This is John Reinan’s weekly marketing column for MinnPost. To view the original, go to http://bit.ly/9pXvUv. The future of journalism has arrived, and I’m excited to be part of it. No, not this MinnPost thing — that’s so 2009. I’m talking Associated Content, baby! I recently became a contributor to Associated Content, which bills itself [...]

Editor’s note: This is John Reinan’s weekly marketing column for MinnPost.com. To view the original, go to http://bit.ly/azMH7e. Newsmakers have always tried to manipulate the media for the best possible coverage. But today, the game is more than ever stacked against the news outlets – and against news consumers hoping for more than self-serving sound [...]

  The Internet is now eating its own. News portals like AOL, Yahoo! and MSN, which helped devastate newspapers, magazines and local TV over the past decade, are themselves being damaged by social networks, notably Facebook. Facebook, the latest Web sensation, is becoming the preferred news source of tens of millions of Internet users. Facebookers [...]

This is John Reinan’s weekly marketing column for MinnPost.com. To see the original, go to http://bit.ly/9Di7sa. The free ride on the Internet isn’t over yet, but there are a lot of people looking for ways to bump up the fare. Last week, AT&T announced the end of its unlimited data plan for smartphones. The problem: [...]

Editor’s note: This is John Reinan’s weekly marketing column for MinnPost.com. To view the original, go to http://bit.ly/bxyQZJ. The financial meltdown of the newspaper business has been astonishing. From an all-time high of $49 billion in 2005, U.S. newspapers lost nearly half their revenue in just four years — to $28 billion in 2009, a [...]

Mainstream journalism has been in a freefall for the last few years, with newsroom staff cuts of 40 percent or more at many newspapers, magazines, TV and radio stations. Now comes another threat to journalism jobs. Just read the following news item from the Big Ten Network’s website: BLOOMINGTON, Ind. – Indiana cross country and [...]

By now it’s semi-common knowledge that soap operas got their name from the soap manufacturers that exploited them to advertise to bored housewives during the daytime hours every Monday through Friday. They brought a sense of drama and excitement to the lives of women whose home lives seemed uneventful by comparison. One of those manufacturers, Procter [...]

Editor’s note: This is John Reinan’s weekly column for MinnPost.com. To see the original, go to http://bit.ly/b8tI1C. If you’re not acquainted with the work of the Pew Charitable Trusts on the media, you’re missing some of the most useful and thought-provoking research on the subject. Anyone interested in the state of the media would find fascinating material [...]

There’s a really interesting story in Ad Age this week about the sales side of the communications business. Basically, it says that publishers and top salespeople in the print media who haven’t already made the move to digital are going to have trouble making it in the future. A couple of the key points: There’s enough [...]

I was thinking about the changes in the advertising business and I decided to look back on the top 100 ad campaigns of the 20th Century as chosen by Ad Age magazine. Their top choice: “Think Small,” Doyle Dane Bernbach’s Volkswagen campaign that began in 1959. A striking thing about the list is that only one [...]