NOTE: This list represents only the pieces I authored. My colleagues Adam Glenn and Michele McLellan wrote several other posts. You can find everything on the News for Digital Journalists blog.

Most important post: March 14: Pew research points to mobile opportunities for local news, info. There’s a lot to learn from in this Pew report. I spotted these strategic implications:

• Attract more young people to your news brand. Tomorrow’s audience has to come from somewhere. The research indicates that news orgs could promote long-term growth of their local news market via mobile offerings.
• Native apps not really such a great revenue strategy. In fact, Pews numbers paint a pretty dismal picture for trying to generate much revenue from getting people to pay for content. Now, if news apps became more service-oriented, that could change the picture…
• Embrace the spectrum of mobile technology, not just smartphones. OK, Pew, didn’t look at this directly, but when you look at their numbers you can see that feature phones are a big part of the picture. And the news business mostly thrives based on audience size. Ignoring feature phones means leaving money on the table and alienating potential allies.

Other posts…

Feb. 22: Disaster news prep: Google Person Finder. I wrote this after the Christchurch, NZ earthquake but before the big Japan earthquake/tsunami. Goal here is to tell news orgs how they can leverage this tool by embedding it in their own pages. Also, if your region gets hits by a disaster, I tell how to ask Google to spin off a new instance of Person Finder. You can spin off your own instance, but it’s better to see if Google will do it first to avoid confusion.

Feb 28: Engaging tomorrow’s news audience today: Report. Research from the Newspaper Association of America takes a closer look at sub-groups within the youth demographic for news audiences. I’d like to see more research like this. More importantly, I’d like to see some evidence that news organizations are actually using this research in their strategies.

March 8: Knight Community Info Toolkit: Help make your community stronger with better info. Summary of a new planning tool for community activists. This is the kind of effort I’d love to see news organizations get involved in, but it’s interesting that the toolkit is not really intended for news organizations.

March 9: Knight names new VP of Journalism and Media Innovation: Michael Maness. Pretty significant shift of leadership at the Knight Foundation. It’ll be interesting to see what direction Maness wants to take Knight’s programs. Especially now that the Knight News Challenge is in its fifth and possibly final year. (It was originally intended as a five-year contest program.)

March 11: Texas Tribune, Bay Citizen win Knight grant to build open-source news platform. I’m curious about this project — especially whether it will build upon existing open-source platforms (hopefully WordPress rather than Drupal, if so), and what kind of mobile functionality, if any, it will include.

March 17: New York Times launches paywall — and why most news orgs shouldn’t. Most people who watch the media business are pretty down on this strategy. Frankly, I’m also pessimistic — although I suspect the Times may be able to pull it off, for a while, without really hurting its audience size or search visibility. But there are so many loopholes, and so few real benefits to paying subscribers, that I’ve got to wonder why they’re even bothering with this. It seems almost like a philosophical exercise. They should be putting these resources into offering services that they can sell, if you ask me. As for the vast majority of news orgs: Don’t try this at home. The Times is a very special case.

March 22: Why “data journalism” is good for the news business. My UK colleague Paul Bradshaw wrote an excellent analysis of the many ways that data-focused content (such as interactive databases) and services (such as APIs of metadata from a news org’s content) can help build a news business.

It’s not especially surprising news, but still good to know.

Report: 90% of Americans own a computerized gadget – CNN.com.

One point I note: According to Pew, 5% of US adults currently own a tablet.  I wrote:

If tablet prices start to drop and more options for size and connectivity emerge (especially likely for Android models), it’s possible that that many people who rely primarily on feature phones might choose to invest in a Wi-Fi-enabled tablet (a one-time expense) rather than upgrading to a full smartphone (with higher monthly bills and often unexpected charges).

Thoughts?

“While we had a hunch that the skills of today’s 2-5 year olds would be very different to those of kids 20 to 30 years ago, we were surprised to find out just how much the childhood experience has evolved. According to our survey, while most small children can’t yet swim, tie their shoelaces or make breakfast on their own, they do know how to turn on a computer, point and click with a mouse, and play a computer game.

Take a look at some of the findings:

• More young children know how to play a computer game (58%) than swim (20%) or ride a bike (52%)

• 28% of young children can make a mobile phone call, but only 20% know to dial 911 in case of an emergency
• 69% of children aged 2-5 can operate a computer mouse, but only 11% can tie their own shoelaces
• Perhaps the most important piece of data to come out of this survey: the fact that 69% of children aged 2-5 are using a computer in the first place.

