I created this space to communicate with our (Cedar Rapids/Iowa City Gazette) developing product planning team as a primary goal. The mission is to gather, disperse and save relevant concepts that apply to our transformation. I want to blend concepts taken from both inside and outside our current industry. We cannot make the changes necessary if we look solely to our peers in media for answers. We have to get out of the column and peer under the hood at other industries, innovations, trends, and business models. It’s about connecting one successful trend with another to accomplish innovation.
What’s with the horse image in the header? Well, besides the fact that he’s my Casanova… I have a deep respect for horses and their ability to read situations with only instinct and training as their filter. No ego. Just honesty. And that is how we need to approach this historic transformation. Remove the attachment to our personal identity and react with guts, humility, and honesty.
Thanks Sara. Very well said. None of us really know how do deal with the necessary steps to achieve this transformation. We have to act and react every day. So, I particularly resonated with:
No ego. Just honesty. And that is how we need to approach this historic transformation. Remove the attachment to our personal identity and react with guts, humility, and honesty.
I came across some interesting concepts in website footer designs at:
http://sixrevisions.com/web_design/25-stylish-website-footer-designs/
Check out the Edgepoint Church footer (2nd one in the list) might be something to look into for our hooplanow.com website to tie in myspace/facebook/flickr/youtube/twitter/etc.
Could also see this as an opportunity for iowaprepsports as the site gets more developed.
Found a great article about the future of journalism. Be sure to check out the link to http://spot.us which takes an interesting and innovative approach to our ever-changing industry.
http://www.good.is/?p=14300>1=34127
From today’s Gazette Opinion page:
MEDIA
Newspapers: The buggy whips of ’09?
The proverbial stake in the heart for newspapers arrived two days before Christmas. Ho, ho, ho.
“The Internet won,” could have been the headline, had anyone bothered to report this long-awaited tipping point.
Sometime during 2008, more people began receiving their news from the Internet than from newspapers, a study by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press said in a report released Dec. 23.
The numbers were even starker for younger readers, who of course indicate a future where this trend will be more pronounced. Among people under 30, 3 out of 5 polled now prefer the Internet as a news source to television and newspapers.
All columnists must eventually type their pronouncements on the decline of newsprint, so here is mine. When I’m done, I promise to resume my job chronicling and commenting on other news of the day.
First, let me say that journalists have every right to be frightened at the dramatic change unfolding in the news business but not to take on grandiose airs about it. We don’t need navel-gazing pontification or hand-wringing about the demise of the profession. Some columnists would have you believe that, without the watchful eye of print journalists upon them, governments would run amok and society would crumble.
That the greed and corruption that created the financial crisis and economic debacles of the day will never be exposed without legions of print journalists on the case.
I agree, but with far less bravado. Much of the credibility modern journalism enjoys — and I admit it has its faults — comes from a highly codified professionalism that has preserved editorial independence from the business side of the newspaper. Separation of church and state, so to speak. But this has meant that reporters and editors have remained gloriously insulated from the workings of their business, from how the money comes in and the bills are paid.
A print reporter will never be able to tell you what their story is “worth.” The reporter’s work has no measurable monetary value. Not in the sense that most wage earners are expected to meet bottom lines or production or sales quotas. A news story is either accurate or not. A column either moves people or not.
This professional ideal, in which serving the truth or the public interest comes before making a buck, is central to the self-image of journalism.
But it doesn’t stem from arrogance. It comes from the belief that such a role is indispensable to a free society. And the people who take up the profession are, for the most part, answering a calling.
(Believe me, the money’s better in PR.) But this ideal has been underwritten, at least in the case of newspapers, by favorable (some would say monopolistic) business conditions in which high margins were possible from a captive market of advertisers. Newspapers used to make oodles of profits in advertising revenue. Classified ads, those little oneliners to sell a car, an extra refrigerator, grandmother’s dining room cabinet, or a litter of puppies, paid for the costs of paying reporters, buying newsprint, running the presses and delivering the paper to front doors. Store ads, those full and half-page color eye-grabbers, generated thousands of dollars a pop.
Much of that advertising has migrated to the Internet, where space is much cheaper, even free. So, too, has newspaper content. An often-reiterated point is that bloggers and radio reporters rely heavily on the work of print journalists. Where else could they get the grist they need for their spin mills? And among the most popular Web sites people are turning to for news are those run by newspapers.
So publishers face a conundrum: their “product” — the news — is more in demand than ever before while the business operations that have long paid the bills — advertising and paid circulation — are in serious decline.
No government bailout is forthcoming for newsprint.
Nor is it likely that billionaire philanthropists are going to pick up the tab for failing newspapers around the country.
I like to believe that capitalism will eventually sort this out. If the role of written journalism is truly important to sustain a free society, some way will be found to sustain operations. But that sort of free market churning will take time.
Journalists will have to adjust to new realities: lower pay, probably, and new challenges and competition in the wide-open field of the Internet. So, yes, I join my colleagues in worrying. But I’m confident the public will always clamor for the news, and there will always be men and women who answer the calling of journalism.
Mary Sanchez
Kansas City Star
Came across this video from Microsoft on what they are predicting will change in technology in the next 10 years. In the second video on the page, there is a very interesting concept of what future newspapers could look like. Talk about innovation. Starts at about the 4:30 mark if you don’t have time to watch the whole video.
http://www.istartedsomething.com/20090228/microsoft-office-labs-vision-2019-video/