Idea Lab

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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Is This News? Reporting with Opinion on Plan Mexico

by Benjamin Melançon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

What is the public to do when an important matter such as $1.4 billion of military-police funding for a neighboring country head toward Congressional rubber-stamping with little media coverage? We take what we can get. And that tends to be reporting from people who have no steady income assured for their considerable journalistic efforts. When one does reporting out of a love of and a concern for humanity, one tends bring some of one's own perspective to the task. And in part what we get appears to be what we want. Alternative sources and aggregators for points of view are...

• November 4, 2007
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