Author Archive
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The News Frontier
How Do You Define “Quality” Content?
March 4, 2011 04:00 PMPerhaps it was the early hour—maybe the panelists hadn’t had their morning coffee yet—but the mood seemed subdued at the “Quality, Quantity, and Mass Content” session at Thursday’s paidContent conference—and some of its participants seemed defensive. In... Continue reading
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The Kicker
N.C. Newspaper CEO Takes It Outside
March 4, 2011 03:00 PMFrom the Lake Norman Citizen out of Huntersville, North Carolina comes a gleeful item about the Citizen’s competition: “Herald Weekly owner banned from post office.” Apparently Alain Roger Lillie, CEO of The [Huntersville, N.C.] Herald Weekly... Continue reading
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The News Frontier
“Hyperlocal” is So 2010
March 4, 2011 01:20 PMWhen TBD announced massive layoffs last week, critics took the opportunity to declare that “hyperlocal” journalism would never pay. Meanwhile, TBD founder Jim Brady took pains to explain that they were never trying to “do hyperlocal” in the... Continue reading
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The News Frontier
Then Why Aren’t Rachel Maddow’s Guests Going On Strike?
March 4, 2011 08:40 AMArianna Huffington and Tim Armstrong are still celebrating the merger deal between HuffPo and AOL—a deal that they hinted will go through within days, rather than weeks. At Thursday’s paidContent conference at the Times Center, Huffington assured the... Continue reading
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The Kicker
The Rumor Mill: AOL’s Politics Daily
March 2, 2011 03:35 PMWhen the news of AOL’s impending acquisition of The Huffington Post first broke, many wondered what it might mean for news sites within AOL, such as Politics Daily and Daily Finance. Rumors that they might close down were fueled by... Continue reading
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Behind the News
Rocky Mountain News Staffers, Two Years Out
February 28, 2011 01:30 PMSunday marked the second anniversary of the final edition of Colorado’s Pulitzer Prize winning Rocky Mountain News, which closed its doors in 2009 after 150 years. On that sad day, Bob Burdick, who had served as managing editor, editor, and... Continue reading
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The News Frontier
Q & A: Jim Brady on the Death of TBD
February 25, 2011 01:50 PMThis week, the staff of TBD, Allbritton’s local website in Washington, D.C., learned that the site would undergo massive layoffs, and that the format would shift from local news to an arts and culture hub under the umbrella... Continue reading
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The News Frontier
“Find Me The Oldest Dog”
February 15, 2011 01:05 PMThe Daily’s editor in chief wants his newsroom to start producing some news, please. In a memo leaked to New York’s Daily Intel, Jesse Angelo implored his staff to go beyond “scraping the web and wires” and do... Continue reading
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The News Frontier
“Information Wars” on Al Jazeera English
February 14, 2011 11:40 AMOn Friday morning, the television in the CJR office was tuned to CNN—and our laptops were tuned to Al Jazeera English—and we watched the jubilant crowds in Cairo following President Mubarak’s announcement that he would step down. President Obama gave... Continue reading
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The News Frontier
AOL Settled with Unpaid “Volunteers” for $15 Million
February 10, 2011 06:00 PMWhen AOL acquired The Huffington Post for $315 million this week, we at CJR wondered, among other things, whether the thousands of bloggers who have contributed free writing to The Huffington Post would continue to do so after... Continue reading
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The News Frontier
Testing the Limits of Crowdsourcing
February 9, 2011 01:50 PMWhen ProPublica launched its Recovery Tracker project—a massive, searchable consolidation of government data on stimulus funding in the U.S.—it got some assistance from Mechanical Turk, an Amazon marketplace that matches workers up with easily completed online... Continue reading
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The News Frontier
Parsing the AOL/HuffPo Merger
February 7, 2011 02:55 PMAfter Sunday night’s announcement that AOL is buying The Huffington Post for $315 million and giving Arianna Huffington editorial control over all of the media group’s content, let’s take a look at what everyone involved is getting out... Continue reading
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The News Frontier
Salon and Slate in the Way-Back Machine
February 4, 2011 02:20 PMCJR has been accused of crankiness for our early critique of Rupert Murdoch’s new iPad newspaper, The Daily. The Poynter Institute’s Damon Kiesow characterized our commentary as a dismissal of the new medium, similar to early... Continue reading
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The News Frontier
The Daily Drops
February 2, 2011 05:05 PMWhen Rupert Murdoch first announced his plans to launch an iPad-only national daily news publication, we all wondered: Can it work? Who’s their audience? How many people actually have iPads, anyway? A few months later, as the launch... Continue reading
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The News Frontier
An Internet Censorship Workaround
January 31, 2011 03:50 PMLast week we learned that Egypt only has four major ISPs, making it relatively easy for the government to shut off the Internet with just a few phone calls. For those who are able... Continue reading
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Behind the News
Reporting a Revolution in Cairo
January 28, 2011 10:00 AMChris Stanton, a New Jersey native who has worked for several years for The National, an English-language newspaper in Abu Dhabi, has been reporting since November from Cairo. He had just returned from a vacation in the U.S. on Tuesday... Continue reading
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The News Frontier
Demand Media IPO Valued Higher Than The NYT
January 27, 2011 08:50 AMDemand Media’s stock made a grand entrance on Wall Street on Wednesday, jumping 37 percent on its first day of trading, paidContent reports. Within hours, a piece on CNN.com had noted that Demand’s valuation by investors—$1.5... Continue reading
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The News Frontier
The Most Tech-Enhanced SOTU Yet
January 25, 2011 04:05 PMDon’t have a TV to watch tonight's State of the Union address? Or do you just get bored with all the standing-applause breaks without constant visual and informational input? You are in luck. Nancy Scola at TechPresident reports... Continue reading
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The News Frontier
The Growing Problem of Search Engine Spam
January 25, 2011 12:00 PMLast week, Google News’s Krishna Bharat spoke at Columbia University about what makes his search engine so helpful and efficient for journalists. Reporters and editors don’t need to spend time thinking about marketing the news they produce to... Continue reading
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The Kicker
NYT On The LAT’s Community Relations Problem
January 24, 2011 01:42 PMThe front page of Monday’s New York Times business page pays a backhanded compliment to its West Coast rival with the story “Despite Distinctions, Los Angeles Times Loses Standing at Home.” Despite its award-winning writing, thirteen (!) foreign... Continue reading
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The Audit Business
- Audit Notes: pyramid people, Disney and ABC, no USA Today paywall Roddy Boyd digs into a diet-shake pyramid scheme
- Hot air Rises Above on CNBC An anchor pins a minor dip in stocks on the TV appearance of a minor politician
The Observatory Science
- Dull news from Doha UN climate summit a ho-hum affair for the press
- Highway to the danger zone Following Sandy, HuffPo and NYT dig into the folly of coastal development
Campaign Desk Politics & Policy
- NBC News sets good example for Medicare reporting People perspective leads to clear explanation of impact of proposed changes
- In Pennsylvania, a niche site with wide reach PoliticsPA drives political conversation in Keystone State
Behind the News The Media
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The Kicker last updated: Fri 3:00 PM
- Must-reads of the week
- The media news cycle is bananas
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- Must-reads of the week
- Tom Rosenstiel leaving Pew
The Future of Media
News Startups Guide last updated: Thu 10:24 AM
- TRVL A free iPad travel magazine
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