Jeff Beckham

Jeff Smulyan, chairman of Emmis Communications - the company that owns Texas Monthly - has offered to take the company private. Media stocks have taken a beating lately on Wall Street. D Magazine editor and publisher Wick Allison says that Emmis owes $726 million of debt on revenues of $618 million.

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Change the word “e-mail” to “weblog”, and think about how much more impactful this Dell job posting would be:
Dell is looking for a creative thinker with a take charge attitude to communicate and market Dell’s products and services through e-mail. This position is responsible for the content, navigation, merchandising, and overall appearance of the Dell [...]

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The Statesman reports today that the University of Texas is installing the world’s largest  high-definition display scoreboard at Royal-Memorial Stadium this summer. The 134-foot wide, 55-foot tall giant will replace the 10-year-old scoreboard in the south end zone. My seats at near that end of the stadium, and it’s always been difficult to see anything [...]

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The Webby Awards, an annual ceremony honoring outstanding websites, handed out their statues today. Although the awards go to sites in a number of categories, I focused on the media-related honors:

Best Magazine Site: National Geographic
Best News Site: BBC News
Best Newspaper Site: Guardian Unlimited
Best Radio Site: NPR
Best Television Site: HBO: Creating the Scene

Perhaps not surprisingly, sites [...]

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Congratulations to the Austin American-Statesman, whose websites Statesman.com and Austin360.com were ranked No. 1 in greatest local reach among large U.S. newspaper sites.
The study, conducted by Scarborough Research and the Newspaper Association of America, estimated that 31 percent of adults in the Austin metro area read statesman.com and/or austin360.com in a typical month.
Statesman.com also is [...]

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Six-year-old Spencer Sartin of Austin shares the cover photo of this week’s Sports Illustrated with Lance Armstrong. The story by Austin Murphy focuses on Armstrong’s post-cycling career and his efforts to get increased funding for cancer research.
Spencer’s dad, Rob Sartin, shares more of the story behind the story and the cover shoot on his blog. [...]

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Why doesn’t the Austin Chronicle do more with their online presence? Given their audience and influence, there’s a great opportunity there for them.
One thing the Chronicle does exceptionally well online is making their back issues available in their archive section. You can browse back issues by date, or look for items by author, by column, [...]

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I smiled when I read Seth Godin’s recent post that mentioned a 1997 piece from Fast Company magazine by Tom Peters called “The Brand Called You“. It’s remarkable how well that story has held up. A few years ago, in the midst of some turbulent times in our industry, I gave a copy to each [...]

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Dan Gillmor, former columnist at the San Jose Mercury News and author of We the Media, gave a rousing talk on citizen journalism at Columbia University for the annual Hearst New Media Lecture. He posted a transcript on his blog.
I like Dan’s points about journalism’s major constituencies - the “former audience” who is now becoming [...]

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I subscribe to nearly 100 RSS feeds. Nine of those come from Statesman.com blogs. So I notice quickly when there are changes to the way I receive those feeds in my feed reader, Bloglines. This week, those feeds changed from delivering the headline and an excerpt from the blog posting to showing the headline only. [...]

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