Intersections Over Avenues

Former Washington Post editor Steve Coll blogs in The New Yorker that the way to save the institution of traditional newsrooms with investigative journalism and reporters in far-flung corners of the earth is for a paper like the Post or the New York Times to become a nonprofit organization.

The typical spend rate for endowed nonprofits is in the five-percent range.

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A lot commentary about the future of journalism and the need for large, well-funded media organizations centers around the need for the fourth estate to stand up to the other, equally well-funded estates.

Seth Godin weighs in with a post entitled "When newspapers are gone, what will you miss?," notes that only newspapers seem to be able to keep government honest.

I worry about the quality of a democr

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Ray Wang of Forrester Research is one of the most influential software consultants, and is never afraid to speak his mind, which makes him a great resource for journalists.

In an interesting turn of events, though, his blog, "A Software Insider's Point of View," now includes a regular "heard on the street feature" that could easily be confused for a very,very well-sourced article.

Ray's blog shares sever… Continue

Jack Shafer can't help being old. But he can help being so obtuse.

Answering David Carr's call for a new publishing business model patterned after iTunes, all Shafer can do is complain about the Kindle (with good reason, I might add) and prattling on about the New York Times Reader, a tech non-starter the Times had the good sense to abandon.

Actually

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A couple of finance junkies with an entrepreneurial drive have created a Tip'd, which combines the best of Salshdot and Digg.

It encourages bloggers and editors to pitch their own stories too, which is fine, but the quality of the site will be dependent on preventing blowhards from hogging all the oxygen.

Content aggregation makes a lot of sense, and adding community can only add value, but all content aggregation sites ultimately depend on content originators. A… Continue