What’s in your wallet?

Our favorite media pundit Jay Rosen shared this test for understanding how people define and are defined by communities. What I carry in mine: — Driver’s License. Geographic community. — Business cards. Connections to global communities. — Insurance cards. My health and wellness, anywhere. — Apple Pro Care. Ticket to my technology. — Hidden Creek […]

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A sight for sore eyes

Sao Paulo, the world’s fourth-largest metropolis became the first city outside of the communist world to put into effect a radical, near-complete ban on outdoor advertising. Although legal challenges from businesses have left a handful standing, 15,000 billboards have been stripped from a city that resembles a battlefield strewn with blank marquees, partially torn-down frames […]

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A mighty wind

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, […]

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Duck, duck, goose

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 […]

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NowFunded: NowPublic

Congratulations to We Media alums Merrill Brown and Michael Tippet, who now get to figure out how to spend $10.6 million of funding for NowPublic, a "crowd powered" news service that has partnered with The Associated Press and that does not want to follow in the footsteps of failed citizen journalism predecessors Bayosphere and Backfence. […]

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Private equity selloff of US newspapers

Like the Wall Street Journal’s Bancroft family, private equity firm PCM has been in a selling mood of late. Selling: a huge chunk of its holdings in US newspaper companies. Then again, those companies are on track for a $2 billion decline in revenue, year-over-year. See: Reflections of a Newsosaur: PCM dumps publishers

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RAM is live

If you read the iFOCOS blog THIS carefully, you deserve something for paying such close attention. So here’s something: a sneak peak at our newest research project, Random Acts of Media. RAM is both research and a collaborative gallery and art project about how people around the world experience media. Our first formal report for […]

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Foundation sponsors quest for better coverage of U.S. Congress

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.

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We Media featured in Knight Foundation report and video

Noted: The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation was a major supporter of this year’s We Media conference, and they’ve featured it in their 2006 annual report. Check out the online experience, and the accompanying video. To produce the multimedia experience, the foundation hired tumultimedia, a small firm from Chicago run by photographer Alex […]

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