Planning his Knight News Challenge entry, Joe Boydston followed his own advice: think small. He won a modest $10,000 to develop a desktop application that will allow web-challenged journalists to drag text files into a folder and have them automatically published online. “Someone at the conference asked me if I regretted not requesting more money,” [...]

Jim Schachter, editor for digital initiatives at The New York Times, isn’t naïve about the business prospects of two blogs the newspaper launched this week for communities in Brooklyn and northeastern New Jersey. In fact, he told me yesterday that the sites will never make money.
“If every single person who lives in Fort [...]

I want to quickly highlight one exchange in that Aron Pilhofer interview I linked the other day:
Q: Are there any free or open-source products out there that small-town newspapers can use?
A: Everything we use is free and open-source. Our platform is Ruby on Rails backed by Mysql databases running on Ubuntu servers. The cost here [...]