Democracy is not something you believe in or a place to hang your hat, but it's something you do.You participate. If you stop doing it, democracy crumbles
-Abbie Hoffman
While Ohmynews is changing the way news is produced in Korea, and Dan Gilmour is changing the way news for the San Francisco Bay Area of the US with Bayoshpere – here in the UK citizen journalism isn’t really taking hold Citizen-journalism already overtaken by big media in UK?
Buchwald helps citizen journalists write a really good column Voice of the people
The Blog, The Press, The Media: Potent Voices vs. Unheard Voices
The conventional news media are embattled. Attacked by both left and right in book after book, rocked by scandals, challenged by upstart bloggers, they have become a focus of controversy and concern.
Their audience is in decline, their credibility with the public in shreds. In a recent poll conducted by the Annenberg Public Policy Center, 65 percent of the respondents thought that most news organizations, if they discover they've made a mistake, try to ignore it or cover it up, and 79 percent opined that a media company would hesitate to carry negative stories about a corporation from which it received substantial advertising revenues
• Bad News [He hacks on and on about the "crisis" in old media in the Times Book Review Judge Posner's Incorrect Verdict ; Posner rehashed tired "liberal media" claims ]
• · Michael McKinnon and his battles with bureaucrats over access to vital documents explaining the decision making process behind federal government policies News loses FOI bid on taxation ; To Serve The National City And Through It The Nation FOI Act may as well be scrapped Transparency and accountability: a blistering editorial ; CCTV fails when it might be inconvenient to Police
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• · · · Save the rainforests by having a beer, help African school-children by eating chocolate: companies have discovered that the way to a customer's pocket is through his heart. But just how ethical is "ethical marketing?" Just how ethical is "ethical marketing"? Selling Goods by Doing Good ; The blogosphere sets off a debate on Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel ‘Guns, Germs, and Steel’ Reconsidered ; Jason Calacanis, fed up with the Technorati 100, will pay you $10,000 to design a Blog 500 list
• · · · · From Technology Review, Lawrence Lessig on how the people own ideas: We entered the youth camp that morning by passing down a long, white gravel road and under a wooden gate. Spread to one side, and for as far as you could see, were rows and rows of tents. In front were scores of showers, with hundreds of kids in swimsuits milling about, waiting to rinse. It felt like a refugee camp The People Own Ideas! [a response by Richard Epstein, ; Years ago I swore off responding to Professor Epstein in print--not because he's not full of ideas and very often right (he is both of those things, and more), but because it's so hard to get him to listen... and a rebuttal by Lessig ]
• · · · · · Dark Blogs Case Study 01 - A European Pharmaceutical Group ; Des Moines Register on bloggers: losers Blog 'reports' lack media's credibility ; Interview with the AdSense million dollar man, Jason Calacanis People who don’t like RSS advertising are freaks