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Howard Rheingold's Library tagged journalism   View Popular

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. "

charman-anderson.com/...killing-straw-men - Preview

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."

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.

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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.

www.socialbrite.org/...ectory-of-journalism-resources - Preview

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.
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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

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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 (Twitter reviews) 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.
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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.

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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.

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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

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