My post on the Washington state linking project focused on the awesome innovation involved and on the benefits of collaborative linking in general. But the project also shows why this kind of news aggregation is so useful for a local audience. The biggest danger with news aggregation is that instead »
The discussion about journalism’s future so often focuses on Big Changes — Kill the print edition! Flips for everyone! Reinvent business models NOW! — that it’s easy to forget how simple innovation can be. Sometimes all you need is a few Tweets, a bunch of links, and some like-minded pioneers. »
I want to further explore the idea of “scrapbook news” as a way of reframing the crowdsourcing/citizen journalism discussion. One reason mainstream news organizations haven’t embraced the concepts may be that the spirit (if not the letter) of the cit-j discussion tends to focus on the people involved »
Discussions about journalism innovation usually focus on technology: Twitter, RSS, Flash, Django, data visualization, and all the other cool stuff that’s making online news so rich. But there’s an equally important conceptual aspect of journalism innovation. Newsrooms have to rethink the kind of stories they cover and the »
There are several reasons why most mainstream news organizations have been slow to embrace link journalism. First, news orgs typically act as though other news orgs don’t exist (blame long-standing notions of “owning” the news, and more recent unjustified fears of sending readers away). Second, news orgs had few »
Matt Thompson and Jeff Jarvis have been doing some important thinking on how news coverage needs to change in the Internet Age. They argue that a flow of shallow, time-dependent stories no longer works as a foundation for helping readers understand the world. Thompson started a blog devoted to exploring »
Scott framed his previous challenge to news sites in general terms: like Drudge, any site could use continuously updated aggregation to become a “destination for links to news of what’s going in the world.” But this kind of aggregation can be just as powerful when applied to specific stories »
