NewsTools2008
This Reporter Becomes a Participant at an Unconference
Are you going to be part of the problem or part of the solution? That’s a question you hear a lot when people complain about something that’s gone wrong in our modern world. And there’s a lot of hand-wringing about the future of journalism and whether it will survive...continued...
Crisis in News
Are Veteran Media Execs the Ones Who’ll See the Future?
BERKELEY — We are midway through the first day at the conference, “Crisis in News: Is There a Future for Investigative Reporting?” [You can read my earlier post from the conference here.] One thing that struck me here is that we have some serious bigwigs and executives at major...continued...
Crisis in News
State of Investigative Reporting at Newspapers, Broadcasting
BERKELEY, CA — I am blogging live from the conference, “Crisis in News: Symposium on Investgative Reporting,” at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism. It is perhaps the most beautiful day outside here, with glorious blue skies, but investigative journalists are like vampires, hiding out in dark spaces when...continued...
The List
Examples of Online Investigative Journalism
This weekend I’ll be attending “The Crisis in News: Is There a Future for Investigative Journalism?” hosted at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley. There will be a lot of old school journalism types who have been plying the trade of investigative work...continued...
Digging Deeper
Semi-Pro Journalism Teams Give Alternative View of U.S. Elections
Elizabeth Gotsdiner got Joe Biden’s errant spittle in her mouth. Shantel Middleton got to ride on a Ron Paul blimp. Mayhill Fowler was following Obama canvassers and ended up helping them carry brochures for the candidate. Each of these folks represents a new class of semi-pro journalist tasked with...continued...
Live-Blogging Super Tuesday
Social Media, Google-Twitter Mashup and More on Super Duper Tuesday
11:02 am Pacific Time I’ll be live-blogging the Super Tuesday election day here in the U.S. and will be highlighting all the efforts online to cover the day’s events and results. I’m especially interested in finding the best social media sites, mainstream news sites and blogs and video coverage —...continued...
Year in Review
10 MediaShifting Moments of 2007
As the year 2007 sets in the distance, we can take some time to consider the year that was. I’m not a huge fan of year-end lists, but sometimes they help us get a grip on what transpired — and ponder what’s to come. What’s perhaps most amazing about...continued...
Digging Deeper
Your Guide to Hyper-Local News
From time to time, I’ll give an overview of one broad MediaShift topic, annotated with online resources and plenty of tips. The idea is to help you understand the topic, learn the jargon, and take action. I’ve already covered blogging, citizen journalism, widgets and other topics. This week I’ll...continued...
Back to School
Teaching Citizen Journalism Challenges Both Profession and Professor
Mark Glaser is away on vacation this week, but we’re happy to have Clyde Bentley filling in as a special guest blogger. Bentley is an associate professor of journalism at the University of Missouri. Bentley helped start the MyMissourian grassroots journalism hub, and teaches students how to incorporate interactivity...continued...
NewspaperShift
Rethinking the Mercury News…with Community Participation
When I was clicking through the website of the San Jose Mercury News metro newspaper, I noticed the navigation bar had the usual tabs for News, Tech, Sports, Business, and finally, Help. But this time, rather than consider this Help tab as a way for readers to get help,...continued...
Digging Deeper
Traditional Media Evolves for Wildfire Coverage, But Hyper-Local Still Lacking
When people think of community or hyper-local neighborhood news, they typically think of bake sales, petty crime and development catfights. But when a disaster strikes, the stakes for community news are raised, and lightning-quick news updates online can save lives and help residents cope. That was the reality in...continued...
The List
California Wildfire Coverage by Local Media, Blogs, Twitter, Maps and More
The last few days have shown that online resources, social media, and collaboration on the Net can make a huge difference in a natural disaster. As the wildfires have spread in Southern California, the evacuees and local residents have utilized the Internet not only to connect and get updated...continued...
Who’s a Journalist?
