The New York Times is expected to begin charging readers for online access this year. A (free) online story in New York Magazine reveals the heated debate between print and online managers, and the difficult issues behind such a decision. Excerpts: “The decision to go paid is monumental for the Times, and culminates a yearlong…
Canadian Press reporter Stephanie Levitz, one of some three dozen journalists who ran with the 2010 Olympic flame, wrote a terrific first-person piece about her ethical dilemma … Update Jan. 17: Canwest Olympics reporter Jeff Lee responds …
The death of Calgary Herald reporter Michelle Lang on patrol with Canadian troops in Afghanistan has produced an outpouring of sympathy from across the Canadian journalism community – not least because her situation inside an armoured vehicle was both blameless and helpless. It has also reignited debate about the potential return on such excursions. Colin…
John Tierney ponders the key question, imo, of the past decade: “When does the wisdom of crowds give way to the meanness of mobs?” Tierney’s New York Times piece today focuses on a new book by digital pioneer Jaron Lanier, “You Are Not a Gadget,” and Lanier’s attack on “the glorification of open-source software, free…
When the bank pulled the plug on Canwest’s newspaper division last week, faint hope flickered in the land. A Town Hall post asked: “Are we coming to the end of the decade-long train wreck of Canadian journalism?” But the history of Canadian media ownership lends itself to more of the same, with hope for a…
There’s more to the story of sexual abuse by clerics than victims, abusers and self-protecting bureaucracies, writes Joyce Smith. Part of the challenge of reporting on religion is recognizing the spiritual element in the story and following the impact of events on relationships and faith.
An ITZ/Belden Interactive study of reader sign-up rates at 26 U.S. dailies that put their online versions behind a paywall found the average number of online subscribers amounted to just 2.4 per cent of print subscribers, Alan Mutter reports on his Reflections of a Newsosaur blog.
Although the Internet has spawned a vast increase in news sources, almost all news is still gathered by traditional media, suggests a study by the Pew Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism. The study, which tracked how news was gathered and circulated through more than 53 news outlets during a week last year in Baltimore, discovered…
A Los Angeles Times column, “Freelance writing’s unfortunate new model,” warns that while everyone has been riveted on the loss of staff jobs, freelancing has been taking a quiet nosedive, compounding the loss of journalism. Excerpt from the piece by James Rainey: “Freelance writing fees — beginning with the Internet but extending to newspapers and…
Montreal’s Le Devoir reached the century mark today. CBC reported that the French-language daily was founded in 1910 under the promise, paraphrased, to “support honest people and denounce the villains.” As Metro Montreal noted, quoting founder Henri Bourassa, it also promised depth and intelligence: “Sans doute nous ne donnerons pas à nos lecteurs le genre…