From Media Transparent.
What’s missing from sites focused on a city? Community organizers. It’s the same leadership dilemma facing any organization, whether physical or virtual. Hyperlocal sites need to be driven and organized by hubs and influencers of the local community, and these hubs need to feel invested and committed [...]
TechCrunch Co-Editor Erick Schonfeld wrote a great article about video hosting service Syndicaster’s increased options for distributing local broadcast news.
Via TechCrunch:
…Syndicaster is adding one-click distribution options to the major video sites so that local TV affiliates or station groups can post their videos to [...]
GroundReport just got a great opportunity through Talk To US: bring the voices and faces of global citizen journalists to national television program Worldfocus.
Every month we ask a question on news perspectives, and the most compelling video response is aired on TV for hundreds of thousands. It’s a big [...]
Dear World:
I’m coming up on four entire years out here on the front lines of the media revolution being waged across the nation, across the world. In that time, a lot of other similar sites (some with millions of dollars of cash injected into them) have fallen. A lot of [...]
I’m not a blogger and mostly a person of images, not words, so turn back now if you’re looking for a pithy read. Plus, I broke my hand which is a funny way to start a new job that relies on said hand. Bad writing aside, I wanted to introduce [...]
Nica has a comprehensive knowledge of web development, design and online strategy. She has worked as a designer and consultant deploying sites using integrated solutions with platforms such as Drupal, Joomla, Plone, AMP, Movable Type and Democracy in Action. In addition she is versed in web standards, semantic XHTML and [...]
My friend and sometime colleague Dave Cohn (of Spot.us fame) has posted the story that was his final Masters project at the Columbia School of Journalism. Entitled Drupal Nation, it traces the early roots of Drupal in left-wing US politics via DeanSpace and CivicSpace, which is really where [...]
Apple’s iPhone is so much of a game changer on the news reporting front that even local media organizations are rushing to accommodate support for both users and reporters.
Knoxville, Tennessee based KnoxNews released their own iPhone application last month [...]
Who doesn’t love a good barter, especially one involving donuts?
Chemistry between West Oakland’s Pepples Donuts, formerly People’s Donuts, and the Chapter Three team was instantaneous; two days and twelve dozen donuts later, PepplesDonuts.com was born. The goal of the partnership: to build a website that is easy to [...]
It’s with great pleasure that I announce that Chapter Three is now an Acquia Gold Partner. This is a move that makes perfect sense to us as a business, and I’d like [...]
If you understood the title written above, skip down to the link, install the script and enjoy your FCC violation-free twitter feed that is safe to broadcast over live television. However, if the headline made no sense to you what-so-ever, then don’t worry. It’s still not that difficult. I can [...]
Arguably the country’s most respected newspaper, the New York Times, along with non-profit site Propublica, have applied for a joint $1 mil grant for their “Document Cloud” entry in in the 2008 Knight News Challenge, according to a Nieman Journalism Lab article. For those not [...]
Dear OffTheBus members,
Back in July 2007 I showed up at HuffPost’s Manhattan office with a suitcase packed with enough clothes to get me through the month while I looked for an apartment and started OffTheBus. Even before our official launch many of you were peppering my inbox with emails, wanting [...]
Denise Lockwood is like thousands of U.S. daily newspaper reporters — she fell victim to staff reductions. But she’s not giving up reporting — she’s pursuing her passion onlline.
Lockwood, an award-winning education and general-assignment reporter, is looking for advice on how to start a non-profit online news and community site [...]
It’s no secret that I started my Drupal career in politics, coming up as part of a self-organizing band of web-savvy volunteers creating a little thing we called “DeanSpace” back in the summer of 2003. However, while about 1/2 of Chapter Three’s business does come from the government and non-profit [...]
BADCamp is the Bay Area Drupal social event of the season. All of the cool drupal genius kids come out to socialize and make fantastic Drupal presentations. Attended by hundreds of Bay Area Drupalers, its really wonderful to see that kind of vibrancy in [...]
In a four-part series, Digital Journal is profiling innovative journalists, editors and institutions that are redrawing the map of citizen media. Find out how these bold men and women are impacting their corner of the media landscape.
This interview is with Dan Gillmor from the Center for Citizen Media.
Christian Grantham of NashvilleIsTalking helped orchestrate a local milestone in television broadcast news when he convinced executive producers at WKRN in Nashville to use Twitter as a way to interact with viewers on air.
