Today I’m attending Making Media Work, a half-day panel in Washington, which is the kickoff event for the New America Foundation’s Knight Media Policy Initiative. (You may remember the announcement that they were hiring part-time fellows a few months back.) It should be an interesting discussion; for starters, the talk today is already starting to [...]

[In October, the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy issued its report on how our media need to evolve to serve the public interest in the digital age. The effort included some big names: Google's Marissa Mayer, former solicitor general Ted Olson, ex-L.A. Times editor John Carroll, former FCC chairman [...]

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 Len Downie/Michael Schudson report on reconstructing journalism joins the growing consensus that journalism — the kind of accountability, watchdog and investigative reporting that helps provide checks and balances in a democracy — has become a public good in the digital age. We all need it, but few are willing to pay for it in [...]

Having spent more than three years doing dissertation research on the changing journalistic ecosystem in Philadelphia, I was excited to see Technically Philly get a great write up last week. And having spent the past six months as a research assistant with the Downie-Schudson report on reconstructing American journalism, I see a connection between Technically [...]

We are not lacking deep lamentations and grand plans for the future of journalism (clever commentary is abundant as well). New additions to this canon appear weekly, and many have a reactionary bent with lots of chest thumping and hand wringing. It’s often a bit much — which is why the appearance of a long-view, [...]

Leonard Downie, Jr., the longtime executive editor of The Washington Post, spoke at the Nieman Foundation’s 70th Anniversary Convocation Weekend Saturday here in Cambridge. Here’s the 23-minute video, the first of several from the weekend. (A full transcript of his talk is below the jump.)
Downie’s topic was the ethical and moral obligations of journalists online. [...]