Remember when journalists were merely overworked and underpaid? In today’s hypercompetitive market, it’s not enough to be a tenacious reporter or an elegant writer; you also need to be a tech-savvy coder, a capable videographer, a constant conversation-engager, a shameless self-promoter, and, in general, a worthy bottom-line-improver. Call it the soft bigotry of high expectations: [...]

When The New York Times and New York University announced last week that they would collaborate on a news site covering the East Village neighborhood, it got me thinking: Beyond Manhattan, what could this mean for the future of journalism education?
While it’s true that this isn’t the first pro-academic partnership — even the Times already [...]

When big news breaks, you can be sure that Wikipedia will cover the hell out of it. Not so much on Wikinews, the collaborative-journalism project that has faltered since launching in December 2004.
For some insight on why Wikipedia has been a more successful news source than Wikinews, I talked to Andrew Lih, who teaches at [...]

The Investigative News Network, a coalition of nonprofit news organizations that met for the first time this summer, is getting closer to launch: They’ve raised more than $500,000, one of the group’s leaders said today.
We first wrote about INN after their meeting in Pocantico Hills, N.Y., where the leaders of more than 20 nonprofits discussed [...]

When Greg Munno started CNYSpeaks in June 2008, he was the civic engagement editor for the Syracuse Post-Standard in upstate New York. Inspired by the Philadelphia Inquirer’s Great Expectations project, CNYSpeaks was aimed at rallying the Syracuse community around the idea of improving the city, and it included a blog, news stories and residents’ forums. [...]

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 [...]

In what may be one of the first publisher-owned web advertising collaboratives, a group of progressive media outlets, including Mother Jones, The Nation, and Air America, is launching the Ad Progress Network, a “one stop buy” for web advertising which is planned to debut early this fall. 
The basic idea of an ad network — smaller [...]

The real payoff of Rebooting The News — the weekly collaboration between journalism professor Jay Rosen and programmer Dave Winer hasn’t been so much that Dave is starting to think like a journalist, but that Jay is thinking more and more like a geek:
“One of the features of a rebooted news system would actually be [...]

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 [...]

As we mentioned previously, it’s time for a new issue of Nieman Reports, our sister quarterly here at the Nieman Foundation. Over the past couple of weeks, we’ve given you previews of two of its stories: Joel Kramer on lessons from running MinnPost and Margaret Wolf Freivogel on her startup, the St. Louis Beacon.
The entire [...]

Here’s some more information about the Knight News Challenge application by ProPublica and The New York Times that generated some buzz and criticism earlier this month. They’re seeking a $1 million grant to develop an online repository of primary-source documents that anyone could contribute to or take from. I spoke at length with developers at [...]