Ryan Sholin

Category: Media

  • Keep the frontier wild

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    Ryan Sholin
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    This month’s Carnival of Journalism question, posed by Doug Fisher, asks — more or less — what the law can do for journalism. My answer?  As little as possible. Keep the frontier wild. Photo by Ushlambad on Flickr. One of the more striking parts of the Media Law class I took a surprisingly long time…

  • Standalones

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    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…

  • Transatlantic passenger ships

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    Ryan Sholin
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    Mindy McAdams offers 10 simple facts about the survival of journalism. Number 5: “Newspapers were a nice business. Publishers could make the product insanely cheap (remember the penny press), and the advertising would cover the expenses, plus generate fantastic profits. However, this is clearly over. It’s done. It worked for a long time, but now,…

  • Declare your independence from the curmudgeon tribe

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    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…

  • Wired Journalists in Cedar Rapids weathered the floods

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    Ryan Sholin
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    Remember back awhile when I mentioned how some seriously wired journalists were bubbling up to the surface at WJ.com? Yeah, I specifically called out Matt Neznanski and Jason Kristufek, didn’t I? Here’s Matt interviewing Jason about running the online operations at the Cedar Rapids Gazette during the floods: “Q: Had you already put into place…

  • Why we don’t read your paper

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    Tim Ball, in a post titled “Newspapers and why nobody reads them” writes: “The problem for newspapers isn’t that I’m getting this information from another source. It’s that I don’t want it at all, and the local-local focus of metro newspapers in the last several years has made them not just less valuable to me,…

  • On print redesigns

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    Ryan Sholin
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    Brothers and sisters in the print design world, you know I love you. You bust your collective ass day after day to dress up content that may or may not be as award-winning as your design work, and in the end, you usually just get laid off for your troubles.  Because when management looks around…

  • If you think online news is difficult…

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    Ryan Sholin
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    If using a Web-based content management system is difficult, try putting together a print edition in an old version of Quark and then come back and tell me how hard it is to push the Publish button. If editing video takes too long, then go back to developing your own prints in the darkroom. If…

  • 10 obvious things, one year later

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    Ryan Sholin
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    A year ago today, I published the most popular blog post I’ve ever written. It’s a little counter-handwringing list meant to answer some of the frequently asked questions posed by Old Journalism. So, a year later, here’s a quick take on where things stand: It’s not Google’s fault: Score one for newspapers. I haven’t heard…

  • Don’t even try to get that story on A1

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    Ryan Sholin
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    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…