Even in U.S., Bloggers Get Little Protection
Earlier this year, there was a debate in journalism circles and in the general public about who could be considered a journalist, as San Francisco videoblogger and media maker Josh Wolf was jailed after refusing to turn over video footage to federal authorities. After spending 226 days in jail,...continued...
Reinventing Community News
MediaShift Launches Idea Lab Group Blog
A few weeks back, I heard gunshots outside my window. It was pretty scary, and reminded me of my urban environment here in Potrero Hill, San Francisco. But where could I turn to get the story on what happened? Was someone killed? Do police know what happened? In the...continued...
Burma Unrest
Can Internet, Blogs Sustain the Saffron Revolution?
When the ruling military junta in Burma cracked down on protesters, killing unarmed Buddhist monks, the world was watching. While mainstream journalists have to work undercover in Burma for fear of the junta’s wrath, Burmese citizens and tourists were able to shoot photos and videos of the protests and...continued...
Digging Deeper
News21 Improves Multimedia, Still Lacks Audience Involvement
The News21 initiative had grand designs to provide fellowships to 44 bright journalism and political science graduate students, and have them create innovative, cutting edge — and sellable — work. In the first year, the Northwestern University fellows broke ground with a Flash-based story on Digital Data Trails and...continued...
Digging Deeper
Can Citizen Journalism Make a Difference in Jordan?
Ramsey Tesdell would like to bring the concept of citizen and community journalism to Jordan, an Arab country that has a long history of state-controlled media. Tesdell, 23, along with three other early 20somethings, launched the site 7iber in May as a place for “people-powered journalism,” hoping that average...continued...
Our Public Lives
’People Searches’ Let Everyone Investigate You
After being an online journalist for 12 years, I figure one of my specialties is doing investigations online about people I’m interviewing for stories I write. I want to know their background, where they’ve worked, where they live and whatever can give me relevant context for my interactions with...continued...
Your Take Roundup
Front Porch Forum Fans Adore Hyper-Local Email Reports
Yesterday, when I heard a shooting take place in broad daylight down the street from me in San Francisco’s Potrero Hill neighborhood, I wondered what happened, who got shot and thought about how lucky I was not to be out and about with my son at that moment. Later,...continued...
People-Powered Reviews
Food Lovers Become Experts at Chowhound, Yelp
Before the web was in widespread use, food lovers would wait patiently for the New York Times restaurant reviews to come out for the hottest new spot in SoHo, or for hometown papers to write up the little Korean joint that just opened down the street. We relied heavily...continued...
Postmortem
Co-Founder Potts Shares Lessons Learned from Backfence Bust
We asked Mark Potts, the co-founder of startup company Backfence, to try to set the record straight about why the series of Backfence hyper-local community sites recently closed up shop. What went wrong? What lessons could be learned? In this guest blog post, Potts explains what happened. There has...continued...
Digging Deeper
Topix Capitalizes on Forums, Reaches Rural Areas
When local news aggregator Topix decided to set up online forums last December for every city and small town in America, they figured the forums would be a loss leader. After all, online forums have a bad reputation for unfettered discussion, gossip and slander, leading most news organizations to...continued...
Digging Deeper
Collaborative Radio Shows Invite Listeners into Creative Process
Long before the term citizen journalism became trendy, ordinary citizens shared the stage for decades with professional journalists in talk radio. They collaborated, they cajoled, they ranted and they often added wit and wisdom to live radio call-in shows. But with the advent of the Internet, public radio shows...continued...
Digging Deeper
Placeblog Pioneer Sees Geo-Tagging as Key to Local Aggregation
For the past few years, bloggers have been living in a keyword-based world. When they write a blog post, they can tag the post by putting it into relevant topical categories. A post about the U.S. attorney general firing scandal might be tagged: “U.S. politics,” “Alberto Gonzales,” “attorney general...continued...
