The evolution of Journalism quickens. Wikileaks dramatically revealed the weakness of our present day corporation owned and controlled media. Murdocs News group revealed the problems that occur when an established news organization tries to obtain news the same illegal way the the wiki boys did. Another thing to consider is what sort of news did these two different organizations reveal? With Wikileaks it seems we are given news we need to know but don't necessarily want to know. Were as in the latter case we get news (entertainment) we like to here but do not need to know. That is private, personal and sometimes tragic revelations revealed. So here from the New York Times:
July 28, 2011
In Baring Facts of Train Crash, Blogs Erode China Censorship
By MICHAEL WINES and SHARON LaFRANIERE

BEIJING — “After all the wind and storm, what’s going on with the high-speed train?” read the prophetic message posted last Saturday evening on the Chinese microblog Sina Weibo. “It’s crawling slower than a snail. I hope nothing happens to it.”

They were a few short sentences, typed by a young girl with the online handle Smm Miao. But five days later, the torrent that followed them was still flooding this nation’s Internet, and lapping at the feet of government bureaucrats, censors and the state-controlled press.

The train the girl saw, on a track outside Wenzhou in coastal Zhejiang Province, was rammed from behind minutes later, killing 39 people and injuring 192. Since then, China’s two major Twitter-like microblogs — called weibos here — have posted an astounding 26 million messages on the tragedy, including some that have forced embarrassed officials to reverse themselves. The messages are a potent amalgam of contempt for railway authorities, suspicion of government explanations and shoe-leather journalism by citizens and professionals alike.

The swift and comprehensive blogs on the train accident stood this week in stark contrast to the stonewalling of the Railways Ministry, already stained by a bribery scandal. And they are a humbling example for the Communist Party news outlets and state television, whose blinkered coverage of rescued babies only belatedly gave way to careful reports on the public’s discontent.

While the blogs have exposed wrongdoers and broken news before, this week’s performance may signal the arrival of weibos as a social force to be reckoned with, even in the face of government efforts to rein in the Internet’s influence.

The government censors assigned to monitor public opinion have let most, though hardly all of the weibo posts stream onto the Web unimpeded. But many experts say they are riding a tiger. For the very nature of weibo posts, which spread faster than censors can react, makes weibos beyond easy control. And their mushrooming popularity makes controlling them a delicate matter.

Saturday’s train disaster is a telling example — an event that resonated with China’s growing middle class, computer-savvy, able to afford travel by high-speed rail, already deeply skeptical of official propaganda.

As state television devoted Saturday evening to reports of mass murder in Norway, Sina Weibo weighed in four minutes after the train accident with a post from the crash scene, by a passenger reporting a power blackout and “two strong collisions.” Nine minutes later, another passenger posted a call for help, reposted 100,000 times: “Children are crying all over the train car! Not a single attendant here!” Two hours later, a call for blood quickly clogged local hospitals with donors.

Then the reaction began to pour in. “Such a major accident, how could it be attributed to weather and technical reasons?” blogged Cai Qi, a senior Zhejiang Province official. “Who should take the responsibility? The railway department should think hard in this time of pain and learn a good lesson from this.”

From a Hubei Province blogger: “I just watched the news on the train crash in Wenzhou, but I feel like I still don’t even know what happened. Nothing is reliable anymore. I feel like I can’t even believe the weather forecast. Is there anything that we can still trust?”

There is no clearer sign of the rising influence of microblogs than their impact on government itself.

Last weekend, Wenzhou bureaucrats ordered local lawyers not to accept cases from families of victims without their permission. After weibos exposed them, they withdrew the order and apologized.

Railway workers had quickly buried the first car of the oncoming train at the site of the accident. On Monday, after an online outcry charging a cover-up, they unearthed it and took it to Wenzhou for analysis. China Daily, the state-controlled English-language newspaper, noted that they had met the request of “many netizens.”

“I call it the microblogging revolution,” Zhan Jiang, a professor of international journalism and communications at Beijing Foreign Studies University, said in an interview on Thursday. “In the last year, microbloggers, especially Sina and Tencent, have played more and more a major role in coverage, especially breaking news.”

