Blogs

Techdirt applauds new efforts to repeal or rework Sarbanes-Oxley, the overwrought post-Enron accountability laws and the mass of new compliance rules and regulations that resulted from them.

As someone who lives with the overhead of these regulations every day, I agree, it's time to take another look.

Steve Outing cautions that style-over-substance print newspaper redesigns miss the best chance to retain loyal readers from older audiences:

"The key ... is to retain older readers by making the thinner print edition emphasize serious, quality journalism, retaining or expanding your paper's watchdog role in the community. Forget the stuff that's solely geared toward attracting young readers; they're for the most part gone from print.

"Then use the print edition to guide your paper readers to the extra stuff and the goodies that are on the digital side of the business."

Links all wishing I had gotten to them sooner:

• No news is no news: Jeff Jarvis' thoughts following a conference on new business models for news.
• Gannett pushes for more tech hires, data centers, niche sites: Mark Glaser interviews Jennifer Carroll, Gannett's vice president for digital content, about the company's Information Center strategy.

In 1984, I earned my bachelor's degree in journalism and political science. That second major instilled in me only two things: a deep-seated suspicion of all politicians, and an equally deep-seated desire to avoid friends-and-family conversations about politics in favor of doing my own homework and making up my own mind.

The Internet, circa 2008, makes that desire almost impossible to fulfill, worse even than four years ago, the last time I brought this up.

Two posts caught my eye for their discussions of print-online relationships:

Mark Van Patten of the Bowling Green (Ky.) Daily News, writing at MediaShift, describes "How the Focus on Print Hurts Our Newspaper Site":

Content site leaders pay more attention nowadays to measures of engagement beyond the venerable but flawed page view, per an overview from Jennifer Saba, writing for Editor & Publisher.

Be it time spent on site, page views per session, or frequency of visits per user, newspaper.com executives interviewed for the article want to grow 'em all.