It was a busy Monday morning in two corners of the hacker journalist community: EveryBlock is acquired by MSNBC, and Y Combinator announces a “request for startups” to address that whole “future of journalism” question hanging out there in the open air.
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Msnbc.com acquires local news Web site
MSNBC.com | August 17, 2009
Ryan [...]

Reading Eagle has brought their journalists out from behind the curtain to share with readers what they are reading on the web — often beyond what can be found on Reading’s own site. Their new link journalism feature is called, appropriately enough, What We’re Reading:

Each editor has a profile on the page with photo, email, [...]

Newspapers face the challenge of ensuring that their websites don’t cannibalize more lucrative print audience and revenue — even as more and more people get their news online. Then there’s the challenge of  shrinking editorial staffs having to put out both a print paper and a website. It’s enough to kept many newspapers from innovating [...]

As newspaper companies lose billions in market capitalization and innovation-minded journalists battle newsroom “curmudgeons” shell-shocked by the rapid pace of change amid increasingly dire economic realities, a lesson in burn-the-rule-book transformation might come from an unexpected source: General Motors. That’s right, the once-dominate car maker, which missed every trend that has lead to Toyota’s dominance, [...]

I received the following “offer” from The Washington Post in the mail today — I’m going to pick on the Post just because I happen to live in the DC metro area, but I’m sure almost every newspaper is sending out circulation marketing pieces like this:

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A cornerstone of journalism has always been reporting what key sources say, put in context and given perspective, alongside reported facts.
It’s time to reinvent that process on the web — make it dynamic — using the fundamental mechanism for connecting information and people: the LINK
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How long does it take to launch an innovative new feature on a newspaper site? About 48 hours — that’s the standard set by innovative editors like Jack Lail at Knoxnews.com, Tom Meagher at Herald News, and Mark Briggs at Thenewstribune.com.
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For most print publishers, mapping the audiences for their various titles would yield a cluster of overlapping circles — many readers of one of the publisher’s titles also read at least one other title. This is particularly true in trade publishing (magazines and books), where publishers often have multiple titles within a vertical, but it [...]

A couple months ago I wrote that the mobile web sucks, based on my own user experience that didn’t seem to match the hype. Some people agreed, but a lot of people defended, passionately, the mobile web. Today the New York Times published some interesting data:
But at a recent conference, 3G was called “a failure” [...]

It’s not surprising that someone finally unmasked the author of The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs AKA Fake Steve Jobs. It’s not really that surprising either that Fake Steve turned out to be an “old media” journalist who’s been fooling all the “new media” geeks. It’s not even that surprising that a journalist at an [...]

Banner ads on Facebook is a dumb way to monetize. Same on MySpace. People don’t pay attention to banner ads on social networks because they are too busy paying attention to EACH OTHER. It’s no surprise that people are complaining about low click through rates on Facebook display ads.
But that doesn’t mean that Facebook won’t [...]

Ok, so shame on me for writing so much about the iPhone without actually having used it, but I fixed that today by spending a couple of hours in an Apple store playing with the iPhone. Granted this is much more limited than the experience of long-term use, but it was enough for me to [...]

While everyone is hand-wringing over the decline of the news business and the attendant decline in Journalism and the Fourth Estate, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation is doing something about it, having just announced the first-year winners of the Knight News Challenge, with $12 million in grants. Here are some of the [...]

Has Facebook missed the boat by not being acquired by Yahoo, or is it just getting warmed up? A MediaPost piece by Gavin O’Malley showcases some opinions supporting the former:
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Instances of REAL innovation are so painfully rare, so few and far between. There’s so much HYPE, so much hollow, empty promise, it just weights you down — but there’s nothing like the head rush of experiencing real innovation — and that’s exactly what Apple delivered to today with the wildly anticipated and obsessively hyped [...]

Google is experimenting with ads in some Google Video clips (via Inside Google via Boing Boing) — a stunning failure of innovation, here is was an example of an Allstate ad embedded into a Charlie Rose clip, which is was as interruptive, untargeted and utterly old school as anything mass TV advertising has ever inflicted [...]

Chris Anderson of Wired has written what may be the most sober and balanced (i.e. ideology-free) assessment I’ve ever read of the upside and downside of 2.0 openness in publishing, or what he calls “radical transparency.” Here’s a sample:
3) “Process as Content”*. Why not share the reporting as it happens, uploading the text of each [...]