Posts under ‘News’

At the Sunlight Foundation, Bill Allison has been uncovering remarkable facts about House Speaker Dennis Hastert and his land dealings back home. Great reporting, and unpersuasive responses from Hastert’s defenders. Now the foundation is looking for citizen reporters to investigate the other members. Recommended if you have the inclination.

A terrific project called News21 — sponsored by two major foundations to help figure out the future of journalism education (and maybe journalism itself) — is under way. This is an important initiative, bringing in students and faculty from five major universities in a multi-year effort that involves some serious journalism about the intersection of […]

He’s not leaving the field, but the New York Times’ redeployment of Len Apcar, editor in chief of nytimes.com, to the International Herald Tribune — memo here on Poynter site — means that one of the newspaper business’ real online innovators will not be focusing on this arena. I hope this is what he wants. […]

Slate Magazine is celebrating its 10th anniversary, and I say congratulations. The online publication is cleverly headlining some essays by folks who explain, “What I Hate About Slate,” including in one case its “insufferable smugness,” by a writer who is occasionally insufferable himself in print. Slate, which I read frequently, is many things. Innovative is […]

Jon Udell at Infoworld hates the expression “user-generated content,” with excellent reason. In “User-generated content vs. reader-created context,” he writes: Now that the original vision of a two-way web is finally made real, we can distinguish between amateur storytellers (in the best and highest sense of amateur) and professional storytellers. Thanks to the contributions of […]

…Please try again. I changed servers and lost a few messages in the switchover. Thanks.

Over at his blog, Jay Rosen writes about — in preparation for a session he’s leading next Friday at BloggerCon — “Users-Know-More-than-We-Do Journalism,” saying: It’s a “put up or shut up” moment for open source methods in public interest reporting. Can we take good ideas like… distributed knowledge, social networks, collaborative editing, the wisdom of […]

It is genuine and excellent news to see that Om Malik, as he writes in “Its Time To Transition,” is going independent. His blog is required reading in Silicon Valley, and he’s one of the best journalists I’ve encountered, period. He’s amused to have been scooped by the ValleyWag blog. This reminds me of when […]

The Knight Foundation’s Gary Kebbel writes: We’re seeking your comment, and that of your readers, on a multimillion dollar request for proposals that we are calling “The Knight Brothers 21st Century News Challenge.” The request will be issued in September, but now we are seeking ideas that will help us shape the rules of the […]

Journalist Chris Carey is partnering with Mark Cuban on a new project that offers great promise and raises some serious questions. Chris writes, in an e-mail: I’m leaving the St. Louis Post-Dispatch at the end of this week to launch an investigative business journalism site, Sharesleuth.com. The blog-style news site will be devoted to exposing […]