[Our friend Michael Skoler wrote this post for Mizzou's Reynolds Journalism Institute, where he's currently a fellow. It's on deal brokering — sites like Groupon or Woot that connect sellers to buyers by offering time-limited deals. He thinks it could be a big part of news organizations' financial future, and we thought you'd be interested [...]

Last week, Jim Barnett raised a question about nonprofit journalism: What makes it legit? How do we know if a nonprofit news outlet shares the ideals and culture of traditional journalism, and how can we make sure we don’t get fooled by advocacy groups disguised as objective journalists?
It’s a difficult question — the Internet makes [...]

The Washington Post caused a bit of a stir yesterday when it announced a $1.99-a-year iPhone app. The choice was interesting both because it offered time-limited access to content and because of the low price point — at a time when other newspaper execs are apparently debating prices more than 100 times greater. As our friend [...]

As a followup to my report on fourth-quarter 2009 earnings reports from most of the major public newspaper firms, we now have earnings releases from E. W. Scripps, A. H. Belo, the Washington Post Co. and Journal Communications (leaving only Gatehouse Media without a report).
The releases from this group followed the script set by [...]

With many new news organizations launching as nonprofits and many nonprofits moving into the news business, one has to wonder: Exactly where does journalism end and something else — call it spin, opinion, or advocacy — begin? Or to phrase the question as Chuck Lewis recently did for me: If a nonprofit says it’s doing [...]

[Every Friday, Mark Coddington sums up the week’s news about the future of news and the debates that grew up around them. —Josh]
The Times’ paywall proposal: No question about media and journalism’s biggest story this week: The New York Times announced it plans to begin charging readers for access to its website in 2011. Here’s [...]

Enterprise reporting partnerships with online news organizations are in vogue at major newspapers these days, and arguably no paper has been more aggressive in pursuing them than the Washington Post. But in his ombudsman column Sunday, Andrew Alexander takes Post editors to task for a series of failures that plagued its most recent partnership, with [...]

When Barnes & Noble announced the Nook — its attempt at a Kindle killer — on Tuesday, the reviews focused on its interface, its native PDF support, its ability to lend books to friends, and the potential of its Android operating system. But I was more interested in how it’ll work as an outlet for [...]

Tom Curley, president and chief executive of The Associated Press, was in China last week for a government-sponsored media summit, where he compared digital content to NCAA basketball and explained the AP’s plans to build revenue online. But Curley was far more revealing when he spoke without a prepared text on October 6 at the [...]

After 44 years at The New York Times, most recently as the assistant managing editor in charge of journalistic standards, Craig Whitney bid farewell to the newsroom this week. The position of standards editor was created in the aftermath of Jayson Blair but has come to address issues that were both hard to foresee in [...]

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 [...]

A quick addendum to Zach’s post on The New York Times Magazine’s great Katrina story. While some will argue that one epic story isn’t the best journalistic use of $400,000 (or whatever the final bill is), I think the folks at ProPublica and the Times are right to point out how expensive quality investigative reporting [...]

The cover story in this weekend’s New York Times Magazine is a 13,000-word investigation of the New Orleans hospital where patients were euthanized in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. It’s a remarkable and tragic story that may also represent the most expensive single piece of print journalism in years.
This is the new economics of news [...]

Washington Post reporter Ian Shapira wrote a whimsical profile of a dubious “business coach” who specializes in understanding Generation Y. (I think that includes me, but who knows.) Gawker, as is its wont, blogged about the piece, quoting extensively from the Post. Now, Shapira has penned a thoughtful and balanced essay on whether Gawker’s appropriation [...]