Berkeley Media Tech Summit goes live

The UCBerkeley Media Technology Summit at the Googleplex in Silicon Valley is being live-blogged now in the window below, thanks to participant Chuck Peters, the tech-savvy chief executive of the Gazette Co. in Cedar Rapids, IA. The summit, which will run through mid-day Thursday, is intended to provide more than 100 invited leaders from media and technology companies with new insights into the

Size matters in non-profit news

Second of two parts. The first part is here. The five-member staff of the Chi-Town Daily News was laid off after Labor Day when its founder could not raise the $300,000 necessary to fund the balance of its annual budget.But Pro Publica, the biggest of the new-breed journalism non-profits, is thriving on a budget that will hit $9 million this year.This disparity dramatically illustrates the

Non-profit news ventures go big time

First of two parts. The second part is here. The founder of the Chi-Town Daily News, a pioneering grassroots journalism project, happened to phone last week shortly before word got out that a wealthy businessman had donated $5 million to launch a major non-profit news venture in San Francisco.“I can’t believe it,” said Geoff Dougherty, whose non-profit news venture ran out of money at summer’s

Only 5% in UK would pay for web news

U.S. publishers planning to erect pay walls may want to take note of a new poll that found only 5% of newspaper site readers in the United Kingdom would be willing to pay for interactive content.In a Harris Interactive Poll conducted for PaidContent:UK, researchers found that 74% of respondents simply would go to other sites if they were required to pay for access to the news they now get for

S.F. gets biggest-ever local news non-profit

A $5 million grant from a single philanthropist will fund the launch in the San Francisco area of the most ambitious project yet to build a non-profit news organization to fill the growing vacuum left by the contraction of the mainstream media.San Francisco businessman Warren Hellman today pledged $5 million to kick off fund raising for a new non-profit news organization being developed in

‘It will take unions to save newspapers’

A number of readers disagreed sharply with my suggestion that newspaper unions may be losing their relevance. One of them was Andy Zipser, the editor of The Guild Reporter, the official publication of The Newspaper Guild-CWA. Here’s what he had to say:By Andy ZipserThe Newsosaur, in a lengthy posting Monday, exhibited a poverty of imagination that cries out for charitable intervention.Commenting

Are newspaper unions becoming irrelevant?

Union members at the Sun-Times Media Group never have been more powerful than they are today, but the power they wield is a weapon of mass self-destruction.The unions can continue voting – as they did last week – against the sweeping wage and other contract concessions being demanded by the potential purchaser of their bankrupt company, thereby almost certainly condemning the business to

My Blog Is Born

Okay, so I have just created this blog. I wanna try it out since I almost tried everything new on the world wide web except blogging. I created this post in order to mark the birth of my blog. I'm still wondering on what to post in here, but I think I will just write about anything that I want or anything that I observe whenever I travel to other places.

The paper that ‘invented’ foreign news

In a captivating and inspiring new book, John Maxwell Hamilton, a former foreign correspondent who now is dean of the Manship School of Mass Communications at Louisiana State University, gives a great deal of credit to the Chicago Daily News for pioneering foreign news coverage among American newspapers.Although the Daily News went out of business in 1978, I am happy, as a loyal alumnus, to honor

Inflated traffic stats cloud pay-wall plans

Newspapers trying to assess the financial impact of potential paid-content schemes are starting with a wildly inflated sense of the size of their online audience that could come back to bite them in a big way. In “nearly every market” included in a study of 118 newspapers of every size in every part of the country, Greg Harmon of Belden Interactive found that publishers on average report the

Ideal pay-wall fee may be less than you think

If the willingness of consumers to pay for online news turns on how much it will cost, a bit of early research suggests the ideal price may be less than some pay-wall proponents might hope.In work conducted in the course of his newly completed study for the American Press Institute, Greg Harmon of Belden Interactive gathered some of the first actual sentiment from real consumers as to what they

ViewPass update

After the New York Times last week dubbed the ViewPass project “dormant,” a number of people have asked what happened to my proposal for an industry-owned solution to do a better job of monetizing newspaper web traffic. Here’s the answer:ViewPass was proposed as a publisher-financed and -owned solution to monetize interactive audiences by encouraging registration across a broad variety of

Only 51% of pubs think pay walls will fly

A bare 51% of the newspaper publishers in the United States believe they can charge successfully for access to their interactive content, according to a survey released today. The other 49% of publishers either fear that pay walls will fail or just aren’t sure.The survey, which was conducted for the latest in the series of industry conferences this year studyng how to monetize the valuable

AP didn’t have to run dying Marine’s photo

While I defend the right of the Associated Press to distribute the controversial picture of a mortally wounded Marine in Afghanistan, I can’t support its decision to do so.The controversy came to light over the Labor Day weekend when Defense Secretary Robert Gates begged the AP to honor the request of the family of Lance Cpl. Joshua Bernard not to run a photo of the young man taken in the moments

Sun-Times can be saved, says CEO

The money-losing Sun-Times Media Group can be turned into a modestly profitable business by the end of 2011, says the chief executive who took the company into bankruptcy court and plans to stick around to lead it back into the black.“The days of a newspaper company running 20% to 35% margins are over and they will not return,” said Chairman Jeremy Halbreich, who joined the Sun-Times Group early

Can latest savior save the Sun-Times?

More cuts, more drama and more trauma almost certainly lie ahead for the Sun-Times Media Group now that a civic-minded businessman has stepped forward to buy a company that probably could not otherwise have lasted out the year.In the latest twist in 25 years of always colorful and often dysfunctional ownership, a group of private investors led by Chicago financier James C. Tyree disclosed an

Yelp: Don’t leave home without it

I just got back from my first fully Yelp-enabled vacation and it was the best ever. As the late, great Karl Malden said in his American Express pitch: Don’t leave home without it.Although tens of millions of savvy Internet consumers know about Yelp, I find that an amazing number of broadcast and publishing pooh-bahs still haven’t heard of it. That’s too bad, because it means they not only are

Zell straps on his dancing shoes again

Sam Zell may (or may not) be headed for the exit as head of the Tribune Co., where he personally lost $325 million as the result of his recklessly financed acquisition of the company. But it looks like he is going to be all right.The man who proudly characterizes himself as a “grave dancer” specializing in the acquisition and turnaround of troubled businesses is organizing a $625 million fund to