The few newspapers and magazines here that consistently push back at censors with investigative journalism are not just printing the results of their digging into the train wreck, but posting them on weibos for millions to see. So were hundreds of more traditional state-controlled news outlets.

Even the Communist Party organ People’s Daily maintains a weibo. But the field is dominated by two players. Sina Holdings Ltd.’s Sina Weibo (pronounced SEE-nah WAY-bo) counts 140 million users, generally better-educated and more interested in current events than those at competitors. Tencent Inc.’s weibo hosts 200 million generally younger users who are more interested in socializing.

In some ways, the Chinese weibos replicate their Western counterparts: they limit posts to 140 characters (though in Chinese, where many characters are words by themselves, much more can be said). Posts can be re-tweeted, too, although in China, tweeting is called knitting, because the word “weibo” sounds like the word for scarf.

There are also differences. Bloggers can comment on others’ posts, turning a message into a conversation. Users also can include photographs and other files with their posts, to telling effect: on Thursday, fact-checking bloggers posted photos of Prime Minister Wen Jiabao’s recent official activities to counter his assertion at a Wenzhou news conference that illness had kept him from visiting the disaster site earlier.

While Western social networks like Twitter and Facebook are blocked here, their Chinese counterparts thrive, largely because their owners consent to government monitoring and censorship — and perhaps because the government fears the reaction should it shut them down. The outpouring over the rail tragedy appears to have enjoyed at least some official approval; many analysts believe the government sees microblogs as a virtual steam valve through which citizens can safely vent complaints.

If needed, the weibos have literally dozens of electronic levers they can press to dilute, hide or delete offending posts, according to one Tencent Web editor who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of dismissal in disclosing that information. Yet the weibos also play cat and mouse with the censors.

“If we did not have any free speech then this company would not have any influence, so the company must act proactively to safeguard our space,” he said. “So that’s why they must go through this process of bargaining with the government departments.”

And even dedicated censors find the weibos hard to restrain. Government minders can electronically delete posts with offending keywords like “human rights” and “protest.” But like Twitter, the ability to instantly forward posts to dozens of fellow users means that messages can spread, well before censorship orders can be implemented.

And there are always screenshots to preserve posts that are deleted, such as this one by Ge You, one of China’s most distinguished actors:

“If a higher-level leader died,” he wrote, “there would be countless wreaths; however, when many ordinary people died, there was only endless harmony” — a euphemism for censorship. “If a higher-level leader died, there would be nationwide mourning; however, when many ordinary people died, there was not a single word of apology. If a higher-level leader died, there would be high-end funerals; however, when many ordinary people died, there were only cold numbers.”

Jonathan Ansfield contributed reporting, and Adam Century, Li Mia, Li Bibo and Edy Lin contributed research.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++
back to me
So in our "free and open society" we still have cover ups and in repressed dictatorships we still have freedom of expression despite censorship all through this wonderful internet and www. I wish George Orwell was here to see it. He would have loved (hated) the cameras in England as something he predicted for the USSR rather then his home country, although as a former civil servant he understood that the USSR was just a metaphor for here and there.

The concept of trust that has to be established with sources is incredible important for all journalists. It is the foundation on which they can collect information and it's betrayal is a failure of honour and a collapse of trust. This can result in a closing of sources which are so very important to finding the information which the public depends on journalists to provide.
Shame, shame, shame on Wired...Wired Releases Full Manning/Lamo Chat Logs
| from the crossed-fingers-legally-binding dept.
| posted by timothy on Friday July 15, @08:06 (The Media)
| with 282 comments
| https://news.slashdot.org/story/11/07/15/000213/Wired-Releases-Full-ManningLamo-Chat-Logs?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[0]bill_mcgonigle writes "After more than a year, Wired has finally
released the (nearly) full [1]chat logs between Adrian Lamo and Bradley
Manning. Glen Greenwald provides [2]analysis of what Wired previously
left out. Greenwald writes: 'Lamo lied to and manipulated Manning by
promising him the legal protections of a journalist-source and
priest-penitent relationship, and independently assured him that their
discussions were "never to be published" and were not "for print."
Knowing this, Wired hid from the public this part of their exchange,
published the chat in violation of Lamo's clear not-for-publication
pledges, allowed Lamo to be quoted repeatedly in the media over the next
year as some sort of credible and trustworthy source driving reporting on
the Manning case.'"

