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Posts under ‘News’

Political Transparency Project

As noted in an earlier posting, the Sunlight Foundation has awarded us one of its “Transparency Grants” for a test in California. As the foundation noted, we intend to develop an Election Year Demonstration Project for citizen journalism in one Congressional district. CCM will oversee the creation of a website that will seek to cover […]

Latest Online Ruse Shows Need for Caution

LA Times: Lonelygirl15’s revelation: It’s all just part of the show. After amateur sleuths uncovered apparent links between the Creative Artists Agency and the official lonelygirl15 MySpace page, a statement claiming to be from “The Creators” was posted on the lonelygirl15 website late Thursday. It read in part: “Our intention from the outset has been […]

Wiki-Edited Story Results

Wired News’ Ryan Singel asked his readers to rework a story on wikis. In “The Wiki That Edited Me,” he offers this debriefing summary: Certainly the final story is more accurate and more representative of how wikis are used. Is it a better story than the one that would have emerged after a Wired News […]

Grant Supports Political Transparency

Many thanks to the Sunlight Foundation, which has awarded us one of its “Transparency Grants” for a test in California. It’s to develop an Election Year Demonstration Project for citizen journalism in one Congressional district. CCM will oversee the creation of a website that will seek to cover everything that can possibly be reported on […]

Can Wikis Help Sort Out the Patent Mess?

WikiPatents – Community Patent Review says it contributes to the US patent system by commenting on issued patents and, soon, pending patent applications. OK, but what does the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office say? They’ll decide whether the overworked examiners — this is the charitable explanation for the garbage patents being issued all the time […]

Journalism by the Numbers

The Project for Excellence in Journalism is making is voluminous data available to anyone who wants to use it in new ways: Perhaps the biggest change is the new Numbers section, which contains virtually all the data PEJ has produced since it began in 1997. Here users can search our data archive by industry, by […]

Matt Marshall's Blog-Venture

Matt Marshall, a former colleague at the San Jose Mercury News, is now on his own with a blog about the technology financial scene. It’s called VentureBeat, and it looks great. Matt is one of the most talented journalists in his field. This is a project to watch.

What if citizen journalism is just a mirage?

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!,” […]

Hartsville Today "cookbook"

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 […]

Needed: Citizens to Query Legislators

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, […]