NewsTrust - Citizen Journalism - Most Recent Stories: News (Independent)

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".

NewsTrust Rating: 4.2 average (not enough reviews) - See Review » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

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."

NewsTrust Rating: 5.0 average (not enough reviews) - See Review » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

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.

NewsTrust Rating: 4.8 average (not enough reviews) - See Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

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.

NewsTrust Rating: 4.2 average - 5 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

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.

NewsTrust Rating: 4.0 average - 3 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

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.

NewsTrust Rating: Not rated yet - See Info » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

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.

NewsTrust Rating: 3.9 average - 4 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

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.

NewsTrust Rating: 3.4 average (not enough reviews) - See Review » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

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.

NewsTrust Rating: 3.8 average (not enough reviews) - See Review » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

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.

NewsTrust Rating: 4.2 average (not enough reviews) - See Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Obama's First 100 Days: How the President Fared In the Press vs. Clinton and Bush

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

Journalism.org - By Tom Rosenstiel, Amy Mitchell, Mark Jurkowitz - Apr. 28 (News Analysis) - As he marks his 100th day in office, President Barack Obama has enjoyed substantially more positive media coverage than either Bill Clinton or George Bush during their first months in the White House, according to a new study of press coverage. Overall, roughly four out of ten stories, editorials and op ed columns about Obama have been clearly positive in tone, compared with 22% for Bush and 27% for Clinton in the same mix of seven national media outlets during the same first two months in office, according to a study by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism. The study found positive stories about Obama have outweighed negative by two-to-one (42% vs. 20%) while 38% of stories have been neutral or mixed. When a broader universe of media—one that includes 49 outlets and reflects the more modern media culture of 2009, is examined, the numbers for Obama’s coverage are similar, though somewhat less positive and somewhat more negative. In this expanded universe of media—which includes news websites, additional regional and local newspapers, plus cable news, network morning news, and National Public Radio, 37% of Obama’s coverage has been positive, 40% neutral and 23% negative. Several factors may be at play in the favorable tone Obama has received during these first months. One element is the pace and sweep of Obama’s activities. Bush and Clinton both started their presidencies pursuing policy agendas much more of their own making than Obama has. But the data suggest the current president has managed the media narrative anyway by responding to the economic crisis with so many new proposals and doing so many events that it has been hard for both his critics and the media to keep up.

NewsTrust Rating: 3.9 average - 4 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Free the Kazakhstan Internet

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

Media Nation - Apr. 27 (News Report) - During my brief time in Kazakhstan, I got the impression that the government is trying to move beyond its repressive past. The country, a former Soviet republic, also seems to be an island of stability in a volatile part of the world. It would send a strong and encouraging message if the government drops its proposal to censor speech online.

NewsTrust Rating: 3.6 average - 3 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Obama and State Secrets? Shhh… : CJR

Sat, 11 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Columbia Journalism Review - By Clint Hendler - Apr. 11 (News Analysis) - But on Friday, that new department sought to have the case dismissed by relying, in part, on a broad reading of a legal principle oft invoked by the Bush department, that the federal government could essentially stop legal proceedings by claiming that any litigation of the case would reveal state secrets. This is a big deal, but so far the story has received little light outside of generally liberal leaning portions of the media.

NewsTrust Rating: 4.0 average (not enough reviews) - See Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Teens know what they want from online news

Fri, 10 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Northwestern University - Apr. 10 (Poll) - A 2009 research study from the NAA Foundation and the Media Management Center at Northwestern University looks at how newspapers can engage with young people. ... "Today’s young people are more disengaged from news than their counterparts in previous generations were. Extensive research shows that if people aren’t news consumers by the time they become adults, they’re not likely to develop much of a news habit later."

