Nick Bergus Thoughts on what media do, and can do better, and other things

The Des Moines Register has finally found someone to replace longtime political columnist David Yepsen. Kathie Obradovich, the paper’s poltical editor, took the post.
The Register’s story announcing the change mentioned, in a throwaway line at the end, that Obradovich “is married to Jim Obradovich, a lobbyist for multiple Iowa organizations including the Iowa Environmental Council [...]

This comes by way of a friend who works at a Florida paper.
Let’s not forget that as much as we think newspapers and news organizations need to change, we as journalists live in a bubble. It’s wrong to assume everyone of our readers is like us. Readers don’t tend to get pissed off about [...]

Online news: now savvier, hipper, more Web 2.0-ier! More ads! Still not making money!

(Hat tip to Matt Waite, whom you should follow on Twitter because he’s smarter about these things than you are.)

Getting a job in journalism isn’t easy, but here’s some advice for journalism students.

A Broken Escalator
Howard Kurtz, on Twitter
My escalator at #nerdprom2 just stopped with us on it. Metaphor for news business

A Loose Genie
Time Inc. CEO Ann Moore, quoted in Peter Kafka’s Time Inc. CEO Ann Moore: Let’s Put the Digital “Genie Back In the Bottle”
Poor John Squires. The Time Inc. SVP seems like an affable fellow. So what has he done to deserve this impossible task–figuring out a digital strategy for Time Warner’s (TWX) publishing [...]

A Migrating Tribe
Jay Rosen’s Migration Point for the Press Tribe
And like reluctant migrants everywhere, the people in the news tribe have to decide what to take with them, when to leave, where to land. They have to figure out what is essential to their way of life, and which parts were well adapted to the [...]

A Café
Daniel Bachhuber’s Newsroom as a cafe
It’s not just about using a different industry to add to reporting revenue, but rather repositioning the news organization as the information hub for the community. The newsroom as a cafe should be an 18th century salon, or space for the leading discussions of the day to take place, [...]

Last Ship Afloat and Colonial Williamsburg
Bill Keller, The New York Times‘ executive editor, and Jason Jones in The Daily Show’s “End Times”
Keller: It’s always been one of the higher asperations in the business to work for The New York Times. Nowadays, we’re a little bit like the last ship afloat. So we have all these [...]

You can read the premise behind this in the orginal news metaphor post, which was linked to by Jim Romenesko, Jay Rosen and The New York Times‘ David Carr, among others. That post has grown unmanageably large so I’ve created a category for it. You can still suggest metaphors via e-mail, Twitter, Publish2 (tagged “newsmetaphors”) [...]