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Free Speech
Why the Olympics, NBC Should Embrace Free Speech in Wake of Guy Adams Affair
Editor's Note: The following is an opinion piece from MediaShift contributor Trevor Timm. Early Tuesday, Twitter finally apologized to journalist Guy Adams -- Los Angeles bureau chief for the Independent and an outspoken critic of NBC's coverage of the Olympics -- for suspending his account under flimsy and suspicious circumstances. Adams may be free to tweet again, but this is... more »
Who We Are
MediaShift tracks how new media -- from weblogs to podcasts to citizen journalism -- are changing society and culture.
AdvertisingShift
Google Touts Promise of Targeted Political Ads, Despite Turning Off Voters
Last week, Google's "Politics, Elections and Public Sector" team unveiled a "Four Screens to Victory" infographic that highlights new trends in how Americans gather political information. The folks at Google suggest that television may be losing its primacy in the world of campaign advertising, and they hope that political campaigns will begin to shift their ad spends online. But can these...
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Global View
Best Online Resources for Following the 2012 London Summer #Olympics
The 2012 Summer Olympic Games in London have largely been anticipated as the first social media Olympics. Athletes, fans, and the media shared their voices online during the 2010 Winter Games in Vancouver, but this time in London, even the International Olympic Committee (IOC) decided to adopt a full-fledged social media strategy. Starting with the Athletes' Hub - fully...
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EducationShift
Student Journalists Go Global, Think Locally in #Olympics Coverage from London
Amid the thousands of professional journalists gathered in London for the start of the Summer Olympics will be a handful of journalism students with the unusual opportunity to work in school-sponsored teams to cover the high-profile games. Several U.S. universities have launched new programs to bring journalists-in-training directly to the scene of the giant international sporting event, where they have...
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World View
Special Series: Olympics in the Digital Age
It used to be that there were two ways to experience the Summer Olympics: watch the games on your TV (and on NBC's schedule) or travel to the games themselves. Oh my, how things have changed. This summer, you can follow your favorite Olympian on Facebook. Live stream the finals on your laptop. Look at near real-time photo galleries online....
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Global View
Russia's Internet Blacklist Bill Threatens A Free, Uncensored Web
Russia's State Duma has passed a number of new laws in the past week, all seemingly aimed at reining in civil society and criticism of public figures. The bills would re-criminalize defamation and impose limits and labels on NGOs. They follow last month's introduction of excessive fines for unauthorized protests. Government Crackdown Heightens One of this week's bills, Duma Bill...
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Global View
How a Salesman-Turned-Citizen Journalist Covers Conflict in Syria
Just before the Syrian revolution became increasingly violent eight months ago, Hussein worked for his family's real estate company showing apartments around the city of Quasir. That all ended when frequent bombings and gunfire between President Bashar al-Assad's forces and Syrian rebels turned the country into one of the most dangerous places in the world. Most jobs in Syria, including...
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Free Speech
How Effective Are Free Speech Campaigns?
When prominent Egyptian blogger Alaa Abd El Fattah was arrested during a protest in 2006, his friends and fellow bloggers from all over the world sprung into action, launching a multifaceted campaign to free the activist. The campaign's success was inspiring, and the techniques used would serve as a blueprint for future efforts. As bloggers and netizens have increasingly become...
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Culture
Young People Who Tweet Are Young People Who Vote
Nearly 7 million young people will be newly eligible to vote this November. And contrary to what most might think, a recent study of how these voters engage in politics using new media shows they're paying close attention. "A lot of what we're trying to understand is the way in which [using new media] might be related to the ways...
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World View
Social Media Flexes Muscle in Mexican Election Protests
Mexican students who organized massive protests against the country's biggest broadcaster may not have seen their favored candidate win, but they did spotlight how online media can seize the political agenda in a country with little media competition. Using the hashtag #YoSoy132, these students created YouTube videos and social media tools to rally against what they saw as the potential return...
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Global View
New Technology Brings New Challenges for Keeping Sources Safe
In a meeting of journalists last year, many of whom work with sources in sensitive places like Iran and Syria, one editor said she knew how to keep her sources safe. When pressed, she detailed a strong understanding of traditional safety methods, but -- to the horror of security experts in the room -- also described talking to sources over...
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Business
Starting a Daily Paper Uniting a Struggling Europe: Crazy or Genuis?
Imagine a Tuesday morning in Rome. A woman dressed in business attire drinks her espresso while browsing the European Daily in a noisy cafeteria. At the same time, imagine in Stockholm, an Erasmus student from Bulgaria is absorbed in a report from the same paper about his country being finally accepted into the Schengen area. Although just a scenario right...
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PoliticalShift
The Pirate Party Gains Steam Overseas; Will It Catch in the U.S.?
Meet Jan Hemme: mild-mannered public relations executive by day, Pirate by night -- specifically, a strategist for Berlin's Pirate Party. This new political movement, with roots in the tech culture, is shaking up politics across Europe and hopes to make some noise in the coming U.S. elections. Given the exponential influence of digital media in the life of political parties,...
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Global View
PDF12: How Cyber-Dissidents Evade Chinese Censorship
NEW YORK -- The famous Chinese artist and dissident Ai Weiwei once wrote in a blog, "To express yourself needs a reason, but expressing yourself is a reason." In the highly censored world of Chinese media, this sums up the growing consensus within that country -- and around the world -- that the freedom of expression and dissent is important...
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Free Speech
How Ethnic Media Is Straining Polish-Lithuanian Relations
What do you do when a longtime friend invites you to come over for a chat? Surely, you perk up and hurry to meet your buddy. But in mid-April, when Polish President Bronislaw Komorowski personally invited Lithuanian President Dalia Grybauskaite to join him in a meeting with the other two leaders of the Baltic States, Andris Berzins of Latvia...
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Best Practices
Tobacco Underground: A Lesson in Collaborating Across Borders
As the most high-profile international collaboration, WikiLeaks offers some interesting lessons about working with news organizations abroad. But it can be difficult to untangle those lessons from the drama that surrounded the story. And frankly, very few media organizations could pull off a similar effort. But there's another international collaboration that has some lessons to share and is less tangled....
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TVShift
Could LinkAsia's Digital Hybrid Model Be the Future for Global TV News?
Last July, a high-speed train crashed in the Wenzhou suburbs of China's Zhejiang Province, killing 38 people and injuring 192. The Chinese government's media apparatus quickly swung into gear, working overtime to quell growing rumors of an engineering flaw that may have caused the crash. But despite the Chinese Communist Party's attempt at full control over China's media outlets --...
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Free Speech
Citizens Get Conflicting Messages About Their Right to Record
This month, federal agencies and local officials sent two powerful but conflicting messages to the American public about our right to record. On May 14, the Justice Department submitted a letter to the Baltimore Police Department providing in-depth guidance on citizens' right to record. The letter was submitted as part of a court case that dates back to 2010. The plaintiff,...
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Free Speech
In the Philippines, a Brash Brand of Journalism Can Be Fatal
Two and a half years to the day since the world's worst-ever single mass killing of journalists took place in the southern Philippines, many suspects remain at large, the trial is stalled, and victim's families are being harassed and intimidated. MANILA -- Most days, Philippine presidential spokesman Edwin Lacierda does a White House-style briefing with Manila's press corps, spinning the...
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Case Studies
OWNI, El Watan Collaborate to Tell Whole Story of French-Algerian War
When it comes to the French-Algerian war, which eventually led to Algeria gaining its independence from France, and arguably caused the collapse of the French Fourth Republic, there's the official story and there's what really happened. The two don't often mix. So on the 50th anniversary of the end of the war (the war took place between 1954 and 1962)...
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Free Speech
Could Facebook, Twitter Be Charged Under Thailand's Computer Crime Act?
On June 3 of last year, MediaShift published the article "Crisis in Thailand Leads to Net Crackdown, Censorship" on the harassment journalists and netizens faced as political clashes arose in the country. Many of the comments in a long thread following its publication mentioned the monarchy. Some of the comments were just opinions, but according to the lese-majesté law, they...
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World View
Why Now Is the Time for Media Innovation in Africa
In Africa, where mobile news and digital innovation are growing but startup capital is too often scarce, innovators have a unique opportunity to help reinvent media: the African News Innovation Challenge. The newly launched contest, modeled on the Knight News Challenge, will award $1 million (in increments of $12,500 to $100,000) to projects that create new ways to tell stories,...
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Legal Drama
The First Amendment Should Protect Everyone's Right to Record
Since September, police have arrested dozens of journalists and activists around the country for the "crime" of trying to document political protests in public spaces. People using smartphones and mobile devices are changing the way we record and share breaking news. In return, police have targeted, harassed, and in many cases, arrested those trying to capture images and video of...
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PoliticalShift
Will Online Video Coverage of U.S. Election Eat into Text-Based Stories?
As I've read up online about the 2012 campaign news in recent months, I've noticed I'm doing a lot less, well, reading. I've checked around a bit and confirmed that websites that traditionally focus on text-based journalism -- like Politico.com and NYTimes.com -- are indeed ramping up their video offerings to add a new dimension to their campaign coverage. The...
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World View
The Digital Age and the Changing Face of International Media Development
Search for the term "international media development" and you won't find many university departments or publications. Nonetheless, the field is over 50 years old and has exerted a major influence on many regions of the world, accounting for a budget of half a billion dollars a year. The Center for International Media Assistance, a Congressionally-funded think tank, defines media development...
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Free Speech
World Press Freedom Day: Where We Stand After the Arab Spring
This post is co-authored by Jillian C. York. Nineteen years ago, before the Internet had reached millions of homes, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the celebration of press freedom, deeming May 3 "World Press Freedom Day." Since then, the day has been celebrated by organizations and government entities alike. Today, the Internet age has created a whole new slew...
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Europe
Spain's iPad Mag, Vis à Vis, Shows Growth, Points to New Path
In a small office in Alcala Street, in the center of Madrid, a team of seven young entrepreneurial journalists are working overtime to produce the next issue of digital magazine Vis à Vis. Conceived exclusively for the iPad and launched in January, Vis à Vis is an interactive, visual and modern publication that wants to reinvent journalism. The first...
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Global View
18DaysInEgypt: Crowdsourcing a Story of Revolution
In the 18 days of Egypt's uprising that began on Jan. 25, 2011 and ended with the resignation of former President Hosni Mubarak, thousands of Egyptians turned to their cell phones, digital cameras or social media sites to document the events as they were unfolding in Cairo and across the country. Tapping into this wealth of material, American documentary...
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Culture
Governments Increasingly Targeting Twitter Users for Expressing Their Opinion
This piece is co-authored by Trevor Timm. In its six years of existence, Twitter has staked out a position as the most free speech-friendly social network. Its utility in the uprisings that swept the Middle East and North Africa is unmatched, its usage by activists and journalists alike to spread news and galvanize the public unprecedented. As Twitter CEO Dick...
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PoliticalShift
As TV Biz Resists Disclosure of Super PAC Ads, ProPublica Turns to Crowdsourcing
Two years ago, the Supreme Court decided in Citizens United vs. the Federal Election Committee that unlimited political campaign spending by corporations and wealthy individuals was permissible under the First Amendment. To people who believed that moneyed interests already had an outsized influence on the electoral process, the decision was chilling. The ruling provided only one consolation for them: that...
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Your Take
Poll: How Is Social Media Changing Activism?
How do people end up in the streets protesting something? What motivates them to take action, even when that action could lead to their arrest? Last year, Facebook and Twitter played major roles in helping organize street protests during the Arab Spring, to the point where dictators were focused on either blocking the services or using them to spy on...
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Mediatwits
Mediatwits #44: Social Media's Role in Activism, Trayvon Martin; Pinterest's Legal Drama
Welcome to the 44th episode of the Mediatwits podcast, this time with Mark Glaser and the Rachel Sklar as co-hosts. Sklar is a writer and social entrepreneur, and is filling in for Rafat Ali. This week, we convene a special roundtable to discuss how social media is changing activism, in the wake of the Trayvon Martin shooting, in a...
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Free Speech
Cautious Hope for Freedom of Information in Burma
BANGKOK -- A week out from special elections that are likely to see opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi take a seat in the country's parliament, Burma's long-straitjacketed journalists sat with local and foreign officials to discuss a new press law that could see the country's censorship regime abolished. Thiha Saw, editor of Myanmar Dhana magazine and Open News (two...
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Social Networking
How Social Media Is Changing Protest Reporting in the U.K.
In March 1984, tens of thousands of British miners went on strike over expected coal mine closures. During the next year, unions faced off with police and Margaret Thatcher's conservative government in what became Britain's most turbulent industrial protest of recent decades.
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Social Networking
Pew Report Finds Americans Unfriending Over Political Beliefs
As a teenager who was vocally opinionated about political issues, I often heard the cautionary refrain "Politics is not the topic of polite conversation." That counsel must have been lost on me, since I find myself as an adult publicly airing my opinions as both the political correspondent for this blog and as a Democratic analyst periodically appearing on FoxNews.com.
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PoliticalShift
Political 'Matchmaking' Sites ElectNext, iSideWith Help Voters Decide
Despite the nonstop coverage of the ongoing Republican primary battle on cable news and talk radio programs, the American voter remains notoriously ill-informed. While people may be increasing their attention to the high-profile horse race of presidential politics this year, it's clear that most voters' knowledge of local politics has sharply declined. This is doubtless related to the dwindling amount...
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World View
Argentina: Orwellian State or Forerunner of Media Reform in Latin America?
Ten years after the wave of social unrest that set the streets of Buenos Aires on fire, the Argentine government is toughening state control over information made available to the public. "As Argentina enters a period of increasing economic uncertainty, having greater power over the media will allow the government to better control information available to the public and presumably...
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MobileShift
How One Reporter Ditched His Laptop and Covered a Conference with an iPhone, iPad
For the first time in my career last week, I went to work naked. I had the requisite snazzy shirt and tie, but I showed up at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, without my laptop computer and without my camera. I had decided to go all mobile. I'm one of those reporters who usually overdoes it with technology....
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EducationShift
Technology Journalism: The Jobs Are There; the Journalists Are Not
BARCELONA -- If journalism is a profession in trouble, you would never know it from the newsroom at the Mobile World Congress. It's hard to find one of the 500 seats in the newsroom empty as journalists from around the world file stories for specialty newspapers, websites and blogs. Unfortunately, few journalism schools can boast about placing their alums here....
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Mediatwits
Mediatwits #38: Online Report from Tunisia; Pinterest Craze; Apple Monitors Factories
Welcome to the 38th episode of "The Mediatwits," the weekly audio podcast from MediaShift. The co-hosts are MediaShift's Mark Glaser and Jillian York, who is filling in for Rafat Ali. First, we get a special on-the-ground report from special guest Mohamed El Dahshan in Tunisia, talking about a ruling expected from the country's Supreme Court about filtering the Internet....
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Legal Drama
Journalists Should Learn Best Practices for Fair Use in Digital Age
As we listened to the 80 journalists we interviewed over the last year for a study, Copyright, Free Speech, and the Public's Right to Know: How Journalists Think about Fair Use, we got a clear message: hard-working journalists are often confronted with copyright questions that threaten to keep them from doing their jobs well. Take these hypotheticals: Caitlin works for...
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Mediatwits
Mediatwits #37: Merger Mania: CIR-Bay Citizen; GigaOm-PaidContent; Twitter Censorship
Welcome to the 37th episode of "The Mediatwits," the weekly audio podcast from MediaShift. The co-hosts are MediaShift's Mark Glaser and Jillian York, who is filling in for Rafat Ali. It's been a crazy week in media + tech, with important mergers abounding! First up is the Center for Investigative Reporting announcing that it will try to merge with...
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PoliticalShift
Are You Part of the 2% (of People Who Get Campaign News From Twitter)?
Many of you are, like me, among the proverbial "99%" when it comes to economics and income. But if you regularly learn about the 2012 campaign from those you follow on Twitter, as I do, you're in an elite class of a different sort. A new report out from the The Pew Research Center for The People and The Press...
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Your Take
Poll: What Do You Think About the Anti-SOPA Protests?
Can online protests make a difference? In the past, they've had mixed success but with enough people pushing against the twin anti-piracy bills, SOPA and PIPA, the U.S. Congress was forced to pay heed. They have now put off bringing the bills to a vote, while contemplating rewrites and changes to the bills. Google alone collected more than 7 million...
