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Utne magazine announces its Independent Press Awards Nominees 2009:
Surely you’ve heard that print journalism is doomed: layoffs this, budget cuts that, blogs, Twitter, podcasts, paid content, and so on. We, the deciders of the 20th annual Utne Independent Press Awards, must respectfully disagree with this conventional but flawed wisdom.
Take a look under “Spiritual Coverage” about [...]

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Steven Berlin Johnson has a similar take on the evolutionary process of changing the way journalism is done:
So this is what the old-growth forests tell us: there is going to be more content, not less; more information, more analysis, more precision, a wider range of niches covered. You can see the process happening already in [...]

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Well, everyone else seems to be blogging Clay Shirky’s Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable, so I may as well, too. I think there’s a lot of sensible points for us to consider at work with our quarterly membership periodical. The take away? We need to do something different. We don’t know (and can’t know in [...]

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As a sometime-participant in community-supported agriculture, I don’t find the idea of community-funded reporting entirely oddball. I even think it’s a creative idea. But I want to see how it works out.
Spot.Us is a nonprofit project to pioneer “community funded reporting.” Through Spot.Us the public can commission investigations with tax deductible donations for important and [...]

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Wonderful post on the terminology of numeral and punctuation typography:
In “Emoticons During Wartime,” a recent article in The New Yorker (December 10, 2007), Tom McNichol documents the usefulness of emoticons in communicating by visual innuendo. Emoticons can mean whatever the writer and reader want them to mean, until, of course the meaning is explicitly defined [...]

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Who knew the Utne site had blogs? They do, including one on spirituality, and we made it with a story I put in our Winter 2007 “Reflections” section: Suicide, Faith, and Compassion
Kate Braestrup encountered this sad reality in her work as a chaplain for game wardens, an experience she recounts in an excerpt from her [...]

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The Nation has a review of Liberty and the News by Walter Lippmann. It (the book!) was written in 1920, but it sounds like it has a lot to say for today.
“There can be no higher law in journalism than to tell the truth and shame the devil.”

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Sometimes Andrew Sullivan links to the most amazing things: WikipediaVision (beta)

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Via Arts & Letters Daily, I discovered a blog written by board members of the National Book Critics Circle. They have a guest post: Morris Dickstein on the Critical Landscape Today. I like some of the points he makes, and I too lament the falling-away of book reviews in major newspapers. I can’t help thinking [...]

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You’ll need to watch an ad to get a one-day pass if you don’t already subscribe to Salon, but this essay made my day: Let us now praise editors
I’ve also worked with writers who have reacted to my gentle suggestion that one of their precious, ungrammatical commas might perhaps be removed as if I’d insisted [...]

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