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

-- 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.

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

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

NewsTrust Rating: 3.9 average - 3 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

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

NewsTrust Rating: 4.3 average (not enough reviews) - See Review » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

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.

NewsTrust Rating: 3.7 average - 3 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

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."

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

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.

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

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.

NewsTrust Rating: 3.9 average - 7 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

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.

NewsTrust Rating: 4.3 average - 5 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

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.

NewsTrust Rating: 3.3 average - 8 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

The Secret Money Project

Fri, 23 May 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Fresh Air - May. 23 (Opinion) - This year, the NPR Election unit is teaming up with the Center for Investigative Reporting to report on the new crop of independent groups. With changes in political strategies and campaign law, they're potentially more important than ever. But we need your help. Why? Even though NPR and CIR have the best research tools available, many of these groups will use strategies that will be visible only to voters.

NewsTrust Rating: 3.1 average - 5 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

YouTube journalism

Wed, 20 Dec 2006 15:32:57 -0800

Los Angeles Times - By Moisés Naím - Dec. 20 (Opinion) - YouTube has 34 million monthly visitors, and 65,000 new videos are posted every day. Most are frivolous, produced by and for the teenagers who make up the majority of the site's visitors. But some are serious. YouTube includes videos posted by terrorists, human rights groups and U.S. soldiers in Iraq.

NewsTrust Rating: 4.3 average - 3 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Citizen media is shifting power back to the people

Tue, 19 Dec 2006 11:28:43 -0800

Examiner.com - By Dan Gillmor - Dec. 19 (Opinion) - In the conversational mode of media that is emerging, our role is quite different. So putting the people of the year "out there" somewhere, Time was in a sense reserving its "we the deciders of what is news" role, still inside the gates of authority. It's a relatively small quibble, because the cover story and supporting articles did, for the most part, capture the fundamental trends that are causing such an uproar in many parts of society, media high among them. But for all the changes the media have already seen, the biggest transition is still ahead of us.

NewsTrust Rating: 2.9 average (not enough reviews) - See Review » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Amateur Hour

Mon, 31 Jul 2006 15:13:14 -0700

New Yorker - By Nicholas Lemann - Jul. 31 (Opinion) - ...the content of most citizen journalism will be familiar to anybody who has ever read a church or community newsletter-it's heartwarming and it probably adds to the store of good things in the world, but it does not mount the collective challenge to power which the traditional media are supposedly too timid to take up.

NewsTrust Rating: 3.7 average - 4 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer