The industry leader in emerging technology research Subscribe
As a freelance foreign correspondent for Current TV and the New York Times’ Jerusalem bureau, Jaron Gilinsky spent much of his time trying to find work and trying to get paid — so he built an Airbnb-style marketplace for professional freelancers called Storyhunter
The Intercept — a magazine that is part of Pierre Omidyar’s First Look Media — has written a piece about the departure of Matt Taibbi, who was supposed to be running another of First Look’s magazines, and the glimpse inside the company is not a pretty one
Neuze says it has developed a revolutionary product that provides an easy-to-carry news summary curated by journalists that requires no power. It’s an inside joke on newspapers — but it still makes you think about what benefits print media had over the web
The new mobile apps from the New York Times have so far failed to make much of an impact, and the paper’s existing paywall is peaking in terms of its reach. So what does the company do now in order to find new readers and revenue?
Billionaire eBay founder Pierre Omidyar says First Look Media, the new journalistic venture he is backing with a $250-million investment, will now be focusing more on a series of experiments aimed at figuring out how journalism can serve small communities of interested readers
British blogger Eliot Higgins, who has become a self-taught expert in the crowdsourced verification of news under his alias Brown Moses, is planning to launch a site called Bellingcat that will bring together other citizen journalists and also offer tools for those who want to learn how to do what he does
The New York Times has said it is planning to shut down or absorb as many as half of its existing blogs, with the hope that those skills can become more widespread inside the newspaper as a whole — but will they?
A Dutch startup called Blendle has built what it calls an iTunes for news that allows users to pay small amounts for individual newspaper and magazine articles, something the newspaper industry has dreamed about for some time — but efforts to create one have repeatedly failed
Postmedia, a large Canadian newspaper chain, is relaunching not just its newspapers and websites, but also offering two very different mobile products: an update-focused phone app and a magazine-style tablet app aimed at the evening news crowd
It’s easy to make fun of Business Insider’s penchant for slideshows, just as it’s easy to criticize BuzzFeed for its animated GIFs — but everyone is trying to find a balance between what readers want and what they need
From the front room of his flat in a British suburb, an unemployed man with no journalistic training named Eliot Higgins has become the go-to source for information about weapons and military activity in Syria
Protection for journalists via a so-called “shield law” seems like a good idea, but as Josh Stearns of Free Press notes, any such law needs to cover acts of journalism, not just journalists
In a recent speech, Guardian deputy editor Katharine Viner described how she believes the social web and the practice of “open journalism” fundamentally changes the relationship that journalists have with their audience.
Twitter is engaged in a full-on love affair with your television set, because it sees that as the road to advertising wealth — but will the changes the service has to make become its salvation or its ruin?
While Margaret Sullivan’s job is to hold the feet of her colleagues to the fire when necessary, she also sits in the newsroom with them and is employed by the newspaper, which creates an inherent conflict of interest.
Using a Google+ group and an open Twitter account, Storyful is trying to build a crowdsourced “open newsroom” that can help verify user-generated content in real time during events like the war in Syria.
With the traditional media industry struggling as it never has before, how could this possibly be described a golden age for journalism? The answer depends on whether you see journalism primarily as a business or a calling.
The new owners of the Chicago Sun-Times newspaper group have invested in a hyperlocal news-aggregation startup called Aggrego, which founder Tim Landon says is trying to create a better model for local journalism.
According to a news report, Google is experimenting with adding hyperlocal news cards to Google Now, its automated personal assistant for smartphones — a service that would also come in very handy on Google Glass.
Sources of all kinds — including politicians — can become publishers and distribute their own information directly to an audience, without the need for a traditional media outlet. Is that a good thing or a bad thing for journalism?
Newspaper companies might not want to think of their business as being similar to industrial manufacturing like the car industry, but in many ways it is — and they can learn from what other manufacturers have been through.
The departure of Thomson Reuters’ social-media editor sparked a debate about whether the position as we know it is dead or dying — but while those jobs may be evolving, the skills involved are more necessary than ever.
