In October, The Huffington Post launched a new section with an unusual goal: turning an audience of passive readers into activists for good causes. The section’s underlying business model is novel, too: All of its content is outsourced to an outside company, a for-profit firm that has nonprofits for clients.
In exchange for that content, [...]

I’ve helped organize a lot of future of journalism conferences this year, and have done some research for a few policy-oriented “future of journalism” white papers. And let’s face it: as Alan Mutter told On the Media this weekend, we’re edging close to the point of extreme rehash.
This isn’t to say there won’t be more [...]

The web has disrupted the way news organizations think about geography and concepts like “national” and “local.” National newspapers like The New York Times and Wall Street Journal are planning local editions in the Bay Area and elsewhere, where online competition has weakened local newspapers. National brands like ESPN and the Huffington Post are launching [...]

From direct mail to web design, A/B testing is considered a gold standard of user research: Show one version to half your audience and another version to the other half; compare results, and adjust accordingly. Some very cool examples include Google’s obsessive testing of subtle design tweaks and Dustin Curtis’ experiment with direct commands and [...]

In my last post, I spent a lot of time laying out a fairly abstract framework for how we can think intelligently about future kinds of news organizations. I argued they could be usefully evaluated and charted on four factors: the type of work they do, how institutionalized they are, how many resources they have, [...]

Go figure: When we’re talking about a new media ecosystem, writers and reporters get all the press. But one in two of the country’s daily print journalists is an editor or a boss. What’s going to happen to them?
Cornelius Swart, the 37-year-old publisher of a respected neighborhood monthly in Portland, Ore., is working on an [...]

Michael Wolff, whose two-year-old site, Newser, is frequently cited as a model for the future of journalism, titled a typically provocative blog post yesterday, “I’m Proud to Kill the News.” He made the usual case that news aggregators understand the web better than newspaper websites. Readers, he said, “come to Newser, rather than the New [...]

The Associated Press document we posted yesterday is in line with the consortium’s most bellicose rhetoric on copyright. It begins, “The evidence is everywhere: original news content is being scraped, syndicated and monetized without fair compensation to those who produce, report and verify it.”
Because we obtained the document, the AP put me on the [...]

Recent posts by Patricia Handschiegel, Amy Gahran, Dana Chinn, and Bill Grueskin have driven home a crucial point about online journalism: Traffic and page views are nice, but engaged readers and loyal audiences are more important. Here, I’d like to point out a new tool that builds on that notion.
Even on the infinitely measurable web, [...]

It’s been four months since Josh predicted that a news organization would sue The Huffington Post for copyright violation over its aggregation of headlines, ledes, and article summaries. The interim has been marked by saber-rattling, settlements, and dubious proposals for changes to federal law.
But I’m still hoping to see that lawsuit — not because [...]

The next time someone tells you that the news industry’s financial crisis is hurting coverage of the federal government, point them to this chart. The Project for Excellence in Journalism has released new figures on the Capitol Hill press corps, and they show that Washington is still teeming with hacks. They’re just working for new [...]

The fascinating, if flawed, meme-tracking study that I wrote about yesterday is full of rich data on the mechanics of American political journalism. To review: The paper analyzes commonly repeated phrases from a broad swath of media coverage in the last three months of the 2008 presidential election. Phrases like “lipstick on a pig,” “No [...]

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 [...]

“TPM started literally out of nothing,” Josh Marshall, the founder and editor of Talking Points Memo, was telling me by phone this week from the site’s new loft in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan. “There was no money behind it. There wasn’t anything like that. And for a long time, the operation was kind of [...]

Behold the power of Yahoo: A link at the top of the site’s front page helped send more than 9 million page views to The New York Times in the span of two hours last week, breaking records for web traffic at the newspaper. That’s per a memo sent to staffers this morning, which said [...]