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Alberto Ibargüen is President and CEO of The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, a leading supporter of journalism in the digital age.

Amra Tareen, the savvy and ebullient founder of AllVoices, has
just closed a $3 million funding round for the innovative, citizen journalism site. That brings funding to $9 million for the two-year-old start-up. Not bad. TechCrunch has a good take on the AllVoices funding.
How does she do it? Amra returns to We Media [...]

The biggest surprise from yesterday’s unveiling of Apple’s iPad was that print publishers and journos weren’t terribly excited. “Waiting to be surprised. That hasn’t happened yet,” said Jim Roberts, the only New York Times wonk who didn’t confuse Steve Jobs with Moses. Valleywag has a good take on Print Media’s Big Tablet Letdown.
Our [...]

Among the many extraordinary efforts to provide aid and relief for the people of Haiti comes this one from The Extraordinaries, winner of last year’s We Media Pitch It! competition: the Haiti Earthquake Support Center utilizes crowdsourcing and facial-recognition to help locate the missing.
Anyone can post photos of a missing person or loved one, [...]

We couldn’t get to Hyderabad for this year’s group hug of the world’s newspaper publishers, but it sounds like the old boys are getting feisty in their dotage. Forced once to postpone because of bad economics and waning interest, the reconvened World Newspaper Congress, organized by the merged World Association of Newspapers and IFRA, launched [...]

Fifty-six million stories. Where’s the one about transparent government?

Dear Mr. Murdoch:
We’re so fortunate that we can entrust you with the future of the news business in the U.S. Such a shrewd business leader, too. Can you help a confused citizen understand your plan to save the news?

1. You’re going to charge people to read a story online that they won’t read, and [...]

Some people love to talk. All the better with wine and cheese.
Others are busy getting things done.
Between those two extremes you can ask yourself whether you’re stuck in an endless conversation, or if you and your business are focused on creation, innovation and achievement.

Dear Arianna,
About 2000 years ago the philosopher Seneca said that “the best ideas are common property,” which is an old thought rediscovered as the fresh ethos of the Internet.
To be fair, the current state of being on the Web allows me to bring to the same sentence a Roman stoic with the Greek [...]

WeMedia is once again producing a regular podcast that features in-depth interviews with prominent media, technology, and social change figures, as well as distinguished experts on current affairs and news. Our goal is to help the WeMedia community understand the roots of the changes taking place in our society, hear from the thinkers and [...]

Worth a read at Forbes.com: Knight Foundation Head Alberto Ibargüen is bankrolling dozens of experiments to save the news business. Can he rescue newspapers?
You may recall Knight was one of the winners of our We Media Game Changer Awards earlier this year, for reasons cited by Forbes: the foundation has pledged to invest $100 [...]

Earlier this year, our annual We Media poll with Zogby Interactive showed deep dissatisfaction with newspapers and the leadership of news media. Now, two additional reports show how deep the dissatisfaction runs.
On a one to 100 scale, newspapers scored a 63 in the American Customer Satisfaction Index quarterly survey. That put them behind the airlines [...]

Each day brings another story that publishers are lurching to the business model that will save newspapers: charging for online content. Yet, each day brings news of additional buyouts and layoffs in newsrooms. Sometime soon, the publishers are going to figure out the next problem: they neither have enough good content that’s worth selling nor [...]

There’s a media and technology feeding frenzy in Washington. Failing U.S. newspapers are looking for a bailout from the government; nonprofits, telecoms and policy wonks are scrambling to have their say and get their piece of the economic stimulus action – a few billion dollars – to expand broadband networks AND create more content and [...]

History may not repeat itself, but it sure does rhyme, observed Samuel Clemens. I was reminded of Clemens’ vision and failures amid this week’s hoopla over the new Kindle as well a Congressional hearing held today on the crisis in newspapers.
Clemens was a visionary who foresaw the age of invention. He wrote a glorious fable [...]