Todd Zeigler at The Bivings Report offers up nine sensible ways for newspapers to improve their websites. They’re all solid:
Start Using Tags
Provide Full Text RSS Feeds
Work with External “Social” Websites
Link to Relevant Blog Entries
Get Rid of All Registration
Partner with Local Bloggers
Offer Alternative Views of Your Content
Modernize Your Site’s Graphic Design
Learn from Craigslist
He’s since added Make [...]
The Austin American-Statesman has put together a terrific story package called “Fields of Green: Texas Coaches’ Salaries“. The report focuses on the salaries of high-school football coaches across the state, which are more than $30,000 per year higher than teachers at large schools.
The paper supplemented its print coverage with an online package that included a [...]
Tags: Media
Website coverage of Hurricane Katrina was a common theme among the finalists for the Online Journalism Awards.
NOLA.com, the website affiliate of the New Orleans Times-Picayune, was nominated for its coverage of last year’s hurricane in the Breaking News category, as well as for the Knight Foundation Award for Public Service. The Biloxi Sun-Herald also pulled [...]
I ran across a pair of stories today around University of Texas sports.
The first was this Sports Illustrated story on the new high-definition scoreboard at the football stadium. The scoreboard, affectionately referred to as “Godzillatron”, measures 55 feet tall by 134 feet wide and is, for now, the largest HDTV in the world. I’ll get [...]
Tags: General
The Economist: Who Killed the Newspaper?
“The danger for newspapers is that all their efforts on the Internet may only slow their decline. Doing the obvious — having excellent websites and selling ad space on them — may not be enough.”
Scarborough Research: A New Story Lead for the Newspaper Industry (pdf)
Scarborough Analysis finds that newspaper websites [...]
Tags: Media
I discovered a great addition to Statesman.com today: a video webcast focusing on Central Texas high school football.
This is right out of the Rob Curley journalism playbook and a great move on the Statesman’s part. It’s locally focused and it’s a topic of intense interest to people in this area. The hosts — Rich Tijerina, [...]
Toddy Burton has a great story in this week’s issue of the Austin Chronicle about Despair.com, the Austin-based company that specializes in demotivation — an antidote to those dare-to-dream, “inspirational” posters and mugs that adorn offices all around you.
After receiving a few demotivational items (calendar and post-its) for Christmas, I was surprised to learn the [...]
You can be sure that newspapers folks around the state are keeping a watchful eye on the situation at the Dallas Morning News, where voluntary severance is currently being offered to almost all newsroom employees. If there isn’t enough attrition via voluntary severance, layoffs are possible, the paper says.
The News is the second-largest paper in [...]
Tags: Media
When Dell launched a corporate blog last month, its arrival was met with a fair share of skepticism. The main criticisms were that it was “too corporate” and didn’t address issues head-on that were in the news about the company.
However, in just a few weeks, the blog team at Dell has done an impressive job. [...]
Tags: General
Two University of Texas media members are featured in this week’s Wall Street Journal story, “Big Media on Campus“, which takes a look at how big companies like Ford, Microsoft and Wal-Mart are placing ads in college papers and how big media companies like Gannett and Viacom are buying papers aimed at college students.
Kathy Lawrence, [...]
Tags: Media
