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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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Mark Glaser

How Do You Balance Anonymity & Accountability?

Here's your question for the week on Idea Lab. Many people think that anonymity is important online for people who are whistle-blowers or would not speak out if they were identified. But the flipside of that is that many people use the protection of anonymity to lob insults and ad hominem attacks at opponents and turn civil conversations into flame wars. What happens if you try to pin down people and make them use real names in forums? Does that bring more civility? That's certainly the case at Front Porch Forum, where people must use their first and last name,...

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A. Adam Glenn

A Conversation, Any Which Way

One of the big lessons we've learned in just a few months into the Boulder Carbon Tax Tracker project is the enormous challenge of getting community members to think of themselves as journalists.So we're about to try a new approach. This week, we'll launch a new bulletin board service on the site with the aim of drawing in those citizen journalists through the relatively simple mechanism of the online comment.

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Featured Comment

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.

Michelle
Changes in Media Over the Past 550 Years

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