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

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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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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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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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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'#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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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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Tea Parties Spark Conservative Insurgency Online

Mon, 13 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Fox News - By Judson Berger - Apr. 13 (News Report) - Conservatives may be catching up with their liberal counterparts in building a Web-driven, grassroots campaign to push their agenda. The online insurgency-in-the-making revolves around the so-called tea parties, the anti-tax protests popping up around the country that they expect to culminate Wednesday -- tax day -- with hundreds of rallies nationwide. The movement, which expanded over the last two months via the Web, is now relying heavily on independent media Web sites to track and cover the campaign. The digital evolution of conservative activists comes too late to help John McCain, whose new media arm was left in the dust by President Obama's campaign. But organizers are holding out hope that this movement has juice. "It's thoroughly viral," said Glenn Reynolds, the Instapundit.com blogger who hosts an online news show for the Web site Pajamas TV. Pajamas TV is on the frontlines of new media coverage for the tea parties. The Web site already has covered some protests and is pledging to recruit an army of citizen journalists, working without pay, to cover the hundreds of protests on April 15. Roger L. Simon, co-founder of the blog network Pajamas Media, which includes Pajamas TV, said the site went after tea party coverage because the mainstream media didn't. He said Pajamas TV has more than 200 people registered to report on Wednesday's tea parties. He said they'll send in text reports, as well as videos and photos, to drive what he expects to be about 12 straight hours of online coverage. "They'll be across the country essentially," he said, calling the operation a "big experiment."

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Schmidt to Newspaper Execs: I'm From Google, and I'm Here to Help

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

Wired - By John C Abell - Apr. 10 (News Report) - Google CEO Eric Schmidt walked into the lion's den Tuesday as the closing keynote speaker of the Newspaper Association of America's annual conference. He got a polite reception from publishers who often blame him for their ongoing economic woes. He addressed head-on publishers' criticisms that Google unfairly makes money off other people's content, reminded the news executives they have the absolute power to keep their content out of the search giant's mix, and told them — as nicely as he could — that they stopped innovating online more than a decade ago. Google has become a big target lately, with public accusations from major media executives that the company is somehow contributing to the demise of the economically faltering newspaper industry by making money off its news portal and search, and in return only sending newspapers a mere one billion clicks a month.

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Twitter's not a Google killer. It's not a Facebook killer, either.

Mon, 09 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Slate - By Farhad Manjoo - Mar. 09 (News Analysis) - For you and me, Twitter is a fun way to procrastinate. But for Silicon Valley's chattering classes, the microblogging company has emerged as something much more—the next Google, the next Facebook, or maybe some unbeatable combination of the two.

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Twitter Has Potential Buyers Atwitter

Wed, 04 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Business Week - By Heather Green, Robert D. Hof - Mar. 04 (News Report) - The microblogging service Twitter has caught on with everyone from celeb Ashton Kutcher to CEOs. Yet for all the buzz, Twitter has always seemed more novelty than business. Many of the 140-character posts, or "tweets," that people send out on Twitter are about topics as mundane as what they had for lunch or when they're going to sleep. Is there any real value in that? It turns out there is. In fact, there's growing evidence that Twitter, a company with no revenues today, could be worth several hundred million dollars. Two sources say social-networking service Facebook offered to acquire Twitter late last year for $500 million in cash and stock. Peter Thiel, an investor in Facebook, confirmed the discussions in an interview with BusinessWeek, though he would not comment on price. He says talks fell apart over questions about the value of Facebook's stock. Facebook's offer is unlikely to be the last. Google (GOOG) has "open lines of communication" with Twitter, says one source, though there are no active deal talks. Yahoo! (YHOO) is another logical buyer, but the price may be too steep for the struggling company. Google and Yahoo declined to comment on acquisition possibilities.

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In Baltimore, No One Left to Press the Police

Sun, 01 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Washington Post - By David Simon - Mar. 01 (Special Report) - In January, a new Baltimore police spokesman -- a refugee from the Bush administration -- came to the incredible conclusion that the city department could decide not to identify those police officers who shot or even killed someone.....

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Online Journalism: Donations Accepted

Thu, 25 Dec 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Business Week - By Douglas MacMillan - Dec. 25 (Special Report) - A growing number of entrepreneurs and journalism advocates around the country are experimenting with a new type of business model for news: community-funded online journalism.

