Expedia never honored my reservation

My dispute with Expedia has a happy ending, though that ending has nothing to do with any responsiveness from Expedia. Summarizing what I blogged last week: I booked a flight to Ottawa through Expedia, which confirmed the flight for $528.46, then tried to raise the fare to over $700. I got no satisfaction by calling [...]

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A decade’s experience in news, training, innovation

This decade is ending with much less fanfare than the past one, which was the turn of both a century and a millennium. This decade passed without really getting a name — the Oughts didn’t quite stick, like I guess they did a century earlier (they so didn’t stick that I don’t even know or [...]

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Reviewing a year’s blogging

Reviewing 2009 on my blog (mostly for my own information, but I share it because that’s what bloggers do): My most popular post by far (more than twice as many views as anything else) was my Blueprint for the Complete Community Connection, posted April 27. I proposed a detailed new business model for community news [...]

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Expedia doesn’t honor my confirmed reservation

I thought I booked a flight Sunday to Ottawa, Canada, on Expedia. I learned in a half-hour phone call with Expedia Tuesday that the travel service that invites you to “find your perfect trip” online doesn’t honor the reservations that it purports to make. So I won’t be flying to Ottawa on an Expedia reservation. [...]

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The Internet’s “rivers of gold”: transactions

I have become a bit tiresome, I suppose, in pushing my views that news companies need to stop pursuing paywalls, move beyond advertising and find a more prosperous future in direct transactions. Well, Dale McCarthy of Fairfax Digital in Australia is showing the wisdom of this approach. A story in B&T reports on McCarthy’s dismissal of [...]

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Publishers optimistic for 2010 (but they missed 2009 by a mile)

Whew! Publishers are expecting the plunge in newspaper advertising revenues to level off next year. Maybe now we can stop the bleeding and not feel so much pressure to change. Or can we? Alan Mutter wrote yesterday of the publishers’ projections in his Reflections of a Newsosaur blog, asking, What the heck are publishers thinking? [...]

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Some journalists get uncomfortable with the transparency they want from everyone else

Journalists fight for openness in government, business, universities, religious institutions and pretty much everyone we cover. But transparency for us? Not so fast. I hope no one was walking by my office when I was reading Paul Bradshaw’s post at Poynter Online, about a journalist who interviewed him by email, then denied him permission to [...]

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Tweeps soothe a frustrated customer

Read this post in Russian, translated by Google. Читать этот пост на русском языке, перевод Google. I guess I was showing some travel fatigue the other day in Barnaul. As our interpreter translated for a Russian speaker, I felt a vibration from my iPhone and looked down at a text message from Mimi, sitting about [...]

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Huge demand for mobile content on the go

If you have any doubts about the need for a mobile-first strategy, check out these numbers from a Frank N. Magid & Associates study: Nearly 90 percent of mobile device owners are interested in live news and weather programming on the go. 46 percent find the idea of watching live TV programming on their mobile [...]

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Mobile-First Strategy

In a comment on my most recent (and rather lengthy) blog post on mobile-first strategy, Chuck Peters suggested a table of contents. So I have combined three blog posts on the topic into one pdf with a table of contents: Or, if you prefer, you can read them on the blog: News organizations need mobile-first [...]

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How news organizations need to change to pursue a mobile-first strategy

To read all three of my “mobile-first strategy” posts as a pdf with a table of contents, scroll to the end of this post. I used to watch the crowds in airport lounges when I traveled, studying how people read newspapers. Even with circulation declining, you could see people reading newspapers intently. Especially after 2001, [...]

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Crowdsourcing on Twitter: My tweeps help me start geotagging

Read this post in Russian, translated by Google. Читать этот пост на русском языке, перевод Google. Twitter is an excellent crowdsourcing tool. An email from Jim Cremer, who’s team-teaching a class with me at the University of Iowa next semester, asked if I could geotag my tweets. Our course will teach students how to develop [...]

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