Zombie Journalism

We as an industry like to collectively wring our hands about the toxicity of online comment boards, but if we really want to improve the quality of on-site discussion we need to be willing to get involved in our sites in a hands-on manner. No amount of filters, comment-detecting robots and user-end moderation will replace the presence of a dutiful moderator.

The New York Times has now said that their metered paywall will not apply to blog referrals and searches, which really doesn’t seem to make it much of a revenue model at all.

I read a lot of industry blogs and they generally all boil down to two topics: complaining about the Internet (or complaining about people complaining about the Internet) and lamenting the future of news.

The 2009 Technorati State of the Blogosphere Report has got some great demographics about bloggers that online news orgs would be good to know, as a lot of them are voracious news consumers.

Online comments are a gigantic albatross for newspaper sites, but I believe we need them. Instead of panicking, we need to ride out these early days of commenting and learn to become better community managers.

We shouldn’t judge the future or value of “hyperlocal” news from the Washington Post’s failed experiment with LoudonExtra. Instead, we need to actually understand what it really means to be hyperlocal in reporting – and take note of sites doing it right.

The Washington Post took on Gawker for alleged copyright infringement this week in a battle of the blogs. Here’s why the Post writer was wrong – and why the debate itself is just a mere sideshow to the real problems for newspapers online.

The Cleveland Plain Dealer is embarrassing itself in its efforts to limit the First Amendment rights of bloggers and get other sites not to give them web traffic. Aggregators are not the enemy.

News and notes such as new pay models for news sites, using local blogs as content providers, why tech skills are only the beginning for journalists and all of the hullabaloo about Google in the news website world.

Digg’s recent decision to hijack shared links from content publishers back to their own home page should be the last straw for online media that has supported sharing content with Digg.