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Mediatwits
Mediatwits #34: SOPA Protests Make a Difference; Yang Out at Yahoo
Welcome to the 34th episode of "The Mediatwits," the weekly audio podcast from MediaShift. The co-hosts are MediaShift's Mark Glaser and Rafat Ali. This week the show is mainly focused on the huge day of protest online Wednesday against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect IP Act (PIPA) before the U.S. Congress. After Wikipedia, Reddit and other...
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Guides
Your Guide to the Anti-SOPA Protests
Today was an important day in the history of the Internet and activism. While the U.S. Congress expected to quickly pass two bills, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect IP Act (PIPA), mounting opposition online has led them to reconsider. That all came to a head today when various sites such as Wikipedia and Reddit decided to black...
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Citizen Journalism
Why Training Citizen Journalists Is So Important After the Arab Spring
Tomorrow (Jan. 14, 2012) marks the one-year anniversary of Tunisia's liberation from 23 years of oppression under dictator Ben Ali. It was a liberation sparked by one man's shocking public protest against injustice through self-immolation and fueled by the power of citizen journalism and social media. During the last months of 2010, Tunisians captured footage of protests and government oppression...
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Ethics
3 Laws for Journalists in a Data-Saturated World
At the Cyberspace Conference in London in November, Igor Shchegolev, the Russian minister of communications and mass media, referred to sci-fi writer Isaac Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics: 1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. 2. A robot must obey any orders given to it by human...
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Legal Drama
Wiretapping, SOPA, Occupy: 2011 Was a Tumultuous Year in Media Law
This piece is co-authored by Jeff Hermes and Andy Sellars. This year turned out to be one that could fit well in a Billy Joel song: peppered protesters, jailed journalists, Internet crusaders ... the list goes on. To recap a year that has been chock-full of shifts in media, we put together a list of the top 10 (plus...
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NewspaperShift
For Better and for Worse: The Changing World of Science Journalism
Jeremy Roberts sat still on the shore of the Bitterroot River, photographing a female kingfisher. The chunky, crested icon of anglers would seize a fish, fly away, then return to the same branch to fish again. Time and again she came and went. In addition to the other photos he took, Roberts snapped a picture with his cell phone and posted it to Facebook.
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Mediatwits
Mediatwits #31: BBC World Invades U.S.; ReadWriteWeb Sold to Say Media
Welcome to the 31st episode of "The Mediatwits," the weekly audio podcast from MediaShift. The co-hosts are MediaShift's Mark Glaser and Rafat Ali. This week we turn across the pond to the U.K., where the BBC is pushing its BBC World cable news channel to an American audience. The BBC recently made a deal with Comcast to increase its...
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Environment
Nobel Prize Winner on How New Media is Democratizing Science News
In his lab, scientist and Nobel prize winner Steve Running focuses on creating and confirming new facts and knowledge about climate change. Running leads the Numerical Terradynamic Simulation Group lab at the University of Montana.
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Legal Drama
Changing Media Landscape Could Topple FCC's Indecency Rules
Since the 1970s, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has regulated indecency in broadcast programming. It has enforced laws that prohibit broadcasters from airing, at least during certain hours, any "patently offensive" sexual or excretory material. And since the 1970s, broadcast outlets have attacked the FCC for doing so. They've challenged the agency's authority, as well as the constitutionality and consistency...
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Technology
Public Laboratory: Don't Just Report Science, Do It!
Can you envision an alternative mode of science journalism? Imagine a science journalism in which the journalist not only reports about science, but also gathers scientific data and develops the tools by which the data is acquired.
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PoliticalShift
How Bloggers, Occupy Wall Street Have Inspired Each Other
From the very beginning, supporters of Occupy Wall Street (OWS) have touted its decentralized nature as one of its greatest strengths. The opponents of a political movement commonly attempt to discredit them by pointing to outside powerful interests secretly pulling strings, thereby jeopardizing its grassroots legitimacy. We saw this with the Tea Party, whose opponents very early on argued that...
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Business
Truth and Contradictions: The Global News Industry Looks to the Future
In recent years, the global news industry has been battered by the double tsunami of the economic downturn and technological disruption, as managers of newspapers and magazines struggle to integrate digital media into their business models. Now, over the past two years, the tablet and the smartphone have appeared, promising to again rewrite the relationship between digital distribution and content...
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Culture
Cameras Everywhere: The Promise and Peril for Human Rights
When you hear the phrase "cameras everywhere" your first thought may be of ubiquitous surveillance cameras, watching your every move on behalf of the state, private businesses and corporations. On second thought it may conjure up the hundreds of millions of cameras, mobile and Internet connections in the hands of ordinary citizens who are filming, sharing and remixing footage --...
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PoliticalShift
Do the Math! How Reporters Squandered the School Loans Story
When President Obama announced his school loan relief plan at the University of Colorado, Denver, a few weeks ago, the mainstream media's coverage followed three predictable trajectories that, for the most part, failed to accurately report the news for the majority of Americans -- and instead contributed to the collective spin-as-news that's all too prevalent these days. This could have...
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Philosophy
TrueTies Activist Demands Transparency Without Transparency
This piece originally appeared in the Washington Examiner It is reprinted here with permission. An Op-Ed appeared earlier this month on PBS MediaShift that seemed to describe a civic-minded endeavor aimed at increasing awareness of who on the nation's editorial commentary pages was trying to influence public opinion. "Every day, Americans read the opinion and commentary of seemingly impartial 'experts'...
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PoliticalShift
Convergence 2.0: How Public TV Can Save Democracy
This September, I wrote in MediaShift about the unfortunate effects on journalism that the deregulation of campaign financing could have. The article hinted that public media might be able to offset the damage, and maybe even save democracy. This sounds so grandiose that, to explain how and why, we need to back up a few steps -- quite a few,...
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World View
Filling the News Gap in North Korea
SEOUL, South Korea -- "I am always worried about security for those who report information to us from inside," said Byoung-Keun, a North Korean working in Seoul as a journalist for The DailyNK, a news website focused on telling the world what is happening in possibly the world's most closed-off society. Byoung-Keun is a pseudonym, because the former North Korean...
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Social Networking
Dutch Artist Explores Privacy, Social Media With 'Showroom Girls'
This past summer, Amsterdam's Foam museum exhibited a controversial project by Dutch visual artist Willem Popelier -- a project that has raised a debate about the intersection of the Internet, in particular social media, and privacy.Popelier's Showroom Girls centers on the story of two 14-year-old girls the artist tracked through social media.The two girls visited a shop where customers can...
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Europe
In Spain, 'Little Black Book' of Journalism Shows Profession in Crisis
Pressure from the publishing industry has weakened the watchdog role of journalists, turning them into lapdogs at the service of corporations and politicians and unable to serve their readers. That's one of the conclusions of Bernardo Diaz Nosty, journalism professor at the University of Malaga. Diaz Nosty, also a journalist, is the author of "Libro Negro del Periodismo en...
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EducationShift
How a $35 Tablet Could Revolutionize Classroom Learning
When Amazon unveiled its new Android tablet, the Kindle Fire, last month, analysts said that its price could well make it a viable competitor to the wildly successful iPad. Indeed, while the iPad has ignited great interest in tablet computing, particularly in schools, that interest has really just been in iPads.
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PoliticalShift
Attack of the Attack Ads: Citizens United and the 2012 Elections
In 2012, two tidal waves will reconfigure the American electoral system and the news media that cover it. A tsunami made of money will buoy up the structure of entrenched political power, while a huge wave of personal technology will disrupt it. I can predict both of these events with certainty because they've happened every election year over the last...
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Legal Drama
Colleges Run Afoul of First Amendment in Barring Sports Journalists
College athletics are, in some ways, the epitome of what sports are supposed to represent. In our collective minds, college sports are pure, a reminder that decades ago, we too were once young, agile, and full of potential. Every season, alumni forced to move away from "dear ol' State" descend upon land-grant campuses in a tribal, nearly reflexive migration. But...
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Business
Social Good Summit: Digital Philanthropy Grows Up
The second Social Good Summit, mounted by Mashable and the United Nations Foundation with support from Swedish mobile phone giant Ericsson is, in Mashable's words, a chance for "the most innovative technologists, influential minds and passionate activists [to come together] with one shared goal: to unlock the potential of new media and technology to make the world a better place."
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World View
Online Journalism Booms in Egypt, But Not Without Restriction
This post was co-authored by Tanja Aitamurto CAIRO -- The historic revolution in Egypt this spring changed the country's media landscape dramatically. Since the uprising, a plethora of new online initiatives have sprung up. Several citizen journalists have become full-on celebrities. News agencies have started disseminating on Facebook. New TV channels are aired. It would seem then, that freedom of...
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Business
Financial Times Enjoys Life Beyond the App Store
There was a time in the not-so-distant past when app makers were fighting to get featured in Apple's App Store, and crying out in protest if their app didn't make the cut. So it's quite a turnabout to talk to folks at the Financial Times, who have not only removed their apps from the App Store but have thrived with an HTML5 web app that lives outside of the App Store completely.
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Free Speech
Censorship Prevails in 'New' Burma, Despite Reform Talk
BANGKOK -- A handful of protestors gathered outside the Burmese embassy in Bangkok last Friday to vent their anger against the detention of 17 journalists in Burma, some of whom have been given multiple-decade jail terms for what activists describe as "no more than doing their jobs." The jailed reporters worked for Democratic Voice of Burma, a Burmese media organization...
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World View
How Social Media Is Keeping the Egyptian Revolution Alive
This piece was co-written by Hanna Sistek. CAIRO -- The revolution in Egypt is unfinished business. While new online tools are used to strengthen civil society, activists are still struggling with the digital divide when it comes to mobilizing masses against the army and the remains of the old administration. On a Saturday evening in Cairo, a digital campaign against...
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Europe
Infographic Explains Hackgate, News of the World Scandal
Maybe you're still confused about the whole "hackgate" scandal in the United Kingdom, where the News of the World tabloid hacked cell phone voicemail messages to get inside information. Perhaps our guide to the scandal was just too dense. Well, here's an even simpler proposition: one simple infographic to explain the whole thing. The infographic was created by security firm...
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Free Speech
Free Speech Concerns Could Sink Missouri's Social Networking Ban for Teachers
Last week, a Missouri judge issued a preliminary injunction against the state, suspending part of a law that would have made it illegal for teachers and students to connect via social networks. Section 162.069.4 of the Amy Hestir Student Protection Act -- which aims to protect children from sexual predators -- prohibits teachers from establishing, maintaining or using a "non-work-related...
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Free Speech
Online Comments Run Afoul of Thailand's Laws Shielding Royalty from Criticism
BANGKOK -- As a high profile case against a prominent media campaigner returns to court in Bangkok, it has emerged that the long arm of Thailand's lèse-majesté law has reached into California. On Thursday Chiranuch Premchaiporn of the Thai current affairs website Prachatai returned to court in the Thai capital to face vague-sounding allegations that she facilitated third-party remarks about...
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World View
Andy Carvin's Twitter Feed Swerves from Libya to Earthquake
NPR's Andy Carvin has been the star of the Twittersphere during the Arab Spring, even sending out an eye-popping 1,200 tweets in one weekend. But today was a day like no other for Carvin, as the Libyan rebels took over Colonel Moammar Gaddafi's compound in Tripoli, while an earthquake struck the East Coast in the U.S., shaking Carvin's house as...
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Social Networking
What the England Riots Tell Us About Social Media
When England instituted the Riot Act of 1714, it did so to prevent "tumults and riotous assemblies, and for the more speedy and effectual punishing the rioters." That statute came off the books in 1973, but now British Prime Minister David Cameron is targeting the "riotous assemblies" of the online and social media worlds in the wake of deadly and...
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Global View
Injured Libyan Rebels Find Ways to Connect to the Front Lines, Digitally
Hassan Sadek, a 29-year-old Libyan engineer turned rebel group leader, lies in his Tunis, Tunisia, hospital bed, straining his eyes and neck to view the laptop resting on his chest. Occasionally he stops, clenching his teeth, contorting his face in pain, as he lifts one of his two casted legs for relief. He muffles his cries of discomfort and sometimes...
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Guides
Your Guide to the U.K. Phone-Hacking Scandal (or 'Hackgate')
From time to time, we provide 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. We've previously covered Twitter, local watchdog news sites, and Net neutrality, among other topics. This week MediaShift U.K. correspondent Tristan Stewart-Robertson looks at the...
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Your Take
What's Your Current Interest in the Phone-Hacking Scandal?
The phone-hacking scandal seems to have everything: tabloids chasing celebrities, celebrities suing news organizations, police getting bribes, politicians cozying up to media moguls, media moguls questioned at Parliamentary hearings, and a media mogul's wife showing off her mean left hook vs. a pie-throwing, tweeting comedian. It has certainly set social media, cable TV (except for Fox News) and mass media...
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Mediatwits
Mediatwits #14: This Week in Rupert; NY Times' Pay Wall Pays Off
Welcome to the 14th episode of "The Mediatwits," the weekly audio podcast from MediaShift. The co-hosts are MediaShift's Mark Glaser and Rafat Ali, the founder of PaidContent. There's a lot of news to cover in this podcast, including Apple's earnings, Yahoo's earnings, the possible sale of Hulu, and more. But the big deal this week is of course another heaping...
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EducationShift
Wikipedia Taps College 'Ambassadors' to Broaden Editor Base
From what I can tell, most of my fellow educators spend more time criticizing Wikipedia than engaging with it. The conversation tends to go round in a fairly tiresome circle: The first educator points to an article on the subject of his/her expertise and points to a glaring error to demonstrate that the whole enterprise is worthless. The interlocutor responds...
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Free Speech
Social Media Plays Major Role in Motivating Malaysian Protesters
More than a week after Malaysian police fired teargas and water cannons at thousands of demonstrators seeking reform of the country's electoral system, a Facebook petition calling on Prime Minister Najib Razak to quit has drawn over 200,000 backers, highlighting the role of social and new media in Malaysia's restrictive free speech environment. One contributor to the page wrote: "The...
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Mediatwits
Mediatwits #13: Smartphone Ownership Booms; This Week in Rupert
Welcome to the 13th episode of "The Mediatwits," the weekly audio podcast from MediaShift. The co-hosts are MediaShift's Mark Glaser and Rafat Ali, the founder of PaidContent. This week's show looks at a recent survey by Pew Internet that found that 35 percent of Americans now have smartphones, and that ownership is even higher among people of color. Guest...
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World View
Social Media and Satire Fuel Arab Spring in Tunisia, Egypt
Political satire is, historically, a great propeller of social movements. As Srdja Popovic, a leader of Optor, the Serbian resistance movement, said: Everything we did [had] a dosage of humor. Because I'm joking. You're becoming angry. You're always showing only one face. And I'm always again with another joke, with another action, with another positive message to the wider audience....
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Your Take
Who Is Ultimately Responsible for the U.K. Phone-Hacking Scandal?
The revelations coming out by the hour in the U.K. phone-hacking scandal are breathtaking. What began as supposedly a rogue operation by a gossip reporter and a private investigator have now allegedly widened to include many more editors, reporters, investigators, bribes to police and the shutdown of the best-selling newspaper in the English language -- the News of the World....
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Europe
UK Phone-Hacking Scandal Shows Clash of Privacy with Need to Know
British journalism has just undergone one of the most radical weeks in several decades. "Rocked," "chaos," "shocking" -- use whatever adjectives you like, but news this week that the News of the World (NOTW) tabloid hacked into the phones of child murder victims, families of London's July 7, 2005 terror attacks, and parents of soldiers killed in action has turned...
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Culture
5 Guidelines for Community Managers to Have Cross-Cultural Fluency
While the behavior of connecting is nothing new, doing it in a virtual environment gives rise to new and sophisticated challenges -- especially when you're connecting across cultures. Knowing how to navigate these challenges is essential to community management. When I first discovered the Internet in 1996, I instantly fell in love. I was a bicultural, New York native who was...
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Global View
News Media Face Challenges in Post-Saddam Iraq
The U.S. government pumped an estimated half a billion dollars into revitalizing Iraq's news media after Saddam Hussein was ousted in 2003. It was the first time in three decades that Iraqi citizens had access to a free press, but the current state of news media in the multiparty republic is not what some had hoped for, according to a...
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Public MediaShift
FCC Report on Media Offers Strong Diagnosis, Weak Prescriptions
A consensus has begun to emerge around the Federal Communications Commission report, "The Information Needs of Communities," released Thursday: The diagnosis is sound, but the remedies are lacking. The 465-page report (see full report, embedded below) is the result of 600-plus interviews, hearings and reams of research conducted over 18 months. It represents the most ambitious attempt yet to come...
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Social Networking
How the Egyptian Revolution Inspired Protests in Spain
Shortly after I moved to Madrid after visiting Cairo, an Egyptian friend tweeted solidarity with the hashtag #SpanishRevolution. A revolution? In Spain? Was this his attempt to make my new home seem more exciting? The link he posted led to video of a packed Puerta del Sol -- a square in the center of Madrid. And so, someone 2,000 miles...
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Social Networking
Weiner Scandal Lesson: Sexting More Trackable Than Real-Life Flirting
My first internship was covering state politics. College parties were nothing compared to the drinking, carousing and eye-opening public behavior I saw during the legislative session. It was the 1970s -- a mere decade after the "Mad Men" '60s. Each week brought a new jaw-dropper, such as when a legislator told me he'd be happy to discuss a bill he...
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Free Speech
eG8 Fails to Protect Net Neutrality, Online Censorship
The eG8 conference held in Paris on May 24 and 25 sounded promising; it was the first event to gather G8 members (France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada and Russia) to discuss views on "civilizing cyberspace." It was also the first forum to talk about the digital economy. At least, that's how it was introduced....
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World View
Despite Blocked Sites, Digital Media to Play Major Role in Opening China
The Chinese masses never experience major Western websites, thanks to China's Great Firewall (along with linguistic and economic barriers). So the Chinese pass their online lives in a parallel universe in which troublesome terms such as "June 4" (anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests) or "Falun Gong" (the banned movement) are filtered out. But the Chinese government also recognizes...
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Europe
In Lithuania, an Overdue Crackdown on Online Hate Speech
Online hate speech is becoming more and more widespread in Lithuania and until recently, comments like, "The world needs Hitler again to do the cleansing job," which was posted on a website called Delfi, or "Expel dirty Roma people out of Lithuania" would have gone unheeded by criminal justice. "Although the Lithuanian Criminal Codex includes sufficient law provisions to prosecute...
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Social Media
BBC Social Media Summit: Crowdsourcing a Research Agenda
The BBC College of Journalism is staging a Social Media Summit (hashtag #BBCSMS) in London this week, which will bring together industry leaders, practitioners and academics from around the world, with a view to collaboratively mapping the future of social journalism. Social media is having a transformative impact on professional journalism. And the speed of the real-time revolution raises significant...
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World View
3 Non-Profits Train Foreign Journalists to Boost Global Coverage
About seven years ago, Global Press Institute founder Cristi Hegranes was working as a foreign correspondent in Nepal. During a visit to a village in the Eastern part of the country, Hegranes offered a pen and notebook to the matriarch of the village, and asked her to write down her own story. "What she came up with was a really...
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NewspaperShift
No Gloom Here: In Latin America, Newspapers Boom
If you spend much time in U.S. newsrooms these days, you might contract a serious case of gloom and doom. Talk is still focused on declining circulations, aging readerships, and the absence of new business models to pay for the production of quality content. But it would be a mistake to assume that this is the case for the rest...
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PoliticalShift
Burmese Media Launch Campaign to Free Jailed Reporters
Hla Hla Win, Sithu Zeya, Maung Maung Zeya, Ngwe Soe Lin and Win Maw are all undercover reporters in Burma, and all are serving jail sentences ranging from eight to 27 years after being caught in one of the world's most draconian media dragnets. To coincide with World Press Freedom Day last week on May 3, Democratic Voice of Burma...
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EducationShift
NextGen Journal Gives College Students' Spin on Global Events
Connor Toohill is attempting to break the college bubble. Last fall, with the help of friends, Toohill launched NextGen Journal, a student-run news and commentary site, writ large. Its roughly 90 contributors are currently enrolled at colleges and universities across the U.S. and Canada. In terms of sheer geography, Toohill has arguably filled college media's biggest niche. At the moment,...
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Free Speech
Is Non-Profit Journalism A Safeguard for Press Freedom?
WASHINGTON, DC -- Since May 3, 1991, World Press Freedom Day has been celebrated worldwide annually to raise awareness of the importance of freedom of the press and remind governments of their duty to respect it. Marking the 20th anniversary last Tuesday, an international conference was organized in Washington, DC, by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization...
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Social Networking
A Twitter Timeline on the Killing of Osama Bin Laden
[View the story "Timeline of Tweets Around Death of Osama Bin Laden" on Storify] Did you see any other key tweets around the news of Bin Laden's killing? Share them in the comments below and I'll add them to the timeline above. Mark Glaser is executive editor of MediaShift and Idea Lab. He also writes the bi-weekly OPA Intelligence Report...
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Social Networking
Canadians Prefer to Get News from Friends (not Editors) on Social Media
Journalists today are expected to be active on social media, sharing observations, anecdotes and links with their audience. Facebook itself is reaching out to newsrooms, recently launching the Journalists on Facebook page as a resource for the media. But a study from Canada suggests more people prefer to get their news via their friends and acquaintances on social media, than...
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PoliticalShift
European Council Changes Course on 'Tweetwall' After Berlusconi Insults
The social network platform Twitter broke the one billion tweets barrier as it celebrated its fifth anniversary in March of this year. Since October of 2010, the European Council and its President Herman Van Rompuy have contributed to this record result. Twitter gives politicians a chance to better connect with their voters. Political institutions have also recognized the value of...
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World View
China Makes Global Media Push, But Skeptics Abound
In the U.S. House Committee on Foreign Affairs in early March of this year, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton admitted that her country is losing the "information war," naming China's CCTV, along with Al Jazeera and Russia Today, as key rivals. "During the Cold War we did a great job in getting America's message out. After the Berlin Wall fell...
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Social Networking
Social Media's Role as a Crucial Lifeline During Japan Disaster
This is the story of seven people connected by the Great Tohoku Kanto Earthquake that rocked northern Japan in March and their need to obtain immediate and accurate information. Mass confusion combined with their desire to reach loved ones compelled them to turn to social media as a lifeline. Through networked, digital technologies, they created new ways to supplement lifelines...
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Free Speech
Bloggers, Media Students Push for Free Speech in Cambodia
PHNOM PENH, CAMBODIA -- A blog criticizing Prime Minister Hun Sen and his Cambodian People's Party (CPP) has been at the center of a recent controversy in Cambodia, shedding light on a deteriorating environment for freedom of expression in the Southeast Asian country. World Food Programme (WFP) employee Seng Kunnaka received a six month sentence for handing out copies of...
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PoliticalShift
How Social Media is Being Used in the Scottish Elections
Since Barack Obama successfully tapped into social media during his run to the White House in 2008, every political group has tried to use the digital world to bring in revenue and votes. This year's Scottish Parliament elections, which take place on May 5, will be the first in that country since Facebook and Twitter came to dominate the social...
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Europe
Romanian Magazine Uses Facebook for 'Crowd-Publishing' Success
It all started over a beer. One evening in April 2009, Cristian Lupşa and four other young journalists were chatting in a pub in Bucharest, Romania about the low quality of the country's print media. They should start their own magazine, someone joked. They could call it Decât o Revistă, which in slightly broken Romanian means "just a magazine." It...
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Public MediaShift
Defunding Public Media Would Stifle Digital Innovation
Political analysts are dismissing last Thursday's House vote forbidding public radio stations to spend federal dollars on content (HR 1076) as little more than red meat for the Republican base. But even if not a single dollar ends up being stripped from public broadcasting appropriations, the current battle threatens to strangle innovation in a sector that was just gaining new...
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World View
How Social Media, Internet Changed Experience of Japan Disaster
The reports and pictures of the devastation from the earthquake and tsunami in Japan last week reminded me of reporting on the earthquake that leveled Japan's port city of Kobe in 1995. On a personal level, I am praying for the people in a country I have come to see as a second home. As a media observer, what struck me...
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Technology
How French Site OWNI Profits by Giving Away Its Content
Most content sites in the U.S. have two ways of making money: charging for subscriptions or running advertising (or both). But a French site, OWNI.fr, has found an unusual business model for a site with no ads and no subscriptions -- that's also profitable. How do they do it? Their main business is doing web development and apps for media companies and institutions.
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Social Networking
How Tuenti Held Off Facebook in Spain with Better Privacy
JEREZ DE LOS CABALLEROS, SPAIN -- When I first got to Spain, my Spanish students immediately asked me if I was on Tuenti. Like most Americans, I had never heard of it. Once I learned that it was another social network, I figured I didn't need it. First of all, I had a Facebook page, and secondly, I was wary...
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World View
How Technology, Social Media Is Making Life Hard for Dictators
This is the third of our on-the-ground reports from Cairo, Egypt, from Jaron Gilinsky. In this video report, Jaron considers the effects of social media on the Egyptian revolution. I wondered how Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak eventually knew about the hundreds of thousands of people in the streets calling for his resignation. Surely, he had many agents on the streets...
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World View
One Journalist's Survival Guide to the Egyptian Revolution
During the uprising that eventually ended the 30-year reign of President Hosni Mubarak, I became convinced that the most important journalistic work being done today is in those countries where journalists are not wanted. Mubarak and his agents were determined to silence the protesters and their message. But, thanks to the valiant efforts of journalists and the resilience of the...
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EducationShift
UPIU Mentors, Publishes Student Journalists Around the Globe
Suleiman Abdullahi was recently an eyewitness to the birth of the world's newest nation.
In early January, the 20-year-old Kenyan journalism student flew to Juba, Sudan to cover the massive referendum responsible for the creation and upcoming independence of South Sudan. As Abdullahi wrote, he arrived in the prospective nation's capital city with a travel visa, a press pass, a story budget, and a 48-hour window to interview, observe, and report upon "the history that was about to be made."
By the end of his first day, he was under arrest.
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World View
Egyptian 'Sandmonkey' Blogger Unmasks Himself in Cairo
CAIRO, EGYPT -- I have been following the Egyptian pro-democracy blog, Rantings of a Sandmonkey, for years now. I have long wondered about the identity of its author, who describes himself as "a micro-celebrity, blogger, activist, new media douchebag, pain in the ass!" on his blog. I contacted him several times on previous trips to Egypt, requesting an interview, and...
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PoliticalShift
WSJ Series Inspires 'Do Not Track' Bill from Rep. Jackie Speier
We didn't plan it this way, but the timing was perfect. Rep. Jackie Speier (D-Calif.) introduced a bill today in Congress that would give the FTC the power to create a "Do Not Track" database so people could opt out of online tracking. And her bill comes right during our special series about online privacy, which included a roundtable...
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5Across
5Across: Online Privacy and the 'Do Not Track' Debate
The debate around online privacy has largely centered around advertising that is targeted at people depending on where they have been online. While somewhat creepy, those ads are perhaps the least of our worries. What many of us don't realize is that there are multiple parties tracking our moves online, some harmless and some possibly nefarious. In fact, one...
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Media Usage
Special Series: Online Privacy
"All the world's a stage," and even moreso with the rise of the Internet, online advertising and social networking. While there is no American "right to privacy" in the Constitution, there are limits to what we want companies, publishers and advertisers to do with our personal information. Do we want advertisers to serve ads based on our web surfing habits?...
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Legal Drama
Will U.S. Government Crack the Whip on Online Privacy?
This week MediaShift will be running an in-depth special report on Online Privacy, including a timeline of Facebook privacy issues, a look at how political campaigns retain data, and a 5Across video discussion. Stay tuned all week for more stories on privacy issues. Online privacy is the new openness. After years of telling all on the Internet, of tweeting about...
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World View
Social Media Alone Do Not Instigate Revolutions
This post was also written by Sean Noonan for STRATFOR. Internet services were reportedly restored in Egypt yesterday after being completely shut down for two days. Egyptian authorities unplugged the last Internet service provider (ISP) still operating Jan. 31 amidst ongoing protests across the country. The other four providers in Egypt -- Link Egypt, Vodafone/Raya, Telecom Egypt and Etisalat Misr...
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World View
Social Media, Facebook Help People Stand Up in Tunisia, Egypt
Even though they're far away from the center of the action in Cairo, Chinese web users felt the impact of the current demonstrations and political change afoot in Egypt. Chinese users searching for "Egypt" on Weibo, the Chinese version of Twitter, came up empty, and 467 sites were reported inaccessible after a call for a "march of a million" was...
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Free Speech
The Yes Men's Bichlbaum Discusses Ethics of WikiLeaks
In my first post on MediaShift, I laid out how the digital media revolution was compelling organizations to become more transparent in their communication with the public. While vigorous in my promotion of radical transparency, I acknowledged "practical limits," such as the revelation of competitive secrets or legally sensitive information. In the two years since that post, I continued to...
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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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Free Speech
News Organizations Should Stop Being Neutral on Net Neutrality
Many news organizations have a love-hate relationship with the Internet. While the abundance of free, online news has helped wreak havoc on the industry, the Internet itself has created incredible possibilities for news outlets to expand their reach and spark innovation. Thanks to the Internet, audiences can contribute to reporting and news in ways that would have been unimaginable a...
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Your Take
What Role Did Social Media Play in Tunisia, Egypt Protests?
As the protests are playing out in the streets of Cairo and the rest of Egypt today, I have been glued to the live-stream of Al Jazeera English as well as the Twitter hashtag #Jan25, a top trending topic based on the big protests a few days ago. The Egyptian protests come on the heels of a similar revolution in...
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World View
Citizen Media Brings Opposing Political Views to the Maghreb
The Maghreb is generally a term used to refer to five countries in North Africa: Algeria, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco, and Tunisia. This article explores the current state of the media in the region, and marks the effect that a burgeoning citizen media sphere is having on democracy. It is based on a contribution by the author, Algerian journalist Laid Zaghlami...
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World View
Will Freedom of Expression Hold in Southern Sudan?
JUBA, SUDAN -- "If someone from southern Sudan trusts you, they will tell you enough to write a book," said Cecilia Sierra Salcido, a Mexican missionary nun turned media entrepreneur who runs Radio Bakhita in Sudan. "We broadcast a special history series, as so much here has not been written or recorded, and so many people have stories to tell."...
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EducationShift
Aussie Academic Journal to Publish Peer-Reviewed Journalism
An Australian journalism professor has started an online academic journal with a twist: It publishes journalism, rather than just studies of journalists and their work. The fledgling journal -- believed to be the first of its kind in the world -- is called Research Journalism and it's the initiative of Edith Cowan University journalism lecturer Dr. Kayt Davies.
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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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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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World View
Vietnam Fighting a Losing Battle Against Free Speech Online
Last October, I had the opportunity to spend almost three weeks traveling through Vietnam, from Ha Long Bay to the Mekong Delta. The breakfast rooms I dined in were always stocked with copies of the government-run English-language daily, the Viet Nam News -- and on its sunny front page, the news is always good. One typical issue heralded plans from...
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Legal Drama
Top 3 New Media Legal Battles of 2010
This year's been a big one. Spain won the World Cup. Lindsay Lohan went to jail. Don Draper married his secretary. And, of course, the federal courts waded into some of the thorniest legal issues affecting new media. Three cases stand out from the rest of 2010's docket. Each one shook up the law in a significant way. Below...
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Free Speech
Online Censorship Grows in 2010, Showing Power of Netizens
Despite some good PR for online freedom this year, online censorship grew and became more subtle in 2010. Online propaganda remains strong within countries like China and Iran, where media censorship is everywhere and the governments have mastered online censorship tools. These countries are as efficient as hacktivists when it comes to controlling information. China and Vietnam remain among...
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Social Networking
Vietnam Pushes Facebook Clone to Control Online Speech
HANOI, VIETNAM - Inside one of Hanoi's more than 3,000 online gaming houses, gamers clad in coats and scarves pass the hours shooting at each other on their screens, oblivious to the wintry gray and 10 celsius evening outside. This is southeast Asia, but the French colonial architecture and the proliferation of tourist-market socialist kitsch -- all covered by a wet blanket autumn gloom -- give the place a slightly European feel.
