NewsTrust - Internet - Most Recent Stories: Opinion (Independent)

Digital Disconnect: Robert McChesney on "How Capitalism is Turning the Internet Against Democracy"

Fri, 05 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Democracy Now - By Amy Goodman,Juan Gonzalez - Apr. 05 (Interview) - Longtime media-reform advocate Robert McChesney looks at how the future of American politics could be largely determined by who controls the Internet in his newest book. "'Digital Disconnect' talks about the difference between the mythology of the Internet -- the hope would it empower people and make democracy triumphant -- versus the reality of large corporate monopolies and the government working together are taking away the promise of the Internet to suit their interests,” says McChesney, the co-founder of Free Press and the National Conference for Media Reform. His book begins with a simple claim: "The ways capitalism works and does not work determine the role the Internet might play in society." [Transcript to come. Check back soon.]

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Georgia Shoots Down Awful Anti-Consumer Broadband Law - Though 19 Cities Now Have Laws Banning or Hindering Community Broadband | DSLReports.com, ISP Information

Fri, 08 Mar 2013 00:00:00 -0800

dslreports.com - Mar. 08 (Opinion) -

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Industry Outlook Panel Yields Words to Thrive By

Wed, 06 Feb 2013 00:00:00 -0800

siia.net - By Ronn Levine - Feb. 06 (Review) - “How far can companies go before they annoy their users?” asked Esther Dyson, chairman of EDventure Holdings, at last week’s Breakthrough: IIS 2013 Conference in New York. With Facebook’s new Search Graph, Google’s deeper searches and other initiatives based on user data, will the time come where people say the loss of privacy is not worth the enhanced information they can get?

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"An Incredible Soul": Lawrence Lessig Remembers Aaron Swartz After Leading Cyberactivist's Suicide

Mon, 14 Jan 2013 00:00:00 -0800

Democracy Now - By Lawrence Lessig, Amy Goodman - Jan. 14 (Interview) - He was also a key architect of Creative Commons and an organizer of the grassroots movement to defeat the controversial House Internet censorship bill, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), and the Senate bill, the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA).

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No More Media for Murdoch

Thu, 29 Nov 2012 00:00:00 -0800

FreePress.net - Nov. 29 (Opinion) -

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Shell Blocks Employee Access to Activist Website

Tue, 02 Oct 2012 00:00:00 -0700

yeslab.org - By Mary - Oct. 02 (Opinion) - Early Monday morning, 71,010 Shell employees received an email from the company's "Grassroots Employee Empowerment Division" providing information on Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum, a pivotal human rights case being argued in the U.S. Supreme Court. The email contained links to news stories, as well as a tool to help employees tweet their feelings about the case at key US news anchors (and Oprah Winfrey). The only thing is, Shell has no "Grassroots Employee Empowerment Division," and they don't want publicity for the case.

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Journalism education cannot teach its way to the future

Sat, 16 Jun 2012 00:00:00 -0700

Poynter Institute - By Howard Finberg - Jun. 16 (Opinion) - As we think about the changes whipping through the media industry, there is a nearby storm about to strike journalism education. The future of journalism education will be a very different and difficult future, a future that is full of innovation and creative disruption. And, I believe, we will see an evolution and uncoupling between the value of a journalism education and a journalism degree. When we think about the future, there’s not a single future. The future for a 20-year-old is clearly very different than the future of a 60-year-old. Each will bring a very different perspective. The future of journalism education is linked to the future of journalism itself. Each is caught within the other’s vortex, both spinning within today’s turmoil of change. The disruption in the economic models of news organizations, rippling out from the United States to Europe and elsewhere, is well documented.

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Stuxnet and the Bomb

Fri, 15 Jun 2012 00:00:00 -0700

Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists - By Kennette Benedict - Jun. 15 (Opinion) - That's why we need vigorous public discussion about this new class of weaponry. The stakes are too high to leave decisions in the hands of military and intelligence officers, or behind the closed doors of the situation room in the White House.

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Journalism: The best of times, and the worst of times

Sun, 03 Jun 2012 00:00:00 -0700

GigaOM - By Mathew Ingram - Jun. 03 (Interview) - Journalism professor Tim McGuire, a long-time newspaper editor and Pulitzer Prize judge, says there is much upheaval in the media industry but a lot of potential as well -- provided media entities give up their gatekeeper role and learn to serve their readers better.

