Idea Lab

The People Formerly Known as the Audience Need a New Name

by Ryan Sholin
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

I'm not one for semantic arguments. There's little-to-no practical value in deciding the names of things. ("User-generated content," anyone?) But if you spend your days and side projects talking to journalists about interacting with their readers, you tend to look for the right words to get your message across. Or at least I do. Because they're not really "readers" anymore, are they? The people formerly known as the audience? Accurate, but wordy -- and maybe a little too professorial for my usual purposes. So what do we call the human beings who both consume the journalism we produce and participate...

• July 21, 2009
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Singing the Praises of 'Strategic Journalism'

by Guy Berger
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

With all the talk of how newspapers can retain readers, it's still worth remembering some useful advice to newspapers from more than ten years ago. It comes from Mike Smith, at that time the assistant director of the Newspaper Management Center at Northwestern University. In a publication titled Values. Culture.Content, he addressed the question, "How do you differentiate your product from the growing number of media and information options?" Observing that "newspapers are place-based media," he went on to note that the standard answer was that newspapers should "become the primary source of local news." Rebutting this, Smith declared that...

• May 26, 2009
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The Long Shelf Life for News Games

by Gail Robinson
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

People who run news sites can be resistant to encouraging the developing games and other interactive feature. Perhaps it's that "game" sounds too playful, although given that most newspaper feature comics, crosswords and Sudoko, to say nothing of the latest celebrity photos and gossip, it's hard to see why. The interactivity may make some editors nervous as well as pairing a light approach -- a game -- with a serious issue such as the deaths in Darfur, hurricanes or legislative redistricting. The amount of staff time and resources -- technical experts, designers, writers, editors-- that go into a game can...

• April 8, 2008
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