"Looking back, we are discovering that the size of the audience has been systematically over-rated. We have made a category mistake, confusing (and equating) consumers of short news with consumers of long news. Both are important, and both must be counted. But they shouldn’t be counted together. Right now we measure them in roughly the same way: a click is a click. Studies have shown that a small number of dedicated readers generate the greatest number of page views. They visit the sites they love most frequently, they look at more pages when they visit, and they spend more time on the site. They are the long readers, and should be counted in that way."

"Then maybe there’s a mechanism where ideas that make more sense as organizations and less as one-off projects have a more structured space they can graduate up to.  If somebody, through that mechanism, comes up with an idea that could be a sustainable company, there’s a more incubator structure that comes in and says, we can help you, we have legal advice here, we have accounting advice, we can get you set up and do the business side for you while you grow and move into your own traditional organization. Once you get through that process then they may end up looking like a traditional company.
It’s the layer of ideas turning into larger projects or groups of people working on projects or organizations where good ideas are most likely to happen"

"A unique app designed for voracious newshounds, politicos, pundits, journalists, opinion leaders, and students of politics, Newsforward is a mashup of the latest breaking news, investigative reports and political opinion from progressive news sources, cable news outlets, progressive bloggers, top tweeters, advocacy organizations, elected officials, DC insiders, etc."

"We believe in order to have an engaged internet audience we have to be in front of them every day; the conversation has to come to the site," Donohue says. "But our mission is to do impactful, meaningful reporting that can take months at a time. It's a constant balancing act to find a way to do both. There's no formula whatsoever."
Donohue told me his site had been having a lot of success with quick-hit rolling investigations. "But all of a sudden we realized we're not really having the impact we wanted to be having. So we've really taken the foot off the gas over the last month or so and put out a couple of big-project pieces."

"Impact measurement is designed to help understand and strengthen social impact. When impact measurement begins to dominate the discussion rather than impact creation, there is a danger we will lose site of our goals. It is not helpful when the tools to measure social impact organisations to become side-tracked or to allocate a disproportionate amount of time."

"You could say that many of the Knight News Challenge winners are themselves a tad socially entrepreneurial. But several of this year’s winners in particular could meet a need that the social sector has had for years: to centralize all of its stuff–raw data, media and motion–into something of narrative substance."

"Having one kind of institution do most of the reporting for most communities in the US seemed like a great idea right up until it seemed like a single point of failure. As that failure spreads, the news ecosystem isn’t just getting more chaotic, we need it to be more chaotic, because we need multiple competing approaches."