Models

One of the most striking parts about the current upheaval in the newspaper business is that business models are profoundly shifting. Sure, the business model of the small weekly is fairly sound when considered next to the major-market daily, but that still doesn’t provide an answer for the internet.
Like an elephant in the room, publishers [...]

Hardtimes

A funny thing happens when people make less money, they cut down on what they deem unnecessary. Seems advertising is unnecessary to many people. Our papers are certainly suffering the current recession. There’s no telling how bad it will get a this point, but the current owner has been through the 80’s with two of [...]

Transparency

Blogging policies and traditional journalism are a bit like trying to write a peace-treaty for Israel and Palestine to sign. While technically possible, the extent to which one will understand the other is dubious. While my writing here is based on the principal that I work for a newspaper, I consider this more an outlet for [...]

Competition

So far I’ve been “scooped” on a story I was supposed to write twice. Considering I work for a weekly and not a daily, that’s not too bad, but it’s also brought up a couple of observations.

One: Daily newspapers seem to run on nearly the same schedule as weeklies. 

As far as features and researched, well [...]

Feedback

I’m going to an office meeting tomorrow (today) to see a presentation on some sort of web forum feedback software. It’s an interesting concept, but I haven’t heard anything about and so am wary. I try to stay abreast of web goings-on and the creators of this software can’t even keep their own website updated, [...]

Technology

I am always looking for better/easier ways to organize all the information that gets thrown at me each week. When I discovered Remember The Milk I was very excited, as it presented a really easy way to organize what I had to do. I even flirted with keeping long-term to-dos in the system. Unfortunately, the [...]

Management

I am not good at managing time. This is an absolute truth and one I wish to change. It is especially bad when you work at a job that involves deadlines, writing (creatively) on deadline, hard deadlines and often office-less work. I am always tempted to just pack up my things and say, “I’ll take [...]

Schooling

Allow me to step into a’nother sphere in my ven diagram of work. Right now I am attempting to get my head around a massive legislative push in the State of Maine to consolidate school districts.
I was called out in an article I wrote last week on a number of details that I just didn’t [...]

Contacts

I’ve read so many lists of how to be an effective journalist by developing contacts. Indeed, one of my favorite aspects of being a reporter is that it gets me out and doing things. For New Year’s I was at a series of concerts in Blue Hill. I was not on assignment and feeling a [...]

Workflow

As I believe I’ve noted, I am now working on a workflow system for the office. Content be damned, what we need is a way to automate the transfer of documents between people and desks.
There are some hurdles, mind you. Firstly, I am new to this business. I’m fairly certain there are big holes in [...]