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Behind the US/Israeli Cyberattacks on Iran

Sun, 03 Jun 2012 00:00:00 -0700

Informed Comment - By Juan Cole - Jun. 03 (Opinion) - Megha Rajagopalan writes at ProPublica The New York Times [has] published a report detailing how the Bush and Obama administrations created the cyberweapon known as Stuxnet and used it to disrupt Iran’s uranium enrichment program. Much has been written about Stuxnet, which, as ProPublica recently reported, remains a threat beyond Iran.

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This I believe about journalism, newspapers and the future of media

Fri, 01 Jun 2012 00:00:00 -0700

Arizona State University - By Tim McGuire - Jun. 01 (Opinion) - The idea that legacy media can find a silver bullet such as tablets, or pay walls, or reinvigoration of old advertising models is silly and reckless. The only silver bullet is dramatic reinvention.

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News articles as assets and paths

Sun, 27 May 2012 00:00:00 -0700

Buzzmachine - By Jeff Jarvis - May. 27 (Opinion) - This is the start of a new project I’m working on to brainstorm new forms, relationships, and (business) models for news. Responding to a current discussion on Twitter among @AntDeRose, @felixsalmon, @jayrosn_nyu & @davewiner about the form of articles, I’m posting it here. The discussion started when Jay challenged Anthony, as a representative of Reuters.

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We need to reinvent the article

Sun, 27 May 2012 00:00:00 -0700

seanblanda.com - By Sean Blanda - May. 27 (Opinion) - This post is outdated. Not the content, necessarily, but the way you are consuming it. Much of the discussion about reinventing media/journalism happens in a frustratingly small spectrum while instead we ought to be reconsidering everything. No really, everything. Perhaps the biggest reason traditional content creators are being usurped by seemingly unrelated and non-journalistic web services is because the foundation of journalism is broken. In other words: we need to reinvent the article.

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After Facebook fails

Thu, 24 May 2012 00:00:00 -0700

Harvard Blogs - By Doc Searls - May. 24 (Opinion) - At the heart of the Internet business is one of the great business fallacies of our time: that the Web, with all its targeting abilities, can be a more efficient, and hence more profitable, advertising medium than traditional media. Facebook, with its 90

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How to peek through Dan Schultz’s Truth Goggles, the B.S. detection software

Sun, 20 May 2012 00:00:00 -0700

Nieman Journalism Lab - By Andrew Phelps - May. 20 (Opinion) - Last November I wrote about Dan Schultz and his Truth Goggles, a piece of software he’s developing in partnership with PolitiFact that highlights suspicious claims in news articles. It’s as simple as spellcheck. Now, as Schultz finalizes his graduate thesis at the MIT Media Lab, he’s conducting a user study to understand how people (anonymously) respond to a prototype of the tool. It’s our first look at the software in action, and he wants you to give it a try.

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Social journalism research helps explain how information is verified on Twitter

Wed, 16 May 2012 00:00:00 -0700

Poynter Institute - By Craig Silverman, Alfred Hermida - May. 16 (Interview) - Hermida, a founding member of the BBCNews.com team who now serves as an associate professor at the University of British Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism, also recently presented a paper at the International Symposium on Online Journalism about A

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Rosen’s Trust Puzzler: What Explains Falling Confidence in the Press?

Thu, 19 Apr 2012 00:00:00 -0700

Pressthink - By Jay Rosen - Apr. 19 (Opinion) - As you can see from the chart, the percentage of Americans who had a “great deal” or a “fair amount” of trust in the news media has declined from over 70 percent shortly after Watergate to about 44 percent today. Why? That is my question in this post. What makes it a puzzle is that during that same period, several other things were happening. Journalists were becoming better educated. They were more likely to go to journalism school, my institution. During this period, the cultural cachet of being a journalist was on the rise. Newsrooms were getting bigger, too: more boots on the ground to cover the news. Journalism was becoming less of a trade and more of a profession. Most people who study the press would say that the influence of professional standards, such as you would find in this code, was increasing.

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Why Bob Woodward is wrong about the internet and journalism

Sat, 07 Apr 2012 00:00:00 -0700

GigaOM - By Mathew Ingram - Apr. 07 (Opinion) - Veteran investigative reporter Bob Woodward said this week the internet would not be of much use in a case like Watergate, the story he helped break in 1972. But he misses the point about the value of using a multitude of sources instead of just one.

