journalism
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Radical Caring for Online News: A Call to Confront Two Disappointing Decades of Stagnation
I’ve worked in the web since the summer of 2000, when I was paid $400 to build a site for a local farm (RIP, Microsoft FrontPage). Fast forward two decades to 2020, and I’m still waiting for online news to break free of stagnation and innovate to improve its delivery and experience for the good…
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Newspaper ignores users, YouTube terms for ad revenue gains
Continuing its history of ethically-questionable advertising policies, my local paper, the Bangor Daily News, is now trying a new tactic: Taking videos from YouTube, embedding them on the News site, and then running their own full :30 second pre-roll ads in front of the videos. This grab for advertising revenue is not only an annoyance…
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Why the Bangor Daily News “ad frame” is bad for you, and what to do about it
Links should be free- and users are worth more than a few cents each. Why “ad frames” are bad business for news. My local newspaper, the Bangor Daily News, has made some admirable improvements to its otherwise lackluster website over the past few months. To their credit, they’ve slowly integrated topic and people-based cross-links throughout their…
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Welcome to The Maine Edge
Welcome to a new alternative weekly publication in my local area: it’s called The Maine Edge, and it covers arts, technology, sports and more in Bangor, surrounding communities, and nationwide. I like the upbeat, positive tone and the coverage seems to be pretty competitive in terms of not just trodding the same ground as our…
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Reading Bill Simmons
If you care even in the slightest for either sports and/or magazine writing, you should be reading ESPN’s Bill Simmons now more than ever. After a couple shaky months (a career so prolific, yet so organic, creates natural ups and downs), Simmons has been on fire lately, with two excellent mailbag columns and two other…