NewsTrust Rating: 3.9 average (not enough reviews) - See Review » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Bloggers Ponder the Decline of Religion, Economic Prosperity and Newspapers

Fri, 20 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Journalism.org - By Tom Rosenstiel - Mar. 20 (News Analysis) - The online conversation last week was strikingly different than the mainstream news agenda. While the traditional press focused on economic villains-such as AIG and Bernard Madoff-bloggers largely eschewed partisan squabbling and parsing of details for a more abstract and far-reaching discussion. As the economy struggled, a major newspaper shut down and a survey highlighted the diminishing appeal of organized religion, bloggers and social media pondered the dramatic social changes that might be taking place and what the implications could be. The top subject was the decline in people claiming an affiliation with organized religion, as documented in a new study. This storyline made up 30% of the most linked to stories by blogs and social media sites for the week of March 9-13 according to the New Media Index from the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism. The second largest story, at 24% of the links, involved the continuing problems in the U.S. economy. While some of the attention was focused on government actions, many bloggers focused on a prediction by New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman that the current crisis would change the growth model that has been the basis of the U.S. economy for the past 50 years.

NewsTrust Rating: 3.8 average - 3 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

The Death and Life of Great American Newspapers

Wed, 18 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0700

The Nation - By John Nichols, Robert W. McChesney - Mar. 18 (Special Report) - Communities across America are suffering through a crisis that could leave a dramatically diminished version of democracy in its wake. It is not the economic meltdown, although the crisis is related to the broader day of reckoning that appears to have arrived. The crisis of which we speak involves more than mere economics. Journalism is collapsing, and with it comes the most serious threat in our lifetimes to self-government and the rule of law as it has been understood here in the United States. After years of neglecting signs of trouble, elite opinion-makers have begun in recent months to recognize that things have gone horribly awry. Journals ranging from Time, The New Yorker, The Atlantic and The New Republic to the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times concur on the diagnosis: newspapers, as we have known them, are disintegrating and are possibly on the verge of extinction. Time's Walter Isaacson describes the situation as having "reached meltdown proportions" and concludes, "It is now possible to contemplate a time in the near future when major towns will no longer have a newspaper and when magazines and network news operations will employ no more than a handful of reporters." A newspaper industry that still employs roughly 50,000 journalists--the vast majority of the remaining practitioners of the craft--is teetering on the brink. Blame has been laid first and foremost on the Internet, for luring away advertisers and readers, and on the economic meltdown, which has demolished revenues and hammered debt-laden media firms. But for all the ink spilled addressing the dire circumstance of the ink-stained wretch, the understanding of what we can do about the crisis has been woefully inadequate. Unless we rethink alternatives and reforms, the media will continue to flail until journalism is all but extinguished.

NewsTrust Rating: 5.0 average (not enough reviews) - See Review » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Get Off the Bus

Thu, 05 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Columbia Journalism Review - By Amanda Michel - Mar. 05 (Special Report) - Collectively, we could do what a single reporter or traditional news organization could not. We dispatched people to report on dozens of events happening simultaneously around the country. We distributed research tasks among hundreds of volunteers, instead of a handful of paid reporters working full-time for weeks. Ground-level access, networked intelligence, and distributed labor became our editorial mainstays. More than twelve thousand people eventually signed up to participate in one way or another, including seventeen hundred writers. With such numbers, Mayhill Fowler’s Bittergate story—or something like it—was almost inevitable.

NewsTrust Rating: 3.2 average - 5 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Journalism Challenged In A Changing Landscape

Mon, 16 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Oxford Analytica - Feb. 16 (News Report) - Throughout the rich countries of the developed world, the audience for broadcast news, especially on television, is falling. The audience for current affairs programs is declining even more rapidly. Where publicly funded broadcasters can continue to support significant news and current affairs divisions, commercial television is cutting back across the board on once prestigious programs. The news they do carry is markedly lighter in content, more concerned with crime and celebrity than has previously been the case. Great U.S. networks that had once kept a legion of correspondents in bureaus throughout the world now have only a handful.

