After lauding the journalistic might of the Plain Dealer's newsroom with a staff of 240, Didiun goes on to dismiss the the blogsphere, where Schultz has been taking a lot of heat from the likes of BuzzMachine's Jeff Jarvis, a journalism professor at the City University of New York.

"It's really a bunch of pipsqueaks out there talking about what the real journalists do," Didiun says. It sure sounds like the Plain Dealer's "reader rep" thinks that his paper's readers need to be protected from what the blogosphere has to say about what's being published in his newspaper.

However, in an effort to cut back on spending, the online content is translated not by professionals, but using automatic software, which has resulted in confusing, and often comical, translations of headlines and stories. "The Chinese car in ambush" and "Internet Explorer: mistrust!" are two examples of awkwardly translated headlines taken from La Tribune's Web site.

I like UserVoice, I really do; but it couldn't stand up to a dedicated person spamming it with foul language over and over again, and until there's enough spam control to deal with that operational issue in real time it's just going to have to be de-emphasized for now. (suk)

This is a redux of #79. The music is the same, but I enlisted the lip-dub and acting chops of my friends down at the East Bay Express, the local alt-weekly here in the East Bay. Yay!

Not hilarious. It makes sense. Over 90% of Politico’s revenue comes from its print edition, even though it’s only distributed in D.C. The truth is, as the CFOs of both the NYTimes and WSJ will tell you, print advertising, on a CPM basis, generates 75x more revenue than Web ads.
— Patricia

In the past several weeks, I’ve been playing with a new format that my friends at TopTenSources developed. We’ve seen the Citizen Journalist; this idea is the Citizen Editor. Several of us have been using a new bookmarklet-style tool that makes it very easy to tag a story when you’re reading it, provide a bit of analysis, and have it posted to a dedicated website on the topic. It’s in many ways what lots of bloggers do anyway. I remember Dave Winer showing me an aspect of Manila that renders a river of news and then lets you check off stories that you want to appear somewhere — dead simple and fun; this idea is in the same vein, only using different tools and with a different output.

Four old-media veterans may have solved the future of news with the Politico Web site, whose audience of six million obsessives and insiders consumes–and feeds–a real-time download of power data. The twist? Politico’s print version is what’s helped make it profitable.

Only one thing may put lard back on the slippery slope: Google the word as news, and it might as well be lard-fearing 1969 all over again. Newspaper food pages still routinely advise using olive or canola oils rather than "fattening" or "artery-clogging" lard. Or they print idiotic utterances like "you get all the lard you need at McDonald's" (a chain that actually abandoned beef tallow for frying its fries only to be saddled with a trans-fatty substitute). Occasionally an article will make a valid point—lard is still anathema to vegetarians and halal observers—but more often there will be surprise that lard does not taste anything like pig.

Found this column by Crain's blogger Bill Shea on some Michigan Citizen charges against the Detroit Free Press and its coverage of soon-to-be former Detroit Councilperson Monica Conyers.

The story is one thing, but the comments back and forth between Bill and the subject of his story is also good reading.

If I had to give a reason why most newspaper blogs are filled with cranky screeds posted anonymously, I'd have to say having a generic blank comment form is key. Most every community that I contribute to offers a comprehensive user profile/history page, letting members customize to their hearts content and allow their profile to reflect their personality. When I think of mainstream news, TV, and newspaper sites trying to solicit comments from readers, I've yet to find something close to even a basic community site. The New York Times requires me to register to read most stories, but their blog system gives me a blank generic comment form when I want to comment on a blog post.

newspaper for "tweens"

Those interested in the vitality of newspapers — a topic that extends as far as the White House these days — are keeping a close eye on the P-I's experiment, as Seattle is the first major newspaper to fully pull the plug on print and try to make a go of it online. Many other newspapers are tentatively moving in this direction. Perhaps they're not kicking print to the curb completely, but they're cutting back on editions and dropping weak days in print.

Cowell doesn’t mention that the advertising is the most important part of the financial equation in paying for journalism, not the cover price. It has been so for as long as he’s been a journalist. The word “Advertise” appears three times on this Web page (and “Advertisements” once), but not in Cowell’s column.

