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08 Nov 09

Killing straw men

"Paul Carr’s main point appears to be that citizen journalists can’t get stuff right, so they should shut up, and those that record events instead of helping to save lives should be ripped a new one. Yet his main assertions are unsupported by the facts, his interpretation riddled with holes and his straw men pathetically easy to demolish.

There are interesting debates to be had about technology, social media, citizen journalism and eye witness accounts, but sadly Carr’s post touches on none of them in any meaningful way. I am befuddled as to why people on Twitter are seizing on it as breaking new ground, as it simply doesn’t. "

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twitter journalism citizenjournalism

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

22 Oct 09

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."

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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.

03 Oct 09

Directory of journalism resources | Socialbrite

Below is one of the best collections of resources to help citizen journalists — and anyone doing research on the Web — learn techniques of accuracy, fairness, transparency, independence and thoroughness in online reporting. Seasoned professionals should find these useful as well. I led the Principles of Citizen Journalism project team that compiled this directory.

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credibility comm217 journalism reference

27 Aug 09

Tocqueville: Book II Chapter 6

The effect of a newspaper is not only to suggest the same purpose to a great number of persons, but to furnish means for executing in common the designs which they may have singly conceived. The principal citizens who inhabit an aristocratic country discern each other from afar; and if they wish to unite their forces, they move towards each other, drawing a multitude of men after them. In democratic countries, on the contrary, it frequently happens that a great number of men who wish or who want to combine cannot accomplish it because as they are very insignificant and lost amid the crowd, they cannot see and do not know where to find one another. A newspaper then takes up the notion or the feeling that had occurred simultaneously, but singly, to each of them. All are then immediately guided towards this beacon; and these wandering minds, which had long sought each other in darkness, at length meet and unite. The newspaper brought them together, and the newspaper is still necessary to keep them united.

xroads.virginia.edu/...ch2_06.htm - Preview

public_sphere journalism

10 Aug 09

MediaShift . Five Ways to Use Mind-Mapping Tools in the Newsroom | PBS

Here are five possible applications for mind mapping tools in the newsroom. After a brief introduction to each, I'll talk about some useful online resources for learning more about mind mapping.

www.pbs.org/...-tools-in-the-newsroom222.html - Preview

mindmapping comm217 journalism

1) Mind mapping story ideas.
2) Taking notes.
2 more annotations...
- 3) Make change visual.
- 5) Community collaboration

07 Aug 09

MediaShift . How Computer-Assisted Reporters Evolved into Programmer/Journalists | PBS

It wasn't until half-way through my journalism degree that I realized I wasn't going to be a traditional reporter. I wasn't even going to be a multimedia reporter. I was going to be a programmer/journalist. Putting a slash in your title makes you more important.

I haven't been able to track down the first use of the phrase, but the earliest reference I could find using a Google News timeline search was in a 2006 interview with Adrian Holovaty, creator of Chicagocrime.org and EveryBlock. No surprise there. That interview was about a year before my revelation.

We're all used to seeing journalists work with words and photos, and in the last few years even video, Flash and more. But how do you tell a story with code? When did simple reporters start becoming programmer/journalists? The history of reporters and computers has been a long and winding road.
The History of CAR

With a little extrapolation, programming in journalism can be traced back to the 1960s and '70s. Most big newspapers had mainframe computers, and government data was being transferred from analog (paper) to electronic form. This was the beginning of what we now know under a slew of labels including Computer-Assisted Reporting (CAR), precision journalism or database journalism.

The earliest example of CAR is arguable, and

www.pbs.org/...-programmerjournalists219.html - Preview

journalism comm217

05 Aug 09

Journalism Needs Data in 21st Century

Journalism has always been about reporting facts and assertions and making sense of world affairs. No news there. But as we move further into the 21st century, we will have to increasingly rely on "data" to feed our stories, to the point that "data-driven reporting" becomes second nature to journalists.

www.readwriteweb.com/...needs_data_in_21st_century.php - Preview

comm217 journalism

23 Jul 09

Think Like A Journalist - A News Literacy Guide from NewsTrust.net - The Four Ds of Journalism

NewsTrust was created to promote quality journalism in the Internet age, a formidable task as millions of news-related posts, blogs and sites are created each day.