NewsTrust Rating: 3.3 average (not enough reviews) - See Review » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Letter From Athens: Greek Tragedies and the News Media in the Age of Twitter - NAM

Tue, 16 Dec 2008 00:00:00 -0800

New America Media - By Andrew Lam - Dec. 16 (News Analysis) - From Greek to Shakespeare to modern tragedies, the plot often pivots on misinformation and rumor: think Iago lying to the Moor or the whispers of witchcraft in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. In an age when serious journalism is on the retreat – holed up, literally, in a five-star hotel in my case – and the world is awash with rumors and misinformation, one cannot help but think that the much touted “Information Age” is not what it’s cracked up to be.

NewsTrust Rating: Not rated yet - See Info » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

The Web Guru

Tue, 25 Nov 2008 00:00:00 -0800

New York Observer - By John Koblin - Nov. 25 (News Report) - The blogger, professor and media consultant has, through his Web sites, seminars, journalism classes, panel-discussion appearances and the occasional flame-war, preached for some time now the gospel of New Media. These days, it’s taking hold — and not just among the patchwork constituency of media studies majors, technophile utopians and media malcontents left and right.

NewsTrust Rating: 3.9 average - 4 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

How Our Gutless Media Helped Trigger the Credit Crisis

Thu, 20 Nov 2008 00:00:00 -0800

AlterNet - By Trudy Lieberman - Nov. 20 (News Analysis) - Truly educating the public seems a pretty remote goal for journalism when consumerism reigns. There's no consumer movement to make news; there are no leaders to be newsmakers, and few local government agencies left dedicated solely to the consumer cause. Heads of regulatory agencies rarely are invited to appear on the Sunday morning news shows, as they once were. There are only advocacy groups, including what remains of the old Nader organization, that get quoted here and there but have little clout.

NewsTrust Rating: 4.5 average - 6 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

The New Newstrust: Features, Insight from Community

Tue, 07 Oct 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Poynter Institute - By Amy Gahran - Oct. 07 (News Report) - Newstrust, the online community that rates the quality of mainstream an independent news stories, just debuted several new features with its site redesign. I'll confess that until now I hadn't explored this site much because it seemed too cluttered and involved too much of a learning curve. But with the redesign, I think it's much more inviting and accessible. ...Which brings up another strength of NewsTrust: They're not just looking at mainstream news orgs, and they're not even limiting their ratings to news orgs at all. Instead, this site recognizes that news comes from many places, including blogs, comedy shows, and advocacy groups. It's interesting to compare how all kinds of news venues inspire trust -- or not.

NewsTrust Rating: 3.4 average - 3 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Citizen Journalists Need to Learn from Jobs Rumor Debacle

Sun, 05 Oct 2008 00:00:00 -0700

daniweb.com - By Ron Miller - Oct. 05 (News Analysis) - This week we learned what can happen when Citizen Journalism runs amok with the Jobs heart attack rumor...

NewsTrust Rating: 3.8 average (not enough reviews) - See Review » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Pre-Emptive Strikes Against Protest at RNC

Tue, 02 Sep 2008 00:00:00 -0700

TruthOut - By Marjorie Cohn - Sep. 02 (News Report) - The raids targeted members of "Food Not Bombs," an antiwar, anti-authoritarian protest group that provides free vegetarian meals every week in hundreds of cities all over the world. They served meals to rescue workers at the World Trade Center after 9/11 and to nearly 20 communities in the Gulf region following Hurricane Katrina. Also targeted, were members of I-Witness Video, a media watchdog group that monitors the police to protect civil liberties. The group worked with the National Lawyers Guild to gain the dismissal of charges or acquittals of about 400 of the 1,800 who were arrested during the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York.

NewsTrust Rating: 4.4 average (not enough reviews) - See Review » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Law School Dean Calls Conference to Plan Bush War Crimes Prosecution - ABA Journal - Law News Now

Mon, 23 Jun 2008 00:00:00 -0700

ABA Journal - By Debra Cassens Weiss - Jun. 23 (Special Report) - The dean of Massachusetts School of Law at Andover is planning a September conference to map out war crimes prosecutions, and the targets are President Bush and other administration officials.

NewsTrust Rating: 4.2 average (not enough reviews) - See Review » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer