NewsTrust - Citizen Journalism - Most Recent Stories

Hellman to invest $5 million in journalism nonprofit

Fri, 25 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

San Francisco Chronicle - By James Temple - Sep. 25 (News Analysis) - San Francisco financier Warren Hellman will invest $5 million to develop a nonprofit journalism venture that will provide regional news coverage online and feed stories to media partners including KQED and possibly the New York Times. The goal of the organization, which is expected to begin next year and create "more than dozens" of positions, is to ensure thorough coverage of local politics, social issues, education and other topics as the traditional media industry shrivels. "We've lost a lot," said Hellman, who specifically bemoaned dwindling reporting on subjects like the San Francisco Ballet, local business openings and vetting of political candidates. "We're going to be meeting an unmet need."

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In San Francisco, Plans to Start News Web Site

Fri, 25 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By Richard Perez Pena - Sep. 25 (News Report) - A wealthy investor, a university journalism school and a public radio station have joined forces to create a nonprofit local news Web site for the San Francisco area, in what may be the largest and most ambitious of dozens of similar local news operations that have cropped up around the country.

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-- Yes Men Say No to Corporate Greed

Fri, 25 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Washington Post - By Jacques Servin, Igor Vamos - Sep. 25 (Opinion) - We are the Yes Men, two guys who dress up as powerful businessmen, propose horrible things to audiences of actual powerful businesspeople and film them cheerfully applauding our most outrageous -- and often illegal -- ideas.

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Banish the Cyber-Bigots

Thu, 24 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Washington Post - By Michael Gerson - Sep. 24 (Opinion) - The Internet could represent a flourishing of democracy. Instead it amplifies hate. The brutality of public debate on the Internet is due to one fact above all -- the option of anonymity

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Editorial: If you thought ACORN was bad ...

Wed, 23 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Dallas Morning News - Sep. 23 (Editorial) - We've all heard plenty about a private U.S. government contractor whose employees were caught behaving unspeakably and which now faces the swift and brutal withdrawal of taxpayer dollars by a Congress demanding accountability. That was ACORN, of

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Cap-and-trade & Health Care & Insurance Reform I see these two issues as one and the same thing. The first one is to heal our planet, and the second is to heal our human bodies. Also, both issues have to deal with how the 'healing' is delievered and wh

Fri, 21 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Washington Post - By Foreign policy, EU news, climate, green technology, health. - Aug. 21 (Investigative Report) - Experts and politicians on whether health care reform will trump climate change.

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Hyper-local news site EveryBlock bought by MSNBC

Tue, 18 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

pressgazette.co.uk - By Conrad Quilty-Harper - Aug. 18 (News Report) - MSNBC.com has bought the US hyper-local news and information aggregator EveryBlock. The site allows users in 15 cities across the US to enter their zip codes (postcodes) and get news, public information, photos and local blogs about their neighbourhood displayed across interactive maps. Everyblock, which has been operating since July 2007, was established by data journalism expert Adrian Holovaty with a $1.1m grant from the Knight Foundation. Holovaty rose to public prominence after designing and launching Chicagocrime.org to chart publicly available crime information onto maps. Local information and news is increasingly being seen as valuable by big web portals. Microsoft’s news and entertainment portal MSN is looking to add UK regional newspaper content to its MSN Local site, integrating papers’ feeds with with its postcode-searchable map. The terms of the Everyblock deal with MSNBC.com were not disclosed, however, reports have claimed the price tag was several million dollars. The company's six full-time employees have all been hired by MSNBC.com, and will remain in the company's Chicago headquarters. MSNBC.com, a joint venture between Microsoft and NBC Universal, said it would continue to operate the site as a distinct brand, "with the same logo and design [and] with the same everyblock.com domain".

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The Many Layers of Nahalat Shimon beg the question: Where's the money coming from?

Sun, 09 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

arabisto.com - By Eileen Fleming - Aug. 09 (Special Report) - Last Sunday morning just before sunrise, Israeli forces evicted seventy more Palestinians from their homes in the Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah, which is being taken over by the Nahalat Shimon settlers. "The events in Sheikh Jarrah garnered international censure from the European Union, the United Nations (UN) and from Britain, which said it was 'appalled' at the move. US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Monday night called the Israeli evictions "deeply regrettable" and she urged "the government of Israel and municipal officials to refrain from such provocative actions."

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Now on YouTube, Local News

Mon, 03 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By Brian Stelter - Aug. 03 (News Report) - With its ability to collect articles and sell advertisements against them, Google has already become a huge force in the news business — and the scourge of many newspapers. Now its subsidiary YouTube wants to do the same thing to local television. YouTube, which already boasts of being “the biggest news platform in the world,” has created a News Near You feature that senses a user’s location and serves up a list of relevant videos. In time, it could essentially engineer a local newscast on the fly. It is already distributing hometown video from dozens of sources, and it wants to add thousands more. YouTube says it is helping TV stations and its other partners by creating a new — but so far not fiscally significant — source of revenue.

