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Conferences, Presentations & Speaking Engagements

  • Available for public speaking around media transformation and opportunity. Please inquire for schedule and rates.

Press Mentions

  • Marketwatch: Tribune newspaper executives exit
    "What we're seeing is the systematic dismantling of one of the nation's top newspaper companies....The idea of bringing in new blood to the newspaper industry isn't a bad one, because I think in a number of ways it does have old ways of thinking. But when you bring in new blood, those people have to bring in new strategies. Cutting pages and jobs isn't a strategy. It's just a way to cut costs, which all newspaper companies are doing."
  • KCRW: Newspapers in Big Trouble, Should Americans Care
    Appearance on program with L.A. Times editors, others.
  • Reuters: Number of Newspaper Analysts Dwindles
    In the absence of critical analysis from Wall Street, bloggers and industry executives have grown in importance. Outsell Inc's Ken Doctor and Alan Mutter, a venture capitalist and former newspaper editor who runs the blog Reflections of a Newsosaur, are two well-read commentators.
  • Fox Business Network: Bad Times for Newspapers
    “What happens in five years if it looks like more of the recruitment is coming through Yahoo’s Hotjobs,’’ said Outsell’s Doctor. The company may wonder if it can get a better deal going directly to Yahoo and cutting out the middleman, which in this case would be the newspaper. “That’s the huge question in this.” Still Doctor said that given Newspaper companies are skilled at selling advertisements they may be able to prove their worth to the likes of Yahoo by building bigger and better sales forces. “The core strength of a newspaper is its sales staff and its relationship to the advertiser,’’ said Doctor. “If they can keep that relationship it doesn’t matter what they are selling.”
  • Marketwatch: Cablevision to acquire Newsday for $650 million
    "The synergies are real here. If you put together the list of advertising clients Cablevision has with the list of accounts Newsday has -- and the combined contacts the sales teams have -- that's significant."
  • NYT: Cablevision Is Winner of Newsday
    “I’ve been skeptical, but this really is a tremendous opportunity for them,” said Ken Doctor, lead analyst with Outsell. “It’s just awfully hard to pull off.”
  • Bloomberg: McClatchy Plans to Cut 1,400 Jobs, 10% of Workforc
    "This is a permanent downsizing of newspaper companies,'' said Ken Doctor. "They're not using the word `permanent,' but it's a recognition that they will get much smaller as they try to find their way in a digital world."
  • Chicago Reader Blogs: Off a Cliff
    With Rupert Murdoch, who's 77, now predicting he'll outlive the print press has another 20 years or so and Steve Balmer, CEO of Microsoft, giving it maybe ten, the scriveners who populate the nation's despondent newsrooms are willing to concede that -- in the words of industry analyst Ken Doctor -- "It's the end of the world as we know it." All those scriveners -- the ones who know they don't know enough to negotiate a path from this world to the next on their own -- ask at this point is that they be led forward by people who do. Which is why it's so troubling to the hundreds of journalists at the Tribune Company when their new leader sounds like a nincompoop....The following observations about the news-ad ratio owe a big debt to Doctor, who's just addressed the subject on an Editor & Publisher podcast and in his own blog.
  • Bloomberg: GM, Motorola, NY Times Burn Cash Flow, Keep Dividends
    Dividend increases by newspaper companies are ``a core strategy'' to retain shareholders, said Ken Doctor. The Times is cutting 100 jobs this year, or 7.5 percent of its newsroom employees. ``They did that even before cutting their dividend, which I think surprised a lot of people,'' Doctor said.
  • NY Times: Cablevision Is Winner of Newsday
    “I’ve been skeptical, but this really is a tremendous opportunity for them. It’s just awfully hard to pull off.”

What's On My Netvibes

  • Steve Goldstein
    Fellow KR alumnus Steve Goldstein understands the research/info needs of end-use enterprise customers, and he's built a company that is helping satisfy them.
  • Peter Krasilovsky
    Centered on e-commerce of all kinds from Yellow Pages through classifieds and new ad models.
  • Mark Potts
    Mark Potts is an experienced journalist, observer of Internet journalism and an alumnus of the Backfence experiment.
  • John Blossom
    Thoughtful views on a wide-ranging mix of media change.
  • Jay Rosen
    Jay Rosen is a provocateur in the best sense, an NYU journalism professor deeply committed to keeping the press accountable and vibrant in the digital age.
  • David Meerman Scott
    David Scott understands web marketing of digital content. Check out his site and his new book, "Cashing In With Content"
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BlogBurst

« Mercury News Staffers Await the Dreaded Call | Main | Searching for Jack Welch and ... the Boston Globe's Survival »

December 03, 2006

West Bronx' Online Paper Reveals the Real Promise of the Web

Those of us in the trade have looked for the first simmering signs that grassroots, community-generated journalism might actually become real. We've see some signs in places -- usually in suburban places, nice, small, gainly places. Places like Half Moon Bay, Westport, Brattleboro, Montclair, N.J.

Now the West Bronx News Network, an umbrella for three sites in one of New York City's toughest areas, is telling us something new about the power of the press, the online press, and reminding us that A.J. Liebling's famous line about freedom of the press belonging to those who own one may have a new meaning in the 21st Century. Westbronxnewsnetwork


Manny Fernandez' story in the New York Times describes the Mount Hope, Norwood and High Bridge neighborhoods of "bodegas, African markets and tall, brick apartment buildings." He tells us the larger area is home to 128,000 people -- that's twice the size of communities that such user-gen sites as Backfence and YourHub will tell you they need to build an online "neighborhood."

Building an online neighborhood is what the founders of the sites are trying to do. What makes Mount Hope different than the Brattleboros and Half Moon Bays? You can start making your own list, but don't forget this one: there's really no local print medium serving it.
A community needs its own voice, and if print can't grow and survive, mainly online can.

It's about brand new, so don't expect a lot of activity yet, for instance in its blog. But you can see how these tools are set up for success. Calendars. Links. Local news. Local photos. In English and Spanish. It's about a place, and that's ultimately what new media pioneers in West Bronx and Westport are trying to reclaim.

The network is funded by One Economy Corporation's "Beehive". Let's hope it's one of many new sprouts to find life.

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