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

How to Use the Internet Wisely, for Your Health and Your Country's

Sun, 13 May 2012 00:00:00 -0700

Atlantic Monthly - By Howard Rheingold - May. 13 (Opinion) - Use the following methods and tools to protect yourself from toxic bad info. Use them and then pass them along to others. Promote the notion that more info literacy is a practical answer to the growing info pollution. Be the change you want to see. Although the Web undermines authority (by enabling anybody to publish), authority is still useful as one clue to credibility in a detective hunt that accounts for many other clues. Claims to authority, however, need to be questioned. I might add credibility to my assessment if a source is a verified professor at a known institution of higher learning, an authentic MD or PhD, but I would not subtract it from people without credentials whose expertise seems authentic. If you are going to grant credibility to people whose expertise is based on being a professor of something, make sure that assertion is accurate. Don't stop at simply verifying that the claim to be a professor is valid if you are looking for scientific credibility. The next step is to use the Faculty Scholarly Productivity Index that derives a score from the scholar's publications, citations by other scholars, grants, honors, and awards. If you want to get even more serious, download a free copy of Publish or Perish software, which analyzes scientific citations from Google Scholar according to multiple criteria. Or use the h-index to calculate how many times other scientists have cited a particular source. Again, don't trust just one source; triangulate.

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8 questions that will help define the future of journalism

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

Google News - By Richard Gingras - Apr. 19 (Speech) - These are extraordinary times. These are exciting times. There has been tremendous disruption, but let’s consider the huge positives that underly that disruption. There are no longer the same barriers to publishing: everyone has a printing press, and there are no gatekeepers. There are new ways for people to both consume and share news. There are powerful new technologies that can change what journalists do and how they do it. In my view, the future of journalism can and will be better than its past.

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Keith Olbermann: Machine Gun for Hire

Sun, 01 Apr 2012 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By David Carr - Apr. 01 (Opinion) - Given Keith Olbermann’s abrupt removal at Current and his typically temperate response — “Current’s statement are untrue and will be proved so in the legal actions I will be filing against them presently” — it seems as if his next stop will be a puppet show shot from a basement somewhere. He’ll never work in this town, or any other, again, right? Wrong. Many of his past employers will testify to his unmanageability and unpleasantness, but the fact of the matter is that somewhere, sometime, after some kind of cooling-off period, Mr. Olbermann will be coming to a television near you. That has less to do with the greater fool theory, which suggests that there will always be someone naïve enough to think that they can accomplish what others have not — that is, make Mr. Olbermann behave like a professional when he is not on the air. (Remember that former Vice President Al Gore and Joel Hyatt — two of the principals at Current — blew through many stop signs to get to Mr. Olbermann. They made very hopeful statements when the deal was cut, which were followed by very frustrated noises thereafter.)

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Howard Rheingold: Knowing How to Collaborate Is Essential

Sat, 17 Mar 2012 00:00:00 -0700

PBS - By Roland Legrand - Mar. 17 (Interview) - I just read the Kindle edition of "Net Smart," written by writer and critic Howard Rheingold. The book provides a thoughtful analysis of some major theories and discourses about the "always on" era, while at the same time giving new insights and practical advice about the literacies we need to thrive in this environment. I've followed Rheingold's posts and videos for some time now, attended presentations, and participated in some of his courses. He's not only an expert in virtual communities (a term he coined himself) and social media, but also teaches digital journalism. I had the opportunity to interview him recently about the implications of his thinking on media, journalism and journalism education.

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Truth And The World Of Wikipedia Gatekeepers

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0800

NPR - By Timothy Messer-Kruse, Andrew Lih, Steven Walling, Neal Conan - Feb. 22 (Interview) - Wikipedia is the go-to source for succinct information on almost every topic imaginable. It strives to reflect neutral truths that can be verified by reliable sources. The site, known as "The Free Encyclopedia" is written and edited by volunteers.

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The World Is Ending, Please Update the Home Page

Tue, 06 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0800

New York Times - By David Carr - Dec. 06 (Opinion) - Let’s say, just for giggles, that the word was ending. Could be an alien invasion, a pandemic or nuclear annihilation. If one of those scenarios became a news event, how would it be covered? That question was posed by Andrew Fitzgerald, one of the partic

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Restoring Factchecking

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

San Francisco Chronicle - By Craig Newmark - Nov. 29 (Opinion) - Recently, Jeff Jarvis at the City University of NY held an event on restoring factchecking to the news business. He did a really good job getting a bunch of players in this arena to play well together.

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The American Autumn: An Accurate Protest Movement Scares The Pants Off Conservatives In Both Parties | adn.com

Sun, 16 Oct 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Anchorage Daily News - By Rudy_Wittshirk - Oct. 16 (Opinion) - Now there is another precisely-aimed protest movement in America. “Occupy Wall Street” looks like it has “legs”---and if those legs don’t freeze off this Winter, watch out!

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NewsTrust on Fact-Checking and the Wisdom of Crowds

Thu, 25 Aug 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Atlantic Monthly - By Walter Frick - Aug. 25 (Interview) - Truthsquad is a new pro-am fact-checking service we are developing with the Center for Public Integrity, to help journalists and citizens separate fact from fiction together. We are combining the best practices of crowdsourcing with the knowledge of a large nonprofit newsroom and the reach of major news partners. This unique approach empowers citizens to collaborate with journalists to investigate controversial statements from politicians and newsmakers. Participants are invited to post questionable claims online, research factual evidence supporting or opposing these claims, and verify their accuracy as a community, with professional oversight.

