NewsTrust - New Media - Most Recent Stories: Opinion (Mainstream)

Good Riddance To Mainstream Media?

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

National Public Radio - By John Donvan - Nov. 12 (Opinion) - As newspapers go under, the network newscasts lose viewers and the mainstream media in general see more and more of their audience shift online, are we as a society better or worse off? Some argue that the diversity of voices available on the Internet to provide information and analysis makes for a better system. Others say a decline in traditional journalism means lower standards and fewer resources to investigate crucial stories. A panel of experts took on this topic Oct. 27 in an Intelligence Squared U.S. debate: John Hockenberry, Michael Wolff, Phil Bronstein, David Carr, Katrina vanden Heuvel. Three panelists argued for the motion "Good Riddance to Mainstream Media" and three against in an Oxford-style debate. Before the debate, the audience at New York University's Skirball Center for the Performing Arts voted 25 percent in favor of the motion and 50 percent against. Twenty-five percent was undecided. After the debate, 24 percent supported the motion "Good Riddance to Mainstream Media," while 68 percent opposed it and 8 percent remained undecided.

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The Rise of the Professional Blogger

Sun, 13 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Atlantic Monthly - By Benjamin Carlson - Sep. 13 (Opinion) - Today, the romantic notion that solitary, untamed bloggers are running the Web is more fantasy than fact—nearly as apocryphal as old myths about stoic Western sheriffs killing 11 outlaws with six bullets.

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What Makes a Digital Native?

Sun, 30 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Frontline - Aug. 30 (Interview) - What Makes a Digital Native? For starters, they take technology for granted, says author Marc Prensky.

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Facebook's Purchase Is Bid to Own Social Media

Sun, 16 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Washington Post - By Chadwick Matlin - Aug. 16 (Opinion) - Facebook just bought the rights to nearly everything you do online. And it cost them only $47.5 million.

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Sotomayor Sworn In, Becoming Supreme Court’s First Hispanic Justice

Sat, 08 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Washington Post - By Amy Goldstein - Aug. 08 (Press Release) - Sonia Sotomayor was sworn in Saturday morning as the first Hispanic justice on the Supreme Court in a brief ceremony that completed a remarkable ascent for a Puerto Rican girl from the South Bronx .

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The ‘green revolution’

Tue, 04 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Dawn - By Bina Shah - Aug. 04 (Editorial) - the vast majority of our people still get their news from the radio and the television, as well as by word of mouth. There’s a mobile phone revolution underway in Pakistan at the moment, but again, our literacy rate is too low to truly take advantage of the social media revolution which is largely visual and text-based. This could change in the future, but for now, we have yet another example of how our poor education levels restrain us when it comes to keeping up with the rest of the world.

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One Newspaper, Many Checkbooks

Sun, 19 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By Clark Hoyt - Jul. 19 (Opinion) - Lindsey Hoshan, a freelance journalist in Palo Alto, Calif., hopes to sell a multimedia slide show and maybe an article to The Times about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a mass of floating plastic trash caught in swirling currents in a stretch of ocean twice the size of Texas. But first, she has to get there. To help finance a $10,000 reporting trip aboard a research vessel, Hoshaw has turned to Spot.Us, a Web site where reporters appeal for donations to pay for their projects. If she can raise $6,000 before the September departure date — so far, only about $1,600 has come in — she will take out a loan for the rest, she said. The Times has told Hoshaw that it might pay about $700 for the pictures, more if it also buys a story.

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Speaking truth to power

Sun, 21 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Chicago Tribune - By Roxana Saberi - Jun. 21 (Opinion) - "Just a moment," an Iranian friend typed as we chatted online, "while I upload my photos of today's protest onto Facebook." He is only one of many ordinary Iranians informing the world about the momentous events taking place in Iran since the country's disputed June 12 presidential election. As traditional media outlets and foreign journalists have faced mounting government restrictions on their reporting, "citizen journalists" have stepped in. Through e-mails, blogs and social-networking Web sites such as Facebook and Twitter, they have been disseminating photos, video and eyewitness accounts of street clashes and violence between anti-government demonstrators and Iranian security forces and militiamen.

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Why the newspaper still beats the Amazon Kindle.

Sat, 20 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Slate - By Farhad Manjoo - Jun. 20 (Review) - After using it for a week, I can say the new Kindle is a good first attempt at melding what's great about papers with what's great about digital devices. The trouble is, it's not nearly good enough.

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In Tehran, fantasy and reality make uneasy bedfellows

Sat, 20 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700

The Independent - By Robert Fisk - Jun. 20 (Opinion) - Fantasy and reality make uneasy bedfellows, but once they are combined and spread with high-speed inaccuracy around the world, they are also lethal. Sham elections, the takeover of party offices, a massacre on a university campus, an imminent coup d'état, the possible overthrow of the whole 30-year old Islamic Republic, the isolation of an entire country as its communications are systematically shut down.

