The sad-spin headline might be this: “Dreams of 2,000 journalists crushed.” But when you have nearly 2,500 applications for what at most will become a few dozen Knight News Challenge grants, there’s necessarily plenty of disappointment to spread around.
I talked with Jose Zamora, who works on journalism programs for Knight, recently to get an [...]

[I've asked Seth Lewis, a former Miami Herald editor and smart journalism professor-in-training at the University of Texas, to join our cast of occasional commentators here at the Lab. One of his primary focuses will be looking at the changing world of journalism schools. Here's an introduction. —Josh]
Last year saw no shortage of future-of-journalism conferences. [...]

The legacy press — or the traditional media, or whatever we’re calling newspapers these days — has one main challenge for 2010, and it’s not finding a new business model. It has to do with vision. It has to do with being able to imagine a world that does not yet exist.
While the news media’s [...]

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 [...]

When you’re a struggling metro daily trying to navigate the world of social media, it makes sense to look to allies in nontraditional places. When the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle partnered with a techies at a local grad school, it found developers enthusiastic to work with old media stalwarts — and even a few who [...]

There’s a friendly rivalry among the various university-based fellowship programs for journalists. It goes without saying, obviously, that the finest is the granddaddy of them all: the Nieman Fellowships here at Harvard, founded in 1938. (Along with being the finest and oldest, it is also my alma mater and my employer, so color me biased.) [...]

In an approach rather different from Microsoft’s vision of content delivery in the future, which I described yesterday, MediaNews Group has announced plans for I-News, a system that will print your own customized newspaper on your own printer:
The “individuated” stories selected by each reader are sent to a special printer being developed for MediaNews that [...]

Jimmy Fallon’s new Conan-O’Brien-replacing late-night show debuts tonight. Will it be any good? Probably not, at least at first. (Conan wasn’t much good when he started, either.)
But this article by Nicholas Carlson gives me some hope that Fallon’s show is ready to innovate in the right directions. And it also provides a few lessons that [...]

A new way of reading The New York Times online turns the traditional web-browsing experience on its side. The prototype, which they’re calling Article Skimmer until someone comes up with a better name, presents the latest news in a horizontal grid that looks and feels radically different from the vertically oriented nytimes.com homepage. Check out [...]

At the risk of being burned at the stake by my fellow journalists, I wanted to pass along a thought that occurred to me recently about the wave of layoffs and mass firings that has been rolling through newsrooms across North America — namely, what if this is actually a good thing? Please, hear me [...]

So, what to do about this over-abundance of advertising inventory in our local markets?
Unlike some in this industry who are looking, again, at some form of paid content as the solution to the revenue crisis, I still believe that there’s a lot of life left in the ad-supported model. We haven’t been particularly creative in [...]

NYU’s Jay Rosen doesn’t seem too thrilled by the ProPublica/NYT application for the Knight News Challenge — at least based on his Twittering tonight:

Rosen’s point seems to be that $1 million going to big dogs like the Times would mean $1 million less for the small, scrappy startup ideas that the News Challenge is probably [...]

The deadline for applications in the third Knight News Challenge is this Saturday at 11:59 p.m. But don’t let the closeness on the calendar intimidate you: The initial application is quick and easy. So if you have only the core nugget of an innovative idea and haven’t worked through things like budgets and implementation, enter [...]

David Talbot, the founder of Salon, presented his (rather depressing) vision of contemporary journalism at the Nieman Foundation a few weeks ago as part of a Nieman Narrative conference:
We’re entering what I like to call sort of the Road Warrior phase — of American life in general, but certainly of journalism. It’s an era of [...]