When I was a newspaper reporter, my peers and I referred to ourselves as “Inked-Stained Wretches.” It was our way of celebrating the broadsheet. The printed product that we all wrote for. From an early age, I wanted to be a newspaperman. I was the editor-in-chief of my high school newspaper; news editor and [...]
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The Day of Infamy for Newspapers
August 29, 2011
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For the newspapers, July 1, 1980 is a day of infamy. (And no, it isn’t because at the time “Do That To Me One More Time” by Captain & Tennille was one of the biggest hit songs.) July 1, 1980 is the day when the Columbus Dispatch launched the first newspaper website and put free [...]
Read moreNewspapers Should Replace Reporting with Journalism
July 28, 2011
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Reporting isn’t journalism. This is a distinction that few people understand, including many in the news business. And an inability to distinguish between the two is one reason why newspapers and other traditional media outlets continue to lose paying customers to the Web. We no longer need traditional media and professional reporters to inform us [...]
Read more Journalism Ethics in the 86,400-second News Cycle
July 7, 2011
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It is difficult to imagine the ethical journey for journalists who would authorize hacking into a missing teenage girl’s mobile phone in order to scour the content for a salacious headline. Worse is when these same journalists then delete messages from a full voicemail box so that additional messages could be left behind – giving [...]
Read more Facebook has Evolved into a Personalized Newspaper
May 5, 2011
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At a recent meeting with a Facebook representative, he said something that really struck me: “The News Feed has really developed into the daily newspaper of our lives.” It’s true. Think about the way we now peruse Facebook – much like how we used to read newspapers. We scroll Facebook at various points in the [...]
Read more Is American Journalism Working Anymore?
April 21, 2011
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Peter Finley Dunn, the late writer and humorist, once described the role of journalism to “comfort the afflicted, afflict the comfortable.” When I was a journalist, Dunn’s quote was at the heart of how I practiced the craft. I believed deeply in Dunn’s assessment and even scribbled the quote onto my journalism notebooks as a [...]
Read moreOther Reasons Why Newspapers Aren’t Read
April 8, 2011
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Journalists and media observers spend a lot of time exploring how the Internet and social networks are cutting into the readership of print publications like magazines and newspapers. I plead guilty as charged. There is little doubt that digital communications is undermining print. The Pew Research Center noted in its “State of the News Media [...]
Read moreThe New York Times Big Gamble: Paywalls (Again)
March 17, 2011
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Starting on March 28, the New York Times will dive headfirst – yet again – into digital subscriptions and… take a deep breath… paywalls. Or should I say the dreaded and much maligned paywalls. The last time the New York Times tried this they dove into the shallow end of the pool and nearly broke [...]
Read moreThe Case for Brand Storytelling
November 2, 2010
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Call it what you want – brand journalism, transmedia storytelling or brand storytelling – but the concept is simple (and powerful): Brands should tell their own stories in multimedia formats and share them online via interactive social networks. Here’s why. Your Customers – Online Consumers are using the internet as their preferred medium for finding [...]
Read moreNewspapers Spin the Bad Circulation News
October 27, 2010
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How bad is business in the newspaper business? The Audit Bureau of Circulation released a report this week that newspaper circulation had dropped 5 percent in the last six months. However, the bureau noted that the bleeding was less severe than in the previous six months. This was greeted by the nation’s daily newspapers as [...]
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HighTalk by George F. Snell III is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
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