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Public MediaShift
Brazilian Public Media Faces Tough Digital Transition
Belém, BRAZIL -- At the mouth of the Amazon river, vendors at the Ver-o-Peso market display the region's fruits, fish and crafts on splintered tables and rusting carts. They hail prospective buyers who pass by their closely packed stalls. Just a block over, behind the security gate of the Estação das Docas, a collection of renovated waterfront warehouses, eco-tourists stroll...
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Europe
Brussels Leaks Tries to Build on WikiLeaks Idea in EU
A new site, Brussels Leaks, modeled after WikiLeaks, launched out of the blue last Thursday to much excitement in the European capital and the Twittersphere. This follows the announcement of OpenLeaks, a spin-off from WikiLeaks from former workers there. But Brussels Leaks doesn't plan to run the documents that are leaked to it, but rather rely on the media to...
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Ethics
WikiLeaks and the Power of Patriotism
A narrow patriotism -- the psychological equivalent of a knee jerk -- is an under-recognized force in modern journalism ethics. It distorts our thinking about the role of journalism as soon as journalists offend national pride and whistleblowers dare to reveal secrets. Narrow patriotism turns practitioners of a free press into scolding censors. Suddenly, independent journalists become dastardly law breakers....
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Free Speech
Online Freedom of Expression Under Siege in Thailand
BANGKOK, THAILAND -- "Today I have to go all the way to Khon Kaen to report to the police," said Chiranuch Premchaipoen, the editor of Thailand's well-known online news site Prachatai during a recent conversation in Bangkok. The town is 450 km from Bangkok, and Chiranuch has to travel there once a month just to check in with police. This...
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Social Media
How Calgary's Mayor Used Social Media to Get Elected
Naheed Nenshi became mayor of Calgary at the end of October not by outspending his rivals or hailing from the incumbent political class in Canada. Nenshi didn't plaster his campaign message across the television, and he didn't even buy a single newspaper advertisement. Instead, Nenshi led a grassroots effort that mobilized soccer moms and utilized online activism on a Facebook page, on Twitter and on YouTube.
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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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4MR
4 Minute Roundup: WikiLeaks Under Attack, Dropped by Amazon
In this week's 4MR podcast, I talk about the recent release of secret diplomatic cables by WikiLeaks, and how it is viewed by governments, journalists and free speech advocates. WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is wanted in Sweden for possible sex crimes, Amazon dropped hosting the documents, and the site has had trouble staying online due to hacker attacks. I spoke with NYU professor Jay Rosen about his views on WikiLeaks, the networked nature of information sharing, and the potential for local WikiLeaks.
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Free Speech
Suu Kyi Set Free But Media Still Held Captive in Burma
Burma has in recent weeks been one of the top world news stories. The country's November 7 general election was followed less than a week later by the release of Aung San Suu Kyi, one of the world's best-known political dissidents, whose appearance at her front gate on Saturday, November 13, was carried on news networks around the world. However,...
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PoliticalShift
Fundly + Facebook = Millions in Micro-Donations for Campaigns
Political campaigns and non-profits must constantly "feed the beast" with their fundraising efforts. While traditionally that chore has meant going after people with the most money, the Internet has helped spawn networked fundraising and even "social fundraising" efforts where micro-donations add up to a lot more. According to the Campaign Finance Institute, 53% of the $750 million Barack Obama raised...
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World View
Burma Elections Include Throttled Net, Blocked News Sites
Japanese journalist Toru Yamaji, the head of the Tokyo-based news agency APF, was arrested over the weekend in the eastern border town of Myawaddy, Burma, after reportedly entering from Thailand. He was taken by helicopter to the Burmese capital, Naypyitaw, for questioning by military intelligence. Yamaji was attempting to report on the ongoing elections in Burma, despite the restrictions put...
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Public MediaShift
Inside the NewsHour's Multi-Platform Election Night Bedlam
Elections test how much information a news organization can process and then quickly and accurately share it with an audience. They're also a good time for news organizations to take stock of how far they've come since the last one, and to try the latest journalistic tools (or gimmicks). Four years ago, YouTube was nascent and Facebook had finally opened...
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PoliticalShift
5 Moments When Digital Media Transformed Australian Politics
The Digital Age has seen significant change in the way Australian politicians, political journalists and the public interact and communicate with each other. As a result, MediaShift asked me to identify the top five events in Australia's recent history where politics and new media intersected. My shortlist, compiled with crowdsourcing assistance from my politically engaged Twitter and Facebook communities,...
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World View
Canadian Murder Trial a Crucible for Real-Time Coverage
Late last month in a Canadian courtroom, Russell Williams, a former high-ranking colonel in the Canadian military, pleaded guilty to the murders of two young women as well as 86 counts of break and enter, sexual assault and other crimes. His sentencing hearing was widely covered by major Canadian media. Here, Canadian online journalism professor Robert Washburn explains how journalists...
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PoliticalShift
Live 2010 Election Day Chat on Social Media + Politics
I will be joined by an all-star lineup of new media experts, comedians, and social media gurus to look at how online coverage of Election Day is going -- with pointers to the most innovative mashups, maps, video blogs and more. The plan is to chat today from 10 am to 1 pm Pacific Time, and then again from...
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4MR
4 Minute Roundup: Sunlight Foundation Tracks Money in Politics
In this week's 4MR podcast I talk with Sunlight Foundation's Ellen Miller about their efforts to track down the biggest donors in this year's election races. On Election Night, they will run their Sunlight Live platform that will give details on who has donated to whom as live video shows the winners and losers. Miller also talks about Sunlight's recent $1.2 million grant from the Knight Foundation.
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5Across
5Across: Politics in the Age of Social Media
5Across is sponsored by Carnegie-Knight News21, an alliance of 12 journalism schools in which top students tell complex stories in inventive ways. See tips for spurring innovation and digital learning at Learn.News21.com. As more people use social media such as Twitter and Facebook, politicians and campaigns need to put more time, energy and money into reaching people there. According...
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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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PoliticalShift
Quirky Conservative Canadian MP Gets Real on Twitter
Tony Clement, the federal minister of industry in the current Conservative Canadian government, was home having dinner with his family one Saturday night in July when a woman began banging on their door. She frantically asked for help, saying her friend was drowning in the nearby river. Clement, his wife and father-in-law ran down to the water. He and...
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PoliticalShift
Will Geo-Location Services Play a Role in Elections?
The experiments that took place with Facebook and Twitter during the 2008 presidential campaign are now viewed as standard operating procedure just two years later. Will the same be said about location-based services come 2012? Foursquare and Gowalla are the current crowned kings of geo-location and have been getting regular mentions in the tech blogosphere and beyond. Geo-social is very...
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PoliticalShift
Special Series: PoliticalShift 2010
About this Series After the success we've had with previous in-depth reports -- the Beyond Content Farms series and Beyond J-School, we decided to do another series on MediaShift. This time the series will look at "PoliticalShift 2010," the way that social media, technology and blogs are changing the equation for politicians in the context of the 2010 U.S. midterm...
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PoliticalShift
GOP Beating Democrats with Social Media for Midterm Elections
There is a major shift going on in politics this election cycle, with more candidates and campaigns using social media and technology to boost their chances. From today until the U.S. midterm elections on Nov. 2, MediaShift presents an in-depth special report, PoliticalShift 2010, with data visualizations, analysis, a 5Across video roundtable and live CoverItLive chat on Election Night with...
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Legal Drama
Michigan Official's Hate Speech Protected by First Amendment
For the last few months, Andrew Shirvell, an assistant attorney general of Michigan, has crusaded against the "radical homosexual agenda" of 21-year-old Chris Armstrong, the openly gay student-body president of the University of Michigan. Shirvell has verbally attacked Armstrong at campus events, demonstrated outside the student's home, and has bashed the kid on his personal blog, Chris Armstrong Watch. On...
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Free Speech
2010 Press Freedom Index Shows Europe on Decline
Reporters Without Borders yesterday released its 2010 World Press Freedom Index. Thirteen of the EU's 27 members are in the top 20 in terms of press freedoms, but some of the other EU nations are very low. The European Union has had a reputation for valuing and respecting human rights, and new data suggests that reputation is at risk. "We...
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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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Free Speech
Will France Sacrifice Online Freedom for the Sake of Security?
On September 8, the French Senate voted for a bill, called Loppsi 2, that seeks to create a dangerous online filtering system that could jeopardize the work of journalists and bloggers, as well as online freedom of speech for French citizens. If this bill becomes law, any French website could be shut down with nothing more than a notification from...
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PoliticalShift
Hallmarks of Good Campaign Sites: Simplicity, Inspire Action
A political campaign website is the place where candidates recruit new volunteers, and where the candidate can get their message out unfiltered. It's more important than ever, and yet many candidates still struggle to get it right. "The website really is that first real encounter with the voter; it's your chance to turn a casual visitor into an actual supporter,"...
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MagazineShift
Activist Magazines Foster Debate Online, Strong Bonds in Print
Climate change. Immigration. Economic crisis. Consumerism. These are all major issues covered by the magazines Mother Jones and Orion, and both magazines have won awards for their high-quality journalism. At the same time, they are nonprofits with tight budgets and ongoing fundraising campaigns. Both magazines have found new energy through digital media, and have developed many opportunities to get their...
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EducationShift
Revamping J-Schools in Australia to Bring in 'Citizens Agenda'
As Australian democracy hangs in the balance, and with the outcome of the August 21 national election unlikely to be resolved for weeks, I'm considering the implications for journalism education -- and how we can invent new models for political reporting.
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Free Speech
Free Speech at Stake as India Demands Encrypted BlackBerry Data
Next week will be decisive for BlackBerry corporate users. BlackBerry maker Research In Motion (RIM) could provide a solution to help security agencies in India access corporate email by obtaining encrypted data in readable formats. If RIM does not offer a solution before the end of the month, India has warned that it will block BlackBerry Messenger service in the...
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Environment
Smartphone, HDTV Boom Begets Gargantuan E-Waste Problem
The digital media revolution promises to improve the quality of our lives though an expanded capacity to communicate, collaborate, learn and make informed decisions. Yet our seemingly insatiable demand for digital media is driving a proliferation of consumer electronic devices and IT infrastructure, which are significantly contributing to a tsunami of toxic electronic waste. This week U.S. Environmental Protection Agency...
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PoliticalShift
3 Hot Topics at Supernova: Public Policy, Social Media, Privacy
Supernova, an annual technology conference, recently convened for the first time on the East Coast, a change that was evident in the composition of the conference attendees and the direction of the overall conversation. Below are the top three major takeaways from the conference. Policy matters Harold Feld, legal director of Public Knowledge, earned a place as crowd favorite during...
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Free Speech
Saudi Blogger/Activist Jailed for 'Annoying Others'
Although Saudi Arabia was one of the first countries to have been authorized to register domain names in Arabic, it is still one of the most repressive countries when it comes to the Internet. For example, since 2009 Internet cafes in the country have been required to install hidden cameras, supply a list of customers and websites accesses, not permit...
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4MR
4 Minute Roundup: Politicians Don't Want Wikileaks Protected
In this week's 4MR podcast I look at the recent move by U.S. senators to amend a Federal journalist shield bill to exclude Wikileaks. Many lawmakers are angry at the whistle-blower site for sharing thousands of classified documents about the Afghan war. But what does this mean for a possible shield law, which already passed the House and a Senate committee?
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EducationShift
Journalism Education 2.0: Training in an Age of Radical Change
Education content on MediaShift is sponsored by Carnegie-Knight News21, an alliance of 12 journalism schools in which top students tell complex stories in inventive ways. See tips for spurring innovation and digital learning at Learn.News21.com. "We are not going to make it with uninspired and uninspiring teachers!" Archbishop Desmond Tutu challenged delegates in his closing address to the second...
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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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EducationShift
Learning From Failure in Community-Building at Missouri
I recently had an opportunity that is rarely handed to a journalism school professor: The chance to be a member of the inaugural class of the Reynolds Journalism Institute Fellows in the 2008-09 school year. I already have a unique job.
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Free Speech
WikiLeaks, iPhone Incidents Show that U.S. Needs Shield Law
The United States' global reputation as a champion of free speech is at stake. This is partly because the legal framework has not kept pace with the evolution of free speech, and also because the Freedom of Information Act is not being applied correctly. Today, the U.S. is in danger of losing its place as the bastion of free speech...
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EducationShift
Free Online Journalism Classes Begin To Gain Ground
The CEO of Creative Commons, Joi Ito, is currently teaching a free online journalism class through Peer 2 Peer University, an online community of "open study groups for short university-level courses." The online class syncs with a graduate-level class Ito teaches at Keio University in Japan, and features a UStream presentation and IRC chat once a week.
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Free Speech
Crisis in Kyrgyzstan Shows Need for 'Responsible Content'
Back in 1996, my Columbia University colleague Jack Snyder and his co-author, Karen Ballentine, published a ground-breaking article called Nationalism and the Marketplace of Ideas. The essay used Serbian broadcasting and Rwandan radio to illustrate how hyper-nationalist media could be used to incite political violence. Today's online media have the potential to be used in a similar fashion -- and...
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EducationShift
Is Aussie Journalism Education Lagging in Teaching Online Skills?
I graduated last year with a journalism degree from Curtin University of Technology in Bentley, Western Australia. As with many journalism programs, the first year was an introduction to print and broadcast. It wasn't until the latter half of second year that the word "online" was used. That's too late in my book.
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World View
Crisis in Thailand Leads to Net Crackdown, Censorship
At least 80 people were killed during the latest clashes in Thailand. But the confusion and danger that are present in various parts of Bangkok do not explain why several Thai and foreign journalists have been shot since April. Two are dead. The tense political situation also doesn't justify the leadership's blocking of more than 4,000 anti-monarchy websites. As we...
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Environment
The Mediavore's Dilemma: Making Sustainable Media Choices
The media business is becoming a complex game. A major study recently conducted by the Knight Commission concluded that the Internet and the proliferation of mobile media have unleashed a tsunami of innovation in the creation and distribution of information, a torrent teeming with hundreds of thousands of media channels and millions of media product choices. We also live in...
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PoliticalShift
Politicians Face Consequences If They Don't Secure Name Domains
Search the name of Representative Pete Hoekstra of Michigan's second district and PeteHoekstra.com is among the top results. But click on the site and you'll encounter this tag line: "Dangerous, Polarizing & Bad for Michigan!" How could a nine-term Congressman, a ranking member of the House Select Committee on Intelligence and now a candidate for the gubernatorial race in Michigan...
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PoliticalShift
Aussie #Spill Breaks Down Wall Between Journalists, Audience
The spectacular demise of the Australian conservative party's leadership in November 2009 was a turning point for political journalism in the country. This is the third and final installment in a special MediaShift series (read part one here and part two here) about the transformative impact of the biggest Australian political story of 2009, which became known simply by its...
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World View
CNN's Zakaria Fails to Include Pakistani Viewpoint on GPS
An Open Letter to Fareed Zakaria Dear Mr. Zakaria, My name is Amra Tareen. I'm the founder and CEO of San Francisco-based global citizen news site Allvoices.com. I am a former venture capitalist, an Ivy League-educated electrical engineer, mother of two boys and a Pakistani-born U.S. citizen. I'm writing to provide the Pakistani voice you neglected to include in your...
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PoliticalShift
U.K. Conservatives Pushed Online Promotion -- But TV Reigns
The new media evangelists who preached of a revolution in British electoral politics will have to wait until at least the next election to see their prophecies come to fruition. In this country steeped in electoral tradition, the impact of new and social media on the 2010 race was minimal. The British still consume high tea and scones, watch football...
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World View
College Media in Iraq Offers Independent Voice for Students
When Namo Kaftan was 9 years old, his father, a biomedical engineer, brought a laptop from work home to the family's residence in Sulaimani, Iraq. For Kaftan, now 21, it was love at first boot-up. "I was really amazed to see a new advanced technology like that," he said. "I guess at that time nobody even knew what it was...
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4MR
4 Minute Roundup: FCC's 'Goldilocks' Approach to Regulating Net
Here's the latest 4MR audio report from MediaShift. In this week's edition I focus on the proposal by the FCC chairman Julius Genachowski to find a "third way" of regulating broadband providers. His "Goldilocks" approach tries to inforce fairness and Net neutrality rules, but not be too heavy-handed by avoiding setting prices for ISPs or forcing them to open up...
