[Here's another excerpt from Ken Doctor's new book, Newsonomics: Twelve New Trends That Will Shape the News You Get. Today, Ken's Q&A with Rafat Ali, who runs media-world must-read paidContent. —Josh]
Rafat Ali is founder, publisher and editor of ContentNext Media. Reuters described its success well: “ContentNext’s flagship paidContent, founded in 2002, has quickly established itself [...]

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 [...]

[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 [...]

If you’ve gone the entrepreneurial route you know that first flush of enthusiasm often dampens when nitty-gritty decisions need to be made. There’s accounting, taxes, incorporation, insurance — and that’s the clear stuff. Toss in murky issues around trademark and branding and it’s easy to see how dreams of independence get squelched.
The Citizen Media Law [...]

The new issue of our older sibling Nieman Reports is out. While it isn’t as tied to the Lab’s subject matter as the last issue was, it does feature some great reporting about Iran, and that includes pieces about how Iranian issues are covered online.
There’s a piece by Kelly Golnoush Niknejad, founder of Tehran [...]

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 [...]

I feel I should point out that, although my name is Josh and I am from Louisiana, I am not the “Josh” from New Orleans who got a little mouthy with Rick Berke in this week’s Talk to the Newsroom feature at the Times. To quote “Josh”:
When you came up through the newspaper system, it [...]

News that The Chicago Tribune is including “attitude” as an employee evaluation metric has made Romenesko.
This is a surprise? In so many ways, attitude is everything, more important often than skills or even experience. It doesn’t substitute for them, of course, but it can accelerate the learning curve significantly.
That said, I think Romenesko buries the [...]