The NewsCloud Blog

Another NewsCloud story crosses over to the mainstream media

Last October, NewsCloud broke the story that YouTube purged its videos of Comedy Central content. This story was shortly picked up by the New York Times, the Washington Post, Reuters and others. In January 2007, NewsCloud broke the story that the Gates Foundation revoked its pledge to review the responsibility of its investments. This story was later picked up by the Los Angeles Times, Financial Times, and Seattle Times. Today, the New York Times picked up the story on Facebook's obscenely named groups such as Fuck Islam, a story NewsCloud reported last week. This is a good track record for an emerging open source journalism platform. These are the kinds of successes we need more of to have an impact on what people read and what the media covers.

Technorati Tags: facebook, media, new york times, newscloud

NewsTrust: High quality stories from a few days ago

I've been following the NewsTrust feed with great interest. I think their ranking system is a fantastic idea. However, it does seem to be suffering from a lack of adequate community of people to rate stories as they break. Timeliness is an extremely important quality in news - as much as quality and accuracy. The stories that come across my NewsTrust feed are three or more days old in most cases. They are interesting, vetted, well-written but old.

It could be that they don't have a large enough pool of people rating stories. It could be that the complexity of their rating system turns off new raters.

I also heard through the grapevine that they use a content management system that is very difficult to extend and will probably have to switch platforms before they can significantly improve the Web site. This is mostly speculative but I heard it from a good source.

Kudos to NT for a great concept and decent initial execution, but it's time to speed up that ratings queue!

Technorati Tags: newstrust

The Web of Dan Gillmor, the most powerful man in citizen journalism

If you're wondering which citizen journalism and media projects Dan Gillmor, author of We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People, is involved in, here is a list of the disclosures on Center for Citizen Media site.

Dan’s current disclosures:

* Member, U.S. advisory board, FON, a collaborative Wi-Fi company.
* Member, advisory board, NowPublic, a new-media company.
* Investor, Wikia, a consumer Wiki company (Jimmy Wales, founder, is a member of the Center for Citizen Media Board of Advisors).
* Investor, Enthusiast Group, a new media company (Steve Outing, founder, is a member of the Center for Citizen Media Board of Advisors).
* Dan’s previous enterprise, Bayosphere, has been sold to Backfence.com, and Dan has a continuing relationship (including financial) with the new owner.
* Dan holds a small number of shares in these media companies: McClatchy Co., the New York Times Co. and Dow Jones Inc.

Dan is also a member of the board of directors of the California First Amendment Coalition.

I had thought Dan was also involved in Daylife but don't see a citation for this, so I am probably wrong.

I would also expect that Dan is involved in the judging for the Knight Foundation News Challenge but have no information on this either.

If anyone has updated information or links, please post them here.

Technorati Tags: center for citizen media, dan gillmor, gillmor, we the media

Justin Cole of Media Matters is This Week's Spotlight Blogger

Justin is the Online Outreach Coordinator of Media Matters for America. His first post this week is about Ann Coulter calling John Edwards a faggot and how the media is covering or not covering it. Read the story and join the conversation.

Technorati Tags: media matters, justin cole, ann coulter, john edwards

When the mainstream media gets it wrong...and doesn't correct itself

Since posting at NewsCloud, I've broken two stories:

1) In October 2006, I reported that YouTube began a purge of Comedy Central clips, sending out copyright notices to users and taking down Daily Show, Colbert Report and South Park clips.

2) In January 2007, I reported that the Gates Foundation revoked its pledge to review the social responsibility of its investment practices.

I've been fascinated in each case at how the mainstream media inadvertently propagates false or outdated information and often never corrects itself. Online media and search engines are often equally wrong, but sometimes serve to publish corrections that the mainstream sites don't.

