Tech blog item #6: Smart stuff

The period of September through December was a dry one for Mark Potts.  There were no blog posts on his “Recovering Journalist” blog because he was just plain tired of “repeating himself over and over again.”  He must have a point because sometimes, you just run out of things to talk about.

However, his main reason was that he was more and more frustrated by the media industry’s inability to make the fundamental changes in product, technology and business model that are needed for survival.  He claims that the shift from traditional media to digital continues at a rather slow pace.

Mark Potts’ advice to the reader is to click these posts by a couple of the smarter people on the subject of the future of media:

• Judy Sims, continuing to fight the good fight against shortsighted newspaper executives and the lies they tell themselves (and employees and stockholders): Newspaper Execs: Still Denying, Still Crying and Still Lying to Themselves

• And John Paton, the smartest newspaper executive of all (mostly because he refuses to define himself as a newspaper exec), with a progress report on the massive changes he’s pushing through at once-moribund Journal Register. (If you want the summary version of John’s presentation, Matt Ingram has it here.)

My advice is to read these posts from these two journalists, and as Potts would say, “if you care about the future of journalism and the media business, you have to read and learn from them.  They’re telling the truth about what’s happening and what desperately, urgently needs to happen.”