A former Metro Editor at the Chicago Tribune and Sunday Editor at the Chicago Sun-Times, Jacob is chronicling the Local News Initiative’s progress for the project’s website. He is the co-author of six books on history and photography.
Posts by or about Mark Jacob
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Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle and Indianapolis Star aim for insights and digital subscribers
Three leading U.S. news organizations are serving as “learning labs” for Northwestern University’s Local News Initiative, a project to harness data and other research tools to find ways to make local journalism sustainable. The three outlets – the Chicago Tribune, Indianapolis Star and San Francisco Chronicle – have submitted terabytes of anonymous online reader data to Northwestern’s Spiegel Digital and Database Research Center for analysis. A key goal: to correlate reader behavior with what the...
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Research by a San Diego State University professor is challenging our definitions of what local news is, and could have an impact on the ways journalists tailor their product to their audiences in the future. News organizations today need to move beyond their antiquated definitions of location and dive deeper into the nuances of geographic spaces in this digital and mobile media era, wrote associate professor Amy Schmitz Weiss in a new journal article featured...
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A $100,000 grant from the Robert R. McCormick Foundation will fuel new research by Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications that is intended to provide tools that can improve the financial viability of local journalism, while also seeking to increase Americans' sense of community and making them more informed about their democracy. The grant, announced Nov. 12, will include both data analysis and qualitative research this year and next, conducted as...
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This is the first in a series of articles on America's local news crisis and the work of the newly launched Local News Initiative at Northwestern University's Medill School. It's a jarring contradiction: The public has never had better access to news, yet local journalism is suffering a dramatic decline. Which means there’s plenty to read and view, but it might not tell us very much. On a single day in July, the New York...