All entries tagged: Ken Doctor
From Ken Doctor’s “Newsonomics”: Freelancing and the gig economy
[Here's our final excerpt from Ken Doctor's new book, Newsonomics: Twelve New Trends That Will Shape the News You Get. It's a Q&A with Nancy Shute, a veteran science writer who is adjusting to life as a specialist in the new media world. —Josh]
Nancy Shute, a twenty-year veteran of U.S. News & World Report, has covered science and medicine for national publications for more than twenty years. Many of us focus on national news, local news, economic news, and the like, but science news greatly impacts our lives. It, too, is suffering in the news traumas we’re seeing.
Usha McFarling, a science journalist who won a 2007 Pulitzer Prize for explanatory writing, argues that “media atrophy” is reducing the discourse on vital issues — at the worst possible time. In her reportage on climate change she showed how vested interests (from both the right and the left side) “hijacked” the story to fit their agendas, but not serve the public overall. Keep reading »
From Ken Doctor’s “Newsonomics”: How paidContent found its niche
[Here's another excerpt from Ken Doctor's new book, Newsonomics: Twelve New Trends That Will Shape the News You Get. Today, Ken's Q&A with Rafat Ali, who runs media-world must-read paidContent. —Josh]
Rafat Ali is founder, publisher and editor of ContentNext Media. Reuters described its success well: “ContentNext’s flagship paidContent, founded in 2002, has quickly established itself as a must-read among executives in the media and digital media sector.” PaidContent has indeed a daily stop for those involved in the business of news, media, and entertainment industries. In addition, the company runs parallel sites for the United Kingdom and India and around mobile content.
Q: PaidContent filled a niche no one had previously seen as clearly as you did. How did you see the niche, define it, and make sure you got it as focused as you could?
A: This was the depths of Internet recession in 2002 in New York City, and I was looking for a way to raise my profile, and this seemed like a good way to showcase my skills as an online journalist covering online media and the Internet. I was aiming for a new job with the likes of WSJ and CNET then. Of course, no one was hiring in those days, much less hiring an online journalist covering online media. Keep reading »
From Ken Doctor’s “Newsonomics”: What Phil Balboni learned about online journalism from cable news
[I'm very pleased to say that Ken Doctor, one of the smartest minds out there on the business side of journalism's digital future, is going to be joining us here at the Nieman Journalism Lab. You'll see his pieces on the economics of news here weekly. But at the moment, Ken is focused on the release of his new book, Newsonomics: Twelve New Trends That Will Shape the News You Get. Today, tomorrow, and Wednesday, we'll be running three brief excerpts from the book, each a Q&A with a leading journalist whose career has been shifted by the Internet. First up is GlobalPost CEO Phil Balboni. —Josh]
Phil Balboni launched GlobalPost in January 2009, just as many news companies were further reducing international reporting. He acted on a forty-year-old idea he’d had about bringing back global news to American audiences — and had seen that the ability of Internet efficiencies now made it possible. GlobalPost is his second career; he founded and ran the award-winning New England Cable News (NECN) business for many years. Now he can look out on the harbor, where clipper ships came in, and beyond, to his growing network of more than seventy correspondents working around the world.
Q: How did your cable news experience inform your GlobalPost plan?
A: There are quite a few, seminal lessons learned from NECN. First, the enormous value of more than one revenue stream and not being solely dependent on advertising. Keep reading »