Digging Deeper
Milbloggers Upset with Restrictions, But Won’t Stop Blogging
Imagine you’re working at a small startup company and there are no regulations in place as to what you can do on company computers. You update your personal blog, and watch clips on YouTube during work breaks. But over time, the company grows bigger, and eventually tighter regulations come:...continued...
Community Rules
Digg Users Show Strength in Numbers in DVD Dust-Up
The community-generated news site, Digg, has been an experimental hothouse for online communities. Last summer, there was the move by Netscape to offer to pay top Diggers to do their news-article bookmarking at Netscape, with Digg CEO Jay Adelson saying he’d never pay Digg community members. Now comes the...continued...
The Net Effect in Politics
Online Presidential Debate Distances the Candidates
The handshake at the beginning. The sideways glances and furious note-taking. The occasional interruption. The partisan cheering. These are the hallmarks of presidential debates of years past. Yet, Yahoo, Slate and the Huffington Post believe that having the candidates in distant locations hooked up virtually online will make for...continued...
Virginia Tech Shooting
Can Media Get Beyond Reactive Response to Tragedy?
I was horrified to hear about the mass-killings at Virginia Tech on Monday, but didn’t want to add my voice to the many who were writing the same thing about it. Luckily, Boston-based software engineer Jon Garfunkel, who publishes media structures research at Civilities.net and helped take the burden...continued...
Digging Deeper
Hyper-Local Citizen Media Sites Learn How to Serve Small Communities
“We are the traditional journalism model turned upside down. Instead of being the gatekeeper, telling people that what’s important to them ‘isn’t news,’ we’re just opening up the gates and letting people come on in.” — Mary Lou Fulton, publisher of the Northwest Voice in Bakersfield, Calif. In November...continued...
Digging Deeper
Sunlight Foundation Mixes Tech, Citizen Journalism to Open Congress
When people talk about corporate cutbacks in mainstream journalism organizations, there’s almost a fervor about how our very democracy is in jeopardy because of the failings of Big Media in holding our government accountable. What such critiques fail to consider is that as citizens we can and will hold...continued...
Pro-Am Journalism Experiment
Assignment Zero Has Birthing Pains with 800 Volunteers
Mark Glaser is traveling this week, but we’re happy to have Jay Rosen of PressThink filling in. He is the founder of the NewAssignment.Net experiment in pro-am journalism. Glaser will return to the blog next Monday. Especially after David Carr’s column about Assignment Zero in the New York Times, people...continued...
The Power of Many
Escaping the Bubble in Campaign Journalism
Mark Glaser is traveling this week, but we’re happy to have Jay Rosen filling in as a special guest blogger. Rosen is an associate professor at New York University’s Department of Journalism and longtime blogger at PressThink. He is the founder of the NewAssignment.Net experiment in pro-am journalism, and executive...continued...
Futurama
How the Online Newspaper Can Become a Community Hub
I was talking with someone the other day about the future of newspapers. That seems like the topic du jour with anyone in the news business, or anyone who follows the media. I brought up the recent imbroglio over people who believe that investigative journalism will die with the...continued...
State of the News Media 2007
Project for Excellence in Journalism Dissects 38 Sites; Blogger Index Coming
Each year since 2004 the Project for Excellence in Journalism has dropped the bomb of knowledge on the media world in the form of the State of the News Media report. The report is breathtaking in scope, with quantitative research on newspapers, online, TV, magazines, radio and ethnic media....continued...
Your Take Roundup
Community Is Key to Participation in Citizen Media
There are so many citizen journalism sites that seem to be in search of communities to populate them. A site such as Yahoo’s You Witness News looks so simple, inviting people to submit their photos or videos of news they have witnessed. So you’ve got easy ways to submit...continued...
Digging Deeper
Reuters Looks to Africa and a Decentralized Future for Media
The 155-year-old Reuters wire service has been reinventing itself for the modern age of decentralized journalism, where millions of people have the tools to capture the news around them. Reuters has made alliances and investments in blog aggregators Global Voices and Pluck, and with Yahoo for the citizen-submitted news...continued...
