Month: March 2009

10,000 Words, an interactive site advising journalists on how to incorporate multimedia into their work, has posted a timeline of notable moments in citizen journalism. Among the examples are video taken from the Virginia Tech shooting in April 2007 and Rathergate (the exposure of CBS's use of falsified documents) in 2004. You can read the 10,000 Words post on their blog here…….

The University of Minnesota, the student newpaper The Minnesota Daily, and news aggregator NewsCloud have launched the Minnesota Daily Facebook Application. The application will combine traditional journalism and citizen reporting, and seeks to become a hub of community news. Researchers will use the application to test how social networking sites can incorporate news and possibly create a working business model. You can read the University of Minnesota press release here…….

The Grafton Times launched today, covering news from Grafton, Mass. The site is run by Jack Schofield, an Internet entreprenuer who is familiar with online advertising. You can read the article in the Worchester Business Journal here…….

The Twin Cities' newspaper, The Star Tribune, will offer premium content to print readers before publishing it online. Editor Nancy Barnes wrote in a column that this move would reward those who purchased a hard copy of the paper. The Star Tribune will continue to publish breaking news on its website free of charge. You can read the paidContent.org article…….

Glam Media has launched another site that seeks to profit from Twitter and other microblogging platforms. Tinker.com acts as a microblogging filter for events and other breaking news. Tinker also has widgets so the conversations can be posted on websites or blogs. You can read the Venture Beat article here…….

As their newspapers shut down or lay off workers, some former newspaper reporters have joined the ranks of their local public television stations. In Seattle, where the Seattle Public Intelligencer quit printing two weeks ago, 20 journalists now advise KCTS-TV. In St. Louis, the number is 14. Though these journalists are currently working as unpaid advisors, they are helping to provide context to local stories and deepening the local coverage that these stations provide. You can read the article in Current here…….

The Bottom Line, a segment on Boston's WBUR National Public Radio station, compares the current state of journalism to the technology market, suggesting that we'll see many start-ups in next 10-20 years. Many of those start-ups are funded by foundations, such as the Knight Foundation or the Kaiser Family Foundation. Such ventures include Spot.us, Placeblogger, or Everyblock.com. You can listen to or read the story from The Bottom Line here…….

Two weeks after the Seattle Post-Intelligencer stopped printing its newspapers and switched to an online-only site, traffic on the site has dropped by 20 percent. About 1.7 million viewers looked at seattlepi.com in January; the number now is closer to 1.3 million. A former Seattle PI reporter via paidContent.org attributes the decline to the dramatic reduction in staff. The Beyond Search blog argues that once the newspaper is gone, marketing the online content has to become the first priority…….

Jack Shafer of Slate questions whether newspapers are really so vital to democracy. He argues that citizens would get their information about government from other venues if newspapers went under. "American newspapers have never been so loved as the moment when they appear to be dying," he writes. You can read the article on Slate here…….

In a study of 18-30 year-olds, Crawford, Johnson & Northcott found that young people have both a strong interest in local information and a willingness to see such information on their social networking sites. Thus, local news might be able to find a following on Facebook or MySpace that wouldn't normally be a part of their audience. You can read the post from Broadcasting and Cable here…….