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04 Dec 09

Jay Rosen on citizen journalism at the Knight Center : A Blog Around The Clock

75 minute video

scienceblogs.com/...rosen_on_citizen_journalis.php - Preview

comm217 journalism citizenjournalism

03 Dec 09

Journalists use RSS to track rivals, news, tweets & other info | BeatBlogging.Org

"RSS is an incredibly useful way for journalists to keep track of beats by watching what is being published online, whether on news sites, blogs, Twitter, saved Google search terms, etc."

beatblogging.org/...-rivals-news-tweets-other-info - Preview

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01 Dec 09

SMSONE: Micro-local news from India to make Silicon Valley jealous

"Consider something even more fundamental: Water. Much of the villages have government-owned water pipes that are turned on for an hour or so once a day, or even in some areas once a week. Everyone has to bring their vats, pitchers and empty kerosene cans and get as much water as they can while the pipes are on. But these pipes don’t really run on a schedule so people frequently miss getting the day or week’s water. Now, SMSONE subscribers get a text when the pipes are about to be turned on.

I know it’s not as life-changing, but I’d pay to get micro-local, highly relevant news about my neighborhood in San Francisco in 160-character bursts, whether it’s about a power or cable outage, a construction project that’s disrupting traffic or details on a shooting that just happened. And I might even welcome local ads that report a hot new restaurant opening or a sale at a boutique two streets over. I feel like modern, uber-connected life has made us less interested in “local news” as we used to think of it on a city or region level, but more interested in the micro-local, hence the excitement in the Valley around Foursquare, CitySourced, and a host of location-aware iPhone apps"

www.techcrunch.com/...smsone-micro-local-india-news - Preview

ict sms comm217

30 Nov 09

Doing it for themselves | Media | The Guardian

"The magazine, EastLondonLines, is a riposte to despair and also the growing opinion that British journalism courses leave students lacking the entrepreneurial skills needed to survive in a world where media organisations are struggling to make content pay. Here, Goldsmiths' MA journalism students have been put in charge of their own startup: they are hoping to build an audience from scratch, market it, make it attractive to advertisers and make contact with those potential sources of revenue."

www.guardian.co.uk/...tudents-launch-online-magazine - Preview

comm217

25 Nov 09

MediaShift Idea Lab . Journalism, Technology Starting to Add Up | PBS

"Earlier this month, Duke released "Accountability Through Algorithm: Developing the Field of Computational Journalism," a report based on a workshop held in July. The report is full of interesting ideas for applying technology to journalists' challenges. Here are a few of them.

Information Extraction, Integration and Visualization

A new set of tools would help reporters find patterns in otherwise unstructured or unsearchable information. For instance, the Obama administration posted letters from dozens of interest groups providing advice on issues, but the letters were not searchable. A text-extraction tool would allow reporters to feed PDF documents into a Web service and return a version that could be indexed and searched. The software might also make it easy to tag documents with metadata such as people's names, places and dates. Another idea is to improve automatic transcription software for audio and video files, often available (but not transcribed) for government meetings and many court hearings.

The report also suggests developing "lightweight" templates that enable journalists to create data visualizations based on XML or spreadsheet files, and tools that help them organize their findings in a timeline. As the report points out, reporters working on in-depth projects often create chronologies in lengthy spreadsheets or text documents. A better tool would let journalists "zoom in, tag events for publication, turn on and off players or events and otherwise use them effectively," the report says.

The Journalist's Dashboard

Here the Duke report suggests that journalists need "a tool with which to spot what's new and what's important in the flow of daily information." A dashboard could include:

* A news alert system similar to Google News that scanned only the sources specified by a beat reporter,identifying the originating publisher and the number of other sites that linked to the item;
* A tool helping journalists keep track of their sources, including news items about that person and citatio

www.pbs.org/...ogy-starting-to-add-up328.html - Preview

comm217

24 Nov 09

The New Journalist in the Age of Social Media | Socialmedia.biz

"Above is the presentation I gave at this gathering, organized by a group of nonprofits in a project called the New Media Lab (there’s no public presence yet, just a private wiki). And while its focus is squarely on the role that journalist/media producers will play in our project, it can also be applied to the new roles that journalists should be expected to take up in an age of social media if you work for a startup, whether it’s for-profit or nonprofit.

