BlackCowPress
Editorial Content and Marketing Strategy for the Web and Print
Categories: Tourism | Add a Comment

Finally got a chance to read John Graham-Cumming’s Geek Atlas. Its subtitle is 128 Places Where Science and Technology Come Alive.  Published by O’Reilly, it is a tour book of the world’s most interesting science tourist sites.
The most compelling? The Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, Ukraine. There is actually a tour of it. It is proof that [...]

Categories: Newspaper, Radio, Social Media, Web | Add a Comment

It’s a joke inside the newspaper industry, but it’s true. The main reason many tired old people take tired old newspapers is the obituary page. They need to know if their friends are dead, and if they didn’t need to know that, they might not feel like they have to take the paper. It’s useful [...]

Categories: Economic Development, Tourism | Add a Comment

Is there anything more boring than a visitor center? This is especially pitiful as travel is one of the more exciting things that people do.
Pictured here is the Sitka Visitor Center, part of Sitka National Park. The photo is part of the American Memory Project of the Library of Congress, and the architecture embodies some [...]

Categories: Newspaper | Add a Comment

We are old school newspaper people. Before the 1970s, newspapers were packed with local information and long stories. We still think that’s the future of the newspaper; it has to be about giving people what is best about a newspaper.
If there are some who dare to actually see a future in newspapers, I suggest that [...]

Categories: Content Development, Social Media, Web | Add a Comment

Churches are taking advantage of all of the new media. The reality? If there were still religion writers at daily papers (which there are aren’t) you wouldn’t need them to tell your story as churches have all the tools they need to get the word out on the web.
Remember. Each time you post something on [...]

Categories: Content Development, Web | Add a Comment

Building your brand name used to be about running commercials. No longer.
Today, with new technology, you still need to run commercials and do in-store, and all those other things. But now, you need to do other things, including posting content about your company on the web.
One of the easiest ways to do it is through [...]

Categories: Newspaper, Web | Add a Comment

Imagine your city without a daily paper. Newspaper publishers, editors, managers and owners are worrying, not only about having to lay off staff, but who will cover the community in a meaningful way.
In Economics 101, it’s the classic “free rider” problem. Who will attend planning meetings and the statehouse? Who will investigate police and crime? [...]

Categories: House museums, Tourism, Web | Add a Comment

The house museum was once the center of pop culture history in the U.S. But today, once notable places like Colonial Williamsburg’s Carter’s Grove have been shut down and de-accessioned, and house museums across the U.S. and Britain are struggling or closing.
I do not share the doom. I see the damage as entirely self-inflicted. Overly [...]

Categories: Social Media | Add a Comment

So someone has suggested that your company needs a “social media” strategy. Whoa daddy. We’ve seen over and over that companies don’t understand it. They either over-estimate it and make it too complex or under estimate how difficult it is.
From working in social media for the last three years, we’ve gathered our Five Fallacies. Hope [...]

Categories: Content Development, Web projects | Add a Comment

It is surprising that it takes so long for people to learn that content helps build website readership.
To get traffic to a website,  you can only do three things. You can either run ads, create inbound links or build content. While there is nothing wrong with the first two, building content is the best long [...]