Joe Murphy » Business

Saving money, newspaper style

Joe — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 01:20:41 +0000

Here’s a list of handy ideas newspapers are using or could use to save that all-important dough. I pulled these from personal experience and observation.

Got elevators? If your newsroom isn’t on the first floor, odds are you’re taking an elevator to get to it. Every second spent in the elevator is a second not spent working. Can that elevator move faster? What about the elevator doors — think of all the time wasted while those doors close. If you could just shave a half-second off the speed of the doors closing and opening, man, those seconds are going to add up.
Give tours? I bet you do, and I bet you’re giving them away for free now. For shame. How about some “value-added” on top of that tour? The tour of the newsroom is free, but sitting in on that morning budget meeting’s an extra $10 a head ($5 for children and seniors). Afternoon budget: $15 / $10. Of course some adjustments for market size ought to be made…
Give your loyal print readers computers. An internet-ready computer can be had for $300. A year’s subscription to the newspaper costs about $100. Hook your loyal readers up with a computer (sure, they have to shell out for the internet), and you’ve got a reader for life (whatever’s left of it).
Go black-and-white. Do you really need color on *all* your section fronts? Really? The Philadelphia Inquirer doesn’t: I caught the Monday Inquirer last month, and its business section was all black and white.
What about the snack-room vending machines? Those are profit centers waiting to happen. If you’re not charging a buck for a can of coke, it’s nobody’s fault but your own when your newspaper goes under.

Maybe nobody in the newsroom wanted the job…

Joe — Sun, 15 Apr 2007 20:09:29 +0000

Update: TBO.com’s Rusty Coats explains what happened: “the timing of this job appearing alongside layoff news is coincidental.” That information makes the meat of this post irrelevant. Which is too bad, because I already posted it. This is my first experience with the “shoot-first” blog practice, and if I keep on top of my stuff, it will be my last.

In the same week that the Tampa Tribune announced 70 job cuts, they post an ad seeking a breaking news producer for their online news team:

Are you an aggressive, competitive news animal? Do you hunger to break news first? As Breaking News Producer, you’ll be a key player on the TBO.com team, bringing users up-to-the-minute information from one of America’s liveliest major metropolitan areas.

I’m not saying that’s wrong, I’m just sayin’ that’s weird. Do they think none of those newsroom folk about to be laid off would want, or be good at, that job?

“Newsroom ISO programmers” gaining online buzz

Joe — Sat, 10 Mar 2007 01:44:28 +0000

There’s been a stream of posts this week about the “newsroom-programmer” connection. You could say it culminated today with Holovaty’s “work with me at the Washington Post” post. Then there’s Mark Glaser’s state-of-the-geek-in-the-newsroom post. Then there’s all the discussion around those posts.

In the spirit of inclusion, I’d like to invite folk in the Denver / Boulder / Colorado area who are interested in building web apps with newspaper data and with public data to work with me.

Here’s what you would be doing:

Building new ways to handle newspaper content online.
Finding and harnessing public data, giving it context, making it interesting. (Some public data will be provided from the newsroom as well)
Building tools to involve the community in, well, the community in interesting, meaningful and meaningless ways.
Building tools to help the newsroom use and publish information more effectively.

Here’s what I’m looking for:

Experience programming with Python (know Django? that’s a plus).
Interest in doing cool stuff.
Database design understanding / experience.
Knowing why semantic HTML matters is a plus.
Knowing how CSS fits into the picture is another plus.

Is this position paid? If you consider gratitude and interesting stories payment, then yes it is paid. I’m sorry, this is the attitude that most news execs have toward their online newsrooms, I’m just passing it along… seriously, the tongue is 20% of the way in the cheek. If you freelance, drop me a line.