Last month, four major newspaper companies announced a joint ad sales venture to “let national advertisers place ads on local Web sites with a single phone call.” When I read that, I realized suddenly why local newspapers are having so much trouble adapting to the web.

There’s no such thing as a local website.

The Eliot Spitzer prostitution scandal is undoubtedly a big story, which every media outlet is covering, so I suppose it’s not surprising that Google News currently shows 2,580 versions of this story. But when you stop and think about, you have to ask — WHY are there 2,580 versions of this story?

You can hum along […]

How can newsrooms do more online with fewer resources? By leveraging the reporting that bloggers in their communities have ALREADY published on the web. Using “local link journalism,” reporters can seek out and link to reporting on a story that’s been published across their local blogosphere and just needs to be pulled together.

And isn’t pulling […]

I was reading the New York Times public editor’s rebuke of the NYT McCain ethics piece that alleged an affair with a lobbyist, when a line at the end reached out and grabbed me by the collar (bold is mine):
The pity of it is that, without the sex, The Times was on to a good […]

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

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.

I was talking to a newsroom last week about adopting Publish2 as an editorial platform for creating news aggregation features for their website — there was a lot of excitement about sketching a big vision, thinking about all of the possibilities. But in a follow-up email, we held hands around a critical guiding principle — […]

Reading Colin Mulvany explain how he’s come to understand the dynamic nature of online content distribution through his own experience blogging, and Howard Owens advocating that this is why every journalist should start a blog, I realized that the problem isn’t just a lack of understanding about blogging, or social networking, as Colin frames it.

The […]

Is there a risk that citizen journalism can be gamed by “PR flacks and unqualified hacks” — Adam Weinstein in Mother Jones thinks so.

Unfortunately, he casts the issue in terms of the risk that economically burdened newsrooms will trade expensive quality journalism for no-cost, untrustworthy content — instead of looking at the very real […]

Craig Stoltz, former health section editor of the Washington Post, pinged me about a projected he just finished with HealthCentral — HealthCare08, featuring the PoliGrpah, a dataviz (data visualization), i.e. flash + database, which plots each presidential candidate’s position on key healthcare issues. Which of course got me thinking why I haven’t see more of […]

I’ve argued that a blog is just a content management system, which can be used to publish journalism or just about anything else. But as a practical matter, the conventions of blogging — e.g. fast publishing, conversational tone, expressing opinion, linking — mean that a blog in the hands of a journalist will not, and […]

OK, enough talk about news organizations resisting change. Time to give some recognition to people actually DOING the hard work of figuring out how to transform journalism in the digital age.

Since 1953 the Scripps Howard Foundation has honored the best work in journalism through its National Journalism Awards program. The awards honor excellence in […]

One of the push backs I often hear about news organizations transitioning their business center of gravity to digital is that journalists don’t want to adopt new online and digital technologies.

Well, these cycles have happened before. In 1982, Jim Fallows wrote an article for The Atlantic about his experience as one of the first journalists […]

As I read this year’s first crop of posts from the smartest voices on the future of journalism, it’s clear that 2008 is the change or die year for journalism, as symbolized by the uncertain future of the newspaper industry.

This is the year that the journalists who will embrace the challenge of transforming journalism for […]

Kara Swisher, a veteran Wall Street Journal reporter, who has covered the Silicon Valley boom and bust for the print WSJ newspaper, has announced that she’s gone all digital, i.e. she will be writing exclusively for the All Things Digital web site. Which made me wonder how many other journalists would go all digital if […]

On the face of it, the question of whether blogs can do journalism is absurd — like asking whether sites published on Vignette can do journalism. A blog, after all, is just a content management system — revolutionary because it made web-native publishing free and easy for anyone — but at the end of the […]

It used to be the product of journalism was static — printed column inches in a newspaper or magazine, a TV segment, etc. — when it was in the can, that was it. Done. The only additional mode of activity was printing a correction the next day, or perhaps a follow-up story. But the original […]

NowPublic has taken a big round of financing and, according to Mathew Ingram, was in a position to turn down acquisition offers. This is being hailed as the success of “citizen journalism” or “crowdsourcing,” but it strikes me that it’s really just the success of….journalism.

The words we use to describe things can have a powerful […]

Mark Bowden, an Atlantic correspondent and author of Black Hawk Down, has a great piece in the Philadelphia Inquirer about the future of journalism in the digital age. Here’s an “old fuddy-duddy,” as he calls himself, who has opened his mind to a the future of multimedia journalism in way that puts many newspaper editors […]

New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller made a series of announcements at a staff meeting that make it clear the Times is aggressively accelerating its transition from print to digital publishing with some dramatic changes (via Gawker):

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 […]

The hallmark of the new media revolution is that the balance of power is shifting to individuals — on the web, anyone can can be a publisher, individuals can make their voices heard through comments on nearly every item of content, and search puts individuals rather than media brands in control of content discovery. But […]

So here’s my perspective on the Calacanis/Winer/Jarvis v. Vogelstein/Wired debate on how journalist interviews should be conducted — both sides are right and also wrong.

Blogging is conversation, yeah, blah, blah, but what’s so unsatisfying about these “conversations” is that too often they turn into linked monologues. Nobody actually TALKS to each other. Everyone just […]

By now we are all quite familiar with the upside of blogging — free, easy-to-use software and the powerful network effects of the web have enable thousands of people who might never have had a voice back in the days of scarce publishing resources to have their voices heard far and wide. But you rarely, […]

There seem to be two principal reactions to the collapse of the print classified business that is destroying the print newspaper business. The first reaction is to insist, as San Francisco columnist David Lazarus does, that people should pay for the news. The second reaction is evident in the report from Tim O’Reilly about trouble […]

With click fraud moving quickly from the ridiculous (Clickmonkeys) to the absurd (”gangs” of click frauders), Google is clearly positioning itself for the coming transition from a click-based online advertising economy to a conversion-based online advertising economy.

Every day new evidence is emerging that Google’s new landing page quality scores and Google Checkout are all […]

The Wall Street Journal will be combining it’s print and online news operations:

IN YET ANOTHER CLEAR EXAMPLE of the inroads online publishing is making against its traditional print counterpart, Dow Jones announced a reorganization that includes a combined print and online Wall Street Journal news operation.

Dow Jones also signaled its belief in the power of […]

It’s now conventional wisdom that the future of media is digital and on-demand — content creators no longer own the distribution channels. But the economic center of gravity in media has not shifted to reflect this change. The laws of media dynamics will force the center to shift — advertising dollars always follow the audience, […]

The citizen journalism movement is shaking Old Media journalism out of its complacency, but is it realistic to believe that citizen media can and should replace institutional media? I remain deeply skeptical.

Jeff Jarvis is out in force again today, smacking the “dinosaurs” of Old Media for not understanding the power of the people. As usual, […]

The problem with the current debate over Old Media vs. New Media is that most people see it in binary terms — either Old Media dies and the web becomes a completely open marketplace of commoditized content (as Jeff Jarvis and countless others have argued), or consumers rebel and cling to the structures of Old […]