NewsTrust - Citizen Journalism - Most Recent Stories: Opinion

-- 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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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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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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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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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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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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How texting and GoogleMaps helped Kenyans survive crisis

Thu, 23 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0700

TED - By Erik Hersman - Apr. 23 (Speech) - At TEDU 2009, Erik Hersman presents the remarkable story of Ushahidi, a GoogleMap mashup that allowed Kenyans to report and track violence via cell phone texts following the 2008 elections, and has evolved to continue saving lives in other countries.

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He Said, She Said Journalism: Lame Formula in the Land of the Active User

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

Press Think - By Jay Rosen - Apr. 13 (Opinion) - Any good blogger, competing journalist or alert press critic can spot and publicize false balance and the lame acceptance of fact-free spin. Do users really want to be left helpless in sorting out who's faking it more? The he said, she said form says they do, but I say decline has set in.

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A local take on global coverage

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

Media Nation - By Dan Kennedy - Apr. 11 (Review) - Even as we lament the ongoing collapse of the newspaper business as we've known it, there are reasons to be optimistic about the survival of journalism. I thought I would take a look at how three Boston-area online news sources — Global Voices Online, GlobalPost and the Christian Science Monitor — are covering the anti-communist protests in Moldova.

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The content cascade

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

Nieman Journalism Lab - By Martin Langeveld - Apr. 07 (Opinion) - 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 metaphor of content as a cascading stream means there is no unit — a stream is a stream, it has no discernible building blocks. And it means that content doesn’t sit still. It is never static, but always changing. Now, that’s not really the way things are right now, especially at newspapers. Right now, usually, a reporter goes out, covers an event, comes back, bangs out 20 inches, moves on to the next assignment and never looks back. The story’s brief online incarnation on the live news site is devoid of hyperlinks; no context is created; and then it disappears into a for-pay archive where few will ever pay the too-high fee to retrieve it. Yes, many newsrooms have moved in the direction of online-first, but even there, it’s mostly publish and move on.

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Where Citizens Gather

Tue, 31 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0700

PBS - By Henry Jenkins, Jessica Clark - Mar. 31 (Interview) - (MediaShift Idea Lab) Professionally produced content is central to public media 2.0--right now, more people than ever are consuming and linking to newspapers and broadcast news sources. Some forms of public media are expensive to produce and difficult to make using only volunteer energy and resources: investigative journalism, long-form documentary, international coverage. Those should continue to be subsidized by taxpayers, by new business models for news, and by social entrepreneurs interested in supporting "double bottom line" projects. What's different in this new ecology is the way in which publics are using content. They are adopting roles up and down the production chain --funding news and information through projects like Spot.us, collaborating in investigations on sites like Talking Points Memo, reporting directly via mobile phone from war zones using tools like Ushahidi , analyzing and critiquing news sources at sites like NewsTrust and disseminating relevant content through social networks, Twitter, Digg, and many other channels. This fundamentally challenges the agenda-setting powers of legacy media, making it much harder to create and maintain an artificial consensus, a "conventional wisdom."

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Rosen's Flying Seminar In The Future of News

Thu, 26 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Press Think - By Jay Rosen - Mar. 26 (Opinion) - The pace quickened after Clay Shirky's Thinking the Unthinkable. Here's my best-of from a month of deep think as people came to terms with the collapse of the newspaper model, and tried looking ahead. I know these twelve links work. I tested them on Twitter. As the crisis in newspaper journalism grinds on, people watching it are trying to explain how we got here, and what we’re losing as part of the newspaper economy crashes. Some are trying to imagine a new news system. I try to follow this action, and have been sending around the best of these pieces via my Twitter feed. It’s part of my experiment in mindcasting, which you can read about here. Lately, the pace has picked up. A trigger was the March 13 appearance of Clay Shirky’s Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable. That essay went viral; it now has a phenomenal 686 trackbacks, making it an instant classic in the online literature about the fate of the press. As good as Shirky’s piece is (very very good, I think) “Thinking the Unthinkable” is only a piece of the puzzle, and mostly backward-pointing. That’s why I’ve collected the following links. Together, they form a kind of flying seminar on the future of news, presented in real time. (They are all from the month of March 2009.) Read all twelve and you’ll be caught up on your newspaper big think. Here they are in the order I think you should read them. If you take the seminar, feel free to leave your impressions in the comments. The “flying” part is simple: go ahead, steal these links. Spread the seminar. Get your people up to speed.

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Die, newspaper, die?

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

San Francisco Chronicle - By Mark Morford - Mar. 20 (Opinion) - The gurus are all aflutter. Shirky, Winer, Johnson et al, a smart, motley crew of big-name, big-brained tech seers and programmers and futurists have weighed in, guys you've probably never heard of unless you're a Slashdot regular or a co-founder of Digg or have a fetish for hardcore database programming, or maybe if you were stargazing at this year's big SXSW Interactive event in Austin, Twittering your thumbs off as the digiterati elite strolled around like minor deities. Mark Zuckerberg! Nate Silver! Bruce Effing Sterling! OMG! It's all fascinating stuff, sort of. In the wake of the hugely depressing shutdown of the Rocky and the Seattle P.I., and with recent death threats to the SF Chronicle and what looks to be a savage year indeed for print newspapers everywhere, these big guns have all stepped away from their normal discussions of deep tech arcania and turned their attention to a 500-year-old technology undergoing its first epic, bloody revolution.

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The Death and Life of Great American Newspapers

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

The Nation - By John Nichols, Robert W. McChesney - Mar. 20 (Opinion) - Communities across America are suffering through a crisis that could leave a dramatically diminished version of democracy in its wake. ... 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.

