US: New sites add to presidential campaign coverage
Posted by Erica Mutschler on October 31, 2007 at 3:40 PM
2 new citizen journalism ventures are adding a new dimension to the US presidential campaign coverage, providing voices in addition to the mainstream media coverage of campaigns and at times giving a new perspective.
One such site is OffTheBus.com (OTB). OTB is a project launched by The Huffington Post for the presidential campaign. Arianna Huffington and Jay Rosen of New York University publish OTB (www.newassignment.net). OTB goes by the slogan “Campaign coverage by people who aren’t in the club.” It relies on the “wisdom of the crowd” of distributed journalism. In 'distributed journalism', the work is broken down into pieces and distributed among several people at once.
With a large base of contributors, OTB has the ability to increase the speed of campaign reporting and widen event coverage. Marc Cooper, OTB’s editorial director said, “In two days, we can have 50 or 100 people work an hour a day and do the work it used to take a reporter two months to do.” OTB consists of 1500 members, though not all are writers.
OTB has been aided by low start up costs of $150,000. Like similar sites, it relies on free labor.
Sites like OTB are giving younger correspondents important training that they can carry over into future employment. Huffington said the biggest lesson she has learned so far is that “a lot of citizen journalists need journalistic guidance.” In response, Huffington has hired Marc Cooper, a journalism professor at the University of California’s Annenberg School, to set editorial standards and maintain them.
Huffington said “we’ve made it very clear this is not a free-for-all.” She said, if someone writes an opinion it can go on the site’s blog. Huffinton doesn’t expect her correspondents to be completely neutral on campaign issues either. However she does expect them to be clear when they have a bias.
A similar site for campaign coverage is Scoop08.com. Scoop08.com plans to debut this Sunday. Scoop08.com has created by high school and college student with a targeted audience of high school and college students.
Source: www.nytimes.com
With a large base of contributors, OTB has the ability to increase the speed of campaign reporting and widen event coverage. Marc Cooper, OTB’s editorial director said, “In two days, we can have 50 or 100 people work an hour a day and do the work it used to take a reporter two months to do.” OTB consists of 1500 members, though not all are writers.
OTB has been aided by low start up costs of $150,000. Like similar sites, it relies on free labor.
Sites like OTB are giving younger correspondents important training that they can carry over into future employment. Huffington said the biggest lesson she has learned so far is that “a lot of citizen journalists need journalistic guidance.” In response, Huffington has hired Marc Cooper, a journalism professor at the University of California’s Annenberg School, to set editorial standards and maintain them.
Huffington said “we’ve made it very clear this is not a free-for-all.” She said, if someone writes an opinion it can go on the site’s blog. Huffinton doesn’t expect her correspondents to be completely neutral on campaign issues either. However she does expect them to be clear when they have a bias.
A similar site for campaign coverage is Scoop08.com. Scoop08.com plans to debut this Sunday. Scoop08.com has created by high school and college student with a targeted audience of high school and college students.
Source: www.nytimes.com
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Just a quick correction. The Annenberg School for Communication, where Marc Cooper teaches, is part of the University of Southern California, not the University of California.
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By the way check this company MDFI. Their stock is set to increase because of their association with Apple iphone and Complete Care Medical. Find more about this company and stock http://www.growurmoney.com/medefile/
The stock has gained 150% from Oct 8, 2007 to Oct 22, 2007.
By the way check this company MDFI. Their stock is set to increase because of their association with Apple iphone and Complete Care Medical. Find more about this company and stock http://www.growurmoney.com/medefile/
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