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About The Authors

Suw Charman-Anderson

Suw Charman-Anderson

Suw Charman-Anderson is a social software consultant and writer who specialises in the use of blogs and wikis behind the firewall. With a background in journalism, publishing and web design, Suw is now one of the UK’s best known bloggers, frequently speaking at conferences and seminars.

She recently launched Kits and Mortar, a blog about planning a green, cat-friendly self-built home. Her personal blog is Chocolate and Vodka, and yes, she’s married to Kevin.

Email Suw

Kevin Anderson

Kevin Anderson

Kevin Anderson is the blogs editor for Guardian.co.uk, where he focuses on journalism innovation. He uses blogs, social networks, Web 2.0 tools and mobile technology to break news, to engage with audiences and tell the story behind the headlines in multiple media and on multiple platforms.

Kevin has been a digital journalist since 1996, writing for both web and print, and broadcasing on the web, television and radio. Before joining the Guardian, he worked at the BBC for eight years. He joined the BBC in 1998, as their first online journalist based outside of the UK. From their flagship Washington bureau, he covered the US for the BBC’s award winning news website, while also providing politics and technology coverage for BBC radio and television.

Kevin came to the UK in 2005 to develop a blogging strategy for BBC news. He also worked on the launch of Pods and Blogs, a Radio 5Live programme covering weblogs and podcasts. He then moved to the BBC World Service and was a key member of the team that launched World Have Your Say, an interactive radio programme with a strong online participation component.

E-mail Kevin.

Member of the Media 2.0 Workgroup
Dark Blogs Case Study

Case Study 01 - A European Pharmaceutical Group

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Interview series:
at the FASTforward blog. Amongst them: John Hagel, David Weinberger, JP Rangaswami, Don Tapscott, and many more!

Corante Blog

Tuesday, June 12th, 2007

Did newspaper companies ever build printing presses?

Posted by Kevin Anderson

Today, I was sittting in the lobby of a posh hotel waiting to interview Jason Calacanis about Mahalo, the human-powered search site that he recently launched. His plane was delayed for five hours, but he was on his way. As we watched members of Motley Crue traipse through the lobby, I got to chat to Wil Harris, and we were talking about innovation and news organisations, or possibly the lack of innovation. I said it was not in the DNA of most news organisations to develop products or software. Wil put it a great way:

Newspapers never felt the need to build their own printing presses.

Why do they feel the need to re-invent the wheel? We both asked. There is Drupal, WordPress and any number of third-party software vendors.

Just look at Mahalo. It runs on MediaWiki, and Jason uses Google AdSense on a few entries already to earn some revenue. As Jason told John Battelle:

Google Adsense exists as a massive, scalable, and wildly efficient monitization engine. We’re not going to sell ads directly… we’re gonna leverage the services out there based on which ones perform best on a PER-SERP basis.

Especially for a lot of small news organisations without the development budget, there are a lot of great web services that can quickly be adapted to build sites and services and generate revenue. Why build it all over again?

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One Response to “Did newspaper companies ever build printing presses?”

  1. Craig McGinty Says:

    I’ve always wondered if any ad sales reps in newspapers know how to set up an Adwords campaign?

    Or even if any offer an online marketing service beyond sticking an image in the right column of the newspaper’s site.

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