New business models for news: the Great Wild Goose Chase

I liked Salon co-founder Scott Rosenburg's challenge to journalists. Don't start from the premise that a newsroom is there to be preserved, and then look for the business model to support it. It should be the other way round, he says, and he's dead right:

"Journalists who set out on the Great Business Model Hunt are trying to figure out how to support a newsroom. This is entirely understandable. If you have a great newsroom -- and as a lifelong reader I certainly feel that the Times does -- then of course you're going to worry about that around the clock once you realize that your old business model is doomed. But it's the wrong question. It's backwards. The newsrooms of today acquired their size and shape and structure thanks to the business model that supported institutions of their size. The world has changed; that model is vanishing. We shouldn't be asking "What sort of business can support a newsroom online?" The question is, "What's the best kind of newsroom that the online business can support?"

Read the whole post here.

What the collapse of the Third Reich tells us about Apple's IPad and newspapers

 This first appeared on my blog for Drum Magazine on January 30, 2010

It's clearly a somewhat inappropriate metaphor, but I can't get the image out of my head of forlorn Nazi soldiers in March 1945 waiting in vain for the Fuhrer's secret weapon to turn the course of the war and secure the destiny of the 1000-year Reich.



But I can think of no clearer parallel to the desperation shown by so many in the newspaper business in their reaction to the release of the Apple IPad. With its ability to reproduce

Independently Funded News Consortia

I'm delighted to have been appointed to sit on the panel to help the UK Government select the consortia to run the Independently Funded News Consortia pilots.
You can read more here and here.
Of course it wouldn't be at all appropriate for me to comment on the process or my involvement in it on this blog or elsewhere, so please forgive the 'radio silence' on this issue from now on.

Going the extra mile

At a bit of a loose end at the weekend, I thought I would see if there was any mileage in an idea I'd been mulling for a while.

I recently moved to Harborne, a suburb of Birmingham, and was surprised that the district was one of the few in the city without a healthy local community blog. Seeing as I've become a bit of an advocate for these kind of ground-level digital endeavours,

Three things I'll miss about newspapers - and three things I won't

• This was first published on January 1, 2010 on my blog for The Drum.
  

In my last post, I discussed why I was leaving newspapers after 25 years.

I thought I'd allow myself one more nostalgic post before this blog returns to what I hope will be its main purpose - discussing what's new in the world of media from the point of view of someone who's trying to make it as an entrepreneur, digital publisher and jack-of-all-consultancies (as well as some other stuff that might touch on the politics and economy of Birmingham).

And what better way to do this than with some good old-fashioned linkbait - a couple of lists?

So here we go. First: what am I going to miss about newspapers?