Neil Sanderson

A picture that’s worth 10,000 Words…

Click on image to enlarge (opens in new window).

The promotional video [above] gives the flavour of this new news organization which launched this morning, while Martin Langeveld at Nieman Journalism Lab explores the Texas Tribune website.

Founder and chairman John Thornton writes about the Tribune’s mission and the reasons for its nonprofit approach.

Details at the Online News Association website.

Highlights of the projects presented during June’s Future of News and Civic Media conference at MIT.

College media service provider CoPress provides this snappy summary of how to turn a newspaper newsroom 180 degrees, to be “web-centric”.

From digitaljournal.com:

Citizen media news outlet DigitalJournal.com is proud to announce it will be hosting a unique panel discussion featuring some of the most influential leaders in Canadian media. Dubbed “The Future of Media,” the live panel discussion will explore how the mainstream media are implementing user-generated content and what challenges news organizations face in the changing news economy today.

The event will take place Thursday September 24 at the Drake Hotel Underground (1150 Queen Street West) at 8 p.m. Doors open at 7:30 p.m. and admission is free and open to the public. Seating is limited and will be on a first-come, first-serve basis. The event will also be filmed and streamed live online, as well as broadcast after the event.

The Wall St Journal moved into new premises in June, and Chris O’Brien at Next Newsroom published the above photos.

Find more info and photos on The Next Newsroom Project

Advertising Age reports that stock car racing body Nascar has accredited 28 bloggers and non-mainstream websites to cover races this season.

It seems fewer newspaper sports writers have been turning up in the press boxes as a result of newspaper cutbacks, so Nascar decided it needed a “Citizen Journalist Media Corps” to keep the fans satisfied.

“The last 12 to 18 months, we’ve seen a drop in print media,” says Ramsey Poston, Nascar’s managing director-corporate communications, who oversees the Citizen Journalist project. “We’ve not only lost some of the biggest auto-racing writers in the business due to layoffs and cutbacks — people like Jim Pedley of The Kansas City Star, John Sturbin (of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram) and Grant James (of the St. Petersburg Times) — but we’ve lost the papers themselves. We used to get great coverage from the Rocky Mountain (Colo.) News, and now it doesn’t even exist. And other papers are simply cutting back coverage.

Nascar’s communications department reviewed some 30,000 websites before making the final selection, which includes RacinToday.com (pictured).

See also: Fire the sports writers? Not if the teams have anything to say about it

The Cato Institute’s Cato Unbound website this month features essays on the future of journalism.

Clay Shirky kicked things off on Monday reiterating a theme on which he blogged a few months ago - that this is a time of upheaval for traditional news media, with no single clear path to future sustainability.

Today, another journalism professor, Philip Meyer of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, responds with five trends he sees emerging from the current chaos. It’s worth reading his full article but, to summarize, the five trends are:

1. The marketplace is calling for ever more specialized information. This trend was well established in the second half of the 20th century, and the Internet greatly accelerated it.
2. The need for processing is increasing at two levels: in the production stage where analysis and interpretation help readers or listeners make sense of the oversupply of data, and in the transmission stage where information is packaged for ready retrieval by the specialized subsets of the audiences that want it.
3. We are starting to place more value on evidence-based versus source-based journalism.
4. Dividing journalism into subcategories of specialists has already started a fourth trend: increasing the number of certification programs for journalists.
5. The leverage for motivations other than profit is growing rather than shrinking. The low entry costs of the Internet guarantee that.

The series is scheduled to continue with contributions from Paul Starr on July 17 and Steve Yelvington on July 20.