Kennedy assassination front pages: A close look 50 years later

I am under no illusion that my thoughts or memories of the Kennedy assassination are any more insightful than all the others you’ve already read and heard for the last month or so.

But I do think the front pages my father saved from November 1963 are pretty interesting.

We lived in Sunset, Utah, at the time. I was a fourth-grader at Doxey Elementary School. My father saved the front page above from the evening edition of the Ogden Standard-Examiner, the daily paper delivered to our home. It apparently started Dad (and then me) on a couple lifetimes of saving historic front pages. This is the oldest of dozens of papers Dad saved over the next 15 years before his death. As the journalist in the family, I got his collection and added dozens (maybe hundreds) more.

Take a look at the front page above. Kennedy was shot at 12:30 a.m. p.m. Central time, 11:30 a.m., right on (or perhaps after) deadline for an evening paper. Clearly they just had enough time and material for one wire story (from UPI) and a file mug shot of the president. There isn’t even a wire photo from Dallas.

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Entrepreneurial journalists should pursue several revenue streams

Entrepreneurial journalists make a mistake if they think advertising is their only potential revenue stream.

Our entrepreneurial journalism class at Georgetown University will focus tonight on exploring possible ways to make money beyond display advertising. I doubt that many organizations would want to pursue all these possibilities. Particularly if you’re a small organization or an individual, you will need to pick your shots carefully and decide which have the most potential and which are worth the time and money it would cost to try them. Some of these opportunities are tailored for the sole proprietor. Others work better for a larger organization or at least for an entrepreneur or team with specialized technical skills.

Here are some revenue streams we will discuss in class:

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A publisher asks tough questions about C3 blueprint

Tough questions help test and sharpen any vision for innovation.

Marty Weybret, publisher of the Lodi (Calif.) News-Sentinel and LodiNews.com, asked some tough questions on Chuck Peters’ C3 blog about the Complete Community Connection concept Chuck and I have been promoting. “The Complete Community Connection vision that you and Steve Buttry have enunciated is intriguing,” Weybret started. “You may detect a certain hesitancy in neutral words such as ‘vision’ and ‘intriguing.’ Frankly I have studied C3 with a fair patience and yet I don’t feel like I have my head around it. May I ask you a few questions — some carry the baggage of skepticism, for which I apologize. Some are posed with wide-eyed curiosity.”

First, I’ll embrace the skepticism and the curiosity. Though I will say that I regard “vision” and “intriguing” as positive words and I am pleased that this publisher has spent this much time and patience studying the vision. I don’t always have my head around it either and I wrote it. Changing deeply ingrained ways of thinking takes patience as well as persistence.

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