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'...

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 ...

Venerable newspaper The New York Times is considering charging readers for access to its website, less than two years after discontinuing an earlier Times Select online-subscription service. In an online question-and-answer session, Bill Keller, the Times’ executive editor, discussed how the n...

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 ...

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...

This came to me this morning under the subject line "An amusing link on the lack of creativity in sportswriting." Let's play along. Before you click on the link, fill in the template: Philadelphia waited _____ to host a World Series game, so what's another _____? The Phillies/Rays won a rain-delayed...

The New York Times reports today on the woes of the dwindling Albany statehouse press corps, but its report could be extrapolated to almost any of the 50 states. Watching editors increasingly write off state government coverage as irrelevant or a luxury continues to remind me how out of touch so man...

The "circles" are dead. Long live the "circles." We know about the "circles" here in Columbia. We went through them in the 1990s. At The State. With Gil Thelen. It's not that we didn't like them. Something was needed to break the newsroom out of the old, hidebound model. But the circles with their b...

Perhaps this last full week of June 2008 just past will be looked back on as the week the final death throes of the newspaper industry began -- 900+ layoffs, copy-editing jobs to India (and more details on an earlier move that have been largely overlooked, a redesign in Orlando that has become the i...

Plenty has been written about Orlando's redesign, partly because it is the coming out of the Zellanistas at the Tribune and because Tribune provides one of the largest testing ground for this kind of design that is heavy on color, label heds, "news you can use" and "fear news," etc. If you haven't y...