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

Andy Carvin on Twitter as a newsroom and being human

Sat, 26 May 2012 00:00:00 -0700

GigaOM - By Mathew Ingram - May. 26 (Interview) - In a discussion about his use of Twitter as a reporting tool, NPR strategist Andy Carvin made some interesting points about the value of crowdsourced journalism -- including the importance of being transparent about the process, and the virtues of being human.

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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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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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The 'Undue Weight' of Truth on Wikipedia

Mon, 20 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0800

Chronicle of Higher Education - By Timothy Messer-Kruse - Feb. 20 (Opinion) - For the past 10 years I've immersed myself in the details of one of the most famous events in American labor history, the Haymarket riot and trial of 1886. Along the way I've written two books and a couple of articles about the episode. In some circles that affords me a presumption of expertise on the subject. Not, however, on Wikipedia. The bomb thrown during an anarchist rally in Chicago sparked America's first Red Scare, a high-profile show trial, and a worldwide clemency movement for the seven condemned men. Today the martyrs' graves are a national historic site, the location of the bombing is marked by a public sculpture, and the event is recounted in most American history textbooks. Its Wikipedia entry is detailed and elaborate.

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"Gasland" Director Josh Fox Fires Back at Republicans After His Unfair Arrest

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0800

AlterNet - By Ed Schultz - Feb. 02 (Interview) - Gasland director Josh Fox, ... was arrested this week, in violation of his first amendment rights, while covering a Congressional hearing on fracking. In the interview, Fox fires back at the Republicans who have been targeting him

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True Or False? Automatic Fact-Checking Coming To The Web – Complications Follow

Tue, 29 Nov 2011 00:00:00 -0800

TechCrunch - By Devin Coldewey - Nov. 29 (Opinion) - The social layer has settled on the web like a dusting of multicolored snowflakes, gracing every story with a little menagerie of sharing counts and buttons. Once basic standards of content publishing were established, basic standards of sharing had to be as well, the internet being as it is a medium of information transmission. First you get the content, then you move it around. We’re still working on the moving around part.

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Occupy PressThink: Tim Pool

Mon, 21 Nov 2011 00:00:00 -0800

Press Think - By Jay Rosen, Alexis Madrigal - Nov. 21 (Opinion) - “Being a livestream he acts as ‘eyes and ears’ for the viewers. Literally. People will tell him to move the camera somewhere and he’ll do it. They’ll ask for interviews with someone, and Tim will go over and do so… The viewers will ask him questions and he won’t rest until he gets them their answers.” Recently, Alexis Madrigal, the technology editor of The Atlantic and pretty much the smartest young journalist ’round these parts, re-described occupy Wall Street as an API, or Application Programming Interface.

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Ex-New York Times Freelancer Natasha Lennard on Quitting the Corporate Media in an Occupy Era

Thu, 17 Nov 2011 00:00:00 -0800

Democracy Now - By Amy Goodman - Nov. 17 (Interview) - We speak with former freelancer at the New York Times, Natasha Lennard, who helped the newspaper cover the initial Occupy protests. She was arrested during the Brooklyn Bridge demonstration while reporting on the event. She no longer freelances for the Times and recently wrote a piece for Salon.com titled "Why I Quit the Mainstream Media." [includes rush transcript]

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Heather Brooke: Data Dealing Is A Bigger Scandal Than Phone Hacking

Wed, 17 Aug 2011 00:00:00 -0700

huffingtonpost.co.uk - By Dina Rickman - Aug. 17 (Interview) - When the woman who exposed the MPs expenses scandal says sheâ€™s uncovered the next big public outrage, itâ€™s impossible not to take notice. Heather Brooke explains to the Huffington Post UK why data dealing is even bigger than phone hacking and the reasons she lost faith in WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

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Why We Need the New News Environment to be Chaotic