Encountered last week-end in Venice, Los Angeles. Still about press, I am fascinated by foreign press available as these A3 sheets of papers sold straight from the printer. Far from the complex e-paper technology, these very low-cost one-sided magazines show an interesting trend about the importance of physical artifacts. Besides, the name of this service (”paper direct”) is conspicuously relevant in these times of frenetic digitalization. Given that it’s printed locally, it’s an up-to-date instantiation (that prevent you from waiting two or three days to have the same newspaper coming from the guts of an Airbus/Boeing Cargo flight).

Although he had had to borrow money to buy the Gazette, his outside earnings soon freed him of any responsibility to Emporia's wealthy for the Gazette's editorial position. For the rest of his lifetime, he carried out the following editorial creed: "What we want, and what we shall have is the royal American privilege of living and dying in a country town, running a country newspaper, saying what we please when we please, how we please and to whom we please."

I’ve been asking Mark Josephson that question for months, and now he has an answer: Josephson, the CEO of local news platform Outside.in, figures the local, online-only newspaper of tomorrow, for a decent-sized city, will have a staff of 20 people. That’s 20 people, period. Perhaps 6 of them will be “news gatherers.”

Josephson was kind enough to model his future newspaper in a spreadsheet for me, and I’ll get to that in a minute.

Editor & Publisher recently remarked about the difficulty in maintaining and moderating user comments:

..traffic volume has made it difficult for any but the wealthiest media operations to monitor user comments as diligently as they do letters to the editor or “talk backs” to news directors. The combination of virtually open access and limited oversight has turned these public squares into mosh pits, without the latter's youthful exuberance or bonhomie.

Trying to adhere to policies that work to keep rules in place without disrupting or silencing the passionate voices of their readers have challenged media operators. Yet, many news media have taken steps in striking a balance between quality and quantity.

A conversation with one of the most outspoken voices on the subjects of newspaper design and editing. For more of his views, see www.wenalway.com.

Also, although John spends more time and slightly more emphasis on comments directed towards ‘curmudgeons’, I would say that the abuse that he saw hurled toward Jessica da Silva by veteran journalists isn’t isolated to comments on blogs. The commenter Robert Knilands (aka Wenalway) may seem your run-of-the-mill troll, but he expresses a virulent form of prejudice too frequently directed towards online and young journalists by some - and I stress, only some - print journalists. Robert Knilands says:

It can’t survive, though, as long as young journos are getting opportunities they are unqualified for and posting ignorant blog entries. All that does is destroy the present and the future.

Wenalway is now banned from IlliniPundit.com. He will not be allowed to post under this screen name, his real name, any other screen name, or anonymously.

I tried to reach an agreement with him, but I failed. I apologize for having to take this step, but feel it's necessary for us to continue to have any sort of polite discussions on this site. If you disagree, please email me or post in this thread to discuss.

I'll be implementing some controls on him over the next few days. In the meantime, please ignore any comments submitted by Wenalway. If you respond to his insults, I'll eventually unpublish the response along with Wenalway's garbage.

Newspapers have more important things to do than worry about comments—like, say, report the stories that blogs so desperately need in their 24-7 quest for content! After all, blogs are often not equipped to regularly break the news, and we need content to chew on.

As Arthur Sulzberger's relation Benjamin Dolnick lamented in the comments section of Carr's NYT story (noticed by Choire Sicha at Radar): "If you ever want to lose faith in humanity, read any comments section on the internet."

P.S. Also, nobody wants to hear the tired old "free speech" argument as a defense of comments. We've had free speech in this country for well over two hundred years, long before it was ever an option to comment on newspaper websites and blogs.

Brown agreed that reader comments are a "really significant" development in online journalism.

"You could have a situation where you put up a story … and this amazing thing happens where people start taking your story apart, going through the facts — doing all sorts of background and fact-checking — better than any editor can do, because you've got this crowd-source effort to go through every line of it," he said.

"At worst, it can be like YouTube's comment section where it's sort of like a bathroom in a subway station with all sorts of comments on the wall. Everybody's completely anonymous. No one has any sense of their reputation within that community, everyone's a troll."

I am writing in defense of the anonymous, unmoderated, often appallingly inaccurate, sometimes profane, frequently off point and occasionally racist reader comments that washingtonpost.com allows to be published at the end of articles and blogs.

