Incubating new economic models for journalism.
Latest from iLab
The difficulty of producing investigative journalism in Russia, where journalists are often threatened, is compounded by the economic hardships many publications face, according to Russian journalists who spoke last week at a conference in Washington, D.C.
The decline of local news is highly visible in the nation's capital, where the once-robust tradition of regional reporting — covering the federal government as it pertains to specific regions, states and communities — is now a shadow of its former self. “When I started, regional reporting was very important,” said Stephen Hess of the Brookings Institution. “I've watched it, over time, fade away.”
Most Recent Posts
President Obama has pledged to increase accountability for the administration’s controversial drone program in a speech today at the National Defense University. The administration has used the program in the killing of thousands of suspected terrorists overseas, including four American citizens.
The move is in response to growing public unease on both sides of the aisle surrounding the administration’s use of drones, and recent criticisms by the state department’s former legal adviser, Harold Koh. In a speech May 7 at Oxford University, Koh asserted that the administration’s lack of transparency regarding drone use has led to public misinformation and disillusionment, and called on the president to release its full legal justification for the assassination of American citizens abroad.
The Senate Judiciary Committee passed an amendment Monday to the 844-page immigration bill that would both better define and limit the use of solitary confinement at immigration detention centers. The amendment limits the use of solitary confinement in adults and bans it for children younger than 18 and those with mental illness except in situations deemed as emergencies or threats.
Journalists from Bangladesh, meeting last week in Washington, implored local and international media to take a broader look at the social issues surrounding the garment factory collapse, and focus on understanding the social, political and economic factors that led to the accident.
The Supreme Court ruled this week that states are not required to extend their Freedom of Information act coverage to people who are not citizens of the state. The unanimous opinion also held, once again, that access to government information is not a fundamental right. Effectively, the court was saying — as it has many times in the past — that access to government information is a privilege that can be regulated largely as governments see fit.
This week "Years of Living Dangerously" Producer Mishi Ebrahim and Associate Producer Jolie Lee traveled to North Carolina to meet with Joel Olsen, a local solar developer. Olsen, a North Carolina native, created O2Energies in 2009 to tap into the emerging solar industry in the state. He built one of his first solar projects in the small town of Mount Airy, the birthplace of Andy Griffith and the inspiration for the fictional town of Mayberry for "The Andy Griffith Show," a CBS sitcom that ran from 1960-1968. Olsen said the location of the Mayberry Farm was symbolic, to show that "America's hometown" was looking forward in its energy use.
We publish online and in print, often teaming up with other news organizations. We post quarterly updates to our BankTracker project, in which you can view the financial health of every bank and credit union in the country, with msnbc.com, now nbcnews.com, and we co-publish stories in our What Went Wrong project with The Philadelphia Inquirer and New America Media. Learn more on our partners page.
Donald Barlett and James Steele, and our Workshop project team, have been reporting and writing about how four decades of public policy shaped America's ongoing economic crisis. You can read excerpts from the authors' new book, "The Betrayal of the American Dream," which is due to be released in paperback in September.
