Month: April 2009

Mark Glaser of PBS' MediaShift has read 600 ideas for how to best serve community information needs, and has distilled them into an eight-step plan to get the job done. Step One: Crack open government data and access.Glaser's project is in connection with a big effort from the Knight Foundation to identify community news and information needs in an era when legacy news organizations may be greatly diminished. You can read Glaser's article on PBS' MediaShift. You can also follow Mark Glaser on Twitter …….

There's good news and bad news for newspapers in a new report by USC's Jeffrey Cole, one of the world's leading authorities on Internet trends. Cole found a significant increase in the amount of time readers were spending on newspaper online sites. Simultaneously, it found a large chunk of Americans had quit their newspaper or magazine subscriptions because they could read the same material free on the Web. You can read the USC Annenberg news release about Cole's research here…….

A new report by Borrell Associates suggests that a four-year decline in newspapers' share of local online revenue has ended. The somewhat surprising finding is attributed to the strength of feet-on-the-ground sales forces during an economic recession. You can read Paid Content's report here…….

Sharesleuth.com is an investigative journalism site devoted to exposing corporate misbehavior and securities fraud. The projects are funded by Mark Cuban, entreprenuer and owner of the Dallas Mavericks. The site acknowledges that Cuban sometimes makes investments based on the information uncovered by the reporters, but that this activity will always be fully disclosed to allow readers to determine any conflict of interest. The patron-funded model of journalism raises some ethical questions for journalists as they try to find a way to fund their work. You can read the article from Poynter Online here…….

Edward Wasserman, in the Miami Herald, argues that online journalism seems to focus mainly on the op-ed model – -where contributors are not employees of the site, hold some knowledge about the topic for which they write, and are paid little if at all. These contributions are edited by full-time editors of the news source. Wasserman sees this trend as a continuation of journalism's tradition of relying on subsidies to prosper. Yet he also worries about potential conflics of interest, which seem almost inherent in the op-ed model. You can read the Miami Herald piece here…….

Penelope Muse Abernathy of the University of North Carolina has written a paper in anticipation of an upcoming conference on nonprofit media at Duke. Her piece, "A Nonprofit Model for the New York Times?", considers four possible nonprofit models for the paper: (1) establishing an endowment (2) support from a foundation (3) purchase by a university, and (4) purchase by a so-called "angel" investor. You can read Abernathy's paper and the New Yorker commentary here…….

Many different proposals have emerged for how government can help the struggling journalism industry, but one UK blogger has a different perspective: "To draw on an old adage: Government should not only give the hungry industry some fish and ensure that the legislative environment is conducive for fishing – but it should also help the industry build the knowledge to devise new ways of fishing." He proposes that the government should be training journalists in new media, so that the industry can better adapt to the changes. Read the For the Media blog post. — April 28, 2009…….

The University of Washington is following the University of Minnesota's lead and forming a Facebook application, joining with Seattle-based company, NewsCloud. In:Site, the new application, will be run by 20 university students who hope to produce at least two original articles per week. The application will focus on interactivity and community-involvement. Read the article from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. — April 28, 2009…….

Bill Mitchell of Poynter Online provides a breakdown of the proposed government intervention in preserving journalism, and adds his checklist of qualifications for any bureaucratic interference. He writes that any proposal, from tax breaks to relaxed antitrust regulations, must preserve editorial independence, promote innovation, and encourage news consumption. He emphasizes that the goal has to be to preserve journalism, not the media companies. You can read Mitchell's article on Poytner here…….