Called Doing Good 2.0: The next-generation’s impact on communication, media, mobile & civic engagement, it looks at the forces driving Web 2.0 and the next-generation Internet, the role of mobile, the new cultural norms that social media is ushering in, and the role of the New Journalist: how we need to still tell compelling stories about people and causes but how we also need to expand our repertoire in this new arena by wearing multiple hats:"

www.socialmedia.biz/...ist-in-the-age-of-social-media - Preview

journalism social_media comm217

23 Nov 09

MapLib.net - About

"Maplib.net turns pictures into zoomable& panable views in easy steps and enables new ways of viewing pictures, just like Google Maps does.
Features

1.

It's simple and professional knowledge is not required.
2.

Make annotations on pictures with legend.
3.

Various icons for markers, as well as uploading your own icons.
4.

Social network system. You can join groups and post topics, and share pictures with group members.
5.

Easily to embedded into your own website, for both atlas and pictures.
6.

Using tags and atlas to organize picture more efficiently.
7.

Full permission control system. Your atlas, pictures and groups can be open to specific users only.

Maplib.net can be used to

1.

Create geographic maps, for example, campus maps and so on.
2.

Create game maps, and share it with those who also love this game.
3.

View digital pictures in a whole new way, and invite your friends to make annotations on it.
4.

Introduce products. Just upload the picture of a product, and make annotations on parts of this product.
5.

Create flow charts that can be used for snapshots of web pages and softwares and so on.
6.

View huge pictures and save the loading time.
7.

And more... "

maplib.net/about - Preview

mapping comm217

20 Nov 09

Journalism Students Write On Twitter For Their Studies | Griffith University

"Social networking upstart Twitter has made the jump to academia's hallowed halls, with 'tweets' made compulsory writing for would-be journalists at Griffith University."

www.smh.com.au/...-curriculum-20091016-gzut.html - Preview

twitter comm217

18 Nov 09

YouTube - Direct's Channel

YouTube's video platform has enabled a new generation of content creators to connect with billions of viewers every day. There's a great opportunity for organizations to leverage this online activity for video campaigns, coverage, or programming initiatives - but many find it difficult to connect directly with YouTube's community in a simple, effective way. We've just made that a lot easier with YouTube Direct.

YouTube Direct allows you to embed the upload functionality of YouTube directly into your own site, enabling your organization to request, review, and re-broadcast user-submitted videos with ease. News organizations can ask for citizen reporting; nonprofits can call-out for support videos around social campaigns; businesses can ask users to submit promotional videos about your brand. With YouTube Direct, the opportunities to connect directly with the YouTube community are endless.

Key features of YouTube Direct include:

www.youtube.com/direct - Preview

video comm217

08 Nov 09

An introduction to social media for journalists « Reportr.net

"Valuable social networking presentation for the News21 Carnegie-Knight Initiative for the Future of Journalism Education.

It’s by Jeremy Rue, multimedia training instructor for the University of California-Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism."

reportr.net/...o-social-media-for-journalists - Preview

comm217 social_media

07 Nov 09

Computational Journalism | Areas Of Research | DeWitt Wallace Center for Media and Democracy

"What is computational journalism? Ultimately, interactions among journalists, software developers, computer scientists and other scholars over the next few years will answer that question. In July 2009 the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences hosted a workshop on this topic called Developing the Field of Computational Journalism. In their workshop report , James T. Hamilton and Fred Turner discuss how computational journalism’ s combination of algorithms, data, and knowledge from social sciences could help preserve the watchdog function of journalism.