Digging Deeper
AP Warms Up to Blogs, Citizen Media at NowPublic
There’s something bland and homogeneous about an Associated Press wire story. Just the facts, ma’am, in classic inverted pyramid style. The satirical newspaper The Onion has made a mint mocking the news wire style, and the blogosphere has targeted the AP and Reuters for hidden agendas in their oh-so-perfect...continued...
Eyewitness News
Saddam Cell Video Subverts News Packages
There’s a certain predictability and glossiness to news “packages,” special reports on breaking news that journalists knew were going to happen ahead of time. So when a pope dies after a long illness, the U.S. invades Iraq after a long runup to war, or the Democrats are sworn into...continued...
Digging Deeper
TPMmuckraker Thrives as Political Corruption Runs Rampant
“I hail as a benefactor every writer or speaker, every man who, on the platform, or in book, magazine, or newspaper, with merciless severity makes such attack, provided always that he in his turn remembers that the attack is of use only if it is absolutely truthful.” — President...continued...
Blog Evolution
Judging the Best Weblogs in the World at The BOBs
Last Friday, I was sitting in a conference room on the 37th Floor of the Park Inn in Berlin, Germany, along with people from Brazil, Holland, Spain, France, Russia, Germany, China and other far-flung places. We had all been flown into town by German public broadcaster Deutsche Welle to...continued...
African Watchblog
Keeping an Eye on the Kenyan Parliament
Mark Glaser is away on vacation this week, but we’re happy to have Ory Okolloh filling in as a guest blogger. Okolloh writes the Kenyan Pundit blog and graduated with a J.D. from Harvard Law School in 2005. She is currently based in South Africa working as the Legal and...continued...
World View
The China and Africa Story
Mark Glaser is away on vacation this week, but we’re happy to have Ory Okolloh filling in as a guest blogger. Ory writes the Kenyan Pundit blog and graduated with a J.D. from Harvard Law School in 2005. She is currently based in South Africa working as the Legal and...continued...
PoliticalShift
Live Blogging the U.S. Mid-Term Elections
Today is election day in the United States, so despite my overall bad feelings about politics at the moment, I’m going back to my roots as a political junkie and watching the results as they come in around the country today. I’ll be watching on TV and online at...continued...
Online Organizing
Gallaudet University Protests Gain Global Audience
If you’re a non-deaf person who generally follows U.S. national news, you probably have a vague idea that there have been protests going on at the only university for the deaf, Gallaudet University, in Washington, DC. You might not be sure why the protests are happening, except that the...continued...
Digging Deeper
Cafebabel.com Breaks Down European Borders with Grassroots Media
In all the various efforts to unite Europe under the framework of the European Union, European Commission, and Euro currency, there is still one effort that has largely failed: creating a truly pan-European media outlet. But a group of college graduates who met in Strasbourg, France, thanks to a...continued...
NewspaperShift
WECAN Harnesses Wisdom of Crowds for Newspaper
Mark Glaser is away on vacation this week, but we’re happy to have Mark Tapscott filling in as a guest blogger. Tapscott is editorial page editor of The Washington Examiner, proprietor of Tapscott’s Copy Desk blog and the Distinguished Journalism Fellow at The Heritage Foundation. Glaser will return here next...continued...
Digging Deeper
Your Guide to Citizen Journalism
From time to time, I’ll give an overview of one broad MediaShift topic, annotated with online resources and plenty of tips. The idea is to help you understand the topic, learn the jargon, and hopefully consider trying it out — even if it’s all new to you. I’ve already...continued...
Digging Deeper
Can Witness, Global Voices Make Human Rights Video Go Viral?
There is an impulse when we see quirky videos we like on YouTube to email them on to friends or co-workers. When those catchy videos start accumulating viewers, marketers say it’s gone viral through word-of-mouth popularity. So what if you could take videos shot by citizens of human rights...continued...
