Sure, the digital age might be killing professional muckraking in local markets, and most of the spadework that becomes local news stories might still come from newspapers. But a new empirical study suggests that all the new online din isn’t crowding out serious policy debate.
Just the opposite: Startup news sites are drawing far more attention [...]

While the New York Times newsroom deals with another round of job cuts, one area of the newspaper is actually growing. Fourteen jobs are currently open at the Times website, most of them for software developers and engineers.
On Thursday, the digital staff gathered for an “all hands” meeting at TheTimesCenter to hear updates on various [...]

As he absorbs more responsibility for the digital operations of The New York Times, executive editor Bill Keller is trying something that anthropologists would call participant observation: For three weeks, he’s been limiting his exposure to the print edition and consuming the Times in its various digital forms, “trying to better understand the joys and [...]

Gawker Media is unveiling an innovative and unruly twist on traditional reader forums this morning. The new feature, part of an otherwise modest redesign across the company’s nine blogs, could transform tag pages, typically little more than archives of old posts, into commenter free-for-alls and transparent tip lines.
Readers are now greeted with a text box [...]

Since I became the first “communities editor” for The Globe and Mail newspaper in Toronto almost a year ago, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what makes for a good community — a healthy community — and what makes for a bad one. I’ve looked at every newspaper I can think of and [...]

[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 Shane Richmond of The Daily Telegraph about how engagement with the [...]

New York is furious about the mayor’s new Twitter habit, Chicago is snickering at an Oprah lawsuit, and Los Angeles continues to mourn the passing of director John Hughes.
These city-wide emotional check-ins are plucked from NBC’s recently launched local web network. The network’s 10 sites, all associated with NBC owned-and-operated broadcast stations, feature “mood” applications [...]

If you’re a Colorado Rockies fan, you can follow your team in any number of ways. There are the obvious national outlets, the Associated Press, the hometown Denver Post, and — before this year’s spring training at least — the Rocky Mountain News, R.I.P. Then there are the television networks and radio stations, and, perhaps [...]

[Here's the final part of Dan Froomkin's essay on the ills facing American newspapers, where he proposes a few answers. You can catch up on the entire essay here. —Josh]
So much of what we do, we do because it’s always been done that way. But here are a few examples of how writing for a [...]

Like a lot of newspapers and media outlets, the paper I work for in Canada — the Globe and Mail — has been experimenting a lot with a great live-blogging and live-discussion tool called Cover It Live. The software comes from a company located in Toronto, but is being used by everyone from Newsweek and [...]

A couple months ago, I posted a 20-minute video of our friend David Ardia at a newspaper conference we both spoke at in November. His topic was Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 and the legal protection it provides to people who run web sites.
But David was just the first of two [...]

[As we mentioned earlier, the next issue of Nieman Reports is almost ready to be unveiled. On Monday, we gave you a sneak peak at one of its articles, by St. Louis Beacon editor Margaret Wolf Freivogel.
We've got one more story to share before the rest of the issue goes online at Nieman Reports' web [...]

— Jack Lail has a few brief videos from an ONA Nashville conference on comments and using social media as journalists.
— It’s a week old, but this Wall Street Journal article details what happens when a web site decides to give its audience the choice to turn off ads.
— Chris Anderson gives a preview of [...]

I wish every managing editor in the country could see this 20-minute video. I’ve heard so many misconceptions over the years about news organizations’ legal ability to police, manage, or otherwise edit the comments left on their web sites. They say “the lawyers” tell them they can’t edit out an obscenity or remove a rude [...]

On Friday, I sat in on the panel of commentators on Beat the Press, the weekly media-criticism show on Boston’s public television station WGBH. One of the topics: comments on news sites, and how news organizations should deal with troublesome commenters. Here’s eight minutes of our discussion, featuring Dan Kennedy, Joe Sciacca, and my colleague [...]