jtm2007

JTM2007 alum Fabrice Florin's Newstrust lands $450K multi-year MacArthur grant

NewsTrust.net, the social news network which help consumers find and rate
quality journalism, reports it received a $450,000 multi-year grant to
expand its non-profit operation. Fabrice Florin (MGP2006 / JTM2007) has
been working with a skeleton crew on NewsTrust for more than three years
from Mill Valley, Calif., keeping it alive mostly with his own money and
time after some initial seed money from the founders of MoveOn.org, and
from the Ayrshire Foundation, the Mitch Kapor Foundation, the Sunlight
Foundation, the Tides Foundation and private donors including Craig
Newmark.

To read NewsTrust's news release, go to: URL: http://www.newstrust.net/about/news/press_release_1128.htm Contact: Fabrice Florin - NewsTrust.net - 415-388-6688

NAA's Beth Lawton seeds the conversation about news-industry future

Beth Lawton (MGP2006, JTM2007) of the Newspaper Association of America is doing her part to seed a conversation about the news industry's future. She has sent around word that the NAA's "Imagining the Future of Newspapers" blog is now up. NAA asked more than 20 leaders from inside and outside the newspaper industry to provide their perspectives on the future of the industry. dWe've published the introduction to the project from Randy Bennett, as well as perspectives from Paul Saffo, Paul Ginocchio, Jeffrey F. Rayport and Howard Finberg.

The NAA blog is at: www.naa.org/blog/futureofnewspapers

The RSS feed is at www.naa.org/blog/FutureOfNewspapers/rss.cfm

Beth is manager, digital media for the NAA. She's at (571) 366-1037
([email protected])

JTM-DC alum at Mercury News on paper's new effort and transparency

Chris O'Brien, a JTM-DC attendee who is helping manage change at the MediaNews Group Inc.-owned San Jose Mercury News is out with a public declaration that the paper's going to be very -- public -- about how it remakes itself. Read what he wrote in an email last night:

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Sun, 4 Nov 2007 21:30:45 -0800
From: "O'Brien, Chris"
To: Various Subject: Rethinking the Mercury News...

Greetings:

You're getting this note because you're someone who I think is interested in the future of the San Jose Mercury News. Like much of our industry, the Merc has been in a nosedive the past few years. Our newsroom has shrunk from 400 to 200 people since 2001. After the latest round of cuts in June, our executive editor, Carole Leigh Hutton, said it was time to "blow up the newsroom." And that began an ambitious attempt to re-imagine what the Mercury News could and should be, though under a somewhat more benign name: Rethinking the Mercury News.

We announced this process last summer, and then we got very quiet about it. Today, that changes. A big part of what we heard from the many people we interviewed is that we need to find ways to be part of the conversation in our community, and to help facilitate those conversations. Our first step in that direction is to announce that we will begin publicly discussing everything we're doing to Rethink the Merc. You can read about our progress every day right here: http://www.mercurynews.com/rethink . Or you can check out our blog, which is here: http://www.mercurynewsphoto.com/rethink . We intend to share our discussions, our ideas, and our prototypes. We are in the earliest stages of taking the information we have gathered and turning that into a new Mercury News.

But we want you to do more than read. We intend for this process to be a conversation between our newspaper and the community it serves. So speak up. We want you to contribute, suggest, rant, applaud, and participate. Our goal is nothing less than to become the leading source of information for the local community and the most innovative paper in the country, the paper that Silicon Valley deserves.

Best,

Chris O'Brien San Jose Mercury News 415-298-0207 AIM:chobrien99

Seven lessons learned teaching citizen journalism: Doug McGill

An early expert at training citizen journalists has authored "What I've Learned Teaching Citizen Journalists," an essay listing seven lessons learned. Doug McGill is a former New York Times reporter, foreign correspondent, university lecturer and Internet innovator. He also briefly headed the World Press Institute.

http://www.mediagiraffe.org/artman/publish/article_576.shtml
http://mcgillreport.org/sevenlessons