The News Frontier
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February 9, 2011 01:50 PM
Testing the Limits of Crowdsourcing
An experiment in automated reporting opens up the debate
When ProPublica launched its Recovery Tracker project—a massive, searchable consolidation of government data on stimulus funding in the U.S.—it got some assistance from Mechanical Turk, an Amazon marketplace that matches workers up with easily completed online tasks. In Srinivas Rao and Amanda Michel’s write-up about the best ways to use mTurk for data projects,...
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February 8, 2011 04:23 PM
Stock, Flow, and My Entrepreneurial Origin Story
The founder of newsbound.tv steps off the hamster wheel
CJR’s “Launch Pad” feature invites new media publishers to blog about their experiences on the news frontier. Past columns by Josh Kalven, founder of Newsbound, can be found here.
I know, I know. I wrote last week that I’d devote my second Launch Pad column to the story of how I came to form
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February 7, 2011 02:55 PM
Parsing the AOL/HuffPo Merger
What everyone gets out of the deal, and what to look for next
After Sunday night’s announcement that AOL is buying The Huffington Post for $315 million and giving Arianna Huffington editorial control over all of the media group’s content, let’s take a look at what everyone involved is getting out of this deal:
The Huffington Post: Money! Money and resources. As Arianna Huffington wrote in an e-mail to her site’s...
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February 4, 2011 02:20 PM
Salon and Slate in the Way-Back Machine
What The Daily can learn from an earlier “digital renaissance”
CJR has been accused of crankiness for our early critique of Rupert Murdoch’s new iPad newspaper, The Daily. The Poynter Institute’s Damon Kiesow characterized our commentary as a dismissal of the new medium, similar to early complaints about the colorful, non-traditional USA Today in the 1980s. But while we felt unsatisfied by the actual content of...
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February 3, 2011 01:26 PM
“The iPad is Awesome,” Says iPad Newspaper
And so does Gabrielle Giffords in offensive new Daily story
Say what you will about The Daily—and we’ve already thrown our two cents in on the first issue—but there sure are some beautiful-looking ads inside. Just today, for example, there are three stunning adverts for Land Rovers, Virgin Atlantic, and the TV show Big Love that have me dreaming of driving to an airport, flying to...
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February 2, 2011 05:05 PM
The Daily Drops
A first look at the first issue
When Rupert Murdoch first announced his plans to launch an iPad-only national daily news publication, we all wondered: Can it work? Who’s their audience? How many people actually have iPads, anyway? A few months later, as the launch got closer, we asked, what kind of a news organization doesn’t even have a website? (We were wrong...
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February 1, 2011 02:27 PM
From the News Junkie to the Newcomer
Launch pad: Newsbound.tv
CJR’s “Launch Pad” feature invites new media publishers to blog about their experiences on the news frontier.
Last Tuesday, I flipped the switch and softly launched my explanatory journalism venture, Newsbound.
I’d spent the previous six months months researching, writing, and expanding my entrepreneurial skill set. I'd talked up my concept to anyone who would listen and attracted a...
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January 31, 2011 03:50 PM
An Internet Censorship Workaround
A brief explainer on Tor, and how you can help
Last week we learned that Egypt only has four major ISPs, making it relatively easy for the government to shut off the Internet with just a few phone calls. For those who are able to get online on Egypt—either through dial-up connection or via Noor Data Networks, the ISP that supports the country’s stock...
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January 27, 2011 08:50 AM
Demand Media IPO Valued Higher Than The NYT
Here’s why we care
Demand Media’s stock made a grand entrance on Wall Street on Wednesday, jumping 37 percent on its first day of trading, paidContent reports. Within hours, a piece on CNN.com had noted that Demand’s valuation by investors—$1.5 billion, with a “b”—was higher than The New York Times Company. The horror!
So why should we care about a...
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January 25, 2011 04:05 PM
The Most Tech-Enhanced SOTU Yet
More reasons to ditch your TV and watch online
Don’t have a TV to watch tonight's State of the Union address? Or do you just get bored with all the standing-applause breaks without constant visual and informational input? You are in luck. Nancy Scola at TechPresident reports that tonight will be the first-ever “simultaneous online visualized annotation of the State of the Union address.”
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January 25, 2011 12:00 PM
The Growing Problem of Search Engine Spam
And what Google says it’s doing about it
Last week, Google News’s Krishna Bharat spoke at Columbia University about what makes his search engine so helpful and efficient for journalists. Reporters and editors don’t need to spend time thinking about marketing the news they produce to the whole world’s audience, he argued—they can concentrate on the production side, and Google’s algorithm will take care of delivering...
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January 21, 2011 12:00 PM
Google News is “The Most Efficient System”
Krishna Bharat on how Google helps journalists stay focused
On Wednesday, Google News product manager Krishna Bharat spoke to Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism students about how Google News can help journalists to do what they do best: on-the-ground, original local reporting.
Bharat, who is also the Hearst New Media Professional in Residence at the school, first explained just how Google News ranks and clusters news on...
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January 20, 2011 02:05 PM
Technology’s Role in Tunisia
The easiest narrative isn’t the only one that matters
Last week, as years of frustration by the Tunisian people culminated in self-immolation, street protests, and the ouster of President Zine El Abedine Ben Ali, the Western media was faced with the problem of how to frame the story. It’s a story with powerful implications for political stability and power throughout the region, a story rife...
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January 14, 2011 12:58 PM
Play With The 2010 News Cycle Thanks To Pew
How did Fox, NBC, NPR fill the year's "newshole"?
Forgive us for not noting this sooner—our attention has been devoted to the Giffords shooting and debates that followed. But a big hat-tip to the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism for their interactive project “The 2010 Year in the News.” The tool allows you to compare and contrast the media’s coverage of 2010’s biggest stories,...
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The News Frontier Feature
Press Forward
Dialogues on the future of news
In a series of essays, interviews, case studies, and roundtable discussions, we’ll explore news’s past as a way of guiding its future. Approximately every three weeks, we will introduce a new unit addressing various topics relevant to both news and the Internet. We’ll question common assumptions and examine orthodoxies—with an eye toward ensuring, above all, that we preserve what’s valuable in journalism as new technologies do their part to redefine the informational landscape. Call it a bid for symbiosis rather than assimilation.
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About The News Frontier RSS
The News Frontier, our exploration of the future of journalism in the digital age, will serve as a scout into the shifting news terrain. We will report on the new ways of gathering, presenting, and financing the news, and we curate some of the best general thinking about the future of news, in order to provide an informed and collective vision of that future.
Desks
The Audit Business
- The WSJ’s Balanced Look at Muni Risk And the FT adds some helpful data
- Audit Notes: Toxic Assets, Foreclosure Mills, SEC (Finally) Looking at CDOs
The Observatory Science
- Snow Job Just what constitutes a “record”?
- The Cost of Living, Part IV Digital mammograms in the medical marketplace
Campaign Desk Politics & Policy
- Priceless: Representative Lee’s flexy photo
- After AOL/HuffPo Merger, a Columnist Jumps Ship Politics Daily’s Matt Lewis won’t work for Arianna