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Redwood High student says he was suspended for conservative paper

Thu, 30 Oct 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Marin Independent Journal - By Rob Rogers - Oct. 30 (News Report) - Cyrus Massoumi was suspended from Redwood High School in Larkspur, Calif. for an article he wrote in the underground conservative newspaper "Deadwood Barf". (IJ photo/Frankie Frost) Redwood High School student Cyrus Massoumi said he plans to continue publishing his online conservative newspaper, even after receiving a five-day suspension from the school district. "If I'm suspended again, or even expelled as a result, it's worth it to me if the end result is that I'm educating people that this district will not accept a moderate or conservative voice," Massoumi said. Although school officials declined to comment on his case, Massoumi, 17, a senior, said he was suspended from school Wednesday for distributing flyers directing students to his online newspaper, which he previously stored on a school computer server. He admits there are articles in The Deadwood Barf - a parody of the school newspaper The Redwood

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New media feels heat after Apple misstep

Wed, 08 Oct 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Christian Science Monitor - By Ben Arnoldy - Oct. 08 (News Report) - Oakland, Calif. - A promo for CNN's citizen journalism site, iReport.com, reads: "You won't believe what people are uploading." Maybe readers should take that literally. An anonymous writer posted a false story to the site claiming that Apple Inc.'s CEO Steve Jobs had suffered a heart attack, sending the company's stock tumbling Friday. The Securities and Exchange Commission confirmed Henry Blodget Monday that it was investigating the circumstances surrounding the article. Unlike stories on CNN's main site, most content on iReport.com can be uploaded by anyone, without editing. The erroneous piece stayed up for more than three hours – long enough to bounce around the blogosphere – before an Apple spokesperson quashed the rumor. Citizen journalism, or user-generated content, has proved successful enough to argue against abandoning it over snafus like this, say new media experts. Rather, the episode serves as a public reminder that "news" now includes both traditional journalism and a crowd-sourced model that treats verification as a public process, not a prerequisite for publishing. Both models have their place, says David Ardia, head of the Citizen Media Law Project at Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet & Society, but users must give the crowd-sourced model time to work. "If you are consuming this news when it first comes out, you have to recognize that the fact-checking function hasn't happened yet."

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An Antidote to Election Day Woes?

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

A Fine Blog - By Nancy Scola, Allison Fine - Oct. 07 (Special Report) - We know. It sounds ridiculous at first. But it might not be as crazy as you think. Why not? Well, here’s what we’re thinking. We all know that American elections can be messy affairs. As longtime online organizer Jon Pincus recently noted, “voter suppression relies to a large extent on information asymmetry.” That imbalance, if not corrected for, can create just enough hoops that discourage all but the most motivated among us from jumping through them on our way to voting. From voter caging to misleading fliers to faulty machinery to the long waits exacerbated by poorly trained poll workers, it’s often a lack of knowing that jams up the process. And for far too long, the job of election protection has fallen largely to lawyers schooled in election law. But there’s an opportunity before us right now and through Election Day for thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of citizens to identify and rectify voting problems in real time. Enter Twitter. In its few years of existence Twitter has proven amazingly adept at one thing: empowering its users to move around 140-character-or-less chunks around quickly and agilely. How Twitter is being used for political ends is constantly evolving. And while Twitter is easiest to use on the Web, it’s a one-to-one and one-to-many and many-to-many communications powerhouse available to anyone with a cell phone in his or her pocket. That’s powerful, potentially game-changing stuff. We believe that Twitter can be instrumental in this election in correcting for some of the information imbalances that plagues American elections:

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Alexander Solzhenitsyn, gulag chronicler, dies

Mon, 04 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Seattle Times - Aug. 04 (News Report) - With "The Gulag Archipelago," he gave a name to the brutal network of labor camps that spread across the Soviet Union during dictator Josef Stalin's frenzied industrialization drive. Tens of millions of men, women and children died in the effort.

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Citizen journalists make new inroads into political reporting

Tue, 29 Jul 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Christian Science Monitor - By Uri Friedman - Jul. 29 (News Report) - Stuck with rising competition from Internet-mediated news, traditional media have been reaching out to Web-savvy citizen journalists to expand their online audiences. But only this year have major television networks and their web affiliates begun carving out reporting slots for nonprofessionals on one of their marquee topics: the presidential election.

