Invisible Inkling

Ryan Sholin on the future of newspapers, online news and journalism education.

All About advertising

Dealing with the elephant, elsewhere

September 3, 2008 – 10:23 pm

Paul Bradshaw comes up with a list of 10 ways that ad sales people can save newspapers:
“…how about a slot against the ‘most popular’ story of that minute (if it helps, think of it as the equivalent as the front page ad), second most popular, and so on (you could even auction these slots in [...]

Dealing with the elephant: Hire Web-native salespeople

August 19, 2008 – 8:33 am

This is the third post in a short series I’m going to write about the business model for online news before I go back to my usual habit of banging my head up against walls made out of giant rolls of newsprint.  The starting point, the givens in the equation, are listed here.  Suggest what [...]

Dealing with the elephant: Incremental change

August 11, 2008 – 1:00 pm

This is the second post in a short series I’m going to write about the business model for online news before I go back to my usual divisive blathering about how to avoid bureaucracy and feed trolls.  The starting point, the givens in the equation, are listed here.  Suggest what I should tackle next using [...]

The innovation gap: Your advertising department could use a hand

July 27, 2007 – 9:35 am

So here we all are.
In the newsroom, in j-school, in our little corner of the blogosphere, producing great journalism, training great journalism students, and pointing out fantastic examples of both to each other and our peers, doing our best to make the transition to online news.
One problem.
We forgot to bring the advertising department to the [...]

Crowd wisdom, some assembly required

May 27, 2007 – 2:35 pm

Scott Karp points out the difficulty in waiting for the monkeys to write Shakespeare and Ian King reminds us all that free content requires filtering that costs time and money.
Both are talking about the NYT bit on Heinz’s ketchup-stained UGC ad ploy.
Which brings me to the point: User-generated advertising content should be amateurish. That’s the [...]