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    How can we reach beyond the local news choir? Spotlight PA’s founding editor has ideas
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    Articles by Andrew Phelps

    Andrew Phelps is a former staff writer at Nieman Lab.
    Droplet demo
    June 20, 2012
    From social-media soap operas to magic orbs: 22 future-of-news hacks you’ve never seen before
    At this year’s MIT-Knight Civic Media Conference, two back-to-back presentations wowed us with new ideas.
    Behavio mockup of photo with smart metadata
    June 18, 2012
    Real-life trending topics: Behavio unlocks your smartphone’s senses
    The Knight News Challenge winners are building an open-source framework to simplify mobile data collection and processing.
    The Lawrence Journal-World gets out of the CMS business, losing out to freebies like WordPress
    The company laid off engineers working on Ellington, a CMS built on Django.
    Reporters' Lab stylized 'R' logo
    Reporters’ Lab seeks a new boss as Sarah Cohen moves on
    The head of Duke University’s tools-for-journalism initiative is moving to The New York Times.
    Ad for the first cheeseburger pizza ever
    June 11, 2012
    What makes something go viral? The Internet according to Gawker’s Neetzan Zimmerman
    The machine-like blogger has generated huge traffic numbers for Gawker — paying the pageview bills so other writers can focus on less viral work.
    A younger Tom and Ray Magliozzi
    June 8, 2012
    A brief history of Car Talk: “They’ve changed the way people see public radio in America”
    Tom and Ray Magliozzi endure, 35 years on, because they act like no one but themselves.
    Read Never
    Sometimes, less is more in a world of information overload
    Save for “sadistic news consumers,” readers may prefer less content, not more. At least they say they do. News.me is adjusting in that direction.
    Andy Bowers (center) at a live taping of the Political Gabfest at Grinnell College in 2011. Foreground, left to right: John Dickerson, David Plotz, Emily Bazelon
    June 4, 2012
    Slate doubles down on podcasts, courting niche audiences and happy advertisers
    Their conversational tone pays off both in user engagement and in added impact for advertising.
    A 404 error on Sina Weibo
    May 30, 2012
    Reverse engineering Chinese censorship: When and why are controversial tweets deleted?
    An MIT student is working to detect patterns in the disappearance of thousands of weibos from the Chinese Internet.
    Keys on computer keyboard spelling "geek"
    May 29, 2012
    3 new ideas on the future of news from MIT Media Lab students
    Adding metadata to hyperlinks, finding stories in ordinary datasets, providing context for impossibly big numbers.
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