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The Associated Press to Set Guidelines for Using Its Articles in Blogs

Mon, 16 Jun 2008 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By Saul Hansell - Jun. 16 (News Report) - Last week, The A.P. took an unusually strict position against quotation of its work, sending a letter to the Drudge Retort asking it to remove seven items that contained quotations from A.P. articles ranging from 39 to 79 words. On Saturday, The A.P. retreated. Jim Kennedy, vice president and strategy director of The A.P., said in an interview that the news organization had decided that its letter to the Drudge Retort was "heavy-handed" and that The A.P. was going to rethink its policies toward bloggers.

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Inside The Texas Two Step

Thu, 06 Mar 2008 00:00:00 -0800

CNN - By Patricio Espinoza - Mar. 06 (Special Report) - (VIDEO 3:26 - Citizen Journalism) An inside "exclusive" look at the process where Texas voters faced a confusing, sometimes chaotic voting experience... yet at the same time practiced democracy at its best. In San Antonio, Texas, hundreds turned out after 7pm for the Democratic Caucuses. Interviews with voters, great inside caucusing video, and a report that takes you up to the point the reporter votes, sharing the entire process. Story by Emmy award winning journalist, Patricio Espinoza. www.espiblog.org Shot with home Flip camera.

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Job cuts at papers shrink coverage

Fri, 29 Feb 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Los Angeles Times - By Thomas S. Mulligan, James Rainey - Feb. 29 (News Analysis) - Experts say the American appetite for news is as strong as ever. Even big-city papers such as The Times that have suffered sharp declines in print circulation in recent years have seen their total audiences grow, when viewers of their Internet sites are included. Political candidates, corporations, even churches find that they can lure more traffic to their websites by slapping on a news "ticker" or a digest of wire-service stories. The problem is that few news organizations have yet found a way to make the kind of money online that they had generated from print. "Citizen journalists" -- unpaid volunteers, mainly -- have stepped into the breach here and there, but research by the Washington-based Project for Excellence in Journalism shows that most of what they are producing is commentary rather than eyewitness accounts of news events or meat-and-potatoes coverage of school board meetings and the like. "If a newspaper reduces staff by 20%, some portion of that community is going to be operating in the shadows in a way it was not before," said Tom Rosenstiel, director of Project for Excellence.

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National Press Club targets citizen journalists

Fri, 15 Feb 2008 00:00:00 -0800

CNET News - By Stefanie Olsen - Feb. 15 (News Report) - The National Press Club, a 100-year-old professional club for journalists, aims to recruit new online-media members through a partnership with Helium.com, a hub for citizen journalists. The deal is expected to be announced on Tuesday.

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E-Resistance Blooms in Pakistan

Wed, 14 Nov 2007 10:14:52 -0800

Business Week - By Manjeet Kripalani - Nov. 14 (Special Report) - Pakistan may be under military siege, but its citizens have found a place to make themselves heard through the sophisticated use of the Internet. An unexpected but robust underground e-resistance movement is under way in Pakistan -- from blogs, to flash mobs, to e-mails, to streaming video broadcasts, to cell-phone multimedia and text messages.

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Campaign Coverage That Is Raw and Fresh

Mon, 29 Oct 2007 09:26:47 -0700

New York Times - By Katharine Q. Seelye - Oct. 29 (Special Report) - "In two days, we can have 50 or 100 people work an hour a day and do the work it used to take a reporter two months to do," said Marc Cooper, 56, who is OTB's editorial director and teaches journalism at the University of Southern California's Annenberg School. The idea is to produce a fuller, more nuanced picture than one reporter could do on his or her own.

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'Citizen Journalists' Evade Blackout On Myanmar News

Fri, 28 Sep 2007 08:57:30 -0700

Wall Street Journal - By Geoffrey A. Fowler - Sep. 28 (News Analysis) - In the age of YouTube, cellphone cameras and text messaging, technology is playing a critical role in helping news organizations and international groups follow Myanmar's biggest protests in nearly two decades. Citizen witnesses are using cellphones and the Internet to beam out images of bloodied monks and street fires, subverting the Myanmar government's effort to control media coverage and present a sanitized version of the uprising. The Associated Press reported yesterday that soldiers in Yangon fired automatic weapons into a crowd of demonstrators as tens of thousands of pro-democracy protesters converged in the capital. Wire services have reported the number of dead at nine, citing the state media.

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