On Tuesday, the Icelandic parliament is expected to introduce a measure aimed at making the country an international center for investigative journalism publishing, by passing the strongest combination of source protection, freedom of speech, and libel-tourism prevention laws in the world.
Supporters of the proposal say the move would make Iceland an “offshore publishing center” [...]

Google News launched a Spotlight section back in September to highlight “in-depth pieces of lasting value.” Initial response was positive, but with a few months under its belt I checked in to see if the feature is living up to that first flush of excitement.
The verdict?
It all depends on how you define “in-depth” and “lasting [...]

The Investigative News Network, a coalition of nonprofit news organizations that met for the first time this summer, is getting closer to launch: They’ve raised more than $500,000, one of the group’s leaders said today.
We first wrote about INN after their meeting in Pocantico Hills, N.Y., where the leaders of more than 20 nonprofits discussed [...]

The element of the Downie/Schudson report that’s triggered the most fuss is its call for a larger role for the government in funding journalism — the creation of a “Fund for Local News,” supported by taxes or fees, that would support news organizations. And it’s true that the United States is a global anomaly in [...]

The latest edition of American Journalism Review has an in-depth piece on the thinking behind the San Diego Union-Tribune’s willingness to spin off (though that’s not the official phraseology) its investigative team as an independent nonprofit, the Watchdog Institute.
Rather than wait for the ax to fall on her four-person team, investigative editor Lorie Hearn did [...]

A quick addendum to Zach’s post on The New York Times Magazine’s great Katrina story. While some will argue that one epic story isn’t the best journalistic use of $400,000 (or whatever the final bill is), I think the folks at ProPublica and the Times are right to point out how expensive quality investigative reporting [...]

The cover story in this weekend’s New York Times Magazine is a 13,000-word investigation of the New Orleans hospital where patients were euthanized in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. It’s a remarkable and tragic story that may also represent the most expensive single piece of print journalism in years.
This is the new economics of news [...]

[The staff at our sister publication, Nieman Reports, is putting the finishing touches on its Spring 2009 issue. Its theme is one dear to our hearts: "Voyages of Discovery Into New Media." The issue features a lot of great pieces by some of the people leading the way in online journalism — Joel Kramer of [...]

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 [...]

The public radio program Marketplace deals with some pretty complicated issues — sometimes too complex to be summarized in a minute or two of airtime. So senior editor Paddy Hirsch is making a series of short videos explaining difficult concepts: naked shorts, credit default swaps, collateralized debt obligations, and so on. They’re really quite clear [...]