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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.
Howard on the Web
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Author Archives: Howard Owens
A Saturday road trip to Niagara and Orleans counties
Today a client sent me to a town in Niagara County near Lake Ontario. The irony was, the night before the assignment came in, Billie said to me, “I’ve been thinking, we haven’t been up to Lake Ontario in a … Continue reading
Tagged photography, travels
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Photos: San Francisco
I suspect I could spend a lifetime in San Francisco and never exhaust the photographic possibilities. A million photographers couldn’t. It’s no wonder it’s a city that inspires so much art. Here are a collection of photos from my two … Continue reading
Tagged photography, San Francisco, travels
1 Comment
A collection of YouTube sales training videos for aspiring local online news publishers
Some time ago I thought it would be interesting to see if I could put together a sales training course for beginners, thinking primarily of journalists, using just YouTube videos. I’m posting what I’ve come up with so far to … Continue reading
Tagged Business, sales
3 Comments
You’re not in the railroad business, you’re in the news business
Countless times in the past 15 years I’ve heard online news gurus exhort newspaper executives to “get” the digital media future with admonition: “Railroads thought they were in the railroad business. They didn’t realize they were in the transportation business.” … Continue reading
Tagged news business, newspapers
8 Comments
It’s time to move legal notices online
There are important reform bills in California and New York, and perhaps elsewhere, that would allow online-only publication of legal notices. Newspaper publishers are predictably fighting the bills, one of the last reliable revenue streams for print newspapers. But what … Continue reading
Tagged legal notices, newspapers
3 Comments
Why Patch will never be profitable
Patch faces to huge obstacles on its path to profitability: The first is expenses; the second is revenue. Expenses: Tim Armstrong is absolutely right that a great deal of the expense of a print publication can be wrung out of … Continue reading
Tagged Patch
4 Comments
Paywalls create opportunities for local news entrepreneurs
It seems like paywalls are popping up all over the place these days. In recent months Lee, GateHouse and Gannett, for example, have all announced or are implementing paid subscriptions for digital content. Nobody is rooting for these newspapers to … Continue reading
Tagged entrepreneurship, newspapers
14 Comments
Advocates of pay walls should consider the fate of the New York World
First, let me remind you of a post November, 2009, in which I quote Walter Lippmann: We expect the newspaper to serve us with truth however unprofitable the truth may be. For this difficult and often dangerous service, which we … Continue reading
Tagged Journalism, newspapers, Paid Content
2 Comments
Photo: A snowy night in my back yard
To me, a night like tonight is a perfect winter night. Such nights are rare enough in winters when much snow falls. They are rarer still on mild winters, such as the one we’ve had to endure so far in … Continue reading
Tagged photography, weather, winter
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Ten things journalists can do to reinvent journalism, the new list
For no particular reason, I found myself looking at Google Analytics and decided to open the calendar all the way back to 2007. I discovered that the most popular post I’ve written in that time (and probably since I started … Continue reading