Accountability Through Algorithm: Developing the Field of Computational Journalism describes how computational approaches, such as the development of a suite of open source reporting tools, can make it easier for reporters and citizens to hold government accountable. This workshop report, written by Hamilton and Turner, lays out the roles that foundations, government agencies, academic research centers, nonprofits, open source developers, journalists, and readers can play in the evolution of this new field."

dewitt.sanford.duke.edu/...computational_journalism - Preview

journalism comm217

04 Nov 09

4 Ways News Organizations are Using Twitter Lists

"Though Twitter Lists are new to most users, some news organizations are trying to stay ahead of the curve by taking advantage of the new feature and implementing it quickly. Whether by creating staff directories to make their journalists easier to find, or recommending tweeps to follow on specific subjects, Twitter lists are giving news sites the ability to curate news and further open up to Twitter users that can help them to gather news. "

mashable.com/...news-twitter-lists - Preview

twitter comm217

02 Nov 09

FoJ09 talk: Twitter as a system of ambient journalism « Reportr.net

"Here are the slides and the text of my presentation on ambient journalism at the Future of Journalism conference at Cardiff University:"

reportr.net/...a-system-of-ambient-journalism - Preview

twitter comm217

01 Nov 09

Build a dynamic local community news resource on Twitter in one hour

"Here’s a perfect way to engage your community by providing them with local breaking news resources using Twitter and Twitter Lists. And it only takes ONE HOUR to build… see the slideshow (best seen in full screen)!"

mediatransparent.com/...esource-on-twitter-in-one-hour - Preview

twitter comm217

30 Oct 09

7 Unique and innovative maps :: 10,000 Words

"
Throwing a few markers on an interactive map? That's so last year. The next generation of online maps or bigger, bolder and incredibly detailed. They provide a unique service to the viewer and push the envelope of data visualization and the distribution of information."

www.10000words.net/...nique-and-innovative-maps.html - Preview

mapping comm217

29 Oct 09

Sunlight Labs: Blog - Recovery.gov Augmented Reality Mashup

"As of today Android and iPhone 3GS users can see recovery.gov contract data on their phones via the Layar augmented reality application. Layar is an application that overlays your view of the real world with waypoints representing your favorite coffee place, the movie theatre you're trying to find, or in this case, where some of that $787 billion from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act is going.

If you have an iPhone 3GS or Android device you can install the Layar app for free and then search for "recovery" or "sunlight" within Layar to find this layer. The layer works best near large cities where you are most likely to find recovery contracts, below is an example of what it looks like on the streets of Washington DC."

sunlightlabs.com/...coverygov-contracts-your-phone - Preview

augmented_reality public_sphere iphone comm217

22 Oct 09

Is Google/Microsoft/Twitter in the news business? (Scripting News)

"And what business are they in now? I believe they're in the news business. This isn't tech anymore. This is what the Times and CNN should have become, what CBS, NBC and ABC should be. What Jay calls a pro-am system where everyone collaborates to create the realtime stream of news on all levels, national, international, local, broad coverage and specialized stuff. Everything from newsletters to nightly news. Everything flows through the same pipes, and curators pick off the good stuff and route it to people who are interested. This is the way news is done from here-on. We're not talking about the future, we're talking about now."

www.scripting.com/...sGooglemicrosofttwitterIn.html - Preview

twitter comm217

Goodbye To The Age Of Newspapers (Hello To A New Era Of Corruption) | The New Republic

"Public goods are notoriously under-produced in the marketplace, and news is a public good--and yet, since the mid-nineteenth century, newspapers have produced news in abundance at a cheap price to readers and without need of direct subsidy. More than any other medium, newspapers have been our eyes on the state, our check on private abuses, our civic alarm systems. It is true that they have often failed to perform those functions as well as they should have done. But whether they can continue to perform them at all is now in doubt."

