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Business
Bay Citizen, Center for Investigative Reporting Plan to Merge. Now What?
The Bay Citizen and the Center for Investigative Reporting, two non-profit organizations based in the Bay Area, announced formally Tuesday that they intend to merge. Under terms of the agreement, Berkeley, Calif.-based CIR, which also runs California Watch, would take over management of the Bay Citizen, an online publication with a publishing partnership with The New York Times. Phil Bronstein,...
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Public MediaShift
How Social Media, Collaboration Fueled Reports on Australia's Refugees
An innovative Australian public journalism project has partnered student reporters and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation with a refugee support agency and a social media startup. The aim of the project, #ReportingRefugees, was to tackle problematic media coverage of asylum seekers and refugees in a volatile political climate in parallel with educating students to connect with a "citizens' agenda." The result...
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Collaboration
The 5 Tenets of Open Journalism
I'm not a middle-of-the-roader and wasn't aiming for a compromise position with my discussion paper, "The Case for Open Journalism Now: A new framework for informing communities," published early this month by the University of Southern California's Annenberg Innovation Lab. Instead, I sought to identify and propel a culture shift that might build a healthier relationship among those who produce...
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EducationShift
Collaboration Profile: A Look at WNYC and NYT's SchoolBook
SchoolBook is an ambitious new web offering from WNYC and the New York Times that provides news, data and conversation about New York City's
schools. The site, which launched just before the start of the school year, has been lauded by members of the education establishment, parents and journalists, and provides an interesting model for other public media stations to consider.
Collaboration
How Non-Profit, For-Profit Newsrooms Are Working Together
BERKELEY, CALIF. -- As traditional newsrooms shrink and budgets tighten, media outlets have realized they can't do as much investigative, time-intensive reporting. But one solution has been for competing news outlets to begin collaborating, whether working together on reports or with content-sharing deals. And with the rise of local non-profit watchdog sites such as Voice of San Diego and the...
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Collaboration
Can Mainstream and Ethnic Media Collaborate?
While investigative collaborations are blossoming in newsrooms across the country, few are taking place between mainstream and niche media. As a result, news organizations could be missing the opportunity to reach a wider audience, tap into reporters' talents, and uncover stories from perspectives not often examined. Niche media include ethnic media and those that publish in a language other than...
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Collaboration
Dispatch from IRE: Important Lessons from Investigative Collaborations
From the air-conditioned meeting rooms to the muggy poolside bar, everyone at this year's Investigative Reporters and Editors conference was talking collaboration. It seems that our once doggedly independent industry is beginning to embrace a lesson long forgotten from elementary school: how to play nicely with others. And that might be because there are few alternatives. With newsrooms across the...
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Collaboration
Highs and Lows of "Post Mortem" Collaboration Between Frontline, ProPublica, NPR
Recently at the Logan Symposium at UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism, Mark Katches, California Watch's editorial director, asked a room full of reporters and editors if anyone wanted to share a "collaboration horror story." There were chuckles, but no volunteers. Horror story may have been too strong a term, but don't be misled by the silence. The thing is,...
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Collaboration
Collective, Non-Profit Investigative Journalism Takes Spotlight at Logan
BERKELEY, CALIF. -- I am back at Day 2 at the 5th Annual Reva and David Logan Investigative Reporting Symposium, a gathering of the top investigative journalists and thinkers at University of California at Berkeley. Day 1 coverage is here, including an appearance by Skype by Julian Assange. Day 2 is shorter, but more focused on new models of journalism,...
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Public MediaShift
World TV Revamps Site to Entice a Younger Audience
How can public media spur multi-platform engagement through a national TV channel? That's the challenge that was posed to the team developing WorldCompass.org, the companion website for the World TV channel, a news and documentary channel now available in parts of 32 states.
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EducationShift
Blizzard Builds KOMU Community with Mobile Video, Facebook
I've always dreamed of a time when my community could come together with the help of our on-air and online collaboration. All it took was a blizzard to make it happen. Mid-Missouri was hit with a blizzard-like storm that dumped 17.5 inches of snow into Columbia, Mo., and even more south of the city. The entire viewing audience of KOMU-TV was home and stuck inside.
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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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World View
How Mapping, SMS Platforms Saved Lives in Haiti Earthquake
This article was co-authored by Mayur Patel Tomorrow marks the anniversary of the devastating earthquake that shook Haiti last January, killing more than 230,000 people and leaving several million inhabitants of the small island nation homeless. Though natural disasters are common, the humanitarian response this time was different: New media and communications technologies were used in unprecedented ways to aid...
