[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. Read his first installment here. —Josh]
I am [...]

The crowdfunded journalism site Spot.us unveiled changes to the site today based on feedback from its users and writers. Users can now easily follow updates on a reporter’s pitch and donate their time or expertise to a story, instead of just their money.
The basic premise of Spot.us stays the same: Writers post a story pitch [...]

As journalism evolves, re-invents, whichever action verb you’d like, I think we need to pay more attention to how news gathering is changing — or should be changing. Yes, crowdsourcing — when a news organization uses a large group of regular folks to report a story — gets a lot of ink, but I’m not [...]

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, [...]

This is what a profitable post-paper newsroom looks like:

And this is what it feels like: 15 hours a day, seven days a week, from the 7 a.m. check-in with your spouse-turned-business-partner to the midnight bookkeeping.
No kids, no vacations, no car. No office; your only away-from-home base is a former Main Street antique shop that sells [...]

As news organizations roll out their coverage plans for Sonia Sotomayor’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearings next week, some interesting innovation is coming from a player some critics have labeled stodgy: the Associated Press.
AP is promising readers insider access to the toughest ticket in Washington with the Twitter feed AP_Courtside. Some tweets will respond to [...]

[We're doing another Lab Book Club this week and next, on Bill Wasik's And Then There's This. Today, Ian Crouch summarizes and reviews the book's arguments; we'll have more excerpts from our interview with Wasik in the coming days. —Josh]
Bill Wasik’s And Then There’s This: How Stories Live and Die in Viral Culture deceptively slim [...]

Two quick thoughts I want to pull up from the comments of Michael’s post on the Guardian’s success crowdsourcing the analysis of documents in the MP expenses scandal:
— Aron Pilhofer of The New York Times (and DocumentCloud) notes the crucial role Amazon’s EC2 plays in projects like these: “Even more than a framework (we use [...]

Okay, question time: Imagine you’re a major national newspaper whose crosstown archrival has somehow obtained two million pages of explosive documents that outed your country’s biggest political scandal of the decade. They’ve had a team of professional journalists on the job for a month, slamming out a string of blockbuster stories as they find them [...]

Citizen journalism further came of age this week as regular citizens using tools like Twitter and Facebook out-reported much of the mainstream media, keeping the world riveted with news and photos pouring out of Iran. It seems particularly appropriate, then, that the Knight News Challenge also announced its grant recipients this week. Many of the [...]

[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 [...]

As we noted yesterday, the Pulitzer Prize for breaking news went to The New York Times for its coverage of the Eliot Spitzer scandal. But since breaking news is perhaps the one area where Internet journalism most outshines print, we wanted to take a look at the two other finalists in the category and tease [...]

I hope it won’t seem desperately lame to reveal that I have long craved an RSS feed for the left rail of Romenesko. You see, two or three times a day, everyone’s favorite media-news crier posts a quick, little story outside his main feed. These are often the most interesting articles he posts — as [...]

Our friend Jeff Howe — author of Crowdsourcing, which was the subject of our first Lab Book Club — was back in town last week to give a talk to our other friends at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. At one level, it’s about his book, which centers on what happens when jobs [...]

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 [...]