The current newspaper business revenue crisis has led to some old ideas being dusted off and presented as new (Paid content! Micropayments! Preservation of print circulation!), and who knows? Maybe some of the experiments rumored and foreshadowed in Long Island and Seattle and across the Hearst Empire will net some needed dollars for the ongoing [...]

[For Chapters 7 and 8 of this month's Nieman Journalism Lab Book Club selection, we turn to Tim Windsor. For more info on the Book Club, check here. —Ed.]
Chapter 7 of All the News That’s Fit to Sell, like much of the book that surrounds it, is a moment frozen in time, like Pompeii or [...]

Newspaper bosses and media companies can be short-sighted. Dull of wit. Evil, even. This should come as no surprise to anyone who’s been paying attention.
Myself, I’ve taken an active role in meetings where the topic — stated or unstated — was “We need to save a pantsload of money, and if that means we create [...]

What does the journalist of the future look like?
PR whiz Steve Rubel says he looks a lot like Peter Abraham, who is not some vaporware demo from 2015, but a flesh-and-blood reporter covering the Yankees spring training camp in Florida right now.
Abraham is the Yankees beat writer for the Journal News in Westchester county (a [...]

Steve Outing adds another angle to the ongoing debate about paid content with a discussion of an upcoming service with the unfortunately Dot-bomb-era name of Kachingle.
Basically Kachingle is a voluntary, centralized system that allows users to support the online publications they like. It’s compared in the article as an NPR-style donation system for publishers, but [...]

Given the recent secret memos and TIME cover stories, the topic of “paid content” has once again grabbed the spotlight, offering at least a slim hope of revenue redemption to some newspaper people — largely on the print side, but with some notable digital advocates as well.
For those of us who went down these paths [...]

Must-reading for anyone keeping up with the resurgent meme of paid content is Steve Brill’s “secret” memo, published today on Romenesko, that offers his plan to save The New York Times by putting it on the path toward paid web content.
Though it sometimes reads like Lee Abrams with a spell-checker (How to charge for content? [...]

And now, a brief commercial interruption.
This ad, which you most certainly remember from the Super Bowl, was not created by the advertising priesthood. It was made by two guys for a couple thousand dollars. And it got the top rating at the annual USA Today post-game ad ranking.
Two lessons in that for our own priesthood:
1. [...]

It’s instructive to look at how two organizations covered an event sponsored by a Seattle City Council member yesterday on the future of newspapers (yes, newspapers).
Aside from the story itself, which is fascinating, the way the two organizations — a daily newspaper in Seattle that’s at the center of the story it’s covering, and a [...]

Whether the shuttering of foreign bureaus by metropolitan newspapers and some TV networks in recent years — to refocus efforts stateside as budgets tightened — was a good thing or bad is certainly worthy of debate.
But what is certain is that, as a result, there are now fewer reporters covering fewer stories in foreign countries [...]

So, what to do about this over-abundance of advertising inventory in our local markets?
Unlike some in this industry who are looking, again, at some form of paid content as the solution to the revenue crisis, I still believe that there’s a lot of life left in the ad-supported model. We haven’t been particularly creative in [...]

News that The Chicago Tribune is including “attitude” as an employee evaluation metric has made Romenesko.
This is a surprise? In so many ways, attitude is everything, more important often than skills or even experience. It doesn’t substitute for them, of course, but it can accelerate the learning curve significantly.
That said, I think Romenesko buries the [...]

It’s shorthand for the chief problem of transitioning a local news operation’s business model from print to online: Newspaper revenue dollars become online pennies. Despite increasing readership online, advertisers continue to pay a much higher price when they place their ads in print.
A lot of that has been laid to inertia on the part of [...]

What’s the better way to save the newspaper business?
Sign a pledge on Facebook to buy a newspaper on February 2nd?
Or work from within to show journalists how to use Facebook (or MySpace or Twitter or Google or just how and why to link) to advance journalism beyond the old business of ink on paper?
The first [...]

There’s no shortage of post-Inaugural commentary available on the web today. So I’ll keep this short.
But I have to say that the CNN/Facebook integration absolutely rocked. Look at this:

On the left, had my workplace’s network not been jammed with other streams, you’d see CNN’s coverage. On the right, though, is where the magic happens. Those [...]