[I'm very pleased to say that Ken Doctor, one of the smartest minds out there on the business side of journalism's digital future, is going to be joining us here at the Nieman Journalism Lab. You'll see his pieces on the economics of news here weekly. But at the moment, Ken is focused on the release of his new book, Newsonomics: Twelve New Trends That Will Shape the News You Get. Today, tomorrow, and Wednesday, we'll be running three brief excerpts from the book, each a Q&A with a leading journalist whose career has been shifted by the Internet. First up is GlobalPost CEO Phil Balboni. —Josh]

Phil Balboni launched GlobalPost in January 2009, just as many news companies were further reducing international reporting. He acted on a forty-year-old idea he’d had about bringing back global news to American audiences — and had seen that the ability of Internet efficiencies now made it possible. GlobalPost is his second career; he founded and ran the award-winning New England Cable News (NECN) business for many years. Now he can look out on the harbor, where clipper ships came in, and beyond, to his growing network of more than seventy correspondents working around the world.

Q: How did your cable news experience inform your GlobalPost plan?

A: There are quite a few, seminal lessons learned from NECN. First, the enormous value of more than one revenue stream and not being solely dependent on advertising. Keep reading »

When big news breaks, you can be sure that Wikipedia will cover the hell out of it. Not so much on Wikinews, the collaborative-journalism project that has faltered since launching in December 2004.

For some insight on why Wikipedia has been a more successful news source than Wikinews, I talked to Andrew Lih, who teaches at USC’s journalism school and wrote The Wikipedia Revolution. As you’ll see in the video above, Lih said that Wikipedia’s formulaic style and continuous format are more conducive to collaborative writing projects than the discrete articles found on Wikinews.

A transcript of the video follows. Keep reading »

[Every Friday, Mark Coddington sums up the week’s top stories about the future of news and the debates that grew up around them. —Josh]

A gaggle of Google news items: Unlike the past several weeks with their paywall and iPad revelations, this week wasn’t dominated by one giant future-of-media story. But there were quite a few incremental happenings that proved to be interesting, and several of them involved Google. We’ll start with those.

— The Google story that could prove to be the biggest over the long term actually happened last week, in the midst of our iPad euphoria: Google unveiled a beta form of Social Search, which allows you to search your “social circle” in addition to the standard results served up for you by Google’s magic algorithm. (CNN has some more details.) I’m a bit surprised at how little chatter this rollout is getting (then again, given the timing, probably not), but tech pioneer Dave Winer loves the idea — not so much for its sociality but because it “puts all social services on the same open playing field”; you decide how important your contacts from Twitter or Facebook are, not Google’s algorithm.

— Also late last week, several media folks got some extended time with Google execs at Davos. Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger posted his summary, focusing largely on Google’s faceoff with China. “What Would Google Do?” author Jeff Jarvis posted his summary, with lots of Google minutiae. (Jeff Sonderman also further summarized Jarvis’ summary.) Among the notable points from Jarvis: Google is “working on making news as compelling as possible” and CEO Eric Schmidt gets in a slam on the iPad in passing. Keep reading »

The New York Times’ announcement that it would be charging for some access to its website, starting in 2011, rekindled yet another round of debate about paywalls for online news. Beyond the practical question (will it work?) or the theoretical one (what does this mean for the Times’ notion of the “public”?), there remains another question to be untangled here — perhaps one more relevant to the smaller papers who might be thinking of following the Times’ example:

What is the underlying economic value of online news, anyway? Keep reading »

Public notices, those tiny-type blurbs announcing zoning issues, licensing applications and public meetings, seem anachronistic in our database-driven world. Does anyone use them? Can anyone use them, with that crammed-in text? They’re a long-term accepted oddity that persists today. When Geoff Cowan and David Westphal came out with their report last week on government’s historic subsidies of the press, the printing of public notices as newspaper advertising was one of the awkward stars. As Cowan and Westphal put it:

Historically, these fine-print notices have been a lucrative business for newspaper publishers, and have touched off heated bidding wars for government contracts…But the era of big money in public notices will almost certainly fade away. Proposals have been introduced in 40 states to allow local and state agencies to shift publication to the Web, in some cases to the government’s own Web sites.

