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

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.

NewsTrust Rating: 3.8 average (not enough reviews) - See Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

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.

NewsTrust Rating: 3.9 average - 15 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Debate: The news industry

Sat, 16 Jul 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Economist - By Jay Rosen, Nicholas Carr, Tom Standage - Jul. 16 (Opinion) - There is no question that the internet is transforming the news industry, just as it has reshaped so many other industries. And, as in those other cases, the internet's impact has both positive and negative aspects. Does this, on balance, strengthen or weaken the news system? This question is not merely of academic interest, or self-interest on the part of journalists. Through an accident of history, the news industry is a largely commercial venture that provides important public goods: serving communities, facilitating public debate and holding those in power to account. This debate will hinge, I suspect, on the effectiveness and sustainability of the new models of accountability journalism that the internet makes possible.

NewsTrust Rating: 3.8 average - 6 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

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.

NewsTrust Rating: 3.7 average - 4 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

The end of mass media: Coming full circle

Thu, 07 Jul 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Economist - Jul. 07 (Editorial) - There is a great historical irony at the heart of the current transformation of news. The industry is being reshaped by technology—but by undermining the mass media’s business models, that technology is in many ways returning the industry to the more vibrant, freewheeling and discursive ways of the pre-industrial era. Until the early 19th century there was no technology for disseminating news to large numbers of people in a short space of time. It travelled as people chatted in marketplaces and taverns or exchanged letters with their friends. This phenomenon can be traced back to Roman times, when members of the elite kept each other informed with a torrent of letters, transcriptions of speeches and copies of the acta diurna, the official gazette that was posted in the forum each day. News travelled along social networks because there was no other conduit.

NewsTrust Rating: 3.8 average - 7 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

The Singularity We Live In …

Thu, 30 Jun 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Wired - By Craig Newmark - Jun. 30 (Opinion) - Around five hundred years ago, another nerd, Johannes Gutenberg, invented some tech, but lacked the marketing skills to go really big. That took a social media practitioner, Martin Luther, who started with a posting on a church door. That had impact similar to a really good Facebook Wall post. However, Luther made use of a social networking platform, the Church store-and-forward network, which really got his stuff around, to considerable effect, in the Western hemisphere. That played out over maybe a few hundred years and led to a new balance of power in Europe and a loss of message control, resulting in many strains of Protestantism, and the democratization of Christianity. The latter led to greatly increased literacy. The social network platform was built by a much earlier social media practitioner, Paul of Tarsus, or St. Paul, to successfully effect mass change. Paul used what I call “e-mail”, or “epistle mail”.

NewsTrust Rating: 3.9 average (not enough reviews) - See Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Mindlessly following Palin tour does the media no favors:

Wed, 08 Jun 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Anchorage Daily News - By Elise Patkotak - Jun. 08 (Opinion) - First, Sarah Palin makes the term "lamestream media" her own, then she goes and proves they really are. And the lamestream media is right there helping her by acting like a bunch of buffoons. Like summer movies, the coverage being provided of Palin's summer vacation is vacuous and forgettable -- it is, as the Bard would say, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

NewsTrust Rating: 4.0 average (not enough reviews) - See Review » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Five myths about the future of journalism

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

Washington Post - By Tom Rosenstiel - Apr. 09 (Opinion) - There are few things journalists like to discuss more than, well, themselves and the long-term prospects for their industry. How long will print newspapers survive? Are news aggregation sites the future? Or are online paywalls — such as the one the New York Times just launched — the way to go? As media organizations plot their future, it’s worth discarding some misconceptions about what it will take to keep the press from becoming yesterday’s news.

NewsTrust Rating: 3.7 average - 6 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

The NPR video and political dirty tricks

Fri, 18 Mar 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Washington Post - By Michael Gerson - Mar. 18 (Opinion) - James O’Keefe’s guerrilla video attack on NPR has led to the resignation of its chief executive and an ethical debate: When are lies justified in pursuit of a political cause?

NewsTrust Rating: 3.5 average - 5 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Beauty, Through Pinhole or Plastic

Thu, 17 Mar 2011 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By David Gonzalez - Mar. 17 (Review) - Toys? Novelties? Curios? Don't tell that to the customers who line up for Randy Smith's modified Holgas and pinhole cameras.

NewsTrust Rating: 4.0 average - 3 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

The NYT paywall arrives

Thu, 17 Mar 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Reuters - By Felix Salmon - Mar. 17 (Opinion) - The NYT paywall has arrived: it’s going up in Canada today, and then worldwide on March 28. The most comprehensive source for the gritty details is this FAQ, which does things like explain the difference between an item and a pageview.

NewsTrust Rating: 3.5 average (not enough reviews) - See Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

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.

NewsTrust Rating: 3.7 average - 5 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

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.

NewsTrust Rating: 3.9 average (not enough reviews) - See Review » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Why our writers are on strike against the Huffington Post

Sat, 05 Mar 2011 00:00:00 -0800

The Guardian - By Bill Lasarow - Mar. 05 (Opinion) - With the $315m AOL deal, the veil hiding labour exploitation is torn away. The author of Third World America must know better For the better part of the last year, Visual Art Source reposted a number of the articles that we publish in our monthly digest, ArtScene , as well as in our Visual Art Source weekly newsletter and on our website to a nationally branded website owned and operated by the author of a book published last year entitled Third World America: How our Politicians are Abandoning the Middle Class and Betraying the American Dream . That author is Arianna Huffington, the website in question being the Huffington Post. After reflecting on and discussing with our writers and editors the array of professional and ethical issues implied by that affiliation, we have made the decision to suspend any further contributions of our writers' work. Accordingly, we published a strike notice . Two central concerns have troubled us from the start: is exposure to Huffington Post's extensive ...

