Daily Archives: 9 July 2007

“Backfence suffered from poor design, insufficient feet on the street, poor choices for locations… [there's an opportunity in] organizing the local web and building databases of knowledge at the local level”

“The biggest challenge facing local news organizations today is figuring out how they can gather more and produce less. That is, how can they help other people produce, so the news organizations have something worth gathering?”

AJR following Backfence closure: “Media companies have high hopes that hyperlocal news online will bolster their newspapers’ futures. But early returns suggest the financial outlook for such ventures is not bright.”

“does the end of Backfence tell us that citizen journalism is dead? …most towns and smaller cities just don’t have the liquidity on the supply side (ie, restaurants, events, burglaries, etc…) to drive any kind of network scale.” Hmmm.

‘Publishing our journalism on the Web should make us more open to change what we publish in the printed newspaper. There is no meaningful division at The Post between “old media” and “new media.”’

“These principles still show that the paper thinks it is at the center. It’s all about how they operate as an institution. They need to break down their walls and recast their role in the world around them.”

“Coming off 47% growth in 2006, online ad spending in the UK will rise from £2.6 billion in 2007 to £4.5 billion in 2011.”

“British online newspapers that currently charge for news stories and op-ed – like FT.com and Independent.co.uk – see the benefits of dropping paywalls and making more content free. “

Report on content strategies and business models at UK newspaper sites from Neil Thurman at City University.

“newspapers’ online editors and managers are increasingly seeing print and online editions as complementary products, and at some titles concern about cannibalisation has ‘diminished to the stage where they are not a significant influence on strategy’.”

“The kind of network I’m referring to is a web of interconnections — links between content and between people. In essence, I’m arguing that on the Web, news organizations… should focus on building themselves ‘into the clickstream’.”