Constitutional Law

Life After Newspapers: One Reporter Takes on the Island of Alameda

Posted on March 19, 2009
Bit of a busy couple weeks for those watching the newspaper business. The presses stopped at the Rocky and the P-I, Clay Shirky and Steven B. Johnson took turns penning big think pieces about the Future of News(papers), and -- good news -- the San Diego Union-Tribune looks like it will sell to a private equity firm...

The Intelligence is in the Network, Social Media and Local Public Life Gathering in Boston Thursday

Posted on March 18, 2009
Join me this Thursday evening at Harvard's Berkman Center for a discussion of Social Media and Local Public Life. It should be an interesting conversation, particularly if you bring examples with you. On a related note, I am getting ready to speak on Saturday at the Newout...

Choosy transparency practiced by the NY Attorney General

Posted on March 17, 2009
Today New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo made headlines by coming down hard on American International Group (AIG), the company that has paid out millions of dollars in bonuses to some of the people thought responsible for the billions of dollars in losses that preceded government bailout money that continues to flow to the insurance giant...

Printcasting Launches in Bakersfield

Posted on March 17, 2009
This week we publicly launched Printcasting in Bakersfield, California. While our focus is on outreach to the 330,000 people who live there, anyone can now use the site to create an automatically updating, printable PDF magazine. I invite you all to give it a try at http://www...

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NY Attorney General Should Practice Transparency He Preaches

Posted on March 17, 2009
Today New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo made news headlines by coming down hard on American International Group (AIG), the company that has paid out millions of dollars in bonuses to some of the people thought responsible for the billions of dollars in losses that preceded government bailout money that continues to flow to the insurance giant...

Where the journalists aren't

Posted on March 16, 2009
Where the journalists aren't: the Marketplaces/Drilling Down on Local conference, a gathering of industry execs and venture investors. The "how do we make money on local" question that is generally the conversation ender at journalism confabs is the conversation beginner at this gathering, where the first panels are stocked with venture investors talking about what they will -- and will not fund, and what they expect to get back, and why...

Media Cloud and Calais

Posted on March 12, 2009
The Berkman Center launched a project called Media Cloud this week, a toolkit that facilitates analysis of trends in the news. The sample visualization on the site now shows world maps that illustrate the number of mentions each country got in Talking Points Memo, the New York Times and the BBC, respectively...

Ease of Use Matters

Posted on March 11, 2009
We spend a lot of time talking about why people don't comment more on Gotham Gazette stories. By "a lot of time," I actually mean about 20 minutes every three weeks, but nonetheless as a project with a mission to improve public discourse and engage New Yorkers in public policy conversations, we gauge our impact in part by how many people are reading and responding to our reporting...

The community radio movement in India

Posted on March 10, 2009
India has been quite a latecomer to this promising channel of people empowerment through community media. Until late 2006, only educational institutions were allowed to set up campus radio stations having a transmission range of 10-15km. The scope was only recently expanded to also include non-profit agencies, agricultural research institutes, and schools, to set up community radio stations that would involve local communities in the content production process...

New Citizen Media Projects Foster Rising Voices in Ivory Coast, Liberia, China, Mongolia, and Yemen

Posted on March 09, 2009
In January we received over 270 proposals from activists, bloggers, and NGO's all wanting to use citizen media tools to bring new communities - long ignored by both traditional and new media - to the conversational web. It was, by far, the highest number of proposals Rising Voices has ever received in its two-year history of supporting citizen media training projects...

Printcasting in BusinessWeek Story about Newspaper Innovation

Posted on March 09, 2009
Printcasting is mentioned in a BusinessWeek story about "online experiments that could help newspapers". The story leads with Bakotopia.com, the social networking site I started for The Bakersfield Californian back in 2005. This is fitting, as Bakotopia's later success with a printed magazine helped inspired the Printcasting concept...

