Tuesday, May 12, 2009

New editor at Lexington

Peter Baniak will replace Linda Austin as editor at the Lexington Herald-Leader.
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3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Newspapers: There is No Magic Bullet

For newspapers, there is no magic bullet.

Charging for online content is not a magic bullet—in fact, in most cases, it may do more harm than good.

Micropayments are not a magic bullet—though they may (or may not) bring in a few extra pennies of revenue for the Wall Street Journal.

The Amazon Kindle (even in doublewide mode) is not a magic bullet—especially when Apple unleashes its rumored large-screen iPhone, aka the Kindle-killer.

Punishing Google is not a magic bullet—indeed, it's a short-sighted strategy that can devastate traffic and ad revenue.

Repeat: There is no magic bullet. In fact, most of the bullets just listed are of the dumb-dumb variety (as opposed to dum-dum, nitpickers). They reflect the thinking of executives and journalists who don't really understand the business of journalism, the reality of the new Internet-driven world, or what consumers are looking for these days. Mostly, they're defensive maneuvers, tired attempts to salvage a print-centric business model that is close to long gone.

Instead, news companies need to be working hard to innovate, to reach audiences in new ways, to create new forms of newsgathering and presentation and to pursue truly new revenue streams. That's a tough prescription in a time of across-the-board cutbacks, and no, there's no guarantee of success for many of the freshest ideas. But at a time when Rupert Murdoch reportedly is spending money for a crash project to find ways charge for content, or the New York Times, Washington Post and other publishers are fiddling with Kindle and other magic tablets while their industry burns, maybe they and others should be looking at other ways to, well, survive.

Here are some suggestions for things the industry in which the industry should be investing serious money and resources—and longtime readers know there's nothing really new here.

Anonymous said...

John Altevogt! The name is like a song!

Anonymous said...

so this 37-YO is the best they could find. journalism schools have been majority female for more than 20 years.
there was no youngish, promising woman for this slot? with all that talent in the pipeline?
riiiight.