How do we make sense of all this digital noise?

NewsTrust knows how. We have assembled a network of the most talented journalists, educators, scholars and informed users who submit articles, opinion, news and more to our site, to enlighten you on current events that affect your personal and professional world.

media.newstrust.net/guides - Preview

journalism credibility

Poynter Online - E-Media Tidbits

To summarize more of Niles' argument: Since newspapers found online publishing technically difficult, news managers assumed that it would be at least as difficult for everyone. This led them to assume they would face limited competition online (only from large organizations).

Thus, they missed or dismissed competition arising from small startups or independent efforts outside of the "media business." This in turn led them to feel less pressure to be creative and innovative online, so they generally implemented conservative strategies in order to keep things as technically simple and under control as possible online. This mindset and approach ended up allowing new online competitors and technologies to quickly outpace news organizations

www.poynter.org/column.asp - Preview

journalism comm217

27 Jun 09

Detecting Bull: How to Identify Bias and Junk Journalism in Print, Broadcast and on the Wild Web

This multi-media book will help you develop your own BS (Bald Sophistry) detector as you look for reliable news in this era of "buyer beware" journalism.

detectingbull.com - Preview

credibility journalism comm217

15 Jun 09

Follow The Developments In Iran Like A CIA Analyst - The Atlantic Politics Channel

I've overdone this metaphor, but I really do see the panoply of sources we have about Iran as an intelligence service to the masses.

We've got reliable Humint -- on the ground sources. We've got open-source reports from broadcast and newspaper media. We've got analysis, in the form of great aggregation by smart observers. We lack, um, signals intelligence, but Twitter is really a form of SIGINT, isn't it? There's plenty of misinformation out there, like rumors that Ahmadinejad is going to stage an assassination attempt, so we need to be careful about how we judge the information. If we're a savvy analyst, we need to be careful about the weight we attach to photographs and video accounts. They're the most immediate and emotionally powerful, but they can distort our understanding of the situation, particularly of about the importance of specific developments.

politics.theatlantic.com/...in_iran_like_a_cia_analyst.php - Preview

twitter comm217 journalism digital_journalism

How online word-of-mouth can change mainstream media election coverage

Over the weekend, in an uprising perhaps not immediately noticed by the mainstream press, people at the grassroots started to protest, not only in Iran but around the world. Despite blockage of various internet sites by the Iranian government, videos of protesters like this, and photos of violence like this began to leak out of the country onto the open Internet. The power of the photos and messages coming from people inside Iran were then amplified by outsiders using blogs and other social media tools like Twitter.

Two days after the election, some of the most popular "trending topics" being discussed on Twitter involve the Iranian election. One of them, nicknamed "CNNfail," is particularly interesting. The notion is that while controversy and violence were occuring in a globally important and politically hairy country in the center of the Middle East, CNN was covering "dumb stories" rather than paying attention. After catching wind of this meme, however, CNN to its credit stepped up its coverage both online and on TV (while other networks appeared to do less).

www.examiner.com/...stream-media-election-coverage - Preview

comm217 journalism twitter smartmobs

28 May 09

Citizen Journalism: The Key Trend Shaping Online News Media - Introductory Guide With Videos - Robin Good's Latest News

Citizen Journalism has put democracy back in people's hands. An army of individuals with mobile phones, portable cameras, and blogs is rapidly replacing traditional media as a reliable and wide-ranging source of information. In this milestone report, Chris Willis and Shayne Bowman were among the first to try to explain what citizen journalism really is and why this bottom-up distribution approach could be the future of news.

www.masternewmedia.org/rend-shaping-online-news-media - Preview

journalism citizenjournalism comm217

Citizen Journalism: The Key Trend Shaping Online News Media - Introductory Guide With Videos
Citizen Journalism has put democracy back in people's hands. An army of individuals with mobile phones, portable cameras, and blogs is rapidly replacing traditional media as a reliable and wide-ranging source of information. In this milestone report, Chris Willis and Shayne Bowman were among the first to try to explain what citizen journalism really is and why this bottom-up distribution approach could be the future of news.

