Results matching “every citizen i”

Non-profit investigative journalism outfit ProPublica is taking advantage of the Super Bowl to dig into the fundraising efforts of politicians, Poynter Online reports.

Reporter Marcus Stern planned to use the football game, held yesterday, to spot members of Congress who were attending and figure out how they obtained their tickets. But since he knew that trying to contact 535 members of Congress would be too big a task for one person, he turned the investigation into a crowdsourcing effort and asked professional journalists and the public to help collaborate.

"To some extent, this is going to be a test of the privacy or the openness of members of Congress when it comes to fundraising," Stern told Poynter Online.

It's a question that can get lost in all the talk of business models and content creation: how might journalism best serve the public?

In Australia, the latest group to ponder this is The Foundation for Public Interest Journalism, directed by a group of journalists, editors, academics and members of the community. Part of the Institute for Social Research at Swinburne University in Melbourne, it is setting up a project called YouCommNews, modeled on the American site Spot.Us, which will allow the audience to commission the stories they want to see.

The Editors Weblog spoke to Dr Margaret Simons, chair of the foundation, and to David Cohn, founder of Spot.Us.

A study carried out as part of an online survey by the research agency DECODE as part of an international benchmark project of the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers in 2008, has found that Dutch youth (based on 1,000 people between the ages of 15 to 29) are neither interested in receiving news via mobile applications nor taking part in citizen journalism projects. They also do not find newspaper sections aimed at young people a compelling reason to regularly pick up a paper. They do, however, judge news media fairly positively.

Whilst initially surprising, the results of the study "Youth, news media and civic engagement," are in line with findings of a new study by IBM's Media and Entertainment Group, which shows that online news consumption has dropped among young adults, but risen among older consumers, calling into question the assumption that young people read more online news and older people favour printed publications.

Citizen journalism website AllVoices has raised another $3 million in funds, bringing their total start-up funding to around $9 million, TechCrunch reports. The new funding comes courtesy of existing investor VantagePoint Venture Partners.

Since its launch in July 2008, the site has seen its audience grow to almost 5 million unique visitors a month, which is considered fast for a media startup. Half of its traffic and visitors are from outside the US and the UK.

Editor of the Guardian Alan Rusbridger made clear his feelings on paywalls and the growing importance of social media during the 2010 Hugh Cudlipp lecture yesterday, entitled 'Does journalism exist?' The Guardian reproduced the text of the lecture here.

Hugh Cudlipp was an editor at the Daily Mirror from the early 1950s to early 1970s,
a period in which, as Rusbridger pointed out, newspaper editors' key challenge was producing good editorial content, rather than trying to come up with a new business model, which is a top issue confronting all editors now.

The Guardian has launched a new data search website, allowing readers to search government data from the UK, US, Australia and New Zealand.

After these different governments made their statistics available on individual websites, The Guardian has collected them in one place, at their new World Government Data website. This enables users to not only search the information, but also collect similar datasets from around the world, and find the best dataset by ranking them.

The more tech-savvy users will be able to transform the data into visualisations, mash-ups and apps. The websites invites users to post such creations.

Much of the transformation in the newspaper industry is led by the big western players: The New York Times has announced it will charge for content, The Guardian has launched a paid news app for the iPhone, and the Apple tablet is eagerly anticipated.

But these changes affect other parts of the world, as the Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram reminds us. "In Egypt, we are also experiencing a seismic media evolution," Tarek Atia writes, in a considered op-ed on the state of the newspaper industry in Egypt and the future of media.

At least some of the bankrupt newspapers owned by Canwest may have found a buyer, Editor and Publisher reports. A group of investors is preparing bids for three of the largest dailies: The National Post, The Montreal Gazette and The Ottawa Citizen.

The consortium includes Beryl Wajsman, editor of Quebec's largest English-language weekly, The Suburban; Raymond Heard, a former Montreal Star managing editor and former editor of the London Observer News Service; and Jerry S. Grafstein, a former Canadian senator and founder of the Toronto television station CITY-TV.

We're in a society that has moved from scoop to buzz, says Aurèle Lambert, new media consultant, speaking at the WAN-IFRA conference 'Using sports news to optimise your revenues'.

A scoop refers to new and exclusive information, while buzz refers to information that is easily reproduced through viral transmission. We've moved from an economy based on attention to one based on contagion, he says, where information attracts attention and is transmitted to other players. It's important to consider the relevance of new information and its singularity. He suggests finding ways to turn a scoop, which is both relevant and unique, into a buzz, which is relevant but highly visible, and thus can monetise information and create profit. To be different, it's important to show that you're not providing the same information as everyone else.

