Reddit landed a personal appearance by the President of the United States on Wednesday when Barack Obama stopped by for one of the site’s “Ask Me Anything” interviews — an event that further adds to the web community’s reputation as an alternative source of journalism. Read more »
As Twitter continues to expand its control over the content that runs through its network, even as it forms partnerships with large TV networks like NBC, media entities of all kinds are going to have to ask whether their reliance on the service is wise. Read more »
Most of the recent attention around WikiLeaks has been focused on the legal issues surrounding its controversial founder, Julian Assange. But we shouldn’t let that blind us to what the organization has accomplished and the critical role it plays as a “stateless news organization.” Read more »
As more and more breaking news comes to us through social media, the task of determining what is true and what isn’t becomes exponentially harder. Storyful says that crowdsourcing is the best way to do this, and so it has opened up its professional verification process. Read more »
As newspapers try and re-engineer their businesses to adapt to the disruption caused by the web and social media, they will have to confront a crucial question: How can they measure the effectiveness of the journalism they are producing — or is pleasing advertisers enough? Read more »
As Twitter tries to evolve from being a real-time information network into a multibillion-dollar commercial media entity, it is having to face the inherent conflict between those two goals, and many critics see the suspension of journalist Gary Adams’ account as a symptom of that conflict. Read more »
There are signs that the U.S. government wants to target mainstream journalists and media outlets for the same kind of investigation that WikiLeaks has been subjected to for publishing classified information, which makes it even more important to defend WikiLeaks’ status as a media entity. Read more »
A journalist from Michigan has raised funding through Kickstarter for a project that will see him travel across the U.S. interviewing people about the election. Could that be an alternative model for financing investigative or in-depth reporting by journalists as newspapers continue to cut back? Read more »
Twitter is launching a partnership with NBC Universal to create a real-time news hub around the Olympic Games — the latest step in the company’s transformation into a media entity, a move that is a double-edged sword for other media outlets. Read more »
As newspapers continue to lay off staff, one question is what will help to fill the gap that is left — where will that journalism come from? We’ve seen signs this week of one partial answer: amateur journalists making use of social media. Read more »
The way that communities like Reddit can come together to produce real-time reporting on incidents like the mass shooting in a Colorado movie theater shows how a new form of journalism — one that blends traditional reporting and crowdsourced reports — is starting to take shape. Read more »
Comparing a traditional news story about a recent shooting with a news report from a Reddit user — who pulled together Twitter messages from the perpetrators and victims — provides a glimpse of what a real-time, crowdsourced newsroom of the future might look like. Read more »
The controversy over new-media startup Journatic and its hyper-local news service says a lot about how difficult it is to find new ways of producing journalism, in part because the traditional media industry and its supporters want to force everything into old models and familiar formats. Read more »
A major error in CNN’s reporting of a landmark Supreme Court decision on Thursday has provided even more ammunition for the ongoing debate over whether it is better to be right rather than first, and whether the scoop as we know it is dead. Read more »
The arrival of the iPhone five years ago changed many things, but one of the most fundamental was the way that news and journalism are delivered and consumed — and at the same time, it also revolutionized the way that news content is created. Read more »
According to Parse.ly CEO Sachin Kamdar, the problem with shares data is solvable. And as accurate social data becomes increasingly important, the first publisher to fully take advantage of this information will reap massive benefits and potentially reinvent how editorial decisions are made. Read more »
Newspaper companies are trying to cut costs by shutting down the printing presses and laying off staff, but unless they have a strategy for managing the transition from print to digital, all they are doing is liquidating the goodwill of a generation of readers and advertisers. Read more »
Journalism professor Tim McGuire, a long-time newspaper editor and Pulitzer Prize judge, says there is much upheaval in the media industry but a lot of potential as well — provided media entities give up their gatekeeper role and learn to serve their readers better. Read more »
One of the poster boys for online specialist entrepreneurial journalism is selling to a price comparison website. But can independent personal finance guru Martin Lewis keep his legion followers happy? Read more at paidContent »
In a discussion about his use of Twitter as a reporting tool, NPR strategist Andy Carvin made some interesting points about the value of crowdsourced journalism — including the importance of being transparent about the process, and the virtues of being human. Read more »