www.tnr.com/...apers-hello-new-era-corruption - Preview

public_sphere comm217 credibility journalism

Public goods are notoriously under-produced in the marketplace, and news is a public good--and yet, since the mid-nineteenth century, newspapers have produced news in abundance at a cheap price to readers and without need of direct subsidy. More than any other medium, newspapers have been our eyes on the state, our check on private abuses, our civic alarm systems. It is true that they have often failed to perform those functions as well as they should have done. But whether they can continue to perform them at all is now in doubt.
Despite all the development of other media, the fact is that newspapers in recent years have continued to field the majority of reporters and to produce most of the original news stories in cities across the country. Drawing on studies conducted by the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism, Tom Rosenstiel, the project's director, says that as of 2006 a typical metropolitan paper ran seventy stories a day, counting the national, local, and business sections (adding in the sports and style sections would bring the total closer to a hundred), whereas a half-hour of television news included only ten to twelve. And while local TV news typically emphasizes crime, fires, and traffic tie-ups, newspapers provide most of the original coverage of public affairs. Studies of newspaper and broadcast journalism have repeatedly shown that broadcast news follows the agenda set by newspapers, often repeating the same items, albeit with less depth.

Online there is certainly a great profusion of opinion, but there is little reporting, and still less of it subject to any rigorous fact-checking or editorial scrutiny.
23 more annotations...
- Whether the Internet will ever support general-interest journalism at a level comparable to newspapers, it would be foolish to predict. The reality is that resources for journalism are now disappearing from the old media faster than new media can develop them
- One danger of reduced news coverage is to the integrity of government. It is not just a speculative proposition that corruption is more likely to flourish when those in power have less reason to fear exposure. The World Bank produces an annual index of political corruption around the world, based on surveys of people who do business in each country. In a study published in 2003 in The Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization, Alicia Adsera, Carles Boix, and Mark Payne examine the relationship between corruption and "free circulation of daily newspapers per person" (a measure of both news circulation and freedom of the press). Controlling for economic development, type of legal system, and other factors, they find a very strong association: the lower the free circulation of newspapers in a country, the higher it stands on the corruption index.
- And while the new digital environment is more open to "citizen journalism" and the free expression of opinions, it is also more open to bias, and to journalism for hire. Online there are few clear markers to distinguish blogs and other sites that are being financed to promote a viewpoint from news sites operated independently on the basis of professional rules of reporting. So the danger is not just more corruption of government and business--it is also more corruption of journalism itself.
- These developments raise practical questions for anyone concerned about the future of American democracy. If the traditional ways of sustaining professional journalism are insufficient, what models are there to support the genuinely vital public functions that the press has traditionally performed? How do these alternatives fit into the new digital environment?
- For the past three hundred years, newspapers have been able to develop and flourish partly because their readers have almost never paid the full cost of production. From the eighteenth century to the middle of the nineteenth century, many newspapers were politically subsidized, directly by governments or through political parties. Then, as consumer markets expanded, newspapers increasingly sold not just news to readers, but also readers to advertisers. And the more advertisers they gained, the less dependent they were on any single one.
- The key to the rise of independent and powerful newspapers in the United States in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was their role as market intermediaries--that is, in connecting large numbers of sellers (advertisers) and buyers in a local area. That role required changes in content, language, and design, so as to appeal to a wider public that included women, working-class, and immigrant readers. Instead of narrowly focusing on politics and business, newspapers now had an interest in presenting a wider range of stories.
- If there is one overriding factor behind the current financial crisis of the press, it is simply that the Internet has undermined the newspaper's role as market intermediary. Advertisers do not need to piggyback on the news to reach consumers, and consumers have other ways to find out about products and sales. Newspapers also cannot possibly duplicate online the monopoly position that they have enjoyed in print during recent decades as the sole surviving papers in their metropolitan area, and so they no longer have the pricing power for ads that Buffett describes as "economic heaven." Craigslist, eBay, and many other sites provide alternatives--and none of them bears any cost of news production.
  
