Zombie Journalism

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 [...]

When it comes to weather coverage, sometimes all we need to do is give readers the latest information. We at Cincinnati.Com used Wordpress to get the weather updates out in a simple, quick way during this month’s snow storms.

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 past couple of weeks have seen the roll out of a few new looks and ideas for online news presentation that really seem to focus on the observed needs and desires of readers, while not ignoring how much the online medium has to offer.

Lest anyone think I’m casting stones without acknowledging my own sins, I decided to share a list of the shameless ploys I’ve used to get page views for my employers. What I’ve listed is hardly out of the ordinary for any website, but I still feel bad about it sometimes.

Big minds in journalism and marketing take on the confusion and misleading nature of web analytics as they relate to readers and news.

Does the quest for page views drive news judgement decisions in online news? Does that make us, the newsroom types, in the employ of advertisers?

I spear-headed the start of the Journal Sentinel’s daily news podcast in 2006. It started with me or another member of the online staff writing, voicing and producing the podcast in Sound Edit Pro each night, but eventually I trained several copy editors to join in a daily rotation for podcasting.
Here are a couple of [...]

We shouldn’t judge the future or value of “hyperlocal” news from the Washington Post’s failed experiment with LoudonExtra. Instead, we need to actually understand what it really means to be hyperlocal in reporting – and take note of sites doing it right.

Recommended links from how newspaper sites handle comments to how journalists can use Facebook for sourcing, online video usage reports and social media mapping.