By TOM HONIG
Sentinel Editor Don Miller has posted a fascinating look into modern journalism on his blog. He describes the appointment of the new chief executive of MediaNews -- the company that owns 56 daily papers, including my alma mater, the Sentinel.
The CEO, John Paton, also runs another organization, the Journal Register Co. In a nutshell, these companies will be operated cooperatively under the umbrella of "Digital First" and will feature, yes, a "digital first" strategy. The Nieman Journalism Lab -- a think tank at Harvard -- calls it a "merger without merging."
What's interesting about all that is that newspaper executives have long known that the future of news is online. But it's still the physical paper product that brings in most of the revenue.
Miller links his blog to some fascinating articles, including this one on the website Gigaom: Is John Paton the Savior Newspapers Have Been Waiting For? And another, this coming from Paton's own blog.
By the way, three cheers for Miller, who puts all this maneuvering into context without sugar-coating any of it. I had complained here last week that other newspapers had reported on their own layoffs by burying that information inside some sort of corporate-speak.
Everyone knows that newspapers are going through massive change. Survival is uncertain. But the articles that Miller links to describe well the latest developments in the ongoing disruption of an entire industry.
