NewsTrust - Citizen Journalism - Most Recent Stories: News

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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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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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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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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'#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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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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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.

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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.

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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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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.

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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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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."

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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.

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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.

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