Can African-Americans Find Their Voice in Cyberspace?: A Conversation With Dayna Cunningham (Part Four of Four)

Posted on March 09, 2009
Henry Jenkins: I do think that the concept of networked publics has a great deal to offer us in terms of identifying a way of addressing some of the concerns you raise here, but I also think you need to go into that realm with your eyes wide open. So much has been written about the democratic potential of an era of social networks and collective intelligence, yet the challenge you pose here is one which might push our current understanding of this potential to the breaking point...

5 New Rising Voices Grantees in Ivory Coast, Liberia, China, Mongolia, and Yemen

Posted on March 09, 2009
In January we received over 270 proposals from activists, bloggers, and NGO's all wanting to use citizen media tools to bring new communities - long ignored by both traditional and new media - to the conversational web. It was, by far, the highest number of proposals Rising Voices has ever received in its two-year history of supporting citizen media training projects...

community news as a livelihood for the world's poorest

Posted on March 07, 2009
Can a Community Producer like Samata, from a slum in Mumbai, ever become fully competitive in a mainstream market? In thinking about Video Volunteers' future work, I'm realizing we need to develop new models of community video that are scalable and allow for video to be a livelihood for thousands of the world's poor...

Change Tracker

Posted on March 06, 2009
This one is for the "wish I'd thought of that" files. Brian Boyer at ProPublica got the bright idea to write a wee widget that uses Versionista to track changes to a handful of White House websites including whitehouse.gov. Since I heard about Change Tracker on Twitter I've been following it on Twitter...

Can African-Americans Find Their Voice in Cyberspace?: A Conversation With Dayna Cunningham (Part Three of Four)

Posted on March 06, 2009
(Part 1.) (Part 2.) Dayna Cunningham: Thank you for reminding me that we are talking about institutions and cultures and politics and that media are nothing more than tools within these contexts. We need social organizations, not just technology. Drat...

Mobile Voices and the Ethical Responsibilities of Citizen Journalism Training

Posted on March 05, 2009

Beanstockd February/March Updates

Posted on March 05, 2009

Using social media in the newsroom

Posted on March 04, 2009

News [metadata] from Porto

Posted on March 04, 2009

Can African-Americans Find Their Voice in Cyberspace?: A Conversation With Dayna Cunningham (Part Two of Four)

Posted on March 04, 2009

Can African-Americans Find Their Voice in Cyberspace?: A Conversation With Dayna Cunningham (Part One of Four)

Posted on March 03, 2009

A Cool (and Easy) Project from a 'Programmer-Journalist'

Posted on March 03, 2009

Can African-Americans Find Their Voice in Cyberspace?

Posted on March 03, 2009

Breaking even - while staying true to the margins

Posted on February 27, 2009

Messages From Hot Places

Posted on February 27, 2009

Breaking Even While Staying True to the Margins

Posted on February 27, 2009

Digital Newsroom Wireframes Available

Posted on February 26, 2009
I'm happy to announce the availability of annotated wireframes for the Digital Newsroom portion of the Populous Project. The functionality, as eloquently described by Gary Kebbel at the Center for Future Civic Media Conference, is being able to "edit from the beach...

CELL PHONE JOURNALISM AND BETTER DEMOCRATIC DECISION MAKING - WHAT DO WE MEASURE?

Posted on February 25, 2009
How do you build a culture of participation? What does it mean to empower people to participate in projects and politics that might improve their own lives? How do you seed participation in a way that promotes sustainability after the initial impetus? 15 years after the first democratic elections in South Africa, following decades of political mobilization by anti-apartheid movements and organisations, these questions are still burning brightly in South Africa...

House Exploded? Try Software for Community Collective Action.

Posted on February 25, 2009
I've written before about the extrACT suite of software tools we have been developing at MIT: information and communication technologies that promote community collective action. We have started to introduce the first of these tools, Landman Report Card, to communities in Texas and Ohio that are being confronted by the impacts of natural gas extraction...

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