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