In the context of professional journalism, this amounts to asking what unanswered questions are most pressing to the community served by a newsroom. One could devise systems of asking the audience (like Quora and StackExchange) or analyze search logs (ala Demand Media.) That newsrooms don’t frequently do these things is, I think, an artifact of industrial history — and an unfilled niche in the current ecosystem. Search engines know where the gaps between supply and demand lie, but they’re not in the business of researching new answers. Newsrooms can produce the supply, but they don’t have an understanding of the demand. Today, these two sides of the industry do not work together to close this loop. Some symbiotic hybrid of Google and The Associated Press might be an uncannily good system for answering civic questions.

Solid description of the challenges facing news organizations.

"But by imitating the best journalism of yesterday without a full understanding of why that journalism was great and what made it so powerful, our industry is slowly amassing an unsettling amount of cargo cult behaviors: we’re imitating a 20th-century writing style and ethical code without the first idea about how these contribute to journalism that is informative, engaging and fair."

David Carr at the New York Times questions the future of WikiLeaks.

The Times doesn’t have an exclusive on intellect. Their readers have quite a bit of it, and can get the information they want even if the Times doesn’t want to provide it. The Times is on much more precarious ground than internet leaking is.

Cool notes from Carlos about what he's working on at the Union Bulletin.

"The journalism of makers aligns itself with the tiny hotbeds of knowledge and practice where great things emerge, the nascent communities of change. Its aim is a deep understanding of the complex systems of the real world, so that plans for a better world may constructed one piece at a time by people who really know what they’re talking about. It never takes itself too seriously, because it knows that play is necessary for exploration and that a better understanding will come along tomorrow. It serves the talent pools that give rise to our future civic planners, economists, judges, scientists, and leaders — regardless of where in society these people may be found, and whether or not they are already within existing systems of power."

" I’ve heard people say that it’s embarassing that it wasn’t a newspaper that invented Craigslist. I disagree. If we had, Craig Newmark still would have kicked our ass and still would have stolen our classifieds. Again: if you bundle things, prepare to get unbundled."

Really great article about the challenges and approaches to learning code.

Really great piece about the structure of news.

Cool article about journalist flocking to Twitter while being so hesitant about blogging.

Interesting experiment around a news cafe.

Some solid questioning of the New Yorker article about the Osama raid.

A breakdown of the actions and gestures surrounding news.

"People who earn their living as journalists should bend over backwards to be fair to people who play a journalistic role without being paid for it."

"The NYT treated its readers as mature and civilized adults, and outperformed internal expectations as a result. Meanwhile, the WSJ and FT are still treating their readers with mistrust, as though they’ll be robbed somehow if they ever let their guard down a little."

Great explainer by Jay Rosen about context.

"News is about stories, and stories are about people. In Andy’s redux, aside from the “hero” image leading the page, the only people’s faces I can see are those of the journalists and columnists. This is a very 20th century view of the news, where the only people you heard from were those with the patronage of the owners of the presses."

"There’s no substitute for good product design. You still have to make something people will want to use and find your way around technical stumbling blocks, not just fill in all the gaps with “ML will solve any difficulties we face”. Because it won’t."

Interesting thoughts on a feed reader for news types.

Well put rationale behind the future of a news system.

"That’s the newspaper business, or at least it was until recently. The average US paper runs more soft than hard news, uses more third-party content than anything created by their own staff, and reaches more people who care about local teams than local zoning. Telling the publishers of those papers to create a digital product so extraordinary that readers will pay full freight is a tacit admission that they do not know how to make such a product today."

Fantastic summary of the News of the World controversy.

Smart words from Gruber on why it's important to link and credit your sources by name.

A really interesting app from ProPublica that analyzes data released by the Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights. Even though it hits just a few data points it is fascinating to compare various districts and schools.

Confederated websites are the future. Time to make them awesome.

"it is not possible to do journalism in an environment where your writing can be taken down if the company hosting it deems it offensive."

Smart words from Jeff Jarvis about what The Guardian could do to survive.

"News sites must do more than tell stories, they must turn readers into customers if they hope to survive."

"Almost everything else we buy is of far higher quality than it was twenty years ago. The worst car you could buy then was a Yugo… clearly we’ve raised the bar at the bottom. Is the same thing true of your news?"

Fantastic article about Bill Simmons and what comes with being the nation's top sportswriter.

"Technology gave us the tools to map these news communities and engage directly with their members. But it is the oldest journalistic skill of all which gives this process meaning and that is engagement. It is the skill most easily overlooked in the rush towards a brand new journalism: the supreme importance of interaction between two human beings."

Great pier exploring paywalls and different approaches to making news a business.

4 ideas from Daniel on subverting newsroom culture.

"The core idea is this: news sources could take an ongoing random sample of their output and check it for accuracy — a fact check spot check. Stories could be checked for errors by asking sources in the traditional manner, or through independent verification by a reporter who did not originally work on the story."

A brief survey of why news sites should link out. it makes the reader's life easier.

Shawn Blanc surveys news.me and how it relates to Flipboard and other news consumption.

Interesting use of real world forums from a news organization.

Cody Brown writes about NYU Local's first day.

A day in the life of the Times' foreign reporters.

