We create the stories of the connected society

At a time when newspapers are hemorrhaging employees and questioning their survival, they are adopting a more stable role in the community through new media – namely, citizen journalism. Newspapers are helping communities connect, reach out, learn more about their resources through their sites. The goal is to foster a way to make the community [...]

In an open letter to craigslist, Steve Outing asks its founders and operators to help save the newspaper industry from itself. My response:

Steve,
It takes real chutzpah to ask Craig Newmark and Jim Buckmaster of craigslist to help newspapers salvage their classifieds businesses and thus save democracy, or at least the part of it that newspapers [...]

Here’s a chance for members of the We Media Community to get involved in something new, practical and ambitious. Bread for the City, a food bank, health clinic and social services provider for the poor in Washington, DC, wants to use the tools of media creation and distribution to help its clients and community members [...]

Sponsored by Washington Post – newsweek Interactive
Location: Storer Auditorium at 4:15 pm
Session Chair: Hal Straus, Interactivity and Communities Editor, Washingtonpost.com
Robin Miller, Editor, Slashdot/SourceForge
Slashdot has a multilayered moderation system for ranking comments. “If you ever get into a content rating system, do *not* call it ‘karma’.” Slashdot moderators are selected at random, and these moderators [...]

For the second year in a row we’ve documented a devastating lack of satisfaction with journalism in American – and an opportunity to do something about it. Here’s the formal press release of the new research, which we discussed in the opening session of this year’s We Media Miami Forum and Festival. The good [...]

The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation is offering big bucks to support innovation in community journalism. The deadline for this year’s Knight News Challenge is Oct. 15. This is a big deal, especially in the U.S. where the commercial news industry is in decline. But it’s a big deal everywhere – in a [...]

Our favorite media pundit Jay Rosen shared this test for understanding how people define and are defined by communities. What I carry in mine:
– Driver’s License. Geographic community.
– Business cards. Connections to global communities.
– Insurance cards. My health and wellness, anywhere.
– Apple Pro Care. Ticket to my technology.
– Hidden Creek Country Club card. My shadow [...]

Unaware of a shooting in a dormitory that left two people dead, Virginia Tech graduate student Jamal al Barghouti headed across campus to meet with his advisor. Nearing Norris Hall he ran into police, guns drawn, rushing inside. As al Barghouti took cover, he pulled out his Nokia camera-phone and started recording. Then came the [...]

One phrase, one song from one of the projects featured stays with me as I consider all the videos that were shown at the Grove Stage on Thursday night. “We’re all in this together”. This phrase, this song, I felt best represented and signified the entire video festival. The art of video to convey strong [...]

Last night at a Miami/We Media bloggers dinner (hosted by Alex deCarvalho of Scrapblog)  Andy Carvin and I got into a discussion about how we got blogging…which got us thinking:  how do bloggers get to be bloggers?  Why do we take up self-publishing?  Where did the passion for media–that’s evident in so many of us–come from?

Those of you who’ve visited the Global Voices web site are probably familiar with our core mission, and the ways in which we’ve been trying to fulfill it thus far. The central feature of Global Voices has been our international blog aggregator, which is driven today by a team comprising nine regional editors, six language [...]

Communities exist in many forms, from chatter on a forum or bulletin board through to multi-player 3D virtual worlds. But what engagement models work and how can media companies nurture communities without alienating them as devices of corporate interests?
In our open discussion on Thursday at 12.30pm at the WeMedia conference in Miami we hope to [...]

Communicating with each other online might turn out to be more than just a fun way to spend time — it may keep us sane, or even save our lives.

Community is diverse, pluralistic, and alive. It develops around shared interests and passions, and carefully balances mass collaboration and personal expression. Rhizome’s value lies in its community, one that has driven new media art and discourse for the past ten years through the exchange of ideas, arguments and practices around an emerging form.

Broadly speaking, “community” can mean a locality, a school, a vocation, even an entire ethnic group or religion – any group bound by a common interest or condition. It may be small, it may be big. The fact is, we all belong to many communities at the same time. Some even overlap because they share [...]