The Guardian has gotten a fair amount of ribbing on Twitter for opening a coffee shop in London, but the venture is just another element in the newspaper’s attempt to open up its journalism and engage more with its readers.
Social platforms like YouTube have become a rich source of “citizen journalism” about breaking news events, but media outlets don’t always provide credit. Mark Little of Storyful wants to try and change that with a public license for video news.
NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen says that many of the cultural barriers to doing “networked journalism” have been lowered, and he is trying to help media outlets develop smart tools and ways of making use of crowdsourcing.
Research from McKinsey seems to suggest that print-based media still commands a large proportion of time spent by consumers of news — but that is just part of the larger picture media companies have to understand.
LinkedIn has been making some significant moves towards becoming a media entity focused on business news, and the launch of new magazine-style channels of content is just the latest example of this.
A trade group says that newspapers like the New York Times have seen large increases in circulation, but that’s partly because they are allowed to count their readers multiple times. The industry needs to do better.
Devices like Google Glass are going to change the way that we consume the news and other information — how will media companies have to change the way they think about the news and how it is constructed?
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg says that the social network is trying to create “the best personalized newspaper” with its news feed. But we all know what has happened to newspapers — can Facebook somehow avoid suffering the same fate?
Twitter’s new advertising API is just part of an ongoing seismic shift in the way advertising works online, where algorithms and self-serve networks are taking over from traditional ad buying and further destabilizing the media industry.
According to the Columbia Journalism Review, the past decade has seen a dramatic decline in longer stories at some of the industry’s leading newspapers. But does that mean longform journalism is dying, or just evolving?
Many publishers are trying to adapt to the way media works in a digital age, but some still see Google and the web as parasites — and Harper’s publisher seems determined to stay in the latter category.
New York Times public editor Margaret Sullivan says in some cases transparency by journalists can trump the principle of objectivity, although she still argues that reporters should refrain from expressing opinions. Unfortunately for the Times, that horse has already left the barn.
Critics of the kind of real-time verification that National Public Radio editor Andy Carvin practices on Twitter during events like the Sandy Hook shootings say the process introduces too many errors and sows confusion — but the benefits of this approach arguably outweigh the disadvantages.
Instead of filing traditional news reports about Syria to traditional outlets like ABC News and Bloomberg, foreign correspondent Lara Setrakian decided to start her own dedicated news site about the conflict in the war-torn country — part of an ongoing trend towards the unbundling of the media.
Instagram says it is removing the ability for Twitter to embed photos because it wants users to go to its own website instead of Twitter’s to see that content. Other media companies should probably also be asking themselves similar questions about their relationship with Twitter.
The news industry is being disrupted by the democratization of information distribution, since anyone can now become a publisher — including original sources of content who once were forced to use newspapers. But media economist Robert Picard wonders whether journalists are prepared for the value-added future.
In the past, the truth about a social or political event was whatever the newspaper or the TV news said it was. But now that anyone can publish their views, the process of arriving at the truth is a lot more complicated — and even more important.
A new app called Circa, from Cheezburger Network CEO Ben Huh, wants to make reading news on mobile devices easier by breaking down the traditional story format into its component parts. Co-founder Matt Galligan says the company is trying to rethink how we consume news.
In an effort to reveal the extent of political ad spending that occurs in key television markets, ProPublica has put together one of the most ambitious crowdsourcing projects in recent memory, and learned a thing or two about how to encourage crowd participation.
In the latest episode of journalistic plagiarism, a Canadian newspaper columnist has been accused of taking content from others without credit. The response from the newspaper and the editors involved speaks volumes about how much traditional media outlets have to learn about how the web operates.
News-filtering service Prismatic has just launched a new “friend following” feature. Although this may look like a social-networking copycat move, founder Brad Cross says it is all about increasing the amount of data the service has about its users so that it can make relevant recommendations.
An incident in which an e-book lending site was shut down by a horde of angry authors with takedown notices — most of whom misunderstood the site’s purpose — is another example of how the publishing industry is fighting the same battles as the music industry.
Twitter CEO Dick Costolo says the company wants to become more of a media player, and also wants to become a Facebook-style platform inside which developers build applications — but can the company find a balance between competing with third-party providers and working alongside them?
