We create the stories of the connected society

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 newsroom, [...]

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 19 [...]

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, 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 [...]

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 [...]

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 week’s [...]

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?

“Are blogs really that important?” asks Jemima Kiss in this post. That’s the question renowened pollster John Zogby addressed during his presentation on the results of the We Media-Zogby poll.
During his presentation, he indicated that:
- “Only 27% of the public said they were satisfied with the news but 76% of people inside it are satisfied.
- [...]

Online survey finds general public, media conference attendees agree that traditional news outlets could do a better job

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
February 15, 2007
A majority of Americans (55%) in an online survey said bloggers are important to the future of American journalism and 74% said citizen journalism will play a vital role, a new We Media – [...]