He distinguishes between two main kinds of bloggers. One is a community, such as Skyblogs, which can create a mass of information and increase a site's visibility. The other could be called star blogs, run by gurus, experts and opinion leaders. These are heavily involved in personal branding, and are used for visibility and loyalty, such as Pierrot Le Foot's blog on Yahoo France.

About a month ago, Jay Rosen, a journalism professor at New York University, published a post on his blog about an idea that could make journalism better by allowing more people to participate in the journalistic process: ExplainThis.

Aware of the importance of context and research in the news environment, Rosen explained to the Poynter Online that his idea was based on a user-centric approach to news.

The Telegraaf Media Groep has the advantage of already having a significant presence in the news landscape of the Netherlands, and Brouwers hopes that his new network can collaborate with Telegraaf's more traditional properties. He realises, however, that his platform is going to be very different, and also that the Telegraaf newspapers will be careful about how much of their content they give away. 

Amidst all the threats to press freedom, here's some good news: the Breaking Borders Award, jointly organized by Google and international citizen journalism website Global Voices and supported by Thomson Reuters. The award is presented to outstanding online projects that show courage, energy and resourcefulness in using the internet to promote freedom of expression and stand up to those who censor information.

Three categories of the prize are awarded: tools that promote freedom of expression, outstanding work on policy, and activism or journalism that contributed an important voice or argument. The winner of each category receives $10,000.

A new initiative from the BBC will grant the general public access to online material used to train the industry's elite, with masterclasses delivered by the likes of John Simpson and John Humphrys, the Guardian reported.

The move comes as the international broadcasting agency launches the BBC Academy today, a centre dedicated to turning out the journalists of tomorrow.

Google announced Monday that it will now be streaming updates from social networking sites in real time as search results. When a term is typed into a Google search, the lead result will now be a section of constantly updating social network, news site, and blog postings pertinent to the topic. 

The newest version of the Telegraph iPhone app allows users to contribute breaking stories or average everyday happenings to telegraph.co.uk. 

Clay Shirky, journalism intellectual extraordinaire, was interviewed at Yale University for a conference on The New News Ecology: "Who will pay for the messenger?" by Leonard Witt for Sustainable Journalism. 

Twitter is changing the way almost every form of business is conducted. As reported by Media Guardian, its newest conquest is local tourism and town information. Darlington, a town in north-eastern England, has just announced the hiring of a Twitterer-in-Residence.

Mike McTimoney, a schoolteacher, will use Twitter to promote local events and to inform people about local news. He was already an avid Twitterer when he signed on for the gig, which will pay him £140 a year for his services. He tweets under the name TheDarloBoard.

BNO News, which achieved fame for the use of citizen journalists to report breaking news via its @BreakingNews Twitter service in 2007, has announced it will launch a paid-subscription wire service early next year.

In January this year, it was reported that the 20 year old Dutch founder, Michael van Poppel, was attempting to move away from the Twitter feed, which now has more than 1.4 million followers, in order to try to monetize the content.

Allvoices, a citizen journalism network that uses a combination of algorithms and user feedback to assess the reliability of contributions, is to start a Provoices network for professional journalists, aiming to cover beats and cities around the world.

Allvoices is promising to pay up to $250 per story to qualified journalists who are selected for the program, and the company may pay "much more" for certain high traffic stories, according to a press release. "We recognize that these are tough times for many journalists as news organizations downsize," Allvoices CEO Amra Tareen said. "We're providing a platform for the best of these journalists to continue to cover their beats, communicate with a global audience and earn money doing it." She specified to the EW that "payment will be determined by what is original breaking news, quality and traffic."

In his latest blog post, David Cohn a.k.a. "DigiDave", founder of crowd-funded news site spot.us, states that journalism needs to be redefined - and moreover, that "honest communication" must be preserved:

"Journalism as a word is loaded because of the ministry it invokes. The profession that, since Watergate, has laid claim to it. That ministry is now a diaspora. Much like after the Gutenberg revolution the ministry lost its authority in interpreting the bible. Martin Luther showed us how. In reaction many journalists cling even tighter to that word," writes Cohn, who states that his key motivations as a journalist are "speaking truth to power" "afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted", as well as enabling communities to inform themselves "so they can make better decisions."

YouTube is releasing a new open-source interface called YouTube Direct that aims to make it easier for news organisations to have access to relevant clips from citizen journalists, it was widely reported. The application, to be unveiled today, will allow media outlets to integrate a video upload tool into their sites, where they can accept and screen user footage, described TechCrunch. All content uploaded will also appear on the YouTube site.

As more and more of the public are equipped to record video on cameras or mobile phones, and it becomes easier to upload, citizen contributions are being welcomed at more and more news outlets, particularly as financial difficulties are cau. So many videos are uploaded to YouTube each minute, however, that it is hard to find news-worthy content and very difficult to ascertain its reliability.