Sun, 10 Jul 2011 00:00:00 -0700

shirky.com - By Clay Shirky - Jul. 10 (Opinion) - The business environment for newspapers continues to be grim. Pew recently reported that advertising revenue rebounded in 2010 for all forms of media, except newspapers.* This might just be a matter of transitioning from print to digital revenues but for the fact that the market values a print reader far more highly than a digital one. The more or less official label for this problem is “analog dollars to digital dimes”; because of the enormous difference in assumed value per reader, lost value from print is not made up for by gains in digital readership. The ‘analog dollars to digital dimes’ problem doesn’t actually seem to be a problem. It seems to be a feature of reality. Digital revenue per head is not replacing lost print revenue and, barring some astonishment in the advertising market, it never will. There is no supply-side scarcity to boost margins; power over aggregation has moved from producer to consumer; advertisers prefer selling cameras and shoes on purpose-built sites; readers feel the same about finding jobs and dates; and there are few commercial or geographic restraints on competition. The market values analog readers more highly than digital ones because the market is right.

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A New McCarthyist Hysteria: WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange Responds to Espionage, Terrorism Allegations

Wed, 06 Jul 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Democracy Now - By Julian Assange, Slavoj Žižek, Amy Goodman - Jul. 06 (Interview) - WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange appeared in London July 2 for an unusual conversation with Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek, moderated by Democracy Now!’s Amy Goodman. Assange is currently under house arrest in Norfolk, outside London, awaiting a July 12 appeals hearing on his pending extradition to Sweden for questioning on sexual misconduct allegations. He has not been charged with a crime in any country. In this excerpt from Saturday’s discussion, Žižek and Assange respond to critics who say Assange should be charged in the United States under the Espionage Act of 1917 and that WikiLeaks should be shut down. “We should always see censorship, actually, as a very positive sign, and attempts towards censorship as a sign that society is not yet completely sewn up, not yet completely fiscalized but still has some political dimension to it. I.E: What people think and believe and feel and the words that they listen to actually matters,” says Assange.

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"A Moment in the Sun": An Extended Interview with Independent Filmmaker, Author John Sayles

Mon, 04 Jul 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Democracy Now - By Amy Goodman - Jul. 04 (Interview) - "However small your audience is, however frustrating it is to get your version of the world or what you want to talk about out there, it’s part of the conversation. And if you shut up, the conversation is one-sided,"

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Glenn Greenwald: Supporters of Bradley Manning Risk Jail for Refusing to Testify in WikiLeaks Probe

Mon, 20 Jun 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Democracy Now - By Amy Goodman - Jun. 20 (Interview) - Earlier this month, the FBI served a subpoena on David House, one of the founders of the Bradley Manning Support Network who helped publicize the oppressive conditions of Manning's solitary confinement at the Quantico Marine Corps Base. U.S. Army Private Manning has been imprisoned without charges for his alleged role in releasing classified U.S. documents to the online whistleblowing website, WikiLeaks. House testified before a grand jury last week investigating WikiLeaks and invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. Political and legal blogger Glenn Greenwald of Salon.com says if House and other witnesses are offered immunity, they will no longer be able to invoke this right and may refuse to cooperate with the grand jury, risking jail time rather than aid the investigation. [includes rush transcript]

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No, Twitter Is Not a Replacement For Journalism

Tue, 31 May 2011 00:00:00 -0700

GigaOM - By Matthew Ingram - May. 31 (Opinion) - With so much real-time reporting of news events via Twitter, some argue that we no longer need the traditional news article. But while reporting on social networks can be very powerful, we still need someone to make sense of those streams and put them in context.

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The article as luxury or byproduct

Sun, 29 May 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Buzzmachine - By Jeff Jarvis - May. 29 (Opinion) - A few episodes in news make me think of the article not as the goal of journalism but as a value-added luxury or as a byproduct of the process. * See the amazing Brian Stelter covering the Joplin tornado and begging his desk at The Times to turn his tweets into a story because he had neither the connectivity nor the time to do it in the field and, besides, he was too busy doing something more precious: reporting. (It’s a great post, a look at a journalist remaking his craft. Highly recommended for journalists and journalism students particularly.) (And aren’t you proud of me for not drawing the obvious and embarrassing comparison to Times editor Bill Keller’s Luddite trolling about Twitter even as his man in Twitter, Stelter, proves what a valuable tool it is?)