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Free Speech
China Tightens Media Control at Shanghai Expo
In honour of the Expo Shanghai China, the biggest display of Chinese might since the 2008 Olympic Games, Reporters Without Borders is inviting Internet users to visit a page on its website, the "Garden of Freedoms," that's dedicated to the freedoms that are often oppressed in China. Hundreds of countries, regions and corporations are participating in this exhibition, but none...
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Public MediaShift
Live-Blogging the FCC Workshop: New Platforms, Strategies for Public Media
This live-blog post is a continuation of the first post covering the FCC's Future of Media Workshop on public media. Panel Discussion III: New Platforms, Approaches and Structures Maxie Jackson III, President and CEO, National Federation of Community Broadcasters Says when he thinks of the future, he wants to stress "independence and impact," in the transition from public broadcasting to...
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World View
Hands-On with WePad Touchscreen Interface
BERLIN -- I threw a party here on April 17 in order to compare the Apple iPad tablet with the new WePad that's being produced by the Berlin-based company Neofonie. I found that the WePad had many things the iPad was lacking -- Flash support, a webcam, multi-tasking and more -- but at the time, the WePad I tried had...
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World View
Will 'Telecentros' Transform Cuba's Internet Access?
It wasn't your typical keynote address. Earlier this month, at an event held on the campus of Cornell University, a room of people gazed at a blank screen in rapt attention, listening to a woman speak over a weak cell phone connection originating in Cuba. The speaker was Cuba's 32-year-old star blogger, Yoani Sanchez. The event was the seventh annual...
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PoliticalShift
How #Spill Effect Brought Color, Collaboration to Media Tweets
Twitter distinguished itself as an important new platform for breaking political news in Australia during the Great #Spill of 2009. This is the second installment in a MediaShift series on the "#spill effect." (You can read the first part here.) It draws on a case study of the event and includes online interviews with eight tweeting journalists who are prominent...
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World View
Navigating Media Ethics and Censorship in Dubai
Around the world, dozens of organizations, from Freedom House to Reporters Without Borders, advance the ideal of a free press and a free citizenry. The ideal suggests there is one type of free press to be secured globally: the Western model of a constitutionally protected free press. What stands over and against the free press? The typical examples are the...
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PoliticalShift
How Technology Changed American Politics in the Internet Age
The 2008 U.S. presidential campaign drew the attention of the world. In the aftermath, the Obama campaign's use of Facebook, YouTube and Twitter were widely credited with helping secure the historic victory of President Barack Obama. But the Obama campaign wouldn't have been able to make its technological strides without the innovations first deployed by the Howard Dean campaign years...
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World View
Reporters Without Borders Issues 'Enemies of the Internet' List
On March 12, 2010, Reporters Without Borders celebrated World Day Against Cyber Censorship. The goal of the event was to rally everyone in support of a single Internet that is unrestricted and accessible to all. It is also meant to draw attention to the fact that, by creating new spaces for exchanging ideas and information, the Internet is a force...
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Environment
Is Digital Media Worse for the Environment Than Print?
Is it possible that digital media could be more destructive to the environment and a greater threat to trees, bees, rivers and forests than printing?"
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Public MediaShift
Witness Creates Sophisticated Evaluation Tools for Video Impact
Last month, Jessica Clark and I explored how various Public Media 2.0 projects are measuring their level of success in informing and engaging publics. We found that many public media organizations are struggling to measure impact -- and some are relying only on traditional indicators of reach, as opposed to other elements of impact such as relevance, inclusion, engagement or...
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World View
Turkish Reporters Unite to Protest YouTube Ban
The Turkish courts banned YouTube in May 2008, and now a new protest campaign launched by the editorial team of the Milliyet newspaper is drawing attention to how long the country has been prevented from using the website. The initiative, which was was launched on February 19, is not the first campaign of this type. But it's notable because previous...
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PoliticalShift
The #Spill Effect: Twitter Hashtag Upends Australian Political Journalism
Australia is gearing up for a national election in 2010 and a core group of influential political journalists in the elite Canberra Press Gallery are tweeting their way along the campaign trail -- and bringing an engaged public along for the ride. Press Gallery journalists are among the most active Australian reporters on Twitter, which entrenched itself Down Under as...
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PoliticalShift
How Mobile Apps Are Revolutionizing Elections, Transparency
The importance of social media in politics was made clear by Barack Obama's 2008 presidential run. But there is a new frontier of Web 2.0 technologies that politicians and political groups are slowly starting to embrace: the smartphone app. These apps have the potential to reshape how politicians communicate, raise money and get out the vote. The biggest player on...
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Citizen Journalism
True North Media House, W2 Provide Citizen Media Hub at Olympics
At the Winter Olympics, members of the press affiliated with official, IOC-designated media outlets have access to the Main Media Center and are given a special accreditation badge. The MMC provides workspace -- as well as massages and McDonald's -- for "the approximately 2,800 accredited members of the written and photographic press," according to organizers. That's been the case at...
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World View
Media Development Needs Unified Research for Digital Age
Not so long ago, some Western governments and private donors decided that investing in the media was a good way to support the development of democracy in other countries. Over the years, media development has become a vast enterprise, responsible for hundreds of millions of dollars of investment every year. The paradigm was straightforward enough: provide training, equipment, and management...
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Digging Deeper
Best Online Resources for Following 2010 Winter Olympics
Spoiler alert! Thanks to NBC's use of time delay in broadcasting the Olympics to the Western U.S., those who live their lives online during the day are bound to find out what happened long before it airs in prime-time. Anyone who doesn't want to know the results prior to airtime is going to have to avoid just about every website...
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Citizen Journalism
Citizen, Alternative Media Converge at Olympic Games in Vancouver
It has become second nature for people to capture experiences, events and news using their phones, cameras and computers. We live in a world were journalism is an action -- and citizens have stepped up to answer that call to action. As a result, the story of the 2010 Vancouver Olympic Games is by no means limited to the version...
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World View
NGOs Must Harness Social Media Beyond Disaster Relief
When the 7.0 magnitude earthquake struck Port-au-Prince, Haiti, Doctors Without Borders had 1,300 followers on Twitter. Now, it boasts over 13,000. The Red Cross follower count shot up by just over 40,000 people in the weeks following the quake. If technology wasn't already transforming the public role of the non-governmental organization, it has now brought many to a point of...
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Social Media
Inside the Social Media Strategy of the Winter Olympic Games
In 2006, Graeme Menzies and a few colleagues travelled to Turino, Italy to watch the 20th Winter Olympics. The group constituted part of what would become the communications team for the 2010 Vancouver Olympic Games, which kick off with opening ceremonies on Friday. Menzies is the director of online communications, publications and editorial services for the Vancouver Organizing Committee, also...
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World View
Bloggers Face Death Sentence in Iran; Some Escape to France
Iranian authorities are once agan cracking down on the Internet. Internet connection speeds were degraded in several cities in advance of the Islamic Revolution's 31st anniversary on February 2. This same tactic was previously used by the regime in advance of events likely to be used by the opposition to stage demonstrations. Several websites were also targeted by hackers, including...
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World View
GlobalPost Expands Partnerships, Struggles with Pay Service
A year ago, GlobalPost launched online with an ambitious mission to "redefine international news for the digital age...with a decidedly American voice." The idea was to hire freelance stringers around the world to report back to the U.S., and thereby fill the gap left by the closure of traditional media's foreign bureaus. While the site has forged important partnerships with...
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World View
Local Radio Keeps Haiti Earthquake Survivors Connected
In two weeks, Haiti will be forgotten by much of the world. After foreign media leave, which will happen soon, only Haitian reporters will remain in the country as witnesses and a source of information. As it stands today, they are struggling just to keep their fellow citizens informed, which is often the case in the aftermath of a natural disaster.
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5Across
5Across: Environmental Impact of Newspapers, Books, e-Waste
When I cancelled my daily newspaper subscription, I figured it was the right thing to do for the environment. No longer would someone have to print up all that newsprint and deliver it to my doorstep. But what I didn't consider was the environmental impact of all my electronic devices -- their energy use as well as the harm they can do when being "recycled" in developing countries.
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4MR
4 Minute Roundup: Text Donations to Haiti; Google.cn Uncensored
Here's the latest 4MR audio report from MediaShift. In this week's edition, I look at the way social media and text-to-donate has helped to transform charitable giving in Haiti after the earthquake. Plus, Google announced it would stop censoring its search site in China after having Gmail accounts of dissidents and free speech proponents hacked there. And I ask Just...
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Digging Deeper
Best Online Resources for Following Haiti News, Taking Action
In the face of devastating news happening far away, there is comfort in making a connection. And those connections often are made online among strangers who are sharing video, photos, stories or tweets about the devastation around them. Such is the case in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, a city that was devastated by an earthquake last Tuesday, with tens of thousands feared...
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PoliticalShift
Local Bloggers Step Up to Watchdog Local Government
Traditionally, newspaper reporters were dispatched to cover the mundane proceedings of a local government in action: the city council meeting. But as the mainstream media grapples with its survival in the Internet era, the seats in the audience once occupied by full-time reporters are sometimes being filled by local bloggers and other citizen media outfits. They're using blogs and social...
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World View
2009 Was a Terrible Year for Free Speech Online
2009 was an unprecedented year for online repression. For the first time since the Internet emerged as a tool for public use, there are currently 100 bloggers and cyber-dissidents imprisoned worldwide as a result of posting their opinions online in 2009, according to Reporters Without Borders. This figure is indicative of the severity of the crackdowns being carried out in...
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Citizen Journalism
Activist-Journalists Bring Citizen, Pro Media Together at COP15
COPENHAGEN, DENMARK -- This past Saturday, on a crisp afternoon in Copenhagen, Jacob Wheeler and Rick Fuentes, two journalists with the non-profit media start-up the UpTake, walked alongside a mostly peacefully stream of demonstrators.* Roughly half of the total police force in Denmark followed in step. Conspicuous among the crowd were the hundreds of ad hoc reporters with serious-looking digital...
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World View
Sri Lanka Makes Journalism an Act of Terrorism
As of December 10, J.S. Tissainayagam, a respected Tamil journalist and editor, had served the first 100 days of a 20-year sentence in a Sri Lankan jail. In his World Press Freedom Day statement, President Obama cited Tissainayagam as an "emblematic example" of a journalist who was being persecuted. Amnesty International also named Tissainayagam a prisoner of conscience, and...
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PoliticalShift
Can Posterous and Tumblr Boost Government Transparency?
If a present-day version of whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg was looking for a way to easily release important confidential information, he might find himself drawn to Posterous or its micro-blogging/lifestreaming competitor, Tumblr. These services have the potential to offer a new level of simplicity for releasing government information, and help open up the closed doors of Congress. Beyond becoming tools for...
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World View
Iran Cracks Down on Internet Expression, Bloggers, Journalists
Last week, the Iranian blogger Sasan Aghaei, who runs the site Azad Tribun, was arrested by intelligence ministry officials after they carried out a search of his Tehran home. It is not known where he was taken. Aghaei is also a reporter for the daily newspaper Farhikhteghan, and he's the third employee of the paper to be arrested since the...
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PoliticalShift
Best of Twitter: FTC Workshop Discusses Future of Journalism
For two days this week, some of journalism's most high profile executives and experts descended upon Washington, DC, for "How Will Journalism Survive the Internet Age?" a workshop hosted by the FTC. One exchange of note came between Rupert Murdoch and Arianna Huffington, who spoke separately but did a good job of representing two divergent points of view. Murdoch kicked...
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Public MediaShift
FTC Should Consider Policy Reform to Support Public Media 2.0
It's been a busy season for prognosticators who examine the intersection of public policy and media. Today will be particularly hectic for them, as journalists, bloggers, public broadcasters and policy wonks pack into a session at the Federal Trade Commission to ponder, yet again, "How Will Journalism Survive the Internet Age?" (Submit your own thoughts via Twitter here). Two weeks...
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PoliticalShift
Young Political Candidates Confronted by Digital Past on Facebook
Last spring Emanuel Pleitez, 26, ran for California's 32nd Congressional seat in a special election to replace Hilda Solis, the new secretary of labor. During the campaign, one of Pleitez's opponents, California State Sen. Gil Cedillo, discovered photos from Pleitez's Facebook profile that showed Pleitez hanging around with various women at parties. The Cedillo campaign used the photos as the...
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World View
President Obama Must Press China on Web Censorship
In China, Google is forced to censor its search engine, Facebook and Twitter are blocked, U.S. news agencies are barred from selling their services freely, and foreign investment in the media industry is closely watched. Yet when President Obama visits the country in a few days, it's unknown if he will publicly pressure the Chinese government on issues of censorship...
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World View
Hossein Derakhshan's Arrest: One Year Later
It's been over a year now since the arrest of Hossein Derakhshan, popularly known as Hoder. Ever since he wrote the first Persian-language blogging guide in November 2001, he has helped pioneer the Iranian blogging community while living in his adopted home of Toronto. (Derakhshan is a dual citizen of Iran and Canada.) However, beginning in 2006, Derakhshan's views started...
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PoliticalShift
10 Projects that Help Citizens Become Government Watchdogs
With the 2010 U.S. elections coming into view, many people are looking for more information about the people running for office -- and the individuals and organizations funding these candidates. Fortunately, there are dozens of initiatives that mine and share the data that influence policy and policy-makers. Many are funded by The Sunlight Foundation, which aims to use "the revolutionary...
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PoliticalShift
Politicians Use Social Media to Bypass the Press Corps
Politicians are figuring out what social media technologies like blogs, Facebook, MySpace and Twitter have to offer: direct access to voters. More than ever before, they can bypass the professional press and deliver an uncensored, unfiltered -- and unchecked -- message. "[Social media] allows me to gives my thoughts on the events of the day and the complete text of...
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Legal Drama
Why the Future of Online Speech Depends on Net Neutrality
Late last week, the Federal Communications Commission announced it was seeking public input on draft rules that would codify and supplement existing Internet openness principles. This was another chapter in the ongoing "Net neutrality" debate. On one hand, the White House was calling for a "free and open Internet" and endorsed a bill called the Internet Freedom Preservation Act. Yet,...
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Media Usage
Kicking Ink: The Guilty Pleasures of Print
On a recent trip to Washington, D.C. for "Public Media Camp," it happened again. I was tempted by print. Starting in May, I gave up my print newspaper subscription, and then compared how the iPhone beat the Kindle when it comes to reading periodical publications on electronic devices. My fingers have remained relatively ink-free each day because I get my...
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Online Forums
7 Keys to Hosting Successful Chats With High-Profile People
In recent weeks we at De Tijd, a Belgian newspaper, have been experimenting with chat sessions where members of the Belgian government are brought in to discuss politics with our community. I'm very enthusiastic about this because I feel that our newspaper has enabled its community to have a direct, high-quality conversation with policy makers. I reported in a previous...
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World View
How Webcasting Helps Exclusive Conferences Be More Inclusive
For four days last month, Bill Clinton convened an elite group of heads of state, business leaders and celebrity activists for the annual meeting of his Clinton Global Initiative (CGI). Each year CGI picks a theme, and the focus of this year's gathering was the empowerment of women and girls in developing countries. The impact of the gathering was considerable,...
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World View
Online Reporters in Malaysia Struggle Against Jail, Fines and Filters
Malaysia ranked No. 132 out of 173 countries on last year's edition of Reporters Without Borders' World Press Freedom Index, which means it's already a hostile place for reporters. Thanks to recent initiatives aimed at controlling the flow of online information, the country appears ready to tighten its grip on the Internet, too. But bloggers and web journalists continue to...
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PoliticalShift
Local Politicians Use Social Media to Connect with Voters
When television cameras panned across the room full of senators and representatives during the recent presidential address to a joint session of Congress, the audience at home caught a glimpse of several political leaders tweeting away on their BlackBerry phones. At the national level, social media has been embraced by many politicians. Even the White House has a Twitter account...
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World View
Environmental Reporting Becomes Hazardous Work in Egypt, China
Since May 2009, Tamer Mabrouk has held one of the saddest records regarding human rights abuses in Egypt. He is the first blogger to receive a fine after a company sued him for having criticized its activities in Lake Manzala, which is connected to the Suez Canal. Mabrouk was fined $8,700, lost his job, and was forced to move out...
