When people talk about the long tail, they often focus on consumer goods, where the infinite shelf space at a company like Amazon or Netflix allows a huge variety of products to be sold. But the same concept can apply to news, where cheap servers make it possible for hyper-targeted coverage — the stuff that [...]

It wasn’t quite the Red Sox winning the World Series, but The Boston Globe saw huge traffic yesterday as it covered the death of Ted Kennedy — a sign that local news sites can still dominate national stories on their turf.
The Globe, which had spent years preparing for Kennedy’s death, had more than 8 million [...]

In a corner of the research and development lab at The New York Times Co., they’ve prototyped a living room of the future. It’s not as whizbang awesome as you might hope — a lamp glows red or green depending on how the markets are doing — but it does feel like a reasonable conception [...]

Since organizers of the Pulitzer Prizes announced in 2006 they would allow the submission of online content in all journalism categories, newspapers have gotten better at integrating their printed and online materials, prize administrator Sig Gissler said.
This was the first Pulitzer cycle to welcome applications from certain online-only news organizations. But ironically, the 65 entries [...]

Here’s a third quick excerpt from our Richard Koci Hernandez interview. In this clip he talks about the power of astonishment in creating great work online:
…we’re really competing for viewers. We’re competing for eyeballs. We’re competing with everything, you know? I even said, you know like — somebody asked, “Well, who’s your competition when you [...]

We’re finishing up posting the videos we shot with speakers at the Nieman Conference on Narrative Journalism. Over the next few days, we’ll be posting excerpts from our session with Richard Koci Hernandez — ex-newspaper photographer, multimedia maven, and now a fellow at UC Berkeley. He was one of the big hits of the conference, [...]

Setting up my interview with Amy O’Leary, a multimedia producer at The New York Times, was a little intimidating because her specialty is audio, and I hardly know a lavalier from a capacitor. The sound turned out fine, though, with the exception of my questions, which I didn’t think to properly record. If only I’d [...]

As we mentioned previously, it’s time for a new issue of Nieman Reports, our sister quarterly here at the Nieman Foundation. Over the past couple of weeks, we’ve given you previews of two of its stories: Joel Kramer on lessons from running MinnPost and Margaret Wolf Freivogel on her startup, the St. Louis Beacon.
The entire [...]

What does the journalist of the future look like?
PR whiz Steve Rubel says he looks a lot like Peter Abraham, who is not some vaporware demo from 2015, but a flesh-and-blood reporter covering the Yankees spring training camp in Florida right now.
Abraham is the Yankees beat writer for the Journal News in Westchester county (a [...]

[Our Ted Delaney interviewed NBC News digital journalist Mara Schiavocampo recently about her leap into working in multiple media. You may remember Mara from our earlier post about her. Today, a look at her gear; part two, on her workflow, comes tomorrow. —Ed.]
When Mara Schiavocampo started out as a digital journalist, she was largely making [...]