Online Remembrances
Reliving 9/11 Without Glitz of Big Media
Today is September 11, and the date 9/11 will seemingly forever be linked to the terrorist attacks on the U.S. in 2001. I kept hearing on NPR News yesterday that the memorials for 9/11 had already started a day earlier on 9/10. I dreaded this day, especially as a...continued...
Your Take Roundup
U.S. Government Should be Focus of Investigative Reports
Whether it’s the Iraq War, the events of 9/11 or the Department of Homeland Security, government conduct (or misconduct) is what you’d like to see investigated most. I asked a very open-ended question to you last week, “What investigative report would you like to see done?” Your answers included...continued...
Digging Deeper
News21 Produces Investigative Reports, But Can Universities Think Different?
In May 2005, you could almost hear the flourish of trumpets when the Carnegie Corporation and the Knight Foundation joined with five prominent journalism graduate schools in pledging $6 million over three years to create the Carnegie-Knight Initiative on the Future of Journalism Education. The idea was to integrate...continued...
Open Source Reporting
Bloggers Gauge Web 2.0 Features for Newspaper Sites Around World
So this is how open source reporting works. On August 1, The Bivings Group released a research report of how the Top 100 U.S. newspaper websites were implementing features such as blogs, podcasts and social bookmarking. (I summarized the findings here.) By August 10, three bloggers located outside the...continued...
Digging Deeper
’War Tapes’ Film Lets Soldiers Tell Their Stories from Iraq
So many times on the Internet, I’ve watched a video clip of combat in Iraq that looks like it was shot by a soldier. I hear some talking, the sound of shooting, screams and yelps in the background. But just as often I don’t have the context of who...continued...
Digging Deeper
Your Guide to Soldier Videos from Iraq
If the first Gulf War put cable news and CNN on the map, the second Gulf War in Iraq has put video shot by soldiers in the spotlight. I first wrote about these videos in January, focusing on the ones that proliferated at the video-sharing site YouTube. But now,...continued...
NewAssignment.net
Can Investigative Journalism Be Done in Collaboration Online?
Robert Parry, an investigative reporter who broke stories about the Iran-Contra scandal in the ’80s, wrote about the importance of investigative journalism for his ConsortiumNews.com site: Investigative reporting is to journalism what theoretical research is to science, having the potential to present new realities and shatter old paradigms —...continued...
Digging Deeper
Should Community-Edited News Sites Pay Top Editors?
If there is one push-and-pull balancing act that defines news in the age of Web 2.0, it’s the question of how much power to give the audience, the masses, the collective mind, and how much control remains centralized. That balancing act has played a crucial role in the development...continued...
Digging Deeper
Stanford Fellow Imagines Every Cell Phone as Citizen Media Outlet
Perhaps some day in the not so distant future, every person on the planet who has a cell phone camera will be able to snap a photo of a newsworthy event happening in front of them and easily send it to a web clearinghouse of such news images. That’s...continued...
Digging Deeper
Big Media Slowly Giving the Audience Some Control
Have you ever watched your local TV news broadcast and railed against the stream of homicides, car crashes and fires? What if you could have a say in what the station was reporting each day? John Schiumo has made that dream a reality for New Yorkers who watch the...continued...
Opening Up the Grant Process
Help the Knight Foundation Give Away Millions
The email pitch was so cheesy, that I almost didn’t open up the message, thinking it was probably a get-rich-scheme spam email: “Last Chance to Help Spend Someone Else’s $$$” was the subject line. But for once, this was no empty come-on. The Knight Foundation — started by the...continued...
Digging Deeper
Blogger Beware: Syndicators Might Offer a Raw Deal
Budding writers often dream of the day their words will reach a wider audience, and that they’ll get paid for their hard work. And for many bloggers who toil in obscurity below the radar, the thought of having their blog posts show up on a huge newspaper site such...continued...
