[Laura Bennett is currently on a Fulbright grant in Madrid to research citizen journalism and the democratization of the mainstream Spanish media. She filed this report about Spain's late (but still talked-about) online news startup, Soitu.es. —Josh]
Spanish news site Soitu.es launched in December 2007 to considerable fanfare. Its homepage boasted flashy graphics and the lofty [...]

From direct mail to web design, A/B testing is considered a gold standard of user research: Show one version to half your audience and another version to the other half; compare results, and adjust accordingly. Some very cool examples include Google’s obsessive testing of subtle design tweaks and Dustin Curtis’ experiment with direct commands and [...]

We’re recapping this weekend’s Online News Association conference through the lens of Twitter — assembling the most interesting or useful tweets from each session. I posted recaps of Friday’s sessions yesterday; here are Saturday’s.
Among the topics covered: the social context of retweeting; why Twitter won’t boost your SEO; a Spanish Twitter-like tool for journalists; [...]

We just returned from San Francisco and this year’s Online News Association conference; it was great meeting a lot of the people I know primarily through their Twitter avatar or URL. There was a lot of interesting material in the panels, and the most interesting nuggets found their way onto Twitter, where a significant fraction [...]

Everyblock won a $1,100,000 grant from the Knight Foundation in 2007 to build its innovative platform for aggregating local news and information. Two years later, soon after the Knight grant had expired, founder Adrian Holovaty announced that MSNBC had acquired EveryBlock.
The sale raised questions about nonprofit funding of for-profit ventures. After all, Knight had essentially [...]

As the digerati arrived in San Francisco yesterday for the Online News Association’s annual conference, I stopped by the job fair to see who was looking for recruits in this awful journalism job market. Oh, there were some old standbys — among them, Gannett Co. and The New York Times — but the busiest and [...]

Zach and I are about to head to San Francisco for the 2009 Online News Association conference, the annual gathering of the tribe. If you spot us there, be sure to come say hello — we love meeting our readers.
In fact, we’re going to have a little get-together on Friday evening at 6 p.m. for [...]

Sooner or later — as Diane Sawyer, Jeffrey Wigand or the National Enquirer could tell you — anyone who makes a living telling the truth is going to need a good lawyer. That’s why major metro newspapers carry libel insurance policies the size of Abrams tanks. Their deductibles alone can run into seven figures.
But what [...]