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PoliticalShift
How the Shift to an Online, On-Demand World of Content Could Impact Political Discourse
Television is still the dominant place for people to get their daily dose of political content. Surprising? No, it's been that way since the late 1990s. But while more than 70 percent of adults in the United States get their political news from television, the growing importance of the Internet on American politics is undeniable. The Pew Internet and American...
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PoliticalShift
How U.S. Departments of Defense and State Differ in Social Media Approach
The Defense Department's new head of public affairs says there is no more powerful communication tool in reaching supporters and critics alike then with a personally delivered message. What's the suggestion? Social media technologies like Facebook, MySpace and Twitter must be thoroughly engaged by civilian and military personnel at DoD in a new era of personal communication. That's what Price...
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World View
Century-Old Groundwork Fuels Internet Interest in Iran Today
A couple of years ago, while browsing in a Philadelphia bookstore, I found a small red hardback book. Its worn woven cover was used, but in decent condition. The side of the book, in a matching faded red background, had a small vaguely Islamic curved label that reads in gold lettering: Mission for my Country / His Imperial Majesty Mohammed...
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PoliticalShift
The Highs (and Lows) of Public Officials on Twitter
Are high profile public officials using Twitter as a noble tool to bypass the proverbial "mainstream media filter" and communicate directly with constituencies? Or do they just see it as yet one more wall in the online echo chamber, something merely to influence and/or amplify mainstream media stories? The answer probably lies somewhere in between as I found from examining...
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5Across
The Importance of Free Speech Online in Iran, China, Kenya
In a crisis, governments will often curtail freedom of the press, censoring or shutting broadcasts and newspapers. But blocking websites, slowing the Internet or cutting off SMS messaging can be harder to do. Stopping the flow of information online can be a difficult task, as the Iranian government has learned over the past few weeks, as protesters have posted images...
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World View
Brave Citizen Journalists Provide New Images of Iranian Life
Like many people, I have been watching this so-called "Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, [Insert New Media Application] Revolution" unfold in Iran from the comfort of my own home. Watching the dizzying and horrifying images that have emerged on the Internet has triggered a whirlwind of emotions and thoughts. I was shocked and outraged by the death of Neda. I felt a...
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World View
How Will Iranian Protests Change Twitter?
There's been much ado about Twitter's role in the political protests in Iran, and for good reason. With the Iranian government expelling foreign journalists, outlets like CNN scrambled to uncover sources where they could. They found these sources among the din of unverifiable messages surfacing on Twitter. It's been fun reading mainstream media accounts of how Twitter is, in a...
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Guides
Your Guide to Iran Election News Online
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 Twitter, citizen journalism, alternative models for newspapers and other topics. This week I'll look at Iran election news online. Background...
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Social Media
Rules of Engagement for Journalists on Twitter
Twitter's role in the Iranian election aftermath leaves no doubt about its power as a global, real time, citizen-journalism style news wire service, along with a tool for facilitating dissent, while countering the view of Twitter as simply a zone for egotistical banality. But it also highlighted Twitter's role as a platform and content generator for traditional media outlets,...
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4MR
4 Minute Roundup: Special Iran Election Edition
Here's the latest 4MR audio report from MediaShift. In this week's special edition, I look at the way that social media have played a vital role in the breaking news happening in Iran after their contested presidential election. Though the government has cracked down on the opposition, censored the media and blocked websites and even text messaging, the news has...
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Social Media
How Journalists Balance Work, Personal Lives on Twitter
Twitter is continuing to make headlines around the world as it amasses followers. But it's also making an impact on the newsmakers themselves. Journalists are invading the space at a rapid pace and learning to report live, crowdsource stories and engage with a whole new audience...in 140 characters or less. It may not be revolutionary -- many journalists view the...
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NewspaperShift
Kicking Ink: The Struggles of a Print Newspaper Unsubscriber
I knew the day was coming, but it was still a shock when the day came. Groggy-eyed in the early morning light, I slowly went down the four flights of stairs in the front of my building and looked down. Nothing. For 18 generally uninterrupted years, I had the San Francisco Chronicle delivered to me, except when neighbors stole...
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5Across
Twitter Mania: Will Twitter Change the World?
Twitter has become a multi-headed phenomenon since MediaShift devoted a week to covering micro-blogging two years ago. Twitter is now established as a new form of communication, an early warning system for breaking news, and a startup company in San Francisco that has no discernable income. And with the power of Oprah, CNN and Ashton Kutcher, it has become...
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NewspaperShift
PressTerra Tests Newspaper 'Printernet' on Iberian Peninsula
In my March 24 column, I talked about the "printernet," a system of networked desktop publishing where the desktops and printers are spread throughout the whole world. This is another way of describing the new printing model of "distribute and print," where you send a digital file via the Internet to the printing facility closest to the final distribution point...
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Public Relations
Issue Advocacy on the Internet, Part 1
The Internet has been alternately characterized as participatory, conversational, and collaborative. By empowering its users to create (not just consume) content, it is by design a more democratic medium than any other. There has been plenty of discussion about how, by giving everyone a public voice, the Internet is upending conventional power dynamics and enabling a new generation of opinion...
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Digging Deeper
Building the Ideal Community Information Hub
Problem: Where can people find the local information they need, whether it's about a school board meeting, a new construction project or a nearby robbery? Solution: A community hub, with all the information aggregated in one online source and pushed out via libraries, in-person meetings, community radio, small run print publications and cable access TV. That's my conclusion after studying...
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PoliticalShift
Live-Blogging Netroots Nation's New Media Summit
SAN FRANCISCO -- I am in the swanky Bently Reserve building in downtown San Francisco for the Netroots Nation's New Media Summit, affliated with the liberal blog Daily Kos. On the agenda today are panels on the evolution of journalism and new media, the wisdom of crowds, social media for social good, and using video to expand your audience....
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MediaShift Innovation Spotlight
ProPublica's ChangeTracker Lets You Watch Government's Moves
The Obama administration has already made strides toward greater transparency and better use of technology in government, but has promised even more. It's important to make sure that President Obama and his people act on those promises. One way to do that is to watch the government's footsteps online. ChangeTracker makes this possible, and not just for government sites -- it can be used to track changes on any website.
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NewspaperShift
Live-Blogging Logan Symposium on Investigative Reporting at Berkeley
BERKELEY -- I am at the University of California-Berkeley for the 3rd Annual Reva and David Logan Investigative Reporting Symposium this weekend. It's an invite-only event run by Lowell Bergman, known for his work at "60 Minutes" (and being played by Al Pacino in "The Insider"). The theme this year is "Reporting on Corruption," and included a preview showing of...
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AdvertisingShift
Political Blogs' Double Whammy: Post-Election, Deep Recession
This week several major bloggers -- most politically right-of-center -- will see the shuttering of their blog ad network. Pajamas Media, which launched in 2004 and provided advertising for conservative bloggers like Glenn Reynolds and Michelle Malkin, announced earlier this year that it would close down its display advertising for blogs in order to put more focus on its online...
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MediaShift Innovation Spotlight
Represent Helps New Yorkers Track Their Politicos
The New York Times' Represent is a data aggregator and sorter that points to information about elected representatives in New York City. If New Yorkers enter an address, they can see their political districts (Congressional, Assembly, Senate and City Council) and representatives. Represent will also track what their representatives have been doing through a recent activity feed from NYT articles and congressional votes.
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PoliticalShift
Public Diplomacy in the Digital Age, Part 2
We're a nation at war. At war not with another nation, but with a hateful ideology violently expressed: terrorism. Every militaristic move a terrorist makes is designed to intimidate, frustrate, agitate....in short, communicate. Physical destruction and loss of life, crass as it sounds, are means to those ends. In this sense, the war of ideas is no longer a metaphor or a figure of speech -- it's a literal war in which we now find ourselves. And in a war of ideas, public diplomacy will be an important tool in our national security toolkit.
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MobileShift
The Promise and Challenges for Mobile Media in the Developing World
Mobile phones are everywhere. They have long surpassed the Internet in number of users, and in some parts of the world, mobile phones now rival television in reach. The mobile tech economy (at least until recently) was booming with telcoms and handset manufacturers fiercely competing in emerging markets, and software giants like Microsoft and Google entering the mobile industry in...
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PoliticalShift
How Obama Inspired Israeli Politicians' Online Campaigns
Just as television changed the way political campaigns were run in the 1960s, the Internet has changed the way political campaigns are run in the 2000s. Upwards of 70 million people watched the more aesthetically-pleasing JFK debating the more radio-suited Nixon on the tube in 1960. Nearly 50 years later, the YouTube debates of 2008 allowed people to ask their...
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Public Relations
Public Diplomacy in the Digital Age, Part 1
"What is public diplomacy?" was the first question that Ted Koppel posed at the recent Media as a Global Diplomat conference attended largely by public diplomacy professionals. I was surprised that the panelists, including the outgoing Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy & Public Affairs, couldn't readily agree on an answer to this foundational question. Koppel continued, "I thought [public...
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World View
Monarchs Use 'Lese Majeste' Laws to Silence Online Critics
"When it comes to a monarchy, all reason goes away," according to a Thai reporter quoted in a Reporters Without Borders report on free expression in Thailand published this week. He was commenting on the multiple charges of lese majeste -- injury or insult to the king -- brought against journalists and writers in his country, where speaking negatively about...
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MediaShift Innovation Spotlight
Washington Post's 'Web Ninjas' Build Map-Timeline Combo
TimeSpace, a Washington Post project, is a coverage mapping framework that displays content from multiple sources in space (via a map) and time (via a timeline). A display map, covering anything from a single city block to the world, is tagged to show viewers where news is being covered. Viewers can also view the news map as it appeared at different points over the preceding hours or days, giving them a picture of how the news events unfolded over time.
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World View
How Social Media War Was Waged in Gaza-Israel Conflict
Both sides deployed dangerous new media weapons during this latest round of fighting in Gaza. Armed with Facebook profiles, Twitter accounts, and Lavazza espresso, warriors fearlessly and tirelessly scoured the cyber battlefield searching for enemy (blog) outposts. Outfitted with high-tech ammunition like HD videocameras, firewire 800s, and white phosphorescent keyboards, they attacked one-sided videos, slanted essays, and enemy propaganda with...
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MediaShift Innovation Spotlight
ProPublica Puts Spotlight on Tracking TARP Money
ProPublica's Show Me the TARP Money is a simple map and chart reflecting the recipients of money provided through TARP (Troubled Asset Relief Program), a federal program that authorizes the U.S. government to buy assets from struggling financial institutions in an effort to remedy the subprime mortgage crisis. The site shows institutions that have been approved for assistance and keeps a running total of the number of institutions, the amount committed, and the amount invested so far. There is an RSS feed and a widget for the site as well.
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PoliticalShift
Obama, Congress Enlist 'Direct to Constituent' Communications
Professional communicators are paying close attention to the rise of "direct to consumer" (DTC) communications. This is a phenomenon largely enabled by the rapid proliferation and adoption of online technologies, whereby organizations can communicate directly to the public without filters or mediation from the press. Corporate blogs or advocacy groups' online "action alerts" are just a couple examples. As a...
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MediaShift Innovation Spotlight
Innovation in Inauguration Coverage
This week, instead of focusing on one innovative journalism project, I'd like to highlight some of the many projects that came up covering Barack Obama's inauguration. The first question I asked myself as I started collecting links was, "Well, this is a cool way to cover the event, but is it journalism? For example, I saw a lot of "official"...
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Digging Deeper
Vodafone's Child Porn Filter Blocks Innocent Czech Tech Blogs
Last summer, the British cell phone carrier Vodafone announced it would be offering a new filtering service for its Czech customers. "Child pornography and promotion of racism [are] such socially dangerous content that we have access to it automatically blocked for all of our customers," said Philip Premysl, senior manager of corporate social responsibility of Vodafone in the press release....
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Citizen Journalism
Ushahidi Platform Used to Document Congo, Gaza Crises
Bloggers have always been timely in their response to local, regional and international crises and Kenyan bloggers were no different when violence broke out following the December 2007 elections. Within nine days Ushahidi, "a platform that crowdsources crisis information," was born. But that open source platform is now being "localized" to cover conflicts in other global hotspots, including in the...
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Digging Deeper
GlobalPost Aims to Resuscitate Foreign Correspondents Online
Mr. Powers: How would you like to cover the biggest story in the world today?
Johnny Jones: Give me an expense account and I'll cover anything.
There has always been a touch of glamour associated with foreign correspondents, able to live in far-away lands and report on wars and strife, as in the Alfred Hitchcock movie "Foreign Correspondent," quoted above. But today, Johnny Jones would likely be brought back from Europe in a round of cost-cutting at his newspaper.
PoliticalShift
Government 2.0: How Social Media Could Transform Gov PR
It's easy to see governments as nameless, faceless monoliths, something impersonal or, even worse, untrustworthy. Much of that is because government culture remains steeped in traditional ideas about public relations and outreach work, notions that have become archaic in an Internet-enabled, hyper-connected world. Just as private companies are learning to embrace social media to manage brand reputations, governments must adapt...
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Legal Drama
Can U.S. Laws Protect Online Speech from Foreign Libel Suits?
"...in cyberspace, the First Amendment is a local ordinance." That's a remark famously made in 1997 by John Perry Barlow, one of the co-founders of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Barlow's complete statement is well worth re-reading but one implication of this particular remark is that the reach of American constitutional values may be limited by our country's physical borders. When...
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World View
Innovative Web Video Series Shows Real Life in Gaza, Israel
One sense of fear, two armies, and three rows of electrical fences separate Israel and the Gaza Strip. For the past 10 years, it has been difficult for residents of these two places to ever imagine meeting one another in person. Now, thanks to a new documentary project produced by French/German television station Arte TV and a handful of Israeli...
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World View
Vietnam Cracks Down on Dissident Blogger Dieu Cay
In Vietnam, speaking out against the government can come with a hefty price. Blogger Dieu Cay ("the Peasant Water Pipe") -- or Nguyen Van Haias in real life -- is learning this the hard way. The 56-year-old man is serving a 30-month jail sentence on a trumped-up charge of tax fraud, a poor excuse for the government to try to...
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Digging Deeper
Video Report from the Czech Online Media World
A funny thing happened on my way to Eastern Europe last week. I sent out a Twitter message saying I was heading to Prague and Berlin and wondered if there were any bloggers or online media people I could meet. I got a reply from Robert Cox of the Media Bloggers Association (MBA), telling me that Radim Hasalik in Prague...
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World View
Burmese Blogger Sentenced to 20 Years For Reporting on Protests
In many countries, you have to commit a serious crime to be sentenced to 20 years in jail, but in Burma this can happen just for using the Internet. There are almost 69 cyber-dissidents in jail worldwide, yet Burma's Nay Phone Latt has become the first blogger to receive such a lengthy prison term. His crime? To have informed the...
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Legal Drama
Canadian Court Rules Linking to Libel Isn't (Necessarily) Libel
Linking to content is the essence of the online experience -- it's the "Web" in the World Wide Web. But there's a lot of legal gray area around linking, and surprisingly few court rulings providing guidance as to the circumstances when linking could result in liability. A court in Canada has now weighed in on the question of liability under...
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World View
Nigeria Joins List of Countries Harassing Bloggers
On October 19, U.S.-based Nigerian blogger and journalist Jonathan Elendu of Elendu Reports was arrested by the Nigerian State Security Services (SSS) upon his arrival at Abuja airport. It was some days before the SSS announced that Elendu had been charged, first with money laundering and then sedition. Yet another report claimed he was charged with sponsoring a guerilla news...
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World View
Video Report from Jeff Pulver's Tel Aviv Breakfast Meetup
I thought I was going to a breakfast where people actually ate food. But food is hardly the top priority at a Jeff Pulver breakfast, where people are too busy pitching their latest ideas to investors, scoping out the competition, or scoping out the eligible singles on the market. Jeff is known for being one of leading innovators in voice-over-IP...
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Weblogs
Poll Crashers Tilt Unscientific Polls Their Way
During the Republican National Convention, NOW, a PBS weekly TV news magazine, posted an unscientific poll on its website asking viewers to vote on whether they thought vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin was qualified for the position. Like most polls the show posts every week, it was taken down from the front page and replaced by a new one after...
