NEWS: Newspapers Past, Present, and Future

Knights News Challenge has 17 finalists to transform community news through digital innovation

...The top finalists are projects that have the potential to "inform, empower and engage citizens and help them participate in the decision-making process of their neighborhoods, their communities and their countries," according to the Knight News.

Some projects are:

"Doing Away with Dewey ~ Unifying Digital and Physical Collections and Knowledge with a new open organization of knowledge (B3OK)" by Bonnie Pierce: By hyperlinking the materials within libraries with an open global digital knowledge network, all physical library collections, informative materials, media, and books, cultural objects, and specific physical locations will be connected. 

"Louretta" by Matthew Waite: An open-source, socially networked, host for small-town weeklies and twice-weekles, which would improve and expand small-town journalism online.  People would participate in and contribute to those social networks, and have mechanisms for following their institutions of government, schools and local sports through databases of public records, newspaper-created information or data entered by the users themselves.

"Flash Storytelling Templates" by Russell Chun: An online site for Flash storytelling templates that is "free, open-source, specific to the needs of the multimedia journalist, and based on community participation and collaboration." Journalists will not need to know Flash to use these templates but will download source files to manipulate and use directly. The community can comment on existing templates, suggest new ones, contribute their own templates, and showcase work that was created with the templates. The site will be available nationally but will be used in to "bring to life those "smaller" stories."

For the complete list, please visit the Knights News site.

Blogging and journalism blurring together

Techcrunch blogger Erick Schonfeld realizes that as more blogs are building up professional writing staffs, more newspapers and magazines seem to require their writers to write more blogs, consequently the distinction between blogs and traditional news sites becomes almost nonexistent. 

The Techmeme Leaderboard shows that the top spots are almost evenly occupied by blogs, which are all professional such as TechCrunch and ReadWriteWeb, and traditional news organizations that have the most active journalist bloggers, such as CNET andNY Times.

US: NAA releases latest revenue figures for American newspapers

Latest figures from the Newspaper Association of America (NAA) show a significant loss in newspaper revenues between 2006 and 2007, reports Follow the Media...

Source: Follow the Media, Newspaper Association of America 

US: Newsweek loses 111 staff members

Last week, 111 Newsweek staffers on its news and business sides accepted a buyout. The magazine will lose much of its institutional memory and some of its most talented writers and editors by the end of the year. 

Poll results show that print is more trusted than Internet

New research by MediaVest suggests that readers trust print more than the web in almost every area. A previous poll had found that Americans are losing trust in news sources...

Source: AdAge through I Want Media