We create the stories of the connected society

MTV, the Associated Press and the Knight Foundation today unveiled “Street Team 08,” a stunning collaboration that could help define newsgathering, distribution and a news-business models into the future. Made possible by a $700,000 grant through Knight’s News Challenge, MTV has recruited and is equipping 51 young, citizen journalists to cover the 2008 elections through [...]

We’ve forecast the inevitability of The News Wars as news providers continue to lose audience and revenue to online aggregaters who redistribute content that others produce, frequently at great expense. Owing to parochialism and intransigence, newspaper publishers have been unable to either mount a united front or to develop meaningful innovation to compete against the [...]

Google’s pursuit of all things media remains relentless. In recent weeks it announced its Android operating system for mobile phones, its OpenSocial standard to link applications across major social-networking sites, and filed a patent application for a magazine of sorts that would allow users to collate Web content around which Google would wrap targeted ads. [...]

A study by Nokia forecasts that 25 percent of the entertainment consumed by people in five years time will have been created, edited and shared within their peer circle rather than created by traditional media groups. Nokia calls it “circular entertainment.”

2007 has been celebrated for digital innovation in U.S. politics. The Huffington Post teamed with Slate and Yahoo! for the first online “mash-up” debate. MTV and MySpace launched instant-messaging forums for online viewers to send questions in real time to presidential candidates. And, of course, all the candidates launched spunky web sites that feature videos [...]

Are you crunchy? No, that’s not  code for your political leanings, or your eating habits, or the length of your armpit hair. Get with the times, for they are a’changin. It’s code for your digital-business-award-worthiness. Of course. Maybe you’ve already won a Webby; or a Bloggy; maybe you’ve made it to the Always On Top [...]

It was an emotional morning at the Lake Anne Coffee House where I get my start-of-the-day latte and early take on the day’s current events. Retirees Tom and Bill were at their usual table talking leisurely over cheese Danish. Each wore their Redskins baseball caps, maroon faded by years of sunlight and memories. Young men [...]

One of the roles of media is to help people understand the world so we can make informed decisions – and then take action. The daily flood of news and information from all the big media institutions we love and love to hate is one approach to learning, sifting, filtering and evaluating all this information. [...]

The daily newspaper in Norfolk, Virginia, announced on Oct. 23, in an anonymous editorial, that its anonymous editorial section will no longer endorse candidates for the U.S. presidency. "Presidential elections are not our beat," The Virginian-Pilot editorial said. "Our time is best spent on local and state problems, or those national ones that bear directly [...]

The audio recording of last week’s Power To Change The World Summit is online and well worth a listen for anyone who cares about media as a force for change in the world. You’ll find the Change Summit audio here. The context was thinking about media for the next hundred years. You probably think in [...]

The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation is offering big bucks to support innovation in community journalism. The deadline for this year’s Knight News Challenge is Oct. 15. This is a big deal, especially in the U.S. where the commercial news industry is in decline. But it’s a big deal everywhere – in a [...]

Here’s an update on who’s coming to the Oct. 24 Power To Change The World summit, a one-day event Dale and I are organizing for UPI in Washington. More details at: www.changesummit.com. The early-bird registration expires Sept. 20. To register, go here. Confirmed participants include: Tom Bosco, VP and head of sales, MySpaceTV; Merrill Brown, [...]

What’s more interesting: Jeff Jarvis skewering Yahoo!, or the smiling ass next to the story? It’s an ad for a … well, never mind, see for yourself. Meetup founder Scott Heiferman rightly notes that the ass web site is not just good, smart or prolific, like Jeff. In Scott’s words, it’s … transcendent. Yes. See [...]

A new report from Harvard suggests that the Internet is “redistributing the news audience in a way that is pressuring some traditional news organizations.” Stop the presses. The report from the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government purports to peer into the future [...]

Each month I have dinner with good friends who happen to be editors at three of the nation’s leading news organizations. Given our friendship and a common kinship to newspapers, conversation invariably turns to journalism and its current woes. As a recovering journalist turned digerati, I am left to defend “Dale’s Internet” during spirited after-dinner [...]