Discuss this story at:
https://news.slashdot.org/story/11/07/15/000213/Wired-Releases-Full-ManningLamo-Chat-Logs?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email#commentlisting

Links:
0. http://blog.bfccomputing.com/
1. http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/07/manning-lamo-logs
2. http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2011/07/14/wired/index.html

Here, now in Japan there is a new awareness and sensitivity to energy consumption and the question has come up about which is the most energy efficient media for distributing the news? Print, T.V.,radio, internet, telephony ie, twit etc. What do you think?

The comic book of Journalism has arrived and you can take a look at the first chapter.The Influencing Machine
culturebox:
entries
12
The Goldilocks Number
By Brooke Gladstone
Posted Thursday, May 19, 2011, at 7:32 AM ET
PRINTDISCUSSE-MAILRSSRECOMMEND...REPRINTSSINGLE PAGE

The following comes from Brooke Gladstone's new book, The Influencing Machine: Brooke Gladstone on the Media, illustrated by Josh Neufeld. Read Gladstone's explanation of the book and a first excerpt about journalistic objectivity here. http://www.slate.com/id/2291942?wpisrc=newsletter_tis

This is something that we talked about a short time ago..the use of fictitious numbers were real one are hard to find or the reporter is just lazy.

The real danger of personalised news is that you don't get what you need to know only what you want to know.
The Rise of Filter Bubbles
| from the sound-of-your-own-voice dept.
| posted by samzenpus on Sunday May 15, @23:21 (Censorship)
| https://yro.slashdot.org/story/11/05/16/0044236/The-Rise-of-Filter-Bubbles?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

eldavojohn writes "Eli Pariser gave a talk at TED which posits that
tailoring algorithms are creating 'filter bubbles' around each user,
restricting the information that reaches you to be — unsurprisingly —
only what you want to see. While you might be happy that your preferred
liberal or conservative news hits you, you'll never get to see the
converse. This is because Google, Facebook, newspaper sites and even
Netflix filter what hits you before you get to see it. And since they
give you what you want, you never see the opposing viewpoints or step
outside your comfort zone. It amounts to a claim of censorship through
personalization, and now that every site does it, it's becoming a
problem. Pariser calls for all sites implementing these algorithms to
embed in the algorithms 'some sense of public life' and also have
transparency so you can understand why your Google search might look
different than someone with opposing tastes." Hit the link below to watch
a video of Pariser's talk.

Discuss this story at:
https://yro.slashdot.org/story/11/05/16/0044236/The-Rise-of-Filter-Bubbles?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email#commentlisting

+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Tenth Annual AusCERT Conference Kicks Off
| from the gentlemen-start-your-computers dept.
| posted by samzenpus on Monday May 16, @01:55 (Australia)
| https://it.slashdot.org/story/11/05/16/0259231/Tenth-Annual-AusCERT-Conference-Kicks-Off?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email

What drives the news in the internet age? Here is one report:
Drudge Generates More News Traffic Than Social Media
| from the nobody-cares-about-your-day dept.
| posted by samzenpus on Monday May 09, @11:15 (The Internet)
| https://news.slashdot.org/story/11/05/09/157222/Drudge-Generates-More-News-Traffic-Than-Social-Media?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

tcd004 writes "A report released today by the Pew Research Center's
Project for Excellence in Journalism shows that the Drudge Report is a
far more important driver of online news traffic than Facebook or
Twitter. In fact, for the top 25 news websites, Twitter barely registers
as a source of traffic. The report hits on several other [0]interesting
findings about news behavior."

