VIENNA — When a massive earthquake rocked Haiti on January 12, there was only one foreign correspondent — a writer for the Associated Press — in the country to cover the disaster. In the following days, media from around the world parachuted in, relying heavily on NGOs for sources and context.
Two weeks later, most media [...]

[Jeff Israely, a Time magazine foreign correspondent in Europe, is in the planning stages of a news startup — a "new global news website." He details his experience as a new news entrepreneur at his site, but he'll occasionally be describing the startup process here at the Lab. Read his first installment here. —Josh]
I am [...]

Remember when journalists were merely overworked and underpaid? In today’s hypercompetitive market, it’s not enough to be a tenacious reporter or an elegant writer; you also need to be a tech-savvy coder, a capable videographer, a constant conversation-engager, a shameless self-promoter, and, in general, a worthy bottom-line-improver. Call it the soft bigotry of high expectations: [...]

[Every Friday, Mark Coddington sums up the week’s top stories about the future of news and the debates that grew up around them. —Josh]
Google Buzzes social media: For the second week in a row, the biggest story at the intersection of journalism and new media is an innovation by Google: This week, the talk was [...]

So, if you are a news publisher, new or old, how do you engage this new world? I’ve checked around and there are precious few metrics to yet point to; it’s all so new. Consider, though, that “social media optimization,” a term that has buzzed quietly about Silicon Valley for a couple of years, will soon get real, becoming as much a fixture of our digital strategy as search engine optimization has become.

Within that social media optimization, we’ll see focused attempts to understand the value of social links, and, of course, the nuances among social links.

Sure, the digital age might be killing professional muckraking in local markets, and most of the spadework that becomes local news stories might still come from newspapers. But a new empirical study suggests that all the new online din isn’t crowding out serious policy debate.
Just the opposite: Startup news sites are drawing far more attention [...]

[If more of our news is going to produced by non-traditional sources — like NGOs who have an interest in promoting their own agenda — how can news consumers sort through their sources and figure out who to believe? Our friend Ethan Zuckerman of Harvard's Berkman Center asks those questions in this essay, which examines a [...]

[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 [...]

It’s hard to put a good face on this kind of news; in fact, it reminds me of the old “bus plunge” meme. The Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC) reports that newspaper circulation for the six months ending Sept. 30 dropped 10.6 percent from the same period in 2008 (7.5 percent on Sundays).
And this is [...]

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 [...]

More than a year ago, Brian Stelter had a story in The New York Times about how the social-media generation takes it upon themselves to pass on the news they feel is worthwhile. The story contained a quote from an unidentified college student that has become iconic of the new journalism evolving before our eyes. [...]

News organizations, take note: More women than men are using social media, a new study says.
The study, from Information is Beautiful, uses Google Ad Planner numbers to come up with its conclusion that more women than men use many popular social networks. Digg stands out because 64 percent of users are men. LinkedIn and YouTube [...]

The announcement of The Washington Post’s new social media policy prompted the usual round of sniping between old and new media partisans. (For a good overview of the back and forth, see this post by my Lab colleague Mathew Ingram.)
The battle lines on this debate are fairly well defined — at this point, I [...]

Nothing brings home the clash of cultures between “new” and “old” media like the debates over social-media policies at mainstream publications like the New York Times and the Washington Post. Earlier this year, the Times was in the spotlight for its attempt to develop a policy on Twitter in the wake of some indiscreet twittering [...]

Can Twitter be a tool of cultural diplomacy?
That was the heady topic David Pogue, New York Times technology columnist and CBS News tech correspondent, addressed Monday during a symposium at Syracuse University. He was part of a panel trying to figure out how to transcend conflict through culture.
Now, the way I understood it, cultural diplomacy [...]