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EducationShift
J-Schools Shift from Learning Labs to Major Media Players
Perhaps the most striking change for journalism schools is the degree to which we have shifted from being learning labs whose actual journalism (if any) was limited in its distribution and impact, to being significant -- even major -- media players in our communities. It is clear that in journalism schools across the United States major projects are increasingly making substantial contributions toward filling the holes left by the hollowing out of local "legacy" media.
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Social Media
How NewsHour Used Crowdsourcing to Refute TSA Meltdown
Social Media content on MediaShift is sponsored by the John S. Knight Journalism Fellowships, a program offering innovative and entrepreneurial journalists the resources of Stanford University and Silicon Valley. Learn more here. During Thanksgiving week, the debate over stricter TSA security measures was turning into the big story. A handful of airport security anecdotes were making the rounds via...
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EducationShift
UBC Students, Globe and Mail Investigate Hidden Cost of Shrimp
Twenty-something university students usually head to Thailand in search of exotic adventures. But when a group of 10 University of British Columbia journalism students went almost a year ago, they were searching for the untold story of shrimp, a seafood delicacy that has become common in North America.
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Public MediaShift
8 Key Lessons the CBC Learned Working with Citizen Journos
The 2010 G20 summit in Toronto marked the first time the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation collaborated with citizen journalists on a large and integrated scale. In the lead up to the event, we noticed our online community was passionate about the topic. As a public broadcaster, we saw it as a perfect opportunity to tap into that conversation and encourage...
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Public MediaShift
Public Media Experiments Show Promise, Need to Involve Public
The Public Media 2.0 series on MediaShift is sponsored by American University's Center for Social Media (CSM) through a grant from the Ford Foundation. Learn more about CSM's research on emerging public media trends and standards at futureofpublicmedia.net. This article was co-authored by Jessica Clark, with research support from Christopher Ali and Erin Roberts. After a slew of reports,...
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Public MediaShift
Special Series: Public Media 2.0
The Public Media 2.0 series on MediaShift is sponsored by American University's Center for Social Media (CSM) through a grant from the Ford Foundation. Learn more about CSM's research on emerging public media trends and standards at futureofpublicmedia.net. About this Series How are public media makers and outlets evolving in the digital, participatory age? Stories in this week's special...
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Public MediaShift
5 Emerging Trends That Give Hope for Public Media 2.0
Public media is facing the same pressures as commercial media when it comes to digital: How can they transition to a new age of social media, collaboration and audience interaction? From today until Thanksgiving, MediaShift will have a special in-depth report on Public Media 2.0, with analysis, case studies, a 5Across video roundtable and coverage of this weekend's national PubCamp in Washington, DC.
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Citizen Journalism
Crowdsourced Fact-Checking? What We Learned from Truthsquad
In June, Senator U.S. Senator Orrin Hatch made the statement that "87 million Americans will be forced out of their coverage" by President Obama's health care plan. It was quite a claim. But was it true? That's a common, and important, question -- and it can often be hard to quickly nail down the real facts in the information-overloaded world...
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Public MediaShift
A Guide to Rising Public Media Networks in the U.S.
While it's taken public broadcasters awhile to catch up to the possibilities and dynamics of social and mobile media platforms, over the past year on MediaShift we have been documenting a flurry of innovation that reveals new possibilities for how the sector might share content, do business, and engage publics. Here's a guide to several types of rising public media...
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Collaboration
Public Media Corps Takes on Broadband Divide for Minorities
If there was a reality show about the Public Media Corps (PMC), the intro might sound something like this: "Here's the true story of how 15 fellows, five public media institutions, three high schools, three community organizations, a library and a museum collaborate to bridge the broadband divide." Secretly, I wish there was a reality show about the project because...
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Collaboration
KCET's 'Departures' Exemplifies Community Collaboration
I've written for MediaShift several times about journalistic collaboration between news organizations, such as the Climate Desk project, for example, or Public Media's EconomyStory. But there's another kind of collaboration that's critical to the future of journalism: Collaboration between a news organization and the community it serves. This kind of collaboration is critical for a few reasons. First, as anyone...
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Collaboration
The Climate Desk: Time-Intensive Collaboration Pays Off
When I first heard about The Climate Desk back in April, I was impressed by its ambitious mission: The Climate Desk is a journalistic collaboration dedicated to exploring the impact -- human, environmental, economic, political -- of a changing climate. The partners are The Atlantic, Center for Investigative Reporting, Grist, Mother Jones, Slate, Wired, and PBS's new public affairs show...
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Collaboration
Media Consortium Pushes Collaboration to Increase Innovation
Once a week, representatives from liberal publications such as AlterNet, Yes! Magazine, the American Independent News Network, the UpTake, and Ms. Magazine convene to discuss mobile strategies. The call, organized by the Media Consortium, is part of an Incubation and Innovation Lab designed to help members collectively tackle the new realities of journalism -- a landscape where traditional revenue sources...
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