Discuss this story at:
https://news.slashdot.org/story/11/05/09/157222/Drudge-Generates-More-News-Traffic-Than-Social-Media?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email#commentlisting

Links:
0. http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/2011/05/pew-the-drudge-report-drive-more-top-news-traffic-than-twitter-or-facebook.html

For Journalists, a Call to Rethink Their Online Models
By BRIAN STELTER
Published: May 10, 2011



Columbia University has surveyed the state of digital journalism, and it has concluded that journalists must rethink their relationships — and their audiences’ relationships — with advertisers.
Enlarge This Image

The classified section of KSL, a TV station in Salt Lake City, attracts 250 million page views a month. A study says part of its success comes from reflecting the community's moral values.
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That does not mean yielding editorial control to sponsors, but it might mean coming up with alternatives to impression-based pricing, creating higher-value content for the Web by tapping into page view data, and helping to ensure that Web ads have value on their own.

In a report released on Tuesday, the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University outlines those recommendations and others, all intended to help newspapers, magazines and television stations better compete in the online marketplace.

“We’re not suggesting that journalists get marching orders from advertisers,” said Bill Grueskin, the academic dean for the journalism school and a co-author of the report. “We are suggesting that journalists get a much better understanding of why so many advertising dollars have left the traditional news media business.”

And, he added, a better understanding of what the news media can do to bring the dollars back. To have a journalism school, especially one as esteemed as Columbia’s, studying ad rate cards and the online coupon craze might seem unconventional. But it is an outgrowth of academia’s growing interest in the economic foundations of journalism at a time when those foundations appear unstable. Columbia and some other journalism schools, for instance, now offer courses on the economics of journalism.

The report’s section for conclusions opens with a quote from Randall Rothenberg, the head of the Interactive Advertising Bureau and a former reporter for The New York Times. Mr. Rothenberg told the report’s authors, “Here’s the problem: Journalists just don’t understand their business.”

That possibility comes up repeatedly in the report. “Many sectors of the traditional news industry have been slow to embrace changes brought on by digital technology,” it states, before recommending a “faster and more consistent pace of innovation and investment.”

It also recommends that journalists “gain a fuller appreciation for how advertisers now reach their customers via social media, new-media ads and search engine optimization,” and that larger news organizations should consider creating or re-creating separate digital staffs, “particularly on the business side.”

The report is a product of several months of visits to news organizations. Mr. Grueskin, a veteran of The Wall Street Journal, co-wrote the report with Ava Seave, an adjunct professor and a consultant, and Lucas Graves, a doctoral candidate at Columbia. The journalism school will hold a public discussion about the report on Tuesday evening.

The report’s authors diagnose problems for digital media. Perhaps chief among them is that advertising on the Web tends to have less value for the consumer than advertising in other formats.

“If you ever watch somebody reading a copy of Vanity Fair, they spend as much time looking at the ads as they spend looking at the content,” Mr. Grueskin said, “because the ads are actually useful for readers.” (Ads having value on their own, he added, is “something that we as journalists have a hard time getting our heads around.”)

One of Columbia’s case studies of advertising adding value is KSL.com, the Web site of KSL, the NBC affiliate in Salt Lake City. Thanks in large part to a robust classified ads service, the site now registers about 250 million page views each month — a staggeringly high figure for a local market of that size. Steep declines in classified advertising have affected countless newspapers and other news properties. But KSL.com has bucked the trend. Its classifieds section benefits from its ownership by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and from the fact that it started up before Craigslist in Salt Lake City.

But it also benefits, Mr. Grueskin said, by reflecting its community’s moral values and by forbidding anonymity. “If I were a publisher, I would spend some time looking at what KSL’s Web site does with classifieds versus what Craigslist does,” he said.

Mr. Grueskin said he was struck by a comment that Chris Hendricks, a vice president at McClatchy, made in an interview for the report:

"It’s almost like we are a sales and distribution company that decided we’re going to fund journalism." Mr. Hendricks’s local sales force sells space on sites like Yahoo as well as on McClatchy’s own sites.

The report’s authors assert that there are limits to the cost-per-thousand model of advertising pricing and say that news outlets and marketers together should “forge new models that integrate digital ads and social-media outreach.”

As an example, it cites the Web site of The Dallas Morning News, which has a section for high school sports. A package deal for advertising on the section during a recent football season included print ads, a player-of-the-week contest and a banquet for players at the end of the season. “That gets you out of the pure ‘five dollars for every thousand page views’ model,” Mr. Grueskin said.

