Citizen Journalism

I consider Citizen Journalism to be strongly linked to Computational Journalism, as Comp. Journalism will help understand the needs for Citizen Journalists and provide guidance to build better tools for citizens to go beyond authoring and sharing eye-witness and opinion pieces.

See http://www.globalvoicesonline.org/ for a great site on voices from all over the world and http://citmedia.org/.

The Wizards of Buzz - WSJ.com

The Wizards of Buzz - WSJ.com
A new kind of Web site is turning ordinary people into hidden influencers, shaping what we read, watch and buy.

(courtesy Jim Foley)

For Bloggers, Libby Trial Is Fun and Fodder - New York Times

For Bloggers, Libby Trial Is Fun and Fodder - New York Times

an interesting article on "blogging"

(Courtesy Amy Bruckman)

Nintendo Wii Interactive News Channel

Wii users can catch news relevant to them by navigating a 3D Globe and selecting regions where the users reside in. They can opt to view international, regional, or local news, all provided by Associated Press (except for the Japanese, that will be provided by Goo).

In order to make use of the Wii News Channel service, customers must connect the Wii to a high-speed connection as demonstrated in the manual and activate the System Update. Once the update is complete, the Wii News Channel will be already downloaded. To keep news up-to-date, the Wii must be connected to the Internet.

Please look at the following link for a demo of the interactive news channel:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5VRPlnvK3Ws

NewsU Fellowship

This may be an interesting opportunity for anyone graduating at the end of this Spring and looking to get more into the world of interactive and multimedia journalism. The Poynter Institute is a very prestigious organization.

Newsmap Visualization

I know we'll be studying news visualization next week, but I came across this today. This newsmap displays the topography of the whatever's on Google News at the moment, using a treemap visualization algorithm to determine the size based on the number of news results for each story.

Google News Breaches Copyright

Apparently a Brussels court has ruled that Google News breaches copyright law, and uses the material without the Authors consent.

"A Brussels court has ruled in favour of a group of Belgian newspapers which argued that the site, which lists links to news stories from around the world, used material without their consent, and ordered that the articles be taken down."

Apparently the group is also pursuing Yahoo! as well for their news service.

Here's the article.

News War Documentary

"In a four-and-a-half-hour special, News War, FRONTLINE examines the political, cultural, legal, and economic forces challenging the news media today and how the press has reacted in turn."

Starts tonight (2/13) on PBS.

Yahoo! Pipes

Yahoo! have recently launched a new service: Pipes. It is an new kind of news/data aggregator. I haven't use it too much yet, so I don't know to much about it, but from what I have read it seems promising: http://pipes.yahoo.com/

AP to distribute citizen media

The AP and NowPublic.com just announced a partnership that will allow for the distribution of the citizen journalism content on NowPublic through the AP news wires. But will these new AP contributors be compensated?

Newspaper in your pocket?

The Readius by Polymer Vision is a roll-out screen mobile device slated for release later in 2007. Somehow I don't see how this will be able to compete with established technologies like Blackberry, other than perhaps the very minimal energy these new displays consume. Still, it will be interesting to see how these new screen technologies affect mobile media consumption.

Congoo Search Engine Enters Beta

News search engine Congoo has launched in beta. The site grants access to over 300 premium and subscription news sites, including the Wall Street Journal, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and Encyclopedia Britannica Online. Users are allowed to download several articles from Congoo's partner sites per month for free.

The catch is that it utilizes a browser toolbar (which is SO web 1.0) to authenticate for the premium content. It might be worth it to have on hand in IE if you use Firefox as your primary browser.

Congoo News

Seraja Reporter

This mobile phone application designed for citizen journalists looks really interesting, but I haven't been able to check it out because I don't have one of the Nokia phones that is supported. If anyone in class has one of the phones (N91, N80, N72, N71, E70) and time to check it out let me know.

Search Engine Optimization Affecting News Headlines

News coverage of the ATHF "bomb" scare

In light of this week's homework assignment, I found this post on boing boing to be kind of amusing. ( Picture: Ed Adkins).

What Happens When Newspapers Start Blogging?

As the main stream media (MSM) begins to enter the blogsphere in a big way, how will this affect the culture, content, and traffic of blogs? Huffington Post has some recent data about the top ten trafficked newspaper sites and the skyrocketing traffic their blogs have seen over the last year. Interestingly, traffic to the Washington Post main site dropped slightly whereas their blog traffic grew substantially. Will the newspapers themselves cannibalize their own readership with editorial blogs? What is the fate of non-MSM blogs as news organization blogs grab more of readers' attention and time?

Dana Hull takes another recent look at the adoption of blogging by several different newspapers in her AJR article of Jan 2007: Blogging Between the Lines. Some of the questions raised are: What about libel: will the newspaper blogs be held to the same standards as the print editions? How will newspapers edit or monitor all the user contributed content and comments without increasing staff? What's the policy for linking to other blogs? What are the ethics or expectations of newspaper writers who also maintain person blogs?