When Toyota first began to rise to prominence in this country, the company's cars were known as cheap, plasticky, not-to-be trusted imports. Now Toyota is on pace to unseat GM as the world's auto sales leader, and is regarded as one of the most innovative companies around. A New Yorker article by James Surowiecki gives a quick rundown on how that happened. At Toyota, "the goal is not to make huge, sudden leaps, but, rather, to make things better on a daily basis ... Instead of trying to throw long touchdown passes, as it were, Toyota moves down the field...
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Idea Lab is a group blog by innovators who are reinventing community news for the Digital Age.
Each Idea Lab blogger is a winner of the Knight News Challenge grant to reshape community news.
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Journalism Will Survive the Death of Its Institutions
Massive layoffs with no end in sight. Wave after wave of acquisitions and mergers fueled by the excesses of artificially cheap capital. Widespread fear that an entire industry and its contributions will stall or simply stop.
This describes the news industry today, but it also described the high tech industry in the late eighties and early nineties.
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Hyperlocal Sites Can Deliver More Than Display Ads
Mark Glaser, our host on Mediashift, asked: " ... is there something (hyper-local news sites) can offer the businesses beyond just a display ad or a place in an online directory? Is there a more creative partnership they might have, where reader/contributors could give the business honest feedback on the site -- positive and negative? Paulding.com, for those who are aware, is based on a simple message board shtick. We have a front page with news but the majority of the action - some 2200 posts a day - occur within the forums. These posts are typically viewed by members...
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One of the biggest challenges of building ChiTownDailyNews.org has been running the business side of things -- fundraising, ad sales, etc -- while also trying to build a network of volunteer community journalists, edit their stories, manage our bloggers and beat reporters. As of this week, we're looking to break those tasks into two separate jobs. All of our non-editorial operations will be supervised by a general manager, and we're looking to fill that role ASAP. You can check out the complete job posting here. And please pass it on to anyone you know who might fit the bill....
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From Community Newspapers to Community Hosts
VillageSoup is one of the James S. and John L. Knight Foundation's first year's recipients of a Knight Brothers News Challenge Grant. It is in Gary Kebbel's words, the only single platform, full service projected funded in 2007. I will try in this blog to share a view which will hopefully encourage others to engage the idea of Community Hosts and to share their thoughts and experiences as well. The idea of a new business model for community newspapers formed in 1997 in the coastal Maine community of Camden. The idea was stimulated by the 1997 book Net Gain: Expanding...
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It sounds like journalists today also have to be marketers. They have to know who they are trying to reach, and... to pitch their stories to a broader audience.
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