The report’s authors take a dim view of online subscriptions to news, cautioning that news sites “now should have very limited expectations for its success — at least on the Web.”

They are more bullish on the prospects of subscriptions for mobile access. They write, “If publishers really hope to expunge the ‘original sin’ of giving away content free online, they may be best positioned to do so not on the computers where they first gave away their wares, but on mobile devices that offer a more welcoming environment.”
A version of this article appeared in print on May 10, 2011, on page B6 of the New York edition with the headline: For Journalists, A Call to Rethink Their Online Models.

Here are three separate articles, all from Slashdot, reporting on the rapid change in what we think of as Journalism:
First Ever Pulitzer For Non-Print Series
| from the take-a-lesson-rupert dept.
| posted by Soulskill on Monday May 02, @21:58 (The Internet)
| https://news.slashdot.org/story/11/05/02/2349248/First-Ever-Pulitzer-For-Non-Print-Series?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[0]decora writes "[1]Last year ProPublica won the first Pulitzer for an
online news site. This year, they have been [2]awarded the first Pulitzer
for a series that did not appear in print. The series was Eisinger and
Bernstein's 'The Wall Street Money Machine,' which described how hedge
funds and financiers profited from the collapse of the economy.
ProPublica publishes under a [3]Creative Commons license and hosts a
[4]Nerd Blog where they write about journalism-related hacking and
publish [5]open source tools they have developed."

Discuss this story at:
https://news.slashdot.org/story/11/05/02/2349248/First-Ever-Pulitzer-For-Non-Print-Series?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email#commentlisting

Links:
0. mailto:decorat@mail.com
1. http://news.slashdot.org/story/10/04/13/2020227/First-Pulitzer-Awarded-To-an-Online-News-Site
2. http://www.propublica.org/podcast/item/podcast-pulitzer-special-jake-bernstein-and-jesse-eisinger/
3. http://www.propublica.org/about/steal-our-stories
4. http://www.propublica.org/nerds
5. http://www.propublica.org/nerds/item/timelinesetter-easy-timelines-from-spreadsheets-now-open-to-allThe Internet's New Alternate Reality
| from the it's-true-i-read-it-on-the-interweb dept.
| posted by Soulskill on Tuesday May 03, @05:11 (The Internet)
| https://news.slashdot.org/story/11/05/03/024252/The-Internets-New-Alternate-Reality?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[0]Hugh Pickens writes "Tim Rutten writes in the LA Times that when
President Obama released his long form birth certificate last week, one
of the striking things about the reaction to the president's calm and —
to reasonable minds — entirely persuasive appearance in the White House
briefing room Wednesday was the rapidity and ease with which so many
leading birthers rejected the evidence he presented. 'Until very
recently, if every professional news organization in the nation examined
a charge and found it baseless, it was — for all intents and purposes —
dropped,' writes Rutten. 'Today, the growth of the Internet has
[1]drained the noun "news" of its former authority. If you don't like the
facts presented on the sites of established news organizations, you
simply keep clicking until you find one whose "facts" accord with your
beliefs.'"

Discuss this story at:
https://news.slashdot.org/story/11/05/03/024252/The-Internets-New-Alternate-Reality?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email#commentlisting

Links:
0. http://hughpickens.com/
1. http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-0430-rutten-20110430,0,6735231.columnBin Laden's Death Causes Twitter Record
| from the almost-nothing-of-value dept.
| posted by CmdrTaco on Tuesday May 03, @08:49 (Twitter)
| https://tech.slashdot.org/story/11/05/03/1240253/Bin-Ladens-Death-Causes-Twitter-Record?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[0]gabbo529 writes "Twitter has been a source of breaking news since its
inception five years ago, and the social network was used at a high rate
last night with the death of Osama Bin Laden. [Sunday night] saw the
[1]highest sustained rate of Tweets ever. From 10:45 p.m. to 2:20 a.m.
ET, there was an average of 3,000 Tweets per second."