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Declassified Docs Reveal Military Operative Spied on WA Peace Groups, Activist Friends Stunned

Tue, 28 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Democracy Now - By ANJALI KAMAT, Amy Goodman, - Jul. 28 (News Report) - Newly declassified documents reveal that an active member of Students for a Democratic Society and Port Militarization Resistance in Washington state was actually an informant for the US military. The man everyone knew as “John Jacob” was in fact John Towery, a member of the Force Protection Service at Fort Lewis. The military’s role in the spying raises questions about possibly illegal activity. The Posse Comitatus law bars the use of the armed forces for law enforcement inside the United States.

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To All the Sharp Dressed Soldiers Shipping Out

Mon, 27 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Op Ed News - By Eileen Fleming - Jul. 27 (Editorial) - "You can't understand the Taliban without knowing about America's covert operations in the region in the 1980s. President Ronald Reagan's administration, mainly through the CIA, used the Pakistani Intelligence services to fund, arm, and train Afghan and foreign Islamist jihadis to defeat the Soviet army in Afghanistan. Pakistan subsequently used "channels built with U.S. money" to install in Afghanistan a friendly government -- the Taliban. "As I write, 4,000 newly arrived U.S. Marines are trudging through the blistering heat of Helmand Province to push back the Taliban so local Pashtuns can turn out to vote next month for Karzai, their fellow Pashtun. What's wrong with this new Obama strategy?"

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Walter Cronkite (1916-2009)

Mon, 20 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Democracy Now - By Robert Parry, Danny Schechter, AMY GOODMAN - Jul. 20 (News Analysis) - Praise for Cronkite’s work and legacy is all over the news, but few in the mainstream media have mentioned what many consider Cronkite’s most important news moment. In February 1968, soon after he returned from a trip to Vietnam, Cronkite cast doubt on the war and helped turn the tide of American public opinion against it.

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Despite 'Bleakest' Year, Journalism Report Sees Some Promise

Thu, 09 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Miller-McCune - By Tom Price - Jul. 09 (Special Report) - This is the first of two articles examining the Project for Excellence in Journalism's latest annual examination of the news media in the United States.

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Crap Detection 101

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

San Francisco Chronicle - By Howard Rheingold - Jul. 07 (Special Report) - The answer to almost any question is available within seconds, courtesy of the invention that has altered how we discover knowledge - the search engine. Materializing answers from the air turns out to be the easy part - the part a machine can do. The real difficulty kicks in when you click down into your search results. At that point, it's up to you to sort the accurate bits from the misinfo, disinfo, spam, scams, urban legends, and hoaxes. "Crap detection," as Hemingway called it half a century ago, is more important than ever before, now that the automation of crapcasting has generated its own word: "spamming." Unless a great many people learn the basics of online crap detection and begin applying their critical faculties en masse and very soon, I fear for the future of the Internet as a useful source of credible news, medical advice, financial information, educational resources, scholarly and scientific research. Some critics argue that a tsunami of hogwash has already rendered the Web useless. I disagree. We are indeed inundated by online noise pollution, but the problem is soluble. The good stuff is out there if you know how to find and verify it. Basic information literacy, widely distributed, is the best protection for the knowledge commons: A sufficient portion of critical consumers among the online population can become a strong defense against the noise-death of the Internet.

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Katie Couric, Tavis Smiley, Bob Woodward, Nicholas Kristof, and I Hit YouTube with Pointers for Citizen Journalists

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Huffington Post - By Arianna Huffington - Jun. 30 (Comment) - We want to deepen the conversation about the importance of citizen reporting in today's media landscape," Steve Grove, the head of news and politics at YouTube, told me. "We want to help media organizations begin to leverage the tremendous power of citizen journalists to contribute to their coverage, and to give citizen reporters new opportunities to improve their work and get it seen by more people. The YouTube Reporters' Center is a great place to get started."

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Voice of Iran

Fri, 26 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Link TV - By Erin Cokin - Jun. 26 (News Analysis) - A propaganda war is underway. Following the extraordinary presidential election, Iran's state-controlled media are aggressively promoting their own version of news events. It is a very different story from the one that is being told in the Western media.

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Iran: When journalists can't be heard, how successful can citizen journalism be at providing back-up?

Wed, 24 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700

The Editors Weblog - By Emma Heald - Jun. 24 (News Analysis) - Following the Iranian election on 12 June, which both sides claim to have won, Iranians and the rest of the world wants to know the truth about the results, as well as wanting to follow protests and other developments. But this has proved more difficult than anticipated given the restrictions on reporting, both by Iranians and foreigners, and the occasion proved to be an opportunity for citizen journalism to show its value.

