Take two simple words: online advertising and replace them with “digital marketing.”

Within that simple word change,we see a world shifting, and one of huge, fundamental importance to news publishing.

[The publishing power of the Internet has opened up new possibilities for NGOs seeking to spread their messages. But is this new access changing the kinds of messages NGOs create, or is it reinforcing old paradigms? Natalie Fenton of Goldsmiths, University of London, examines how the online landscape has changed NGO communications. This is the [...]

On Saturday, Gawker broke a big story: It ran a first-person account by a man named Robert Thomas who said Richard Heene (of balloon-boy fame) had talked about planning a hoax to get media attention and make himself famous. Not long thereafter, the local sheriff said the stunt was, indeed, a hoax.
Gawker got some attention [...]

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 [...]

I don’t own an iPhone, but I play with one on TV. Apple’s widely praised ads, with their relentless focus on the phone itself, have demonstrated the magic of its mobile device even to those of us who cling to our BlackBerries. Lately, I’ve been made aware that the iPhone can shoot and edit video [...]

[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 [...]

Last week we published two videos from my interview with Alan Murray, deputy managing editor of The Wall Street Journal, covering his wisdom on charging for content and his thoughts on changes at the Journal under Rupert Murdoch.
In this third installment, Murray, who oversees the Journal’s website, talks about what qualities he looks for in [...]

Last weekend, the Nieman Foundation hosted its annual Nieman Conference on Narrative Journalism, which was great fun for all involved. In the coming weeks, we’ll be bringing you a taste of the conference — more accurately, the parts most aligned with our topic here at the Lab, figuring out the future of journalism.
We’ll start [...]

Susan Mernit — another prolific and incisive writer that may not be yet be among the bookmarks of enough journalists — shares a long excerpt of an even more exhaustive White Paper on how she and her team used social media to significantly raise awareness of the most recent Knight News Challenge.
In “Case study, using [...]

It’s all the fault of us bloggers on “websites that feature negative, gloom-and-doom stories about newspapers.”  So, “a group of newspaper executives” has launched NewspaperProject.org,* which “will be devoted to insightful articles, commentary and research that provide a more balanced perspective on what newspaper companies can do to survive and thrive in the years ahead.”  [...]

— Seth Godin says now’s a great time to start a newspaper. (Or, more accurately, an email news…something.) “It will cost you nothing. It will become your gift to the community. And it will be a long lasting asset that belongs to you, not to the competition.” And he’s right — so long as your [...]

I spoke to Murray Gaylord, vice president of marketing at The New York Times, on Wednesday evening to get more information on his Facebook advertising campaign that seemed so successful. (They more than tripled the fans of the NYT’s Facebook page, and Facebook users sent their friends more than 400,000 free gifts with a [...]

Anyone who’s designed or coded a web site has faced the self-reckoning: the moment when you realize you’re not entirely sold on the design choices you’ve made. Would that icon look better on the left or right? Does the order of things in the sidebar make navigation confusing? Is that purple the ugliest purple possible?
There’s [...]

— An interview with Joi Ito that serves as a decent introduction to Creative Commons. “We are now shifting from what I call the ‘delivery problem’ to the ‘discovery problem.’ Whereas the difficulty use to lie in the mechanics of getting the product to the user, now the challenge is getting the attention of the [...]

The New York Times is happy to be your Facebook friend. An internal memo yesterday from Times president Scott Heekin-Canedy touted the newspaper’s “successful” advertising campaign on Facebook in the days following the presidential election.
Members of the leading social networking site could answer the NYT’s question, “What should Barack Obama do first as president?” [...]