Discuss this story at:
https://tech.slashdot.org/story/11/05/03/1240253/Bin-Ladens-Death-Causes-Twitter-Record?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email#commentlisting

Links:
0. mailto:g.perna@ibtimes.com
1. http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/140411/20110502/twitter-osama-bin-laden-twitter-record.htm

And again from the New York Times another very slanted Head Line:

- ON THIS DAY -
On April 30, 1975, the South Vietnamese capital of Saigon fell to Communist forces.
See This Front Page
http://learning.blogs.nytimes.com/on-this-day/April-30?th=&emc=tha213&nl=todaysheadlines
Buy This Front Page
http://www.nytstore.com/Front-Page-New-York-Times-Reprint_p_103.html
"Fell to Communist Forces"?? Well most people in the world at the time saw it from the other side of the line. Vietnamese capital of Saigon Liberated by Vietnamese forces.
The following are much funnier and thus slightly suspect as real headlines, however, you get the idea:

Proofreading is a dying art, wouldn't you say?
Man Kills Self Before Shooting Wife and Daughter
This one I caught in the SGV Tribune the other day and called the Editorial Room and asked who wrote this. It took two or three readings before the editor realized that what he was reading was impossible!!! They put in a correction the next day.
I just couldn't help but send this along. Too funny...
Something Went Wrong in Jet Crash, Expert Says
No crap, really? Ya think?
---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Police Begin Campaign to Run Down Jaywalkers



Now that's taking things a bit far!
----------------------------------------------------------- Panda Mating Fails; VeterinarianTakes Over
What a guy!
---------------------------------------------------------------
Miners Refuse to Work after Death
No-good-for-nothing' lazy so-and-so's!
------------------------------------------------------
Juvenile Court to Try Shooting Defendant
See if that works any better than a fair trial!
----------------------------------------------------------
War Dims Hope for Peace
I can see where it might have that effect!
----------------------------------------------------------------
If Strike Isn't Settled Quickly, It May Last Awhile
Ya think?!
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Cold Wave Linked to Temperatures
Who would have thought!
----------------------------------------------------------------
Enfield (London ) Couple Slain; Police Suspect Homicide
They may be on to something!
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Red Tape Holds Up New Bridges
You mean there's something stronger than duct tape?
----------------------------------------------------------
Man Struck By Lightning: Faces Battery Charge
He probably IS the battery charge!
----------------------------------------------
New Study of Obesity Looks for Larger Test Group
Weren't they fat enough?!
-----------------------------------------------
Astronaut Takes Blame for Gas in Spacecraft
That's what he gets for eating those beans!
---------------- ---------------------------------
Kids Make Nutritious Snacks
Do they taste like chicken?
******************************
Local High School Dropouts Cut in Half
Chainsaw Massacre all over again!
*************************************************** Hospitals are Sued by 7 Foot Doctors
Boy, are they tall!
*******************************************
And the winner is....
Typhoon Rips Through Cemetery; Hundreds Dead
Did I read that right?
***************************************************

Here is a very good example of a bad headline. Headlines should catch your attention but also describe as best they can,accurately, what the story is about.
- TECHNOLOGY -
PC Sales Off, Games Buoy Microsoft
A slowdown in personal computer sales at Microsoft was
overshadowed by strong sales of its Kinect and Xbox video
game products.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/29/technology/29microsoft.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha26
As you can see 'a slowdown in personal computer sales at Microsoft' leads. Microsoft does not sell computers, so a slow down of zero is how many sales?? Thinking should be involved in headline writing as well as writing the story itself.

The news as you see it:Filtering the Social Web to Present News Items
By CLAIRE CAIN MILLER
Published: April 24, 2011

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SAN FRANCISCO — News events as varied as the commercial jet landing in the Hudson River and the uprisings in Egypt have demonstrated that people armed with cellphones — not professional reporters — are often the first source of breaking news, uploading Twitter posts, photos and video to the Web. But the result can leave people drowning in too much information.
Enlarge This Image
Jim Wilson/The New York Times

Burt Herman, left, and Xavier Damman, the founders of Storify, which opens Monday.