He just posted a blog about his experience, which is definitely worth checking out [...]
Well before newspapers hit a decade of exclusive Web-only coverage, they may want to take a look at how they archive articles.
Rarely are instances of breaking news done as one official report. Instead there could be a first version that is a few paragraphs explaining the [...]
Chapter Three is pleased to announce that Moblin.org, the developer community for a worldwide effort to build a better Embedded Linux platform (with the involvement of the likes of Intel), has re-launched on Drupal 6.0.
This is our first big project to [...]
The future of news gathering will serve the same purpose as it does today, but changes to the way its gathered might be best interpreted by King Kong — at least that’s the rational of Nir Ofir, founder of iamnews.com, an open newsroom platform that aims to give both [...]
A new video series called “Porkbusters On Patrol” is putting relatively inexpensive cameras into the hands of local reporters in an attempt to monitor unnecessary government spending.
Using a Flip Video Camera, reporters go to the site of governmentally financed projects to show what was produced [...]
It is sort of disappointing how goofy many cyclists look. Bicycling is such a wonderful thing and can be done with such great beauty, why do all the cycling jerseys need to be plastered with dull [...]
There’s a great interview with NPR’s Andy Carvin over at Poynter where he talks about their coverage of Hurricane Gustav. It’s a classic example of what I’ve previously called ‘Distributed Journalism,’ and a lesson for any news organization in how news production has changed:
Drupalcon Szeged 2008 was the annual European gathering of some of the best Drupal minds of our generation with plenty of excitement and style thrown into the mix. For the event I flew across the pond to represent for Chapter Three and [...]
We all love the elegance the Drupal. The code style is clean, the architecture beautiful, and it’s all pretty well thought out. Plus the logo is pretty amazing.
To find a fitting tribute to our favorite content management system, I spoke with [...]
Firebug is a hell of a thing and at Chapter Three we use it regularly - as many others do - to analyze and debug our web development work. It can do things like inspect the HTML, manipulate the CSS, execute and debug [...]
When you’re wielding the power to influence society, you’ve got an obligation to deliver the truth at all costs. My fellow journalists, we’ve got to do better.
I’m talking about the amount of hyperlinks found in an average news article, or rather the lack there of. We now have the ability [...]
Once of the biggest advances “under the hood” in Drupal 6 is the addition of the preprocess architecture to the theme layer. This is part and parcel with the deeper embedding of template files, and together they render Drupal 6 the most flexible and powerful release yet in terms [...]
A typical practice for most editorial staffs is to gather up all the reporters about once a week to pitch/assign future stories. It’s an essential part of the work schedule because it keeps everyone in the loop about what’s going on and also provides an opportunity for feedback from the [...]
It’s been a LONG time since Assignment Zero. It’s often referred to as a successful failure. I still disagree for various reasons. We had all kinds of obstacles - but the end product I think speaks for itself.
At Chapter Three we use the Subversion Version Control System to manage our client and internal Drupal projects. When we kick off a new project we roll out the latest version of Drupal, stick it in the SVN repository, and start developing.
As a matter of best practices it is [...]
From Eat Sleep Publish:
Jay Rosen, who I follow on Twitter, got me thinking about newsroom curmudgeons with his tweets last week. It got me to suggest that we compile a giant, handy-dandy guide to these curmudgeonly views and their counterpoints.
This is that guide.
And so, without further ado, here [...]
Locative Journalism is the process of using location-based technology to enhance the journalistic experience. It was the goal of a student project, which documented its progress via LoJoConnect.com
The project wrapped up recently and the students posted a list of recommendations for J-schools and media companies here.
What happens when you put laptops, digital cameras, high-speed wireless cards, and Ustream accounts into the hands of two curious young net users in the technology mecca of the world, just as one of the most sensational global news stories of the year erupts around the corner?
That’s what happened [...]
Via The Orlando Sentinel.
“I’m going to try a little citizen journalism experiment for the launch of the iPhone 3G. Since a lot of the early adopters who will be buying iPhones use Twitter, I’m soliciting reports from them while they’re at Apple and AT&T stores getting an iPhone or [...]
Much like book covers, you cannot judge a Web service by its vowel-less, silly name. The truth is, the best web services — Flickr, Google, digg — often sound like nonsense, making many newsrooms disregard them. Yet, what they fail to realize is that these services are tools, despite whatever [...]
