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

Women! Wikipedia needs you

Mon, 08 Aug 2011 00:00:00 -0700

The Guardian - By Jemima Kiss - Aug. 08 (Special Report) - In a revealing glimpse inside the Wikipedia kimono at its annual conference in Haifa at the weekend, co-founder Jimmy Wales described the typical Wikipedia editor as a 26-year-old geeky male with a PhD. Eventually he'll get married, go on to some other project and leave the site, said Wales. And Wikipedia's own research found that 90% of editors are male. This imbalance has meant that while technology and science are covered comprehensively, other subjects are left wanting. "The main thing is to bring in people of all different backgrounds," Wales told the event, reports the Independent. "If you do that, you increase the knowledge base of the site, which can only be a good thing. At the moment, we are relatively poor in a few areas; for example, biographies of famous women through history and issues surrounding early childcare."

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WikiSecrets

Tue, 24 May 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Frontline - By Martin Smith - May. 24 (Special Report) - It's the biggest intelligence breach in U.S. history -- the leaking of more than a half million classified documents on the WikiLeaks website throughout 2010. At the center of the controversy stands Bradley E. Manning, the Army intelligence analyst who's charged with handing them over. Who is Bradley Manning, and what does his story tell us about how and why the secret cache of documents may have been leaked? In WikiSecrets, FRONTLINE correspondent Martin Smith gains exclusive access to those closest to Manning -- including his father, close friends and his Army bunkmate -- and uncovers video of Manning taken around the time of the alleged handover of classified information.

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NPR’s Andy Carvin, tweeting the Middle East

Wed, 13 Apr 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Washington Post - By Paul Farhi - Apr. 13 (News Report) - Since December, Andy Carvin, a social-media strategist at NPR in Washington, has become a one-man Twitter news bureau, chronicling fast-moving developments throughout the Middle East.

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The State of the News Media 2011

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

Pew Research - By Amy Mitchell, Tom Rosenstiel, Paul Moore, Rick Edmonds, Deborah Potter - Mar. 14 (News Analysis) - By several measures, the state of the American news media improved in 2010. After two dreadful years, most sectors of the industry saw revenue begin to recover. With some notable exceptions, cutbacks in newsrooms eased. And while still more talk than action, some experiments with new revenue models began to show signs of blossoming. Among the major sectors, only newspapers suffered continued revenue declines last year—an unmistakable sign that the structural economic problems facing newspapers are more severe than those of other media. When the final tallies are in, we estimate 1,000 to 1,500 more newsroom jobs will have been lost—meaning newspaper newsrooms are 30% smaller than in 2000. Beneath all this, however, a more fundamental challenge to journalism became clearer in the last year. The biggest issue ahead may not be lack of audience or even lack of new revenue experiments. It may be that in the digital realm the news industry is no longer in control of its own future. News organizations — old and new — still produce most of the content audiences consume. But each technological advance has added a new layer of complexity—and a new set of players—in connecting that content to consumers and advertisers.

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Lebanon's Missing

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

BBC News - By Photography Dalia Khamissy, Production Benjamin Chesterton - Jan. 20 (Special Report) - Photographer Dalia Khamissy attempts to uncover what happened to the thousands of people who were kidnapped during the Lebanese civil war.

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Rio favela tweets create overnight celebrity

Mon, 29 Nov 2010 00:00:00 -0800

BBC News - By Tim Hirsch - Nov. 29 (News Report) - For the past few days, Brazilians watched transfixed as scenes more reminiscent of Iraq or Afghanistan than of their own "marvellous city", Rio de Janeiro, unfolded live on TV screens.

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snopes.com: 3.8% Tax on Real Estate Transactions

Fri, 01 Oct 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Snopes.com - Oct. 01 (Investigative Report) - Mostly FALSE

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Over 70,000 Blogs Mysteriously Shut Down

Mon, 19 Jul 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Associated Press - By Bianca Bosker - Jul. 19 (News Report) - CNET reports, some 73,000 blogs hosted by WordPress blogging platform Blogetery.com, were shut down last week by BurstNet , Blogetery's web hosting company. According to CNET "nobody seems willing to say why or who is responsible." What is known is that BurstNet informed Blogetery's operator, via email, that the its service had been terminated "by request of law enforcement officials, due to material hosted on the server."

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Ushahidi - Africa’s Gift to Silicon Valley: How to Track a Crisis

Sun, 14 Mar 2010 00:00:00 -0800

New York Times - By Anand Giridharadas - Mar. 14 (Special Report) - A small Kenyan-born Web site called Ushahidi is bringing crowdsourcing to disaster relief and other humanitarian causes.

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Understanding the Participatory News Consumer

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 00:00:00 -0800

Pew Research - By Kristen Purcell, Lee Rainie, Amy Mitchell, Tom Rosenstiel, Kenny Olmstead - Mar. 01 (Special Report) - The overwhelming majority of Americans (92%) use multiple platforms to get their daily news, according to a new survey conducted jointly by the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project and Project for Excellence in Journalism.

