Jason

Vintage Thanksgiving Day Postcard from riptheskull on FlickR

Thanksgiving is one of my favorite holidays, mostly because I love food, and there is no better holiday for someone who enjoys cooking and stuffing their face as much as I do.

Just for fun, I cruised through the Thanksgiving entry on Wikipedia to see if there was any tangential relationship I could draw between the holiday and the publishing world. As far as I can tell, I’m on my own.

But today, like on all thanksgivings, I plan to:

• Eat, and then
• Sleep

So I figured I might as well log in and hit

• Publish

As well. I hope you all have a wonderful Thanksgiving. What are you doing reading a blog today anyway?

Last week I wrote a guest post for TwiTip, the new Twitter blog run by Darren Rowse, of ProBlogger and Digital Photography School. If you don’t already know who he is, you should really look him up.

TwiTip already has a large and active readership after one month (this should tell you how important Darren is), and I thought it would be a great opportunity to ask people about what place Twitter has in journalism, especially in light of how well Mónica’s earlier post on Twitter was received.

I was expecting a lot of really cool conversation in the comments, and that’s exactly what I got.

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You’ll remember that in late October I invited readers of this blog to participate in Microsoft’s new “TV on Your PC” beta program. I’m now happy to announce that the Windows Media Center group at Microsoft will be sponsoring The Pitch on December 10th.

If you haven’t already, be sure to put your name on the guest list.

This chart comes from Edward Roussel at the New Model for News conference (incidentally, Edward once answered questions on changes in the newsrooms for Eat Sleep Publish).

Looks like a big drop, doesn’t it? That’s because it it.

There are a lot of legacy costs involved with a print product that will not plague online-only publishers, and on-balance, if a company is smart about it, “dramatically lower costs” can quickly become “profits.”

All the statistics I’ve seen indicate that companies expect to continue spending more in online advertising, despite the economic climate.

Seth Godin wrote a good post last week on the New York Times, and six things they aren’t doing (or didn’t do), but should.

I particularly like this idea:

5. Stringers:

The Times has always used freelancers and stringers to report and contribute to the paper. But how many? Why doesn’t the paper have 10,000 stringers, each with a blog, each angling to be picked up by the central site? You wouldn’t have to pay much per story to build a semi-pro cadre of writers and reporters. When you organize the news (delivering unique perspectives to people who want to hear them) you influence the conversation.

Because it sounds a lot like my own

Markets change. Innovate or die.

Most of the time I hate highlighting generational differences because I think that the differences are often both exaggerated and not really based on your physical age, but this research brief from MediaPost highlights an interesting statistic:

Preliminary findings about these Millenial Generation journalists, shared by the Society for New Communications Research Symposium, showed that 100% of Millennial respondents (i.e., 18-29 year-olds) believe new media and communications tools are enhancing journalism, versus 40% in the 50-64 demographic.

That’s a startlingly huge gap, and I think that unfortunately, your mental attitude towards new media technology as a journalist is going to make a difference in whether or not you can innovate successfully.

I am a big believer in the idea that your attitude affects your outcome. I guess I read The Little Engine That Could too much when I was a kid.

Ryan Sholin from IdeaLab interviewed me last night via Instant Messenger about The Pitch. It was a pretty interesting conversation, and I’d recommend you check it out:

Ryan Sholin: How long has The Pitch been going on, and who is involved with it now?

Jason Preston: The Pitch is actually fairly new, as is my blog Eat Sleep Publish — and they are very much connected. I booted up the blog in May 2008, so, about 7 months ago, and the first Pitch happened on September 18th.

From the very beginning, I’ve wanted to make ESP a hub for opinion as much as a broadcast platform for my own ideas, and given that Seattle has such a vibrant tech community and there are inherent limitations to just how social a WordPress installation can be, I thought doing a real life event would be a natural fit.

Also, I’ll be at MindCamp this weekend, see you there?

According to both PaidContent and PC Magazine itself, Ziff-Davis has decided that starting early next year, PC Magazine will kill its print edition and live completely online. The print magazine has been around since 1982, and the parent publishing company only recently left bankruptcy.

How in the world did a publishing company climb out of bankruptcy?

According to CEO Jason Young, who spoke to Paid Content:

On the online side, he wouldn’t disclose the revenues for the PCMag brand, but said it was in “tens and tens of millions” of dollars. He said the revenues on the online side have grown an average of 42 percent yearly since 2001; digital is about 70 percent of the revenues for the PCMag brand, and overall is profitable. He said that despite the economic situation, the PCMag brand revenues grew about 18 percent in Q308, and thinks that it will hold up despite advertising downturn due to the power of the brand.

The truth is that the cost of publishing online is so much lower than the cost of print publishing, especially for properties that focus on computers and technology, that carrying a legacy print product just doesn’t make sense.

Talk has been thrown back and forth in the comments on this blog (but I’m too lazy to go find them) about the value of the research behind what a journalist produces, especially now that the internet makes it easy and cheap to share.

It turns out that Ian Lamont at The Industry Standard has been doing just that for the past several weeks by providing what he calls source blocks at the end of every post.

A source block is basically an extra paragraph, like academic end notes, that list out the sources a writer referred to when putting together their article. It’s an easy way to show that some research went in to the article, and to give credit to resources that might not earn a direct link (in his case, the American Journalism Review fits the bill).

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