South Dakota is pretty great. Now, I am not sure how many people have written those words who weren’t from the Dakotas, but I am here to tell you, South Dakota is great. That comes from a native Texan and an adopted Kansan. I love my homeland, but South Dakota was somewhere I could see myself living if we ever left the great State of Kansas. Why? I love newspapers, and South Dakota does, too. Both Dakotas are mostly comprised…
What I am going to say is going to piss some journalists off. I am OK with that. I am so sick of hearing about the death of newspapers, it is starting to drive me insane. Why do so many good journalists just accept that the industry is dying without looking at the mounting evidence that it is simply changing slightly and there are not just a few good years left, but decades, and more for a lot of us?…
It never seems to go away. Sometimes failure is the best learning application you can have in life though, and I would like to tell you about one of the biggest ones I have ever had: Maize Free Press. It’s something I will never forget. About a year after purchasing The Clarion, a newspaper that covers five towns along the K-96 Highway corridor between Hutchinson and Wichita, Kan., we were coming to some fairly strong realizations about our small community…
I struggle to talk engagement sometimes when I am selling our papers. It’s so easy to just talk about raw numbers like I was taught. It just flows off the tongue. Circulation this. Reach that. What we should be doing is sending things like this to our advertisers and letting them know that you can have 1 billion people looking at a website, but if they didn’t engage with the content they didn’t see any of the advertising either. http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/02/print-still-refuses-to-surrender-214732…
Sometimes you have to vent. A few weeks ago was that time for me, and as the comments came in and the questions about my sanity ensued, I realized that maybe not everyone knows the purpose of this blog or my intent. In my post a few weeks ago, I used some lewd language and was fairly angry as I wrote a post about a paid news site giving away their content and assuming they are going to make money…
News isn’t free, and the faster we get to this realization as media companies, the better we will be as an industry. Covering the news of the day costs money. It takes resources to employ a professional reporter, buy equipment, maintain a printed paper and website, and basics like turning the lights on every day. This is why it perplexes me that news organizations are still under the delusion of being able to give their content away for free and…
The death of journalism has been coming for some time—just depends on who you ask. First it was radio, which would put newspapers into the ground. Then television was going to end the profession. Finally, the Internet would be a death blow, right? No, even if we have tried to speed our death along by giving away our content online, the Internet hasn’t meant death to newspapers, and I doubt it ever will. The death of journalism isn’t coming from…
John Oliver is just one of the funniest people on television now. I have slapped my knee many times during his “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver” show on HBO, and a segment about journalism had me both sad and laughing at the same time. I have said many times that the plight of large, daily newspapers isn’t comparable to what we do at small, community newspapers. Their overhead is much larger, but more importantly, their owners are usually investment…
I understand why publishers all over the country are scared to death about ad blocking software and what it is doing to their bottom lines. I am also completely unconcerned, personally. After 20 years of doing everything we could as an industry to build a presence online and sell advertising around content we gave away, it must be scary to hear that folks don’t want the annoying Flash ads that pop up randomly, the auto-play video ads, and the sort…
I often tell people to quit drinking the Kool-Aid and start reading things that challenge your way of thinking and how you run your news operation to see if you can grow from it. So this link is none of that… This is my jam. This is just preaching to the choir for me. I couldn’t resist reading this and just nodding my head in agreement all the way to the end. We practice many of these things with…