Cit Media

Jack Shafer at Slate reminds us that people who don’t know history are, well, uninformed. Read “Who won the Great Press War of 1897? Hearst or Ochs?” to see why.

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It’s here — and purports to be what people on the political right see when they read the New York Times. Extremely clever.

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What if citizen journalism is just a mirage?

Let’s look into the abyss for a minute — just as a thought experiment.

As many critics have noted, it’s easy to point your browser at a placeblog, or a pol-blog that sometimes does news, look at it for fifteen seconds, and say, “What a crappy newspaper!,” and hit the Back button.

But to do that obscures almost everything we could learn about placeblogs and pol-blogs, both of which – pol-blogs especially – are having a major impact. (Kossacks raised $56M for these twelve candidates alone).

Question: Are we only interested in placeblogs and pol-blogs to the extent that they mirror traditional journalism? Are we interested in “citizen journalism” in the abstract only to be disappointed when confronted with actual weblogs?

(more…)

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Doug Fisher has created a 75 page manual/journal of the effort to wrap a citizen journalism layer around a traditional paper:

When we started it with funding from J-lab, we promised a “cook book” that would give other smaller papers considering such projects a road map of what to expect and how to handle some of the challenges.

The report is done and now available. Feel free to download it. It’s a 1 Mb PDF that covers everything from the multitude of early decisions about design and content to the rigors of getting people involved, sales and the technical aspect.

In addition to covering all the aspects, we think it is the first major extended study of such a site, the postings and their contributors. There is an extensive section that tracks five months of postings and proposes a codebook that may be of use to future researchers.

I’ve got it pumping out of my printer right now, and I’m really looking forward to reading it. In my current research collecting “placeblogs,” I’ve focused mainly on independent citizen journalism sites, but the more I see, the more I feel there’s promise for local weeklies and dailies to combine their existing efforts with online initiatives that connect citizens to each other. There’s no evidence that such initiatives “work,” if by “work” we mean increase circulation or halt declining circulation. But I think they’re very promising experiments to recreate the feeling of “our newspaper” that’s missing in so many towns and cities.

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Wired News has posted a draft of a story on wikis on its site and is inviting readers to help edit it.

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Blake Fleetwood (Huffington Post) Media Blood Sport: “Snake”, “Ghoul”, “Prissy Perv”, “Wolf”. It became a game - a blood sport to be played for the greatest entertainment value. The public craves this stuff - the sexual abuse and murder of a blond child beauty queen - and has a pathological need to hate.

John Karr became the perfect media Piñata. Sell newspapers, get ratings. Who cares what it does to the justice system or the idea that suspects should be presumed innocent until proven guilty.

Here’s a fact. While the major media were turning this story into the BIGGEST THING in months, the most widely read people in the blogosphere — while not ignoring the story — were not nearly so preoccupied.

This happens again and again on the tabloidish tales that make TV people and the New York Post (and, sadly, the San Jose Mercury News and San Francisco Chronicle, though to a somewhat lesser degree) go utterly berserk.

This isn’t to say bloggers’ collective focus is always the best one. What’s really scary is the utter shamelessness of major media right now.

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UPDATED

Over at the TPM Muckraker site, they’re asking for help unmasking a U.S. senator who won’t fess up to holding back vital legislation. What’s up?

Just before the August recess, the Senate was set to vote on a bill co-sponsored by Sens. Barack Obama (D-IL) and Tom Coburn (R-OK) that would create a public, searchable database of all federal grants and contracts. Envisioned as a Google-like website, it would provide free, immediate access the information, which can be alarmingly difficult to obtain.
The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee unanimously passed the measure July 27th, and S.2590 seemed to be speeding on its way to full Senate passage when, in the dark of night, an unknown Senator placed a “secret hold” on the bill. According to Senate rules, the bill will never come to a vote as long as the hold continues.

So who’s the culprit?

Give them a hand if you can.

UPDATE: Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens is the one.

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Jay Rosen says here how he’s contemplating the development of his important project, NewAssignment.net. I’m helping out in small ways, and hope to help in bigger ones…

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It’s in Vienna, Austria, in early October. Details here.

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Good video summary from last spring’s Beyond Broadcast gathering here.

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