Results matching “editor discusses publication o”

Michael Kinsley has offered his insights into what type of ownership model is preferable for a newspaper. He discusses how US newspapers often used to be owned by "grandees: wealthy and civic-minded individuals or families," but many of these sold out to large chains. As newspapers make less money, these chains cannot afford to keep them, so Kinsley considers whether ownership by a 'grandee' or a nonprofit foundation is the solution.

"Which will be most likely to provide the combination of financial security and editorial freedom that newspapers need?" he asks. Having experience of both different arrangements, he believes that "being owned by or dependent on a nonprofit foundation is the worst possible solution." Kinsley was editor of Harper's Magazine when it was set up as a non-profit foundation with money from the MacArthur Foundation. He reported to the board of directors, and had to comply with their "ruthlessly conventional views" and the tendencies of their friends to "take offense at any attempt to be interesting." He mentions that he had to publish a board member's wife's poetry.

The New York Times is now discussing making readers pay for online content. Less than two years after abandoning fees to help boost revenues from advertising, editors are now considering making some of its online features paid-only.

Though Executive Editor Bill Keller gave no specific details or characteristics of this change, he mentioned that the internal discussions were general and ongoing, reports Editor & Publisher.

The Guardian recently spoke with John Wintherow. In his first interview in nine years, the Sunday Times editor discusses the "tactile" joy of the Sunday paper, reading every word of the paper (and other nostalgia) and impersonates the competition. Below follows an edited transcript of what appears on the Guardian's website:

Over the past year, speculation about the future of the longest-serving editor in Rupert Murdoch's UK newspaper empire has mounted as his paper's sales have declined... Highly successful and very low-profile, Witherow is in some ways like his newspaper - admired and respected, but without much fanfare.
 
Declining print sales and online competition have led several newspaper groups to merge the daily and Sunday staff with their online counterparts. News International has ruled out such integration. "We will remain separate entities with separate staff" says Witherow, adding that Sunday titles suffer from integration. There will be no editorial job cuts despite an efficiency drive conducted by the Murdoch-appointed Boston Consulting Group. He is talking to his daily counterpart, James Harding, about how the Sunday can be better "represented" online - the weekly drives a third of timesonline's traffic. Witherow is boyishly enthusiastic about the "tactile" joy of a Sunday read and wonders jokily whether the environmental damage of reading his newspaper online is greater than printing all that paper. "Newsprint still has the same elemental excitement about it - don't you think that?"

He still receives a weekly call from Rupert Murdoch, typically on Saturday evenings. "It's always been the same," he says. Unlike his counterpart at the Sun, Rebekah Wade, Witherow wasn't called to give evidence in the recent House of Lords inquiry about the influence of the media titan on his titles but he has always been "open" about it, he says. Does Murdoch suggest what the paper should be covering? "No ... he just likes to know what's going on. The conversation is invariably about world economics."

...One of the biggest criticisms of recent years is that the paper breaks fewer stories than it did. Even the first two issues of the relaunched paper failed to deliver a knockout scoop. "Ideally we would have liked something bigger but you can't always organise it that way," Witherow concedes. The conservative paper has instead landed big interviews with the former Colombian presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt and French first lady Carla Bruni.

A former foreign and home news reporter, Witherow sounds a little nostalgic for the fiercer competition of the 1980s and accepts that "generally Sundays on the news front are not as strong as they were" then. Staff and former colleagues suggest that he is far from complacent. One calls him "absolutely relentless", regularly berating editors if he felt their sections could improve. And Witherow does admit that there's something in a rival newspaper every Sunday that he wishes he'd had.

He denies that the Sunday Times is going downmarket in a bid to beat the Associated titles or the top-selling Saturday Telegraph and instead suggests there must be something for everyone in the paper. "He knows the Sunday Times reader better than anyone else and, annoyingly, he is always right," says Will Lewis, who spent three years as Witherow's business editor before going on to edit the Telegraph.

Despite a reputation as a tough perfectionist, Witherow is relaxed, thoughtful and funny during our interview - even doing impressions of rival newspaper executives. His public image seems largely derived from his failure to grant many interviews - "are they a useful thing to do with your time?" - and from the contrast with his predecessor Andrew Neil. "Both he and Dacre are in the same mould," says Hinton. "They're old school in that way and don't hang around on TV ... You can't get him to go out for lunch after Wednesday. He is a very, very involved editor."

Witherow used to read every word of the enormous newspaper before it went to print. "I tried to do it for a few years and went cross-eyed," he laughs. "It drove me bonkers, not because of the content but just demands of time." Now he signs off every front cover and reads three main news sections before publication.

Source: Journalism.co.uk

Our colleague Robb Montgomery from Visual Editors interviewed German-based KircherBurkhardt founder Lucas Kircher, who discusses change management for today’s publication companies.

- Kircher holds that publishing companies are traditionally unaccustomed to major change
- “Publishing companies never had to cope with general company change. They changed little bits and pieces of the culture, or the technical [aspects], but they never thought about the whole company."

- The future of the industry is uncertain so the modifications publication companies must make in order to weather the changes can’t be piece meal
- “Nobody knows what we have to do in this industry in the next 5 years. We need orgs…that can react with change much more quickly than publishing companies can now. That means you have to invent a new culture, which means you have to set up an industrial grade change process that’s being monitored and steered by professionals.”

- The change process must be a top-down, holistic one that avoids in-house conflicts between editors and management
- “We need to set it up as a strategic top level process, with the top being the management, not only the editor. Often, and especially in Germany, there is a divide between management and editors. Editors are responsible for content, management for numbers and circulation. In general we have to change the whole picture.”

- The change process requires recruiting the right types of people in order to achieve a desired company culture
-“I think we have to think about: what is the environment, what could be the product, how must the organization look, and what kind of people have to work there to accomplish that [goal]? That could lead to big changes in staffing and in education of staff.”

Listen to the interview by clicking below.

Source: Visual Editors

John Micklethwait, editor of The Economist discusses his online publication and highlights the content and audio features provided on the site.