The News Frontier
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March 15, 2010 01:14 PM
Bad News
Howard Rheingold sees a critical need for critical thinking
They went looking for crap, and by golly they found plenty of it.
Students in Howard Rheingold’s journalism class at Stanford recently teamed up with NewsTrust, a nonprofit Web site that enables people to review and rate news articles for their level of quality, in a search for lousy journalism.
The students, along with other NewsTrust users, spent...
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March 15, 2010 08:35 AM
State of the Media, By the Numbers
Seven notable stats from the Pew State of the Media report
The annual State of the Media report by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism was released this morning. The report looks back on how every part of the media fared in 2009, including newspapers, magazines, network news, cable television, and online sites.
It’s not the most uplifting bit of news about the news--but in...
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March 11, 2010 04:17 PM
Zonied Out
Adam Klawonn tried everything to make his journalism startup succeed. It wasn't enough.
In 2006, Adam Klawonn cashed out his newspaper job vacation pay to reinvent himself as a digital journalist. He bought a laptop and a camcorder, and trained himself how to create a blog, edit HTML code, shoot video and edit it in Final Cut Pro, edit photos, create graphics in Photoshop, and manage a Web site—specifically, “The Zonie...
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March 10, 2010 12:58 PM
“Rejuvenating American Journalism”
What the FTC will hear today from Robert McChesney
Among those who care about serious journalism, some are counting on an economic comeback that will bring sufficient media advertising back to newspapers and Web sites to support quality reporting; others bet on the evolution of pay walls and a public that will change course and learn to buy news content; still others put their money on other kinds of...
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March 04, 2010 06:37 PM
Press Forward: Authority and Credibility
The latest entries in CJR's "Press Forward: Dialogues on the Future of News" series
Who Says - Megan Garber on narrative authority in a fragmented world
Trust Falls – Justin Peters on lessons from St. Louis on authority, credibility, and online communications
Further Reading - Annotated reading lists from Megan Garber and Justin Peters
For an overview of the Press Forward series and links to older content, click Continue reading
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March 04, 2010 05:45 PM
Who Says
Narrative authority in a fragmented world
Great is Journalism. Is not every Able Editor a Ruler of the World, being a persuader of it?
— Thomas Carlyle, 1837
Journalism is just ditchwater.
— Thomas Carlyle, 1881In its inaugural State of the News Media report in 2004, the Project for Excellence in Journalism put its finger on a core paradox in contemporary American journalism:...
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March 04, 2010 05:44 PM
Trust Falls
Lessons from St. Louis on authority, credibility, and online communications
In November of 2009, an editor at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch decided to show his readers who was boss. After a commenter persisted in posting “a vulgar expression for a part of a woman’s anatomy” on a “Talk of the Day” feature asking readers to name “the craziest thing you’ve ever eaten,” the editor, Kurt Greenbaum, observed...
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March 04, 2010 05:36 PM
Who Says: Further Reading
Roland Barthes’s “The Death of the Author” is a classic in postmodern thought, and it underscores many of the ideas I’ve explored here.
Peter Burke’s A social history of knowledge: from Gutenberg to Diderot delivers exactly what its title promises: a solid, illuminating treatment of the evolution of knowledge from the age of the printing press.
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March 04, 2010 05:35 PM
Trust Falls: Further Reading
Imaginary Futures: From Thinking Machines to the Global Village, by Richard Barbrook, examines the political ideology of the Internet, from its inception to its many potential futures, both past and present. Curious and occasionally grandiose (from its promotional Web site: “WARNING: This is a book that many who control the Internet do not want you to read.”), the...
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March 02, 2010 04:55 PM
The Atlantic Tweaks its Web Redesign
The site responds to complaints from its readers—and its own bloggers
At 1 a.m. last Friday, TheAtlantic.com rolled out a much-anticipated new redesign. By 4 p.m. Monday, the redesign had already undergone a redesign.
Web site redesigns always provoke a bit of howling from loyal visitors who are used to the old layout (See: every time Facebook has ever changed its homepage). But the pushback against The Atlantic’s...
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March 02, 2010 02:57 PM
Shhh! It’s a Secret!
This made the rounds among journo-types yesterday, but in case you haven’t seen it, there’s an exciting development in the media world: a startup is “aimed at fixing news.” (Yes, really!)
Unfortunately, it’s a secret. Hence, the handle for the employer in the ad listing at the Poynter site: “Secret Journalism Startup.” (Yes, really.) The accompanying description helpfully...
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February 24, 2010 04:52 PM
The Upshot of Embargoes
Oransky launches blog examining controversial publishing standard
A longstanding and controversial topic of conversation within the science journalism community—news embargoes on peer-reviewed research articles—will now receive regular scrutiny at a new blog launched by one of the country’s top medical writers.
On Tuesday, Ivan Oransky, the executive editor of Reuters Health, launched a new site called Embargo Watch that is dedicated...
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February 22, 2010 06:22 PM
At HuffPost, the Old College Try
The outlet branches into college news
There’s a species of journalism we often forget to include when we talk about our fabled ‘new media landscape’: college newspapers. And part of that is structural. After last year’s folding of UWIRE, a college-journalism wire service, the Web has lacked a centralized space for college news.
Enter…The Huffington Post. Today, “the Internet newspaper” added a...
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February 19, 2010 12:13 PM
To Catch A Plagiarist
There are tools to catch plagiarists in action. Why don’t news outlets use them?
As the general manager of the iThenticate plagiarism detection service, Robert Creutz has unique insight into the recent Gerald Posner plagiarism flap at The Daily Beast.
Posner’s theft was first identified by Slate’s Jack Shafer, which caused Beast editors to begin looking into Posner’s previous work. (Meanwhile, Shafer published another column that revealed additional examples of...
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The News Frontier Feature
Press Forward
Dialogues on the future of news
In a series of essays, interviews, case studies, and roundtable discussions, we’ll explore news’s past as a way of guiding its future. Approximately every three weeks, we will introduce a new unit addressing various topics relevant to both news and the Internet. We’ll question common assumptions and examine orthodoxies—with an eye toward ensuring, above all, that we preserve what’s valuable in journalism as new technologies do their part to redefine the informational landscape. Call it a bid for symbiosis rather than assimilation.
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About The News Frontier RSS
The News Frontier, our exploration of the future of journalism in the digital age, will serve as a scout into the shifting news terrain. We will report on the new ways of gathering, presenting, and financing the news, and we curate some of the best general thinking about the future of news, in order to provide an informed and collective vision of that future.
Desks
The Audit Business
The Observatory Science
- When the Well Runs Dry Is Duke Energy’s support for a new SciTech section a problem?
- Reviving Science Coverage in the Carolinas Weekly newspaper section, community-journalism project deliver fresh content
