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Two related announcements today from a U.S. journalism institute reflect the changing nature of how journalism is produced, distributed and experienced globally - and also the expanding role for non-profits and philanthropy in paying for U.S. journalism.

In an open letter to craigslist, Steve Outing asks its founders and operators to help save the newspaper industry from itself. My response:

Steve,
It takes real chutzpah to ask Craig Newmark and Jim Buckmaster of craigslist to help newspapers salvage their classifieds businesses and thus save democracy, or at least the part of it that newspapers [...]

What would you do to provide a better news service for your community? Or for any community? David Cohn, one of our We Media Fellows at this year’s We Media Miami conference, is trying to ferret out good ideas for one community, San Jose, California, from an obvious source: people who live there.
On April 19 [...]

Here’s a chance for members of the We Media Community to get involved in something new, practical and ambitious. Bread for the City, a food bank, health clinic and social services provider for the poor in Washington, DC, wants to use the tools of media creation and distribution to help its clients and community members [...]

From Singapore: Conference Bay, an eBay-style auction marketplace for buying seats at conferences worldwide.
Nothing new here, right? We all know about online auctions. The only innovation is applying a well-tested online transaction model to a different niche -  in this case a potentially high-value niche that may provide real utility - and new buying power [...]

For the second year in a row we’ve documented a devastating lack of satisfaction with journalism in American - and an opportunity to do something about it. Here’s the formal press release of the new research, which we discussed in the opening session of this year’s We Media Miami Forum and Festival. The good [...]

washingtonpost.com’s “On Being” project is simply stunning: real stories from real people based on the simple notion that “we should get to know one another a little better.” An elegant design and interface, enhanced by professional video production standards, bring to life the musings and passions of ordinary extraordinary people. This is how journalism [...]

You have to admire the chutzpah of any group that seeks to save journalism from itself by blowing with the wind. But inspired by native forces, the goo-goos at Journalism That Matters gathered in “open space” at a George Washington University cafeteria to agonize over the ill-winds of change. All the right people – which, [...]

If the Next Newsroom sounds familiar, it is. It borrows language from Newspaper Next (request the report; don’t republish), the “transformation project” financed by newspaper publishers. Both projects owe to Harvard business professor Clayton Christensen’s broadly applicable, 1997 book The Innovator’s Dilemma. The difference: the American Press Institute paid Christensen’s consulting company $2.5 million to [...]

Here’s an interesting collaboration that nicely illustrates how seemingly different agendas can intersect: The Sunlight Foundation, a watchdog organization that focuses on expanding online access to information about the U.S. Congress, is collaborating with NewsTrust, a kind of non-profit Digg designed as a platform to evaluate the trustworthiness of online journalism.

Carlos Garcia and Omar Ramos presented and did a live demo of Scrapblog:
“Scrapblog is a free web service that allows everyone to create multimedia scrapblogs.”

I’m not sure there’s a better-defined “community” than the members of a college or university. Student, faculty, staff, alumni and friends generally have strong feelings and ties to the institution where they teach, work, study, play and spend (or spent) a good part of their adult life.
With ready access to computers, cell phones, personal data [...]

Yahoo was downgraded today by S&P to “sell” from “hold.” Why?

A novel approach to collaborative filtering launched a couple of weeks ago and is worth a look. NewsTrust is tying to develop a more reliable means of finding the most trustworthy news and information for specific stories - not simply by relying on your hunches and experience with your media, but by relying on the [...]