The Jeff Beckham Weblog

Plan Capitol Metro Trip Via Cell Phone: The Austin Chronicle’s Lee Nichols has great success at first, then a few stumbles, when using a text-messaging feature through the Capitol Metro web site to plan the fastest bus routes around town. Cap Metro is partnering with Dadnab to provide this feature.
Austin Called a Great Beer Town: [...]

[Read more →]

On his new blog, Texas Monthly editor Evan Smith answers my contention that opening up full versions of the magazine’s archives and current issue content would bring a boost in revenue and exposure. He’s all for giving away more rather than less, but the business-side folks at TM see a dual revenue-stream (circulation and advertising) [...]

[Read more →]

The change in commenting policy wasn’t the only news coming out of TexasMonthly.com yesterday. The magazine debuted a new design and several new online features.
Not surprisingly, the design looks terrific. There are some spiffy additions right up front, starting with video Table of Contents, a narrated slideshow, and video tour of the state capitol from [...]

[Read more →]

Texas Monthly Senior Executive Editor Paul Burka let readers know today of a change in policy for his blog, BurkaBlog, following the comments brought on by Burka’s reason (”ungentlemanly personal conduct”) for Rep. Mike O’Day’s appearing on the magazine’s Dishonorable Mention list among Texas legislators.
“What I have learned,” Burka says, “is that, under the [...]

[Read more →]

Two Austin publications were honored at the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies Awards last week. The Austin Chronicle won third place in the Ad Design category, while the Chronicle’s Kevin Brass won third in the Media Reporting/Criticism category for his Media Watch columns. The Chronicle’s online group won second place in the Website Content Feature category [...]

[Read more →]

Kudos to Alamo Drafthouse founder Tim League for his recent talk to Bootstrap Austin, a group of local startup entrepreneurs. Tim shared how he and his wife, Karrie, ran all the facets of the Drafthouse in the early days of the business before finding great success.
In conjunction with League’s speech, the Bootstrap Austin group kicked [...]

[Read more →]

Back in November, the New York Times wrote a profile on Brian Stelter, the 21-year-old writer of the TVNewser.com blog, which has gained prominence as the place to go for inside news on the television industry. Earlier this week, the Times has now hired Stelter as a staff writer for their Business section. It’s a [...]

[Read more →]

The always-insightful Scott Karp wonders whether local newspapers should compete with local TV stations by producing their own news video.
Equipping reporters with a video camera along with the traditional pen and notepad gives local papers another outlet for distributing information, and, as Scott points out, another way to reach out to local advertisers.
To quote [...]

[Read more →]

Via Mr, Magazine comes notice that British newspaper The Independent merged all of its sections in the Sunday paper into one big newspaper section and one big magazine. It’s too early to speculate on whether this would be a successful strategy, but as Mr. Magazine points out, North American is “the only continent that has [...]

[Read more →]

Jeff Jarvis passes along word that the Greensboro (NC) News & Record, one of the papers that people point to as one that has embraced the Internet in the right way, announced layoffs last week. It shows that even though a paper may make the right moves to adjust to today’s news-sharing environment, the economic [...]

[Read more →]