Posts under ‘Techniques’

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 […]

Rebecca Dube’s advice to readers who comment on the Toronto Globe & Mail includes: 1. Understand that an online discussion is not a free-for-all. Editors like me moderate online discussions for reasons of space, time and basic human decency. This will be difficult for some folks, unfortunately. (Disclosure: Dube’s husband, Jon, is a member of […]

To creat the Tunisian Prison Map, Sami Ben Gharbia “pulled data from Human Rights NGOs report as well as a temporary list of Tunisian prisons prepared by Tsar Boris on TUNeZINE website.” Brilliant use of mashups, in a worthy cause.

Digg has new features: a video by co-founder Kevin Rose explains some of it.

UPDATED The rise of the citizen journalist is not a new phenomenon. People have been witnessing and taking pictures of notable events for a long, long time. And they’ve been selling them to traditional news organizations just as long. But professional photojournalists, and more recently videographers, have continued to make good livings at a craft […]

NewsTrust, where people rate the quality of news stories, has launched a beta site. The potential of this approach is terrific: community involvement in understanding how well journalists — including bloggers — do at their jobs (whether it’s a professional or amateur activity or something in between). Clearly, this is an early iteration. But the […]

Here’s the latest way to annoy people online — hotlinks to words in articles that go to advertisements. The pictured item (click on it or here for a full-sized image) is a from a PC Magazine column by John Dvorak. The word “computer” is highlighted in green, and underlined. Put the mouse over the word […]

In a conversation with a political reporter yesterday, we wondered whether collaborative communications had made a breakthrough in this election cycle. I said there had been some progress, but not the ultimate breakthrough we’re all hoping for. More than ever, campaigns used the Net to communicate with the faithful and especially to raise money. They […]

Tom Evslin asks: “VoterStory.org – What is the Story?” This site is asking citizens to keep an eye on electronic voting machines tomorrow, Election Day. Specifically: Tom wants to know who’s getting the data the site seeks from voters, who’s keeping it and for how long. He notes that there’s a lot of personal information […]