And when those proposals are made, newspaper companies are quick to defend their lucrative turf — vociferously. Legislatures in Missouri, Pennsylvania and Ohio, among others, have considered moving public notices to government-run websites as a cost-cutting maneuver. These efforts are often for naught after strong newspaper opposition. (Virginia’s the latest, last week.)

Since the case against public notices seems so obvious — why should a local government buy ad space in a newspaper when it can publish the same material itself, in a more searchable and useful form? — I wanted to hear the arguments on the other side. Tonda Rush, a registered lobbyist for the newspaper industry and head of the Public Notice Resource Center, outlined for me the common arguments surrounding public notices. They fall into three domains. Keep reading »

Anne Galloway didn’t know anything about nonprofits or websites when she was laid off from Vermont’s Times Argus last January. She once believed the web was more distracting than resourceful. But a layoff has a funny way of upending your perspective, and now Galloway sits at the helm of her own nonprofit news site.

Galloway launched VT Digger in September 2009 with designs on filling a coverage gap in her home state of Vermont. Take a look through the offerings and you’ll see much of the content reads like the nitty-gritty stuff that used to grab column inches. That’s the point. During months of pre-launch interviews and research, Galloway concluded that the demand for enterprise reporting isn’t being met by the reduced staffs of Vermont’s newspapers.

VT Digger isn’t a hobby or a side project. Galloway is all in. She works full-time on the site, often starting at 4 a.m. and finishing up well after dinner. When I talked to her, she had just settled in at the Vermont statehouse. She’s commuting 45 minutes each way while the legislature is in session.

On the content side, Galloway tries to post 5-7 pieces a week. That’s a tough task for what’s basically a one-person operation. It’s made harder by the time-intensive nature of her content, which often requires interviews and background research. But in a savvy bit of efficiency, she’s boosting coverage by dialing back her editorial filter. That’s not to say she’s posting shaky articles. She’s just letting readers parse information for themselves. Keep reading »

On the morning of my second-to-last day as the editor of The Washington Independent, I was surprisingly nervous waiting for my boss to walk across the newsroom to meet me for what I pitched to him as an “exit interview” for my new job at the Nieman Journalism Lab.  At 10:33 a.m. an email popped into my inbox titled, “I’m giving David the ‘wrap it up’ signal”; it was from my boss’ secretary, who sat just out of my view in our D.C. office. David S. Bennahum, CEO of the nonprofit Center for Independent Media, which publishes TWI and five other news sites around the country, is on the phone talking with a potential donor about his recent coup: a $352,000 grant from the Knight Foundation to launch his seventh news website, The Florida Independent, with two local foundations.

I’m not surprised by the delay (or the grant). Bennahum spends hours on back-to-back phone calls, which usually sound like conversations with an old friend. He strolls on a walk station at .8 miles an hour as he describes his sites’ successes, like the 16.4 million pageviews the network drew in 2009. Bennahum’s calls, plus in-person meetings all over the country and dozens of grant proposals, have paid off. Since CIM’s launch in May 2006, he’s raised close to $11.5 million, making CIM one of the largest nonprofit publishers in the country. In this economic environment — and at a time when the nonprofit journalism world is getting a lot more crowded — that’s no small achievement. Keep reading »

CNET and Gizmodo have been sharing content for the last couple months. I confirmed that a partnership exists, but requests for additional information from either party were not fruitful.

Frankly, the most intriguing aspect of this partnership is already in plain view: The sites are posting the same articles. Take a look at this Gizmodo story then click over to the CNET version. Headlines change and there are subtle formatting differences, but the body copy is essentially the same.

Why is this relevant? If you’ve spent any time in the SEO world, you’ve probably heard of the semi-mythical duplication rule. As far as I can tell, CNET and Gizmodo are in duplication’s gray area.

The duplication penalty, or lack thereof

The cautionary tale of duplication generally goes like this: Google wants its search results to give precedence to the most popular/legitimate/relevant pages, and it’s tough to pull that off if the same articles appear on different domains. So Google uses filters to push copycats to the margins. Some people call this the “duplicate penalty,” but that’s a misnomer. Google isn’t slapping hands. Keep reading »