From the Neiman Journalism Lab comes a review of this new product: The nonprofit news organization Center for Public Integrity is announcing an alternative today at the annual Online News Association conference. The Center wants to make reading its work more enjoyable for the user, and a smarter investment for an organization rethinking its online and mobile strategies. The Center has a new HTML5 product that gives users an app-like experience in a web browser. The project is part of a new digital initiative at the Center, funded by $1.5 million in grants from the Knight Foundation. “We think we’ve created a...

On TechCrunch, Paul Carr has an interesting piece on online journalism being used to show up traditional print journalism. (It is also being covered by ReadWriteWeb.) It talks about Adam Penenberg, who in 1998 exposed one of print journalism’s big names of the day, Stephen Glass, for fabricating his news stories. Penenberg has been at it again. Having written a book in 2003 about Ford’s negligent attitude toward the safety of its SUVs concerning a woman, Donna Bailey, who was nearly killed in an accident, he recently learned of a recent court award of $131 million in damages...

Last week, Techdirt held its “Techdirt Saves Journalism” event, a workshop to come up with ideas for, well, “saving journalism.” JD Lasica at PBS’s “Mediashift” blog has a post enumerating and elaborating on six ideas he brought back from the event. Those six ideas are: Mine the data Elevate your writers Create a platform for your community Multiple revenue streams Expand the brand Changing ideas about news Most of the discussion seems, at root, to be about building...

Noted journalist Dan Gillmor has an interesting editorial on Salon.com suggesting that in order to “save” journalism, the government should focus on building out the American broadband network. Gillmor starts by discussing the government subsidies to newspaper mailing that Congress granted back in 1792. These subsidies were crucial to the development of the American press, as they allowed sending papers very cheaply to anyone in the country. Now, Gillmor notes, the FTC is circulating proposals on how to aid journalism—but as we mentioned before, most of these proposals are less about saving journalism than they are about...

A few days ago, Mike Masnick at TechDirt reported on a PDF document released by the FTC containing a number of suggestions aimed at “saving” journalism. Except, by “saving journalism,” most of the suggestions seemed to mean “saving traditional newspapers.” Ars Technica has also taken a look at this document, though it notes the FTC has clarified that the document in question was never intended to be taken as official government suggestions—just conversation-starters. If that was their goal, they have certainly succeeded, as there is an awful lot of conversation going on right now about how misguided...

Steve Jobs has been talking about the future of journalism at All Things Digital’s D8 conference. Saying that he does not want “to see us descend into a nation of bloggers,” he has some opinions on what can be done to “save” journalism. "One of my beliefs, very strongly, is that any democracy depends on a free, healthy press," he said.  "Anything that we can do to help the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal find new ways of expression so they can afford to get paid, so they can afford...

The Gizmodo “4G” iPhone prototype story continues to get play in the blogosphere. Dan Gillmor posts a look at Apple’s behavior—apparently prompting a police raid on Gizmodo editor Jason Chen’s house—and New York Times columnist David Carr’s editorial about it. Gillmor quotes Carr casting the raid as only the latest of a number of hostile actions by Apple toward journalists, then Gillmor asks the same questions he did in another column I covered a month ago: When I read that, I thought, Aha, now he’s going to address his own organization’s flagrant questions of...

BoingBoing reports on a benefit to raise funds for Jeanne Robinson, wife of Baen SF writer Spider Robinson, who is battling cancer and needs assistance with medical funds. A number of renowned artists are donating works to an eBay charity auction held by SF podcast Sci-Fi Saturday Night. Journalist Alan D. Mutter, whose “Reflections of a Newsosaur” blog we’ve mentioned a few times before, has a post in which he talks about the best model for newspapers to charge for on-line content, as opposed to the models newspapers are currently trying: The only way...

As I mentioned in a Quick Notes post the other day, Gizmodo lately acquired and posted photos of what turned out to be a prototype of this summer’s coming 4th-generation iPhone. But they did not stop there. Subsequently, Gizmodo actually revealed the identity of the poor schmuck who lost it—an Apple software engineer out on the town celebrating his birthday. Then Gizmodo posted yesterday that they had received a request from the Apple legal department to return the phone, and would be complying (in as smarmy a manner as possible). Gizmodo also explained why Apple couldn’t simply...

Dan Gillmor at Mediactive raises an interesting question of ethics in his look at the New York Times’s dealings with Apple. Apple has been featuring the Times very prominently on the iPad page on its website, brought out a Times exec at the iPad launch back in January, and in fact Apple and the Times have been getting very cozy with each other in general. It makes sense: Apple wants big media franchises to appear on its iPad to drive the device’s sales, while the Times is trying everything it can to monetize itself as ad...

In contrast to papers, such as the London Sunday Times, that are erecting paywalls, one English and Scottish local newspaper publisher is bringing its paywall trial to an end. Press Gazette reports that Johnston Press is dropping the paywalls it erected on the websites of two Scottish and four English weekly papers starting in November as a trial to learn more about how well paywalls might work. If one source the Press Gazette heard from is right, they might have learned a lot: One source has told Press Gazette the number of subscribers paying...

The Sunday Times of London is the latest newspaper to institute a paywall, and has posted an editorial explaining why. The Times plans to charge the same amount it charges for its print paper—£2 per week (approximately $2.98 at current exchange rates)—for access to its on-line site, because selling on-line ads just wasn’t cutting it, and “giving away expensive journalism is financially unsustainable and ultimately bad for us and our readers.” Write the Times’s editors: We acknowledge the risk involved when much other good journalism is still available free online. However, we believe that if we are transparent with our readers and...