Warren Buffett has pledged a “hands-off” policy at Berkshire Hathaway Inc. newspapers and called for their editors and publishers to make their papers indispensable to anyone who cares about their city or town.“You should treat public policy issues just as you have in the past,” he wrote in a letter e-mailed Wednesday to publishers and editors of the daily newspapers that Berkshire owns and those it plans to buy from Media General Inc.“I have some strong political views, but Berkshire owns the paper I don’t. And Berkshire will always be non-political,” he wrote.Buffett said he does not use Berkshire’s resources to speak on behalf of the company’s 600,000-plus shareholders.“I am 81, and many of you will outlive me as an employee of Berkshire,” he wrote. ... Continue reading →

We're about to close the book on the Oregon Daily Emerald. After 92 years, the University of Oregon's newspaper will end its run as a Monday-to-Friday operation in June. Yes, it's the end of an era, and we're sad about that. But it's also the start of a new era, the digital one. Next fall, we will replace our traditional newspaper with a modern college media organization, Emerald Media Group. This isn't about rebranding. This isn't about ramping up revenue for our non-profit company. Sure, we face the same economic pressures as every legacy media company. But this is our best financial year since 2000, and we have no debt and a reasonable reserve fund. This is about delivering on our mission to serve our ... Continue reading →

(Updated 5/17 to add link to Reese article) Eric Newton, senior adviser to the president of the Knight Foundation, really laid into journalism educators last week. J-schools are too slow in change, he said. They risk losing private sector funding. They are too academic, too siloed. In many ways, I very much agree that there needs to be more collaboration, that top professionals need to be given the same respect for their talents, that there probably need to be some new professional-level master's and PhD degrees that recognize the changing culture and digital reality. I agree that accreditation needs to change so that journalism students take more hours in their major - but no more than half so we preserve the important liberal arts component ... Continue reading →

You, if you didn't know that the Facebook estimates were cut. A lot of people still don't understand why the Facebook bombshell that broke yesterday--that analysts had cut estimates during the roadshow--is such a big deal. Analysts change estimates all the time, they point out. And they're just estimates. So who cares? The reason it's a big deal is that these particular estimates aren't really estimates, at least not in the true sense of the word. Rather, they are "estimates" that are developed through close collaboration of the analysts at the IPO underwriters and the management of the company that is going public. In other words, they are really a form of guidance--the company's outlook about how its business is expected to perform. The analysts ... Continue reading →

Matt Mullenweg, the founder of WordPress and Automattic (see disclosure) says that the service is preparing for a significant change of direction — by releasing a much simpler version designed to work on mobile. Speaking at the paidContent 2012 event on Wednesday, Mullenweg said that he had been hard at work coming up with a new interface that will eradicate some of the complexity that WordPress is usually associated with. “One of the things I’ve been working on for the past few months is a radical simplification of the interface,” he told interviewer Anil Dash. “WordPress it’s a complex tool, it’s like the back of a digital SLR… but that doesn’t work on a phone.” That complexity has become one of the reasons it is ... Continue reading →

Back in November, I grappled with the fact that online display ads in general, and banner ads in particular, are clearly not working very well; my suggested alternative was for brand advertisers to embrace the power of the external link. That was one suggestion; there are many, many more. But what they all have in common is that they’re attempts to go beyond the ad, and to leverage the interactive power of the internet. Over at Tumblr, David Karp is being characteristically vague about what he’s offering to potential advertisers: all we know for the time being is that he “wants brands and marketers to use Tumblr as a way to tell stories that they can’t otherwise tell on other social networks”. Which sounds great, ... Continue reading →

Facebook has reminded investors of a simple lesson: Avoid companies whose bosses don’t care about you. From the get-go, Mark Zuckerberg, the social network’s not very sociable founder, made clear he had little interest in welcoming public shareholders. That indifference set a tone for his executives, venture capitalists and bankers that arguably contributed to the glaring flaws in Facebook’s initial public offering last week. True, the company’s earlier backers, who were able to unload more than $10 billion of stock at the highest possible price, may consider the deal worthy of high-fives and Cristal. But the combination of a stock already trading well below its offer price, annoyed retail investors - many of them Facebook users - and regulatory probes constitutes a botched deal. And ... Continue reading →

All the President's Men: A great scene that's representative of the newsroom power structure. If you watch the movie, there's a newsroom meeting that says it all. Trust me, you'll recognize it. Journalists are a protective bunch, especially when it comes to their newsroom meetings. The invite lists typically enforce the professional hierarchy they not-so-secretly crave. My favorite morning news meeting remains the one I attended in the early 80s at Newsweek. At 10 am (news was a civilized profession back then), talented editors who had risen to proud gatekeepers reveled in debating and deciding what the magazine’s then three million subscribers should know every week. The best afternoon show was lorded over by Abe Rosenthal, the legendary New York Times editor. Thirty years later, ... Continue reading →