The New York Times’ announcement that it would be charging for some access to its website, starting in 2011, rekindled yet another round of debate about paywalls for online news. Beyond the practical question (will it work?) or the theoretical one (what does this mean for the Times’ notion of the “public”?), there remains another [...]

It’s not just newspapers struggling to find their way in the digital era. Many content companies — broadcasting, film, music, publishing, and gaming — are grappling with the same business model uncertainty.
In a recent survey (pdf), the consulting firm Accenture asked 102 content-industry leaders to pick the biggest hurdle they face. Overwhelmingly, executives pointed to [...]

One of the keys to success in the online news game is making sure people who might be interested in your content can find it. And the most common path for those seekers goes straight through the multihued logo of search giant Google.
Google’s genius is using algorithms to determine the value of content — what [...]

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 [...]

The weddings and celebrations section of The New York Times can sometimes read like a Mad Lib: insert Ivy League degree here, mother’s medical specialty there. Now, couples submitting their nuptials to the Times can do so with an online form that will truly automate the process. And while input fields and dialog boxes may [...]

[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 [...]

Computer-assisted reporting or CAR has been around, well — ever since there were computers. Even when I was in journalism school (which was longer ago than I care to remember), we learned about databases we could search, etc. But the explosion of Web-based tools and ways of sifting through and sharing data has created [...]

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 [...]

Today marks the launch of a big new project from our friends a couple blocks away at the Berkman Center. It’s called Media Cloud, and its aim is to allow researchers and individuals to use data to observe how stories unfold, both in the mainstream media and in the blogs.
Media Cloud is a massive data [...]

Ever since The New York Times began rolling out a series of APIs four months ago, I’ve been eagerly anticipating what might come of them. Tomorrow’s event at the newspaper’s midtown headquarters, Times Open, is intended to encourage development around the APIs and could point in a few new directions for news delivery and consumption.

— You know they take software development seriously at the Times when they create their own nerd conference to support it.
— Mark Glaser reports on the RJI Talkfest at Mizzou.
— Both Martin and I are quoted extensively in this piece, in the alt-weekly in Lafayettte, Louisiana, about cutbacks at The Advertiser, the daily paper there. [...]

The New York Times has unveiled a “Visualization Lab” that allows readers to create graphs and charts based on data Times staffers compile. You can create bar charts, scatterplots, tag clouds, maps, stack graphs, tree maps, and other forms.
While they’re still imperfect (a little explanatory text would go a long way on some of [...]

The Medill grad students at the Crunchberry Project have a good post examining the various ways of getting comments from readers. Interestingly (and smartly), they define “comments” broadly to include any sort of feedback from the audience — including polls, star ratings, Slashdot-style up/down voting, Salon’s letters to the editor, and even Mad Libs-style fill-in-the-blanks.
I [...]