NewsTrust - New Media - Most Recent Stories: News (Independent)

At the NPR and PBS unconference, 2009 is the year of “We, the media”

Mon, 19 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Digiphile - By Digiphile - Oct. 19 (News Report) - “TV, radio and pro journalism still matter in this new ecosystem”-John Boland, PBS. This past weekend, I attended Public Media Camp, an unconference at American University in Washington, D.C. I came away from the two days of sessions, talks, informal discussions, random encounters and rapid-fire information exchange inspired, exhilarated and a bit exhausted. That last is why it took a day to get a post up. By its nature, I couldn’t go to everything. What I did attend, I tried to take notes upon and livestream to Livestream.com and uStream. When it comes to the archiving that video, unfortunately, I endured two crashes and suffered from the lack of a decent mic. Happily, much better video will be coming online from other sources over the next week. What follows are my thoughts, links and video from “Pubcamp.”

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Adding Trust to Wikipedia, and Beyond

Fri, 04 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

MIT Technology Review - By Erica Naone - Sep. 04 (News Report) - The official motto of the Internet could be "don't believe everything you read," but moves are afoot to help users know better what to be skeptical about and what to trust. A tool called WikiTrust, which helps users evaluate information on Wikipedia by automatically assigning a reliability color-coding to text, came into the spotlight this week with news that it could be added as an option for general users of Wikipedia. Also, last week the Wikimedia Foundation announced that changes made to pages about living people will soon need to be vetted by an established editor. These moves reflect a broader drive to make online information more accountable. And this week the World Wide Web Consortium published a framework that could help any Web site make verifiable claims about authorship and reliability of content.

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FCC Apparently Not Very Concerned About Consumer Views On Broadband | Techdirt

Fri, 14 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

techdirt.com - By Mike Masnick - Aug. 14 (News Analysis) - This definitely seems like politics as usual. And it's a problem, not just for the FCC, but for the very businesses involved in these discussions. Ignoring consumer will these days is increasingly a suicide pact. The businesses leading this discussion would be well-served to look at what's happening in other industries (music, newspapers) where business execs have been trying to ignore consumers' rights and interests

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Senator Sanders Unfiltered

Mon, 10 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Huffington Post - By Sen. Bernie Sanders - Aug. 10 (News Report) - Nowadays you don't need to be a senator or a CEO or a celebrity to have a voice in the media, and if you happen to be a senator, a CEO or a celebrity, you have a thousand people each with their own respective audiences to hold you accountable. And as we all have come to learn only too well, there are plenty of senators and CEOs (maybe not celebrities) that need badly to be held to account. It is in this new media ecosystem that we wage our national debates over critical issues like health care reform, global warming, the war in Afghanistan and the collapse of the American middle-class. In this complex and exciting landscape, democratic debate isn't just a two-way street, it's five intersecting eight lane highways.

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Is Google Killing General Knowledge?

Wed, 05 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

moreintelligentlife.com - By Brian Cathcart - Aug. 05 (Special Report) - The average student, though better-informed than the earl’s daughter appears to be, seems not to value general knowledge. If asked a factual question, they will usually click on a search engine without a second thought. Actually knowing the fact, committing it to memory, does not seem to be a consideration.

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Cyber media Vs Print Media of Pakistan: A war within

Thu, 30 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

chowrangi.com - By Hina Safdar - Jul. 30 (News Analysis) - Media in Pakistan has grown after mushrooming of private TV channels and we have seen number of journalists becoming analysts, hosts and opinion-makers, making and breaking public image of their followers. On the other hand, cyber space has been getting populated in our country since last few years as people started to get into blogging and making their mark by commenting and participating in discussions.

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Is Crowdfunding the Future of Journalism?

Sat, 18 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Mashable - By Leah Betancourt - Jul. 18 (Special Report) - Crowdfunding, or getting many people to donate small amounts of cash to fund a project, startup, or service, is nothing new. Think public radio or television pledge drives. Think political campaigns. Think tip jar. Now, as the media landscape changes and traditional revenue sources are beginning to disappear, some forward-thinking journalists and entrepreneurs are starting to apply the crowdfunding concept to the news. A new crop of sites are combining crowdfunding with volunteer and professional contributions in order to source news that people want to read.Crowdfunding, or getting many people to donate small amounts of cash to fund a project, startup, or service, is nothing new. Think public radio or television pledge drives. Think political campaigns. Think tip jar. Now, as the media landscape changes and traditional revenue sources are beginning to disappear, some forward-thinking journalists and entrepreneurs are starting to apply the crowdfunding concept to the news. A new crop of sites are combining crowdfunding with volunteer and professional contributions in order to source news that people want to read.

