Today, with the signing of the largest government stimulus program in history, Publish2 is announcing a new initiative to help newsrooms faced with declining resources continue to play the watchdog role that is so vital in this time of crisis. Digital Sunlight is our code name for a new feature set that will allow citizens [...]

I want to further explore the idea of “scrapbook news” as a way of reframing the crowdsourcing/citizen journalism discussion.
One reason mainstream news organizations haven’t embraced the concepts may be that the spirit (if not the letter) of the cit-j discussion tends to focus on the people involved rather than the news being covered. That is, [...]

Someone posted a false report that Steve Jobs had heart attack to CNN’s citizen journalism site iReport. The fallout (which could include an SEC investigation) lead to the inevitable question of whether this is a failure of citizen journalism.
It’s not. It’s a failure of open systems.
As Sarah Perez points out at ReadWriteWeb, ANYONE can become [...]

Is there a risk that citizen journalism can be gamed by “PR flacks and unqualified hacks” — Adam Weinstein in Mother Jones thinks so.
Unfortunately, he casts the issue in terms of the risk that economically burdened newsrooms will trade expensive quality journalism for no-cost, untrustworthy content — instead of looking at the very real [...]

There’s been a lot of debate about what killed Backfence, the hyperlocal news site. Was it poor design? Lack of incentives for users to generate content? Bad business model? Maybe all of these contributed.
But what really killed Backfence was Google and Web 1.0.

While everyone is hand-wringing over the decline of the news business and the attendant decline in Journalism and the Fourth Estate, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation is doing something about it, having just announced the first-year winners of the Knight News Challenge, with $12 million in grants. Here are some of the [...]

I haven’t posted yet about Virginia Tech because I’m still trying to wrap my mind around it, which is difficult, to say the least. For me, Andrew Sullivan’s first take still applies:

There is so much we don’t yet know about the Virginia Tech massacre, so much that keeps changing, so much to be angry about, [...]

There seem to be two principal reactions to the collapse of the print classified business that is destroying the print newspaper business. The first reaction is to insist, as San Francisco columnist David Lazarus does, that people should pay for the news. The second reaction is evident in the report from Tim O’Reilly about trouble [...]

Jay Rosen proposes a new model for jouralism — “In simplest terms, a way to fund high-quality, original reporting, in any medium, through donations to a non-profit called NewAssignment.Net.” What jumps out at me, beyond the effort to empower “pro-am, open-source” journalism, is that it’s a nonprofit endeavor, driven by donations.
Jay empahsizes that NewAssignment.Net [...]

I’m headed off to the Mesh Conference in Toronto, where I’ll be on a panel with Om Malik, Michael Tippett, and Mathew Ingram, debating whether bloggers are journalists.
I’m with Jay Rosen on this:
The question now isn’t whether blogs can be journalism. They can be, sometimes. It isn’t whether bloggers “are” journalists. They apparently are, [...]

Much has been said already about the lawsuit against blogger Lance Dutson by ad agency Warren Kremer Paino Advertising, but here are some issues I haven’t seen addressed yet:
1. The lawsuit should be required reading for every blogger — seeing the substance of his blog posts cast in the legal terms of defamation, whether right [...]

I’ve read A LOT about Web 2.0 — I haven’t seen so much Koolaid since I was at summer camp. And I’ve taken a stand that Web 2.0 is a long way from Media 2.0.
Kent Newsome has the latest antidote to Web 2.0 hype, invoking Monty Python’s Holy Grail to show that most Web 2.0 [...]

Do we need professional journalists, editors, and publishers to help filter the sea of information and help keep us informed — do they have a place in Media 2.0? Most Web 2.0 advocates would argue, NO (we don’t need no stinkin’…)!
This school of thought embraces what I can only describe as anti-hiearchicalism, which, at the [...]

It’s official — advances in communications technology (email, cell phones, voicemail, telework, etc.) have made workers less productive. Rather than make our lives easier, technology is making our lives more complicated and more difficult. From a study by Day-Timers (via CNET):
Unlike a decade ago, U.S. workers are bombarded with e-mail, computer messages, cell phone calls, [...]

The demise of Publishing 2.0 was predicted early on — I’m still chugging along, but Phil’s point here is spot on — starting to blog is easy but blogging successfully over the long term is really, really hard. Which makes me wonder about the future of consumer-created media, especially in light of a fascinating analysis [...]

From Karl Martino at Philly Future — corporations see blogs as media they can manipulate. If it happened to Karl, it can happen to any of us. Please blog about this and show your support:
Here goes a strike against grassroots (efforts without $6million dollar backer) civil journalism sites….
Without naming any names….
A user on our site [...]

The citizen journalism movement is shaking Old Media journalism out of its complacency, but is it realistic to believe that citizen media can and should replace institutional media? I remain deeply skeptical.
Jeff Jarvis is out in force again today, smacking the “dinosaurs” of Old Media for not understanding the power of the people. As usual, [...]

The reactions to Dan Gilmor’s open letter on Bayosphere have fallen into two camps — lessons on start-ups and lessons on the dynamics of citizen journalism.
These perspectives, while important, miss the critical question in middle — who will fund citizen journalism, or any journalism, for that matter? As Justin Fox puts it in his [...]

Will media become a commodity? Google and the search marketing industry that grew up around it think so. Creators of Web 2.0 content applications like Digg and Reddit think so. Today, we learn that eBay also thinks so — MediaPost reports that they pitched an electronic trading system for buying and selling media. And who [...]

The problem with the current debate over Old Media vs. New Media is that most people see it in binary terms — either Old Media dies and the web becomes a completely open marketplace of commoditized content (as Jeff Jarvis and countless others have argued), or consumers rebel and cling to the structures of Old [...]

There is so much wrong with the blogger view that the monoliths of old media will be brought down and consumers will bask in the glory of infinite media choice — discussing, creating, tagging, rating (meta-ing) each other’s content in one big solipsistic frenzy. Everyone can create media. Everyone controls their own media. Everyone is [...]

Taking “old media” to task for trying too hard and lamely to look like they have the dynamism and growth-oriented business models of “new media,” Diane Mermigas at Hollywood Reporter coins the term “new media religion” to describe the jump-on-the-bandwagon phenomenon. (She doesn’t waste any breath on the poor companies who don’t even realize there’s [...]

Ah, the irony. Ana Marie Cox, AKA Wonkette, will no longer be blogging for Wonkette . So that’s the end of Wonkette? You’d think.
But no. It turns out a blog can exist without the blogger. The Wall Street Journal’s new blog(!) revealed that Wonkette will continue to be published — by a Wonk (sort [...]

In the race to capitalize “citizen journalism” content, traditional publishers have a crutial advantage over aggregrators like Topix and Google — a deep relationship between their audience and their content brand