Gary Goldhammer –author and storyteller.
Content strategist, PR practitioner and marketer | digital and social media innovator | writer and author
Category: News Media
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"As a news organization, we are not Web-savvy. If anything, we are Web-stupid." – excerpt from L.A. Times internal committee report. DRIVING IN LOS ANGELES is as much an exercise in patience as it is a windshield-eye view on a Third World. Every turn brings a dichotomy of culture, every street a display of economic…
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Via Leonard Witt, read the following passage from an interview with Howard Owens, the Director of Digital Publishing at Gatehouse Media, owner of more than 400 community newspapers (empahsis added): Every student journalist should spend at least six months totally immersed in blogging. Start a blog and try to draw an audience. Do the things…
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Newspapers – online as well as in print – look too much toward television as their savior. Many papers today embrace technology instead of story, catering to the national short-attention pandemic through videos, flashy graphics and slide shows. Newspapers are in a sprint when they should be running a marathon, a race in which endurance…
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The Riverside Press-Enterprise in Riverside, Calif., requires its entry-level reporters to shoot video of their stories in addition to the written versions. The directive is optional for older or more established reporters, but the message is clear: Get with the future or get out. There is some truth and I’m sure even noble purpose to…
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Newspapers in Los Angeles, like newspapers in most other large U.S. cities, once measured themselves against their competition. Getting a “scoop” was the journalistic equivalent of a knockout in boxing. And news – at least within the newsroom – was sport as much as anything else. Being first mattered as much as being right, and…
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(Note: see update below about Fox’s decision to pull the O.J. program.) In 1994, I wrote an op-ed for the Los Angeles Times in which I said O.J. Simpson would not get the death penalty because he was rich – and rich people, especially rich celebrities, don’t get executed. Turns out I was right. Nevertheless,…
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Time is amnesic. We know there was a time without an Internet, but few can remember what that was like. There was a time when bank tellers weren’t automated and using a phone while driving required a really, really long extension cord. And of course, there was a time when most people got their news…
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When I went outside this morning I saw something I thought I would never see in my life – an empty driveway. No newspaper. I checked the bushes, nothing. I asked if someone had brought it in already, but no. I wondered if the delivery person forgot or was sick, but then I remembered. It…