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News is a subset of the conversation «

Sat, 21 May 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Buzzmachine - By Jeff Jarvis - May. 21 (Opinion) - Here’s a tale that reveals how journalists tend to think of their role in the conversation that makes up news and society. I think the conversation is happening all around us, with or without the journalists. I teach now that it’s the role of the journalist to add value to that conversation: verification, debunking, facts, reporting, context, platforms, teaching…. The late James Carey defines the role differently. As Jay Rosen explains in the Carey Reader: “The press does not ‘inform’ the public. It is ‘the public’ that ought to inform the press. The true subject matter of journalism is the conversation the public is having with itself.” But I’m seeing that news organizations think it is their role to lead the conversation (they set the agenda), allow the conversation (you may now comment on our story, now that it’s done), and judge the conversation (see Bill Keller’s sniffing at vox polloi). That’s why I went theatrically batshit on Twitter against the BBC for holding the first day of a meeting this week about *social media* under Chatham House Rule, which decrees: “participants are free to use the information received, but neither the identity nor the affiliation of the speaker(s), nor that of any other participant, may be revealed.”

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JR's TED Prize wish: Use art to turn the world inside out

Fri, 04 Mar 2011 00:00:00 -0800

TED - Mar. 04 (Speech) - JR, a semi-anonymous French street artist, uses his camera to show the world its true face, by pasting photos of the human face across massive canvases. At TED2011, he makes his audacious TED Prize wish: to use art to turn the world inside out.

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US Courts Help Corporations Win

Thu, 20 Jan 2011 00:00:00 -0800

Consortium News - By Michael Winship - Jan. 20 (Opinion) - Now, on Jan. 13, that same court ruled, as reported in The New York Times, that Joe "could not invoke a journalist's privilege in refusing to turn over that footage because his work on the film did not constitute an act of independent reporting," and that the argument "that he was protected as a journalist from being compelled to share his reporting materials was not persuasive."

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Julian Assange on WikiLeaks, War and Resisting Government Crackdown

Fri, 31 Dec 2010 00:00:00 -0800

Democracy Now - By Julian Assange, AMY GOODMAN - Dec. 31 (Interview) - 2010 can be defined as the year of WikiLeaks. The whisteblowing website first made headlines around the world in April when it released a video of a U.S. helicopter gunship indiscriminately firing on Iraqi civilians killing 12 people, including two Reuters news staff. In July, WikiLeaks created a bigger firestorm when it published more than 90,000 classified U.S. military war logs of the war in Afghanistan. Then in October, WikiLeaks published some 390,000 classified U.S. documents on the war in Iraq -- the largest intelligence leak in U.S. history and the greatest internal account of any war on public record. And in November WikiLeaks began releasing a giant trove of confidential State Department cables that sent shockwaves through the global diplomatic establishment. Throughout it all, WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange were targeted by the U.S. and other governments around the world. We play our interviews with Assange and with Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg. [includes rush transcript]

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Son of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg: "My Parents Were Executed Under the Unconstitutional Espionage Act -- Here's Why We Must Fight to Protect Julian Assange"

Thu, 30 Dec 2010 00:00:00 -0800

Democracy Now - By Robert Meeropol, Amy Goodman - Dec. 30 (Interview) - U.S. officials have said Julian Assange could be charged under the Espionage Act of 1917 and suggested laws could be amended to overcome any legal obstacles to his prosecution. Well, the potential use of the Espionage Act has special significance for our next guest. In a moment we’ll speak with Robert Meeropol. He’s the younger son of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. They’re the only U.S. citizens to be executed for conspiracy to commit espionage, described as the most controversial death sentence in U.S. history.

