Thursday, November 24, 2005

May we be grateful for the passing of dark days... That blogger formerly known as South Knox Bubba said "Happy Thanksgiving" over at FacingSouth by republishing an eloquent Thanksgiving wish... one that I think I read at his site last year. I quoted one phrase from  it at the end of my last item, but here's a little more. (Then go read the whole thing and see who wrote it.) May we recall the courage of those who settled a wilderness, the vision of those who founded the Nation, the steadfastness of those who in every succeeding generation have fought to keep pure the ideal of equality of opportunity and hold clear the goal of mutual help in time of prosperity as in time of adversity. May we ask guidance in more surely learning the ancient truth that greed and selfishness and striving for undue riches can never bring lasting happiness or good to the individual or to his neighbors. Happy Thanksgiving... 3:21:51 PM    comment [] New Citizen Journalism and Saving Journalism (with it, not from it) Here's a Thanksgiving collection of links to a bunch of articles and discussions I've been neglecting... and will continue to neglect until my final course grading marathon ends in a few weeks. If you have time to read them all and point me (or other readers) to the best of the lot, please do so in the comments on this post. First, an update from the last item: Craig Newmark is helping a company that wants to "help people find the most trusted versions of the more important stories." It's not related to Craigslist.com, he says, and not intended to compete with existing newspapers and news sites as reported in shrill headlines earlier this week, including mine. Says Craig: "This kind of technology is intended to preserve the best of existing journalistic practices, and should help retain newsroom jobs... It's intended to complement, preserve, and grow existing media." Comment on the above, from a reader of LostRemote: "Misreporting a story about a new system to find the most trusted news sources? Where's Alanis Morisette when you need her? :)" Heh. Good one, David. I didn't even know she did irony; have to listen. (That's spelled Morissette, by the way.) CNET's Newsblog apparently came closer to the mark with its "Craigslist founder pro-community journalism," which links to his interview with GradetheNews.org. In it, Craig mentions this Salon article and points to several more examples of citizen or community journalism online. Related themes elsewhere: Journalism professors and newspaper industry folks are being invited to discuss the question of "What's ahead for newspapers?" in a new forum attached to our AEJMC Newspaper Division website... One comment mentions both professional staff cutbacks and a new interest in "citizen journalism" at the Memphis Commercial-Appeal. Jeff Jarvis already has close to 50 responses to his provocatively titled essay, "Saving journalism isn't about saving jobs." Lisa Williams (filling-in for Jay Rosen... and didn't I link to this already?) has collected about 60 reader responses to her piece about starting her Watertown, Mass., h2oTown.com "citizen journalism" news site: If I Didn't Build It, They Wouldn't Come. At least Washington Post columnist Gene Weingarten found some humor in newspapers' getting so desperate for readers that they're looking for new ways to... listen to readers! He also solves another mystery: We journalists -- a famously skeptical and analytical group of people -- just can't seem to understand why people aren't buying as many subscriptions as they once did, and are instead reading our online versions, which we give away free. CNET's Charles Cooper on newspapers being slow to catch the cluetrain on blogs and such, including Craigslist -- which CNET announced was costing newspapers millions just about a year ago. Getting back to Craig Newmark's topic, the idea of having readers decide (or help editors decide) the relative importance of stories is being addressed by several Web technologies, including shared sites, tagging systems and recently announced sites like Newsvine.com and digg.com. Om Malik: "Introducing Newsvine"--"So what these guys have done is basically mashed-up traditional online news site with About.com, Del.icio.us and OhMyNews and created a rather interesting blend of citizen journalism." (Couple of links added. Newsvine itself isn't quite here yet.) More irony: Joris Evers on a "technology news community" site, digg, having temporary technical trouble when it became news itself. In its own words, digg "employs non-hierarchical editorial control. With digg, users submit stories for review, but rather than allowing an editor to decide which stories go on the homepage, the users do." It's easy to imagine how having a ton of new users at once could stagger a project like that. (Probably safe if all of my readers go there at once. Double-digits weren't the problem.) Digression: Digg's in the news partly because of recent venture capital investments from, among others, Marc Andreessen, author of the browser that really got the Web rolling. (Hmm. I gave that program a try for the first time almost 13 years ago, thanks to a friend who knew how to compile it on a Sun workstation.) Speaking of Digg, I see that another audience-edited site, gabbr.com, has subtitled its home page "why digg when you can gabb?" Yikes. I don't even have time to be a Slashdot regular. Finally, one of my favorite bloggers (thanks, skb/rn) just posted a Thanksgiving wish from more than seventy years ago... One phrase really struck me. It's a reference to Americans, after hard times, recognizing a "new spirit of dependence one on another." Maybe the same could be true for professional journalism, community journalism, citizen journalism, self-editing news communities -- anyone interested in the general idea of waking up the public's watchdog and feeding it a good meal. Happy Thanksgiving.  12:09:02 PM    comment []

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