Mixx.com - a social news link sharing site where users submit content much like digg or reddit - recently added a new feature that allows 
communities to submit and vote on their own links. Essentially, Mixx has now become a social news site inside of a [...]
Even in huge metropolitan cities, every journalist is familiar with the concept of hyper local news and what it looks like. But what does hyper, hyper local news look like?
Small newspapers do a great job of reporting local happenings to a relatively small town or [...]
Via Steve Yelvington…”Mayhill Fowler, the non-journalist who has broken at least two major campaign stories this season by simply not playing the usual game by the usual rules, reflects on an interview with an Al-Jazeera reporter”
She writes: For the first time I realized what is most obvious about the [...]
Nashville is talking, but it never used to. Not even a year ago Tennessee’s capital city was just reading and watching, maybe blogging a little bit— but no talking, no commenting, and definitely no tweeting.
For those not privy to the slang, a “tweet” is a [...]
Via OffTheBus.Net: It’s the electoral race of the century. Political maps are being redrawn, and rules are getting rewritten across the board. Fundraising record have been broken. The candidates are even comparing the size of their email lists.
The mainstream media is tripping over itself to report on every last [...]
Mahalo, the human powered search engine, surprised me very recently with their response to the tragic news of journalism-great Tim Russert’s passing.
I had heard the news via twitter before anywhere else, but there were zero details. Whatever work ethic I had gathered to [...]
Via J.D. Lasica and Steve Outing.
Boss Rosen on the Mayhill events. J.D. has a thoughtful writeup on his blog.
How citizen journalism is changing campaign coverage from JD Lasica on Vimeo.
Undoubtedly, the greatest piece of technology we could hope to achieve during this era of journalism is a holographic, extremely perceptive answer-bot channeling the theories of Marshal McLuhan whenever a new communication medium makes its way to the public.
Or you could just remember his [...]
“We’ve completely rebuilt every single page on NowPublic for your enhanced viewing pleasure. Yes, a site re-design that preserves all the site’s current functionality but makes the content more readable, the news more relevant and the tools more usable.”
More.
I still believe NowPublic is positioned to be the “OhMyNews” of [...]
Via Mathew Ingram
There’s a great piece in the Los Angeles Times about Mayhill Fowler, the 61-year-old “citizen journalist” who has become a lightning rod for critics of the practice, after not one but two somewhat embarrassing scoops from the U.S. campaign trail, the first of which involved Barack [...]
OffTheBus has gotten quite a bit of attention for the work of its citizen journalist contributors. This past week we expanded the definition of the term, at least for us here at OffTheBus, by including among our staff eight citizen-journalism editors! Nearly all of the OpEd posts on OffTheBus this [...]
Twitter is like a stethoscope pressed firmly against the beating heart of a vibrant community. Through this communication tool, it is actually possible to hear the ongoing thoughts of people as they experience content/news for the first, second and third time. You can listen in on a community’s reaction to [...]
Good news for crime reporters with large workloads and not a lot of time to keep up with an entire city.
A new Web site called SpotCrime.com combines the attention demanding police scanner with Google’s Maplets technology to form the ultimate tool for anyone who has ever [...]
There are two reasons why I left the newspaper business and, at the moment anyway, have no intention of going back. The first was that many of the people controlling the business today do not care all that much about journalism. The second was that, among those who do care, [...]
Note: I am not disappearing from NewAssignment.net, Beat Blogging, NewsTrust or Broowaha, but I am taking a serious step back to work on a new project: Spot Us, which will be a nonprofit that enables community funded reporting. I will use the lessons I have [...]
Via Jeff Howe at Crowdsourcing.com.
As you may know, I’m writing a book about crowdsourcing and also operate the blog, Crowdsourcing.com. I’ve been publishing the lion’s share of this book on the Website with the goal of eliciting critical comments that can be collected together and published in an [...]
The media might have a fantastic citizen journalism tool in Twitter - if they don’t botch it up.
Read Reuter’s post today on Twitter: Breaking news, Twitter style.
There are vast amounts of data in the twitter community that is being lost. Such as.
1. Links. What is happening to all those [...]
Via Reportr.net
The citizen journalism beat has a new kid on the block in the shape of VancouverIAM.
