Paton Adds Web Thinkers to Newspapers Board
Everyone… please give a round of applause to CEO John Paton, of the Journal Register Co. for his move to add social media and online innovators Jeff Jarvis, Jay Rosen and Betsy Morgan to the publishing group’s board.
For years, the newspaper industry has talked about getting digital and for the most part, they’ve been making valiant efforts at digitizing offline products. However, as we’ve said in the past, digitizing products is only half the battle, the rest comes in how you syndicate, drive traffic to and appropriately monetize these products, along with intuitive user interface and functionality that breed social ambassadors. This list sounds daunting, I know, but they represent the necessities for staying alive in this digital age. Moreover, attempting to do the items we’ve listed as the ‘necessities’, requires that a publishing organization recognize that their business models will have to change, and that reality is not an easy one at the start.
Paton’s move to include Web visionary thinkers to his newspapers board means that they will have a collective of board members continuously challenging them to do more and experiment with new models. All in all, we chalk this up as a brilliant move by John Paton!
New additions to the Journal Register Co board are:
Jeff Jarvis
Jeff Jarvis, author of What Would Google Do? (HarperCollins 2009), blogs about media and news at Buzzmachine.com. He is associate professor and director of the interactive journalism program and the new business models for news project at the City University of New York’s Graduate School of Journalism.
Jay Rosen
Jay Rosen is a press critic, a writer, and a professor of journalism at New York University. He is a strong supporter of citizen journalism, encouraging the press to take a more active interest in citizenship, improving public debate, and enhancing life. Rosen’s blog is entitled PressThink, and it focuses on journalism in the age of the Web.
Betsy Morgan
Betsy Morgan is the former CEO of Huffington Post, an aggregated news and blog site that started with its content being provided by the users – true citizen journalism.