A simple news service like Evening Edition — which a group of web designers came up with as a side project — contains a number of lessons that mainstream media outlets might want to consider, such as serving readers’ information needs instead of their own.
Many online media outlets continue to rewrite news without providing a link to the original source, but doing this is both rude and short-sighted: Linking is one of the fundamental underpinnings of the internet and a crucial part of the culture of the web.
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.
Media advocates say Twitter should add a feature that allows users to correct an erroneous tweet by striking through a mistake after the fact, to prevent errors from being retweeted — but is such a thing really necessary, even if Twitter could implement it?
Twitter’s hiring of editorial staff to curate real-time information around news events through “hashtag pages” may not be a direct competitor for media companies, but the areas of overlap are growing — and so is its attractiveness to the advertisers that media entities desperately need.
While some mainstream newspaper companies are being dragged toward a digital future whether they like it or not, the Daily Emerald at the University of Oregon has decided to remake itself for a digital and mobile world before it is forced to do so.
As more newspapers confront the same reality as the New Orleans Times-Picayune, and have to stop printing and go digital only to cut costs, what happens to the public role that a newspaper plays in a community? Can a digital-only media entity fulfil the same purpose?
A single chart from a presentation by internet analyst Mary Meeker illustrates why the decision to move away from print is such a difficult one for traditional media companies to make — and also why it so important that they do so.
Gawker Media CEO Nick Denton says he is making the network’s revamped discussion platform the centerpiece of a new advertising effort — hoping to convince brands that they should come and talk about their products and services in Gawker’s comment section instead of on Facebook.
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.
The recent dramatic declines in users of some Facebook social-reading apps from newspapers like the Washington Post reinforces a lesson that media companies need to keep in mind at all times — namely, that Facebook is the information gatekeeper now, and you are just a provider.
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.
Newspapers find themselves at a crossroads: they need to generate more revenue in order to stay in business, but some of the ways they could do that might conflict with the public-interest aspect of journalism. How do they find a middle road — or can they?
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.
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.
Smashwords says its internal data shows that the agency-pricing model — which is the subject of a federal antitrust case against Apple and the major book publishers — doesn’t mean higher prices for e-books. But does that mean the Justice Department’s case is irrelevant? No.
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.
Amazon (s amzn) has been taking a beating recently for what some see as its attempt to cut in on the business…
Prince Alwaleed’s $300-million investment in Twitter has raised fears of undue influence if the “Arab Spring” uprisings spread to Saudi Arabia. While this seems unlikely, that users are concerned at all highlights the pressure Twitter is under as it becomes a major media entity.
In the wake of an Oregon court ruling that decided a blogger wasn’t a journalist, some have argued it’s more important to define what journalism is — but in many ways, that’s even harder to define than who qualifies to be a journalist.
By keeping e-book prices high, the Big Six book publishers are not only getting less money from their books in many cases, but they are also fuelling piracy and pushing readers away — all of which is giving Amazon even more ammunition to use against them.
Amazon has been busy disrupting the traditional publishing market by encouraging self-publishing and signing authors to its own in-house imprint, but author Charles Stross argues that publishers themselves handed Amazon its biggest weapon in this fight: namely, the widespread use of digital-rights management locks for books.
NewsCred, which started off trying to filter the news for consumers based on credibility, has created what it says is the modern digital version of a traditional newswire and signed up more than 750 sources including mainstream publishers such as Forbes and The Guardian.
In another sign that it doesn’t really understand the evolution of media in the age of Twitter, the Associated Press has admonished its journalists for posting news about their own arrests to Twitter instead of saving that information for its traditional wire service.
A writer at the Columbia Journalism Review has taken aim at what he sees as the real reason for the media industry’s problems: “future of news” visionaries, who he says are hurting more than they are helping. But is that really where the problem lies?
Associated Press says its journalists shouldn’t express opinions on Twitter, and some are recommending reporters modify the way they retweet to avoid giving the impression they agree. But all that’s really required is that we stop pretending journalists don’t have opinions in the first place.
