Peter Bale - CNN cuts, others to come elsewhere; Post kills mag, more to come - Issue #83
Oh, another sort of bonus. This is the finest piece of writing I have read all week. I bloody love Jill Lepore but this is so funny and so simple and the way she does metaphors is a lesson to all of us who make them so clumsy.
Chris Cillizza was one of the worst columnists in the US -- in my opinion. That is saying something. Glib and ill-informed and noisy. However, many other excellent people have had their jobs cut and I am not talking about the paid contributors who are generally smug and noisy. No, I am talking about excellent journalists including a friend who has been fired and whom I consider one of the cleverest digital thinkers anywhere. CNN International looks like it is being gutted or filleted again. Madness. Discovery doesn't really know what it has there even if there was some crud.
As often in the news industry some of this is self-inflicted. A failure to adjust when times are good followed by instant retrenchment. Publishers need to look outside their own er...industries at how to manage and anticipate downturns and develop true strategies.
This is not necessarily in the same vein. Paper has become enormously expensive -- especially newsprint and yes, I know the magazine is glossy. Ink is also expensive, as is printing, and so are printing presses and spares -- if you can even get them. Time to get on with the shift to digital. Now.
Glad to see this though it is never a good look for one journalist to sue another. Ware is a fantastic investigative journalist and it just shows how blindly loyal or fanatical those Corbyn supporters are. True useful idiots.
This chap Simon Owens is starting to annoy me because he gives every impression of knowing what he's talking about. I have long felt that publishers, while right to embrace and experiment with podcasts, seldom seem to do it through any value-for-money lens. On the other hand, to be fair, they are having to be broadcasters, product reviewers, merchants of filth (Outbrain and Taboola) and digital publishers all at once.
The time to remove the print corset was about five years ago -- see The Independent in the UK. On the other hand -- if print still makes up the bulk or even a large percentage of your profits it is hard to give that up but you can at least try to not let it distort the entire business, especially the behaviour and performance of your newsroom.
Quite interesting though a friend of mind immediately pointed out to me that they get a big chunk of subscription revenue from specialist sports sites
A sample of the weekly thing I do, curating the big stories, for a New Zealand site.
A little bonus, if you want to see it that way, a copy of a curated thing I do for a New Zealand website each week. You might find the odd nugget in it. Doing it each week has given me some thoughts about the value, or lack of it, of foreign news sections in many national sites unless they do this and assemble it in some sort of meaningful editorially curated way.