Mark Coddington

Consider this your dictionary for the common phrases in the future-of-journalism world that function as shorthand for big, fundamental ideas.

The future of journalism and new media is fun to talk about in the abstract, but things get a little hairier when we start talking about actual projects tried out at actual news organizations, especially the small, local ones that make up the vast majority of our journalistic ecosystem. So I thought it’d be helpful [...]

Of course there are going to be idiots who post stupid, irresponsible and downright wrong things during breaking news events. There always have been, and the advent of social media doesn’t change that. That just underscores the importance of filtering that firehose of real-time information and providing something that’s of real value to users.

As The New York Times’ media critic, David Carr, noted on Friday, this last week has been a rather momentous one in future-of-journalism happenings. That means I’ve got a ton to cover, so I’ll try to keep it digestible for you. (Explanation of what I’m doing, as always, is here.)
— First off, this was the [...]

I read a lot of small-town weekly newspapers on my beat covering rural Nebraska, and most of them could hardly be regarded as bastions of journalistic excellence. (There are exceptions, of course.) For the most part, they contain the same untouched press releases, long-winded meeting stenography and “Boy grows unusual potato” feature photos that they’ve [...]