16 May 09

The Journalist's Guide to Twitter

Journalists are using Twitter to engage with their audience, connect with sources and continue building their personal brands.

The 140-character format forces writers to focus their attention and get to the point quickly. But this isn’t just sound-bite style reporting. I talked with some reporters about TwitterTwitter reviewsTwitter reviews and how they use it.

mashable.com/...twitter-journalism - Preview

twitter comm217 journalism literacy

Journalists are using Twitter to engage with their audience, connect with sources and continue building their personal brands.

The 140-character format forces writers to focus their attention and get to the point quickly. But this isn’t just sound-bite style reporting. I talked with some reporters about Twitter () and how they use it.

08 May 09

Wikipedia hoax points to limits of journalists' research - Ars Technica

Wikipedia may be a fantastic resource, but any savvy Internet user is aware of its limits. Edit wars, entries made and modified for PR purposes, hoaxes, and basic inaccuracies all creep into (and back out of) the system, meaning that any use of the information there for purposes that might be considered significant should require some serious fact-checking. And, accordingly, many academics don't accept references to Wikipedia, and its entries have been rejected as evidence by US courts. So, it's a bit of a surprise to find out that one Wikipedia hoax, perpetrated by a sociology student, managed to appear in a variety of news reports, and has stayed there even after the hoax was revealed.

arstechnica.com/...ts-of-journalists-research.ars - Preview

wikipedia credibility journalism

Wikipedia may be a fantastic resource, but any savvy Internet user is aware of its limits. Edit wars, entries made and modified for PR purposes, hoaxes, and basic inaccuracies all creep into (and back out of) the system, meaning that any use of the information there for purposes that might be considered significant should require some serious fact-checking. And, accordingly, many academics don't accept references to Wikipedia, and its entries have been rejected as evidence by US courts. So, it's a bit of a surprise to find out that one Wikipedia hoax, perpetrated by a sociology student, managed to appear in a variety of news reports, and has stayed there even after the hoax was revealed.

04 May 09

Technology Review: Blogs: Jason Pontin's blog: A Manifesto

Today's newspapers and magazines will be transformed or replaced by other publications, which will have new forms and modes of business. There will be a great and terrible clearing: scores of newspapers and magazines will vanish; those that survive will be much reduced; and most people employed as journalists or media professionals today will have different jobs in five years. At the same time, millions of Shirky's amateurs and Winer's sources will flourish to bewitch readers. But anyone who tells you that media-as-a-business is dying is wrong.

www.technologyreview.com/...23489 - Preview

journalism

Even a few years ago, Joseph
Addison and Sir Richard Steele, those 18th-century London gallants and the
founders of the Spectator,
would have recognized the forms and modes of business that characterized our
newspapers and magazines. Not now.

For 300 years, two related sources of revenues
sustained publications: subscriptions and advertising. The system worked
imperfectly. Most readers of newspapers and magazines were freeloaders,
borrowing copies someone else had bought; and because no one really knew how
many people read publications, or how advertisements influenced readers' purchasing,
advertisers spent their monies inefficiently.

But so long as subscription and advertising
revenues grew, the system did work. In
turn, the business of publishing supported the profession of journalism, which was,
when all is said and done, a useful thing. In open societies, magazines and
newspapers were the most important exchanges in the free marketplace of ideas. Publications
informed, instructed, diverted, and delighted.