As you might have guessed from the name, it is a citmedia site about Vancouver, based in Vancouver. The site describes itself as:
The destination for people who want to know what?s going on [...]
Environmental journalist/professor Dave Poulson and a group of students at Michigan State University took on an ambitious task with no real guidelines, no compass and no idea how to get where they were going. However for those who had a hand in creating the greatlakeswiki.org, they [...]
All of us need to do our bit to free up information. And you can start by emailing your local council.
Read More via the Gaurdian.
whereIstand.com is a new, user-driven Web 2.0 community and opinion aggregator that discovers, organizes and presents a wide variety of news, opinions, debates and issues discussed all over the Web using proprietary search technologies and a user-generated content model.
From a community journalism perspective, whereIstand.com takes a hybrid approach. When [...]
From Mindy McAdams: Who are you calling a journalist?
Many people have commented on the actions of Mayhill Fowler, who went to a fund-raising dinner for Barack Obama and later wrote about remarks Obama made there. (Today Jeff Jarvis commented on Michael Tomasky commenting about Jay Rosen commenting on the [...]
From Robert Niles at Online Journalism Review
Let’s just get this on the record — there is no such thing as “off the record” anymore.
Should anyone online have doubted this fact, let this week’s tempest over U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama’s recent comments eliminate that doubt.
A writer for the Huffington Post’s [...]
Via Yahoo News with a hat tip to Andrew Fowler from Newsvetter
Newspaper readers agree with editors on the basics of what makes good journalism, but they are more apt to want looser rules for online conversations, a new study on news credibility has found.
ADVERTISEMENT
Newspapers highly discourage [...]
OffTheBus.net has had a HUGE scoop this past weekend. Read the NYT story copied below and Jay Rosen’s take.
Via the New York Times
The backstory of how Senator Barack Obamas comments about small-town voters became news is getting almost as [...]
The folks at Personal Democracy Forum do it again. They are fantastic at taking crowdsourcing practices and principles, applying them to subjects that people are passionate about (politics) finding that community and empowering them.
From "Rebooting America"
Tell us your great idea to reinvent democracy in America (and maybe win [...]
The webbies are in. Take a look at the list of honorees. A wonderful mix of old/big and small/indy media.
I don't think the web belongs to either. The list below contains alternative news sites like the HuffingtonPost and Slashdot, citizen journalism site Orato along with Reuters UK Guardian [...]
Via “write now is good” - a contributor to OffTheBus.net and AssignmentZero.
Last Friday evening, I went to see a panel discussion on "How the Web is Changing American Politics" at New York University. The panelists were Arianna Huffington of the Huffington Post, Micah Sifry of techPresident.com, [...]
Submitted By G. Kofi Annan For Africa 2.0 on New Assignment.net.
Project Manager: Saba Kennedy-Washington
On March 9, 2008, the 2008 South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive Conference and Festival in Austin, Texas hosted the Africa 2.0: Affecting change Using technology panel. Four African bloggers and entrepreneurs took their [...]
Open source reporting isn’t defined, but that hasn’t stopped the majority of journalists and mass media scholars from trying. This post will not be another one of those commentaries —- it’s about Muppets.
Ok, it’s mostly about the Muppet Wikia, which is a collection of information [...]
John Seigenthaler Sr. is a regular visitor of Wikipedia, which came as a surprise to me. To my knowledge, he was the first veteran journalist to speak out against Wikipedia for its flaws after discovering his biography entry contained false statements.
Yet, three years after that ordeal, in a 40 [...]
Lets play a game.
Name an international politician/activist, someone on the cutting edge of web development and a veteran journalist. Put all three individuals into a room full of people and try to predict what they would say about freedom of speech on the Internet.
Such an event [...]
Rough transcript
What have you learned from OffTheBus
I've learned that, as Jay Rosen said a couple years ago, this divide between bloggers and journalists is a phony divide.
The future resides in some fusion of the two and what we are learning at OffTheBus.net is that citizen journalism is a [...]
Inside the front flap of Starbucks’ box are African Arabica beans grown on a plantation in a threatened mountain rain forest. Behind the lofty phrases on the back label are coffee workers who make less than a dollar a day and a dispute between plantation officials and [...]
Increasingly I believe newspapers will become more and more like civic centers, libraries, or even local cafes. I don’t know who owns NewsCafe.com, but they have potential to be the next newsroom of Miami.
