gawker is changing its measure of choice away from the page view to the unique user, when will the rest of the news industry follow suit?

Industry News and Ideas

Is there a flaw in the proposed federal shield law? This scathing rebuttal to an overwhelming support of a Federal Shield Law has definitely caused me some pause. For every organization that needs a shield law to protect sources that deserve it, others can exploit it to push through a salacious story [...]

In the three months since Newsday put up their pay wall, they’ve signed up only 35 online subscribers and their traffic has plummeted.

The New York Times has now said that their metered paywall will not apply to blog referrals and searches, which really doesn’t seem to make it much of a revenue model at all.

The New York Times’ plan to charge for online content is an act of desperation from a company that chose to abandon a growing audience of dedicated online readers (and the ad dollars they bring with them) in favor of a quick fix.

The New York Times announced today that beginning in 2011, it will begin charging online readers for unlimited access to articles. While it’s not a bad idea to try out, Times execs will need to readjust their expectations for their online readership stats and change their online content when they go forward with this plan.