[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 Courtney Lowery of NewWest.Net writes about how a local disaster illustrated [...]

Shortly before 10 this morning, Amy Trachtman heard what seemed like a military jet zoom past her apartment building in Jersey City, N.J. Her first instinct? Tweet about it.
“just had a mild heart attack from a jet plane grazing the apartment…” Trachtman wrote at 9:59 a.m., becoming — as far as I can tell — [...]

As we noted yesterday, the Pulitzer Prize for breaking news went to The New York Times for its coverage of the Eliot Spitzer scandal. But since breaking news is perhaps the one area where Internet journalism most outshines print, we wanted to take a look at the two other finalists in the category and tease [...]

Back in the day — you know, five years ago — when a big news story had been written, edited, fact-checked, vetted, proofread, and anguished over one last time, an adrenaline-pumped editor would cry out, “Run it!” As in, the presses.
When The New York Times was ready to report that Eliot Spitzer, then governor of [...]

One of the most popular hashtags on Twitter today is #iagaymarriage, which people are using to comment on this morning’s Iowa Supreme Court decision legalizing same-sex marriage. That’s fairly standard for big, breaking news, but this isn’t: The hashtag was created by Iowa’s largest newspaper, The Des Moines Register.
In anticipation of the ruling, the Register’s [...]

If newspapers are the first draft of history, then consider these the first sketches.
In the video above, San Diego developer and artist Tim Schwartz shows off several visualizations of history he created with The New York Times’ entire 158-year corpus as his dataset. They are alternately quirky, beautiful, and probing — hundreds of millions of [...]

By now, I would hope that most journalists with an interest in online or social media have heard about Twitter, and are at least open to the idea (if they haven’t adopted it entirely) that this group-chat/instant messaging hybrid can be a powerful tool for tracking breaking news events. For me, the tipping point was [...]