New research about how news is verified through Twitter and a crowdsourced debunking of some fake Wikipedia entries reinforce the point that social networks and online communities can be powerful tools for the real-time verification of events, something that used to take place behind closed doors. Read more »
I Can Has Cheezburger CEO Ben Huh’s day job may involve funny pictures of cats and other internet memes, but he also has some serious opinions about the future of journalism, including the idea that journalistic objectivity as we know it has outlived its usefulness. Read more »
When they think about competition, many traditional outlets still seem to look mostly at media players such as the Huffington Post or Buzzfeed. But the reality is that much of what is competing with journalism in the digital world are things we barely recognize as journalism. Read more »
The legal profession has undergone a lot of change over the past few years, but don’t dismiss it as an anachronism just yet. As the web changes the way citizens consume and digest information, including on important legal issues, lawyers should remain as important as ever. Read more »
Some of the media industry’s leading “data journalists” have published a crowdsourced handbook for the practice of data-oriented journalism, including examples of some of the best projects, tips on how to hire hacker-journalists — and an argument for why data journalism could help save the media. Read more »
Tech giants may have their own views on what journalism should become, but some news organisations are questioning what benefits the social vision of future news can really bring at a time when they’re struggling for business survival… Read more at paidContent »
Some of Silicon Valley’s biggest technology companies keep rejecting comparisons with news organisations.
But they nevertheless think they have the prescription for what news media must do next… Read more at paidContent »
Should the New York Times charge hedge funds or large financial institutions more for early access to market-moving stories like its Walmart exposé? Reuters blogger Felix Salmon says yes, but doing this would fundamentally change what the New York Times and its journalism are all about. Read more »
The Pulitzer Prize win by the Huffington Post has been hailed by some as the first win by a “blog,” but the reality is such terms have become increasingly meaningless. All we have now is media, some of which is journalism and some of which isn’t. Read more »
Veteran investigative reporter Bob Woodward said this week the Internet would not be of much use in a case like Watergate, the story he helped break in 1972. But he misses the point about the value of using a multitude of sources instead of just one. Read more »
It’s tempting to get nostalgic about the disappearance of the Encyclopedia Britannica’s print edition after two centuries, but as we have found with journalism, knowledge building of all kinds gets better when there are more people involved. It may be chaotic, but the result is superior. Read more »
According to a Pew Research Center report that looked at 38 newspapers, both large and small, some are seeing massive declines in digital revenue while others are seeing dramatic increases. One of the main reasons for this discrepancy, the report suggested, are cultural differences within newspapers. Read more »
In contrast to the wave of support for paywalls that is sweeping the newspaper industry, Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger says that he remains committed to practicing “open journalism,” an approach he believes is the only real option for media in the digital era. Read more »
Debates about whether Twitter breaks news or not miss the point about how the news game has changed with the arrival of social media and the democratization of distribution it provides. Mainstream media outlets are still players, but they are no longer the only ones. Read more »
Being a billionaire means Warren Buffett’s views on all kinds of things get a lot of attention — but his comments about the benefits of newspaper paywalls suggest the octagenarian investor misunderstands what the business of content looks like in our digital and hyper-connected age. Read more »
If a mainstream media outlet like the Wall Street Journal fails to link to a blog that broke the news they reported hours later, is that just a lack of courtesy or something more serious? The bottom line is that linking is about building trust. Read more »
News agencies that want to cover events happening in restricted parts of the world have had few options for licensing high-quality content. Cont3nt.com is trying to solve that problem, with a platform to discover and license videos shot by local professionals. Read more »
A new survey funded by Craigslist founder Craig Newmark looked at public attitudes toward the news media and found that only a tiny fraction of those surveyed care whether a news source is the first to report something. The most important quality by far was trustworthiness. Read more »
There’s been a lot of debate about whether a Forbes blog post that excerpted and summarized a New York Times story qualifies as journalism or not — but to some extent that’s a red herring. The only question that matters is whether the reader is served. Read more »
Instead of appearing on TV or in a newspaper, events like the death of Whitney Houston are as likely to be reported in a tweet or on Facebook — and in the long run, this shrinking of the traditional “news cycle” could be a good thing. Read more »
