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Archive for the ‘Civic journalism’ Category

What happens when your local newspaper disappears?

This is a mirror post of an editorial I wrote for The Exception Magazine (here for post). I enjoyed writing this because it was written for readers instead of for other journalists. Journalists suddenly noticed their industry looks like all the other ones they write about on Wall Street. Newspapers, such as the Rocky Mountain ...

The incredible shrinking press corps

In the past week a lot has been written about Jon Stewart's skewering of CNBC and the faux-populist Rick Santelli. In the midst of all the praise for what was truly a deserving comedic spanking of arguably the most-watched group of financial journalists on television, others are concluding that Stewart's eight-minute jab-fest was an example ...

Part 5: Group 3 prototype, the nomadic community journalist

GROUP 3 PROTOTYPE

The concept

Our group identified two major problems: the disappearance of local journalism institutions and a public disconnected from journalists. So we wondered, "how might nomadic journalists work and how would community life continue to be successful?" This idea builds on Group 2 (inadvertently), mixes Spot.Us, Innocentive.com, OhMyNews.com, uWeb/iTunes/iNews and other journalism movements: public journalism, ...

Part 3: Group 1 prototypes, reviving public spaces

GROUP 1 PROTOTYPES

The concept

They wanted to create a news experience around a physical public space, likened to town halls of Benjamin Franklin's day. So they chose to partner with places like Starbucks, Wal-Mart and other congregation areas within communities. In doing this, you create a cohesive community that centers around news, interest-based conversations and tasty merchandise. As ...

Journalism cannot just save itself or it will fail

So instead, news needs to find a way to create something that doesn't only help the journalist, but helps thousands of other unpaid creative people. uNews must be for more than news. It must be for all creative endeavours. It must be for InnoCentive.com, it must be for people who want to make money off of ...

Distinguishing journalism from information

As sources of information proliferate, journalists are losing their special status as the town crier, telling us new and surprising and important things about our world. With information coming at us directly from every source imaginable, journalism gets lost in the avalanche of information overload. A recent article called Overload! Journalism’s battle for relevance in ...

Your objectivity is flawed

Objectivity in journalism is not only a fallacy but a dangerous goal. She basically said in order to be an objective journalist, you cannot have values. Therefore, because journalists publish themselves to other people, in order to remain perfectly objective, you cannot make moral judgments on what you observe and write about, otherwise you are inherently ...