The fact that none of the six major book publishers are taking part in the “Netflix for books” lending program that Amazon just launched for the Kindle is another sign that the industry is more interested in retaining power than adapting to a changing business model.
In the wake of the sanctioning of a public-radio host for being involved in an Occupy Wall Street protest, former Slate media critic Jack Shafer says that media outlets should stop trying to force their journalists to pretend that they are soul-less robots without opinions.
Are books just packages for ideas, or physical souvenirs designed to market an author, or can they become social in the same way the news is becoming social? Everyone from Amazon to new startups like Subtext and Findings are trying to come up with the answer.
A new report on tablet usage found that more than half of those surveyed use their devices to read the news, and they are reading more than they used to — but many of the sources they are using are non-traditional, and few are willing to pay.
The products created by Apple and its founder Steve Jobs have revolutionized a host of different industries in the past couple of decades, from personal computing to mobile telephony. But they have also had a substantial impact on the way we consume media of all kinds.
In addition to launching its new color tablet the Kindle Fire last week, Amazon also announced another price drop for the original Kindle, which is now just $79. Could the e-reader eventually become free, and if it did, what would that mean for the e-book industry?
At Google’s recent Zeitgeist symposium, legendary TV newsman Ted Koppel suggested that it is somehow Google’s duty to “fix” the news, and CEO Larry Page seemed to agree. But relying on Google to choose what news we should read is a very slippery slope.
It’s nice for media companies to have a strong alternative like Amazon’s Kindle Fire when it comes to the tablet market, but the bottom line is the same as with Apple: They provide the content, but the platform owner is in control of the relationship.
What kinds of lessons can newspapers and other print publishers draw from the experience of Netflix, which has come under fire from users for trying to make the transition from its legacy DVD-rental business to online streaming? Here’s a hint: they’re not good.
Police across the country have been arresting people for taping them with cellphones, but a recent decision by the First Circuit Court of Appeals makes it clear that such behavior is protected by the First Amendment, and that people doing this are effectively acting as journalists.
Amazon is allegedly planning to launch a Netflix-style subscription service for books. While this idea is bound to get some criticism from book lovers — not to mention book publishers — it seems like a natural step in the ongoing evolution of the book.
In response to the upheaval in the media industry and what they see as the problems that the web has created for journalism, some are arguing that journalists should be regulated and licensed — but such solutions would create worse problems than they claim to solve.
The idea that newspapers need to become more social and transparent in order to build trust with their readers is not a new one — but few have put it as well as a student journalist did in a recent column for The Daily Californian.
Amazon has launched a new feature that allows readers to ask questions of authors from their Kindle e-book readers — which looks like yet another step in the online bookseller’s ongoing quest to cut publishers out of the equation and build relationships directly with authors.
While every other aspect of traditional publishing has been disrupted by digital forces, there is one large market that remains undisturbed — academic journals. Why has this business been able to resist the tide of change that is sweeping through the rest of the industry?
Just as CNN created the 24-hours news cycle for television, Twitter has accelerated that to the point where news breaks every minute, and a tweet is almost as good as a page-one scoop for a political reporter. Not only that, but anyone can do it.
Typically, periodical contributors are paid either via per-item fee or through a salary, if at all. New iPad magazine Once thinks that a new format calls for a new compensation model; one that provides contributors with a more direct share of the revenue from their work.
In the latest sign of the disruption of the book-publishing business, John Locke — who earlier this year became the first self-published author to sell a million e-books — has signed a deal with Simon & Schuster that shows how the industry is having to adapt.
The New York Times has rolled out a site called beta620, to provide a home for all of its experimental web projects and apps. But can the paper successfully adopt the kind of beta culture that drives startups, or is the new site just a sideshow?
Chartbeat’s Tony Haile says the company created a special version of its real-time analytics service called Newsbeat because it wants to help publishers understand their online businesses better, by giving them more data about what readers are interested in and where they are coming from.
For several days now, journalism professor Jay Rosen and author Nicholas Carr have been debating whether the internet makes journalism better or worse. In the end, neither side wins — or both do — because the internet amplifies both the good and the bad things about the media.