  To read the news, moreover, consumers do not need to pay for it online.
- The implications of these developments for the public role of newspapers are dire. Think of the newspaper as a collection of different lines of business represented by its various sections, from the news pages to the classifieds. Insofar as newspapers have upheld a public-service vision, they have been engaged in cross-subsidy, using their profitable lines of business, such as the classifieds, to pay for news coverage that probably would have been hard to justify on a narrower view of return on investment. Especially in recent decades, when newspapers were cash cows, their owners could afford to pursue public-service journalism, and some of them did (others just milked their papers for all they were worth). In addition, Buffett's law of the newspaper jungle, the "survival of the fattest," favored a broad conception of the purview of the newspaper, attentive to a wide variety of human interests. Now the incentives are workin
- Of course, a medium that 40 percent of the public still claim to read should not be pronounced dead yet. The situation is also a bit more complicated, and more hopeful, than these trends suggest. Total readership of news that originates from newspapers has probably at least stabilized.
- Among many journalists as well as investors, the hope has vanished that newspapers as we have known them can make the transition to a world of hybrid print-online publication. Like network TV news and weekly newsmagazines, newspapers have been living off aging audiences that acquired their media habits in earlier decades. A few years ago, it seemed that they could rely on that aging print readership to tide them over until revenue began gushing from the Web. But online ads still account for only 8 percent of ad sales, and their growth has stalled just as earnings from print have tumbled. The result is that newspapers are shrinking not just physically or in labor power, but in the most important dimension of all--their editorial mission.
- The average reader who might have learned about world events in a local paper or on the evening news is probably not going to search out foreign news sites on the Internet. And it cannot be a good thing that at a time when America's economic and security interests are so entangled with the rest of the world, America's news media are withdrawing from it.
  
  Newspapers around the United States are also pulling back their coverage of Washington.
- The concern about statehouse coverage--indeed, about newspaper retrenchment in general--is not just the declining number of reporters, but deterioration in the quality of journalism. As the editorial ranks are thinned, internal checks on accuracy are being sacrificed. As reporters with years of experience are laid off, newspapers are losing the local knowledge and relationships with trusted sources that those reporters had built up, which enabled them to break important stories.
- After the dot-com bust, the effusive talk about the miracles of the information revolution thankfully went out of style. But the social transformation under way--and there ought to be no doubt that one is indeed underway--is breaking up old monopolies of communication and power and creating new possibilities for free expression and democratic politics. As in any upheaval, some effects are unanticipated, and not all of them are positive, and what is perhaps most confusing, the good and bad are often intertwined.
  
  By vastly increasing the options for diversion as well as information, the Internet has extended a process that had already begun when cable began increasing the number of TV channels. And if the political scientist Markus Prior is right, that expansion of choice is partly responsible for one of the most worrisome trends in American life: diminished attention to the news and reduced engagement in civic life among a significant part of the public.
- But there is another side to the story. As Yochai Benkler argues in his brilliant book The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom, the new "networked information economy" has some critical advantages for realizing democratic values. The old "industrial model" mass media have required large investments of capital and provided a platform to speak to the public for a relatively small number of people, but now the falling costs of computers and communication have "placed the material means of information and cultural production in the hands of a significant fraction of the world's population--on the order of a billion people around the globe." Instead of being confined to a passive role, ordinary people can talk back to the media or circumvent them entirely and enter the public conversation.
  
  The new public sphere, in Benkler's view, is also developing mechanisms for filtering information for reliability and relevance, organizing it into easily navigated paths, and raising it to higher levels of public debate, contrary to critics who have worried that the Internet would be a chaotic Babel or a polarized system of "echo chambers" (as Cass Sunstein argued in his book Republic.com). And, unlike the old mass media, the new digital environment facilitates decentralized individual and cooperative action, often organized on an open and voluntary basis. Benkler invests a great deal of hope in this type of non-market collaborative production--the kind that has generated new social media such as Wikipedia, which, amazingly, despite being an encyclopedia, has also become an important news medium because it is so rapidly updated.
  
