Breaking News

Breaking News: The Top 5 mistakes newspaper make when news happens

Bill — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 02:51:43 +0000

Last month a large and boisterous fire appeared on the rooftop gardens of a Toronto waterfront condo during the afternoon rush hour. Bright orange flame pierced thick black smoke, and the wind-whipped plume was so large and so high it was visible from clear across Lake Ontario, in St. Catherine's, 51 kms to the south. Thousands of workers in the downtown towers gawked at the fire from their windows, commuter traffic slowed to a crawl along the elevated expressway mere metres from the fire-struck condo. On the islands and ferries and boats in the harbour, all

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Getting Naked for CF – Seven Days and Counting

Bill — Mon, 24 May 2010 19:18:12 +0000

And now, as Terry Gilliam said more than once, for something completely different.

My large and rambunctious clan is taking part in the Canadian Cystic Fibrosis Foundation's annual Great Strides fundraising walk, under the Dunphy Armada banner. The walk is on May 30.

In addition to the walk, I've decided to challenge my network to raise enough money for me to shave off my beard - something that hasn't been done since the previous century. That's right, I'm going to go naked faced out into the world next Sunday.

You can learn more about it - and even sponsor

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How to write for the Web (it ain’t just words on a page)

Bill — Wed, 19 May 2010 10:33:49 +0000

Looking at research around writing for the web quickly turns up a central paradox: Readers scan web pages, they don't read them like books, they jump from page to page, from link to link and back again, they drop stories and headlines within reading the first two words YET people are apt to finish more stories on the web, and to read deeper into stories if they finally do light on them.

What's up?

Hard to say. Surely it has something to do with the conditioning we've received on the web, with the continual invitations to distraction that a

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Mapping The Story

Bill — Mon, 17 May 2010 07:00:05 +0000

Here's the slides - complete with links - from my Camp VJ session on Mapping and the Web.

Cheap and easy video for independent newspaper sites

Bill — Fri, 14 May 2010 22:18:50 +0000

This is really for the folks from Ink and Beyond, the Canadian Newspaper industry's annual gathering, where I gave a brief presentation on video for independent newspaper web sites.

I'm posting it here really just to give everybody the links.

Bill

Beware of turtle-necked strangers bearing gifts, or: The iPad is a many-edged device

Bill — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 04:03:25 +0000

Rarely have I been so conflicted as while trying to evaluate Apple's much-hyped iPad. On the one hand I can see the real potential in an instant-on, beautifully-engineered, letter-sized touch screen device that plays videos and music, that replaces books, magazines and newspapers, and offers print publishers the same simple digital storefront that music and video folks have had for years with iTunes Simply put — I want it. On the other hand, I look at Steve Jobs, loose and lanky on that Moscone Centre stage, smiling lightly and offering the world his latest shiny steel and plastic fetish

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Newspapers: Stop chasing yesterday’s readers

Bill — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 15:42:46 +0000

Why are we always aiming at yesterday's readers? I've spent the better part of the past year and a half building and installing a sprawling content management system at one of our larger newspaper chains. Eighteen months. And the entire time I've been beset by the nagging, gnawing worry that I'm just bolting a big shiny brand new anchor to the belt of a powerful — but aging — swimmer who even now is floundering in rough waters. These enterprise systems, even the newest releases, are inevitably constructed with layer upon layer of legacy code, programming bloated by years

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Ernst Zundel goes free: Defending the indefensible

Bill — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 05:42:38 +0000

As this day slowly slips away, I wonder if I should write this post at all. It's March 1st. 2010. This morning, German authorities released Holocaust denier and Nazi apologist Ernst Zundel from jail. I know Zundel all too well. Back in the last century, I spent five or six years as an investigative reporter for the Toronto Sun, specializing in the rise and fall of Zundel, his sorry skinhead shocktroops, and the motley crew that coagulated under the Heritage Front banner waved by Zundel's protegé, the late Wolfgang Droege. Nearly a decade later, in a post 9-11 America,

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Goodbye advertising, hello circulation!

Bill — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 16:05:37 +0000

(Cross posted from ShiftLock, my tech column in the Canadian Newspaper Association’s paper, The Publisher)

Straws in the wind, or a sea change blowing in?

This past quarter at the New York Times (and my own newspaper and many, many others) circulation surpassed advertising as the dominant revenue source for newspaper operations. Advertising revenue for US newspapers showed double digit declines for the 8th consecutive quarter. A brand-new Portuguese national daily newspaper is attracting attention - and readers - with a design philosophy that places readers and their daily needs first. Paid circulation jumped by 50 percent within

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If you outsource print production, are you still a newspaper?

Bill — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 03:15:07 +0000

(Cross posted from ShiftLock, my tech column in the Canadian Newspaper Association's paper, The Publisher) "Schmuck!" The red-faced man was sitting high in his SUV, leaning out his window, pointing with one hand, and calling across to us. He was entering the parking lot, we were leaving it. A kind of backwards irony.

Can the print monster be beaten?

He works in pre-press, in imaging; we work on a team that's rolling out a new, centralized content management system across the whole chain. We're not too popular this day. "You schmuck! They're going to lay off 40 of

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