Tag: journalism

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This Day in Media

— Jay Rosen introduced and discussed NewAssignment.net — “an experiment in open-source journalism” — at Harvard’s Berkman Center (video)

— Al Jazeera International finally launches its English-language broadcast. It’s U.S. distribution is quite thin, having been turned down by Comcast, however, it will be available online at VDC.com and english.aljazeera.net.

— Len Downie is the latest to announce layoffs and consolidation as the state of the job market circa my impending graduation from J-school begins to eerily mirror the quasi- market circa my high school graduation in 1993 (and how things changed with 2 years of Net proliferation). An ONLINE Journalism major, I’m not nearly as concerned as my colleagues.

— Free Press and the Center on Media & Democracy released their second report on the use of Fake News and Video News Reports in mainstream media.

— Amanda Congdon of Rocketboom fame is goin’ Disney — she’s signed on to blog at ABCNews. Just the other day she announced a contract with HBO (check int’v w/ BizWeek). Hopefully her lovely vidblogging wit will transfer to print better than Mark Halperin‘s (of the Note) personality lame-ified ABC News Now appearances.

Tonight at a presentation of a soon-to-be-release study of Media Usage Gap by the Annenberg School for Communication and Ketchum, it was revealed that “it’s all about the influencers,” 18-30 year olds digest an incrediubly broad array of media, from social networking sites to print newspapers, etc… and blogs are not as infouential on a broad scale as many think, according to the study, of course. More on all that later.

Lots of deeper blogging to come as the past few days have included BarCamp LA 2 and encounters with ‘net early adopters/enablers/activists John Gilmore and John Perry Barlow… .

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Election Day Belongs to WE, the people.

Free and fair elections, as we’ve heard over and over recently (in re: iraq) are the linchpin of a true democracy.
vote November 7
My recommendations are: take off the right/left hat and abolish words like “partisan” and “bias” and re-register as “independent” or “upright caucasian.”

Listening to the mud-slinging and standing by while the media sits back enabling and magnifying the ridiculum, I realize that it’s important to not lose focus on the matters at hand. For one day, we’re in control (at least to some extent).

OK, I’ll leave it there. I’ll be roaming L.A. country documenting for Video the Vote — more on the grassroots, non-partisan efforts recently launched tomorrow…

Freshly launched NewAssignment.net lists Nine Ways Citizen Journalists Can Cover the Election

For all in CA, here is a proposition party-style breakdown of this year’s assortment of y/n legislation.

Know the issues, know the candidates and don’t answer the phone or check the mail during the 72 hours of shadiness.

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New York Times Co. Leads Funding for New Online J Site ‘Daylife’

daylifeA formal announcement is forthcoming from Daylife — the news site that has popped up in conversation over the past year because of Craig Newmark, Jeff Jarvis and others’ involvement in the project.

The New York Times Company appears to be one of the top investors, which could foreshadow a bold move into user-generated news and reader-customizable content.

Staci Kramer at Paid Content writes:

The mission is to gather and organize news in ways that are most relevant to the user. That could be by event, topic, author, geography or other factors. Source pages that show what a journalist writes about or who is quoted are part of the mix. RSS plays an important role. In an interview, [Upendra] Shardanand [founder of Firefly] said the distributed platform—designed for use across multiple sites—will be open “to a degree” with options for revenue sharing and licensing for those doing a heavy volume. “Anyone can take what we’re building and add it to their own site … Obviously, we have to make some revenue.”

Nice to see the Times making a proactive move long after their relatively idiotic acquisition of About.com. Interested to see how — if at all — Jay Rosen‘s NewAssignment.Net is involved.

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‘Democracy on Deadline’

The power of the media as a make-or-break element in a functioning democracy sets the foundation for a journalist’s struggle to seek out and report the honest truth. But how does the role of a free press factor into the vitality of a free society?

These concepts are examined vividly in the exceptional documentary, Democracy on Deadline by director Calvin Skaggs (Go Tell it On the Mountain) and co-producer Jed Rothstein. The documentary puts the audience in the position of several of the world’s finest journalists, complete with candid interviews and not-seen-before-in-America footage that is in one way reminiscent of Control Room, the 2004 documentary on the Arab-language satellite network, Al Jazeera International.

The filmmaking and production of “Democracy on Deadline” is outstanding, mixing uniquely regional experiences with candid exchanges and graphic footage over the course of two hours. In one memorable instance, the audience is literally in the back seat of a car driven by Ha’aretz correspondent Gideon Levy, delayed at a checkpoint at the West Bank border crossing. This is not business as usual, we’re assured, when Levy gets on his cell phone, enraged that the border guards were not previously notified and waiting for him to cross with American journalists in tow.

“Democracy on Deadline” examines issues and struggles regarding press freedom around the world through an examination of six unique (and high-profile) case studies in progress. The film profiles various journalists in different settings — all taking relatively radical approaches to reporting and exuding a vociferous enthusiasm for their responsibilities as guardians of democracy.

In one segment, Dana Priest of the Washington Post is followed by a camera as she works security insiders (watch quicktime video) at what appears to be a press event regarding the status of detainees in December 2004. We watch Priest at her desk taking notes as she digs deeper and deeper for dirt on her CIA black prisons article, nearly a year before she would publish the core piece in her package that landed her a Pulitzer.

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