Tag Results for Zachary Seward

As regular readers of this blog might surmise, I'm becoming quite a fan of Nieman Journalism Lab blogger Zachary Seward. He's an astute analyst of media trends who also knows how to sniff out interesting examples of the topics he's writing about.

Today Seward has a fascinating post about how New Zealand fishermen who specialize in catching the Hoki - "an unattractive sea creature best known as the primary ingredient in the (McDonalds) Filet-o-Fish" - used a Google Adwords campaign to draw attention to their rebuttal of a New York Times article suggesting the species was being overfished.

Seward notes that the strategy employed by New York-based PR man Jim McCarthy was fiendishly clever in several ways, not the least of which was that it took advantage of an existing Times link to send readers to a rebuttal page.

Our friends at Harvard's Nieman Journalism Lab have an interesting blog post about GlobalPost, the international news startup created by New England Cable News founder and former WCVB executive Phil Balboni and former Boston Globe foreign correspondent Charlie Sennott.

Speaking at a recent conference at Harvard University's Shorenstein Center, Balboni said the company should generate $1 million in revenue this year. That's the good news. The bad news: Nieman Lab blogger Zachary Seward estimates that GlobalPost's annual expenses are about $5 million.

But as with any startup, the question isn't so much whether you're profitable right now as whether you can get to profitability before you burn through your seed capital. Balboni said the goal is to achieve profitability by 2012, which would mean reducing the company's operating loss by 50 percent each of the next two years.