Will pay walls make news orgs irrelevant?

As a follow up to Tuesday’s post, I contacted John Robinson, editor of the Greensboro News & Record, to get his thoughts on the fact that 75 percent of the N.C. Press Association‘s newsroom leaders are at least thinking about charging for online content.

Robinson has fully embraced social media. He sports about 800 followers on Twitter and frequently uses the microblogging service to create a dialogue with his community as well as fellow journalists. I figured that makes his opinions particularly salient, since I feel like its social media that will be impacted by a news organization’s decision to placed their content behind a pay wall.

Robinson agreed to answer a few questions via e-mail about his perception of pay walls and the future of online content for the News & Record. Read the rest of this entry »

For journalism, there's no place like home

Photo by Ali A under Creative Commons license

I’m going to follow up Wednesday’s gushing over Greensboro News & Record Editor John Robinson with a little more gushing.

The News & Record was one of the few papers in the country that decided not run Sonia Sotomayor’s nomination to the Supreme Court on the front page.

That was for a few reasons. First, the story broke as most people were fishing their papers out of the puddles in their front lawns Tuesday (seriously, it was rainy that day). By the time the N&R staff began, it was old news. Second, the staff had no unique angle — Robinson’s conclusion was that his paper had nothing to add.

That decision was an admirable one — a refusal to replicate what’s being said over and over again in most papers and cable news channels and a conscious choice to use that valuable real estate for unique local stories no one else had.

But recognizing the controversy, Robinson asked via Twitter whether his decision was the right one, then published the resulting conversation. Read the rest of this entry »

Why don't news orgs trust their journalists?

I don’t know why, but news people seem to be largely afraid of change.

You sort of expect it at larger news organizations, where experienced newsroom leaders are set in their ways and a lot of money has been invested in the infrastructure of the existing business model. But I also saw it occasionally in college newspapers, where young staffers were often reluctant to do things differently.

An anomaly though it is, especially at a time when news organizations need to be bold to stay alive, you see perfect case studies whenever new technology enters the mix.

Most recently, of course, it’s Twitter, that oh-so-trendy microblogging service with an exponential growth rate, an usually high bounce rate and enough hype to pique the interest of Oprah herself (and apparently the cute puppy in her profile picture).

After being mostly scorned at first by management, individual journalists began realizing the true potential that Twitter could provide for their work, and they began to pick it up.

Then came the rules. Read the rest of this entry »