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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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Facebook Opens Up Its Stream API To Developers

Mon, 27 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0700

TechCrunch - By Erick Schonfel - Apr. 27 (News Report) - As we speculated this weekend, Facebook has opened up its activity stream through a new API for developers. Now any developer can create new applications incorporating the real-time stream. One of the first apps to take advantage of this new API is Seesmic Desktop, A Twitter client which is now adding your Facebook feed through this API (something Tweetdeck already did in the past through other more restrictive means). Facebook has also created its own desktop notification client to demonstrate what can be built with the API. I just got off the phone with Ethan Beard, Facebook’s director of platform marketing, who tells me that the entire feed will be available through a single API call. A developer could recreate the entire Facebook home page if he wanted to or take parts of the feed and remix it to make something more interesting. For starters, I’d expect most Twitter clients to add the Facebook stream as an additional option. On Tweetdeck, for instance, you can read your activity stream, but you cannot respond in-line. The new Facebook Open Stream API is two-way, so it would allow developers to build apps which allow for that two-way communication inside the app.

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Spare change for news

Tue, 14 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Salon - By Katharine Mieszkowski - Apr. 14 (Special Report) - As newspaper newsrooms around the nation cut back or shutter, an urgent conversation is taking place about where the reporting that exposes corruption and holds public officials accountable will come from. What new models for financing professional journalism will spring up?

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Texting Toward Utopia

Sun, 12 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Boston Review - By Evgeny Morozov - Apr. 12 (Special Report) - The major challenge in understanding the relationship between democracy and the Internet— aside from developing good measures of democratic improvement—has been to distinguish cause and effect. That is always hard, but it is especially difficult in this case because the grandiose promise of technological determinism—the idealistic belief in the Internet’s transformative power—has often blinded even the most sober analysts.

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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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The State of the News Media 2009

Mon, 16 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Journalism.org - By Tom Rosenstiel - Mar. 16 (Special Report) - Two developments converged in the last year to shorten the time that journalism has left to reinvent its business model and secure its financial future, according to a new comprehensive study on the State of the American News Media. First, the audience migration to the web accelerated substantially in 2008, and even though most of that growth was at traditional news destinations, the financial impact of that was a negative one, according to the report by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism. Traffic to the 50 news websites, for instance, jumped 24%, triple the pace of growth of the year before, but online ad revenue flattened, and in newspapers it declined. Second, the recession hammered advertising and diverted attention away from innovating new revenue sources. The news industry was already in a race to find new ways to underwrite the gathering of news online, using the declining revenue of the old platforms to do so. The result of the changes of 2008, according to the report’s overview, is an industry diminished, with less time and resources to finance the transition. On the other hand, the notion that traditional journalism is on the brink of extinction is overstated.

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Media War Heats Up Around El Salvador's Elections

Sun, 15 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0700

AlterNet - By Roberto Lovato - Mar. 15 (News Analysis) - “In a country where saying publicly that you supported the FMLN could get you killed, alternative media offers the best alternative to the multi-million dollar campaigns of the right,” he said. “The media itself has become a field of battle-and we’re going to win!”

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Stop The Presses

Sun, 15 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0700

stopthepressesdoc.com - By Mark Birnbaum, Manny Mendoza - Mar. 15 (Special Report) - The American newspaper’s vital role as public watchdog is in danger. Circulation and revenue have plunged as readers and advertisers flee to the Internet, thousands of journalists have been laid off or bought out, and stockholders have forced top news organizations out of business. Stop the Presses takes viewers inside disheartened newsrooms to document the devastation and into the community to learn what readers think of journalism’s fate. Critics have called the film “an absorbing account that should appeal to anyone concerned about the future of democracy” and “surprisingly inspiring, as it points to the inevitable reinvention of an industry in need of new life.”

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Twitter: A Media Darling, and a Backlash Target

Tue, 10 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0700

The Wrap - By Devin Browne - Mar. 10 (News Report) - But while Twitter is changing the way reporters and editors have to do their jobs, it is also inspiring a round of crankiness, agita and outright backlash against the service.