Live from London
We Media’s World Tour from Reuters
LONDON — First, the good news. I can report that the halls of the We Media conference were buzzing today with people slagging the overproduced Big Media lovefest at the BBC yesterday, and heaping praise on the second day’s global focus and more intimate setting at Reuters’ headquarters in...continued...
Live from London
We Media, Me Too Media and Them Media
LONDON — It’s exciting to be in a room — well, actually a glitzy BBC TV studio — with a group of top media executives, consultants, think-tankers and gadflys for a day of discussion about We Media or citizen journalism. Much of the discussion was about how Big Media...continued...
Live from London
Which Media Do You Trust?
LONDON — I am your on-the-scene correspondent this week from London, where I am currently in a BBC TV studio listening to various people discuss citizen journalism at the We Media Forum. The conference bills itself thusly: “No ordinary conference, We Media is about how we create a better-informed...continued...
Free Hao Wu
Blogosphere Unites to Help Jailed Chinese Filmmaker
It’s a strange sensation reading through the personal musings of Hao Wu on his Beijing or Bust blog. There is an entry, Teacher for Life, in which Hao recollects a recent meeting with a former teacher. The entry is dated February 22 — the same date that the Beijing...continued...
Wikipedia Bias
Is There a Neutral View on George W. Bush?
One of the guiding principles for Wikipedia, the free online community-generated encyclopedia, is the “neutral point of view.” According to Wikipedia’s own explanatory page, “NPOV (Neutral Point Of View) is a fundamental Wikipedia principle which states that all articles must be written from a neutral point of view, representing...continued...
Citizen Media Conundrum
If You See News, Where Do You Report It?
One of the ideas behind citizen journalism is that anybody who witnesses something newsworthy can photograph it, videotape it or write about it for the rest of the world. But one of the conundrums of citizen journalism is where do you do that? You could start a blog or...continued...
Your Take Roundup
Sense of Community Motivates You to Work for Free
So much of the web is powered by volunteer work it’s mind-boggling. The non-commercial ethos of the early days of the web, when people posted their thoughts to usenet groups and bulletin-board services, stuck around for years even as the web became more commercialized. America Online’s chat room moderators,...continued...
Citizen Power?
CBS, Wisconsin Newspaper Let Audience Vote
Two recent announcements made me wonder if the mainstream media was really starting to “get” citizen journalism, and starting to allow the former audience into the news process. The Wisconsin State Journal newspaper, run out of the state capital of Madison, decided to let its web visitors vote on...continued...
Your Blog Here
SportingNews.com Gives Readers Super Platform
If you’re nutty about sports, and live in the U.S., you probably spend a good amount of time on the leading American sports website, ESPN.com. It’s flashy, it has attitude, it’s filled with good info, and it’s awash in video highlights. And for fan involvement, there’s ESPN SportsNation with...continued...
Futurama
San Francisco Earthquake Coverage, Circa 2016
The year is 2016. President Jeb Bush is running for a third term as U.S. president. There has been major upheaval in the entertainment world, and the Long Tail has come to pass, with each of us gaining global access to all the music, movies and news and information...continued...
Digging Deeper
Dan Gillmor Finds His Center
A year ago, Dan Gillmor was in a plum position. He had been a technology journalist and columnist for the San Jose Mercury News, in the heart of Silicon Valley. He had written the Bible of grassroots journalism, We the Media, describing how weblogs and other new media forms...continued...
The Military Responds
Soldier Videos Don’t Violate Policy
Last week, I wrote about the video-sharing site YouTube and discussed some videos there that appeared to be shot by soldiers in Iraq. The videos are well produced, and show soldiers in the field of combat, with gunfights, explosions and the like all edited to heavy metal and rap...continued...
Digging Deeper
YouTube Offers Soldier’s Eye View of Iraq War
The American public’s interest in the War in Iraq has waxed and waned over the years, from intense debate to complete disconnection. So too has the media’s interest, as Iraq goes from the front page of the newspaper to someplace buried deep within. But there’s one viewpoint of the...continued...
