The New York Times’ announcement that it would be charging for some access to its website, starting in 2011, rekindled yet another round of debate about paywalls for online news. Beyond the practical question (will it work?) or the theoretical one (what does this mean for the Times’ notion of the “public”?), there remains another [...]

Ethan Zuckerman — the gentleman we posted about earlier today — has written a smart piece for the next issue of Nieman Reports on the importance of serendipity in news consumption. As he puts it:
The number of choices an engaged citizen has for reading or watching news has exploded in recent years, and this increase [...]

In Friday’s Christian Science Monitor, Vijaysree Venkatraman talks with Harvard’s Ethan Zuckerman about homophily — the tendency for people to want to associate with people like themselves. Online, this can mean someone interested in the Red Sox will spend a lot of time hanging out on Red Sox forums, writing comments on Boston Globe Red [...]