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How Journalism Education Can, and Should, Blow Up the System
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Social Media
Timeline: Facebook's Stormy Relationship with Privacy
No company has done more to push the boundaries of online privacy than Facebook. The world's leading social network has changed the way friendships are maintained, news is shared, and protests are organized -- among much else. While many of these innovations have been enthusiastically embraced by Facebook's 600 million-plus users, others have provoked serious backlash. Below are some...
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NewspaperShift
NY Times Defends WikiLeaks Collaboration, Metered Pay Wall
"All the News That's Fit to Print" is both the slogan of the New York Times and the title of the most recent installment of the Kalb Report, a monthly media discussion put on by George Washington University in D.C. Given its title, the overflow audience at last night's discussion between Marvin Kalb and Times executive editor Bill Keller and...
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EducationShift
NYU's Studio 20 Creates Innovative, Collaborative Hothouse
This week, three senior staffers from ProPublica will visit the second class of students enrolled in the Studio 20 program at NYU Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. The reporters and students will begin formally collaborating on a question the non-profit newsroom has puzzled over since its founding in 2008: How can you quickly and clearly summarize the basic facts of the investigations ProPublica specializes in?
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Environment
How Green is Facebook, Microsoft Push into Cloud Computing?
Information and communication technology (ICT) companies already account for up to three percent of global greenhouse gas emissions -- a figure projected to increase as more data centers are built to store the shift of information to the web. During interviews with MediaShift, executives at Microsoft and Facebook said cloud computing could have positive environmental impacts. But analysts and activists have expressed serious doubts about the implications of the coming data-center building boom.
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EducationShift
J-School Incubator News21 Balances Investigations, Innovation
During the slow news week of Thanksgiving, two articles about the shortcomings of the National Transportation Safety Board were published on the websites of Fox News and the Capital Gazette of Annapolis, Maryland. On the busiest travel week of the year, their story selections would be unsurprising were it not for their provenance. Both were written over three months earlier by students taking part in News21, an immersive journalism education program.
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Public MediaShift
NPR, PBS Try to Tame Controversy, Embrace Tech at PubCamp
The second annual National Public Media Camp, which wrapped up Sunday night at American University in Washington, D.C., provided an opportunity for representatives from all three organizations to share their experiences and -- more importantly -- the lessons learned. Not surprisingly, the session entitled "How to handle an online revolt" was one of the many highlights of a packed weekend of diverse discussions.
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PoliticalShift
How the Tea Party Utilized Digital Media to Gain Power
The biggest story of the U.S. midterm election has been the growing influence of the Tea Party movement. Since their first rallies in early 2009, these vocal, visible conservatives have succeeded in shifting the center of American political discourse to the right. This election cycle, Tea Partiers have gone a step further, successfully backing primary challengers against moderate Republicans...
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Environment
How Climate Activists Are Warming to Social Media
American environmentalists recently suffered a pair of devastating defeats in their decades-long effort to halt global warming. Progress stalled on domestic legislation to cap greenhouse gas emissions prior to a key UN summit in Copenhagen. Lack of leadership from America, the world's second largest climate polluter, made it impossible to produce and binding international agreement at the conference. Then, a...
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Hyper-Local
Writers Talk About Working the Hyper-Local Beat
In my first article for our special Beyond Content Farms series, I examined the opportunities available to writers at some of the biggest content farms. Today, I look at jobs covering hyper-local news. What hyper-local news organizations are aiming for is nothing short of revolutionary: AOL's two-year-old Patch network and established players like Examiner.com are attempting to recreate a...
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Business
Writers Explain What It's Like Toiling on the Content Farm
"We are going to be the largest net hirer of journalists in the world next year," AOL's media and studios division president David Eun said last month in an interview with Michael Learmonth of Ad Age. Eun suggested that AOL could double its existing stable of 500 full-time editorial staffers in addition to expanding its network of 40,000 freelance...
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