Another "Future of Journalism Event"

Does Journalism Have a Future?

Date:Monday, November 17, 2008
Time:7:00pm - 9:00pm
Location:Coffman Memorial Union Theater
300 Washington Ave. S.E.City/Town:Minneapolis, MN

To celebrate its centennial, the National Press Club is organizing forums across the country on the First Amendment, freedom of the press and the future of journalism. A panel of leading local journalists will discuss where the news business is going and
how to preserve its core values.

Panelists include Thom Fladung, Editor, St. Paul Pioneer Press; Nancy Barnes, Editor, Star Tribune; Joel Kramer, CEO and Editor, MinnPost; Nora Paul, Director, Institute for New Media Studies, and Moderator, Alan Bjerga, Bloomberg News and National Press Club
treasurer. Co-sponsored by the Minnesota Journalism Center.

10/29 Assignment- Delicious

(Sorry this is late. I was out of town. I had time to post comments to other stories before I got to this.)

del.icio.us is a social networking tool that lets me access my bookmarks from any computer and to share bookmarks that I think may be interesting to others. I can use it as a resource for my own research, and I can share those bookmarks with others of a like mind. For example, as I look for information for this class I have been posting the bookmarks to my Delicious page. I can make that page available to anyone. I can share or not share bookmarks. Each bookmark can be tagged with multiple terms which are searchable (like the tags on this blog entry) so I and others can quickly find items of relevance to our work. Perhaps most usefully, I can create a network of people who also have Delicious accounts where we could be very specific about the bookmarks we want to pass around among ourselves. Here is one of many descriptions of Delicious' uses in Journalism.
It took me awhile to get used to this but I've found it to be pretty useful now that I'm getting the hang of it.

@ WebbyConnect: Will The NYT Go The Way Of The Dinosaurs? Sulzberger Responds

I started to post this article on this blog but Blogger was down so I put it on mine.
How convenient.

Journalism Professor Sorts News From Opinion

Sounds like Judy Muller from Annenberg in CA has been taking our class and has been taking good notes. We're obviously on the cutting edge and in a pretty good position to clear up all these bothersome questions about what is Journalism and the future of News- Lets do it! Judy Muller says be inspired to be part of the factual crowd. (4:44)

News 21 Project

One of the areas I'm exploring for my project is what methods are available for the effective and comprehensive reporting of stories using new media technology and web 2.0 social networking tools. I found some ambitious examples at a site called News 21 Project which is a coordinated effort between several Journalism Schools in the U.S. I found out about the project in a Miller-McCune magazine article that included the following:

Journalism has been twisting in its own end-of-an-era dance, and the transition to digital democracy is nowhere more evident than in the fragmented news coverage of this year’s presidential campaign... (Yet) Amid the clutter and noise of this fragmentation, disaggregation, deprofessionalizing and proliferation of news media channels, though, are real journalistic jewels. In some senses, coverage of the 2008 presidential campaign is much better than any I’ve ever seen... Begun three years ago, News21 is a collaboration among journalism students, their professors and technical specialists at five major universities...

More importantly to my investigations:
Along the way, fellows and their faculty advisers have learned that multimedia success involves skills with few parallels in traditional journalistic enterprise. Web developers who are also journalists can be golden, Calo says, bringing good journalistic ideas to life on the Internet in new forms that a fill-in-the-blanks Web site cannot accommodate. Perhaps even more valuable, he says, are journalists who can conceive and produce stories so compelling in form and content that they go viral, spreading across the Web by the digital equivalent of word of mouth.

New Media and the News

As far as I know, WCCO is the only local news outlet to have a "Breaking news" twitter. I think all of the local news sites have adopted blogs by some or all of the news teams, but I have only seen twitter accounts from Jason DeRusha of WCCO and the breaking news twitter. In my opinion, this adds another dimention to the 'tip line' allowing people to 'tweet' about breaking news that is happening, and conversly allowing WCCO to monitor and react to any news that is potentially taking place.

I'm still working on my exact question(s) to ask, but I am curious on Don's opinion on weather new media is helping or hindering news. Should we keep new media/citizen journalism to the web, or should it evolve to the big screen of one of the newscasts?

In somewhat related news: CNN's iReport caused Apple stock to drop on Friday. The user submitted iReport, where anyone can post anything, "Unedited. Unfiltered. News" had a headline of Steve Jobs having health issues. The news was passed around the internet on both digg.com and twitter subsequently dropping apple's stock price 9% before the rumor could be deemed false. If we are given the opportunity to report on news, who is held accountable for the facts? Should citizen journalists hold citizen journalists accountable, should the 'trained media' hold them accountable? Will this only lead to editing and filtering of the news that is submitted? I'm asking more questions that I can answer, but I'm curious to see what will happen with user generated news/content and if the opportunites to submit will start to be limited because people can't control themselves and need to constantly push the limits.

Read more here:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/10/04/MNIV13B9E4.DTL

VIDEO: New Media, New Standards? Ethics in Online Journalism

Hi all,
I found this after talking with Kathy about the The Silha Center
for the Study of Media Ethics and Law upcoming lectures. I missed it and just wanted to share in case anybody else did and wants to check it out. Seems like it was a good show. (March 08)

New Media, New Standards? Ethics in Online Journalism