[Jeff Israely, a Time magazine foreign correspondent in Europe, is in the planning stages of a news startup — a "new global news website." He details his experience as a new news entrepreneur at his site, but he'll occasionally be describing the startup process here at the Lab. —Josh]
I realized not long ago that it’s [...]

[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]
Google Buzzes social media: For the second week in a row, the biggest story at the intersection of journalism and new media is an innovation by Google: This week, the talk was [...]

In online-nonprofit-news terms, Charlottesville Tomorrow is an old timer. It’s been covering the growth and development around the Virginia city since 2005 — back when “twitter” was still a term confined to ornithological circles.
Born from executive director Brian Wheeler’s interest in local government (he serves as chairman of the county school board), the privately-funded Charlottesville [...]

Can Twitter be a tool of cultural diplomacy?
That was the heady topic David Pogue, New York Times technology columnist and CBS News tech correspondent, addressed Monday during a symposium at Syracuse University. He was part of a panel trying to figure out how to transcend conflict through culture.
Now, the way I understood it, cultural diplomacy [...]

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 Vaughn Hagerty of the Wilmington Star-News about the paper's new experiment [...]

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. [...]

To me, one of the most interesting aspects of AnnArbor.com is its reliance on community bloggers for a large portion of the site’s content. It’s also the aspect most likely to give many journalists the heebie-jeebies.
AnnArbor.com launched when The Ann Arbor News closed in late July, ending the newspaper’s 174-year history. It was a sad [...]

For decades, news organizations have tried to figure out how to capture those illusive female readers. A room full of editors — likely by and large white and male — would metaphorically bang their heads against the wall, trying to conjure what that confounding group that makes an estimated 80 percent of the buying decisions [...]

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 [...]

Newspapers have long viewed themselves as a kind of virtual public space — a place for community members to trade information and learn about each other. New media, however, has largely thrived on specialization: think clubhouses, not the town square.
With a $40,000 grant from the Knight News Challenge, Boston artist John Ewing hopes to [...]

[Our series profiling winners of the 2009 Knight News Challenge continues with Michael Andersen writing about Gotham Gazette's grant for a local wiki called Councilpedia. —Josh]
Every newsroom’s got them: A few dozen gadflies who’ve been in town forever and are proud to have their favorite reporters on speed-dial.
The little team at New York City’s Web-only [...]

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 [...]

Last week we published two videos from my interview with Alan Murray, deputy managing editor of The Wall Street Journal, covering his wisdom on charging for content and his thoughts on changes at the Journal under Rupert Murdoch.
In this third installment, Murray, who oversees the Journal’s website, talks about what qualities he looks for in [...]

For the past several years I’ve had a nagging suspicion that it would be the small community newspapers that would survive the bloodbath that is consuming our major metros, because they never lost focus of what we’ve recently taken to calling hyperlocalism. Howard Owens, late of Gatehouse, now of The Batavian, does an excellent job [...]