NewsTrust Rating: 3.9 average (not enough reviews) - See Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Nir Rosen's Offensive Tweets Shouldn't Have Surprised Us

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

Politics Daily - By Matt Lewis - Feb. 17 (Opinion) - After examining Rosen's past writings (and Tweets), none of us should be terribly surprised that he would have so viciously attacked Logan.

NewsTrust Rating: 3.5 average (not enough reviews) - See Review » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

NewsTrust: one way the internet is reshaping journalism

Wed, 16 Feb 2011 00:00:00 -0800

Marc Steiner Show - By Marc Steiner, Gin Ferrara, Khalilah Harris, Malaika Aminata, Brionna Hollie - Feb. 16 (Interview) - NewsTrust is an online social network that seeks to help people identify quality journalism. We take a look at how this works by discussing coverage of recent events surrounding the Superblock development in downtown Baltimore, and the movement to save Read's Drug store, site of an early civil rights sit-in, from being demolished.

NewsTrust Rating: 4.0 average (not enough reviews) - See Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

The Economics of Blogging and The Huffington Post

Sun, 13 Feb 2011 00:00:00 -0800

New York Times - By Nate Silver - Feb. 13 (Opinion) - Although The Huffington Post does not pay those who volunteer to write blogs for it, this content represents only a small share of its traffic. And, to put it bluntly, many of those blog posts aren't worth very much.

NewsTrust Rating: 3.9 average (not enough reviews) - See Review » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Arianna Huffington's ideological transformation

Wed, 09 Feb 2011 00:00:00 -0800

Washington Post - By Dana Millbank - Feb. 09 (Opinion) - Did Arianna Huffington just sell out her fellow progressives?

NewsTrust Rating: 3.9 average (not enough reviews) - See Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

SEO Speedwagon

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

Slate - By Jack Shafer - Feb. 07 (Opinion) - Back in 2005, no self-respecting journalist would ever sink so low to chum the waters with such foul SEO bait. But thanks to Huffington, all self-respecting journalists—especially those who fear for their jobs—have abandoned those anxieties and are happy to chase Arianna's SEO Speedwagon wherever it may go.

NewsTrust Rating: 3.9 average (not enough reviews) - See Review » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Wallflowers at the Revolution

Sun, 06 Feb 2011 00:00:00 -0800

New York Times - By Frank Rich - Feb. 06 (Opinion) - The consequence of a decade’s worth of indiscriminate demonization of Arabs in America — and of the low quotient of comprehensive adult news coverage that might have helped counter it — is the steady rise in Islamophobia.

NewsTrust Rating: 4.3 average (not enough reviews) - See Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Tunisia's youth finally has revolution on its mind

Thu, 13 Jan 2011 00:00:00 -0800

The Guardian - By Sam - Jan. 13 (Opinion) - We've become used to gossiping about the regime and feeling that we're plotting. But now we see the time to rebel has come.

NewsTrust Rating: 3.2 average (not enough reviews) - See Review » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Amazon's Kindle opens new chapter for publishing industry

Wed, 29 Dec 2010 00:00:00 -0800

Los Angeles Times - By Alex Pham - Dec. 29 (Interview) - Russ Grandinetti, the head of content for Amazon.com's Kindle business, talks about Amazon's plans for its rapidly growing Kindle business. When Amazon.com Inc. launched its Kindle digital book business in 2007, little did many people realize that the company was really rewriting the book on the entire publishing industry.

NewsTrust Rating: 3.6 average - 5 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Don't Buy Me an iPad for Christmas

Wed, 22 Dec 2010 00:00:00 -0800

Wall Street Journal - By Brett Arends - Dec. 22 (Opinion) - Ten reasons why Apple's tablet computer—this year's hottest adult toy—makes a lousy gift.

NewsTrust Rating: 3.9 average - 4 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

A Wiki hornets' nest

Mon, 13 Dec 2010 00:00:00 -0800

Washington Post - By Eugene Robinson - Dec. 13 (Opinion) - The most important legacy of the WikiLeaks affair will almost surely be the rapidly escalating cyberwar that the group's renegade disclosures have sparked. If you think you're unaffected by unseen "battles" fought with keystrokes instead of bullets, you're wrong. At stake are issues of free speech, censorship, privacy, piracy, sovereignty and corporate power.

NewsTrust Rating: 4.0 average (not enough reviews) - See Review » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Julian Assange's Great Luck

Tue, 07 Dec 2010 00:00:00 -0800

Slate - By Jack Shafer - Dec. 07 (Opinion) - Although a stay in stir and the prospect of Swedish prosecution might not sound appealing or even advantageous, it's actually a lucky break for Assange. I don't expect him to express his gratitude publicly, but I'll bet he's gamed out how to turn the Swedish arrest warrant, the extradition hearing, and beyond to his benefit.

NewsTrust Rating: 3.5 average - 5 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer