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/.
Saturday, February 17, 2007
Thursday, February 15, 2007
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)
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)
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
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
Wednesday, February 14, 2007
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.
Tuesday, February 13, 2007
Newsmap Visualization
Google News Breaches Copyright
Apparently a Brussels court has ruled that Google News breaches copyright law, and uses the material without the Authors consent.
Apparently the group is also pursuing Yahoo! as well for their news service.
Here's the article.
"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.
Monday, February 12, 2007
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/
Saturday, February 10, 2007
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?
Thursday, February 8, 2007
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.
Wednesday, February 7, 2007
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
Monday, February 5, 2007
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.
Saturday, February 3, 2007
Friday, February 2, 2007
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).
Thursday, February 1, 2007
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?
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?
Friday, January 19, 2007
Mobile News Gathering
Last week we had two guests from CNN (Paul Ferguson and Terence Burke) come in to talk about their experiences in international news gathering. Paul talked a lot about the technology that CNN has developed over the past 3-4 years to facilitate better mobile news gathering including a system they put together that allows a one-man band or a pair of journalists in the field to gather, edit, and upload news video with equipment that fits in a backpack. They can even go straight to air over a mobile-sat connection with this setup! Now they're experimenting with the Nokia N93, which is a sleek and flexible mobile phone that does mp4 video at 30 fps.
One of the interesting effects of having a mobile and (unobtrusive in the case of cell phone video) capturing rig is the access to new situations that it allows for. No need to lug around big and heavy equipment. Not only that but the reactivity associated with people seeing larger video equipment and satellite uplinks is no longer affecting their behavior: the result is a more true to life depiction. So instead of people stopping to gawk at a gaggle of reporters, news video can be gathered more surreptitiously and thus show the raw reality. Citizen journalism is peppered with stories of people catching newsworthy events on cell phones and this is only bound to increase with more and more sensors in the field.
Another interesting point that came up in talking to the seasoned journalists was how important social networks are to their news gathering efforts. A professional news organization like CNN has spent years and years cultivating sources and developing databases of contacts for various pieces of information. Who's got the information? If they don't know the guy, they might know the guy that knows the guy. It's all about leveraging the network and the trust that's built into that network. This is paramount especially when the motivation of sources might be in question and serves to increase the quality of information that a large news organization can bring to light. There are a few questions here. In the transition to participatory journalism, how can citizens who don't have a trusted network of sources collect information about difficult topics? Also, can social networking technology enhance the news gathering efficacy of either traditional or citizen journalists?
One of the interesting effects of having a mobile and (unobtrusive in the case of cell phone video) capturing rig is the access to new situations that it allows for. No need to lug around big and heavy equipment. Not only that but the reactivity associated with people seeing larger video equipment and satellite uplinks is no longer affecting their behavior: the result is a more true to life depiction. So instead of people stopping to gawk at a gaggle of reporters, news video can be gathered more surreptitiously and thus show the raw reality. Citizen journalism is peppered with stories of people catching newsworthy events on cell phones and this is only bound to increase with more and more sensors in the field.
Another interesting point that came up in talking to the seasoned journalists was how important social networks are to their news gathering efforts. A professional news organization like CNN has spent years and years cultivating sources and developing databases of contacts for various pieces of information. Who's got the information? If they don't know the guy, they might know the guy that knows the guy. It's all about leveraging the network and the trust that's built into that network. This is paramount especially when the motivation of sources might be in question and serves to increase the quality of information that a large news organization can bring to light. There are a few questions here. In the transition to participatory journalism, how can citizens who don't have a trusted network of sources collect information about difficult topics? Also, can social networking technology enhance the news gathering efficacy of either traditional or citizen journalists?
Saturday, January 13, 2007
What is Computational Journalism?
What do we mean when we talk of "Computational Journalism"?
Firstly we might try to define what we mean by invoking current examples from the online zeitgeist such as Google News, Yahoo News, or MSN Newsbot - aggregation sites using computation to provide a different interface to a range of news online. Other examples revolve around the numerous blogs, collaborative news sites (such as open source reporting NewAssignment.net), or "citizen journalism" (for instance community driven news site Bluffton Today). These types of behavior are all enabled and facilitated by the networked computing environment and increasing pervasiveness of digital cameras and phones. Another take on Computational Journalism involves the use of New Media (i.e. interactivity) to tell more contextualized and relevant stories about news events. Interactive infographics, videos, maps, panoramas, and slideshows are being used more and more by news outlets such as the New York Times and Washington Post (among others).
Looking at and citing examples of what the convergence of computing and journalism are doing to online media is fun, but I think there could be a lot more to it than that. Perhaps we should try to understand Journalism and Computing in their own rights first and then defocus and cross our eyes (for a moment!) to see where that might bring us.
So, what's Journalism then? Journalism consists of collecting news information and disseminating that information with a layer of contextualization and understanding provided by the journalist. Traditionally, journalism has also entailed an ethos of working on the side of the citizenry to provide them with the information they need to make informed civic decisions in the process of self-governance.
And what's Computation? Computation is what you do with computers! No really, computation can be thought of as algorithms designed to run on computers in order to solve any number of different problems. Computation here is defined broadly, but fundamentally, we're talking about media computation: the ability of the computer to process things like text, video, audio, pictures, or any combination of those. This involves computational areas such as information retrieval/science, artificial intelligence, machine learning, data mining, mobile computing, natural language processing, computer vision and image processing, multimedia analysis and synthesis, information visualization, computer supported cooperative work, and computer interfaces.
Taking our conception of Computing with that of Journalism, what again is "Computational Journalism"? The application of computational algorithms to the goals of journalism: to collect, contextualize, and make sense of news information. At heart it is an Information Science, guided by the practices and processes of the Journalist and facilitated by forward looking technologies meant to empower journalists (both traditional and citizen) and news information consumers in their goals.
Firstly we might try to define what we mean by invoking current examples from the online zeitgeist such as Google News, Yahoo News, or MSN Newsbot - aggregation sites using computation to provide a different interface to a range of news online. Other examples revolve around the numerous blogs, collaborative news sites (such as open source reporting NewAssignment.net), or "citizen journalism" (for instance community driven news site Bluffton Today). These types of behavior are all enabled and facilitated by the networked computing environment and increasing pervasiveness of digital cameras and phones. Another take on Computational Journalism involves the use of New Media (i.e. interactivity) to tell more contextualized and relevant stories about news events. Interactive infographics, videos, maps, panoramas, and slideshows are being used more and more by news outlets such as the New York Times and Washington Post (among others).
Looking at and citing examples of what the convergence of computing and journalism are doing to online media is fun, but I think there could be a lot more to it than that. Perhaps we should try to understand Journalism and Computing in their own rights first and then defocus and cross our eyes (for a moment!) to see where that might bring us.
So, what's Journalism then? Journalism consists of collecting news information and disseminating that information with a layer of contextualization and understanding provided by the journalist. Traditionally, journalism has also entailed an ethos of working on the side of the citizenry to provide them with the information they need to make informed civic decisions in the process of self-governance.
And what's Computation? Computation is what you do with computers! No really, computation can be thought of as algorithms designed to run on computers in order to solve any number of different problems. Computation here is defined broadly, but fundamentally, we're talking about media computation: the ability of the computer to process things like text, video, audio, pictures, or any combination of those. This involves computational areas such as information retrieval/science, artificial intelligence, machine learning, data mining, mobile computing, natural language processing, computer vision and image processing, multimedia analysis and synthesis, information visualization, computer supported cooperative work, and computer interfaces.
Taking our conception of Computing with that of Journalism, what again is "Computational Journalism"? The application of computational algorithms to the goals of journalism: to collect, contextualize, and make sense of news information. At heart it is an Information Science, guided by the practices and processes of the Journalist and facilitated by forward looking technologies meant to empower journalists (both traditional and citizen) and news information consumers in their goals.
Sunday, January 7, 2007
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