Forbes | Reinventing the Newsroom | Newsonomics | The New York Times
There's been much consternation about the stop-printing-daily part of the news from The Times-Picayune and Advance Publications' three Alabama papers. But what of the "exciting changes" — the new emphasis on digital? There are skeptics.

The goal isn't bad, writes John McQuaid, who used to work at the Picayune, but Advance has so far fumbled efforts to integrate its legacy and online operations.

The company, McQuaid writes, "has pursued a web strategy that is only lightly tethered to newsgathering." Its websites often combine information from several newspapers and "are not very attractive and are notoriously difficult to navigate." (Wade Kwon Storified reader reaction to the Alabama papers' bloggy design after it debuted recently.)

At the TP, the intrinsic clunkiness has improved somewhat of late; but in spite of all the bold talk, jargon and corporate branding going on around online news, Advance has yet to provide a clear sense it’s committed to making a systematic move to the online news ecosystem, or that it “gets” digital news at all beyond the crude basics: more blogging, tweeting, video, mobile.

(more...)

Knight Foundation | Common Sense Journalism
Eric Newton, senior adviser to the president at Knight, didn't hold back in his criticism of the state of journalism education in a speech last week. Although he praised a handful of schools that have revamped their programs to help chart the future of news, he spent a lot of time criticizing "the middle of the bell curve."

With all due respect, journalism and communication education plays at least second chair, and sometimes first chair, in the symphony of slowness. What I mean is the reaction time to new things. Consider this: On one side of campus, engineers are inventing the Internet, browsers and search engines. But the news industry is slow to respond. Then public radio slower still. Foundations even slower. Government slower yet again. Then comes the journalism and communication schools, on the other side of campus from the engineers. And finally, public television.

Who suffers from the symphony of slowness? Students and society. (more...)

stdout.be
Software developer Stijn Debrouwere is getting attention with a provocative post about how journalism is being replaced by other sources of information that provide a roughly equivalent service to users. Add up all his examples (he provides plenty) and you see how people are gravitating away from traditional news stories to answer questions about music, real estate, health care, neighborhood news and many other issues.

There are organizations and websites everywhere that are taking over newspapers’ role as tastemaker and watchdog and forum. These disruptors don’t replace investigative reporting, but they replace the other 95% of what made professional news organizations important.

This is not sharing cat pictures, this is stuff that matters. People can read the health section in their newspaper and get drip-fed badly researched advice about how to live a healthy life, or they can visit the NIH or the Mayo Clinic online, or create an account on one of the many bulletin boards about anything from fitness to dealing with cancer.

He argues that this is a generational shift: (more...)

Thursday's "TechRaking" conference, sponsored by the Center for Investigative Reporting and Google, was not an experiment in transporting journalists into the world of ideas before reality smacked them back to the realm of the possible. No, it aimed to bring journalists and tech types together and see if they couldn't find some way forward for investigative journalism, which many people claim to love and fewer and fewer news organizations can afford to fund. Matt Stiles, a data reporter who works on NPR's StateImpact project, told me over the phone that the conference gave him some ideas for news apps that can "help reporters and the public understand politics better." For instance, he floated the idea of a Google Analytics-type site with customizable widgets that would let news consumers arrange data about campaigns -- ad buys, coverage, social media. Perhaps reporters could use a more sophisticated version to find stories in all that data. Stiles explained that "there's this tension in the data journalism community: Does the data come first or does story come first?" In other words, do you pitch a story and look for supporting data, "or do you look at the data first and find the story in the data? It seemed to me I've always leaned toward the first," Stiles said. "It is a nice tension." (more...)

Knight News Challenge
The judging for the first of the thrice-annual News Challenge contests is going quickly. This one focuses on networks. Judges have whittled the list of entrants from 1,078 to 51. The contest page says: "Included in this 51 are the five applications that generated the most chatter on Tumblr: Amauta, Cont3nt, the Unconsumption Project, MediaReputations.com and PreScouter." Other projects by people I recognize: (more...)

DigiDave
David Cohn has decided to leave Spot.Us four months after the crowdfunded journalism site became part of American Public Media's crowdsourcing platform, Public Insight Network. When APM took it over, Cohn had planned to stay involved in a contract role. Now, he writes on his blog:

It has come to my realization, however, that in its new form Spot.Us is no longer the best place for me. In many respects that’s perfectly fine. ... With this post I’m handing full reigns of Spot.Us over to APM not just in ownership (which already happened) but in terms of direction. This change has been going on in the background for some time and now it’s official. This is me taking a bow and exiting stage left.

When I asked him what happened, Cohn told me by email: (more...)