All entries tagged: windsor
Einstein proves advertising and content are not necessarily opposites
The current newspaper business revenue crisis has led to some old ideas being dusted off and presented as new (Paid content! Micropayments! Preservation of print circulation!), and who knows? Maybe some of the experiments rumored and foreshadowed in Long Island and Seattle and across the Hearst Empire will net some needed dollars for the ongoing operations.
But what about advertising, which remains a huge part of any revenue strategy? Surely the banner ad isn’t the sum total of our creativity in commerce? Google couldn’t have managed to build the most perfect form of commercial speech on their first try, could they? Where is the creativity in commercials? How can local newspaper companies — with their deep ties into their communities, their newsrooms full of subject-matter experts, and their platoons of sales people — have managed to not move the needle more than a few notches in 15 years of building and selling ads online?
I was wondering this last week as found my mind drifting away from the evening clot of sheet metal and tires inching northwards toward the ‘burbs and thinking about the life of Albert Einstein. My Einstein reverie wasn’t out of the blue; it was prompted by an equal parts funny and entertaining riff by The Chicago Sun-Times’s tech columnist Andy Ihnatko, who was recommending — at length — an audio book about the atomic genius.
And here’s the point: it was an ad. It’s part of a weekly feature on the popular podcasts from Leo Laporte’s TWiT network in which journalist panelists on the showstep ever-so-slightly out of their traditional roles to talk about a book that they love that happens to be available for download as part of an Audible.com subscription.
Listen below as Ihnatko and Laporte talk about Einstein: His Life and Universe, by Walter Isaacson.
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Forget TiVo-proof 30-second spots, that’s a 12-minute ad! Or, to be more precise, it’s 10 minutes of interesting and entertaining content that happens to also be the largest part of an ad. Keep reading »
Lab Book Club: A look back at the early days of online news
[For Chapters 7 and 8 of this month's Nieman Journalism Lab Book Club selection, we turn to Tim Windsor. For more info on the Book Club, check here. —Ed.]
Chapter 7 of All the News That’s Fit to Sell, like much of the book that surrounds it, is a moment frozen in time, like Pompeii or Colonial Williamsburg. Published in 2004, using data gathered in 2000, it’s a slice of history.
But what can we learn from this detailed look into the past? Let’s jump into The Wayback Machine, crank up some ‘N Sync on your CD Walkman and let’s take a look at the state of Online News, circa 2000.
Unions: Time to step up with ideas
Newspaper bosses and media companies can be short-sighted. Dull of wit. Evil, even. This should come as no surprise to anyone who’s been paying attention.
Myself, I’ve taken an active role in meetings where the topic — stated or unstated — was “We need to save a pantsload of money, and if that means we create less expensive ways to cover the news, then so be it.” Yes, I have been a suit, running the online division of The Baltimore Sun until August of last year.
And yet, to the chagrin of some of my employers at the time, I do believe that unions have a proud history in this country and have continued to be necessary and to contribute value to their members into this century, if only to negotiate slightly better severance packages when jobs are eliminated.
But if the newspapers of America are going to crawl out of the bomb-crater they currently find themselves in, unions like The Newspaper Guild are going to have to lose some of the Norma Rae routine and come to the table as true negotiators, with real ideas. The time for the same old posturing is over.
I’m thinking about this announcement from the Washington-Baltimore Newspaper Guild at The Washington Post, which takes issue with the creation of a new “community reporter” position, starting at $34,000, which is close to the mean ($37,010, 2006 Census data) salary for people in metropolitan areas. Keep reading »
