While newspapers and magazines continue to lose some of their best writers to downsizing and other cutbacks, one news organization has been building up staff with the hope of becoming the preeminent investigative news source online. The organization is ProPublica, a privately-funded public-interest news Website that opened for business earlier this summer. ProPublica aims to […]
Archives for July 2008
Good reads on changes in online news business
To start the week, here’s a round up of recent stories about happenings in the online news business: CJR on NY Times’ online holdings – The cover story of the July/August issue of the Columbia Journalism Review, Sulzberger at the Barricades: Can Arthur Sulzberger Jr. transform The New York Times for the digital age? reveals […]
Top 10 things writers want from PR people
It’s popular for writers to look down on PR people. The stereotypical media relations representative is inexperienced, doesn’t know one publication from another, hasn’t a clue about how the news business works, and actually makes it harder to get through to a source. While that’s an exaggeration, it’s still true that in many cases the […]
Should you put ads on your blog?
Your blog has picked up a decent amount of traffic, enough to make you wonder whether you could actually make money from it. And what’s one of the best ways to make money from a blog? Advertise. That’s the conventional thinking. But when I posed the question to a bunch of freelance writers and bloggers […]
More on blog post comments: be careful what you wish for
Last week I wrote a post lamenting how difficult it is to get people to leave comments on blog posts. The post generated a lot of comments – ironic yes, but a good thing too – because it proved food for additional thought on the subject. The general consensus of the dozen or so people […]
Writers can SWOT their way through bad times
With the economy still sputtering and freelance writers complaining about clients taking longer and longer to pay their bills, it seems like a good time for a SWOT. SWOT is the name of a career assessment technique espoused by Grant Plowman, owner of Interactive Media Publishing, a digital media publishing company in southern Oregon. I […]