The media landscape is evolving. Nothing new here. The web and the recession brought traditional media to their knees, in a dramatic change of the economic environment.
People are usually quick to point out that old-fashioned curmudgeons will go bankrupt or that ordinary people are now able to produce their own news.
Cheaper newsgathering combined to depressed [...]

Dear employer,
Last winter, I decided to drive across the Caucasus passes at the worst possible time – during a snow storm – so I could be in Yerevan on time to make a few interviews.
It’s only normal that I now enter the job market during a recession. I like challenges.
Why should you make new hires [...]

You don’t need to be a genius to understand that advertising will not pay for online journalism:

Display isn’t adequate online, since it requires a scarcity of publishers to function. We all know that the unlimited inventory of the web pushes prices towards 0.
Contextual ads don’t work for news. It’s been 10 years since [...]

6 months ago, I left the sinking newspapers of Western Europe to study online media in the vibrant post-socialist Europe.
17,000 miles, 19 countries and 75 interviews later, I produced this report entitled ‘Online news in post-socialist Europe‘ that provides an overview of the current developments happening on the Eastern front.
Online news in post-socialist Europe
If you’re [...]

Twitter-bashing has been running high ever since mainstream media started running stories on the micro-blogging service.
Everyone, it seems, compares Twitter with Second Life, the next-big-thing that failed to gain traction in 2007, predicting doom and gloom for the current media darling. Look at PaidContent, Clickz and Greg Verdino for the stories.
Although it’s true that journalists [...]

A discussion with a commenter here on Window on the Media pushed me to write the database journalism article on Wikipedia.
Database journalism was born in the 1950’s as a synonym for computer-assisted reporting. Since then, computers have become ubiquitous, to the point that database journalism in its original meaning has come to merge with the [...]

In 2003, Austrian publisher Styria came into Slovenia with a weekly, Zurnal. Its 12 journalists produced mediocre content and its management’s lack of strategy didn’t allow for Zurnal to tap into Slovenia’s advertising tolars.
4 years later, in 2007, Styria decided to shake things up. It launched a free daily, Zurnal24, combined with a real website, [...]

My favorite news website, Wikipedia, is funded exclusively with its readers’ money (except in Germany). And I don’t need to tell you it’s not subscriptions.
Is the Wikipedia model replicable for news websites? I know of a few experiments that I’m sharing below:
1. Hetq.am This independent Armenian site made a call to its readers, begging them [...]

It’s common wisdom in the online world to say that the 1st mover has a definitive advantage, all the more if it’s competing against a foreign player.
That’s what anyone close to Seznam (Czech #1 search engine), Yandex (Russia) or Baidu (China) will tell you. Social networks also have their regional champions, such as Vkontakte in [...]

In the Southern Balkans, there’s a country as small as Vermont that hopes to become the new IT hotspot in Europe. Macedonia’s government is following Estonia in trying to develop a wired society; but so far, there’s little sign of a Silicon Vardar (Macedonia’s valley) in the making.
(Really) pushing for online
In 2005, the Macedonian government, [...]