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A visit with CT News Junkie editor Christine Stuart

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

Media Nation - By Dan Kennedy - Mar. 09 (Special Report) - I spent last Wednesday with Christine Stuart, the editor of CT News Junkie, which covers Connecticut politics. Stuart, who's based at the Statehouse in Hartford, posts two to four times a day, often covering hearings on important but secondary stories that the mainstream media ignore.

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Get Off the Bus

Thu, 05 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Columbia Journalism Review - By Amanda Michel - Mar. 05 (Special Report) - Collectively, we could do what a single reporter or traditional news organization could not. We dispatched people to report on dozens of events happening simultaneously around the country. We distributed research tasks among hundreds of volunteers, instead of a handful of paid reporters working full-time for weeks. Ground-level access, networked intelligence, and distributed labor became our editorial mainstays. More than twelve thousand people eventually signed up to participate in one way or another, including seventeen hundred writers. With such numbers, Mayhill Fowler’s Bittergate story—or something like it—was almost inevitable.

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Public Displays of Connection

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

Media is a Plural - By Rory O'Connor - Mar. 04 (Special Report) - A still-growing body of academic research supports the notion that online networks (such as Facebook or Slashdot, to name just two) actually make finding and sharing credible news and information more possible than it was in the previous era of legacy media.

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The Fairness Doctrine

Thu, 19 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0800

FAIR - By Steve Rendall - Feb. 19 (Investigative Report) - A license permits broadcasting, but the licensee has no constitutional right to be the one who holds the license or to monopolize a...frequency to the exclusion of his fellow citizens. There is nothing in the First Amendment which prevents the Government from requiring a licensee to share his frequency with others.... It is the right of the viewers and listeners, not the right of the broadcasters, which is paramount. — U.S. Supreme Court, upholding the constitutionality of the Fairness Doctrine in Red Lion Broadcasting Co. v. FCC, 1969.

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Reports - Jailing Kids for Cash

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

TruthDig - By Amy Goodman - Feb. 17 (News Report) - As many as 5,000 children in Pennsylvania have been found guilty, and up to 2,000 of them jailed, by two corrupt judges who received kickbacks from the builders and owners of private prison facilities that benefited. The two judges pleaded guilty in a stunning case of greed and corruption that is still unfolding. Judges Mark A. Ciavarella Jr. and Michael T. Conahan received $2.6 million in kickbacks while imprisoning children who often had no access to a lawyer. The case offers an extraordinary glimpse into the shameful private prison industry that is flourishing in the United States.

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Top 10 Online Tools to Connect With the Obama Administration

Mon, 19 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Mashable - By Shaun Dakin - Jan. 19 (Special Report) - With the arrival of the first truly technologically savvy President in Washington, DC many people have high expectations of both the President and Congress. After all, during the election MyBarackObama.com became the hub for the campaign and supporters to do more than simply donate money online; it allowed users to organize themselves, create walk and call lists, post blogs, donate money and to tell the candidate what they wanted him to do and become. The reality is that outside of the Presidential campaign, much of government remains stuck in the technology dark ages. It wasn’t until the last few months that the US Congress decided that it was OK for a member of congress to post a YouTube video! We have a long way to go. So, what tools exist for interacting with this President 2.0? I’ll take a look at tools that the Obama administration will control and those that they will not.

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Johnny Jones 2.0

Thu, 15 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Columbia Journalism Review - By Megan Garber - Jan. 15 (Special Report) - GlobalPost’s editorial agility—you decide, we report—is echoed in its anatomy. A lack of legacy infrastructure (foreign bureaus, printing presses, print distribution costs, etc.) means that, while “a lot of newsrooms are struggling to retrofit…..[w]e can create this for the web right from the start,” Sennott told NextNewsroom’s Chris O’Brien. And also that individual GlobalPost correspondents—armed with portable video cameras, still cameras, and audio recorders in addition to their pens and notepads—will be able to offer “a sui generis take on the wider world,” as The Phoenix’s Adam Reilly had it. Resources both physical and financial can thus be channeled directly toward GlobalPost’s primary goal: being there, and telling people what it’s like. “It’s a different structure than most traditional media outlets,” Beatblogging (NewAssignment’s beat-focused blog) notes. It’s “a flatter, nimbler structure that should allow the Global Post to add more correspondents where demand is high.”

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