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A Push to Redefine Knowledge at Wikipedia

Wed, 10 Aug 2011 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By Noam Cohen - Aug. 10 (Opinion) - “MAKING fun of Wikipedia is so 2007,” a French journalist said recently to Sue Gardner, the executive director of the foundation that runs the Wikipedia project. And so Ms. Gardner, in turn, told an auditorium full of Wikipedia contributors and supporters on Thursday in Haifa, Israel, the host city for the seventh annual Wikimania conference, where meetings and presentations focus on the world’s most used, and perhaps least understood, online reference work. Once routinely questioned about its reliability — what do you mean, anyone can edit it? — the site is now used every month by upwards of 400 million people worldwide. But with influence and respect come responsibility, and lately Wikipedia has been criticized from without and within for reflecting a Western, male-dominated mindset similar to the perspective behind the encyclopedias it has replaced. Seeing Wikipedia as The Man, in so many words, is so 2011.

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The future of news: Back to the coffee house

Sat, 09 Jul 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Economist - Jul. 09 (Opinion) - Three hundred years ago news travelled by word of mouth or letter, and circulated in taverns and coffee houses in the form of pamphlets, newsletters and broadsides. “The Coffee houses particularly are very commodious for a free Conversation, and for reading at an easie Rate all manner of printed News,” noted one observer. Everything changed in 1833 when the first mass-audience newspaper, the New York Sun, pioneered the use of advertising to reduce the cost of news, thus giving advertisers access to a wider audience. At the time of the launch America’s bestselling paper sold just 4,500 copies a day; the Sun, with its steam press, soon reached 15,000. The penny press, followed by radio and television, turned news from a two-way conversation into a one-way broadcast, with a relatively small number of firms controlling the media. Now, as our special report explains, the news industry is returning to something closer to the coffee house. The internet is making news more participatory, social, diverse and partisan, reviving the discursive ethos of the era before mass media. That will have profound effects on society and politics.

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Learning to Love the (Shallow, Divisive, Unreliable) New Media

Wed, 16 Mar 2011 10:25:51 -0700

Atlantic Monthly - By James Fallows - Mar. 16 (Opinion) - Consumer-obsessed, sensationalist, and passionate about their work, digital upstarts are undermining the old media—and they may also be pointing the way to a brighter future.

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Citizen journalists of the right: Watch out for the other side

Mon, 14 Mar 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Baltimore Sun - By Susan Reimer - Mar. 14 (Opinion) - What we have here is a mash-up of citizen journalism, conservative activism and micro video cameras. The goal appears to be to catch those who work for institutions that you do not support doing something improper, or saying something stupid, and using those recordings to turn public opinion against their cause.

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Andy Carvin: The Middle East revolutions one tweet at a time

Mon, 07 Mar 2011 00:00:00 -0800

Washington Post - By Melissa Bell - Mar. 07 (Interview) - The Middle East uprisings have seen a flood of information like never before spill out over the networks of the world. Wading through all of that information has been Andy Carvin, the head of social media at NPR who has attempted to tell the story through Twitter. What al-Jazeera English did for the the video coverage of Egypt, Carvin has done for the Twitter coverage: provide consistent, thorough, wide ranging aggregation of the events in the Middle East. A "human router," as the blog TechCrunch calls him, Carvin has spent the past two months -- except for during meals with his family and when putting his children to bed -- tweeting news out about the Middle East.

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George Monbiot

Wed, 23 Feb 2011 00:00:00 -0800

The Guardian - By George Monbiot - Feb. 23 (Opinion) - The tobacco industry does it, the US Air Force clearly wants to ... astroturfing – the use of sophisticated software to drown out real people on web forums – is on the rise. How do we stop it? Every month more evidence piles up, suggesting that online comment threads and forums are being hijacked by people who aren't what they seem. The anonymity of the web gives companies and governments golden opportunities to run astroturf operations: fake grassroots campaigns that create the impression that large numbers of people are demanding or opposing particular policies. This deception is most likely to occur where the interests of companies or governments come into conflict with the interests of the public. For example, there's a long history of tobacco companies creating astroturf groups to fight attempts to regulate them .

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Why the world needs WikiLeaks

Mon, 26 Jul 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Aljazeera - By Julian Assange - Jul. 26 (Interview) - The controversial website WikiLeaks collects and posts highly classified documents and videos. Founder Julian Assange, who is reportedly being sought for questioning by US authorities, talks to TED's Chris Anderson about how the site operates, what it has accomplished and what drives him.

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With World Watching, Wikileaks Falls Into Disrepair

Wed, 30 Jun 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Wired - By Ryan Singel - Jun. 30 (Opinion) - Would-be whistle-blowers hoping to leak documents to Wikileaks face a potentially frustrating surprise. Wikileaks’ submission process, which had been degraded for months, completely collapsed more than two weeks ago and remains offline, in a little-noted breakdown at the world’s most prominent secret-spilling website.

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Future of news lies in the grassroots

Wed, 17 Mar 2010 00:00:00 -0700

The Guardian - By Dan Kennedy - Mar. 17 (Opinion) - One way to think about the new media environment is that the handful of news sites singled out by the Project for Excellence in Journalism include the few with the resources to cover the truly big stories, from the battle over healthcare reform to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It makes sense that most people are going to read those sites.

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-- 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.

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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

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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

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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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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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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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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.

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