MediaShift

Digging Deeper

Reuters Looks to Africa and a Decentralized Future for Media

by Mark Glaser

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.

• February 21, 2007
• 3 comments

Digging Deeper

AP Warms Up to Blogs, Citizen Media at NowPublic

by Mark Glaser

There's something bland and homogeneous about an Associated Press wire story. Just the facts, ma'am, in classic inverted pyramid style. The satirical newspaper The Onion has made a mint mocking the news wire style, and the blogosphere has targeted the AP and Reuters for hidden agendas in their oh-so-perfect objective style.

• February 14, 2007
• 18 comments

We Media 2007

How Technology Can Help a Conference Succeed

by Mark Glaser

I am back from the We Media conference in Miami, but I am not done reporting on what took place there, and how the conference helped clarify the role of "we media" or citizen media in society. While I spent the last couple blog posts savaging the parts of the conference that got under my skin -- most notably an underlying theme of Big Media showing they "got it" -- it's also worth writing about the good parts of the conference. (As a former writer of humorous satire, including a newsletter called "3-Minute Roast" and a CNET column called "Skewer," I obviously gravitate toward the negative before the positive.)

• February 12, 2007
• 9 comments

We Media 2007

Informal Conversations Trump Pomp of Panels

by Mark Glaser

MIAMI -- Your tireless correspondent shook off the South Beach-induced hangover and slogged over to the University of Miami for another day of schmoozing and conversing at the We Media conference. Once again, I was impressed with the people who attended the confab, and learned a lot about what's going on in the social media world -- but not in the main auditorium where the "stage-setters" largely hogged the stage.

• February 9, 2007
• 5 comments

We Media 2007

Mainstream Media Wants to Take Back Control

by Mark Glaser

MIAMI -- Thanks to the audience taking control of their media experience and creating their own media in blogs, podcasts, video and social networks, the people who are losing control have decided to meet -- and meet, and meet again -- until they figure out how they can take back some control of this uncontrollable situation.

• February 8, 2007
• 16 comments