David Black

“Last week, the Telegraph’s Shane Richmond put out an appeal for the essential blog posts about online journalism. Here’s my contribution — hopefully a case of ‘better late than never’.”

“This is a series of essays on the future of journalism and some of my ideas on how advances in technology have changed the way that we report and write the news”

“The Web… has every advantage that should be available to the CAR practitioners, including unlimited depth, the ability to customize or personalize and the luxury of designing a database so that it will truly be useful to readers. “

“f I were in a position to hire a reporter, I’d be looking for a solid writer with Web skills… Next, I’d be looking for one of the trinity: multimedia, interactivity, data.”

“It’s not the maker of the toy who holds the affinity position but the one who gives it to him, and this is the problem with the whole on-demand media frenzy currently underway”

“the value of newspapers isn’t, and never has been, a function of the content they create. It has always been a function of owning the relationship with the reader.”

“1. Audiences are built. Communities grow. 2. Communities face a tradeoff between size and focus. 3. Participation matters more than quality. 4. You may own the software, but the community owns itself. 5. The community will want to build. Help it, or at l

“Think of passengers on your ship who got a boat of their own. The writing readers. The viewers who picked up a camera. The formerly atomized listeners who with modest effort can connect with each other and gain the means to speak— to the world, as it w

“The traditional premium on impartial journalism is a function of media scarcity: if you are the main or sole source of news you have an obligation to be balanced.”

“The day that you could, as a media organisation, expect people to come to your home page, to navigate to news within your site, make you a part of their daily routine. That day is going.”

“Widgets are taking over the web, small pieces at a time. Big web destinations are opening their templates to custom configurations by users and pre-configurations with special partners.”

Vin Crosbie: “newspapers and their Web sites must change their approach to publishing news — online and off — if they want to successfully compete with the many Web sites and other new information sources vying for readers’ attention and loyalty.”