The News Frontier
-
March 24, 2011 01:15 PM
Instapaper and Readability Come Out of Their Shells
The New York Times’s Gadgetwise blog notes today that the online reading services Readability and Instapaper are both undergoing curious transitions.
Readability was originally launched as a browser plug-in that stripped web pages of distracting links and ads and left only text on a white page. Last month, it released a new version that sounds more like...
Continue reading -
March 23, 2011 11:15 AM
Arab Spring: A Guardian Interactive Timeline
On Tuesday, The Guardian posted an excellent infographic, ”The path of protest,” which promises to make the popular uprisings sweeping the Middle East a little easier to follow.
The timeline begins on December 17, when Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire in Tunisia, and goes up until today, with Libya’s Gaddafi calling the U.S. and its...
Continue reading -
March 23, 2011 10:36 AM
Detecting Fake Photos with Digital Forensics
A Q&A; with Hany Farid on photo forensics
As photography has gone digital, it has become ever easier to manipulate images with Photoshop and other technology. Digital photographs used in the news industry are often adjusted for reasons of aesthetics—a contrast adjustment here, a color-alteration there. But they can also be altered with the aim to deceive editors or readers. Luckily, digital detection technology is quickly advancing, as...
Continue reading -
March 21, 2011 03:15 PM
Narrative Found
This Land Press closes investment deal; will become Oklahoma’s first (or at least strongest) new media company
Earlier this month, This Land Press published the latest installment in its ongoing coverage of Bradley Manning, the army private accused of providing thousands of pages of classified documents to WikiLeaks. The story, by newly minted This Land staff reporter Denver Nicks, looks at a formative period of Manning’s life through the eyes of Jordan Davis,...
Continue reading -
March 17, 2011 05:40 PM
“Information Wants to Be Free”; The NYT Does Not
Paywall reactions and misunderstandings
The New York Times has announced that its metered paywall will go into effect on March 28, costing readers $15 per month to read more than twenty articles in a month’s time, with the price going up a bit for the use of the Times mobile application. On day one, at least, opinion on the web seems widely...
Continue reading -
March 17, 2011 01:35 PM
The Newspaper Guild Calls for HuffPo Boycott
The Newspaper Guild of America, which represents 26,000 media workers across the country, has called for a strike of unpaid writers against The Huffington Post. The Guild is joining the art publication Visual Arts Source, which represents fifty artists and had also called for a boycott several weeks prior. According to the Guild’s website:
[The Guild]...
Continue reading -
March 17, 2011 11:50 AM
NYT Announces Paywall Details, In Effect March 28
After months of speculation and anticipation from all sides of the industry, The New York Times revealed Thursday morning the details of its website paywall, which will be erected for US readers on Monday, March 28 (for Canadian readers, it goes into effect immediately). The magic number? $15. From Jeremy Peters:
Beginning March 28, visitors to NYTimes.com will...
Continue reading -
March 16, 2011 04:55 PM
The Internet’s Least Helpful Webpages
How content farms do Japan
Taking to Google with your questions about the fast-breaking situation in Japan can lead down some pretty strange paths—paths to articles that are sometimes misinformed, sometimes misleading, and sometimes downright nonsensical.
If you Google “Japan” and click “News,” as of 1:30 p.m. Wednesday afternoon, the first hit is The Huffington Post contributor column “A Glimpse Into Our Own...
Continue reading -
March 16, 2011 12:40 PM
Should News Paywalls Demand Less in Poorer Countries?
The case for variable pricing
CAIRO—Consumers have made peace with the fact that some things cost more in certain places. A cup of black coffee at a Cairo McDonald’s costs less than the same stimulant at a McDonald’s in Manhattan. A night at the Four Seasons Hotel in Damascus costs $445, while in Maui it’ll set you back nearly $1,000.
I wonder, then, whether...
Continue reading -
March 14, 2011 01:07 AM
“The News Industry Is No Longer In Control Of Its Destiny”
And other findings of the Pew State of the Media Report
Today the Pew Research Center for Excellence in Journalism released its annual “State of the Media” report, and it’s a mixed bag of good and bad news. According to the report, there are signs that the industry is beginning to recover “after two dreadful years”: hiring has picked up, as has revenue, and layoffs have slowed down somewhat....
Continue reading -
March 11, 2011 11:20 AM
Imagining a Digital Public Library of America
A Q&A; with Berkman Center fellow Maura Marx
For at least a decade, librarians, technologists, and academics have been discussing an idea that seems as inevitable as it is challenging: a centralized, digitized public library that would contain all of the country’s books, images, and archival materials, and be accessible to anyone with an Internet connection. It would be like having the Library of Congress—plus every local library...
Continue reading -
March 9, 2011 04:25 PM
Improving News, Improving Community
“Write for Arkansas” funds reporters in small newsrooms for two years
On the future-of-news beat, it’s easy to see which projects and innovations get the most attention. From automation to augmented-reality, the more experimental the idea, the brighter the spotlight; not to mention the more funding it can hope to attract. But when it comes to local news in underserved areas, sometimes the most welcome addition to the media landscape is...
Continue reading -
March 7, 2011 04:50 PM
Institutional Grants On the Rise; Crowdfunding, Not So Much
And other findings from a new Knight Foundation survey
Here at CJR, The News Frontier Database is our ongoing project to track and gather online news startups throughout the country. It’s slowly building, dozen by dozen, and we’re already starting to see some trends. For instance, it’s interesting to see how many outlets have received sizeable grants from charitable institutions, a much more direct and reliable source...
Continue reading -
March 7, 2011 12:45 PM
The New Newsweek, She Has Arrived
The newly redesigned Newsweek hits the newsstands today, and The Society of Publication Designers has a first look at several pages here. It’s designed by Dirk Barnett, previously of Maxim, who tells SPD that the new design emphasizes photography more than the previous iteration, and borrows visual elements from the magazine’s web partner The Daily Beast.
The Wall...
Continue reading
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.
Continue reading—advertisement—
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
- Audit Notes: Mortgage Industry Conflicts of Interest Edition
- NYT Is Superb On General Electric’s Tax Avoidance Plus, David Kocieniewski continues his Charlie Rangel exposés
The Observatory Science
- Misinformation Clouds Much Japan Coverage International media’s output enters the “Journalistic Hall of Shame”
- Quaking in California Articles about the “big one” short on science
Campaign Desk Politics & Policy
- The Real Problem with Fox News A case study
- Governor’s Inbox Puts Deputy Prosecutor Out (Updated) Walker’s e-mails give Wisconsin watchdog a story
