Everyblock won a $1,100,000 grant from the Knight Foundation in 2007 to build its innovative platform for aggregating local news and information. Two years later, soon after the Knight grant had expired, founder Adrian Holovaty announced that MSNBC had acquired EveryBlock.
The sale raised questions about nonprofit funding of for-profit ventures. After all, Knight had essentially [...]

Okay, question time: Imagine you’re a major national newspaper whose crosstown archrival has somehow obtained two million pages of explosive documents that outed your country’s biggest political scandal of the decade. They’ve had a team of professional journalists on the job for a month, slamming out a string of blockbuster stories as they find them [...]

— How and where Google makes its money. Notice the string of red “X”s next to Google News (and many other products) — it’s the unending wave of cash generated by its advertising business that allows Google to spend so much of its energies on products that don’t raise a nickel.
— If you were planning [...]

— Andy Dickinson argues the Kindle-like device the news companies are hoping for misunderstands how people interact with a newspaper.
[T]he compelling feature of newspaper as a medium is that we are prepared to throw it away. Bin it, shred it, leave it on the bus. Whatever we do we are happy to spend money [...]

The Medill grad students at the Crunchberry Project have a good post examining the various ways of getting comments from readers. Interestingly (and smartly), they define “comments” broadly to include any sort of feedback from the audience — including polls, star ratings, Slashdot-style up/down voting, Salon’s letters to the editor, and even Mad Libs-style fill-in-the-blanks.
I [...]