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Neda And Iran's YouTube Revolution

Mon, 22 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Silicon Alley Insider - By Matt Mireles - Jun. 22 (News Analysis) - More than Twitter, it is the ubiquity of digital cameras and the democratization of video publishing that makes this revolution so different. If it were up to CNN and the old school broadcast networks, you would have never heard of Neda, the 16-year-old Iranian girl. She was shot in the heart by Iranian Security Forces as the cell phone cameras rolled and her father stood by. More than some sophisticated Internet filtering program, these guardians of the TV screen were the real censors. They controlled the visual information pipeline. No longer. I saw Neda die for the first time last night––from two different angles. I was at home in bed. It changed how I felt about the ongoing violence. It changed what I thought the U.S. should do. I can't be the only one.

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Mapping the Arabic Blogosphere: Politics, Culture and Dissent

Tue, 16 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Berkman Center - Jun. 16 (Poll) - We conducted a study of the Arabic language blogosphere using link analysis, term frequency analysis, and human coding of individual blogs. We identified a base network of approximately 35,000 active blogs, created a network map of the 6,000 most connected blogs, and with a team of Arabic speakers hand coded 4,000 blogs. The goal for the study was to produce a baseline assessment of the networked public sphere in the Arab Middle East, and its relationship to a range of emergent issues, including politics, media, religion, culture, and international affairs.

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Twittering the uprising?

Mon, 15 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Sacred Facts - By Richard Sambrook - Jun. 15 (Opinion) - or two days I have stayed closely across Twitter's "coverage" of events in Iran. Twitter has had such a strong write up after previous breaking news stories, I thought I'd compare with conventional news coverage. Result? Mixed. If you, as an average news consumer, relied on Twitter you might believe all sorts of things had happened, which simply hadn't, running a high risk of being seriously misled about events on the ground. You might at best, have simply been confused. You probably wouldn't have thought Ahmadinejad enjoys much popular support at all.

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'#CNNFail': Twitterverse slams network's Iran absence | Webware

Sun, 14 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700

CNET News - By Daniel Terdiman - Jun. 14 (News Report) - Even as Twitter became the best source for rapid-fire news developments from the front lines of the riots in Tehran, a growing number of users of the microblogging service were incredulous at the near total lack of coverage of the story on CNN, a network that cut its teeth with on-the-spot reporting from the Middle East.

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Jon Stewart Continues To Hammer Fox News For Obama Coverage: Calls Out Hannity For Unfair Editing, The Rest for Irresponsible Insinuation (VIDEO)

Tue, 09 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Huffington Post - By Jon Stewart - Jun. 09 (Comedy News) - Last week Jon Stewart took on Fox News for their coverage of Obama's speech in Cairo calling their personalities "extremists" and saying, "What a torture it must be for such pretty people to see such ugly things." Last night, Stewart continued to pound the cable network for biased insinuations, and showed a clip of Hannity editing Obama's words to unjustly make him sound like a 9/11 apologist. This practice, as our own Jason Linkins has pointed out, is not unique to Hannity, but endemic to Fox as a whole. To keep things fair, Stewart also looked at the other big two cable networks: MSNBC and CNN. He mocked the former for mentioning Rush Limbaugh at every turn, and CNN for being desperate to win the social networking wars.

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The rebirth of news

Mon, 18 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Economist - May. 18 (News Analysis) - The race is crowded, but San Francisco stands a fair chance of becoming the first major American city without a daily newspaper. The San Francisco Chronicle, founded in 1865, is trimming its already pared-down staff in an attempt to avoid closure. And if it does disappear? “People under 30 won’t even notice,” says Gavin Newsom, the city’s mayor. Most industries are suffering at present, but few are doing as badly as the news business. Things are worst in America, where many papers used to enjoy comfortable local monopolies, but in Britain around 70 local papers have shut down since the beginning of 2008. Among the survivors, advertising is dwindling, editorial is thinning and journalists are being laid off. The crisis is most advanced in the Anglo-Saxon countries, but it is happening all over the rich world: the impact of the internet, exacerbated by the advertising slump, is killing the daily newspaper.

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A Grand Conspiracy Theory From Pakistan

Wed, 13 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - May. 13 (Opinion) - The Web site Pakistan Daily is an Islamabad-based hub for Pakistani citizen journalism, promising Pakistani readers: “Your News. Powered by You.” It is also an excellent place to turn if you want to read in on the latest conspiracy theories making the rounds in that country. Or just get very scared.

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Nominee Ethics Promises May Prove Unrealistic

Fri, 01 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

ProPublica - By Olga Pierce - May. 01 (News Analysis) - The ethics agreements that nominees for the Obama administration are required to file offer an unprecedented peek into the new president's high standards. But how high is too high? Last month, we posted a batch of these first-person letters, written and signed during the nomination process, outlining steps each nominee will take to avoid potential conflicts of interest and other ethical dilemmas.

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