[This is the first essay in our series examining the evolving relationship between NGOs and journalism, produced with Penn's Center for Global Communication Studies. Kimberly Abbott of the International Crisis Group leads off by exploring the pros and cons of established news organizations relying on NGOs for help in their reporting. We're collecting the entire [...]

Our friend Marion Fremont-Smith at the Harvard Kennedy School has just issued an important paper on the nonprofit model in journalism. If you’re part of a news organization that is considering switching to nonprofit status, it’s definitely worth a read.
While there are plenty of news organizations operating as nonprofits, there have been looming questions around [...]

The panelists at last night’s Centennial Conversation on the the Future of Journalism, hosted by The Christian Science Monitor in Boston, identified two dichotomies at the heart of online news media: “value vs. values” and “perfection vs. good enough.” Though both issues are endemic to journalism in any medium, they seem particularly important as the [...]

Two events that may seem unconnected but aren’t: Tuesday’s announcement of The Christian Science Monitor leaving the daily print world and Wednesday’s editorial in The New York Times damning the administration of Quinnipiac University for clamping down on a new online student publication, Quad News.
The first is all about shuffling off the cost of daily [...]

Other people’s thoughts on the Monitor’s moves:
– Design guru Mario Garcia likes the idea of shifting away from daily, but isn’t thrilled with the prototype of the new weekly. “Here is where I am somewhat disappointed…seems a bit primitive in terms of style, somewhat clunky in its use of page architecture, and not truly what [...]

After thinking about the Christian Science Monitor’s plan, the most puzzling part is the (non-free, price TBA) daily PDF edition, delivered over email. PDF editions have always felt to me like a poorly reasoned set of training wheels for the transition online. They look like familiar print editions, and they speak the same design language, [...]

The Christian Science Monitor took some preventive medicine today in planning to close the newspaper’s daily print edition and ramp up its website. Coverage of the announcement has tended toward breathless: MediaPost believes it signals “a fundamental shift in the publishing industry,” while Gawker says the Monitor “will be the first of many.” Certainly, the [...]