The News Frontier
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November 18, 2009 11:25 AM
Going Mobile: An Interview with Rob Durst
Thinking about print products as interfaces to online information
Rob Durst is a Boston-based business and technology consultant who believes that newspapers can remain viable—if they move quickly and use innovations such as “mobile codes.” Anderson University communication professor David Baird asked Durst a series of questions about how print media can adapt to the challenging new environment they find themselves in.
David Baird: Is it a foregone...
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November 12, 2009 02:15 PM
Sad Stats from Seattle
Ruth Teichroeb, former Post-Intelligencer writer and current blogger, catches up with her colleagues to see where they are now--7 months after the paper closed. The results are anything but reassuring, with less than 1/3 of the 71 respondents having found full time jobs and fewer still in journalism.
Seventy-one of the 140 who lost their jobs responded:
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November 10, 2009 05:45 PM
Trash Compactor
The NYT’s “Pacific garbage patch” story: a Spot.us “deliverable” that doesn’t quite deliver
Today’s New York Times features an article about a patch of garbage, estimated to be two times the area of Texas, swirling in the middle of the Pacific ocean. The piece was written by freelance journalist Lindsey Hoshaw, and the travel expenses for her reporting trip were covered by donations from several hundred people—a crowd-funding model--via Continue reading
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November 09, 2009 05:48 PM
Citizen Journalism vs. “Tragi-porn”
In defense—kind of—of Paul Carr’s attempted takedown of citizen journalism
There’s a fine line, apparently, between citizen journalism and “tragi-porn.” If you believe TechCruch’s Paul Carr, the two might as well be the same thing. Carr made waves this weekend with a harsh critique of citizen journalism and the Fort Hood shootings—and his claim that some of the errors that made their way into the initial coverage of...
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November 09, 2009 03:02 PM
MinnPost Turns Two
A brief conversation with Joel Kramer
Those agonizing over the future of local news may take heart at the success of MinnPost.com, the online news site founded by former Minneapolis Star Tribune publisher Joel Kramer, which turned two on Sunday. The nonprofit site held a birthday bash for its members yesterday and about 175 people turned up, Kramer...
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November 06, 2009 11:14 AM
Fort Hood: A First Test for Twitter Lists
In the aftermath of violence, lists suggest the benefits of collaboration
Journalism and curation—it’s becoming increasingly difficult to determine where the one ends and the other begins. The chicken/egg relationship between the two solidified into conventional wisdom during the aftermath of the Iranian election this summer, when journalists—mostly impeded from shoe-leather reporting and other, more traditional methods of newsgathering—were forced to play the role of social-media editors. In the...
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November 03, 2009 09:00 AM
Twitter: Rea-list/Idea-list
Twitter lists are upon us. How will they affect the platform’s culture?
Twitter is listless no longer. Following in the footsteps of Facebook, the increasingly popular platform has given its users the ability to sort other Twitter users into lists. "The idea is to allow people to curate lists of Twitter accounts," Twitter’s list feature project lead, Nick Kallen (@nk), explained.
For example, you could...
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October 29, 2009 04:14 PM
FCC Taps Waldman to Study “State of the Media”
Beliefnet founder to make policy recommendations to ensure "a vibrant media landscape"
Steven Waldman, veteran journalist and co-founder of Beliefnet, has been tapped by the FCC to lead an agency-wide initiative designed "to assess the state of media in these challenging economic times and make recommendations designed to ensure a vibrant media landscape."
Waldman announced the move to his readers in a Beliefnet blog entry yesterday afternoon....
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October 28, 2009 03:48 PM
Correction Fluid
Lessons from the Scalia misquote heard ‘round the Web
It seemed too strange to be true—and, in the end, it was. A story posted to The Huffington Post yesterday announced rather shocking news: “Scalia on Brown v. Board of Education: I Would Have Dissented.” On the site's homepage--where the story spent much of the day--the headline was even more provocative:
The story, it...
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October 12, 2009 12:49 PM
NPR Builds a Brain Trust
Thought leaders convene for a digital “Think In”
An unusual gathering took place in San Francisco on Friday: NPR corralled about sixty Bay Area technology thought leaders—innovators, entrepreneurs, strategists, and investors—put them in a bunch of conference rooms, and asked them to brainstorm ideas for the network’s digital future. NPR called it a “Digital Think In.”
The goal was to come up with ideas that would...
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September 28, 2009 02:34 PM
The Washington Post, Angsty Teenager
The paper really, really wants to go to prom with you
Reading the text of The Washington Post’s new guidelines for its staff’s use of Facebook, Twitter, and the like, I couldn’t help but think of…John Hughes. Almost every movie the director ever made revolves, in its way, around an axis of insecurity, its key characters so preoccupied with what other people think of them that they risk losing...
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September 25, 2009 04:27 PM
Q & A: Jim Brady
Guardian America's Web consultant on building audiences, brands, and a culture of innovation
Named executive editor of washingtonpost.com in late 2004, Jim Brady presided over a near-doubling in Web traffic and saw the site win numerous awards during his four-year tenure. After the Post announced plans to integrate its print and online operations, Brady stepped down earlier this year. He is now serving as a consultant to Guardian America,...
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September 18, 2009 04:43 PM
MinnPost.com Launches “Science Agenda”
Newcomer outlet picks up the slack left by MSM
On Thursday, I wrote about a group of thirty-five research universities that have launched a “newswire” called Futurity.org to showcase their best research. The impetus for the project was the decline of science coverage in the press. Elsewhere, however, the day also brought hope that all is not lost for traditional journalism.
MinnPost.com announced that it...
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September 18, 2009 11:37 AM
“A Big Chance to Win Back the Public’s Faith”
MediaBugs’s Scott Rosenberg on error-correction in the digital age
Earlier this summer, Scott Rosenberg, co-founder of Salon.com and author of the new book Say Everything, received word that he was one of only nine winners of a 2009 Knight News Challenge grant. As soon as I heard the name of his project, I had a feeling it was going to be something 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
- Saving Corwin’s Creatures MSNBC wades into new territory with environmental documentary 100 Heartbeats
- Trains, Planes, and Carbon Offsets Times keeps a needed eye on green premiums
Campaign Desk Politics & Policy
- Greg Craig and Transparency
- Not For All the News in China, Part I Former NYT Shanghai bureau chief Howard French on the coverage of Obama’s trip to Asia
