Mark Coddington

[This review was originally posted at the Nieman Journalism Lab on Jan. 22, 2010.]
The Times’ paywall proposal: No question about media and journalism’s biggest story this week: The New York Times announced it plans to begin charging readers for access to its website in 2011. Here’s how it’ll work: you can view an as-yet-unidentified number of [...]

To me, it seems more helpful to think of all of these media sea changes as something the tablet could do, not something it will do. I read Mark Potts’ medium-by-medium list of the effects of iSlate as a sort of call to action for people in those media to do some serious thinking, planning and developing to be on the front end of that revolution if it comes. This could be traditional media’s second chance to be more proactive in finding ways to (gasp!) use technology to its advantage, after its first chance with the Internet was largely squandered.

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 [...]

The best way to keep crappy content from choking out good content? Keep creating and linking to good content. Google’s search dominance depends (at least in part) on its ability to lead users to the good stuff; makes sense to just produce quality stuff, link to it and pass it around, and let Google’s engineers do their jobs.

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 [...]