I discovered all this from the helpful feedback provided to me in the "reader comments" section at the end of my past four columns on washingtonpost.com. I undertook this exercise on the advice of former washingtonpost.com editor Doug Feaver, who wrote on these pages recently that journalists need to take the comments seriously ["Listening to the Dot-Comments," op-ed, April 9]. Further, he added in his blog, "those who don't are making a mistake."

Nowhere in the comments section, however, did readers hear anything from a staffer at the Tribune. No one with that authority stepped in to admonish the rude, correct those who posted wrong information, or to respond to those who had questions about the story. Without that leadership, the Tribune lost the opportunity to forge a community based on these readers' common interest in this engaging story. Readers were left just to argue among themselves.

You heard me. That’s enough.

Comment privileges for new stories at siuDE.com are revoked until the Daily Egyptian has reason to believe our readers are mature enough to use them.

Congratulations. It is not easy to offend college students who spend most of their time in a newsroom, but some of you have persevered, pursuing standards of bad taste to depths so subterranean we could not help but take note.

This issue came up on the Online-News discussion list this week, so I know many newspapers are struggling with comment management at the moment. It also came to a head this week in Batavia, where the Daily News was hit by a particularly ugly comment thread in which a socket puppet attacked fellow elected officials, one politician is posing as a defender of said politician, and a community activist brought to light unfounded allegations against a city councilman (I won't dignify the charge by repeating it here, and because I know these people, it's pretty easy to figure out who's who).

So, instead of just poking him for sounding like Grandpa Simpson, I’d like to help fix the problem. Here are ten things newspapers could do, right now, to improve the quality of the comments on their sites. (There are lots more, but you know how newspaper editors can’t resist a top ten list.)

"I've also seen a noticeable change in tone in comments and other interactive forums, like Coveritlive.com. As soon as someone from the paper steps in and makes a comment, the whole tone changes. If you just give people a blank wall and a spray paint can, you get a predictable outcome. But as soon as anyone says we should stick to the topic or knock off the personal attacks, it has a noticeable effect.

There's been a bit of a backlash recently against the angry commenter on newspaper websites. Some are calling for newspapers to stop allowing comments sections all together. But what about democracy on the web? Bob, with the help of "This American Life"'s Ira Glass, ruminates on the dark side of the comments section.

Neighborhood blogs and social media are particularly important at a time when daily and weekly papers are cutting just about everything to stay afloat, Morgan said. Consider Gannett Co. Inc.’s recent decisions to close the Birmingham, West Bloomfield, Troy, Southfield and Rochester editions of the Observer & Eccentric Newspapers; and replace the Ann Arbor News with a smaller news organization, annarbor.com, with print editions only twice a week.

Starting this month, the independent student newspaper at the University of Minnesota will cease publication on Fridays and expand its coverage online.

H. Martin, "Just a Few of the Regular Diners at a Broadway Physical Culture Restaurant."
Illustration for "Eating Walnut Croquettes and Broiled Peanuts with the 'Straight Edgers' and
Indulging in Date Butter and Nut Sandwiches at a Vegetarian Restaurant,"
New York World, Sunday, June 10, 1906

newspaper for monroe, mi; often has good coverage of DTE because of the Fermi 2 plant there

very thin online newsppaer for niles, mi

Even as my weekly newspaper, Indian Country Today, continued to grow, I refused to put it on the Internet. I figured, and I believe quite correctly, that if readers could get the paper free on the Internet, they would not subscribe to it. And I think that in an effort to keep up with technology, the decision by newspaper publishers to put their newspapers on the Net has been the cause of their continuing decline. When I sold Indian Country Today it was not on the Internet and it had a weekly circulation of 24,000. It is now on the Internet and its weekly circulation has declined to 7,000.

SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) -- The Detroit Free Press, owned by Gannett Co. (GCI:
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GCI 7.53, -0.06, -0.8%) , is considering scaling back home delivery of the print edition of the newspaper, The Wall Street Journal reported Friday in its online edition. The leading scenario, set to be unveiled Tuesday, would call for the Free Press and its partner, the Detroit News, to end home delivery on all but the most lucrative days which are Thursday, Friday and Sunday, the newspaper said, citing a person familar with "the company's thinking." A final decision has not been made.

The Tribune Company filed for bankruptcy protection in a federal court in Delaware on Monday, as the publisher of newspapers like The Los Angeles Times and The Chicago Tribune struggled to cope with rising debt and falling ad revenue.

