By now almost everyone knows that a group of demonstrators protesting against the killing of a young father by a transit officer splintered off and began a wave of destruction in downtown Oakland. Mainstream media outlets called it everything from a riot to a violent protest. Some bloggers referred to it as a civil unrest, rebellion or both a riot and civil unrest. Like is true with many issues, our perception of what happened is often shaped by our fault lines of race, class, gender, generation and geography. Perhaps because I live in Oakland and spent some years in Detroit,...
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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.
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Meet the Editor Behind Sterohyped
A little more than a year ago, when Jossip Initiatives launched Stereohyped, it tapped former print journalists Lauren Williams to be the editor for the "black interest" site, which boasts the tag line "Once you blog black, you never go back." Written with attitude, humor and at times a sense of horror at the mess we humans can make, the site provides one stop shopping for those who enjoy everything from Beyonce to Barack, from the serious to the celebrity. On any given day, Williams will post an item and links on subjects ranging from an historical overview of the...
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Sean Bell Illustrates Lines that Divide Us
Blaring red headlines on the Drudge Report announced to the world that the three New York City Police who shot Sean Bell 50 times, killing him, were found not guilty. Drudge, with his right wing reputation, it turns out was one of the only mainstream white blogs to prominently play the Bell verdict. In fairness, the Huffington Post did have a small headline about the verdict. Things were different in the black blogosphere. It wasn't just that the black interest sites carried the coverage, it was also that many included rich texture and context in which to look at the...
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When I first began thinking of launching a website that published the work of citizen journalists, one of the most alluring potential benefits was the idea of putting more eyes on the street. If we ran a typical local news operation that had a dozen reporters or so, we'd have a dozen people out and about who might see some news. But with grassroots journalism, the possibilities are vastly expanded. We got an illustration of how important that is on Friday, when citizen journalist Kimberly Michaels called to say that an acquaintance had witnessed an instance of apparent police brutality...
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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.
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