But the Internet taught readers they might read
stories whenever they liked without charge, and it offered companies more-efficient
ways to advertise. Both parties spent less. As a consequence, today the
business of media is sickly.
The comparative advantage of
mainstream media is not the ownership of presses, but the collaboration of
professionals. The creation of good journalism is a tremendously laborious
process, requiring an infrastructure more expensive than any press. The
illustration and design of stories has an infrastructure, too. Developing an
audience that will attract particular advertisers requires another
infrastructure. Selling advertising requires yet another. These structures,
which allow publications to reach large, coherent audiences, can exist only
within complex organizations, mostly businesses.
1 more annotations...
- Today's newspapers and magazines will be transformed or replaced
  by other publications, which will have new forms and modes of business. There
  will be a great and terrible clearing: scores of newspapers and magazines will
  vanish; those that survive will be much reduced; and most people employed as
  journalists or media professionals today will have different jobs in five
  years. At the same time, millions of Shirky's
  amateurs and Winer's sources will flourish to bewitch readers. But anyone who
  tells you that media-as-a-business is dying is wrong.
  
  Tags:
  advertising, new media, magazine, market, newspaper, publishing

30 Apr 09

MediaShift . Building the Ideal Community Information Hub | PBS

Problem: Where can people find the local information they need, whether it's about a school board meeting, a new construction project or a nearby robbery? Solution: A community hub, with all the information aggregated in one online source and pushed out via libraries, in-person meetings, community radio, small run print publications and cable access TV.

www.pbs.org/...munity-information-hub120.html - Preview

community media comm217 journalism digital_journalism

Problem: Where can people find the local information they need, whether it's about a school board meeting, a new construction project or a nearby robbery? Solution: A community hub, with all the information aggregated in one online source and pushed out via libraries, in-person meetings, community radio, small run print publications and cable access TV.
8 Steps to Build the Ideal Community Information Hub

1) Crack open government data and access.
7 more annotations...
- 2) Bring together all stake-holders in the community for face-to-face discussions.
- 3) Teach digital media literacy as a basic course for all. Bridge the digital divide.
- 4) Create an online hub that aggregates local information.
- 5) Boost community radio with local reports, roundtable discussions, deeper looks at issues.
- 6) Disseminate information with smaller run print publications.
- 7) Rethink public access TV with online hooks.
- 8) Make libraries an important real-world hub.

07 Apr 09

The content cascade: How content will flow in digital news enterprises » Nieman Journalism Lab

Rather than trying to redefine “the basic unit of news” — it used to be the story; is it now the fact, or the topic, the issue, or what? — and what that implies for the work of journalists, going forward it will be most useful to think about content as a cascade, as in a stream running down a rocky glen, always moving, dividing, uniting, filling pools here and there, constantly finding new niches to fill.

www.niemanlab.org/...managing-the-content-cascade - Preview

comm217 literacy journalism wiki rss knowledge

Rather than trying to redefine “the basic unit of news” — it used to be the story; is it now the fact, or the topic, the issue, or what? — and what that implies for the work of journalists, going forward it will be most useful to think about content as a cascade, as in a stream running down a rocky glen, always moving, dividing, uniting, filling pools here and there, constantly finding new niches to fill.
The content cascade starts with raw information. It can be anything: reporter-gathered data, citizen journo input, crowd-sourced information, audio, video, press releases, government data and reports, industry data.

In a traditional newsroom, this stuff comes in, serves as story fodder, or not, gets piled up under and around the desks of reporters, and stays there — static — until the next general purge.

But in a digital newsroom, it can be digitally archived and organized, and much of it can be made available online to readers interested in digging into it. And of course, the digital newsroom further regards the entire Web as raw data and actively exploits that sourcing avenue.

