Every future-of-news conference should invite Bill Densmore, director of the Media Giraffe Project and CircLabs, if only to serve as the scribe. He was, fortunately, in attendance at yesterday’s conference on business models for news, hosted by our friends across Harvard Yard at the Shorenstein Center.
I’m always on the lookout for new data on the [...]

For all the angst over online appropriation of newspapers’ work, information actually flows in all directions, right? Blog posts inspire newspaper articles, newspapers lift from other newspapers, and radio stations do the rip-and-read. So when a blogger uncovered a major zoning violation in her Brooklyn neighborhood last month, it was only natural that the New [...]

Recent posts by Patricia Handschiegel, Amy Gahran, Dana Chinn, and Bill Grueskin have driven home a crucial point about online journalism: Traffic and page views are nice, but engaged readers and loyal audiences are more important. Here, I’d like to point out a new tool that builds on that notion.
Even on the infinitely measurable web, [...]

Yesterday we named the top 15 newspaper sites of 2008 (judging by average monthly unique visitors) and took a closer look at the five national papers that lead the list. In the next tier are six regional newspaper sites that showed impressive growth last year.

The data is in, and we’re ready to declare the top 15 newspaper websites of 2008! It was a hard-fought battle in a year that saw visitors to all newspaper sites rise by 12.1 percent from the year prior. We’ve ranked the top 15 by average monthly unique visitors, according to Nielsen Online, which is [...]