It’s exciting and commendable that so many parents are teaching their children such valuable computer skills so early on—they will need these skills to succeed later in life, and perhaps increasingly, not so later in life.

Uncle Jay Explains the News: Sept. 22, 2008

I think he really nailed it with this week’s “news word.”

This excerpt is from the Aug. 18 episode of one of my favorite vidcasts, Uncle Jay Explains the News. In it, he explains how a recent bit of news-business insanity (15,000 journalists covering each of the national political conventions) might actually be a masterful move by news-org staffing strategists.

(Uncle Jay owns the copyright on this. Posted here with his kind permission.)

One of my BlogHer friends, Elana Centor, just wrote me to pose an interesting question. She asked: Is journalism a smart career path in 2008?

I’m just one of many people she asked, so I can’t wait to see her final piece. (I’ll post a link to it when it’s up.) But here’s a cleaned-up and expanded version of what I told her:

————–

Hi, Elana

Great question. Personally, I think that developing journalism skills and experience is valuable for many career paths — but I think that betting that you’ll spend your career working for mainstream news orgs is a losing proposition in most cases. I think most j-schools are setting bright students up to fail, and that bugs me. A lot.

It’s such a shame that most j-schools still are not teaching new journalists crucial skills they’ll need to act entrepreneurially in media: content management systems (including blogging tools), mobile tools and mobile media strategies, social media, business skills, management skills, economics and business models, marketing, SEO, community management, etc.

One exception to this is Arizona State Univ., which just launched the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship that Dan Gillmor is heading up. Also, at various schools, there are exceptional teachers who really get online/mobile media and entrepreneurial journalism, such as Barbara Iverson at Columbia College, Mindy McAdams at the Univ. of Florida, Rich Gordon at Medill j-school (Northwestern Univ.), and Kim Pearson at The College of New Jersey. That’s important — sometimes all you need is one really good teacher in a program to open a student’s mind. (Disclosure: Barb, Rich, and Kim all contribute to Poynter’s E-Media Tidbits blog, which I edit.)

That said, what surprises me even more is that most j-school students don’t seem to care much about online media or being entrepreneurial…

I get asked to speak to journalism students a lot, and it’s stunning. Most of them actually seem to believe that their career path will lead them to writing big investigative or literary features for major magazines or newspapers. They believe good journalism = Pulitzer. They’re actually BEHIND many other people their age in terms of how they use and view online and mobile media.

I’m not sure why that is — whether most journalism students are close-minded before the come to j-school, or whether j-school does that to them. But I see it so much that I can’t ignore it. Of course, I could just be getting fooled by how disengaged most of them act in class when I’m speaking, so maybe I’m just a bad speaker for that audience. But my gut tells me no, that most of them really believe we’re in the Lou Grant era, even though they’re not old enough to remember that show.

Regardless of the cause, I look at how little most of those students seem to know and care about online/mobile media, and about establishing their personal brand and making their own opportunities outside of mainstream news orgs, and I figure those ones may deserve to go down with the ship of mainstream news orgs.

But there are always a few bright, energetic, ones who get that it’s up to them to make their own career path, they’re eager for opportunity — and they’re generally being shortchanged by their education. A damn shame.

On one discussion group I belong to, the question recently came up about whether members of the group had abandoned “landline” telephones entirely in their homes.

Actually, right now I’m in the process of trying out a VOIP service — and if it works to my satisfaction for a few months, I’ll move my phone number over to it and ditch my landline. (And if I eventually find a mobile phone and carrier plan that suits me, I may abandon VOIP too.)

My colleague Gary Rosenzweig of CleverMedia made an interesting comment: “I’ve got a couple of young people working for me that have never owned a land line in their lives. They say none of their friends do either.”

Make sense. Why should they? It seems to me that the one advantage of a landline is that it works when the power goes out and the cells are down — as long as the whole phone system hasn’t crashed. But is that emergency capability worth paying $25-$30/month for? I don’t know about you, but I live in a fairly compact neighborhood where some of my neighbors are keeping their landlines and would let me make outgoing calls or give their number in an emergency. So I feel no need to keep a landline of my own for emergency communication.

And anyway, I figure if you’re serious about wanting emergency communication, get an amateur radio license.

What about you? Have you given up landlines? What about people you know? And does age seem to be a factor? Please comment below.