What newspapers can learn from baseball

Photos: Creative Commons via Flickr from Bobster1985, lisatozzi, jeffpearce and Annie Mole. The practice of professional journalism is like the practice of professional sports. It’s physically demanding, dirty, and success requires a combination of skills, talent, experience and luck. But it’s different in one glaring respect. Sports fans love their teams, the players and the […]

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Esquire’s e-ink cover: The future blinks

Back at the turn, print publishers tried to persuade us the future was in electronic ink — a fusion of chemistry, physics and electronics that transformed the “printed” page into a constantly changing stream of updated news and information. Eight years and two Web revolutions later, e-ink has finally made its mass-media debut on the […]

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Bono and Sachs blog the UN

Bono is a rock star musician. Jeffrey Sachs is a rock star economist. This week, they were also bloggers for FT.com. Read their posts and you can see clearly how people with passion and purpose can produce journalism that stands out from the routine, gutless reporting we’ve been indoctrinated to view as normal and right.

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Undercover reporters: Everyone, everywhere

Earlier this month a New York University student went “undercover” into her own journalism classroom to report on the class for Mediashift, a blog published by the US public television network PBS. She didn’t tell the professor or fellow students what she was up to, or ask their permission. In her report, student Alana Taylor […]

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Creative? Or crossing the line?

PC pulls an advertisement in the guise of an editorial, called “Stop Switching to Mac”, from the sacrosanct news wall on today’s front page of NewYorkTimes.com. Washingtonpost.com, too. A godlike Mac watches and comments just below the nameplate.

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Gov. Palin and her email: Let us decide

The hacking of a Yahoo account used by Sarah Palin for both personal and government email is a loathsome act that damages the integrity of discovery on the Internet. Having said that, I read every word and downloaded every screenshot before Gov. Palin’s handlers deactivated the account. I guess that makes me either a voyeur, […]

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Reflect, celebrate, drink: OneWebDay 08

Wash off your champagne glasses, and order your web buttons and bumper stickers to show off your webbiness on Sept. 22. That’s OneWebDay, the brainchild of University of Michigan law professor Susan Crawford. It’s a day of public events, talks, meetups and drinks worldwide intended to raise awareness of issues that are important for the […]

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Freakamedia: The limits of the connected culture

As the UK economy suffers its worst crisis in 60 years and some of the world’s biggest private financial institutions crumble beneath the crash of the U.S. housing market, we can’t help but reflect on the notion of enlightened anxiety. That’s a phrase Dale used in the introduction to our original We Media report, published […]

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