Invisible Inkling

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

All About Business

If you can’t beat ‘em, or buy ‘em, use the API

August 5, 2007 – 5:21 pm

Newspapers should produce amazing local databases with great maps, ratings and reviews.
A newspaper company should buy Yelp.
Yelp now has an open API. Newspapers should stop trying to develop something better, and use the API to provide users with Yelp’s functionality on their own sites, applied to their local businesses.
Apply that logic everywhere it makes sense. [...]

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 [...]

Hope for mobile news

June 7, 2007 – 8:05 am

I’ve gotta admit, when it comes to the question of newspapers adopting new delivery systems, I’m usually the one wagging my finger and saying “You better…”
But John Duncan over at The Inksniffer has a far more hopeful approach when it comes to the prospects for cutting deals with cell phone carriers and getting headlines from [...]

Flickr Pro and the freemium business model for newspapers

May 24, 2007 – 9:33 am

Given the recent developments around our house and the logical uptick in uploading to Flickr, I went ahead and took the $24.95/yr plunge.
What I get for my money: Unlimited uploading, unlimited image storage, unlimited bundling and feeding of images, and all the old stuff that had been pushed out of my top 200 by the [...]

Will the real online news business model please stand up?

April 21, 2007 – 9:03 pm

Terry Heaton’s take on the Yahoo/Amigos deal and other attempts to make up for lost print revenue with online advertising dollars turns on this point:
“…the essential problem for all local media companies is their insistence in the belief that a model of scarcity online will generate the kinds of revenue needed to offset losses to [...]