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Why Iran Matters

Fri, 19 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Atlantic Monthly - By Andrew Sullivan - Jun. 19 (Opinion) - Iran is at the very heart of the global struggle between the forces of distorted and politicized religious tyranny and the power of real faith and freedom. This struggle was never ours' to impose, however good the intentions. It was always there for the people themselves to grasp. And grasp it they now have - with astounding courage, clarity and calm.

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Mourning a Scourge of the Comfortable

Sun, 07 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Washington Post - By Dana Milbank - Jun. 07 (Comment) - When an investigative reporter passes on it’s not just the family that suffers.

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We no longer fully understand the web

Fri, 05 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New Scientist - By Tim Berners-Lee, Paul Marks - Jun. 05 (Interview) - World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee wants to put the web under the microscope to investigate how it changes our behaviour. Paul Marks asked him what he hopes to achieve.

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Dual Perspectives Article

Tue, 02 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Wired - By Julian Dibbell - Jun. 02 (Opinion) - ... by forcing users to commit their thinking to the bite-size form of the public tweet, Twitter may be giving a powerfully productive new life to a hitherto underexploited quantum of thought: The random, fleeting observation.

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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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High Time We Set the Record Straight on Newspaper 'Myths'

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

Editor & Publisher - By Donna Barrett - Apr. 23 (Opinion) - Let's set the record straight: Newspapers still enjoy considerable readership and deliver strong results for advertisers. More Americans read printed newspapers than watch the Super Bowl. More Americans read printed newspapers than own dogs. Newspapers and their Web sites reach a larger audience than ever before.

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Will the New York Times put the Boston Globe out of business?

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

The Guardian - By Dan Kennedy - Apr. 07 (Opinion) - Will the Boston Globe go out of business? Almost certainly not, despite the threat issued last week by its owner, the New York Times Company, that it would shutter the plant if the Globe's unions don't cough up $20m in concessions within 30 days.

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Twitter switch for Guardian, after 188 years of ink

Wed, 01 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0700

The Guardian - By Rio Palof - Apr. 01 (Comedy News) - (SPOOF) Consolidating its position at the cutting edge of new media technology, the Guardian today announces that it will become the first newspaper in the world to be published exclusively via Twitter, the sensationally popular social networking service that has transformed online communication. The move, described as "epochal" by media commentators, will see all Guardian content tailored to fit the format of Twitter's brief text messages, known as "tweets", which are limited to 140 characters each. Boosted by the involvement of celebrity "twitterers", such as Madonna, Britney Spears and Stephen Fry, Twitter's profile has surged in recent months, attracting more than 5m users who send, read and reply to tweets via the web or their mobile phones. As a Twitter-only publication, the Guardian will be able to harness the unprecedented newsgathering power of the service, demonstrated recently when a passenger on a plane that crashed outside Denver was able to send real-time updates on the story as it developed, as did those witnessing an emergency landing on New York's Hudson River. It has also radically democratised news publishing, enabling anyone with an internet connection to tell the world when they are feeling sad, or thinking about having a cup of tea.

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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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Goodbye, Encarta. A cautionary tale for newspapers?

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

Christian Science Monitor - By John Yemma - Mar. 31 (Opinion) - Wikipedia killed Encarta. Encarta was the early digital encyclopedia. It began life as CD/ROM and increasingly went online. What it never did was truly embrace the power of the Internet. What does that say about how we get information? And about the future of newspapers?

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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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SXSW 2009

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

National Public Radio - By Jacob Soboroff - Mar. 15 (Interview) - Greetings from Austin, Texas and SXSW 2009. South by Southwest is a 22-year-old festival featuring music, film and an interactive component that focuses on the web and technology. Yesterday I spent time roaming the halls and caught up with Steve Garfield, one of the very first video bloggers, Zadi Diaz and Steve Woolf of the popular video blog EPIC FU, blogger Robert Scoble, Fred Davis, part of the "brain trust" that founded and launched Wired Magazine, and Stanford professor Lawrence Lessig. I spoke to them about everything from publicly financed elections to web video formats. I'm in Austin until Monday, and you can follow me at @jacobsoboroff on Twitter while I'm here for more.

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Generation Twit

Thu, 12 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New Yorker - By Jenna Krajeski - Mar. 12 (Review) - You are in your early to mid-twenties and you are illiterate and disengaged, did you know that? The good news is that you finally fit in—you are part of a mostly illiterate and disengaged generation and, since your apathy likely took root in the multitudinous indignities of high school, this participation in intellectual squalor is a homecoming.

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Financial collapse threatens real journalism

Sun, 15 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Seattle Post Intelligencer - By David Horsey - Feb. 15 (Opinion) - Arguably, newspapers are as vital to American democracy as banks are to the American financial system. Yet the implosion of the news business is the most underreported story amid the great flood of bad economic news.

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Glenn Greenwald and Jay Rosen

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

Bill Moyers Journal - By Bill Moyers - Feb. 07 (Interview) - Is the old media sustaining the old politics? News and analysis with NYU journalism professor and PressThink blogger Jay Rosen and political journalist and Salon.com blogger Glenn Greenwald.

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