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Something is Rotten

Fri, 10 Dec 2010 00:00:00 -0800

TruthOut - By Dave Lindorff - Dec. 10 (Opinion) - In most countries, including the US and UK, these would not pass the test to be considered a crime, much less qualify as a category of “rape," but Swedish authorities, who in all of this year have only submitted one other request to Interpol for assistance in capturing a sex crimes suspect, asked the international police agency to issue a so-called Red Alert for Assange, who was subsquently asked by police in the UK, where he was staying, to turn himself in or face arrest. (The other Interpol Red Alert sought by Swedish prosecutors this year was for Jan Christer Wallenkurtz, a 58-year-old Swedish national wanted on multiple charges of alleged sex crimes and sex crimes against children.)

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Bolivian President Evo Morales at Cancún Climate Summit: WikiLeaks Cables Reveal "Diplomacy of Empire"

Fri, 10 Dec 2010 00:00:00 -0800

Democracy Now - By Evo Morales, Amy Goodman - Dec. 10 (Interview) - Speaking at the U.N. Climate Change Conference, Bolivian President Evo Morales warned against throwing out the Kyoto Protocol, saying such a move could result in ecocide or genocide. Bolivia has become a leading critic of how the climate talks have developed and of last year's U.S.-backed Copenhagen Accord. At a news conference, Morales also talked about U.S. dispatches on Bolivia unearthed by WikiLeaks and his response to recent criticism from Nobel Prize winner Mario Vargas Llosa.

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Josh Silver: Sarah Palin, Jim DeMint Take Aim at NPR Funding

Fri, 22 Oct 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Huffington Post - By Josh Silver - Oct. 22 (Opinion) - It's no longer just about Juan Williams or NPR. We're in a moment when we have to decide: Are we going to let our news media further devolve into a morass of shouting heads, hateful rhetoric and political opportunism? Or will we build something better?

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Who's a journalist? Does that matter?

Thu, 26 Aug 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Salon - By Dan Gillmor - Aug. 26 (Opinion) - If you're a creator of media, and most of us are these days in one way or another, what should I call you? Why do I ask? I'm finishing up a new book, called "Mediactive," to be published this fall. My primary goals are to persuade people to become much more active users, not passive consumers, of media. Part of this is what we've traditionally called "media literacy" -- among other things, applying critical thinking to what we consume. And because we are all becoming creators in the Digital Age, it also means we need to apply some basic principles so people will trust what we say (assuming we want to be trusted). One of my dilemmas has been what to call these new trusted media creators. In the era of scarcity, when there were relatively few outlets, many of them were called "journalists." This isn't only my problem, and it's more than just semantics. Asking the question in the right way has real-world impacts. So-called shield laws, for example, aim to protect whistle-blowers and the journalists whom they tell about government or corporate wrongdoing. Some states specify who counts as a journalist, which leaves out a huge range of people who effectively practice journalism nowadays; it also encourages a pernicious, back-door licensing of journalists. The right approach, if we need shield laws at all, is to protect acts of journalism. As digital media become ubiquitous and more and more of us communicate and collaborate online, every person is capable of doing something that has journalistic value. Quite reasonably, relatively few of these folks imagine themselves as journalists, and they'd laugh if you called them one.

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Truthsquad Shows We Can 'Crowdfight' Culture of Misinformation

Fri, 13 Aug 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Poynter Institute - By Kelly McBride - Aug. 13 (Opinion) - There's a lot of evidence that suggests that people don't care about the facts anymore. For the umpteenth time, PoltiFact pointed out this week that the latest claim that President Barack Obama was born outside the United States is a big fat lie and that the video tape of Obama admitting his Kenyan birth is a doctored falsehood. Last week, a CNN poll pointed out that 27 percent of Americans believe the president was "probably" or "definitely" foreign-born. Politcal science researcher Brendan Nyhan has argued that many American citizens have bad information and -- even in the face of clear proof that they are wrong -- these citizens are unable to correct their misperceptions. The Internet has only made things worse, Nyhan says, because for all the good information out there, there is enough bad information to support any distortion.

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