About
Isaac Cubillos
This site is about the reality of working in print and online worlds. It’s is about helping you save your news organization, and saving your career. It’s about changing your mindset to think like a journo-entrepreneur. I’ll share with you the tools and techniques you should be using in order to stay in the business.
Don’t get me wrong, newspapers papers aren’t dead yet. They still have another generation or two before technology, economy and ecology finally put them to bed.
Readers have NOT left the building
Readership of the local daily newspaper among the general population is down a little from the last reading in 2006, but that result may be due to seasonal variation.
Readership among 18-24-year-olds in the general population continues to slowly decline; but the habit is fairly stable for 45-plus.
People who read newspapers say they spend, on average, 27 minutes with them on weekdays, and 57 minutes on Sundays. The first figure has stayed stable, but the latter figure has been slowly dropping since we first started tracking in 2002.
Readers continue to engage with the newspaper, on average, more than five days a week.
On average they complete 60 percent of the paper on weekdays and 62 percent on Sundays – again, stable habits.
The penetration of newspaper Web sites is still quite low in most communities, though it should be noted that we measured response only to the main site, not to related sites whose ownership consumers might not recognize.
Source: 2008 study by Readership Institute
I first began building online newspapers in 1994, just when the Internet exploded for the public. Back then, it has spending hours hand-coding HTML pages and getting them online. Of course, in the age of dial-up, uploading and viewing pages could take hours.
By 1996, the first generation WYSYWIG softare products were coming out, saving in building Web site. I sometime use that package to build a quick page or minisite when needed.
I recall sometime in 1997 I received an e-mail from someone in Michigan that loved Latino Beat, but asked, “why don’t you cover Michigan, too?”
Latino Beat 1998
After a lot of research, my partner and I found there was a growing Hispanic market that did not have a news catering to their needs. Thus, we took Latino Beat national and became the first national daily news service online. We were noted in a New York Times article covering the emerging Hispanic market, and from there our readership exploded.
The now defunct technology company Zip2 approached us and wanted us to use their platform to deliver news. At the time, Zip2′s product was creating regional content management systems for newspapers such as the Washington Post, The New York Times, Knight Ridder, Morris Communications, and newspapers in the Hearst, Times Mirror, Media General, Pulitzer Publishing and Freedom Communications chains, The San Antonio Express-News (MySA.com) and others.
Their sales rep said we could have the San Diego market, if we wanted. I replied, “I’ll take L.A., it’s a bigger market.”
But I wanted was a national market, which Zip2′s platform could deliver — they just hadn’t thought about it that way.
HispanicVista 1999
When they said yes in 1999, we rolled Latino Beat into HispanicVista (nothing like the distastrous product its current owners have created) and began reaching a national audience of nearly 150,000 users per month. Not bad for a two-person operation.
At the same time, we met with a TV reporter Laura Castaneda to see about putting a 10-minute news brief online as a wrap-up of the days events. Something simple, a talking head in front of a logo reading the news of the days sitting on a stool.
The response was it took five people, a $100-per-hour camera and an editing booth worth for a few grand. I laughed and said the online industry was going to make that kind of newsmaking obsolete. Today, a person with simple videocam can break news faster and feed it to the world using a Web site or YouTube, and cheaper than it takes a news crew to get on the road.
So, here we are 12 years later and many news organizations have still not figured it out the Web is the future of getting news to people. In a 2008 Pew Reseach study shows more people are getting their news online — for free — than they are from newspapers.
Some are going back to charging for content, something that was being done as far back as 1994 when AOL charged by the minute for their content. If news organizations begin charging for content in whatever fashion they think will make a profit, then reporters will need to up the quality of the writing and be able to add still photos, audio and video images that will compel viewers to pay for it.
But it also is a great time for journalists to lead their editorial departments, or start their own companies delivering the news. And that’s really what journalism is about — delivering news, not necessarily delivering newspapers.
On this site I’m going to show you how to master the tools you’ll need for online journalism. You don’t need to fear the technology; it will only make you a better journalist. You just need some practical lessons that will make you an asset to your editors or to your own company.
I hope you subscribe and share your thoughts as well.
Member of:
Military Reporters and Editors Association (MRE)
Society of Professional Journalists
Investigative Reporters and Editors
Online News Association
Wire Journalists