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propaganda

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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Benjamin Melançon

We the Media, How Have We Failed: "Re: Fwd: Who is Barack Obama?"

This is old news, I know. Various political forums mentioned the "Obama is a MUSLIM" e-mail smear campaign more than a month ago. But when I read about it, my understanding was this hatemongering and lying - or at least the lying - had been laid to rest. But then the e-mail was forwarded to me. Thoughtfully. As in, "you should know this." I trust this friend. This friend is a good person. This friend has a college degree and has read more books than most of our presidential candidates, probably. And this friend forwarded me a whole troop of...

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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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