After the Los Angeles Times published Dark Cloud Over Good Works of Gates Foundation, the foundation told the Seattle Times that Bill and Melinda would personally oversee a comprehensive review of its investments. This report was repeated over and over again, here are just a few examples:

Gates Foundation to Review Investments (Seattle Times)
Gates Foundation to Reassess Investments (Los Angeles Times)
Gates Foundation may shift billions into ethical stocks after attack on investments (Guardian UK)
Gates Foundation Reviews Investments (Chronical of Philanthropy)
Gates Foundation to Review Investments (UPI)
Gates Foundation Reviewing Investments (AP)
Gates Foundation launches investment review (The Register UK)
Review in train as social conscience pricks Gates (The Age AU)
Gates Foundation to review investments after criticism (The New Standard)

Then, after NewsCloud reported that the Gates Foundation revoked this pledge (also linked by Slashdot), only a few updated articles were posted, few if any corrections. I don't think UPI ever published a correction to the wires, though AP did. Most of the coverage of the revocation occurred in different sources:

Gates Foundation faces multibillion-dollar dilemma (Seattle Times)
Gates Foundation to keep its investment approach (Los Angeles Times)
Gates in snub to ethical investment movement (Financial Times)
Gates Foundation not changing investment practices (AP)
Whiplash at the Gates Foundation (Huffington Post)

With Google, you can now track the evolution of these kinds of reports, just search on Gates Foundation, click News, then sort by date. You can see the thread as it evolves over time. But Google is no truth-meter. Google on Gates Foundation today and you will still get the impression that the Gateses will review their investments. This story appears on the first page of results but no mention of the updated story appears until you click for following pages.

In Anatomy of a Fast One, Geov Parrish discusses the benefits of this to the Gates Foundation, the weakness in commentary of the Seattle Times and the loss to the public:

What we have, then, is a massive investment firm (embedded in a multi-billion dollar philanthropy) smoothly reassuring the public while changing its odious practices not a whit; and the hometown paper first publicizing the odious practices and then, obediently, helping make it all right and sunshiney again.

The only losers are the millions of people around the globe victimized by the practices of firms invested in by the Gates Foundation; and local news consumers who think that the Seattle Times, for once, cast an unfettered, critical eye on a feelgood local institution. In both cases, it’s bad news.

Kudos to Seattlest for laying out the facts and crediting us as a source for the follow up story.

Technorati Tags: bill gates, comedy central, gates foundation, journalism, mainstream media, parrish, viacom, youtube

Microsoft's Approach to Citizen Journalists: Buy them

Apparently, Microsoft's attitude toward citizen journalists is that they can be easily bought, perhaps for less than the mainstream media. The company gave out free laptops to a number of bloggers.

Technorati Tags: microsoft, citizen journalism, bloggers, free laptops

Using journalism to save lives

A rash of carbon monoxide poisonings in the wake of Seattle's recent windstorm led the Seattle Times to publish a multi-lingual warning (PDF) about using indoor heating elements on the top of their front page. This is a great example of journalists using their unique place in our cities to save lives. Kudos to the Seattle Times and kudos to the LA Times for noticing.

Now if we could just get them to endorse candidates with the same sort of ethical considerations rather than routinely endorsing Republicans to push for an estate tax ban in one of America's most liberal cities.

Technorati Tags: seattle times, windstorm, seattle

Eben Moglen on The One Laptop Per Child and Citizen Journalism

As I mention here, I finally watched Eben Moglen's keynote from the 2006 Plone Conference that my friend Jon has been raving about for weeks. Moglen made some great comments on the potential of the One Laptop Per Child project to affect citizen journalism:

"What is journalism like when every village has a video camera and is on the net? ...

What does it mean if the next time somebody starts some nasty little genocide in some little corner of the Earth the United States government would prefer to ignore, that there's video all over the place all the time in every living room?

What does it mean when children around the world are networking with one another over the issues that concern them directly without intermediation, everybody to everybody?"

Every OLPC is specified with a video camera. Here's a recent New York Times article on the One Laptop Per Child project.

