Ravings from the editor

The Knight Foundation, one of our wonderful funders, announced its second round of News Challenge winners today.

Looking at the list of lucky winners, which includes Internet god Tim Berners-Lee, I'm amazed at the breath and ambition of what they're proposing to do.

And I'm relieved that we applied last year, because I don't know we could have kept up with the competition this time around.

When Toyota first began to rise to prominence in this country, the company's cars were known as cheap, plasticky, not-to-be trusted imports.

Now Toyota is on pace to unseat GM as the world's auto sales leader, and is regarded as one of the most innovative companies around.

A New Yorker article by James Surowiecki gives a quick rundown on how that happened.

At Toyota, "the goal is not to make huge, sudden leaps, but, rather, to make things better on a daily basis ... Instead of trying to throw long touchdown passes, as it were, Toyota moves down the field by means of short and steady gains."

The piece had a lot of resonance for me, because I've been talking lately with people who wonder where the Daily News is going, if the site today represents the culmination of our business plan or merely a first step toward a much more ambitious goal.

Most news organizations today are well past their formative phase. The typography, logo, tone, biases, breadth and quality of coverage have been compressed by the weight of time into diamond-hard rules. While layoffs may loom, there's not...more

Los Angeles magazine is running an insightful article about the demise of the L.A. Times, told through the eyes of the half-dozen men who have edited the paper in recent years.

By ordering the accounts from oldest to most recent, the article allows you to ride along the death spiral. Things go from rosy ("Best paper in the world") through years of myopic management, to their current state (clueless flailing, mindless cost-cutting).

The one guy who seems to have a good fix on a way out of the problem is Jim O'Shea, the export from Chicago who was canned by Sam Zell.

His solution: Strategic investment in new products and sections that will make money. Will it ever happen? Not in a million years.

We've been working with the Society of Professional Journalists and DePaul's new journalism school on a nifty new program that debuts later this month.

It'll offer some great information to bloggers, citizen journos and others looking to learn about ethics, media law, and news technology.

Chicago will host the first of three Citzen Journalism Academy events on May 17 at DePaul's Lincoln Park campus. I'll be leading a reporting workshop, and folks from Columbia College and elsewhere will also share what they know.

The other two programs will be in Los Angeles and Greensboro, N.C., in June.

The registration deadline is coming right up, so check out the details and sign up if you're interested.

Answer: Not very. In a great example of crowdsourced reporting, the Freakonomics guys published a study by one of their readers who plotted actual weather data against the forecasts of the Kansas City TV stations.

Turns out that the TV weather segment is more about charming patter and snazzy graphics than actually... you know... telling you how the weather's going to be.

Newspapering is filled with editors who seem to have graduated with honors from the Dark Ages School of Management.

Yelling, pouting, passive-aggressive temper tantrums, heroin-induced forgetfulness... These are pretty much a given at our country's top papers.

So it's no surprise that a Washington Post editor is not so popular with the staff.

But it is surprising that the Post actually decided to do something about it.

Next year's national reporting winner can be found here.

The city is not a finalist for the 2016 Olympics. This is a bitter disappointment for those who strongly supported the idea of turning our city into an absolute clusterf*&k for a year or so.

Normal people, however, can go ahead and breathe a huge sigh of relief.

I got an interesting perspective this morning on how people see Chicago from afar.

We're hiring a general manager, and one of our candidates listed a reference at a real-estate data firm in Texas. I called to check up on the candidate. I wound up hearing a long, sad story from someone who's been trying unsuccessfully for months to obtain public records on property assessments from the Cook County government.

"Every time I deal with them, it sucks the life out of me," she said.

The county wants close to $100,000 for records that are compiled and maintained with taxpayer money. The woman said her company gets this kind of public information without hassle from local governments all over the country.

But not the local government here.

"It's like dealing with people from a different planet," she said.

Indeed.