We create the stories of the connected society

The Orange County Register confirmed it will outsource copy editing and page layout to an editorial services company based outside New Delhi, India. So much for local knowledge and the sense of place that only local publishers can deliver.

Jay Rosen has posted his cogent take on “semi-pro journalism” on TechPresident. Provocative metaphor about the news tribe and its survival drama.

At this week’s Personal Democracy Forum, a sponsor distributed a low-tech, but highly effective stress toy to attendees willing to listen to their pitch: a rubber ball on an elastic string that connects to a velcro band. Strap the band to your finger and you can play catch with yourself. Which is what I came [...]

Christy Bradford, who taught me how to be an editor, died late last week at her home in Kansas City. She had been teaching journalism at the University of Kansas since 1999. I love the description of Christy by her students at KU: “combination den mother/drill sergeant.” It was the same for us in her [...]

For the past week I’ve been playing with the private “alpha” of a new social bookmarking tool called socialmedian. You can also give it a try. To register as a tester, use this code on the signup page: wemedia. (This code is available for 100 testers).

What would you do to provide a better news service for your community? Or for any community? David Cohn, one of our We Media Fellows at this year’s We Media Miami conference, is trying to ferret out good ideas for one community, San Jose, California, from an obvious source: people who live there. On April [...]

More than 300 people from 13 countries gathered last week in Miami for our annual deep dive into the emergence of We Media as a defining force for the connected society. We’re already working on several big ideas we heard to take the conversation forward – through new research, the We Media Community, member working [...]

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, [...]

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 news: [...]

Since the presidential campaign began for the 2008 United States election,mainstream media coverage of the campaign never stopped amazing me at all.Matter of fact is,this is my first ever election campaign i have literally seen in the United States. And though i occasionally watched other U.S. presidential campaigns and elections while still in Africa via [...]

Three Israeli journalists who traveled to Lebanon and Syria are under investigation by the Israeli police for travel to "enemy" countries. One of them, Lisa Goldman, has been part of the informal We Media community for some time. She participated in the 2006 We Media Global Forum in London, where she rather bravely challenged Al [...]

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 [...]

Here’s an interesting collaboration that nicely illustrates how seemingly different agendas can intersect: The Sunlight Foundation, a watchdog organization that focuses on expanding online access to information about the U.S. Congress, is collaborating with NewsTrust, a kind of non-profit Digg designed as a platform to evaluate the trustworthiness of online journalism.

Topix.net  sponsored Podtech.net to produce a "man on the street" video, asking a few ordinary people (and a few not-so-ordinary media insiders, like webware.com editor Rafe Needleman, KQED Executive Director of News Raul Ramirez and craigslist founder Craig Newmark): "What’s missing from local news?" They also posed the question to a few people at this [...]

My friend John Bell at Oglivy asked me to provide some feedback on what Jay Rosen is up to with NewAssignment.net, a new open source journalism project. No need to re-post here – you can read what I said at John’s blog: Digital Influence Mapping Project: Is NewAssignment New Media?