About
Howard Owens is a digital media pioneer. He started publishing local news online in 1995 when very few local news outlets had web sites. The header image on the site depicts the film camera he used early in his career and the press pass from his year on the staff of the Carlsbad Journal. For more on Howard's professional background, read his LinkedIn profile.
HowardOwens.com is the personal web site of Howard Owens and covers his range of interests -- political localism and libertarianism, music and personal interests, as well as his professional interests.
Howard is currently publisher of The Batavian and lives in Batavia, N.Y.
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Daily Archives: May 28, 2007
Danny Sanchez is now a journalism cartoonist

Danny explains the new feature here. Cool, uh? Continue reading
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Getting past free content and into services
Ryan Sholin introduces me to the word “freemium.”
It means, it seems, giving stuff away for free and then taking on up sells.
His example is his recent decision to upgrade his Flickr account.
Up sells are easy in classifieds, as Ryan notes, but not so easy in content.
But I’d take the lesson of Flickr and Feedburner and WordPress and apply them not to content, but to services. What services can newspaper companies create that have free uses but paid upgrades can be bolted on?
Or, how can the relationship a newspaper.com has with members of its community be leveraged to entice the most loyal users to buy services from the paper? What would those services be? What jobs-to-be-done can we help our readers solve?
Free content isn’t just about generating page views to boost advertising revenue. It’s also about building relationships with the people who are attracted to that content. Continue reading
