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

Earlier this month, the Corridor Business Journal reported that Iowa City was all but video store-less. Mr. Movies and others have closed, and That’s Rentertainment, a local independent shop, was soon to follow suit, leaving us with a just single Blockbuster. This is gets back to the news business, just stick with me. That’s Rentertainment has clearly seen [...]

Remember how The New Yorker is on Tumblr? Tumblr is diverse. Some blogs cover politics. Some collect examples of cutting edge Web design. Some blogs have a personal vibe. Some post for lulz. But the ones that work, at least to my mind, remember that Tumblr is a social platform and have an authentic voice. [...]

Today, The New Yorker said on Twitter: We are now on @tumblr! Follow us: http://newyorker.tumblr.com/ But the magazine has 199 pages of Tumblr posts and its first post is dated Dec. 1, 2009. So really they meant We are now going to try to pay attention to our @tumblr! Follow us: http://newyorker.tumblr.com/ or We remembered [...]

Earlier this year, a reporter from US News & World Report got in touch with my wife. The reporter was working on a story for the magazine’s annual graduate school rankings issue, which is a Big Deal for both the magazine and the schools. After several e-mails back and forth and a few phone calls [...]

It this week’s Hoopla, Gazette Communication’s weekly for “young adults,” there is a short interview with Doug Roberson, longtime booker and bartender at Gabe’s and the Picador. After the interview, Mr. Roberson was laid off. This sucks. But to make matters worse for Mr. Roberson, when the story appeared online, it ran with this editor’s [...]

I complain about The Gazette in this space a lot, partially because it’s a good target as the largest media company in the Corridor Crandic, and partially because I want it to be a great organization. So, today, some kudos. Todd Dorman is a guy who gets it. Three columns a week about stuff that [...]

Gazette Communications publicly announced its reorganization (which I’ve written about here and in the Corridor Business Journal) and laid off 13 employees. According to the media company, the restructuring will result in 100 fewer jobs. The restructuring sees Steve Buttry move from editor of The Gazette and GazetteOnline to overseeing the entire news gathering operation [...]

Lots of Iowa newspapers ran stories early this week about the hardware they won from Iowa Newspaper Association. They use it to show their readers how valuable they are, how good their journalism is. According to the AP, this year’s winners of the annual awards: General Excellence:Dailies Class 1: First Place- Carroll Daily Times Herald, [...]

In Monday’s Corridor Business Journal is the first of what we plan to be a monthly media column that I will write with John Goodlove. In this installment, we wrote about the recent announcement that The Gazette is restructuring its newsroom, and the following staff uneasiness. Mr. Goodlove is a grizzled newspaper veteran while I’m [...]

When The Des Moines Register isn’t firing its high-profile staffers, they’re quitting. David Yepsen, the Register‘s senior political columnist, is expected to leave to become the director of the Paul Simon Public Policy Institute at Southern Illinois University, the paper reported. (The New York Times‘ political blog The Caucus sounds pretty convinced that that he [...]