Idea Lab

Community News Companies Will Become Extinct

by Richard Anderson
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

The internet has created the need for radical change in the community news business. Incremental changes such as Yahoo consortiums will not be sufficient to stem the loss of print revenue. Consumers do not want to be limited to browsing content provided by legacy top-down, control oriented news organizations. As well, banners and buttons, the online version of double trucks, ROP's and classifieds, do not translate into a value proposition that support feet on the ground reporters. If one reflects on the origins of the Internet - its reason for being - it is not surprising that applying print practices...

• April 11, 2008
• 2 comments

How Can Ads Support Community News?

by Mark Glaser
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

I'm going to be posting weekly questions here on Idea Lab to spark discussion by the various authors, as well as our community of readers. This week I'd like to follow up on the recent theme of new business models for local news sites. Many small hyper-local community sites start up with Google AdSense ads and other automated, quick ways of bringing in a small revenue stream. Eventually, though, they need to make more money than that, and must turn to local businesses to advertise. But it's difficult to entice small businesses online, as they are more likely to employ...

• March 26, 2008
• 3 comments

Reinvigorating Community News? Start with Middle-Schoolers

by Kimberly Sultze
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

The Innovation Incubator students have headed to Toronto for the Online News Association conference. Working with the challenge of re-invigorating community journalism, students from seven institutions have been working long hours since the beginning of the summer to come up with innovative ideas through what turned out to be the 'tough love' process of creation netting. As it happened, four students from St. Michael's College ended up working together in the pre-conference phase with students from Ithaca College and Michigan State. Together they developed LockerTalker--an interactive platform targeted at middle-schoolers that combines news articles and interest groups with locker decorations,...

• October 18, 2007
• 1 comment

Welcome to Idea Lab

by Mark Glaser
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

A few weeks back, I heard gunshots outside my window. It was pretty scary, and reminded me of my urban environment here in Potrero Hill, San Francisco. But where could I turn to get the story on what happened? Was someone killed? Do police know what happened? In the past, I might have heard something about it on the local TV news or radio news, or perhaps read something in the local newspaper. But in this case, no one was hurt or killed, so there was nothing to see in any of the bigger media outlets in my local area....

• October 16, 2007
• 16 comments

From Community Newspapers to Community Hosts

by Richard Anderson
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

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...

• October 14, 2007
• No comments

Innovation Incubator Heads to Toronto for the Online News Association Conference

by Dianne Lynch
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

It's been an extraordinarily challenging five months, and the students who have been working on the Innovation Incubator project are about to find out whether it's been worth it. About thirty-five students and faculty from seven journalism schools around the country are headed to Toronto tomorrow to present their projects at the ONA's annual conference. They've been working on them since June, when the group first gathered in Ithaca to talk about creation netting, the process we adopted to develop some new and original thinking about -- and approaches to - -community news. We figured there was nobody better positioned...

• October 14, 2007
• No comments