Few things vex online news organizations as much as commenting does these days. Many sites find themselves flooded with obscene, viputerative, sexist, racist or just plain dumb comments that they cannot afford to properly moderate nor influence and which leave them despairing for the quality of their audience. Which is one of the reasons the Knight and Mozilla foundations are running a Beyond Commenting Challenge, hoping to unlock innovations in this critical piece of online

Subtlety usually dies just after civility

journalism and my god speed them on that journey.  (UPDATE: the contest has closed: I’ll cover the results

Continue reading Shut up so I can listen to you

Back in 2005 my newspaper was lucky enough to be the only Canadian participant in The Learning Newsroom, an ambitious, 18 month-long, million dollar, newsroom culture transformation experiment. At one point we were asked to describe what the newspaper of 2015 would look like: how would it function? what would it cover? etc. etc. At the time, I had been reading Harvard prof Clayton Christensen’s The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fall and luxuriating in the outpouring of ideas and creativity bubbling out of the web developer community.

The past is somewhere you’ve been –

Continue reading The Future is now – so why is everyone facing backwards?