Tribune, which was acquired last year by billionaire real estate investor Samuel Zell, had hired bankruptcy advisers like Lazard and the law firm Sidley Austin in recent weeks as it negotiated with creditors over debt covenants. (Read the bankruptcy petition here.)

With your contributions, I'm building another roster of newspaper-by-newspaper layoffs and job cuts, as publishers notify individual employees losing their jobs in the 10% layoff now underway.

(Updated at 2:42 p.m. ET.) We've now accounted for 26 papers. Total layoffs and other job cuts: 946 (including publishers' early estimates).

My former co-workers at The Ann Arbor News were told in a meeting this morning that most copy editing, page design and graphics jobs were being moved to The Grand Rapids Press and the Kalamazoo Gazette, as well as some advertising and support jobs. Similar announcements were made at other Booth newspapers in Michigan.

The Evening Telegraph project has been on the go for a number of years. The original idea which was to reprint the 16 June 1904 edition of the Dublin Evening Telegraph had to be abandoned when we discovered the condition of the surviving originals. It was then decided to investigate recreating the paper using computer based typographic and graphic software.

In the Ann Arbor area, members of the Western Star Lodge No. 6 are documented as speaking out against the craft and even John Allen, who was a made a Freemason at the second meeting, as well as Judge Samuel Dexter, went into the business of publishing an anti-Masonic newspaper named the Western Immigrant. By September 17, 1844 the Grand Lodge of Michigan had reformed and helped to reorganize a number of the lodges that had been in the area before the national anti-Masonic climate had taken hold. In Ann Arbor, a brand new lodge was formed instead and it was named Oriental Lodge No. 15 when it was officially chartered on January 13, 1847. This lodge was beset by obstacles to success, however, and lost a number of members due to the California gold rush of 1849 as well as societal factors including a generation gap. By 1858 the Grand Lodge of Michigan had revoked the charter but the Oriental Lodge had not met since August of 1856.

The Toronto Star closed the Cambridge Reporter, so it's been resurrected online with citizen journalists.

on the Nashua Telegram's use of Twitter to broadcast headlines in real time. Waiting for a newspaper to rename itself after Twitter.

Adrian and I developed Django to allow us to create reasonably complex database driven web applications in as little time as possible.

This was at one time the usual name for an entertainment given by a master printer to his workmen each year on or about St Bartholomew’s Day (24 August). This marked the traditional end of summer and the point at which the season began of having to work

The new model creates a more trusted environment for reaching high-value, frequent purchasers, whether of airline tickets, electronics, clothes or other items. Where does that leave the less-frequent purchasers? Probably looking to their friends rather th

pittsburgh daily newspaper; curious that they don't put their city name in the page title

He said the DNR's drought code - a compilation of rainfall, wind and temperature - normally gets worrisome at about 300 or 400. “We just cleared 600,” he said. “We are really dry.”

The story of this fire is not in the woods -- only one structure was lost and most of the devastation is hidden deep in the wilderness. The story of this fire is in the relationship between the firefighters and the community.

In the 2007 study, published on Tuesday, VSS forecasts that online advertising will grow by more than 21 per cent per year to reach $62bn in 2011, making it bigger than newspaper advertising, which is expected to total $60bn in 2011.

The L.A. "Times" has a shitty Website. Outclassed by the Yahoo News. Even bested by the built by computer Google News. Because those in charge at the paper see the Web as an afterthought, an ancillary market, as opposed to the real thing.

google in print.

ok, lolcats made the newspaper, time to move on (or time to start doing lolcats banner ads for soap or shoes)

“a newspaper's duty to its advertisers to place the most sinister of rapes, the bloodiest of slayings, and the most pendulous breasts above the front-page fold.” The torrent of money that followed would forever alter the destinies of media, the econo

comprehensive, or at least extensive, list of blogs run by MLive or that cover the area that the Ann Arbor, Jackson, Grand Rapids, Saginaw and Flint papers (Booth Newspapers)

The Outlook, Marquette Senior High School’s new student newspaper, is expected to roll off the presses soon, according to the student writers and artists who have been working on it.

question of course is what if anything funds these efforts, love or money? and if money, where from?

on the demise of a local newspaper

ann arbor news breaking news blog

daily newspaper in Marquette, MI

Bala Pillai on village media

Ron Jeffries never gets his sunday paper delivered correctly.