WHAT'S NEXT: INNOVATIONS IN NEWSPAPERS

A new global danger: Weekenditis.

In the PPRuNE Forum, this comment:

European authorities suffer from weekenditis. If this had started being a problem on a Monday, it would be sorted by Friday with at least a clear indication of what it would take for airspace to reopen. As it is, two days of apparent inactivity mean an extended period of uncertainty.

And journaliss too.

It’s the weekend news blackout.

A well known trick played all the time by PR agencies.

And by companies in trouble that release all the bad news on Friday late evenings.

(In the picture, a BA Boeing 747 in a test fly yesterday taking off from London and going to Cardiff. No problems found.)

Editor&Publisher is alive again.

Good news.

Glad to know.

But I am getting tire of this kind ob obituaries.

The same with the UK Press Gazette.

But let’s be clear.

Editor&Publisher was for many years a boring, bland and PR outlet for the big newspapers companies.

Do you remember the covers?

Big ads each week from a big company.

It was a safe magazine.

Always ready to publish your press releases, and with the other hand get some ads.

Happy news for happy editors and publishers.

Then, one day, the magazine changed hands and they started to do, well, real Journalism.

Journalism 101.

Just covering the industry.

The good, the bad and the ugly.

And, of course, the industry didn’t like it.

I have old friends that were involved in this failed turn.

I respect them very much.

And they could explain better than me the real story.

Unfortunately, the newspaper industry said, OK, guys, you want to cover us in a real way, well then forget about our ads.

And they died.

Or, better, they were killed.

That’s the real story of the old Editor&Publisher and the UK Press Gazette print editions.

They are now trying to survive as online products.

Good luck, you deserve it, and we need you.

You don’t need to read too much abut the UN Conference in Copenhagen.

Just listen to Kumi Naidoo, Executive Director of Greenpeace:

“Not fair, not ambitious and not legally binding.

The job of world leaders is not done.

Today they failed to avert catastrophic climate change.

The city of Copenhagen is a climate crime scene tonight, with the guilty men and women fleeing to the airport in shame.

World leaders had a once in a generation chance to change the world for good, to avert catastrophic climate change.

In the end they produced a poor deal full of loopholes big enough to fly Air Force One through.

We have seen a year of crises, but today it is clear that the biggest one facing humanity is a leadership crisis.”

As The Guardian says today:

Low targets, goals dropped: Copenhagen ends in failure.

So don’t be fooled by the propaganda machine and PR spin of the big polluters.

Copenhagen was not “Hopenhagen” but, as Pedro Monteiro says in his great poster, “Nopenhagen.”