Posts from ‘February, 2007’

New Orleans Times-Picayune: LHSAA rescinds block of photo sales. Calling the matter a misunderstanding, Louisiana High School Athletic Association Commissioner Tommy Henry on Tuesday rescinded a policy that sought to block newspapers from selling to the public photographs taken at state athletic championships. No misunderstanding: As noted yesterday, this was a flat-out attempt to monopolize […]

Ben Sheldon: The Future of Cable Access. I believe that the important part of Cable Access Television is access. Access to: * media production tools * media distribution systems * training to use them * media literacy education to understand them And all of this should be within the context of the needs of the […]

New Orleans Times-Picayune: News photographers denied access to LHSAA’s girls state tournament. Several newspapers, including The Times-Picayune, were denied access to photograph the state girls high school basketball championships Monday night when they refused to sign a document limiting the right of newspapers to resell their photos to the public. If I was the editor […]

For the past several years, in every talk I’ve given about what traditional journalism organizations could do to involve communities in the reporting, I’ve suggested a “Pothole Map” — a mashup where citizens post the location of street potholes. Bakersfield.com has done it — well, part of what I suggest. The other part would be […]

OpenCongress “brings together official government data with news and blog coverage to give you the story behind each bill” before the national legislature. Lots of intriguing ideas, and well worth a look. (Note: One of the site’s funders, the Sunlight Foundation, has provided funding to us for a separate project.)

Yesterday’s Beyond Broadcast session on the future of public access TV was a valuable conversation. As expected, my earlier suggestion, which I hoped would generate a lively conversation — to phase it out with a blast of training for citizen media creators — wasn’t greeted with universal praise (ahem). It was definitely lively, and we […]

Jack Shafer, in “When bad financial news for newspapers is good news for journalism,” thinks the implosion in stock value of newspaper companies — and newspaper sales for well below what they’d have brought only a few years ago — is potentially good news for journalism. It pops the bubble that had carried newspaper valuation […]

I’m at the Beyond Broadcast conference in Cambridge, Mass., where MIT professor Henry Jenkins, author of the important recent book Convergence Culture, was keynote speaker. I’ll be co-heading a workshop latger about the future of public-access television — the channels on local cable systems that carry locally generated programming, generally by non-professionals. Jason Crow, access […]

Reuters: Egyptian blogger jailed for insulting Islam. An Alexandria court sentenced an Egyptian blogger to four years in jail on Thursday for insulting both Islam and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. Abdel Karim Suleiman, a 22-year-old former law student who has been in custody since November, was the first blogger to stand trial in Egypt for […]

Big, big news in journalism today: First, read this press release from Reuters about the launch of its Reuters Africa site. The mission: to cover Africa in detail and from all angles, to give a wider sense of the issues and their contexts, and to explore the individual countries and cultures. Reuters Africa will target […]