Author Archive
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The News Frontier
Tweeting a Wildfire
September 30, 2010 06:00 AMAround ten in the morning this past Labor Day, the sky above Boulder, Colorado turned a dusty orange. A fire had sprung up in nearby Fourmile Canyon, and was spreading. Fast. Black smoke billowed up, visible for miles. Since it... Continue reading
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The Kicker
ONA Award Finalists: Digitech Innovators
September 29, 2010 03:53 PMThe finalists for the 2010 Online Journalism Awards given by the Online News Association have just been announced, and we thought we’d highlight the four finalists in the category “Outstanding Use of Digital Technologies (Professional).” The Las Vegas... Continue reading
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The News Frontier
Money, Volunteers, Money, Patch, and Money
September 28, 2010 08:00 AMLast week, some of the busiest people in journalism pried themselves away from their laptops, stood up from their kitchen table offices, and met face to face. It was the Block by Block Community News Summit, where the... Continue reading
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The News Frontier
Q&A: Mike Liebhold, Principal Technologist at The Institute For the Future
September 24, 2010 11:16 AMThe Institute for the Future is a forty-two year old nonprofit research group based in Palo Alto, California, dedicated to “aggregating group opinion about the future,” says senior researcher Mike Liebhold. A technologist who was the director of the Atari... Continue reading
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The News Frontier
NJSpotlight.com, Trenton’s State House Startup
September 22, 2010 05:15 PMWhen reporters pass each other in the echoey maze-like tunnels below the legislative hearing rooms of the New Jersey State House, they tend to greet each other like this: “How ya doin’? Surviving?” “Yeah, you?” “Surviving.” It hasn't... Continue reading
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The Kicker
Steal This Google Map!
September 22, 2010 11:42 AMMy colleague Joel Meares has written a lot lately about various news sites’ makeovers for the midterm election season, from Yahoo’s “hyper visual, hyper-interactive” new site “Ask America” to PBS NewsHour’s snazzy redesign, an attempt to... Continue reading
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The News Frontier
Whatever Happened to NewsTilt?
September 20, 2010 09:59 AMIn August, I wrote about FailFaire, a recurring event in the nonprofit industry that revisited projectsa gone wrong in order to prevent future mistakes. I thought it would be a great idea for the news industry to do... Continue reading
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The News Frontier
Checking In on Kachingle
September 17, 2010 08:30 AMEarly in 2009, the micropayment service Kachingle received a lot of attention when a piece in Editor and Publisher suggested that it could—gasp!—“save journalism.” By April 2009, Kachingle founder Cynthia Typaldos was getting interview requests from NPR’s <a... Continue reading
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The Kicker
The Times’s Latest Interactive on the WTC
September 10, 2010 12:07 PMIf you visited the New York Times home page earlier this morning, you couldn’t miss the interactive feature “Reviving Ground Zero” by Gabriel Dance, Tom Jackson and Graham Roberts. (It’s since been pushed down by President Obama’s... Continue reading
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The Kicker
ProPublica Welcomes All Nerds
September 9, 2010 12:40 PMProPublica has just launched what they call their “Nerd Blog” to highlight their latest developments in news applications. (“So what the heck is a ‘news application’? It’s an interactive web page that uses software instead of words... Continue reading
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The Kicker
You Can’t Do That Online
September 9, 2010 10:53 AMA piece in The New York Times Home & Garden section got a little bit meta on Wednesday. Anne Raver wrote the first-person piece about how to grow a vegetable and fruit garden in the Fall without resorting... Continue reading
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The Kicker
Federal Judge Says Website Not Liable For Comments
September 3, 2010 01:23 PMFrom Online Media Daily, a small item about a libel case dismissed by a Southern District court U.S. District Court in Mississippi. The case involves a news website in Mississippi, which a former employee sued for libel when... Continue reading
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The News Frontier
Q & A: Longshot co-founder Alexis Madrigal
September 3, 2010 08:00 AMThis past May, a group of California writers and designers hunkered down one weekend in the Mother Jones office for a radical experiment in publishing: an independent magazine fully produced in just two days. They actually did it,... Continue reading
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The News Frontier
“Data Is the New Soil”
September 2, 2010 08:00 AMJournalist and designer David McCandless gave an inspiring TED talk last month, just posted online last week. In it, he shows off some of his favorite visualizations of data and explains why visualization is increasingly vital, the more... Continue reading
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The Kicker
NYT Internal Memo Addresses Anonymous Sourcing
September 1, 2010 02:18 PMA memo went out to New York Times staffers on Wednesday, reminding them of the hazards of anonymous sourcing. The memo was issued by Times standards editor Phil Corbett. An excerpt: Pat, formulaic expressions of why an anonymous source wants... Continue reading
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The News Frontier
Q & A: Brian Herbert, Developer for Ushahidi
August 31, 2010 02:36 PMUshahidi, a word that means “testimony” in Swahili, is the name of a group of computer programmers and human rights workers who are developing innovative crowdmapping tools for humanitarian aid organizations and local news sites. CJR’s Craig Silverman... Continue reading
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The Kicker
Reporter Gives Money to Panhandlers, Watches What They Spend
August 30, 2010 02:43 PMJim Rankin, a reporter for The Toronto Star, found an interesting way to profile some of his city’s neediest citizens. For an article published on Saturday, he handed out prepaid credit cards to several panhandlers, asked them what... Continue reading
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The Kicker
Gasp! The Third Edition of the OED May Never Be Printed
August 30, 2010 12:35 PMLogophiles, put your down your magnifying glasses! The Oxford English Dictionary will not print another edition. Because of the Internet’s increasing impact on the sales figures of the venerable tome, the next edition of the OED will most likely appear... Continue reading
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The Kicker
Can Yahoo Woo San Francisco?
August 27, 2010 04:30 PMFollowing rival AOL’s lead, Yahoo has started a hyperlocal rollout. First stop: San Francisco. Yahoo purchased online publisher (content farm) Associated Content this spring, which it is now putting to work. Yahoo just sent out an e-mail blast to Associated... Continue reading
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The Kicker
Longshot Wants Your Stories (Right Away)
August 27, 2010 03:05 PMThe Magazine Formerly Known As 48 HR (before a cease-and-desist letter from CBS made them change their name) is back! Under the new moniker Longshot Magazine, the same team will produce a second issue, both in print and... 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
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- Dull news from Doha UN climate summit a ho-hum affair for the press
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- NBC News sets good example for Medicare reporting People perspective leads to clear explanation of impact of proposed changes
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The Kicker last updated: Fri 3:00 PM
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- 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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