Using social-media tools has become almost a necessity for musicians and artists of all kinds, as a way of promoting their work and connecting with fans. But can doing all this get in the way of the creativity that makes them artists in the first place?
The forces that are driving the disruption in traditional book publishing are the same as those affecting other media as well, whether it’s newspapers and magazines or virtually any other publishing-based business. So what can publishers and content companies learn from what is happening to books?
A startup called Tackable has launched a mobile “crowdsourcing” app for the San Jose Mercury News called TapIn that allows the paper to ask readers to submit photos and tips about news events, and also allows it to pitch them on Groupon-style location-based discount offers.
John Green, whose book for young adults hit the number one spot this week before he was even finished writing it, is the latest example of an author whose use of social media and the web has given him tremendous power within the publishing industry.
While some mainstream media outlets are trying to take advantage of social tools to engage with their readers, others still seem stuck in the Dark Ages. The latest example of a misguided policy comes from E.W. Scripps, which owns a chain of newspapers and TV affiliates.
Using Twitter as a tool for journalism has become more and more mainstream over the past year, and the company’s launch of a media resource center and toolbox for reporters is clearly designed to stake Twitter’s claim as a journalist and media company’s best friend.
OnSwipe is launching the full version of its web-publishing service today, which allows media companies to create tablet-friendly views of their content that look and act like apps. But will that be enough to drag publishers out of the arms of Apple and its walled garden?
Amid all the flailing around that media companies are doing to try and solve their revenue problems, with paywalls and iPad apps, too few are looking at how connecting with their community (or communities) of readers can help increase engagement and lead to new revenue models.
We’ve spent so long consuming the news in fairly predictable formats that the new forms of journalism we are seeing all around us can be confusing. But these new forms have the potential to broaden the field immensely, and that is a good thing.
Many mainstream media companies are busy releasing me-too iPad apps and launching paywalls, but few are doing anything really innovative or different. Anil Dash of Activate Media says media entities need to find ways of disrupting themselves and their businesses by hacking their own organizations.
Social activity around books used to be limited to Oprah-style book clubs, but Jeff Howe — the author and journalism professor who coined the term “crowdsourcing” — wants to take that concept into the future by using Twitter to create the world’s largest virtual book-reading club.
New York Times executive editor Bill Keller says he is concerned that Twitter is decreasing our attention spans and generally making us stupid — but he misses the crucial point that Twitter and other social media are just tools, and that their benefits outweigh their disadvantages.
You wouldn’t think that we would still be having debates about the value of linking, but a blog post by Doc Searls about the dearth of links in newspaper stories led to a Twitter debate that shows how far some media outlets still have to go.
The story of how a children’s book with an unusual title made it to number one on the Amazon bestsellers’ list before it was even published reinforces a lesson for content publishers of all kinds: sometimes what looks like piracy is actually marketing for your content.
Google said Friday it has added location-based news to its mobile version of Google News — not a huge development for the web giant, but another step towards offering news that is personally relevant to readers, something newspapers and other media outlets continue to struggle with.
The American Society of News Editors has come out with a report looking at social-media policies at major media organizations, and while there is some positive advice, the report continues to tell media outlets that journalists should not be human beings when they are online.
Bloomberg has come out with a social-media policy for its journalists which, like many other such policies, talks a lot about what not to do, and why social media is bad. Why not talk about some of the ways journalists should be using these tools?
While many would like to give credit to Twitter for breaking the news about Osama bin Laden, this isn’t about Twitter vs. media — it’s about the reality of a new ecosystem of news, one in which Twitter and Facebook play an extremely powerful role.
At the Activate conference in New York, Craigslist founder Craig Newmark talked about his work with non-profits and his views on the importance of a free press, and Electronic Frontier Foundation co-founder Lawrence Lessig talked about his efforts to fight corruption with a project called Rootstrikers.
Journalism professor Jay Rosen says one of the lessons he has learned in his career is that “the more people who participate in the press, the stronger it will be.” In other words, while “crowdsourcing” can produce plenty of noise, journalism is the better for it.
