Ideas from Mark Stout

If I were the publisher of a newspaper, I'd be thrilled by Facebook's new partnership with newspapers.  And I'd be scared to death of it too. In May, Facebook and nine media outlets, The New York Times among them, announced a partnership, Instant Articles ,  where Facebook would publish the paper's content in Facebook's news feed.  Ads served with the stories sold by the papers will generate revenue for the papers they do not have to share with Facebook.  Revenue for ads sold by Facebook will be shared with the papers, with the newspapers getting 70%. Eventually, more newspapers will be included.  Maybe even your local paper.

Usually you don't see two signs of changing times within a few minute of one another, but I did just now.  I looked over my Twitter feed for the past hour and saw Mashable's report that Amazon thinks sales of e-books in their Kindle Store will overtake paperbacks by the end of 2011.  Amazon recently announced that e-books had over taken hardback sales last quarter.  And Amazon expects e-books to overtake paper and hardback combined some time after that.  Jeff Bezo's of Amazon marvels that the Kindle is only 33 months old. And according to the Digital Future Project from the USC Annenberg School for Communications and Journalism and reported by Editor and Publisher , 56% Internet users ranked newspapers as  important or very important sources of information while the internet is at 78% and television is at 68%. The internet continues to rock the world, and disrupt old ways of doing things.  We have to make sure the information continues to f...

How different will newspapers, televisions news, and news magazines be from one another in 10 years? That might sound ludicrious to ask.  But think about it.  What's the one thing each of those news outlets have now? Web sites. The television web sites of course have written stores, just like the newspaper web sites do. And the newspaper web sites increasingly have videos I got to thinking about this from Time Magazine's demo of their new technology for bringing magazines into the 21st Century.  Take three minutes and watch it. Wouldn't a newspaper be able to package its own news in a similar fashion? And TV stations too? TV sets are rapidly becoming computer like. I suspect in the near future, we'll have touch pad remote controls that let us control our TV's just as we do our computers. Instead of moving a mouse to move a pointer around as we do on computers now, or touching the screen as we do on our smart phones, we'll move the pointer o...

Once upon a time, I was trained as a journalist. While I've never actively worked in the field, I do follow the profession and have used the tools I was taught in many ways. As I've integrated Google Voice into my life, I have considered how it could be valuable to a journalist. I was planning to research this more and write a blog post for it. Today on Poynter Online , Etan Horowitz covers all I might have, and more in his post " How Journalists Can Use Google Voice to Improve Their Reporting ". Check it out.

In writing the response for my local paper I posted a few days ago, I had the pleasure of remembering one of the coolest little newspapers I've ever known. In 1979 the small town newspaper, The Point Reyes Light , won a Pulitzer for investigating the cult, Synanon. From the paper's About page : The Point Reyes Light is one of the few weekly newspapers to ever win a Pulitzer Prize. In 1979, when the paper's circulation was only 2,750, it received the Pulitzer gold medal for Meritorious Public Service as a result of a series of exposès and editorials about the Synanon cult. The cult was not only abusing its tax-exempt status, it had also turned to violence in an attempt to silence critics. The violence culminated in October 1978 when Synanon members tried to murder a lawyer by planting a 4.5-foot rattlesnake in his mailbox. The lawyer was bitten but survived, and The Light was the first to reveal that cult lea...

It was on March 13, 1989 that Sir Tim Berners-Lee presented a paper on how scientists could share information via a computer network. In January of 1990, he implemented his idea into what became the world wide web. Considering all the industries disrupted by his invention, Dr. Berners Lee should be grateful there is not a time machine. The list of industries eager to send executives back in time and stop him would be long : Recording industry newspapers television movies travel agencies book publishing magazine publishing retail airlines business travel telephone cable tv Which ones have I missed?

With each issue, my mother reads the newspaper cover to cover. She'll highlight parts my father would be interested in. When they are done with the paper, she saves it until my cousin visits and gives it to her. The amazing thing is that my parents have not lived in the town covered by this paper in over 40 years. Earlier this week, my local paper consolidated their printing plants and decided to close one of two editorial offices in my county. It is no doubt traumatic for the printers that are laid off, I'm sure. I Twittered about it ( @BigGrayBeast ) and heard a few minutes later from one of the editors asking if I had any ideas for them. The fact they seek connections with their readers and bother to ask means they are trying. I started on Twitter only a few months ago; mostly as a way to call some attention to this blog. It wasn't long before the Twitter account for the paper started following me, followed closely by one of the reporters and ultimately an editor. ...