News must be really hard to follow for an everyday consumer of a newspaper website. First tweets go out, sometimes with no links to additional coverage. Then a few grafs go up on a blog, followed by additional updates, either to the top of that post or as new posts. Eventually, a print story gets started, which is posted through an entirely different workflow onto a different-looking story page.

Continue reading on 10,000 Words

Helsingin Sanomat, the leading national daily in Finland, decided back in 2006 to offer a "Combo" subscription to print and all digital versions of the paper.

Five years later (with an iPad version now in play too) Helsingin Sanomat has 120,000 subscribers to the combo, a third of its subscription base. Now, 80 percent of new subscription sales are for that package.

Continue reading on Poynter

A really interesting discussion arose recently about a memo sent to journalists working on a group of newspapers just outside Detroit of what was expected of them in the age of digital journalism and social media. The memo details an extraordinary list of requirements that is well beyond being achievable or even desirable for most news stories or pieces of content.

However, it is what some are being asked to achieve as their editors and publishers ask for too much, without putting in place the resources needed to make it happen, to the detriment of the most of important thing which is the story.

Continue reading on the Wall Blog

by Steve Outing

I recently participated (well, sort of -- via a remote Skype presentation) in the University of South Carolina's "Journalism, Sustainability, and Media Regeneration Conference." Its organizer, Professor Augie Grant, sent a survey to everyone who attended that opened with a couple questions that I should not answer but cannot resist:

"Think about all of the possible forms of delivering news and information online. In general, what 'top of the mind' ideas do you think 'online news' will look like in 20 years?"

Continue reading on steveouting.com