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Google’s ‘Project Glass’ Augmented Reality Glasses Are Real And In Testing

Wed, 04 Apr 2012 00:00:00 -0700

TechCrunch - Apr. 04 (Opinion) - After weeks of speculation and rumors, Google has officially pulled back the curtain on what they have come to call Project Glass -- a pair of augmented reality glasses that seek to provide users real-time information right in front of their eyes. "We think technology should work for you — to be there when you need it and get out of your way when you don’t," wrote Babak Parviz, Steve Lee, and Sebastian Thrun, three Google employees who are part of the Google X skunkworks. "We’re sharing this information now because we want to start a conversation and learn from your valuable input." Something tells me that they won't be hurting for feedback.

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Mike Daisey: Reports of my Death have been Greatly Exaggerated

Tue, 20 Mar 2012 00:00:00 -0700

mikedaisey.blogspot.com - By Mike Daisey - Mar. 20 (Opinion) - In the last forty-eight hours I have been equated with Stephen Glass, James Frey, and Greg Mortenson. Given the tenor of the condemnation, you would think I had concocted an elaborate, fanciful universe filled with furnaces in which babies are burned to make iPhone components, or that I never went to China, never stood outside the gates of Foxconn, never pretended to be a businessman to get inside of factories, never spoke to any workers. Especially galling is how many are gleefully eager to dance on my grave expressly so they can return to ignoring everything about the circumstances under which their devices are made. Given the tone, you would think I had fabulated an elaborate hoax, filled with astonishing horrors that no one had ever seen before. Except that we all know that isn’t true.

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How Hypothes.is is going to fix online Identity and Reputation

Sun, 04 Mar 2012 00:00:00 -0800

ReadWriteWeb - By Jon Mitchell - Mar. 04 (Opinion) - There are two fundamental, related cultural problems with the Web that Hypothes.is wants to address: identity and reputation. Reputation is the main problem, but you can't approach it without fixing identity. A reputation doesn't refer to anything withou

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Pair Programming Considered Harmful?

Sat, 03 Mar 2012 00:00:00 -0800

TechCrunch - By Jon Evans - Mar. 03 (Opinion) - Coding has always been seen as lone-ranger work; witness the opening scene in The Social Network. Despite managers’ dreams of programmers as fungible units, it’s nearly universally accepted that a great developer is ten times as productive as a mediocre one, and/or that a small team of the software equivalent of the Special Forces can code rings around an army of hundreds of grunts. The flip side is that one cowboy coder’s bad decisions can cripple you — maybe immediately, or maybe next year, when you suddenly discover that your organization has quietly racked up so much technical debt that it has become the software equivalent of Greece.

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"MyFacts"

Sun, 12 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0800

Doonesbury - By Gary Trudeau - Feb. 12 (Cartoon) - This week, the Doonesbury comic strip takes on "MyFacts", a fictional online service that packages "faux facts" to support anyone's ideology, from creationism to 9/11 conspiracy theories.

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Jon Stewart Has Some Harsh Words For SOPA And Its Sponsors

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 00:00:00 -0800

Gawker - By Matt Toder, Jon Stewart - Jan. 18 (Comedy News) - On tonight's Daily Show, Jon Stewart attempted to wrap his head around SOPA and its draconian take on internet piracy. He saved his harshest criticisms for its sponsors in Congress and their inability to truly understand (a) the internet and (b) what their bill will actually do.

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Ex-FCC Commissioner Michael Copps on Media Consolidation, Broadband Expansion, Threats to Journalism

Thu, 12 Jan 2012 00:00:00 -0800

Democracy Now - By Amy Goodman - Jan. 12 (Interview) - Michael Copps served two terms with the Federal Communications Commission. Now the staunch supporter of an open internet and opponent of media consolidation has retired. In a wide-ranging discussion, he examines the FCC's key accomplishments and failures of the past decade. Copps argues broadband is "the most opportunity-creating technology perhaps in the history of humankind," and laments that the United States still lacks a national broadband infrastructure. He says the FCC has yet to address a lack of diversity in media ownership, noting that "owning a station has a lot to do with the kind of programing that is going to be on that station." Regarding the future of journalism, Copps calls on the FCC to make access to quality journalism a "national priority," saying, "the future of our democracy hinges upon having an informed electorate."

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