  Of course, some of these innovations are mixed blessings: people can now share their misinformation as well as their knowledge. Viral email, Twitter, and social network sites can be used to spread rumors and malice through channels hidden from the wider public and insulated from criticism. Benkler is right about the many important gains from new technology, but he does not adequately balance the gains against the losses that the emerging networked economy is also bringing about--among them the problems that Prior identifies, such as the diminished share of the public following the news, and perhaps most important, the toll on the institutions of professional journalism.
- News distributed to the public is a public good in two respects. First, from a political standpoint, news contributes to a well-functioning society inasmuch as it enables the public to hold government and other institutions accountable for their performance. Second, news is a public good in the sense economists use that concept. When someone consumes a box of chocolates, no one else can have them, but that is not true of news. The news itself is never really "consumed" at all, which is why anyone can pass on news to those who have not paid for it--and in the digital environment, information is so easily and instantly passed on that news is, in a sense, even more of a public good than it has ever been. (Copyright protects only the form of expression, not the information itself.)
  
  Markets under-produce public goods because private incentives are insufficient to generate as much production of those goods as there would be if all those who derived a benefit from them had to pay. Still, for a long time, thanks largely to their role as market intermediaries, newspapers have been able to produce this particular public good--newsworthy information, necessary to hold government accountable--on a commercial basis. And that way of getting around the problem of financing news for the general public is now coming to an end.
  
  The non-market collaborative networks on the Web celebrated by Benkler represent an alternative way of producing information as a public good. Before Wikipedia was created, hardly anyone supposed it would work as well as it has. But it has severe limitations as a source of knowledge. Its entries, including news items, are re-written from other sources, and it does not purport to offer original research or original reporting. The blogosphere and the news aggregators are also largely parasitic: they feed off the conventional news media. Citizen journalists contribute reports from the scene of far-flung events, but the reports may just be the propaganda of self-interested parties.
  
  Voluntary networks cannot easily duplicate certain critical advantages that large-scale and professionally run media have had--the financial wherewithal to invest in trained reporters and editors and to assign them to beats and long projects, and a well-established system of professional norms that has been a source of conscientious motivation and restraint in the reporting of news. The new social media add value when they are a supplement to professional journalism. To the extent that they supplant it, however, the wildfires of rumor and malice will be harder to check.
- Nearly a century ago, in Liberty and the News, Walter Lippmann wrote:
  
      The news of the day as it reaches the newspaper office is an incredible
      medley of fact, propaganda, rumor, suspicion, clues, hopes, and fears,
      and the task of selecting and ordering that news is one of the truly
      sacred and priestly offices in a democracy. For the newspaper is in all
      literalness the bible of democracy, the book out of which a people
      determines its conduct. It is the only serious book most people read. It
      is the only book they read every day.
  
  Of course, the day is long gone when anyone would seriously claim the newspaper was the bible of democracy or that their editors exercise a priestly power. But the job of separating rumor from fact remains just as vital as it ever was. Although daily journalism may be losing its economic foundation, it has not lost its justification.
- If newspapers are no longer able to crosssubsidize public-service journalism and if the de-centralized, non-market forms of collaboration cannot provide an adequate substitute, how is that work going to be paid for? The answer, insofar as there is one, is that we are going to need much more philanthropic support for journalism than we have ever had in the United States.
  
  When a society requires public goods, the solution is often to use government to subsidize them or to produce them directly. But if we want a press that is independent of political control, we cannot have government sponsoring or bailing out specific papers. In the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, besides using printing contracts to subsidize favored party organs, the federal government supported the press in what First Amendment lawyers today would call a "viewpoint-neutral" way--through cheap postal rates that were available to all newspapers. And since the 1960s, both the federal and state governments have aided public broadcasting, which has enabled public TV and radio stations to become important sources of news.
- The other standard means of supporting the production of public goods is through private non-profit organization. In fact, non-profit support of journalism has recently been increasing.
- Besides full non-profit operation of a newspaper, a second approach is philanthropic support of specific kinds of journalism, available through multiple outlets, whether they are commercial or non-profit. The best-known example of this solution is ProPublica, which describes itself as "an independent, non-profit newsroom that produces investigative journalism in the public interest." Publishing online as of last June, ProPublica also works in partnership on some stories with newspapers such as The New York Times. The partnerships enable newspapers to keep down the costs of investigative stories, and they give ProPublica access to mass distribution as well as a check on quality. Similarly, the Kaiser Family Foundation, which focuses on health policy, announced last fall that it would begin directly employing reporters to create a health policy news service. According to Drew Altman, Kaiser's president, besides making some stories freely available to newspapers and online, the news service will establish partnerships with newspapers for specific stories, which the papers will then have the right to release first. Some other foundations that focus on specific areas of policy may follow this approach as a way to promote public awareness of their concerns.
- But there is yet a third use of non-profits--and it is for underwriting new models of journalism in the online environment. A good example of this approach is the Center for Independent Media, which, according to its director David Bennahum, receives about $4 million annually from seventy funders to support online political news sites in five states as well as one for national news, The Washington Independent. Bennahum says that "the narrative voice of newspapers is not what [online] readers want" and that the sites his center finances are instead doing a kind of journalism that brings readers into dialogue.
  
  The notion that the digital medium requires a more inclusive relationship with the "people formerly called the audience" is a common theme among online journalists. Joshua Micah Marshall, the founder of TalkingPointsMemo.com, which runs on a commercial basis, says that many of the stories on his site grow out of ideas and tips supplied by readers in thousands of emails daily. Any news operation has information flowing in and out; an online publication can productively open up this process to anyone who is able and prepared to help. Stories develop online incrementally, often through participation in a collaborative network, rather than being written behind the scenes and released only when checked and finished. This is entirely different from "citizen journalism," and has the potential to be just as rigorous as traditional journalistic practices.
- Doubtful that they can ever achieve the scale of the big metros, Rosenstiel compares the Web-based city news sites to aggressive city magazines. If one major concern is keeping government accountable, that kind of aggressive reporting is certainly a valuable function and well worth supporting. But owing to their more limited economic basis, the non-profit news sites are unlikely to be able to offer the coverage, or to exert the influence, of a daily newspaper read by half the people in a city.
- Many people have been expecting the successors of newspapers to emerge on the Web. But there may be no successor, at least none like the papers we have known. The metropolitan daily may be a peculiar historical invention whose time is passing. We may be approaching not the end of newspapers, but the end of the age of newspapers--the long phase in history when newspapers published in major cities throughout the United States have been central to both the production of news and the life of their metropolitan regions.
  
  Metropolitan newspapers have dominated news gathering, set the public agenda, served as the focal point of controversy, and credibly represented themselves as symbolizing and speaking for the cities whose names they have carried. They have tried to be everyone's source of news, appealing across the ideological spectrum, and to be comprehensive, providing their readers with whatever was of daily interest to them. Some newspapers, a smaller number than exist today, will survive the transition to the Web, but they probably will not possess the centrality, the scope, or the authoritative voice--much less the monopolies on metropolitan advertising--that newspapers have had.
- News coverage is not all that newspapers have given us. They have lent the public a powerful means of leverage over the state, and this leverage is now at risk. If we take seriously the notion of newspapers as a fourth estate or a fourth branch of government, the end of the age of newspapers implies a change in our political system itself. Newspapers have helped to control corrupt tendencies in both government and business. If we are to avoid a new era of corruption, we are going to have to summon that power in other ways. Our new technologies do not retire our old responsibilities.

13 Oct 09

AnalyzeThe.US — Analysis

"Employees of KBR (formerly Kellogg, Brown and Root) have been convicted of contractor fraud on numerous occasions. Although the employees themselves are blacklisted by the government – i.e. placed on the EPLS – there are no official links on record between these employees and KBR. This video uses both structured EPLS data and unstructured data from Department of Justice press releases to link excluded individuals to their employers.
"

www.analyzethe.us/analysis - Preview

visualization comm217 social_networks

11 Oct 09

How Google Wave could transform journalism | Technology | Los Angeles Times

For the last two months, while we've been testing the Google Wave developer preview, we have been talking amongst ourselves about how this thing could change (or add to) what we do. So, here's a list of a few wild ideas we had for using Wave.

latimesblogs.latimes.com/...-collaborative-journalism.html - Preview

comm217 google_wave