It made me happy that I released most of my work from the past two years to the open source community this week.

Technorati Tags: eben moglen, open source, plone, one laptop per child, olpc

NewsCloud Released as Open Source Media Platform

As Americans, we face a number of critical challenges: our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, threats to national security, rising costs of health care and college, rising federal debt, rising prison population, weak public schools, problems with our election system, decline of the middle class, global warming, energy independence, recovery from Hurricane Katrina, etc. The list goes on... Deep and thoughtful media coverage will be essential to help inform us to address these challenges in creative and constructive ways. Media consolidation, control by private corporations and the profit motive is often a barrier to quality and open, vibrant journalism.

While the blogosphere has dramatically expanded the ability for important stories and diverse views to get traction, it's important for the platforms which promote mainstream news, blogs and citizen-powered journalism to be open to public access. While there are a number of social network journalism platforms that allow a wide variety of original content, none of the latest Web 2.0 generation so far are licensed to the open source community to inspect, re-purpose and improve.

Today, we released code for NewsCloud to the open source community with a GPL license. Now other organizations can repurpose our platform to expand their own efforts or simply to improve the features they want to see in our site.

The NewsCloud platform is written in PHP and MySQL. Visit the NewsCloud site at SourceForge to download the code. Visit our Developer Wiki to get more information. There are a number of ways for developers to get involved with us. We've also set up a Google Groups discussion forum for developers. If you just want to integrate your site with NewsCloud, our pre-existing REST-based PHP class of Web Services API is still available.

One of the coolest things about the NewsCloud platform is its expanding use of Smarty as a template engine to individuals and groups to fully customize the look and feel of their content without having to host their own server.

As always, visit the NewsCloud Blog (or RSS feed) to stay up to date on development updates.

NewsCloud's Top Journalism Beats for 2007

NewsCloud readers are currently voting on the top citizen journalism beats for 2007. Voting concludes December 31st and results will be announced in January.

About NewsCloud

NewsCloud began in 2004 as CommonBits, a community directory for distributing political videos via BitTorrent. It evolved into CommonTimes, a social network for news and was rebranded as NewsCloud.com in May 2006. NewsCloud is primarily the work of Jeff Reifman, a former Microsoft technologist and free-lance journalist and co-founded by Garrett Moon, a computer science student at Western Washington University.

Technorati Tags: newscloud, citizen journalism, open source, programming, media reform, blogging

Kovach and Rosentiel's Principles of Journalism

We've gone ahead and posted Kovach and Rosentiel's Principles of Journalism at NewsCloud. These are an outstanding list of values for citizen journalists to learn and practice. Thanks to Chuck Taylor for passing these on to us.

Technorati Tags: chuck taylor, bill kovach, principles of journalism, newscloud

Jon Stewart Mocks CNN's iReport on The Daily Show

Update: here is the new working link to Daily Show's CNN iReport Clip on iFilm. It's long since been taken down off of YouTube.

Jon Stewart mocked CNN's iReport on the Daily Show - making fun of CNN's rabid pursuit of shallow citizen journalism. The best line: "This just in, my balls are on Wolf Blitzer's head!" Enjoy!

Technorati Tags: balls, citizen journalism, cnn, daily show, ireport, jon stewart, wolf blitzer

Thinking about our mission and vision

We've accomplished a lot with very few resources at CommonTimes - but we need to do more. So, right now we're thinking a lot about what we want to be when we grow up.

It's easy to get caught up in feature wars in terms of what our numerous and well-funded competition is doing, but lately, I've tried to isolate myself and think of the big picture. What is the problem we're trying to solve for our readers? What values do we have?

With that in mind, we're thinking about the world, media, community and our readers.

I came across Craig's manifesto on community. It's short and simple - but makes some good points.

I will definitely have more thoughts for you soon.

Technorati Tags: entrepreneurial, media, mission