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The horse-and-buggy set’s lament

Tue, 17 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0700

wordyard.com - By Scott Rosenberg - Mar. 17 (Opinion) - A panel at the UC Berkeley School of Journalism that I attended yesterday evening was titled “The SF Chronicle in Transition.” “Transition,” here, is plainly a euphemism; the title ought to have been “The Chronicle In Extremis,” and the mood was that of a wake. There is plenty of cause for communal handwringing in the face of the wrenching cutbacks and shutdowns that are plaguing newspapers across the U.S. and that most recently have threatened the survival of our major Bay Area daily, which has reportedly been losing its owner, the Hearst Corporation, $50 million a year, and looks likely to cut its staff by half if owners and unions reach an agreement. If not, Hearst has threatened to shut the paper down, leaving this city without a major daily newspaper. (It’s hard to believe that Hearst would simply write off its huge investments in the Chron, however; the threat sounds more like a negotiating tactic than a serious option.) The panel offered a by now familiar litany, a mixture of wrongheaded cliches with legitimate fears. Heard, for instance, was the old canard that giving up newspapers for the Web means we won’t ever stumble on things we didn’t know we were interested in. (In fact, hugely popular sites like Boing Boing or Kottke.org have professionalized the generation of serendipity, and our Twitter friends feed us as varied a diet of links as we choose to feast on.) Here was the routine complaint about rudeness and “uninformed shouting” in comments forums. (A brief shouting match between one member of the crowd at the Berkeley event and the editor and publisher of the Berkeley Daily Planet — from what I could hear, about whether a writer had been censored — was as rude and off-topic as anything I’ve seen in a newspaper comments section.)

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"This Song Ain't About You"

Sat, 14 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Huffington Post - By Daniel Sinker - Mar. 14 (Opinion) - You see, Stewart's real critique wasn't about Cramer, it was also only marginally about CNBC. Instead, Stewart's real rage comes from the role the modern media has created for itself: the role of cheerleader instead of watchdog, of favoring surface over depth, of respecting authority instead of questioning it. It's the same critique that some have about the New York Times (and the rest of the media) in the leadup to the war in Iraq; the same critique lobbed every time a TV reporter does a stand up in front of the Apple Store before a product release; the same critique leveled every time a sensational murder steals a headline from a corporate crime: is this really the job we want the fourth estate to be doing?

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Preaching Ethics, D.C. Pol Threatens To Squash Tiny Paper

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

Washington Post - By Marc Fisher - Mar. 09 (Opinion) - [G]oing after a tiny, non-profit paper's advertisers when you don't even accuse the paper of a single error is pure bullying. [D.C. city councilor Harry] Thomas should pick on someone his own size; he owes Padou and her readers an apology.

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The Beleaguered News Industry ...

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

Salon - By Tom Tomorrow - Mar. 09 (Cartoon) - After the last reporter files the last news story, an army of citizen journalists gamely try to fill the void.

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Death of newspapers

Tue, 17 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Salon - By Gary Kamiya - Feb. 17 (Opinion) - ... the real problem isn't the impending death of newspapers, but the impending death of news -- at least news as we know it

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Journalism Education's Broader, Deeper Mission

Sat, 07 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0800

PBS - By Dan Gillmor - Feb. 07 (Opinion) - Accepting an award from Arizona State University's Walter Cronkite School for Journalism & Mass Communication several months ago, former PBS NewsHour host Robert McNeil called journalism education probably "the best general education that an American citizen can get" today. Perhaps he was playing to his audience, at least to a degree. Many other kinds of undergraduate degree programs could lay claim to a similar bragging rights; a strong liberal arts degree, no matter what the major, has great value. Still, there's no doubt that a journalism degree, done right, is an excellent foundation for a student's future. Even if McNeil overstated the case, however, his words should inspire journalism educators to ponder their role in a world where these programs' traditional reason for being is increasingly murky. Our raison d'etre is open to question largely because the employment pipeline of the past, a progression leading from school to jobs in media and related industries, is (at best) in jeopardy. Yet journalism education could and should have a long and even prosperous life ahead -- if its practitioners make some fundamental shifts.

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Content and Its Discontents

Mon, 08 Dec 2008 00:00:00 -0800

New York Times - By Virginia Heffernan - Dec. 08 (Opinion) - For years, we in traditional media have consoled ourselves about the increasing irrelevance of our work. First, we insist that content is king. If a story, image, film or report is compelling enough — a candid photo of Malia Obama, “Slumdog Millionaire,” the columns of Maureen Dowd — it will translate into pixels. It will flourish on any platform, dominate every sport. By this logic, creators, producers, artists and journalists should attend only to producing great work and leave the current changes in the distribution and display of information to nerds in suits.

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Election '08: A Transparent Disaster?

Mon, 03 Nov 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Huffington Post - By Craig Stoltz - Nov. 03 (Opinion) - How will election officials deal with the tens of thousands of Tweets, blog entries, videos, photos and other social media reports from citizen journalists alleging fraud or intimidation of some sort?

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St. Paul Police Conduct Mass Preemptive Raids Ahead of Republican Convention

Mon, 01 Sep 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Democracy Now - By AMY GOODMAN, Coleen Rowley, Bruce Nestor - Sep. 01 (Interview) - Armed groups of police in the Twin Cities have raided more than half-a-dozen locations since Friday night in a series of "preemptive raids" before the Republican National Convention. The raids and detentions have targeted activists planning to protest the convention, as well as journalists and videographers documenting police actions at protests.

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