The News Frontier
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January 21, 2011 12:00 PM
Google News is “The Most Efficient System”
Krishna Bharat on how Google helps journalists stay focused
On Wednesday, Google News product manager Krishna Bharat spoke to Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism students about how Google News can help journalists to do what they do best: on-the-ground, original local reporting.
Bharat, who is also the Hearst New Media Professional in Residence at the school, first explained just how Google News ranks and clusters news on...
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January 20, 2011 02:05 PM
Technology’s Role in Tunisia
The easiest narrative isn’t the only one that matters
Last week, as years of frustration by the Tunisian people culminated in self-immolation, street protests, and the ouster of President Zine El Abedine Ben Ali, the Western media was faced with the problem of how to frame the story. It’s a story with powerful implications for political stability and power throughout the region, a story rife...
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January 14, 2011 12:58 PM
Play With The 2010 News Cycle Thanks To Pew
How did Fox, NBC, NPR fill the year's "newshole"?
Forgive us for not noting this sooner—our attention has been devoted to the Giffords shooting and debates that followed. But a big hat-tip to the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism for their interactive project “The 2010 Year in the News.” The tool allows you to compare and contrast the media’s coverage of 2010’s biggest stories,...
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January 14, 2011 12:20 PM
On Mugshots and Cover Photos
(And giving your readers what they want)
There’s not really all that much we can say about Jared Loughner’s mugshot. Like any image that accompanies a news story, it provides context and contains a certain amount of information. The key bit of information this image most readily presents, of course, is “crazy.” If you’re like me, the first time you saw the photo after it was released...
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January 11, 2011 02:30 PM
A Lost Opportunity at The Columbus Dispatch
How news sites can use YouTube to their advantage
By now you’ve probably heard the feel-good story of Ted Williams, the man with the “Golden Voice” who went from homeless on a highway to Kraft Macaroni and Cheese voice-over guy in mere days. And you’ve probably also seen the video that changed Williams’ life, shot by Columbus Dispatch videographer Doral Chenoweth III. A post on...
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January 4, 2011 04:45 PM
NYT Sports Editor Apologizes for Column Switcheroo
Piece on Patriots’ decline was altered after a 45-3 win
A piece by New York Times public editor Arthur Brisbane on Dec. 25 addressed a reader’s concerns about a sports column by William Rhoden earlier in the month. Or rather, two columns.
The first column, titled “The Day the Patriots Empire Began to Crumble,” went up online on Dec. 6. Rhoden wrote the column before a Jets-Patriot...
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December 30, 2010 11:57 AM
Best of 2010: Lauren Kirchner
Kirchner picks her top stories from 2010
This Headline May Be A Work of Art The New Museum’s exhibition “The Last Newspaper” featured collage, sculpture, and installations all made out of—or conceptually “about”—newspapers. I went, I saw, I took pictures.
What it’s Like to Be The Wall Street Journal’s Friend This was another field trip I took, trying out Foursquare for the first...
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December 21, 2010 06:00 PM
FCC Passes Net Neutrality Policy (Sort Of)
And the press plays all the angles
The Federal Communications Commission voted three to two on Tuesday afternoon to approve a new set of rules governing the practices of broadband Internet service providers. The new policy bans discrimination by Internet companies of any specific online service. But does not go so far as to bar those from charging more money for faster service, leaving open...
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December 14, 2010 09:33 AM
We Are Not Alone: News Startup Community-Building
Launch Pad: Portland, Oregon
CJR’s “Launch Pad” feature invites new media publishers to blog about their experiences on the news frontier. Past columns by Michael Andersen, founder of Portland Afoot, and Barry Johnson, who is at work on an arts journalism project, can be found here.
Barry Johnson: Michael, we have come to the end of our mini-series on starting non-profit...
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December 13, 2010 02:15 PM
Are Online Attacks Civil Disobedience?
And other questions from the PDF symposium on WikiLeaks and Internet freedom
This past Saturday, Personal Democracy Forum hosted a symposium about Internet freedom issues raised by WikiLeaks. (Videos of the gathering are available here.)
Afterward, PDF editor Micah Sifry posted a summary of some of the most interesting questions to come out of the day’s conversations:1. Is what WikiLeaks has done...
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December 10, 2010 04:00 PM
Beware the Twitter Echo Chamber
Pew study shows the limits of the Twitter-verse
The Pew Internet & American Life Project released a report on Thursday, the result of their study of Twitter demographics. Among other findings, the report focused on the fact that about 8 percent of American adults who use the Internet are Twitter users. Only 74 percent of American adults use the Internet, so that means that Twitter users...
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December 9, 2010 02:25 PM
Public Media: “More Local, More Inclusive, More Interactive”
The Knight Foundation and the Aspen Institute Communications and Society Program jointly released a policy paper on Wednesday with recommendations for federal support for public broadcasting. The report, written by Barbara Cochran of the University of Missouri School of Journalism, is entitled “Rethinking Public Media” and is available here.
Cochran’s paper recommends both ways...
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December 9, 2010 12:30 PM
Global Post’s Anti-Hamster Wheel Scheme
A Q&A; with executive editor Charles Sennott
Global Post, an international news service for an American audience, with seventy correspondents in fifty countries, is forming a nonprofit arm to help fund its longer-form, multimedia “special projects.” Executive editor and vice president Charles Sennott previously spoke with CJR about one of those packages that Global Post had put together, titled “Life, Death,...
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December 8, 2010 03:15 PM
MinnPost Wants to Create “the World’s Longest Byline”
How The Intelligencer blog does crowdsourcing, fifteen minutes at a time
ProPublica’s Recovery Tracker, a database of stimulus funds broken down by state and county, makes it easy for anyone with the time and interest to browse through and find a story. Moving through pages and pages of data in any kind of comprehensive way, though, is a challenge.
Jeff Severns Guntzel, proprietor of MinnPost's The Intelligencer...
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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
- Don’t Forget Massey Energy’s Long History of Violations
- Pearlstein: On China Trade, an Eye for an Eye
The Observatory Science
- The Hottest Thing in Science Blogging ScienceOnline2011 conference puts convergence of old and new media on display
- Giffords’ Medical Care Healthy dose of science coverage adds context
Campaign Desk Politics & Policy
- Republican Study Committee Gets Specific Reporters grapple with complexities
- Q & A: Election Law Expert Richard L. Hasen How the press fared covering the post-Citizens United landscape, and stories to do now
