In 2006, Boston.com launched a local search tool that was supposed to be a big part of the site’s future. The project made perfect sense on paper: Readers would get search results focused on eastern Massachusetts. Those results would mix the best of the machine and human worlds by using algorithms and editors’ picks. Next [...]

Josh Marshall, the founder and editor of Talking Points Memo, just spoke by webcam to a conference at Kent State University, and it was a revealing discussion. He said that TPM’s readership is now at 1.8 million unique visitors per month, which is up from the 1.5 million he told me in July. “We’ve had [...]

[Our sister publication Nieman Reports is out with its latest issue, and its focus is the impact of social media on journalism. There are lots of interesting articles, and we'll be highlighting a few here over the next few days. Here's a piece by Shane Richmond of The Daily Telegraph about how engagement with the [...]

When you’re a struggling metro daily trying to navigate the world of social media, it makes sense to look to allies in nontraditional places. When the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle partnered with a techies at a local grad school, it found developers enthusiastic to work with old media stalwarts — and even a few who [...]

New York is furious about the mayor’s new Twitter habit, Chicago is snickering at an Oprah lawsuit, and Los Angeles continues to mourn the passing of director John Hughes.
These city-wide emotional check-ins are plucked from NBC’s recently launched local web network. The network’s 10 sites, all associated with NBC owned-and-operated broadcast stations, feature “mood” applications [...]

For decades, news organizations have tried to figure out how to capture those illusive female readers. A room full of editors — likely by and large white and male — would metaphorically bang their heads against the wall, trying to conjure what that confounding group that makes an estimated 80 percent of the buying decisions [...]

CircLabs, the hard-to-describe startup that aims to create new revenue streams for news sites, has detailed a little more about its plans. And Martin Langeveld, who’s involved in the project, has written more about it too. (You know Martin from his writings here.) Their initial product, Circulate, seems to be a browser plugin that tracks [...]

Running a marathon this fall? The New York Times wants to be your coach.
The Times recently debuted what may be a first for a traditional newspaper: an interactive marathon training application called Run Well. It lets you choose an upcoming marathon to run and offers six training programs — from famous coaches including Greg [...]

[Our series profiling winners of the 2009 Knight News Challenge continues with Michael Andersen writing about Gotham Gazette's grant for a local wiki called Councilpedia. —Josh]
Every newsroom’s got them: A few dozen gadflies who’ve been in town forever and are proud to have their favorite reporters on speed-dial.
The little team at New York City’s Web-only [...]

[Here's the final part of Dan Froomkin's essay on the ills facing American newspapers, where he proposes a few answers. You can catch up on the entire essay here. —Josh]
So much of what we do, we do because it’s always been done that way. But here are a few examples of how writing for a [...]

A couple months ago, I posted a 20-minute video of our friend David Ardia at a newspaper conference we both spoke at in November. His topic was Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 and the legal protection it provides to people who run web sites.
But David was just the first of two [...]

James Cox just wanted the news on his phone. But the year was 2006, and if you can remember that distant age, getting the latest headlines on your mobile device wasn’t yet trivially easy.
CNN already had a longstanding email news alert that hit inboxes whenever a plane crashed or foreign capital fell. And out in [...]

Here’s the third and final part of my interview with Jesse Thorn, host of public radio’s The Sound of Young America. (Here’s my intro post, Part 1, and Part 2.)
In this excerpt we talk about MaxFunCon, his upcoming weekend convention of fans of his radio show and a mix of former guests and other interesting [...]

Here’s Part 2 of my interview with Jesse Thorn, the host of public radio’s The Sound of Young America. (Here’s my intro post and Part 1.)
In this part of our conversation, we talk about the state of the radio business — both commercial and public — and its unwillingness to imagine a truly new model [...]

As promised yesterday, here’s Part 1 of my interview with Jesse Thorn, the host of public radio’s The Sound of Young America. (Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say “The Sound of Young America podcast,” given what Jesse says below about his interactions with both the public radio mainstream and his devoted core audience online.) [...]