Today the Seattle Times announced a contest: to “design your own Seattle Center.” Via [...]
Each of these folks represents a new class of semi-pro journalist tasked with covering the U.S. presidential election in innovative, more personal ways. Gotsdiner is one of five citizen journalists doing reality-TV style video reports for PurpleStates.tv; Middleton is one of 51 mobile journalists on MTVs Street Team [...]
There are all kinds of role crediting systems out there. Movies have a huge list of credits; television not much so. And CNN, for example, usually has none (that I’ve seen, anyway). But let’s talk writing.
Books get credits right on the front cover, and on the title page. Newspapers have [...]
Once again, I am unable to give the following post the attention it deserves. But hey, that’s what happens when you are juggling other projects (see the right hand column of this blog).
Still: I want to bring attention to Leonard Witt’s newest venture: “Representative Journalism.” Essentially what Leonard Witt [...]
Via JournalismSchool.wordpress.com.
The following is a syllabus for the Largemouth Citizen Journalism workshop, a six-week citizen journalism training program. The course teaches the essential journalism skills needed to write stories for newspapers, newsletters, magazines, and the Internet in a way that focuses public attention on important social issues. The [...]
A Knight Digital Media Center conference brought together leading newspaper editorial writers to explore ways to make their opinion pages engaging and relevant again.
“The most compelling, and telling, answers in the opening session sprang from a best-practices share session, where the 20-odd newsies unveiled their range of active editorial-page [...]
Over time, it has become evident that Africa 2.0 is a growing force in technology. The SXSW Festival being held in Austin, Texas will bear witness to the relevance of this growing movement. The SXSW Interactive Festival features five days (March 7-11) of panel content [...]
I’m traveling and received a few notes about a specific study that came out by Neil Thurman. Hat tip to Chris Mims.
The study can be found here: News Websites Have Uneasy Relationship with User-Generated Content
“Major news websites are struggling to make the most of readers’ contributions due [...]
Dallas Morning News asks its readers, Help us examine the lost JFK files.
A particularly smart move not only because the JFK files are too many for any single journalist to examine - but because it’s a local story with national appeal.
The role of the newsroom: pointing out where the [...]
For the visually-obsessed Generation X-ers comes their newest online revolution: Howcast.com, the little bastard offspring of Youtube and Wikipedia.
A cohort of former Google and Youtube employees put their giant brains together and came up with the idea for a Youtube-like encyclopedia warehouse where individuals will record acts of demonstration [...]
Last week I had the pleasure of chatting with Tim Hood the founder of Yoosk.com which is in full startup mode. I’m confident I had come across the site before, although I’m not sure where. Perhaps this Center for Citizen Media post? Either way [...]
Over at my personal blog I wrote a post: Social Bookmarking for Journalists: 101.
I bring it up here because there is one more aspect of social news sites that I left out in that post - which is more of an introduction to the utility of those sites.
Social news [...]
We’ve taken note in recent months of the growth and innovative use of Web 2.0 in Kenya and how it has really taken root in light of severe adversity that still continues in the aftermath of the most recent Presidential election there. Apparently, we’re not the only ones
taking note [...]
India is a ‘vast’ country. The population is big. The physical landscape massive. The languages diverse and people form a cultural mosaic of difference.
Problems are equally in abundance. Poverty and hunger, illiteracy and joblessnes, malpractices in governance and the powerlessness of citizens, they are major impediments for decent livelihood in [...]
Vancouver-based NowPublic.com is making news again, with the appointment of BBCNews.com senior editor Rachel Nixon as its Global News Director to lead its editorial operations.
It was a 15 minute phone conversation that occurred yesterday between myself and Henry Abbott, who really gets it: If you have a blog, you can try quick experiments like this no problem.
Abbott wanted to paint a picture of New Orleans "as a multi-layered, not [...]
By Robert W. King
(Disclosure: I am an active contributor at Citizendium.)
Much like the increase in college tuition rates, how Wikipedia actually manages to function is a mystery to most, I suspect.
Despite all of the trolling, flaming, edit warring, perspective pushing, and political infights, somehow content is still loosely [...]
It seems like part of the wiki culture is to develop a tolerance for dilapidation. No matter how hard you try, it is simply impossible to totally eliminate “cruft” or to reduce the amount of “staleness” (if I may be allowed to make that word up!).
Part of it I think [...]
