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

It’s offical: Fev at “Headsup: The Blog” agrees with one of my previous admonitions.

The day after Thanksgiving is usually a slow news day but never fear, dear journalist, there is a HUGE cultural event that demands coverage! Time to throw everything you got at it! Luckily you had the forethought to build a database. Now make sure you’ve got a Twitter hashtag set. Then, on Friday, get some [...]

The Gazette’s A1 hed on Wednesday, Nov. 5: The Gazette’s sports section hed on Sunday, Nov. 9: I already complained about Wednesday’s Obama hed. Reusing the hed — down to the exclamation point! — a second time this week doesn’t make it better.  As the ancient Chinese proverb goes: Cliché me once, shame on you; [...]

I missed this because my feedreader is purpetually at 1000+ unread items, but I would be remiss if I didn’t link to Mindy McAdams’s reponse to Dan Conover’s 10 reasons why newspapers won’t reinvent news. I was overly optimistic when I took issue with some of Mr. Conover’s assertions. Ms. McAdams is, of course right. [...]

On Xark, Dan Conover lists 10 reasons why he no longer believes newspapers will be significant players in the reinvention of news. It’s a pessimistic piece and I can’t say that I fully disagree with him. I think I’m just more hopeful (some might say naive). First are his reasons; my responses follow. 1. Newspapers’ [...]

From the front of today’s Gazette sports section. That would be a deck about how a college running back took the “unpaved road.” His picture has been put in front of a — wait for it — paved road. (Hat tip to IowaHawk1, via Twitter.)

On Monday, The Tampa Tribune launched a redesigned, single-section paper similar to the Chicago Tribune‘s effort. The Tampa paper’s new format emphasized shorter, alternate format stories and fewer jumps. It had been in the works for a few months (I saw prototype pages floating around when I was there over the summer). Today, less than [...]

So The Gazette is planning to live with the Associated Press. A difficult decision, I’m sure, but one I fully support. My suspicions were aroused when Steve Buttry tweeted about a meeting with the AP bureau chief and the regional vice-president. And this evening, Mr. Buttry moved this on the Twitter wire: My letter notifying [...]

More on this later, but this is a great example of operating in the so-called “link economy” by recognizing that more can be made from becoming a reliable source of information by linking to stories from others (even your competitors) than by producing your own duplicate version. First came this: Then came this: Yes, that [...]

Right above Kurt Michael Friese’s column in today’s Press-Citizen is Michael Knock’s column all about Kurt Michael Friese. But nowhere in the 3,000-inch story (a Q-and-A style piece takes up the majority of the the feature front and then jumps inside for another half-page of broadsheet real estate) about Mr. Friese’s new book does anyone [...]