Is it ever too late to reinvent a career?

A late 50-something executive with an MBA, regarded as a leading figure in his field, gets laid off with a nice (nearly $200k) severance payment and is having extreme difficulty getting a job. Michael Blattman, with a long career in the student loan business, has sent out 600 job applications in the last 18 months, [...]

Readings: Newspapers and democracy, the freelancing life, Craigslist and slow media

Some good long-form pieces on journalism, the media and related topics for some weekend reading. I’ve been thinking a lot this week about the fate of newspapers, but soon I’ll be unveiling a revamped blog concept designed to move far beyond those boundaries. As usual, I seem to conclude this roundup with an admonition to [...]

Basking in the decadent glory of print’s decline

I don’t want newspapers to go away because I will always love them. But how much more watered down and hollowed out do they have to become before the hardiest print defenders stop deluding themselves about the real reasons for their demise? How much longer will they blame the Internet, mock the efforts of those [...]

Stepping outside a niche, or creating a new one?

Below are a few items from my heaping Delicious collection of bookmarks on topics that range beyond journalism to take in career and technological change, entrepreneurship and creativity. This is how this modest blog seems to be evolving as it approaches its first year. I’ve learned from forward-thinking former colleagues and other journalists eager to [...]

Lost amid the clamor over health care reform

I had just posted here yesterday about the subject of entrepreneurship and media when I came across this piece from the Talent Zoo career site urging media professionals to rethink the future of their work in a radically different way: “Do I think that jobs are obsolete? Hardly. There’ll always be a need for steady, [...]

Flashback to a journalistic future

As I was throwing out some old magazines recently, I came across a few copies of Entrepreneur dating back to the early 1990s (yes, I’m a bit of a pack rat). These were the days before the Web, when I was a part-timer at my former newspaper and was coming up with a Plan B [...]

Before taking a little time off the grid . . .

I just got a bit too busy — at least to write here in any meaningful way — during what’s been a very productive week. What I need more than anything is a bit of a break from the Web and will be posting lightly here over the next week. A number of freelance writing [...]

Is the potential of hyperlocal news overhyped?

This is a question that constantly races through my mind as I build up content on my own local sports news site and ponder the possibilities not just for monetizing it, but also for engaging a vibrant community around it: Is the hyperlocal news model, as envisioned and explained by some of the leading lights [...]

The long, slow grind of solo journalism

Former Cleveland Plain Dealer travel editor David Molyneaux is continuing his passion for writing about faraway places as a freelancer. With two failed Web ventures and other hit-or-miss experiences behind him in the last year, he remains generally optimistic that he’s on the right track to establishing a viable niche: “It’s still not there. I’m [...]

Readings: Garrulous Luddites, hyperlocal hyperventilating, going viral and the joys of vinyl

Arts journalist Bill Wyman’s tough-minded series on Splice Today this week about “Why Newspapers Are Failing” leads off a weekend long-form reading list on topics related to journalism, the media and the Web. In his first installment, Wyman takes his own profession to task for being too sentimental and naïve about the newspaper industry while [...]