After tracking radiation levels in Fukushima, Safecast is measuring air...
When a nuclear crisis came on the heels of the March 2011 tsunami that devastated Japan, there was an outcry from those seeking accurate information about radiation levels in various prefectures. The...
View ArticleMonday Q&A: Andrew McGill on Philly Rap Sheet, his automatic arrest-tracker
Crime reporters in Philly can thank Andrew McGill, who in his free time created a tool that scrapes docket sheets to produce a database of arrests in the city. The result: Philly Rap Sheet, a...
View ArticleNew York Times, Washington Post developers team up to create Open Elections...
Calling all data hounds! Senior developers from The New York Times and The Washington Post are looking for volunteers to help collect more than 10 years of federal elections data from each state. With...
View ArticleNew Pew study: Where you live helps shape your news diet
Residents of cities, suburbs, small towns, and rural areas have distinctly different news consumption habits, according to a study out today from the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in...
View ArticleFree the Files! ProPublica taps the crowd for a database-building sprint to...
Political transparency geeks got both good news and bad news from the Federal Communications Commission last April. Good news first: The FCC decided it would require television stations to put...
View ArticleLet me guess: You sleep with your iPad, don’t you?
Chances are good that the warm glowing warming glow of an iPad screen is one of the last things you see before you fall asleep or one of the first things you reach for when you wake up. A study...
View ArticleMonday Q&A: Bill Wheatley on presidential debates, how they’ve changed, and...
For a certain breed of political junkie, the Twitter back channel has become as much a part of the election as what the candidates are actually doing and saying. During the 20 Republican primary...
View ArticleTalking Points Memo launches membership-only program, wades into longform
Encouraging mass readership within a niche coverage area is at the heart of Talking Points Memo’s ad-supported business model. So when founding publisher/editor Josh Marshall began to assess the best...
View ArticleElection season gives major daily newspapers ripe testing ground for video work
This election season has continued online news’ march toward video — particularly video produced by news organizations that haven’t historically been known for it. Here’s a look at how three major...
View ArticleThe Orange County Register is hiring dozens of reporters, focusing on...
Why did the Orange County Register send reporters and photogs to cover 40 — yes, four-zero, 40 — high-school sporting events in one weekend? No, it’s not another news mob. Nor is it a one-time thing....
View ArticleFor politically playful news orgs, the 2012 election means social interactivity
Wanna make your own over-the-top Bobby Newport-style political attack ad? PBS NewsHour is on it. This week it launched Ad Libs 2012, an interactive feature that has you pick quotes and photos from...
View ArticleHow to make your journalism project succeed on Kickstarter
There were lots of little cupcakes and big hugs in the wake of Kickstarter success for Laura and Chris Amico, who last month surpassed their $40,000 fundraising goal to keep Homicide Watch D.C....
View ArticleProPublica’s Message Machine is figuring out what the Obama campaign knows...
Just how much do presidential campaigns know about the voters they’re trying to court? The short answer: More than ever. But figuring out precisely how the campaigns use your individual personal data...
View ArticleUpworthy has a recipe for chocolate-covered news broccoli that actually...
Imagine coming up with 25 distinctly different headlines for each and every story you file. Insane, right? Maybe, but it’s a key part of the strategy at Upworthy, the still-pretty-newish site devoted...
View ArticleNews companies use Cyber Monday to attract subscribers, push coupons
News companies aren’t just covering Cyber Monday this year — they’re hawking their own wares, trying to woo new subscribers with holiday discounts. The New York Times has a half-off special that runs...
View ArticleNo sleep till: Technically Media’s next expansion stop is Brooklyn
NEW YORK — News organizations have long seen value in their ability to connect people: linking citizens to public officials, advertisers to readers, and so on. But in today’s nichified media world,...
View ArticleFor The New York Times, redesigns happen in print, too
If you picked up a print copy of The New York Times today — you do remember print, right? where newspapers still make most of their money? — you would have seen a little note from the editor on the...
View ArticleLessons from The New York Times’ app graveyard: When an app has an expiration...
The election is over. Even the inauguration is over. So it makes sense, perhaps, that The New York Times this week discontinued its Elections 2012 mobile app. The Times launched the app some 13 months...
View ArticleSocial media editors: Do you have a robot deputy?
It was only about a year ago that Liz Heron — then a social media editor at The New York Times, now in a similar role at The Wall Street Journal — predicted her job title wouldn’t exist in five years....
View ArticleChanging trains: The Local East Village, NYU’s hyperlocal blog, moves from...
NEW YORK — New York University’s hyperlocal East Village blog has found a new home and a new name. After a two-and-a-half-year partnership with The New York Times, the newspaper is shutting down The...
View Article“Post Classic”: The Washington Post integrates its print edition into a new...
What if you had an old-school newspaper newsroom where the digital producers were at the core of the operation, and the task of putting together the print newspaper was the side job? The Washington...
View ArticleOne in 10 young debate-watchers skipped TV altogether
Eleven percent of people who watched the presidential debate live last week were “dual screeners,” tracking the action both on TV and on a mobile device. That’s according to new research by the Pew...
View ArticleGawker is letting readers rewrite headlines and reframe articles
Relegating online comments to the bottom of an article seems so old-school newspapery in retrospect, doesn’t it? Long the default for many news organizations online, the message is that reader comments...
View ArticleColumbia is launching a new post-bac program to breed journalism unicorns
The journalism unicorn exists. I’ve seen one — even worked with one. Maybe you know the kind: a journalist who’s as nimble and dynamic as a reporter as she is with coding. Yes, journalism unicorns are...
View ArticleA solo home run: The Slurve is trying to build an authentic, profitable...
Right up there with “kill your darlings” and “write what you know” is the classic advice to write for just one person. Kurt Vonnegut called this the “secret of artistic unity.” He believed that “every...
View ArticleWhat does the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel know that your newsroom doesn’t?
Editor’s note: In 1882, not long before his 25th birthday, a Wisconsin newspaperman named Lucius Nieman gave his new paper, The Milwaukee Journal, a mission: “The Journal will be the outspoken,...
View ArticleAdrienne LaFrance: What does Pierre Omidyar see in journalism?
Editor’s note: Before Adrienne LaFrance came to work for Nieman Lab last year, she worked for Honolulu Civil Beat, the Hawaii online news startup that’s made some unusual, creative choices in its...
View ArticleSix lessons The Wall Street Journal learned from its experiment in reality TV
Donald Trump may be a Wall Street Journal reader, but the Journal is not a brand that immediately evokes the style of Trump’s long-running reality show The Apprentice. And yet the Journal is...
View ArticleThe rise of the fluid beat structure
A favorite editor of mine used to say that you can tell a news organization’s values by what it chooses not to cover. I always liked that, especially as it applies to news judgment in a content-choked...
View ArticleFrom Nieman Reports: The powers and perils of news personalization
A new era of personalized news products began, in earnest, as a reaction to horrific global news. Today, a Google search for news runs through the same algorithmic filtration system as any other Google...
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