Are the Yellow Pages more widely-used than Google? Short answer – No.

On a journalism mailing list to which I subscribe, the following claim was made recently: One more thing: the last time I checked, more people used the Yellow Pages as a reference tool than Google. Suffice it to say, I found this claim somewhat unbelievable, since I personally haven’t had a yellow pages book in … Read more

The Web surpasses newspapers as source of news

ReadWriteWeb reports today on a study by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism. The takeaway? According to the survey, 46% of people now say they get their news online at least three times a week, surpassing newspapers (40%) for the first time. Only local television is more popular among Americans, with 50% indicating … Read more

News Grader: our KNC 2011 entry

So tomorrow is December 1, which is the deadline for entries into the Knight News Challenge, an annual contest for innovative ideas for the intersection of technology and news, funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. I (along with my buddy Eric Marden) have an entry in this year’s competition.  It’s a … Read more

Transparency and objectivity in journalism: Possible? Desirable?

This post is an amalgam of several emails I sent to a private journalism-related listserv.  I’ve got a project brewing in the ol’ noggin relating to journalism, objectivity, and transparency.  I figured I’d post this publicly, in the hopes of soliciting more opinions, so please feel free to post in the comments. So, one of … Read more

The job hunt begins, and I’m offering a cash bounty

Greeting, friends. Eleven months ago, I left Florida to come to Chicago and work my way through Northwestern’s Master’s of Journalism program.  Since then, I have been gainfully unemployed, focusing all my attention on my studies. This year-long project has been a success thus far.  I’m now in my fourth quarter, and the end is … Read more

Should investigative journalism get a public subsidy?

Another thing that came my way via the excellent Overcoming Bias site. The author of this piece, Paul Starr, is a professor of Sociology and public affairs at Princeton University, and he floats the idea that public subsidies of investigative journalism might be one way to combat the deluge of journalists that have given up … Read more

New quarter, new beat

Starting today until the beginning of June, I’m working on Health/Science reporting. My beat is Technology/Gadgets/Nanotech. If you should happen to have any good tips on these subjects, please please contact me and clue me in (ian at ianmonroe.com). I finally have a beat that I can write about with some kind of clarity, so … Read more

If it isn’t there, you can’t fix it.

This fellow gets it. Everyone knows by now that the newspaper industry is broken, possibly beyond repair, but, particularly over the last three or four years, I’ve come across countless folks that want to sell you a solution to “fix” it.  But it can’t be fixed.  The environment has changed, and the niche that newspapers … Read more

Want to know the main problem with trying to do grad-school journalism?

Here’s the thing — journalism is transactional.  You rely on other people to feed you information that you can use to write your stories.  In exchange, your sources get to draw attention to the things that they think are important. For instance, if you’re writing an article about a new business, you contact the business … Read more