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PoliticalShift
LIVE Election Day Chat with Special Guests!
I will be joined by an all-star lineup of new media experts, academics, and social media gurus to look at how online coverage of Election Day is going -- with pointers to the most innovative mashups, maps, video blogs and more. The plan is to chat today from 10:30 am to around 9 pm Pacific Time. Be sure to join...
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PoliticalShift
Citizens, Media Use Social Media to Monitor Election
In a YouTube video uploaded on October 24, a husband and wife couple from Oregon sit at their kitchen table and fill out their mail-in voting ballots for the 2008 election. The wife explains to the camera that Oregon has had mail-in voting for "about the last 10 years," and the two walk the viewer through the entire voting process,...
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Thought Leader Q&A
Current TV's 'SuperNews' Comedy Gauges Success on Web Views
I live about 7 minutes' drive from the headquarters of Al Gore's innovative Current TV in San Francisco, yet my cable system, Astound, still doesn't carry the channel. So when I was visiting my parents last summer in St. Louis, I made a point of checking it out. The first thing I saw was a cartoon spoof of social networking...
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World View
China Blocks Blogs, Search Results on Tainted Milk Scandal
The evidence is accumulating. The censorship imposed on the Chinese media about the contaminated milk scandal has had disastrous consequences according to Reporters Without Borders. Last July, a journalist working for the investigative weekly Nanfang Zhoumo (Southern Weekend) gathered reliable information regarding a wave of hospitalizations of new-born babies, with four killed and 53,000 sickened. These illnesses were linked to...
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Guides
Your Guide to Political Polling Sites
We are an impatient nation. We can't stand waiting until election day to find out who will win an election -- we want to know who will win now. That explains the popularity of political polling simulations, aggregators and analysis blogs in the run-up to the U.S. presidential election. Because we have such a fascination with winners and losers, we want to see the current state of the race on a daily, even hourly, basis, and the web can deliver that in spades.
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World View
Google Blocks Chrome Browser Use in Syria, Iran
Recently, I learned from Joshua Landis' Syria Comment, my main source for news and analysis concerning Lebanon's eastern neighbor, that Google has blocked the use of its new web browser, Chrome, in Syria. A quick Google search turned up a post by Syrian blogger Yaser Sadeq with an account of his abortive attempt to take the new browser for a...
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World View
Africa News Empowers Citizens to Report Online
Over the past couple of months I have been following a new African news portal, Africa News, the latest in the 12-year history of African online news media. Africa News goes much further than previous attempts to create online news communities serving Africa; the site includes content submitted by locally based citizen journalists who use mobile phones and the Internet...
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Digging Deeper
Political Fact-Check Sites Proliferate, But Can They Break Through the Muck?
As the U.S. elections near the finish line, the presidential campaigns are throwing around enough verbal attacks and inflammatory advertising to make the average voter's head spin. Fortunately, there are now three excellent sources for fact-checking political discourse online: Annenberg Public Policy Center's FactCheck.org, the St. Petersburg Times and Congressional Quarterly's PolitiFact and the Washington Post's Fact Checker blog....
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PoliticalShift
How Greenwald's Brave New Films Spreads Its Political Message Online
Last month, Politico's Mike Allen asked presidential hopeful John McCain the seemingly innocent question of how many houses he owned. McCain's response -- "I'll have my staff get to you" -- became a major focus for both the media and Obama's campaign, who repeated it in just about every speech to illustrate that the Republican candidate was "out of...
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World View
Activists Face Obstacles Online in Winning Women's Rights in Iran
Women in Iran have learned to unleash the Internet's potential to promote freedom. In the country that has, according to the OpenNet Initiative, experienced the most explosive online growth in the Middle East, the Internet has become a battleground between a repressive regime and the increasingly active feminists demanding the end of legal discrimination against women. Women activists, who...
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World View
Arab Bloggers Meet to Discuss Free Speech, Reject 'Journalist' Label
BEIRUT -- A quick look at the Regions sidebar on DigiActive, a nine-month old blog that catalogs how activists use digital tools, reveals something unexpected. The site details case studies of online activists from around the world, but by far the largest number of stories involve bloggers from the Middle East and North Africa -- 39 -- compared with...
more »Your Take
Where do you get U.S. election news online?
What sites do you follow for US Election coverage?I want to know which sites you trust for news on the US election: blogs, news sites, newspaper sites, aggregators, video sites? Share your thoughts and check out responses at www.pbs.org/mediashift With the U.S. election season hitting its final stages, political junkies are inundated with information online. But where do you go...
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Embedded Report
Blogger Conditions Worsen as Many Defend Palin Pick
Shame on us, the media, for thinking the Republican National Convention would pale in comparison to the Democrats' show in Denver last week. For bloggers on both sides of the aisle here in St. Paul, what the RNC has lacked in strawberry-lemonade smoothies, it has more than made up for with juicy stories. While Hurricane Gustav may have stopped...
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PoliticalShift
Digg Puts Focus on Politics, Bringing Charges of Liberal Bias
Last week, Digg CEO Jay Adelson sat in a crowded room in Denver holding a stack of papers while facing a camera and trying to project his voice over the cacophony around him. Next to him sat a tired-looking U.S. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, who had taken a break from the Democratic National Convention to meet with Adelson....
more »Embeds
Blogs Help Humanize, Demystify Life in the Middle East
JERUSALEM -- Blogs exemplify the best and worst attributes of the Internet (and human nature). At their worst, blogs can be untruthful, bad sources of news and gossip. But without the profit motive, the need for immediacy, and the thirst for conflict, blogs can also help show a more complete picture of the Middle East. At their best, they can be a great source of anti-news and help demystify this murky region.
more »PoliticalShift
Bloggers Make Progress Covering Convention at DNC
DENVER -- Even for members of the traditional media here in Denver, access to floor seating at the convention has been scarce, and talk time with politicians and celebrities at the Democratic National Convention is a game of persistence and luck. Some days you see all the newsmakers, other days you're stuck on the outside with the gawkers, watching...
more »Digging Deeper
The Best 2008 Political Convention Coverage Online
In 2004, the major political conventions gave a few dozen bloggers press credentials, a historic moment for the new media outsiders. And this year, the political conventions have tried to be even more open to bloggers, video reporters, podcasters and new media. The Democratic convention credentialed 120 bloggers, and the GOP has credentialed 200 bloggers, according to Forbes. And the...
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World View
How a Protester Pulled Off the Clandestine Radio Broadcast in Beijing
The voices of Chinese human rights activists can be heard on the radio. A former journalist describes the censorship she experienced, and a human rights activist explains the increasing crackdown on Chinese dissidents that has occurred these past few months. A former political prisoner complains about the appalling conditions in which he was held. Have the Chinese authorities gone wild and suddenly opened the airwaves?
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PoliticalShift
Will the Big Tent in Denver Help Bloggers Break Through?
As the 2008 Democratic Convention quickly approaches, thousands of journalists will begin swarming into Denver for what is sure to be an around-the-clock media event. Reporters will interview throngs of convention goers to examine every facet of the political landscape and the implications it has for the upcoming election.
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World View
Cell Phone Use, Texting Widespread in China
BEIJING -- As basketball fans geared up for the U.S.-China pairing on August 10, a banner headline in the China Daily predicted more than a billion fans would watch the game. There were watch parties everywhere -- at ex-pat bars, local dives, even the hotel room two doors down from me. And in the lobby, even the security guard...
more »NewspaperShift
Walls Tumble Down as Mediafin Integrates Print, Online Newsrooms
The company where I work is well-known in Belgium for its print publications. Mediafin is the publisher behind the Dutch language business daily De Tijd and its Francophone counterpart L'Echo. But in recent years, the company's Internet sites have grown to rival the popularity of its print editions. In July, Mediafin websites reached a new high of an estimated 160,000 unique visitors on one single day, an amount roughly equivalent to the average number of readers per day. But even as online journalism continues to reach more and more readers, journalists themselves continue to balk at putting their work online.
more »World View
China Partially Lifts Great Firewall for Media, but Access Remains Pricey
BEIJING -- Journalists scrambling to make Games-time deadlines might not make it to Badaling or Juyongguan during their trip overseas, but they're sure to become familiar with China's other Great Wall: the Great Firewall, that is. On July 31, Olympic officials admitted the International Olympic Committee had not yet secured unfettered Internet access to foreign journalists, leaving everyone to...
more »World View
African LGBTI Communities Come Out of the Closet Online
"The closet I have come out of -- it is similar to the wardrobe my relieved parents stepped out of when I unlocked the wardrobe after the police had left. If you're black in South Africa, the inhuman laws of apartheid closet you, if you're gay in South Africa, the homophobic customs of this society closet you. If you...
more »World View
A Mix of Skepticism and Hope on 'Propoganda Tour 2008'
We wrestle hi-def video cameras into our carry-on luggage, brandish SLRs at tourist attractions and arrange "Skype dates" with significant others half a world away. Blogging is the acceptable (and perhaps preferred) method of communicating with home, and the Internet at our hotel strains under the weight of so many Facebook photo uploads in so few hours. We are journalism students at the University of Missouri and volunteers at the XXIX Olympic Games, self-proclaimed new media experts and hopeless foreigners all at the same time.
more »Weblogs
EU Member's Plan for 'Blogger Registry' Is Wrong-Headed
When blogs were born over 10 years ago as a way to share the details of one's life with a limited number of people online as a sort of journal, no one could have imagined the importance that this type of D.I.Y. publishing would later take on. Today, bloggers who started out just writing for themselves have empires. Bloggers these days have larger spheres of influence, attracting the eyes of more people -- even presidential candidates. -- and they enjoy the freedom to write whatever they want (within reason) on their blogs.
more »Jennifer Woodard Maderazo
Spain's National Obsession with Mobiles, Texting
A few weeks ago I told you about the perpetuation of print newspapers here in Spain, and in that post I mentioned the fact that you don't see a whole lot of laptops being used on the streets of Barcelona or Madrid. One might think that this is an indication of a lack of love for gadgets. Quite the contrary: You may not see laptops, but what you do see are cell phones -- and tons of them.
more »Jennifer Woodard Maderazo
Slingbox Lets Me Take Live TV Abroad
Last month, I moved to Spain, and I took my TV with me. Not the actual TV set, but my shows. As I write this, I'm watching a live episode of "Larry King Live," where politicians and pundits are discussing the implications of the Obama victory. It's 9:00 in the morning here in Spain, and even though I'm having breakfast, late-night Larry King and everyone else is truly live, thanks to Slingbox.
more »Digging Deeper
Newspaper Vet Malcolm Finds Blog Religion with 'Top of the Ticket'
If you have preconceived notions about political blogging, Andrew Malcolm is here to shatter them. Malcolm, 64, has decades of experience as a foreign correspondent and bureau chief at the New York Times, and later as an editorial board member and feature writer for the Los Angeles Times. He has ink in his blood, but when he was tapped by the L.A. Times to help write the new political blog, Top of the Ticket, Malcolm became a quick convert to the online religion.
more »Jennifer Woodard Maderazo
Are Print Newspapers Alive and Well in Spain?
From a picture window in an office from where I am writing in the Gracia neighborhood of Barcelona, I can see the same sights I could see from a similar window in my former neighborhood in San Francisco: pedestrians, taxis, cafes and bookstores. But there is something different about my view here: I can spot three different storefronts specializing in newspapers and magazines, all on one block and on one side of the street. A couple of yards away, there are more newsstands. A visit to the corner cafe reveals something else that's rather curious: the room full of coffee drinkers is full of people reading the news -- not on laptops or iPhones -- but on good old-fashioned pulp.
more »MobileShift
Learning the Limits of Locative Media
Once our "LoJo team" finalized our locative story idea, we had to decide which format and technology worked best. We debated the advantages of driving tours versus walking tours. Driving tours are particularly attractive when tour locations are miles apart, which is the case with some of Chicago's planned Olympic venues. But a driving tour would limit our story to people with cars and to locations with available parking. We ultimately decided on a hybrid driving and walking tour.
more »MobileShift
Medill Students Use 'Locative Media' for Mobile Storytelling
If you've ever been on an audio tour of a museum or tooled around with an interactive map, you've experienced "locative media." Reliant on numerous emerging mobile and location-based technologies (from GPS-enabled mobile phones to Google Maps-based applications), locative storytelling provides multimedia content that enhances a user's connection to a given place.
more »Philosophy
Takeover Tiff Best Thing to Happen to Yahoo
Microsoft made what appeared to be its last bid for Yahoo at $33 per share, and Yahoo wanted $37. Microsoft walked away. What a weird way for this entire drama to end -- if it is indeed over. Most people expect this to be a very bad week for Yahoo on Wall Street, with Silicon Alley Insider's Henry Blodget...
more »Digging Deeper
Net neutrality or network neutrality means that Internet service providers (ISPs) such as cable and telephone companies must treat all traffic equally that travels across their networks. That means that your broadband service provider couldn't block you from seeing a particular site or using a high-bandwidth service arbitrarily.
more »Social Networking
Africa's Social Media Conundrum
"Web 2.0 [is] a venture capitalist's paradise where investors pocket the value produced by unpaid users, ride on the technical innovations of the free software movement and kill off the decentralizing potential of peer-to-peer production."
more »Weblogs
How Bloggers Covered Kenya Violence, Deal with Racism, Sexism
Within 24 hours of the outbreak of the post election violence in Kenya, Kenyan blogs were posting hour by hour reports. On December 31st there was a complete shutdown of the mainstream media.
more »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 covering the U.S. presidential election in innovative, more personal ways....
more »Digging Deeper
Politico 2.0: Ruffini Blogs, Twitters, Crowdsources Obama Donations
Patrick Ruffini is the epitome of the new breed of political consultant. He's a numbers wonk who swears by Microsoft Excel. He's a tech geek who's had his own political website since the mid-'90s, and he writes for various big-name group blogs such as TechPresident and TownHall.com -- as well as his own blog. And though he has worked...
more »Jennifer Woodard Maderazo
Citizen Journalism Spreads in Spanish-Speaking World
Traditional media has always drawn a line between the reporter and the "reported to." But citizen journalism is a phenomenon that looks to bridge the gap between the news and the people, with average folks being able to use digital technology and the Internet to create and distribute their own news. But most stories about citizen journalism in the...
more »Jennifer Woodard Maderazo
Facebook Becomes Catalyst for Causes, Colombian FARC Protest
This morning, I received a notification on my Facebook profile that said if I sent a virtual plant to some of my friends, I'd help them "save the Earth." If you're a Facebook user, you probably wonder how much the incessant pleas by certain applications on the site might actually "change the world." Modules built to help you attack...
more »Open Source Reporting
How Our Next President Should Use Participatory Media
Today is President's Day in the U.S., celebrating the February birthdays of past presidents Abraham Lincoln and George Washington. But rather than looking back, I'd like to look forward to the next president of the United States -- whoever he or she will be -- and consider how they might use technology and new media to be more responsive...
more »Citizen Journalism
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 -- and am asking for your input on any innovative efforts...
more »Media Usage
The Efficiency (and Shame) of Long-Distance Reporting
My writer friend Marlene once had a dot-com job that seemed odd. She wrote for a travel site about various countries but never traveled to those countries. She simply aggregated information from other websites and did extensive online research before writing about them and putting together guides. But strange as it seemed at the time, I was destined to...
more »PoliticalShift
Iowa Caucuses Blanketed by Twitter, Blogs, Video
If you were anywhere in Iowa yesterday, you might as well assume that anyone around you could report on what you were saying, even in what you thought was a private moment at a restaurant. That's the hard lesson learned by veteran GOP political strategist Ed Rollins, who was repeatedly flummoxed in a Fox News interview with Chris Wallace,...
more »Your Take
How important is digital media in the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign?