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Honoring Citizen Journalists

Mon, 22 Feb 2010 00:00:00 -0800

New York Times - By Brian Stelter - Feb. 22 (News Report) - A George Polk Award was given to an anonymous man for a video of the violent death of Neda Agha-Soltan, an Iranian woman who became a symbol of the opposition movement in June.

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Hellman to invest $5 million in journalism nonprofit

Fri, 25 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

San Francisco Chronicle - By James Temple - Sep. 25 (News Analysis) - San Francisco financier Warren Hellman will invest $5 million to develop a nonprofit journalism venture that will provide regional news coverage online and feed stories to media partners including KQED and possibly the New York Times. The goal of the organization, which is expected to begin next year and create "more than dozens" of positions, is to ensure thorough coverage of local politics, social issues, education and other topics as the traditional media industry shrivels. "We've lost a lot," said Hellman, who specifically bemoaned dwindling reporting on subjects like the San Francisco Ballet, local business openings and vetting of political candidates. "We're going to be meeting an unmet need."

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In San Francisco, Plans to Start News Web Site

Fri, 25 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By Richard Perez Pena - Sep. 25 (News Report) - A wealthy investor, a university journalism school and a public radio station have joined forces to create a nonprofit local news Web site for the San Francisco area, in what may be the largest and most ambitious of dozens of similar local news operations that have cropped up around the country.

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Cap-and-trade & Health Care & Insurance Reform I see these two issues as one and the same thing. The first one is to heal our planet, and the second is to heal our human bodies. Also, both issues have to deal with how the 'healing' is delievered and wh

Fri, 21 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Washington Post - By Foreign policy, EU news, climate, green technology, health. - Aug. 21 (Investigative Report) - Experts and politicians on whether health care reform will trump climate change.

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Now on YouTube, Local News

Mon, 03 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By Brian Stelter - Aug. 03 (News Report) - With its ability to collect articles and sell advertisements against them, Google has already become a huge force in the news business — and the scourge of many newspapers. Now its subsidiary YouTube wants to do the same thing to local television. YouTube, which already boasts of being “the biggest news platform in the world,” has created a News Near You feature that senses a user’s location and serves up a list of relevant videos. In time, it could essentially engineer a local newscast on the fly. It is already distributing hometown video from dozens of sources, and it wants to add thousands more. YouTube says it is helping TV stations and its other partners by creating a new — but so far not fiscally significant — source of revenue.

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Crap Detection 101

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

San Francisco Chronicle - By Howard Rheingold - Jul. 07 (Special Report) - The answer to almost any question is available within seconds, courtesy of the invention that has altered how we discover knowledge - the search engine. Materializing answers from the air turns out to be the easy part - the part a machine can do. The real difficulty kicks in when you click down into your search results. At that point, it's up to you to sort the accurate bits from the misinfo, disinfo, spam, scams, urban legends, and hoaxes. "Crap detection," as Hemingway called it half a century ago, is more important than ever before, now that the automation of crapcasting has generated its own word: "spamming." Unless a great many people learn the basics of online crap detection and begin applying their critical faculties en masse and very soon, I fear for the future of the Internet as a useful source of credible news, medical advice, financial information, educational resources, scholarly and scientific research. Some critics argue that a tsunami of hogwash has already rendered the Web useless. I disagree. We are indeed inundated by online noise pollution, but the problem is soluble. The good stuff is out there if you know how to find and verify it. Basic information literacy, widely distributed, is the best protection for the knowledge commons: A sufficient portion of critical consumers among the online population can become a strong defense against the noise-death of the Internet.

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'#CNNFail': Twitterverse slams network's Iran absence | Webware

Sun, 14 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700

CNET News - By Daniel Terdiman - Jun. 14 (News Report) - Even as Twitter became the best source for rapid-fire news developments from the front lines of the riots in Tehran, a growing number of users of the microblogging service were incredulous at the near total lack of coverage of the story on CNN, a network that cut its teeth with on-the-spot reporting from the Middle East.

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The rebirth of news

Mon, 18 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Economist - May. 18 (News Analysis) - The race is crowded, but San Francisco stands a fair chance of becoming the first major American city without a daily newspaper. The San Francisco Chronicle, founded in 1865, is trimming its already pared-down staff in an attempt to avoid closure. And if it does disappear? “People under 30 won’t even notice,” says Gavin Newsom, the city’s mayor. Most industries are suffering at present, but few are doing as badly as the news business. Things are worst in America, where many papers used to enjoy comfortable local monopolies, but in Britain around 70 local papers have shut down since the beginning of 2008. Among the survivors, advertising is dwindling, editorial is thinning and journalists are being laid off. The crisis is most advanced in the Anglo-Saxon countries, but it is happening all over the rich world: the impact of the internet, exacerbated by the advertising slump, is killing the daily newspaper.

