Wallflowers at the New Media Dance: Newspapers Can’t Decide On Paid Content
Due to some intense consulting projects, multimedia presentations at national conferences, and BizDev meetings with like-minded New Media entrepreneurs, there has been quite a gap in my updates on the whole “Will they or won’t they” kerfuffle over paid content. This should get us up to about last Friday; tomorrow, I will post this week’s follies – and there have been a lot of them. The overriding theme these days seems to be borrowed from the debate over the war in Afghanistan: dithering. Waffling. Hemming and hawing. The newspaper industry is shifting from foot to foot, licking its lips, and generally acting like a 14-year-old boy at his first

Newspapers’ Dying Swan Song: SF Chronicle Tries Glossy Paper, Splashy Color
Print die-hards claimed that all that was needed to reverse the audience migration to the internet was to make newspapers more “lively” in appearance. Early verdict: looks pretty, but the advertising still isn’t there, and that sound you heard was Mort Zuckerman puking and weeping over in the corner. I’ve been in the Bay Area for a convention of “[fill in blank] for Dummies” authors and various business meetings, and I’ve taken the opportunity to scope out what the San Francisco Chronicle has been doing with its much-ballyhooed investment in glossy magazine-style paper for the front pages of its sections, and the use of high-quality colo

Transcript of Kazakh Journalist Interview
Beatings, midnight phone calls and a culture of fear This is the transcript of my interview with an independent journalist in Kazakhstan.  He was commiserating with me about my hospital stay, and mentioned that he too, had suffered because of his political beliefs.  I grabbed my little camera, and asked him to describe what happened to him. You want to know about hospital. What happened. For me it happened because we have this public association here of professionals. And our organization, they try to take away from us. Apparently, it was authorities and in that particular case, you know, there, some guys show up and they just start beating.

Kazakhstan: Old Stalinist Repression in a New CyberWar Wrapper
Under the guise of “protecting citizens from terrorists and porn,” the government in Kazakhstan is eliminating freedom of speech and of the press via a particularly toxic cocktail of Old Stalinist School beatings, jailings and intimidation – and cutting-edge CyberWar attacks. I conducted a series of interviews with journalists, bloggers, opposition political leaders and human rights workers in the cities of Astana and Almaty, Kazakhstan. I was there because in mid-October of 2009, the US State Department invited me to travel to Kazakhstan to do a series of traini

On the Way Home from Kazakhstan – Eagles and the Gobi Desert
I’m done with my training sessions for journalists in Kazakhstan, and this trip really stretched the boundaries of my knowledge. These are the issues that I was asked to address: 1. DDoS attacks that rival anything else in the world, taking down any journalist who dares to challenge the government 2. How to use the web to help in investigative reporting 3. How to monetize web content 4. How to grow web audiences in a country where the internet penetration rate is below 20%, and the ad marketing is in its infancy 5. How to use social media to help publicize your web page – or to get the news out when your page is taken down (see #1 above)