[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 raft of ideas at SXSW: The center of the journalism-and-tech world this week has been Austin, Texas, site of the annual conference South by Southwest. The part we’re most concerned about [...]

[Our friend Mark Coddington has spent the past several months writing weekly summaries of what's happened in the the changing world of journalism — both the important stories and the debates that came up around them online. I've liked them so much that I've asked him to join us here at the Lab. So every [...]

Our own Mathew Ingram moderated a panel discussion last week between two luminaries in the future-of-content-online space: Clay Shirky (who readers of this site know well) and Andrew Keen, whose thoughts on the subject can probably be sussed out from the title of his book, The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet is Killing [...]

NYU professor and Internet thinker Clay Shirky gave a talk Tuesday at the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy, our friends just on the other side of Harvard Square. His subject was the future of accountability journalism in a world of declining newspapers. Even for those of us familiar with his ideas, [...]

No matter how many times people like Clay Shirky or Mike Masnick try to pop the bubble of faith around micropayments as a cure for what ails the newspaper industry (or even the media industry as a whole), another believer emerges to argue that a secure and extensible micropayment system is a big part of [...]

Even as he leads newspaper publishers toward charging for their websites, Steve Brill remains skeptical of one oft-mentioned model for making money online: micropayments. In our conversation yesterday, he told me that his startup, Journalism Online, isn’t expecting newspapers to reap much revenue from per-article fees, though readers will have that option.
“I think that people [...]

Us Now is a new hour-long British documentary about online collaboration, distributed intelligence, and the kinds of joint efforts that the Internet makes possible. It’s available free online:

Of most interest to journalists may be the presence of NYU’s Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody and that blog post about newspapers everyone linked to in [...]

So you’ve read Clay Shirky’s widely-linked “Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable,” and you know why the unthinkable is nigh, but Shirky has no answer (italics added):
So who covers all that news if some significant fraction of the currently employed newspaper people lose their jobs?   I don’t know. Nobody knows. We’re collectively living through 1500, when [...]

On Thursday, the non-profit investigative journalism outfit ProPublica named Amanda Michel its first “editor of distributed reporting.” Her title alone suggests the future of news gathering, and so does her background: Michel was director of The Huffington Post’s citizen-journalism effort, Off the Bus, which enlisted 12,000 volunteers to cover the 2008 presidential campaign.
Michel wrote a [...]

Is it possible to be fascinated by an issue and yet tired of it at the same time? If so, then micropayments for online news pretty much fits that bill for me. I know that it’s a crucial time for the newspaper business (which pays my salary), and I know that many thoughtful and intelligent [...]

— Mario Garcia applauds upcoming changes at Newsweek and says hurrah for more opinion: “Objective journalism, in this case, is more about the accuracy and fairness of the piece, and NOT necessarily in keeping viewpoints out of the mix.”
— Clay Shirky brings the smackdown on micropayments.
— Simon Owens writes about The Printed Blog, which I [...]

— Adrian Monck is writing a series of posts on the interplay between journalism and democracy. In this one, he discusses the alternative sources of information for citizens.
— Bill Densmore (and others) are reporting from their meeting in Missouri around the Information Valet Project.
— James Gleick argues the book-publishing industry should go back to the [...]

London Tory broadsheet The Telegraph is reversing the traditional copyflow: having reporters post their stories online, then editing them once they’re up. Assistant editor Justin Williams:
We’re experimenting with post moderation on web stories — so we have either the desk or, in an increasing number of instances, writers publishing all stories direct to the website. [...]