Author and media consultant Jeff Jarvis has come up with a breakdown of what he calls some “hard economic lessons for news,” and it makes for somewhat gloomy reading indeed. That said, however, there are some glimmers of hope amid the murk and despair.
The word “book” used to be so simple — now there are e-books, and blogs that become books, and long pieces of journalism published by startups like Byliner and The Atavist. If you’re an author, it’s a time of incredible chaos, but also incredible opportunity.
News.me, which grew out of an experiment by the New York Times, and Trove — which is backed by the Washington Post — have very different takes on customizing the news and making it social, but both are part of a growing trend towards personalized media.
If there’s one thing The Huffington Post does better than just about any other media entity, it’s take advantage of social media — and the site has just rolled out some new features that traditional publishers and media entities could learn some useful lessons from.
Advertising agency titan Sir Martin Sorrell was recently asked by BusinessWeek what the media industry needs to do in order to survive in these difficult times, but unfortunately for anyone hoping to be enlightened, his advice — paywalls, consolidation and government subsidies — is almost completely wrong.
News-reading app maker Zite has been threatened by a group of traditional media outlets who allege it’s guilty of copyright infringement for reformatting their content. Instead of sending legal threats, those publishers should try to learn what Zite is offering readers that they aren’t.
Hyper-local site EveryBlock started out as an automated news aggregator, pulling in feeds based on specific locations. But founder Adrian Holovaty says he has realized that data is nothing without human interaction, and so the site has relaunched with more of a focus on community.
AOL has made the acquisition of The Huffington Post sound like a nice add-on for its existing content business, but the reality is that AOL had to do something dramatic, since traffic has been plummeting and losses increasing at some of its major media properties.
With just a few paragraphs about the evils of aggregation and the rise of the Huffington Post, in which he talks about aggregators as “pirates,” the executive editor of the New York Times manages to say volumes about how little he understands where media is now.
The secret to online success for newspapers doesn’t depend on technology or even specific kinds of content, says Emily Bell, the former head of digital for The Guardian. All it requires is a firm commitment to be “of the web, not just on the web.”
The New York Times is expected to launch a service soon called TimesLimited, which appears to be a Groupon-style email marketing platform. Since they have such close relationships with advertisers already, why didn’t newspapers like the NYT come up with this idea before Groupon did?
The evidence continues to accumulate that e-books are not just something established authors can use, but that they are becoming a real alternative to traditional publishing contracts for emerging authors as well — and that should serve as a big wake-up call for the book-publishing industry.
Making the transition from print publishing to being digital-first media outlets hasn’t been easy for newspapers — in fact, many have stubbornly resisted this change, and tried to dip their toes into digital waters gradually. But incremental changes are not helping them adapt to the new reality.
The dismantling of Washington-based local news site TBD has some arguing that such local online-media ventures are doomed to failure, but others maintain that the site’s demise was a result of corporate infighting, and says nothing about the strength of the original concept.
The web has turned breaking news into something that lasts a matter of minutes — or even seconds — rather than hours. If your business is to break news, your job is becoming harder every day, as Deadline Hollywood blogger Nikki Finke is only the latest to discover.
Google has gotten a lot of attention for One Pass, the all-in-one subscription plan for publishers that the search giant revealed earlier today — mostly because it’s a contrast to Apple’s new subscription system. But does that mean publishers should sign up with Google? Not necessarily.
Facebook CTO Bret Taylor said in a recent interview that he sees the news business as the next industry that the social network can help to disrupt — but that goal could see Facebook clash with Twitter, which is busy doing the same thing.
One of the more high-profile experiments in hyper-local news, a Washington, D.C.-based startup with the unlikely name TBD, has had a somewhat troubled history — losing its general manager just months after launch — and now the site has been restructured, raising fears about its future.
Storify, a San Francisco-based startup that launched a social-media aggregation service for journalists last fall, has closed a $2-million Series A round of funding from Khosla Ventures. Founder and former Associated Press foreign correspondent Burt Herman says he wants to reinvent the way storytelling happens online.
