Invisible Inkling

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

All About news-organization

Dealing with the elephant: Build the software you need, then sell it.

August 21, 2008 – 7:34 am

This is the fourth post in a short series I’m pretty much done with about the business model for online news before I go back to my usual routine of pointing out the obvious to people wearing dark glasses.  The starting point, the givens in the equation, are listed here.  Suggest which windmill I should [...]

Generation gap

July 8, 2008 – 10:41 pm

So I’ve been reading this book my Dad sent me a few weeks ago.
It’s not that impressive so far (about 100 pages in).  The mentions in the title of MySpace and YouTube seem to have been tacked on in order to sell books, fittingly enough, and the authors make their political alignments clear from the [...]

Standalones

July 8, 2008 – 9:35 pm

Steve Yelvington, on the consequences of removing copy editors from the newspaper equation:
“The dirty little secret of newspaper journalists is that a lot of them can’t write very well. That’s by no means universally true, but it’s true enough.”
…
Zac Echola, on his vision of a distributed and loosely joined newsroom:
“The Internet is my platform. Not [...]

Declare your independence from the curmudgeon tribe

July 4, 2008 – 12:01 am

More than a year ago, I wrote a blog post aimed at the curmudgeons in your newsroom.
The ones who prefer hand-wringing editorials to reorganization plans.
The ones who prefer complaining about bloggers to starting a blog.
The ones who prefer whining about Google and craigslist and every other disruptive organization to becoming a disruptive organization.
Jay Rosen has [...]

Don’t even try to get that story on A1

June 3, 2008 – 7:14 am

Pullquote from a bit of morning reading at the Knight Digital Media Center’s News Leadership 3.0 blog:
“I once consulted at a well-respected metro newspaper where several writers told me they tried to avoid pitching their stories for the front page because the ’serial editing’ of these stories was such a hassle for them and damaging [...]