"For people in the press, bloggers vs. journalists is an elaborate way of staying the same, of refusing to change, while permitting into the picture some of the stressful changes I have mentioned. A shorter way to say this is: it’s fucking neurotic."

Khoi Vinh writes about the real costs of the New York Times paywall.

Great interview with Felix Salmon about how blogging has changed journalism.

Jason Fry writes about the New York Times' pay plan and how it's only a first iteration.

"What I am trying to create is a fluid content marketplace which allows innovation in content packaging, filtering, and presentation. There is no guarantee that such a market will pay publishers anything like what they used to get for their content, and in fact I expect it won’t. But nothing can change the fact that there is way, way more content than there used to be, and much of it is both high-quality and legally free."

Marshall Kirkpatrick gives a bit of insight into how he's tracking the future of the music industry via Twitter. This type of journalism-hacking is brilliant. The information is out there if you can put the effort into collecting and sorting it.

"All this talk about a digital future, about moving journalism onto the web, about innovation and saving journalism is just talk until developers are allowed to hack at the very core of the whole product."

What journalism looks like in North Korea. Fascinating read about how information slips and moves through the margins.

"The mistake is not viewing this from the other end of the communication pipe. Listen to to the pitch from the other guy's point of view."

"So, memo to journo-bloggers: Less talk, more walk. Build something or STFU. When that urge to run to Wordpress so you can tell us your thoughts on paid content or aggregation or community strikes you, stop yourself and spend that time actually creating something that does what you say."

There are 5 beachheads that must be established in order to successfully reinvent media. Attacking everything head-on is a recipe for disaster and will allow outside groups the ability to innovate and supplant incumbents.

"Here’s a great idea for local TV news departments: start streaming, 24/7/365, on the Net."

"In fact, in digital media, illustration is missing in action, and its absence is palpable. I can’t think of a single, regularly publishing, large-scale digital publication that uses original illustrations prominently, much less pays illustrators a working wage for their efforts."

In other words, you aren't going to create the innovative journalism company of the next 10 years by finding additional sources. You'll do it through reinventing the consumption experience, finding new ways to engage users, and curating the really valuable content.

Lauren writes about the new Spot.us design.

6 months after it's founding TBD may not be dead but it's certainly not thriving.

A totally fascinating story about how Albert Gonzalez mislead the United States Secret Service and eventually stole over a hundred million credit cards. He was even able to hack into the point of sale devices used by stores.

College Publisher's update to their terms of service and pricing plan is going to drive many news organizations to WordPress-based sites.

Martin Belam discusses some of the questions posed to him by students and digital media.

Dan Conover gives more background for understanding his outline for a semantic content management system for journalism.

Dave Cohn's post from the January edition of Carnival of Journalism.

"One veteran editor described news judgment to me as “tribal,” i.e. publication dependent and essentially arbitrary — which is of course at odds with theories of “objective” reporting."

Great ideas from Justin Tadlock about how a WordPress news theme could and should work.

"We find the publics we wish to join based not merely on gross labels, generalizations, and borders drawn about us—red v. blue, black v. white, nation v. nation—but instead on our ideas, interests, and needs: cancer survivors, libertarians, Deadheads, vegetarians, single moms, geeks, even privacy advocates. We finally tear down the elite of the public few and each become public people in our own right. . . ."

"Does this all sound familiar? It’s like a blog network of the academia breed. If it really takes off and becomes successful, monetize the university blogs and do a rev-share, in which you can start to pay some of those people within the university who continue to provide unique content, which brings in more readers, which brings in more money, etc."

Daniel Bachhuber's thoughts on universities and journalistic activity. For the Carnival of Journalism.

Standards-based journalism with a semantic content management system is the future. Totally stellar essay.

Sean Blanda introduces Technically Media and what his goals are for the organization.

"if what you're interested in is power to influence public opinion, and becoming more relevant over time, not more niched over time -- if being influential is what you're about, they really did you a favor."

Dave Winer's tips on merging journalism and programming. Great stuff.

RSS is alive and thriving at The Guardian. 8000 plus topic feeds can attest to that.

David Cohn is back with his carnival of journalistic fun.

Dave Winer's streaming feed of WikiLeaks coverage.

"So the burning question that the World Public Opinion study leaves me with is just this: why wasn’t it a news organization that commissioned this survey?"

More thoughts from Clay Shirky about WikiLeaks and its role as a stateless/international organization.

"Long-form content, the importance of context, and rebuilding trust emerged as important topics at the first News Foo."

"Journalism without effect does not deserve the special place in democracy that it tries to claim."

"Wikileaks is the press, but not the press as we have known it. This is the press of the 21st century, the press that comes after we’re all connected. Suddenly, all of the friendliest computers have become the deadliest weapons, and we are fenced in, encircled by threats – which are also opportunities."

"One of my favorite write-ups is from euobserver.com: Heads start rolling in WikiLeaks affair. Let’s see: A German bureaucrat fired for leaking internal discussions to the US. A Swedish diplomat feeling really bad for similar reasons. Berlusconi in hot political water. The Georgian ambassador to Rome implicated in the Berlusconi mud. The leader of the Moldovan Communist party exposed in what seems like a perfectly routine attempt at parliamentary bribery.

Isn’t that awful. Losing sleep? Me neither."

Lauren's thoughts about the surprising move by College Media Network to support WordPress installations.