1) CJR Daily just isn’t very good. Eight full-time salaries — and what do they come up with? Mostly snarky tidbits with a pronounced leftish tilt. The content is indistinguisable from stuff available elsewhere from unpaid volunteers. CJR daily gets the occasional link from Romonesko…but that’s about it. The site is just not part of the conversation.

2) I have read CJR for more than 30 years. I have also been a TV news director and helped run web operations for a large publisher. So you don’t have to sell me on the Web. I agree the print edition of CJR is fading. For one thing, six issues a year isn’t enough. (Reminds me of the old joke about the the Catskills resort: “The food here is terrible. And, besides, there’s not enough of it!”)

3) My plan? Expand the print edition to 8 issues a year. Re-allocate resources to create a website that has mostly “in between” articles of around 1,000 words: longer than bloggish blurbs, shorter than magazine pieces.

4) Hey, my plan sounds more or less like what Lemann is doing. In that context, spending money on a direct mail campaign is not ridiculous. Remember: he’s also merging the websites and setting a new direction.
Along the way, he lost a couple of staff members. Spinning the story as “clueless boss doesn’t get Web” is unfair.

CJR (the magazine) is a shadow of ghosts. Lehman never noticed that the conversation about journalism and news media moved from the shadows to the light of the web. So he spreads his cluelessness in The New Yorker then turns down the light at CJR’s website.

Not exactly an inspired vision for the dean of a prestigous journalism school.

Dale Peskin

By the way, speaking of self-promotion, you really ought to delete that auto insurance spam, Jeff.

I am not on the stand here. I did not take a stand against Lemann’s decision. As such my fun with my credentials are non sequitur.

The point you apparently miss is to compare apples to apples, business to business. The point you miss is Jeff is comparing vocation to avocation… for the purposes of promoting his own agenda I might add.

- Amanda

Bottom line professionally speaking, I am 5’ 4” tall, athletic, Pantene shoulder-length black hair, perfect perky boobs. I present well and am most accomodating. I’ve slept with clients. I sleep with my boss. I am the consummate PR strumpette. When I was 7 my mother told me I’d “never get anywhere with that mouth.” I’ve apparently dedicated my life in proving her wrong.

What’s Jeff’s income and employee number got to do with his critique of Nick Lemann’s decision?

It was a business decision. FYI: business doesn’t “roll the dice.”

Have you seen his balance sheet or financial projections? No. But that never stopped the demagogue from using a news items to further his agenda.

So what kind of money do you make here Jeff? If you’re going to hold yourself out as a standard, tell us. How many people do you have on staff there?

- Amanda

After I read about Lemann’s cuts I remembered a piece in Phil Meyer’s book The Vanishing Newspaper. He tells how smart the Poynter Institute was to pick up Romenesko online. He writes thanks to the audience built by Romenesko:

“By 2002, PoynterOnline was the trade publication most read by journalists, beating both the slick-paper publications, American Journalism Review and Columbia Journalism Review. ”

There’s more at the PJNet.org. But the thrust is: Nick Lemann get smart , double the online budget, and maybe catch up to the forward thinking folks at Poynter.