Posts under ‘News’

Brendan Greeley reports “Open Source Radio’s Shiny New MacArthur Grant” for developing tools at Open Source that are going to be useful in the future to a lot of people. People in public radio, people in public television, people tiptoeing toward that fantastic beast we’re beginning to call “public media.” Open Source Radio is a […]

Capitol Weekly: Out in cyberspace, looking in. For 60 years, the Capitol Correspondents Association has been charged with deciding which reporters should be sanctioned to cover the California Legislature. But a new set of bylaws aimed at restricting the access of partisan bloggers has set off a mini-firestorm within the Capitol, as California aims to […]

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.)

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 […]

I criticized JetBlue yesterday for missing an opportunity in its customer-relations debacle of recent days. The company’s failure to use its website smartly, I said, was a missed opportunity. Today, JetBlue has posted a video by its CEO, David Neeleman, apologizing again for the mess — and offering a “Customer Bill of Rights” that will […]

The online magazine spiked has a story entitled “Is Wikipedia part of a new ‘global brain’?” in which a writer asks some reasonable questions but then undermines herself with — at best — incomplete reporting. She writes, in part: Much was made of a study conducted by Nature magazine at the end of 2005, which […]

Chicago Reader: The Public Sentiment Machine. Not long ago a letter to the editor required three things: time, an idea, and the ability to put it into words. All three impediments have been swept away. Once American bedrock, today a letter to the editor is often a chunk of computer-generated boilerplate. This practice indicts almost […]

The slime who use blog comment systems to peddle their often-fraudulent crap are innundating this and other blogs with spam. Luckily, the Akismet spam filter traps most of them and you never have to worry about seeing this garbage. But the deluge is such that hundreds are now showing up in the filter each day. […]

The PBS Frontline series starts in most places tonight. It looks extraordinary.

SF Chronicle: Blogger jailed for defying grand jury sets record / He’s U.S. journalist imprisoned longest in contempt of court. Josh Wolf, a blogger who refused to give a videotape of a San Francisco anarchist protest to a federal grand jury, achieves an unwanted distinction today, when he becomes the longest-imprisoned journalist for contempt of […]