At the next level in the content cascade model, significance is extracted from content — facts, background, comments and opinions are pulled into traditional “stories” as well as being analyzed, compared, questioned, evaluated, refuted, corrected, updated and otherwise spun and massaged. This happens in editorials, columns, blog posts, blog comments, Tweets, social network interactions, collaborative work by newsroom teams, and, not least of all, in actual conversations at the proverbial dinner tables, water coolers and bus stops, and even in old-fashioned letters to the editor. There are no walls around this process — it crosses all boundaries including those between rival news enterprises.
6 more annotations...
- All that massaging in blogs, comments, Tweets, social networks and conversations can now advance content into another stage, in which facts and opinions which have become generally accepted in the process are codified into wisdom — into generally accepted facts, into the fairly still, cool waters of collectively derived truth, into a collaboratively created, edited and augmented wiki.
- Why should a reporter write a 20-inch story containing just one or two new facts embroidered with a rehash of background, quotes from interested parties and ancient history, when all that’s really needed is a brief report presenting the new information and referring readers to the wiki for the rest?
- why should a reader, interested in deeper information about a subject in the news, have to search and sift through prior “stories” to figure out the background?
- Why should a reporter have a quota measured in “stories,” whether it’s two courts-and-cops reports a day or one in-depth investigative masterpiece a week? In the cascade model of content management, every reporter follows a portfolio of issues, topics, trends, trials, personalities, businesses, governmental entities, towns, streets, buildings, non-profits — and a day’s work may consist of finishing a major investigative piece on one of these, while blogging about new developments touching on a handful of others, and adding new facts to the wiki entries for a bunch more. And the process of augmenting or correcting the wiki never really ends.
- In the traditional model, whether in print or online, we only scan the latest “stories” to glean what’s of interest. But in a functional content cascade environment, we just watch the stream. We fish, if you’ll pardon the extended metaphor — today perhaps with a set of RSS feed specs, but soon, one hopes, with more sophisticated tools that can deliver to us what we really want and need on whatever device we want it.
- What’s clear is that the flow of content, going forward, will no longer be linear, but convoluted. Facebook refers to its own content presentation as a “stream”; Twitter’s is clearly streamlike; but both are random and chaotic, as well, and both must be seen as elements of the raw material level of the content cascade — bits and pieces that will be rejoined downstream in blog and wiki formats.

DIP's Dispatches from the Imagination Age: The Launch of a Journalistic Experiment: The Virtual Newsroom of the American University in Cairo

Today at the Virtual Journalism Conference at the Murrow School of Communication at Washington State University (WSU), Dancing Ink Productions (DIP) is proud to premiere our latest documentary: "Virtual Journalism: Inside the Virtual Newsroom of the American University in Cairo." The documentary is part of an ongoing project in collaboration with Lawrence Pintak the director of the Kamal Adham Center for Journalism and Research to explore the transformation of the business and culture of journalism in a global context. It was produced in conjunction with Ill Clan Animation studios. It describes a news conference in Second Life organized by DIP and AUC which brought together James K. Glassman who was then US Undersecretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs and a group of eight Egyptian bloggers.

eurekadejavu.blogspot.com/...f-journalistic-experiment.html - Preview

journalism comm217 second_life

Today at the Virtual Journalism Conference at the Murrow School of Communication at Washington State University (WSU), Dancing Ink Productions (DIP) is proud to premiere our latest documentary: "Virtual Journalism: Inside the Virtual Newsroom of the American University in Cairo." The documentary is part of an ongoing project in collaboration with Lawrence Pintak the director of the Kamal Adham Center for Journalism and Research to explore the transformation of the business and culture of journalism in a global context. It was produced in conjunction with Ill Clan Animation studios. It describes a news conference in Second Life organized by DIP and AUC which brought together James K. Glassman who was then US Undersecretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs and a group of eight Egyptian bloggers.
The AUC Virtual Newsroom project idea was hatched by Pintak and DIP's Joshua Fouts over tea in Amman, Jordan at an Aspen Institute Retreat on U.S.-Arab Media. Fouts and Pintak were interested in trying to explore how blogging and other evolving Internet-based technologies could be used to illustrate how journalism is changing and what role these technologies, especially virtual worlds, can play in empowering and training journalists worldwide. Second Life, in particular, had a robust user base with a diverse global population.

That retreat also produced an article DIP wrote for the Aspen Institute called, "Virtual Pilgrimage to Mecca: Building Dialogue with Avatars," about an encounter DIP had at a virtual hajj to Mecca while conducting research for the Understanding Islam through Virtual Worlds project.

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