Last month, four major newspaper companies announced a joint ad sales venture to “let national advertisers place ads on local Web sites with a single phone call.” When I read that, I realized suddenly why local newspapers are having so much trouble adapting to the web.

There’s no such thing as a local website.

The Eliot Spitzer prostitution scandal is undoubtedly a big story, which every media outlet is covering, so I suppose it’s not surprising that Google News currently shows 2,580 versions of this story. But when you stop and think about, you have to ask — WHY are there 2,580 versions of this story?

You can hum along […]

How can newsrooms do more online with fewer resources? By leveraging the reporting that bloggers in their communities have ALREADY published on the web. Using “local link journalism,” reporters can seek out and link to reporting on a story that’s been published across their local blogosphere and just needs to be pulled together.

And isn’t pulling […]

The link journalism meme seems to have legs, based on the number of smart people who picked it up. Now it’s time to kick it up a notch, with the concept of NETWORKED link journalism, which can give journalists, collectively, the power of Digg and Google to direct huge amounts of traffic on the web.

I was reading the New York Times public editor’s rebuke of the NYT McCain ethics piece that alleged an affair with a lobbyist, when a line at the end reached out and grabbed me by the collar (bold is mine):
The pity of it is that, without the sex, The Times was on to a good […]

A cornerstone of journalism has always been reporting what key sources say, put in context and given perspective, alongside reported facts.

It’s time to reinvent that process on the web — make it dynamic — using the fundamental mechanism for connecting information and people: the LINK

Jack Lail, an editor and journalist with a deep understanding of the web, big vision, and a “let’s do it” innovator’s spirit, set out to publish “the best Tennessee election coverage that can be found on the Internet” — he rounded up a group of journalists and bloggers, set them up on Publish2, and off […]

Publish2 is organizing a network of newsrooms, journalists, freelancers and network-affiliated bloggers to aggregate the best news coverage of the “Super Tuesday” February 5 U.S. primary elections, leading up to it and after. Publish2 is still in private beta, but we’re going to syndicate everything out via RSS feeds.

Publish2’s web-based bookmarking feature will aggregate bookmarks […]

Jeff Jarvis challenges news organizations to define the role of editor in the 21st century, i.e. Editor 2.0. Jeff connects a number of dots that involve a significant, even radical shift in the traditional editorial role, such as new search/tag editor positions. But one of the most radical shifts taking place is that editors are […]

There is a massive wave of media consolidation going on, but it’s very different from how media companies traditionally scaled.

The archetypal consolidated media company was, in many ways, the newspaper chain, which consolidated monopoly media channels across non-competitive local markets, guaranteeing that the whole would exceed the sum of the parts. But on the web, […]

When you place a big bet on a new model, it’s always nice hear that smart people are thinking about the big trends that underlie that model. So it was great to hear Robert Scoble, Paul Graham, and Larry Kramer thinking about human-driven information filtering on the Web — and particularly the role of TRUSTED […]