A friend of mine recently tipped me on the upcoming Earth Journalism Awards. This Internews-supported project aims at rewarding the best coverage of climate-change-related issues, both local and global.
I’m not going to argue over the economic flaws of such awards (although I’d love to) since these competitions represent an incentive for journalists not to focus [...]

Back in March, I predicted that, contrary to a popular belief, there was no room for local champions on the social network market.
Well, I hate to say it but… I was (mostly) right
My estimates were vastly imprecise, but the direction is clear: Facebook will own the global social graph, simply because of network [...]

Faire payer pour l’info sur le web, ça ne marche pas. Se mettre hors du gratuit, c’est se mettre hors des liens, se marginaliser. C’est ce que disait Versac lors de la sortie de Médiapart. On ne peut pas aller contre l’esprit du web.
Plus prosaïquement, je vois 3 obstacles majeurs à l’introduction du payant.

La culture du [...]

I’ve just sent in my application for the Knight News Challenge.
DépensesPubliques.com (PublicExpenditures.com) aims at making a city’s finances more transparent and accessibel to every citizen. I’ll develop it in collaboration with Jeff Mignon. Here’s the project description to be read on the NewsChallenge website:
DepensesPubliques.com makes public finances transparent. Transparency means accessibility, of course. It also [...]

Funny reading in my Google Reader today.
First, an article by media economics guru Robert Picard, who argues that classifieds will recover with the economy. After all, he said, each recession hits newspapers harder but they always get better in the end.
At the same time, Alan Mutter published a post about real-estate classifieds, which account for [...]

The media landscape is evolving. Nothing new here. The web and the recession brought traditional media to their knees, in a dramatic change of the economic environment.
People are usually quick to point out that old-fashioned curmudgeons will go bankrupt or that ordinary people are now able to produce their own news.
Cheaper newsgathering combined to depressed [...]

Dear employer,
Last winter, I decided to drive across the Caucasus passes at the worst possible time – during a snow storm – so I could be in Yerevan on time to make a few interviews.
It’s only normal that I now enter the job market during a recession. I like challenges.
Why should you make new hires [...]

You don’t need to be a genius to understand that advertising will not pay for online journalism:

Display isn’t adequate online, since it requires a scarcity of publishers to function. We all know that the unlimited inventory of the web pushes prices towards 0.
Contextual ads don’t work for news. It’s been 10 years since [...]

6 months ago, I left the sinking newspapers of Western Europe to study online media in the vibrant post-socialist Europe.
17,000 miles, 19 countries and 75 interviews later, I produced this report entitled ‘Online news in post-socialist Europe‘ that provides an overview of the current developments happening on the Eastern front.
Online news in post-socialist Europe
If you’re [...]

Twitter-bashing has been running high ever since mainstream media started running stories on the micro-blogging service.
Everyone, it seems, compares Twitter with Second Life, the next-big-thing that failed to gain traction in 2007, predicting doom and gloom for the current media darling. Look at PaidContent, Clickz and Greg Verdino for the stories.
Although it’s true that journalists [...]