As the U.S. presidential primary season quickly approaches, the question remains just how important the Internet and new media have been in the election race. While political tracking sites such as TechPresident can show how many Facebook friends the candidates have, or how many video views they've had on YouTube, there isn't a direct correlation between online popularity and actual...
more »Digging Deeper
TechPresident, 10Questions Put Spotlight on 'Voter-Generated Content'
Just as the Internet and technology have shifted the playing field in media, allowing bloggers and podcasters to help set the news agenda, so has the realm of politics been disrupted by technology that gives voters more power to inject their own issues into the fray. And in the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign, that disruption has been strongest in...
more »MobileShift
Pocket Journalism Takes More Than Stylish iPhones
An AP technology story out of Japan hit home week. It detailed how young folk in Asia are abandoning the PC by the drove.
more »Jennifer Woodard Maderazo
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, Wolf was dubbed the "longest-jailed journalist in American history." But...
more »Digging Deeper
BBC Trains Iranian Journalists through ZigZag Online Magazine
Iran has a thriving blogosphere and a large educated and Internet-savvy class of people. But because it's a closed society, most journalism training does not address the importance of objectivity and balance in reporting, nor does it stress the importance of online journalism. The BBC World Service Trust has been quietly trying to change that, training 150 journalists in...
more »Weblogs
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 transmit them to the outside world. The contrast between this...
more »Jennifer Woodard Maderazo
YouTube, Flickr Become Forces for Cultural Change
The term "social web" brings to mind images of people around the world interacting with each other without borders or barriers. With the arrival of more and more sites that help us connect, express ourselves and share media, it seems like we're advancing toward a more open Internet, in which everyone has the right to view or post whatever...
more »Your Take Roundup
Internet Offers Unlimited Time for Presidential Debates
One of the complaints most people have about televised politics and debates is the prevalence of the sound bite. There's never enough time for candidates to discuss issues in-depth or argue their point for more than a minute. Instead, we are stuck with the tyranny of zingers and one-liners, perfectly fit for highlights on SportsCenter, uh, I mean the...
more »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 folks would tell the stories overlooked by mainstream media in...
more »Digging Deeper
Traditional Journalism Job Cuts Countered by Digital Additions
If you follow the world of traditional journalism, you can't help but notice the seemingly constant stream of layoffs and buyouts at news organizations. But media observers don't often emphasize the flip side: As newspapers and broadcasters slice their senior-level workforce, they are also quietly building their digital and online teams. For example, when I heard about job cuts...
more »Your Take
How would you update the presidential debates for the Internet Age?
The New York Times Op-Ed page recently asked a few experts to answer this question: If the CNN/YouTube presidential debates still had too much scripting and canned answers, how can we create a real new-media debate? Various folks answered, with Kevin Kelly saying candidates should have webcams attached to their heads 24/7, and Tom Brokaw joked that candidates should answer...
more »Jennifer Woodard Maderazo
Face-to-Face Networking Trumps Panels at Conference
SAN FRANCISCO -- In my account of Supernova 2007 yesterday, I didn't mention one of the things that really irked me about the conference: the silence. When panelists were on the huge stage at the main ballroom in the Westin St. Francis Hotel, the large audience sat silent typing away at their laptops. While some sessions ended with a...
more »Jennifer Woodard Maderazo
Orkut, Friendster Get Second Chance Overseas
What do Brazilian and Indian Internet users have in common? A favorite social networking site called Orkut, a Google web property which, when it was launched in 2004 was meant to put its parent company on the social networking map in the U.S. Orkut may not have taken off stateside, but it has exploded in these two countries, and...
more »Digging Deeper
New Media Literacy as Important for Educators as Students
For so long, the focus of media literacy education has been on helping students understand the media they consume. What are the biases? Who owns what outlet? How are news reports produced? But with the rise of new media, perhaps the focus of media literacy education should shift to educating the educators -- and other adults -- about blogs,...
more »Jennifer Woodard Maderazo
Community-Edited News Sites Abound in Other Languages
Back in 2004, when developer Kevin Rose launched the community-edited news site Digg, he could not have imagined it would launch a global phenomenon. A simple application that allowed users to contribute web links and vote on stories to push them to the front page somehow appealed to so many of us that by the next year, it had...
more »Jennifer Woodard Maderazo
Reporting from Afar Might Work, But Not for Local News
While much has been made of the outsourcing of American jobs to foreign countries, until recently the field of journalism had remained largely untouched. Earlier this month local news website Pasadena Now announced its decision to outsource work to India, specifically reporting of City Council meetings. The site's owner, James Macpherson, said the meetings are streamed on the Internet,...
more »Digging Deeper
Web Leads, Print Pubs Improve Environmental Impact
If you've grown tired of answering the question, "paper or plastic?" you can now consider another nagging environmental question when choosing your news source: "Online or print?" Environmental critics have decried "dead-tree media" for decades, saying that print publications rely on clear-cutting forests, energy produced to run paper mills, and gasoline used to deliver publications to each doorstep.While print...
more »Your Take
Should online video of presidential debates be free for public use and remix?
Just who owns the video of presidential debates? Up until this point, the TV networks that broadcast the events held the copyright to that footage and could post it online, monetize it in whatever way they wanted, and restrict usage by other folks. But Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig, a proponent of Creative Commons "copyleft" systems, started an online petition...
more »PoliticalShift
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 a better "user-generated" debate. The troika of websites recently announced...
more »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 our government accountable, with or without the media apparatus. One...
more »PoliticalShift
Escaping the Bubble in Campaign Journalism
This week Arianna Huffington and I announced at the Huffington Post and PressThink a new project in campaign journalism.
more »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 site, You Witness News. Plus, Reuters made a high-profile move of putting a correspondent into the virtual world, Second Life.
more »PoliticalShift
2008 Candidates Jump Online with Early Blog Ads
There has been a delicate dance between political operatives and the Internet. While activists have been using blogs and new media to spread the word about politics or specific candidates for years, the politicians and their consultants have been wary of spending too much of their campaign chest on online marketing. They have largely stuck to the tried and true: TV ads.
more »Digging Deeper
TPMmuckraker Thrives as Political Corruption Runs Rampant
If Roosevelt lived today, he might add in "blog" to the list of places where muckrakers do their work -- and he probably would be a bit more scared of the work they're doing. One hundred years after Roosevelt coined the "muckraker" term for journalists who uncover corruption and fraud, bloggers have taken the mantle once reserved for investigative print journalists and created a new brand of muckraking that moves at the speed of the Net and involves collaboration with readers.
more »Weblogs
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 be jury members to decide the winners of the annual Best of the Blogs (The BOBs) awards.
more »Citizen Journalism
Keeping an Eye on the Kenyan Parliament
One of the things I'm most proud of as far as my accomplishments go is being the co-founder of Mzalendo. At a basic level Mzalendo intends to monitor what Kenyan Members of Parliament are doing for their constituents. The Kenyan government generally operates in a very opaque manner and it is very difficult to obtain access to public information both online and offline. While there are some government offices that are trying to remedy this (the Office of Public Communications is one example), most of the information provided is generic.
more »World View
Over the last year or two, mainstream media outlets have started paying much more attention to China's increasingly strong presence in Africa. This interest was recently amplified by the China-Africa summit, which was recently held in Beijing.
more »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 the same time, and considering the differences in media coverage in both mediums. The following post will be updated live throughout the day and night, with the most recent information at the top, and the time it was posted.
more »Your Take
Do you think we should vote in elections by mail or online?
As the mid-term U.S. elections are today, I thought it would be a good idea to consider the intersection of technology and politics once again. So far, the mix has been pretty toxic, with so many electronic voting machines coming under fire for a lack of paper trail or being susceptible to hacks. Oregon has gone around precinct voting problems entirely with a vote-by-mail system where people have a few weeks to mail in ballots or drop them off at their convenience, which raises the participation level. Jeremy Wright, who helped push through the system in Oregon, explains how it works on the Daily Kos blog. What do you think? Should other states switch to mail-in ballots? Or should we create a safe way to vote online as well? What would the problems be with online voting besides security concerns? What other ideas do you have to eliminate the problems of long lines, voting machine irregularities, and intimidation at polling places? Share your thoughts in the comments below and I'll run the best ones in the next Your Take Roundup.
more »PoliticalShift
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 students don't want the incoming president, Jane Fernandes, to assume her new duties in January.
more »Your Take
What sources do you check for political news on the U.S. mid-term elections?
Now that the mid-term elections are less than a month away, we can ignore them no longer. With the Mark Foley page-enticement scandal smoking in the Beltway, the various nationwide races are heating up as the Democrats try yet again to take control of one or both chambers of Congress. There are plenty of news sources online to follow the races, from mainstream media sites such as CNN's Inside Politics to the conservative-blog aggregator, Pajamas Media's PoliticsCentral to liberal power-houses such as Talking Points Memo with its Election Central clearinghouse of polls. So where do you go online to follow the election races and results? Who do you trust for good information, and where do you feel you can have a say in a political community online? Or tell us if you prefer TV and newspapers for political coverage. I'll run the best comments in the next Your Take Roundup.
more »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.
more »PoliticalShift
Transparency Key to Constructive Partisanship
Among the oddities of the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act effort was that many of the major advocates -- who spanned the political spectrum from left to right -- had never worked together and did not meet in person until the day President Bush signed the measure into law.
more »Futurama
English Today, Mandarin by 2020?
Because the Internet and computers were home-grown in America, it's no surprise that the Internet naming convention (.com, .net, .org) and computer keyboards and software interfaces are based on the English language. That has helped to push English into the dominant second language worldwide for people doing business across borders.
more »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 violations, such as police brutality or torture, and got them to go viral, bringing more attention to the crimes?
more »Digging Deeper
Journalist Paints Bleak Picture for Media in Zimbabwe
The government shuts down independent newspapers. It jams radio signals from outside the country. Internet access is sporadic. Inflation is out of control. A bill is in Parliament that would allow the government to censor private email communications.
more »Your Take Roundup
BBC, Deutsche Welle Best Sources for Mideast News
When U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice visited Beirut today, there were numerous ways to report and interpret that news.
more »World View
Bloggers Freed From Jail in China, Egypt, Iran
With bombs dropping in Lebanon and Israel, sectarian violence rising in Iraq and civil war in Somalia -- among other bad tidings -- we are in dire need of good news and a reason to get up in the morning. Thankfully, there has been a spate of such news in the blogosphere, with a few high-profile bloggers being released from jail in China, Egypt and Iran.
more »PoliticalShift
Campaigns 2.0::Most Senate Candidates Shy Away from Blogs, Podcasts
Can a candidate's blog or podcast make a difference in a campaign for the U.S. Senate in 2006? No one knows yet. What we do know from 2004 is that Howard Dean's groundbreaking blog didn't help elect him to the presidency -- though it did build buzz and make him a short-lived frontrunner in the Democratic race. A recent...
more »NewspaperShift
Digging Deeper::Can Newspaper Letter Editors Stop Astroturf Onslaught?
People are so outraged by the Medicare drug program overhaul that they're writing letters to the editors of many newspapers to complain. And people are equally upset by gay marriage and are writing letters in support of the Marriage Protection Amendment. But there's one problem with these two sets of letters: Each set contains largely the same text, taken...
more »Digging Deeper
Digging Deeper::Chinese Entrepreneur Downplays Censorship Problem in China
When Google launched its web search engine in China, and admitted having to censor search results, we made a big stink about it here in the U.S. And when Microsoft admitted to censoring its MSN Spaces blogs in China, we made a big stink about it. And when any American technology company was found to have collaborated with the...
more »World View
Digging Deeper::Blogs, Wiki, Google Bomb Used to Free Egyptian Activist
Last August, when I was working on a story for Online Journalism Review about activists using technology to organize protests in Egypt, I made the mistake of focusing too much on blogs. One of the people I interviewed, Alaa Abd El Fattah, was quick to pounce on me for asking about blogs and only blogs, when Egyptians were using...
more »Legal Drama
Sock Puppetry::Are Blog Commenters Paid in Net Neutrality Debate?
When I posed a question to my readers on March 31 -- Should the government regulate Net neutrality? -- I was surprised to see how many readers opposed Net neutrality regulation. In the Your Take Roundup the following week, I even headlined it, "People Wary of Government in Net Neutrality Debate." Now word is spreading through the blogosphere that...
more »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 Canary Wharf on the east side of London. Today, the...
more »PoliticalShift
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 division of China's State Security Bureau arrested Hao, jailing him...
more »Digging Deeper
Digging Deeper::Singapore Tries to Squelch Political Blogs, Podcasts
While many Americans have been focused lately on online censorship in China, few have noticed a similar practice in other countries such as Singapore. That island state is a parliamentary republic in theory, but has really been run by one dominant party in its history of independence since 1965 (see a Singapore historical timeline here). The mainstream media is...
more »Wikis
Email Debate::Wales Discusses Political Bias on Wikipedia
Conservative blogger Robert Cox, who writes the National Debate blog, told me he was amazed at the quality of Wikipedia and thought it was a great resource. But there was something about the free online community-generated encyclopedia that was getting under his skin -- what Cox believed was a liberal bias in many hot-button topic entries, despite Wikipedia's principle...
more »Your Take Roundup
Two-Tiered Net::People Wary of Government in Net Neutrality Debate
The debate over "Net neutrality" has heated up immensely over the past few weeks. Why the hubbub? Broadband service providers -- mainly telephone and cable companies -- want to charge some heavy-use sites such as Google and Yahoo more money for carriage on their systems, creating a kind of two-tier Internet. The issue has pitted companies such as Amazon,...
more »Weblogs
Israeli Elections::Live Blogging the Next Best Thing to TV
Before the 2004 U.S. elections, I considered political news on the Internet to be an addendum to the breaking news I would get from cable TV or the serious journalism of newspapers and magazines. But as the 2004 elections neared in October of that year, I realized that any serious political junkie was getting a much better fix on...
more »Your Take Roundup
Your Take Roundup::Email Trumps Blogs for Political Action in '06
As more people have broadband, more people are going online to get their news. The latest research from Pew Internet & American Life Project shows that 50 million Americans went online for news in a typical day in late 2005 -- up sharply from the number in 2002. And with the upcoming 2006 mid-term U.S. elections, you can count...
more »Digging Deeper
Digging Deeper::Internet Gives All Sides in Israel-Palestine Debate
Many people living outside the Middle East would like to understand the political situation in Israel and Palestine. But the more you read online at blogs and opinion sites, the more you realize that it's not a simple situation of good vs. evil, or us vs. them. There are many ways to view the highly charged issues in this...
more »Online Forums
Riding Talk Revisited::Politicians Speak Out About CBC Forums
In early February, I looked at an interesting project by the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. (CBC) called Riding Talk, where they provided a moderated forum for each and every riding (electoral district) in Canada before the late January elections. I had hoped to include the thoughts of a few politicians who participated in the forums but I didn't hear from...
more »Digging Deeper
Digging Deeper::Reporters Without Borders Backs Online Freedom Act
While the Republican-majority U.S. Congress has favored less regulation of big business, one GOP lawmaker, Rep. Chris Smith of New Jersey, has shown a willingness to regulate technology and Internet businesses in their dealings with China. Smith held prominent hearings on Capitol Hill on Feb. 15, compelling representatives from Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Cisco to answer criticism of their...
more »Your Take Roundup
Your Take Roundup::Congress Takes Action on China Collusion
Various technology companies in the West have helped the Chinese government in its longtime efforts to censor the Internet and do cyber-surveillance. Over the years, these companies have excused their behavior with a variation on the same theme: We have to follow local laws when we do business in China, and we can't ignore China as it has become...
more »Online Forums
World Wide Flame War::Topix.net Forums Give Window on Cartoon Flap
Pre-Internet days, a newspaper in Denmark that printed cartoons could be assured that they wouldn't be seen in other parts of the world. Those days are over. With protests and riots still burning bright in the Middle East over cartoons depicting Mohammed, we cannot ignore our global neighbors even if they live on the other side of the world....
more »Digging Deeper
Digging Deeper::CBC Offers Moderated Forum for Every Precinct
The hodge-podge of political discussion boards online can give you a headache. Usually it's a matter of who can scream the loudest and attack the fiercest. And if the subject is economics, someone will spout off on abortion. Plus, how can you find the right forum for the issues that concern you or your locale? The Canadian Broadcasting Corp....
more »Featured Comment
"One important fact that is often overlooked discussing "cutting the cord" is access to free digital television. Nearly 20% of Americans (60 million taxpayers) live in areas with no transmission and many more only have access to poor quality transmissions. The FCC has done very little to protect taxpayers' access to a regulated industry that uses a vast array of public property from easements and public utility right of way to NASA funded space vessels to launch satellites."
— Matthew
Your Guide to Cutting the Cord to Cable TV (Updated 2012 Edition)
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