The News Frontier
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July 18, 2011 01:50 PM
A Visualization of Newspapers’ History
Stanford University team maps papers' progress throughout the West
Did newspapers make the west, or did the west make newspapers? This is one of the questions that drives Geoff McGhee and his colleagues at The Bill Lane Center for the American West at Stanford. McGhee is part of a team of scholars, students, and journalists that is chronicling the state of the rural west, and one of their...
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July 15, 2011 11:34 AM
Unemployment Lines
Yahoo readers share their joblessness stories
Unemployment coverage is often so dominated by sterile numbers and political pontification that it can seem like a lonely, cold world out there for the actual humans who are affected by this economy.
Where many media outlets have given their stories away to talking heads and percentage crunching, Yahoo News asked its readers for their personal stories, specifically from...
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July 13, 2011 10:17 AM
Mommy Bloggers Cover the Casey Anthony Trial
If mama ain't happy, ain't nobody happy
Debi Cruz-Beck blogs almost everyday about motherhood, parenting and the like for her popular blog, The Truth About Motherhood. She writes with a distinctly snarky tone, particularly on Thursdays in her weekly wag-of-the-finger “Throat Punch Thursday” column. The week of June 3rd was entitled “Casey Anthony; Mommy’s a Homicidal Maniac Edition”:
This weeks Throat Punch has been...
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July 12, 2011 12:07 PM
Q&A;: Luke Stangel, Co-Creator of TapIn Bay Area
“Mobile could make us focus again on what we do really well as reporters.”
This week, Bay Area News Group—publisher of the San Jose Mercury News, the Oakland Tribune, and several other newspapers—will release a new map-based mobile news application called TapIn Bay Area. As Luke Stangel, one of its creators, described it, “Imagine cutting up your local paper into 10,000 little pieces, and organizing those pieces on a map. TapIn is that map.”
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June 28, 2011 04:03 PM
The Article Is Journalism’s Yellow Mustard
Launch pad: Newsbound.com
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.
If you’re the sole founder of an early-stage startup and you’re beginning to execute your concept, there’s a moment where you actually feel the company growing inside of...
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June 21, 2011 11:50 AM
iPad Magazines: Just a Little Bit of History Repeating
Tablet news following a pattern as old as paper itself
Last December, headlines decreed that the digital publishing world was falling apart. After an initial surge, iPad magazine sales were steadily—sometimes precipitously—dropping. According to a report that cited numbers from the Audit Bureau of Circulation, November was a bad month for the iPad and iPad magazines.
Vanity Fair went from an average 10,500 digital...
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June 10, 2011 01:19 PM
Grantland Rises
An initial review of Bill Simmons’s sports site
As a journalist it’s impossible not to root for Grantland, the long-form ESPN spinoff site captained by logorrheic NBA junkie Bill Simmons. Three cheers for any venture that begins by throwing money at Writers, by gum, actual Writers, those miserable lickspittles who have been search-engine-optimized into near-oblivion in the past decade.
Simmons wouldn’t be my...
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June 9, 2011 03:50 PM
US vs. The Wired World
Comparing per capita broadband adoption
FCC’s new report “The Information Needs of Communities,” released Thursday, surveys the current state of the American media and finds “a shortage of local, professional accountability reporting.” The report’s lead author, Steve Waldman, argues that the expansion and proliferation of online media outlets have not yet made up for shrinking newspaper staffs and budgets—especially in the area of...
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June 6, 2011 02:50 PM
The Media Tourist’s Guide to the World
Traveling to a distant land, and wondering where you’ll get the news in your new spot? Or hear of a breaking story across the world and want to get the local take? Newspaper Map is a great place to start. It’s a searchable, zoomable, color-coordinated map of about 10,000 newspapers across the globe—available online and as a
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June 3, 2011 11:52 AM
Best Practices for Social Media Verification
Some tips and thoughts from the experts
Whether you view it as long overdue or just in time, I believe we are starting to see the emergence of best practices for verifying social media content and citizen reports. Recent weeks and months have seen leading practitioners of social media verification and crowdsourced verification share tips and thoughts to help move the discipline forward.
Below is a...
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May 25, 2011 04:40 PM
The Great Comment Challenge
Knight-Mozilla’s initiative to reinvent online news discussions
It’s easy to complain about the comment sections of news websites. It’s harder to improve them. They’re as problematic as they are essential, and no single website seems to have gotten the balance just right. Comment moderation is time-consuming, and often more trouble than it’s worth—especially for sites with relatively low traffic. Spammers and troublemakers can discourage meaningful dialogue between...
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May 20, 2011 12:19 AM
Q&A;: Sam Apple of The Faster Times, on Alternative Revenue Sources
“Journalism hasn’t ever directly supported itself.”
Last week, CJR released a new report by the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and the Tow Center for Digital Journalism, entitled “The Story So Far: What we know about the business of journalism.” To supplement Chapter Eight, “New Users, New Revenue: Alternative ways to make money,” assistant editor Lauren Kirchner spoke with Sam Apple,...
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May 19, 2011 12:45 PM
Before the Web, There Was the Storefront
A post by Chris Marstall today on The Boston Globe website pulls out some great photos from the Globe’s archives of Newspaper Row, the blocks in front of the paper’s headquarters. When news broke, Globe staffers rushed out to the street to write headlines on big blackboards to grab the attention of passersby.
Marstall compares this practice...
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May 19, 2011 06:00 AM
Q&A;: John Temple of Honolulu Civil Beat, on Doing More with Less
“We’re much more nimble, much more able to change course.”
Last week, CJR released a new report by the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and the Tow Center for Digital Journalism, entitled “The Story So Far: What we know about the business of journalism.” To supplement Chapter Seven, “Dollars and Dimes: The new cost of doing business,” assistant editor Lauren Kirchner spoke with John Temple,...
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The News Frontier Feature
The News Frontier Database
A searchable, living, and ongoing documentation of digital news outlets across the country.
Featuring originally reported profiles and extensive data sets on digital news organizations across the United States, the NFDB is a tool for those who study or pursue online journalism, a window into that world for the uninitiated, and, like any journalistic product, a means by which to shed light on an important topic. We plan to build the NFDB into the most comprehensive resource of its kind.
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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
- Murdoch’s Journal, Joe Nocera, and Fox-ification The paper has slipped, but don’t give up on it yet
- The News Corp. Scandal is a Triumph for Investigative Reporting Expensive, time-consuming, risky, stressful—and indispensable
The Observatory Science
- Growing Science in the Desert Several Middle Eastern countries are pouring money into research; will it work?
- Arab Spring to Arab Summer World Conference showcases science journalism in Middle East
Campaign Desk Politics & Policy
- A Medicare Miss at the LA Times Some fact-checking, please
- A Voice for the Unemployed Yahoo!’s haunting look at the lives of the long-term jobless
