It's time to quit all of this wringing of the hands about the "future of news." We're in the damn future of news. People genuinely concerned about its direction ought to cancel their next speaking gig pontificating about that future, whether dystopian or bright, and put their hands instead to shaping it.

There's no better example of the problem and its solutions than the latest round of navel-gazing in the wake of the shootings in Aurora, Colo., late into the night of July 19. What began as an earnest attempt to understand a tragedy and then to parse this country's collective response to it has devolved into just another "journalists vs. bloggers" bull session. It's a false dichotomy, as almost everyone in that argument has already conceded.

Citizen media and "mainstream" media aren't even two sides of the same coin. There is no longer such a thing as "citizen media" or "'mainstream' media," as far as I'm concerned, because each is now such an integral part of the other.

What if the Watergate scandal had developed in the age of the Internet? For the last three years, an advanced class of Yale journalism students have been asked that question, and every year they've said the scandal would have blown up in a matter of days and the Nixon Administration would have backed down or even collapsed in a matter of weeks. And then they get to talk to Bob Woodward. Read More

The closing down of an effort known as Expert Labs this month acted as a marker of sorts in the open government movement. Epitomizing the general ethos of the time, here was a group of Internet-famous hipster technologists and personalities who had decided to storm the barricades and focus their collective attention on helping the federal government to break out of the Beltway bubble to connect better with the public when making policy decisions. Why shouldn't the world be excited about what kind of change they could potentially bring about? As the organization closes up shop, here's a look at what it did after launching in 2010. Read More