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Legal Drama
Changing the Law to Save Newspapers: Some Modest Proposals
As newsroom staffs continue to shrink and newspapers go out of business at an alarming rate, the difficulty newspapers have experienced in gaining economic traction online has been blamed on blogs and websites that link to content on newspaper sites. According to some, this kind of "free riding" is responsible at least in part for the distress in which newspapers...
more »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...
more »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...
more »Social Media
Journalists Still a-Twitter About Social Media
Journalists are obsessed with Twitter. Obsessed. They use it, talk about it, analyze it, deconstruct it, reconstruct it, love it, hate it, capitalize on it, become experts on it, monetize it, argue about it, and become micro-famous on it. They are mesmerized with what it is and they are as giddy as Tom Cruise on Oprah just thinking about what...
more »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"...
more »EducationShift
The Place of Blogs in Journalism Education
Blogs have become part of the editorial furniture of most news sites. In the U.S., 95% of the top 100 newspapers feature reporter blogs. So it seems appropriate to include blogging in the curriculum of journalism schools. For the past couple of years, my students at the UBC Graduate School of Journalism have written blogs as part of their course...
more »Online Video
Can Pulitzer Contest Boost Serious Journalism on YouTube?
Whenever news breaks, the first people on the ground, before reporters arrive, are ordinary folks with cameras. Citizen journalists have played an important role in getting us the first glimpses of developing news, from the London transit bombings to the Southeast Asian tsunami to the Virginia Tech massacre. With the advent of YouTube as a hub for video-sharing, there's finally...
more »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 »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...
more »Digging Deeper
Lessons from Katrina Help Media, Volunteer Efforts in Gustav Coverage
When Hurricane Gustav hit the Gulf Coast, the evacuation of the area went much more smoothly than during Hurricane Katrina three years ago. This time, the local, state and national agencies were more prepared for a potential disaster. Similarly, online media outlets and volunteer efforts were also better prepared for this hurricane, having learned their lessons from the Katrina...
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 »MagazineShift
How PaidContent Succeeded in Mining Digital Media Niche
Rafat Ali was just another freelance journalist back in 2002, and wanted to strut his stuff on a blog, so he started PaidContent to write about his take on the business of digital content. Now he is much richer for his efforts, having expanded the blog into a mini-media empire with venture funding and last week selling it entirely to Guardian Media Group for about $30 million.
more »Your Take
What's the future of wire services in the digital age?
With all the fuss lately around the Associated Press and its legal tussle with Drudge Retort over lifted quotes, there's been a renewed focus on the future of the AP and its role as a newspaper cooperative. The Wall Street Journal noted that newspapers were becoming disgruntled by the high cost of being an AP member and that the AP wasn't providing enough return for that cost. One problem is that AP is putting more efforts into courting digital business and isn't giving enough back to the papers who back it. So more generally, do you think the AP will have role to play in the digital age?
more »Open Source Reporting
Educational Centers for Journalism Experiments
Will print newspapers exist in 10 years? How will we fund investigative journalism in the future? How can journalists learn to do reporting, moderating communities, filtering content, building Google Maps and all the other technical and online duties they will need to know?
more »Thought Leader Q&A
Charles Lewis Tries to Solve -- Not Bemoan -- State of Investigative Journalism
The state of investigative journalism in America is in its five-alarm fire phase, with newspaper staffs being severely pared down, and TV news going for flash and celebrity. But Charles Lewis, the godfather of non-profit investigative journalism as founder and former director of the Center for Public Integrity, would rather put out the fire than simply yell "fire!"
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
Twitter Helps with Reporting, Filtering the News
Last May on MediaShift, we wrote a series of articles about a new microblogging tool called Twitter, which was just beginning to gain visibility among the digerati. At that time, many bloggers were still on the fence as to how useful the service really was. Many thought it was a waste of time. Others just didn't understand if it...
more »NewspaperShift
Are Veteran Media Execs the Ones Who'll See the Future?
BERKELEY -- We are midway through the first day at the conference, "Crisis in News: Is There a Future for Investigative Reporting?" [You can read my earlier post from the conference here.] One thing that struck me here is that we have some serious bigwigs and executives at major media companies, like the New York Times, Washington Post, NPR,...
more »Digging Deeper
The Social Press Release: Multimedia, Two-Way, Direct to the Public
Silicon Valley journalist/blogger Tom Foremski had had enough. Two years ago, he wrote a poison pen letter to the PR industry in a blog post titled Die! Press release! Die! Die! Die!, in which he exhorted publicists to break down press releases into sections, tag the information and provide links to more sources. "Press releases are nearly useless," he...
more »Philosophy
It's Time for Newsrooms to Walk the Talk of Change
Seems like nearly every day I get a notice in my in-box about a new conference, a new initiative, a new working group that will be looking at ways that traditional media can change with the digital times. For the most part, these programs have thoughtful people who sincerely want to help news organizations change. My worry is that they...
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