I’ll be honest, I have mixed feelings about this. Obviously, it makes sense to unify the branding between the paper and its website, but at the same time, a) the logo looks awkward against the current design background of the site, and b) we received the announcement regarding the change at 2:15 this afternoon – kind of short notice for such a dramatic change. Combined with the forthcoming newsroom merger, it feels like a little bit of the culture of the web house has been lost. I’m sure eventually I won’t even notice, but I’ll always have a soft spot in my heart for the black and red. (Plus, we have a boatload of merchandise with the wrong logo now!)

NEVER FORGET

Are we trying to say the the New York Times should force all its print subscribers onto the Kindle or else? No. That would kill ad revenues and also, not everyone loves the Kindle.

What we’re trying to say is that as a technology for delivering the news, newsprint isn’t just expensive and inefficient; it’s laughably so.

Prediction: 2009 isn’t going to be any easier on the newspaper industry than 2008 was.

[Post publisher Katherine] Weymouth details what the Post will do about utility (“make the paper and washingtonpost.com go-to places for local information”) and convenience (“make it possible for [local consumers] to complete many… transactions on the site”). But nowhere does Weymouth expand on how the Post will promote engagement.

How odd – and disturbing. It’s great that the Post will work ever harder to help its readers and users find movie listings and streamline their shopping. But what, if anything, does it plan to do about helping to turn them into a community that can make the District of Columbia and its suburbs – home to many of them – better places to live?

Grubisich went on to say that one of the reasons the Post fails to properly connect with readers is the use of anonymous comments on washingtonpost.com stories and features. He felt the lack of accountability lessens the sense of community vs. a site like FaceBook, where everyone basically identifies themselves as, well, themselves.

Krim and former washingtonpost.com editor Russ Walker responded in the comments, pointing out that the site has done several commendable things to promote greater awareness of the underlying issues behind a story (see the link for all the examples).

Grubisich later wrote a response post, taking up the topic of how the site handled the recent “Fixing D.C.’s Schools” series that Krim brought up in the comments of the previous article. Again, there was some great back-and-forth discussion on what it means to be a reporter of information vs. a community-building force for action.

The reason these posts and the conversation they generated interest me is that I sort of wonder if they’re both going about this the wrong way: does it really make sense for the Post to invest a huge amount of resources in building a FaceBook-like community for its readers, or would we be better off just partnering with FaceBook directly? It’s pretty clear that FaceBook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and the like are as well-established as social media is likely to get for 2009. Instead of drawing people away from the communities they’ve already formed there, should we be doing more to send information their way and let them integrate it into their existing worlds?

There’s a risk there, of alienating the very people you’re trying to reach—how dare these old-school journalists try to impose their imperialist ways on us new-frontier types and so on. Plus, how do you send your content out into the world and still maintain editorial credibility (stop giggling) over it, not to mention making money from it?

As Krim pointed out, the Post has a very active community built up around the OnFaith and PostGlobal sites. Should we have steered them into a pre-existing community instead?

Obviously, I don’t have the answers or else I’d be running the company instead of making sure the site works. Okay, I’d probably be paying someone else to run the company, since I hate the thought of being a CEO. The point is, this is one of several issues that the Post and other newspapers are facing as they try to figure out how to evolve. Although it probably doesn’t mean anything for the immediate future, I do think it’s not insignificant that FaceBook welcomed a new board member late last year.

disclaimer time: I almost ended up as a freelance writer of sorts under Russ when he worked at WPNI; I’ve met Jonathan once when I helped him with a USB drive a couple of years ago; I wouldn’t know Tom if I bumped into him on the street.

“You should be ashamed of yourself,” he told foreign reporters.

“You should be patriotic, protect your family and children, not report like you have been doing for the past two weeks since this war has started,” he said.

I’m of course in favor of citizen journalism, and I basically have no real stake in the specific conflict at hand (religious quarrels always made about as much sense to me as using jello for a doorstop), but come on. This is the best Pajamas Media could do? Really? This guy? Wow.

A divorced father of a 6-year-old daughter, he distinguished himself as one of the most fearless reporters in The Post’s Baghdad bureau. He began work for the paper in early 2004 as a stringer in his hometown of Tikrit, north of Baghdad.

In July 2005, he received a note threatening his life if he did not quit journalism and leave the city. He refused. “This is my city, and I’m a journalist,” he told colleagues.

Shortly after, he was attacked by two men, who beat him with their fists, a metal pipe and the butt of a pistol, leaving him with bruises all over his body and opening a gash in his head that required eight stitches. After he was released from the hospital, The Post implored him to leave Tikrit. When he refused, Omar Fekeiki, the newspaper’s former office manager and special correspondent, said he was told he would be fired if he didn’t leave.

Saif Aldin later moved to Baghdad, where he repeatedly braved the city’s most dangerous neighborhoods, often traveling alone.

Sadly, Saif Aldin is but one of over 100 journalists killed since the beginning of the war in Iraq, and well over 600 in the past ten years. The next time someone spouts off on how the media are all cowards and refusing to report the truth or driven solely by agenda, feel free to point them to the above as an example of how wrong they truly are.

[Billy] Poff, 51, of Charleston was westbound on Interstate 64 near the Oakwood Road exit when his truck collided with a vehicle coming the wrong way about 3:15 a.m. Saturday.

The driver of the other vehicle, Adriana Bailey, 27, of Madison died in the crash.

Seven bundles of Saturday Gazette-Mails packed into the cab of Poff’s 1974 Toyota pickup cushioned him from the tremendous impact, investigators said.

The bundles had 25 newspapers each.

“The newspapers are pretty much what saved him,” said Sgt. Shawn Williams of the Charleston Police Department’s traffic division.

Let’s see your fancy-schmancy websites and PDF editions try that!

• At least 657 men and women were murdered — eliminated as they tried to shine light into the dark recesses of their societies — and only one in eight of their killers were prosecuted.
• In two-thirds of cases the killers were not even identified, and probably never will be, underlining the absence of full and proper investigations when a journalist or other news professional is killed.

To say that this is horrific is an understatement. The report gives several recommendations for governments, editors, and individual journalists on ways to minimize or eliminate the risks, but the sheer magnitude of the issue is scarcely fathomable. Sort of puts to rest those stories about how cushy a job journalism is supposed to be, eh?

source: editorsweblog.org

Murali Mantrala, who is the Sam Walton professor of marketing in the College of Business, and Esther Thorson, director of research for the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute and associate dean for graduate studies in the Missouri School of Journalism, recently examined the profitability of newspapers. They collaborated with marketing doctoral students Hari Sridhar and Prasad Naik, who is now a professor at the University of California-Davis. The team of researchers focused on three areas of operation – news quality; distribution and circulation; and advertising – by analyzing financial data of small- to medium-sized newspapers with circulations of 85,000 or less. Research revealed that news quality most directly affects the bottom line.

“The most important finding is that newspapers are under-spending in the newsroom and over-spending in circulation and advertising,” Thorson said. “If you invest more in the newsroom, do you make more money? The answer is yes. If you lower the amount of money spent in the newsroom, then pretty soon the news product becomes so bad that you begin to lose money.”

Who would have guessed it, eh? The study used a complex mathematical formula to model financial data from the past 10 years for a variety of newspapers. According to the results, investing in news gathering can substantially offset losses in ad revenue and actually boost circulation, two key crises facing the industry. The full article will appear in the April issue of the Journal of Marketing.

(via editorsweblog.org)