The News Frontier
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May 18, 2012 04:10 PM
You have a right to remain recording
Carlos Miller’s crusade for freedom of photography
On January 31, officers from the Miami-Dade and City of Miami Police Departments donned riot gear and headed to Government Center, in the heart of downtown Miami, to evict the Occupy protesters who had been camping there for three months. Carlos Miller, a local blogger, was there to film it—but he ended up becoming part of the story.
Miller...
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May 14, 2012 06:50 AM
Seattle news site PubliCola is out of business
But its writers are moving to another Seattle site: Crosscut.com
The Seattle-based political news site PubliCola is closing, despite strong readership. As founder Josh Feit describes in a post, the site is quite popular, with “more than 400,000 monthly page views during the election season and currently more than 10,000 Facebook and Twitter followers.” But that doesn’t always equal commensurate returns. Feit writes, “We haven’t been...
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May 7, 2012 11:00 AM
Staying Safe
CPJ’s “Journalist Security Guide” is a must-read
The Committee to Protect Journalists just released its “Journalist Security Guide,” a 68-page manual for reporters that has tips on every sort of security, from digital to physical. To promote the publication, written mainly by CPJ's Frank Smyth, CPJ and Columbia’s Journalism School held a panel discussion last week about security challenges facing today’s reporters.
Anne Garrels,...
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May 4, 2012 03:00 PM
The Kickstarter Chronicles
China’s green technology, a call-girl confesses, and the running world’s Tim Tebow
Each week, dozens of journalistic endeavors turn to Kickstarter for funding. Pitching media projects to this online community brings another meaning to the concept “public interest journalism”; success depends on how intrigued people are by the pitch. From the hugely popular to the barely noticed, CJR’s Kickstarter Chronicles is a look through some of these journalistic proposals.
Project of the...
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April 24, 2012 02:21 PM
Self-Regulation Done Right
How Scandinavia’s press councils keep the media accountable
When right-wing militant Anders Behring Breivik killed 77 people in and around bucolic Oslo last July, the story dominated the press in Norway for months. For many of the survivors, and for loved ones of those who did not survive, this news coverage was understandably hard to bear.
Some Norwegians thought a few papers went too far—that newsrooms...
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April 20, 2012 12:03 PM
The Kickstarter Chronicles
Conflict in Afghanistan, Occupy Brooklyn, and Star Wars figurines
Each week, dozens of journalistic endeavors turn to Kickstarter for funding. Pitching media projects to this online community brings another meaning to the concept “public interest journalism”; success depends on how intrigued people are by the pitch. From the hugely popular to the barely noticed, CJR’s Kickstarter Chronicles is a weekly look through some of these journalistic proposals.
Project of...
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April 19, 2012 07:04 PM
Online News Startups Struggle to Break Even in Western Europe
A viable business model remains as elusive overseas as it is in the U.S.
Last year, in a research project titled “The Business of Digital Journalism,” the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism set out to find digital news outlets that were successfully making money on their own: without being bankrolled by institutional grants or other investors, and without being propped up by profits from a legacy, print-based counterpart. With the exception of big-name...
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April 17, 2012 01:09 PM
Teletext Lives On in Scandinavia
The pre-Internet digital news service shuts down in the UK, but survives in Northern Europe
Just about every television in Europe has a “teletext” button. Push the button on your television remote and you’re digitally transported to the early 1980s. Against a black background, brief news dispatches are spelled out in bright, thickly pixelated text reminiscent of an Atari game title screen. As old-fashioned as it looks, the news you see isn’t from the ’80s—it’s...
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April 13, 2012 04:45 PM
The Kickstarter Chronicles
Investigating a mysterious illness, Zelda's Christian ties, and small-town basketball
Each week, dozens of journalistic endeavors turn to Kickstarter for funding. Pitching media projects to this online community brings another meaning to the concept “public interest journalism”; success depends on how intrigued people are by the pitch. From the hugely popular to the barely noticed, CJR’s Kickstarter Chronicles is a weekly look through some of these journalistic proposals.
Project of...
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April 9, 2012 11:37 AM
Unpublishing Requests Are on the Rise
As more content shifts from print to web, journalists are seeing rising requests from sources to remove stories
I recently encountered a sticky conundrum as editor of a student-run digital news website at the University of Southern California.
A woman, the centerpiece of a story on the continued plight of the architecture industry in California three years after the recession, contacted one of my reporters in a panic. The source was a Canadian citizen, and it became...
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April 6, 2012 02:20 PM
The Kickstarter Chronicles
Comics journalism, drone aircraft, and a tea partier’s personal tale
Each week, dozens of journalistic endeavors turn to Kickstarter for funding. Pitching media projects to this online community brings another meaning to the concept “public interest journalism”; success depends on how intrigued people are by the pitch. From the hugely popular to the barely noticed, CJR’s Kickstarter Chronicles is a weekly look through some of these journalistic proposals.
Project of...
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April 5, 2012 01:58 PM
Seven Years of New West
Experiments in regional reporting, the pro-am model, and a multi-pronged business plan
When the website New West was founded, it had grand ambitions. The digital news outlet blended local and regional reporting to tell stories of growth and change in the Rocky Mountain West. Today, however, New West has been dormant for over six months, and is now transitioning to its third owner since it launched in 2005.
The site...
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April 3, 2012 11:51 AM
What McClure Said: “The Story is the Thing”
Clearing space for the agenda-setting narrative in digital journalism
Editor's note: CJR’s Dean Starkman was invited to give the opening keynote speech at this year’s Narrative Arc Conference, at Boston University. The three-day conference at the end of March gathered some of the best nonfiction writers in America to talk about the craft. Starkman edits The Audit, CJR’s business desk, and is our Kingsford Capital Fellow....
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April 3, 2012 09:42 AM
Orlando Startup Covers the Trayvon Martin Story
When the national news is local
West Orlando News Online in Orange County, Florida, has, like many outlets, devoted considerable resources to covering the story of Trayvon Martin, the 17-year-old who was killed by neighborhood watch volunteer George Zimmerman, who says he shot in self-defense after an altercation in their gated community in Sanford, Florida. Keith Longmore, the founder of West Orlando...
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The News Frontier Feature
CJR’s Guide to Online News Startups
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 News Startups Guide 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 News Startups Guide 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
- A game of telephone fools the Times And the newspaper-of-record short-arms the correction
- Audit notes: Questions for JPMorgan, hindsight journalism, Ticketmaster Jesse Eisinger asks what and when Dimon & Co. knew about the bank’s big loss
The Observatory Science
- USA Today’s oily, gassy rainbow Detailed cover story a bit too rosy about ‘energy independence’
- Attachment parenting, detached debate Time’s titillating cover overshadows article’s substance
Campaign Desk Politics & Policy
- The entirely predictable failure of Americans Elect A little poli-sci—or just recent history—would have helped pundits avoid the hype
- The Obama camp serves up a Bain story Some local outlets take the bait, while others offer a closer look
Behind the News The Media
Blog
The Kicker last updated: Fri 3:00 PM
- A game of telephone fools the Times
- What Warren Buffett sees in local newspapers
- Don’t take my traditional Internet away!
- Why China ejected Melissa Chan
- Seattle news site PubliCola is out of business
