ProPublica invites publishers to “Steal Our Stories.” John Thornton, founder of The Texas Tribune, asked newspapers to pay for stories, but concluded the effort was hopeless. But another new nonprofit news organization, California Watch, the Sacramento-based reporting initiative to be launched next month by the Center for Investigative Reporting, is barreling full speed into the [...]

Every future-of-news conference should invite Bill Densmore, director of the Media Giraffe Project and CircLabs, if only to serve as the scribe. He was, fortunately, in attendance at yesterday’s conference on business models for news, hosted by our friends across Harvard Yard at the Shorenstein Center.
I’m always on the lookout for new data on the [...]

Google is developing a micropayment platform that will be “available to both Google and non-Google properties within the next year,” according to a document the company submitted to the Newspaper Association of America. The system, an extension of Google Checkout, would be a new and unexpected option for the news industry as it considers how [...]

Last month, I wrote about how The Associated Press plans to leverage its network of members and customers with centralized topic pages linked to content distributed by the consortium. That post has sprung at least three noteworthy legs:

an intelligent comments thread on Wikipedia’s strength in search results
some informed skepticism of automated pages from Reuters’ Felix [...]

Michael Wolff, whose two-year-old site, Newser, is frequently cited as a model for the future of journalism, titled a typically provocative blog post yesterday, “I’m Proud to Kill the News.” He made the usual case that news aggregators understand the web better than newspaper websites. Readers, he said, “come to Newser, rather than the New [...]

In a break with tradition, The Associated Press plans to prevent members and customers from publishing some AP content on their websites. Instead, those news organizations would link to the content on a central AP website — a move that could upend the consortium’s traditional notions of syndication.
That’s one revelation from a document we [...]

Remember? Two months ago, Associated Press chairman Dean Singleton said his organization would take a firm stand against unlicensed use of its content and that of its members. “We are mad as hell,” he declared at the AP’s annual meeting in San Diego, “and we’re not going to take it any more.”
Singleton is a newspaper [...]

When I was in Toledo Friday, I stopped by the first newspaper to give me a job, The Toledo Blade. You may know The Blade as a family-owned paper that has historically punched well above its weight; it was for many years the smallest American newspaper to maintain a full-time foreign bureau (first in Paris, [...]