Okay, question time: Imagine you’re a major national newspaper whose crosstown archrival has somehow obtained two million pages of explosive documents that outed your country’s biggest political scandal of the decade. They’ve had a team of professional journalists on the job for a month, slamming out a string of blockbuster stories as they find them [...]

The Knight News Challenge’s biggest winner, with a two-year grant of $719,500, is DocumentCloud, the primary-source index conceived by journalists and developers at ProPublica and The New York Times. Here’s why you should care: There’s good reason to believe the project will transform how some investigative journalism is conducted — and who conducts it.
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— Via Adrian Monck, British political cartoonist Matt Buck wonders about the future of his profession:
So, are we going to see people like me directly employed by political factions again in the future? And if that happens, will it be a good or a bad thing? Is it a return to the roots of [...]

In June, three smart Cantabridgians — from Harvard, MIT, and the private sector — published a book called Blown to Bits. Its subject: how the eruption of digital data about our lives impacts issues like privacy and the law. It’s doesn’t address journalism issues as directly as some other whither-the-Internet books, but it’s a good [...]

Here’s some more information about the Knight News Challenge application by ProPublica and The New York Times that generated some buzz and criticism earlier this month. They’re seeking a $1 million grant to develop an online repository of primary-source documents that anyone could contribute to or take from. I spoke at length with developers at [...]

After thinking about the Christian Science Monitor’s plan, the most puzzling part is the (non-free, price TBA) daily PDF edition, delivered over email. PDF editions have always felt to me like a poorly reasoned set of training wheels for the transition online. They look like familiar print editions, and they speak the same design language, [...]