Yesterday’s Wall Street Journal included an article that caught my attention. Titled “New Google Hire Takes Aim at Apple,” the piece – can’t bring myself to call it a story – recounts how a Google employee ( Tim Bray) recently poached from Sun used his personal blog to say nasty things about Apple’s mobile phone …more
I’m tired of reading how American students lag behind their international counterparts on the academic front. Johnny can’t write. Johnny can’t add. Johnny can’t spell. Even The Wall Street Journal has piled on with an article which highlights that only 23 percent of the 2009 high school graduates taking the ACT admissions test have the skills to succeed …more
I have to give credit to BusinessWeek’s Executive Editor John Byrne. He got the engagement religion and has never wavered in prostelyzing the message. While the BusinessWeek pages — both print and the digital variety — serve as the pulpit for most of Byrne’s communications beyond the BW corridors, he penned a op-ed for The Christian Science …more
One of the last places you’d expect to see the art of storytelling is where a publication sells its advertising. Even one of the bastions of high-brow reading, The Atlantic, – home to Malcolm Gladwell and other marquee-name storytellers – offers a fairly mundane sales pitch: The Atlantic is America’s leading destination for brave thinking and bold ideas …more
I came across an enlightening piece called “Becoming a Storyteller, Not Just a Reporter” (you might need to scroll down to reach the article). While the entire piece is worth a read, the following advice caught my attention: Don’t limit your inquiry, or your thinking, to the basics of journalism: Who, what, when, where, why, how. Think …more
Cloaked with a veneer of secrecy that leaves readers to wonder “Who the hell wrote that article?” The Economist takes pride in baffling the garden-variety PR person. Its editorial decisions can at times seem quirky for the sake of being quirky. I mean, do we really need 499 words devoted to ornithology and a bio-acoustic monitor that can distinguish …more
The concept of reader engagement championed in the blogosphere is now making the rounds in the traditional publishing world. BusinessWeek serves as a good exhibit A. MediaShift captured changes afoot at BW in a far-reaching post that included an interview with the big cheese himself, EIC John Byrne. On the topic of reader engagement Byrne shared: …more
