Aggregation guidelines: Link, attribute, add value

I have added three updates, marked in bold, since posting this originally. Aggregation has become a dirty word in much of journalism today. Bill Keller, former editor of the New York Times, last year wrote: “There’s often a thin line between aggregation and theft.” Patrick Pexton, Washington Post ombudsman, in an April 20 column called [...]

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AP offers some good social media advice, but not enough

You may have read this from me before about other news organizations: The Associated Press social media guidelines raise important issues but stop short of providing the excellent advice I would hope for from the AP. I won’t go into chapter and verse on the AP guidelines. They are an improvement on the fear-laden guidelines [...]

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Engagement, curation, content, branding: Buzzwords, yes, but also accurate

Journalists hate few things more than buzzwords. Many of us regard ourselves as guardians of the language (as if protecting the First Amendment and being watchdogs of the powerful weren’t enough guard duties). Buzzwords feel to many purists as some kind of assault on the language. Washington Post ombudsman Patrick B. Pexton writes scornfully of [...]

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Carole Tarrant discusses APME board’s Twitter use

My Sunday post about the APME board’s use of Twitter drew a detailed, thoughtful response from APME board member Carole Tarrant. Carole, editor of the Roanoke Times, had prompted the Sunday post with a tweet from a meeting of the Associated Press Managing Editors. She responded in a comment to the original blog post. But, [...]

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Twitter scoops Google, AP on earthquake

I woke up in the middle of the night and was having trouble getting back to sleep, so I checked Twitter. “Earthquake” was a trending topic, so I clicked. Hundreds of tweets reported an earthquake in Indonesia, causing buildings to sway in Jakarta. Twitter was reporting location, near Java, and magnitude, 7.3, and reporting on [...]

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Newspapers’ Original Sin: Not failing to charge but failing to innovate

A mistaken matter-of-fact statement in an Associated Press story launched Chris O’Brien on an insightful blog post that had little to do with the original story. In the same way, a statement in Chris’s post launched me on this post, which will start out in a different direction from his blog. The AP story, about [...]

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AP contradiction: Move forward but restore

When I read the Associated Press “Protect, Point, Pay” plan, I think of the Hummer. General Motors thought it was moving forward when it trotted out the massive sport-utility version of a military vehicle. The Hummer represented a lot of smart work by a lot of engineers and GM sold a lot of Hummers. It [...]

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Does AP plan “protect” its members?

The Associated Press is giving me an uneasy feeling again. I want to read the full AP “Plan for Reclaiming Content Online” for myself before I draw firm conclusions. I first read of it at the Eastern Iowa Airport this afternoon on the Nieman Journalism Lab blog entry by Zach Seward. Zach acknowledges that he’s [...]

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AP should serve industry interests by shifting from content focus to business solutions

For all of my career and far beyond, the Associated Press has existed to serve the interests of the newspaper industry. For most of that time, AP has served our interests well. When our readers needed us to provide national and world news, stock tables and coverage of sports beyond our own markets, AP developed a [...]

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Let’s focus on innovation, not protection

One of the first lessons I learned in chess was that the best defense is a good offense. In team sports, a defense can keep the other team from scoring and win a championship. But chess has two points: you try to keep your king alive and you try to capture the opponent’s king. The [...]

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Can There Be Freedom of the Press without a Press?

I was a panelist for a First Amendment Day program at Iowa State University Wednesday, April 15. Dr. Michael Bugeja, director of the Greenlee School of Journalism and Communication at Iowa State, introduced the panel with these remarks, which he gave me permission to post to his blog (I added the links). My response to Dr. [...]

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Clinging to the past won’t save newspapers

Newspapers need to move into the future and stop clinging to the past. Two bloggers I respect greatly, Tim McGuire and Alan Mutter, blogged favorably this week about efforts to force Google to pay for linking to content from newspaper web sites. Because I respect both of these men and consider McGuire a friend, I read [...]

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