A number of journalism educators and administrators traveled to Mexico City this past spring to assess the state of journalism in our bordering nation. Unfortunately, more journalists there are being killed than in any other country in the world as they report on drug cartels. While some journalists have had illegal drug dealings to supplement salaries, officials assume all are guilty and do little to solve or protect them. This situation has worsened over the past five years, especially since the free trade agreement has forced many smaller businesses out of business, and the drug cartels have gained a stronghold....
more »Mexico
Idea Lab is a group blog by innovators who are reinventing community news for the Digital Age.
Each Idea Lab blogger is a winner of the Knight News Challenge grant to reshape community news.
Learn more about the Knight News Challenge »
When Mobile Media Becomes Political
MobileActive.org posted an interesting interview with "Artivist" Ricardo Dominguez, who is working on a locative media project designed to assist immigrants crossing the border to the U.S. from Mexico. His work-in-progress concept, called the Transborder Immigrant Tool, leverages GPS enabled cell phones to aid in the safe passage of desert border crossers. "The device seeks to reduce the number of deaths along the border by helping immigrants locate resources such as water caches and safety beacons." Not only is the tool seemingly well designed (read below) for the population it targets, but it seems relevant for remote and wilderness emergency...
more »
Open Journalism Challenge: Can Paid Media Report on Plan Mexico this Well?
Immigration, military contractors, fiscal responsibility, foreign policy, domestic policy, trade policy, business, labor, crime- this story has it all, plus underlying themes about access to information and democracy (optional, if you care to report on those kinds of things). And all with a presidential race coming up! Is your favorite news source keeping up? The Bush administration is trying to get Congress to approve what it calls the Merida Initiative, a $1.4 billion aid package to Mexico in order to fight drug cartels. The plan is more commonly known as Plan Mexico because of its inevitable similarities with Plan Colombia,...
more »
Is This News? Reporting with Opinion on Plan Mexico
What is the public to do when an important matter such as $1.4 billion of military-police funding for a neighboring country head toward Congressional rubber-stamping with little media coverage? We take what we can get. And that tends to be reporting from people who have no steady income assured for their considerable journalistic efforts. When one does reporting out of a love of and a concern for humanity, one tends bring some of one's own perspective to the task. And in part what we get appears to be what we want. Alternative sources and aggregators for points of view are...
more »Featured Comment
It sounds like journalists today also have to be marketers. They have to know who they are trying to reach, and... to pitch their stories to a broader audience.
Topics
Monthly Archives
Get Idea Lab via E-mail
Creative Commons Attribution NC SA 3.0 License