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Tea Parties Spark Conservative Insurgency Online

Mon, 13 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Fox News - By Judson Berger - Apr. 13 (News Report) - Conservatives may be catching up with their liberal counterparts in building a Web-driven, grassroots campaign to push their agenda. The online insurgency-in-the-making revolves around the so-called tea parties, the anti-tax protests popping up around the country that they expect to culminate Wednesday -- tax day -- with hundreds of rallies nationwide. The movement, which expanded over the last two months via the Web, is now relying heavily on independent media Web sites to track and cover the campaign. The digital evolution of conservative activists comes too late to help John McCain, whose new media arm was left in the dust by President Obama's campaign. But organizers are holding out hope that this movement has juice. "It's thoroughly viral," said Glenn Reynolds, the Instapundit.com blogger who hosts an online news show for the Web site Pajamas TV. Pajamas TV is on the frontlines of new media coverage for the tea parties. The Web site already has covered some protests and is pledging to recruit an army of citizen journalists, working without pay, to cover the hundreds of protests on April 15. Roger L. Simon, co-founder of the blog network Pajamas Media, which includes Pajamas TV, said the site went after tea party coverage because the mainstream media didn't. He said Pajamas TV has more than 200 people registered to report on Wednesday's tea parties. He said they'll send in text reports, as well as videos and photos, to drive what he expects to be about 12 straight hours of online coverage. "They'll be across the country essentially," he said, calling the operation a "big experiment."

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Schmidt to Newspaper Execs: I'm From Google, and I'm Here to Help

Fri, 10 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Wired - By John C Abell - Apr. 10 (News Report) - Google CEO Eric Schmidt walked into the lion's den Tuesday as the closing keynote speaker of the Newspaper Association of America's annual conference. He got a polite reception from publishers who often blame him for their ongoing economic woes. He addressed head-on publishers' criticisms that Google unfairly makes money off other people's content, reminded the news executives they have the absolute power to keep their content out of the search giant's mix, and told them — as nicely as he could — that they stopped innovating online more than a decade ago. Google has become a big target lately, with public accusations from major media executives that the company is somehow contributing to the demise of the economically faltering newspaper industry by making money off its news portal and search, and in return only sending newspapers a mere one billion clicks a month.

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Twitter's not a Google killer. It's not a Facebook killer, either.

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

Slate - By Farhad Manjoo - Mar. 09 (News Analysis) - For you and me, Twitter is a fun way to procrastinate. But for Silicon Valley's chattering classes, the microblogging company has emerged as something much more—the next Google, the next Facebook, or maybe some unbeatable combination of the two.

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Twitter Has Potential Buyers Atwitter

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

Business Week - By Heather Green, Robert D. Hof - Mar. 04 (News Report) - The microblogging service Twitter has caught on with everyone from celeb Ashton Kutcher to CEOs. Yet for all the buzz, Twitter has always seemed more novelty than business. Many of the 140-character posts, or "tweets," that people send out on Twitter are about topics as mundane as what they had for lunch or when they're going to sleep. Is there any real value in that? It turns out there is. In fact, there's growing evidence that Twitter, a company with no revenues today, could be worth several hundred million dollars. Two sources say social-networking service Facebook offered to acquire Twitter late last year for $500 million in cash and stock. Peter Thiel, an investor in Facebook, confirmed the discussions in an interview with BusinessWeek, though he would not comment on price. He says talks fell apart over questions about the value of Facebook's stock. Facebook's offer is unlikely to be the last. Google (GOOG) has "open lines of communication" with Twitter, says one source, though there are no active deal talks. Yahoo! (YHOO) is another logical buyer, but the price may be too steep for the struggling company. Google and Yahoo declined to comment on acquisition possibilities.

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In Baltimore, No One Left to Press the Police

Sun, 01 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Washington Post - By David Simon - Mar. 01 (Special Report) - In January, a new Baltimore police spokesman -- a refugee from the Bush administration -- came to the incredible conclusion that the city department could decide not to identify those police officers who shot or even killed someone.....

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Online Journalism: Donations Accepted

Thu, 25 Dec 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Business Week - By Douglas MacMillan - Dec. 25 (Special Report) - A growing number of entrepreneurs and journalism advocates around the country are experimenting with a new type of business model for news: community-funded online journalism.

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Redwood High student says he was suspended for conservative paper

Thu, 30 Oct 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Marin Independent Journal - By Rob Rogers - Oct. 30 (News Report) - Cyrus Massoumi was suspended from Redwood High School in Larkspur, Calif. for an article he wrote in the underground conservative newspaper "Deadwood Barf". (IJ photo/Frankie Frost) Redwood High School student Cyrus Massoumi said he plans to continue publishing his online conservative newspaper, even after receiving a five-day suspension from the school district. "If I'm suspended again, or even expelled as a result, it's worth it to me if the end result is that I'm educating people that this district will not accept a moderate or conservative voice," Massoumi said. Although school officials declined to comment on his case, Massoumi, 17, a senior, said he was suspended from school Wednesday for distributing flyers directing students to his online newspaper, which he previously stored on a school computer server. He admits there are articles in The Deadwood Barf - a parody of the school newspaper The Redwood

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