Yeah, I know, no layoffs are good. But today's layoffs at The State, including nine newsroom workers, included editorial page editor Brad Warthen. File this under "stupid." Warthen, love him or hate him -- and many people did both -- "got" the Web. He wasn't necessarily one of the first - the paper'...

After you've read the Baltimore cops piece mentioned in my previous post, read Marc Fisher's lament about the state of Statehouse coverage. And throw in Howard Kurtz's look at the sagging newspaper industry overall. There's a fair amount to quibble with in both pieces (though Fisher's quoting my old...

I've been toiling on a post about last week and the news biz for several days, trying to do it between a mound of grading and other commitments, such as getting out a new Convergence Newsletter. Between the closing of the Rocky, the cancellation of the ASNE conference, various bankruptcies, and the ...

MSNBC has an article out this week basically asking if our current stressful social/economic situation might be pushing "spelling snobs" and "grammar grunions" over the edge. (Or see the Netvine version that has comments.) Forget for the moment the framing of that article -- why do people who insist...

Desperate times breed desperate "solutions," and here's one we haven't seen for a while -- micropayments. The Phoenix arose from the ashes yesterday in David Sarno's L.A. Times Tech blog. Sarno picks up a different facet of the meme started by David Carr of the New York Times, who suggested we need ...

In print. Unfortunately, this example from The (Colubmbia, S.C.) State shows what's wrong with shovelware in a Web 2.0 age. Look at the last line. There is no "related story on this page" and -- it's the Web, dang it -- there's no link from that to the related story elsewhere on the site. Newsrooms ...

UPDATED 10:50 P.M. EDT 12/24 with some further thoughts about Lanham Act and alternative torts, as well as links to the original suit and Mark Potts', John Duncan's, Damon Kiesow's, Dan Kennedy's and Danny Sanchez's takes on it. Later added Dan Gillmor and the Citizen Media Law Project. Gatehouse su...

Sorry to have been away for a while, but grading for three lab courses is, well, a bear. (However, do have a look at what some of my students have done. Modest but promising for our pre-capstone course, I think.) For this month's Carnival of Journalism, David Cohn has asked us to tackle "positive ne...

Ah, such an upbeat report from the Future of Journalism project in Australia. As quoted in the Australian (because, apparently, the folks involved haven't figured how to put this on the Web yet -- at least as of this filing I see no link): A report, Life in the Clickstream: The Future of Journalism,...

Some bon mots from the recent Atlantic Coast region meeting of AP sports editors: Tim Wheatley, the Baltimore Sun sports editor, brought up the idea of a la carte charging, paying for what newspapers actually use. That's because larger newspaper are charged more than smaller newspapers, but smaller ...