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Underwritten by John S. and James L. Knight Foundation

Idea Lab is a group blog by innovators who are reinventing community news for the Digital Age.

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Each Idea Lab blogger is a winner of the Knight News Challenge grant to reshape community news.

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Benjamin Melançon

Markets Fail News

Thanks to Chris O'Brien's challenge, serious talk of business models for journalism have come to the IdeaLab blog. Let's pause a moment for an overarching view. Turn off the bright lights and stare into the empty studio. Markets - selling and buying at prices set by supply and demand - don't work for news and information. Valuable news is a public good. All right, if you care about journalism, you already believed that. But news is also a public good in the sense economists use the term: once one person comes into possession of it, everybody can have it. Expensive...

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Featured Comment

Media companies been trying to use technology to build new audiences and business models for ages now. Feels like too little, too late.

Hiroko Tabuchi
Journalism, Technology Starting to Add Up

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