A Web start-up named Storify, which opens to the public Monday, aims to help journalists and others collect and filter all this information.

Using the Storify Web site, people can find and piece together publicly available content from Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, YouTube and other sites. They can also add text and embed the resulting collages of content on their own sites. During a private test period, reporters from The Washington Post, NPR, PBS and other outlets used the service.

Storify, based in San Francisco, is one of several Web start-ups — including Storyful, Tumblr and Color — that are developing ways to help journalists and others sift through the explosion of online content and publish the most relevant information. Investors are also betting there is a market for filtering the social Web for high-quality posts. Khosla Ventures has invested $2 million in Storify.

Even though journalists may not be the first on the scene, they select the most reliable sources, digest loads of information and provide context for events, said Burt Herman, a founder of Storify and a longtime Associated Press reporter.

“We have so many real-time streams now, we’re all drowning,” Mr. Herman said. “So the idea of Storify is to pick out the most important pieces, amplify them and give them context.”

Al Jazeera English introduced a talk show, “The Stream,” which appeared online last week and will be televised in May, that collects perspectives from social media using Storify. A recent item on the fear of Islam in the United States, for instance, included YouTube videos, Twitter posts and paragraphs from essays on Web sites and blogs.

“Storify is essentially our script,” said Ahmed Shihab Eldin, a producer and host of “The Stream.” “We knew we basically needed to capitalize on the reality that the industry is facing, which is that we no longer have exclusivity on sharing and publishing information.”

Andy Carvin, NPR’s one-man encyclopedia on Twitter for the uprisings across the Middle East and northern Africa, first used Storify to cover the shooting of Representative Gabrielle Giffords, when he realized that the reaction to the event was a story itself.

“It quickly evolved into looking at how people were discussing the media coverage surrounding it and its potential political impact,” said Mr. Carvin, senior strategist on NPR’s social media desk. “There’s a big need for tools that allow people to collect bits of social media context and organize them in some fashion.”

The tools will remain free, but Storify will consider selling ads or charging brands to use the service, said Xavier Damman, a Storify founder. Levi’s and Samsung have already used it for marketing campaigns.

Mr. Herman started Storify with Mr. Damman, who is an engineer. Mr. Herman also founded Hacks/Hackers, a group for journalists and engineers with chapters worldwide.

“We’re really trying to put together computer science plus storytelling and journalism to think creatively about how you can blend the two worlds,” he said.
A version of this article appeared in print on April 25, 2011, on page B4 of the New York edition with the headline: Filtering the Social Web To Present News Items.

Your So Shallow:
This is an excerpt from an interview with a great designer talking about what kind of an education designers should have and he then relates that to journalism.
Q-How should universities change?

A-The first thing to do is ask: "What is the purpose of all the technology we are developing?" And the answer is, obviously: "To help people." But the understanding of "people" is in a different school—the social sciences—than the school where the understanding of technologies are taught. Right now, people in one area don't understand what someone else in their own department does, let alone what is being done in other departments.

If you want to be broad, you have to be shallow. In fact, you are shallow, because that's what journalists are: very broad, and therefore of necessity, relatively shallow in any area.

Thank you.

Here is a very good idea. Where anybody can evaluate and publish the evaluation of reporting. Check out Journalism Wall of Shame at >http://jpquake.wikispaces.com/Journalist+Wall+of+Shame
Scroll down to the evaluations and the review chart. Nicely done.

A very nice double piece from Slate in fictional journalism;Numbers Are Hard To Come By
What journalists write when they encounter a known unknown.
By Jack ShaferPosted Friday, Nov. 5, 2010, at 5:02 PM ET

In 2002, while speaking to reporters, Zen master Donald H. Rumsfeld noted that we are bedeviled by "known unknowns."

Master Rumsfeld wasn't talking about the exasperating job of journalism. He was riffing off of a pressman's question about Iraq's willingness to supply terrorists with chemical and biological weapons. But he could have been talking about the work reporters do. Every day, they bruise their brains on known unknowns—news tips, hunches, half-formed story ideas, scraps of information, and soft rumblings in the distance—in hopes of converting them into solid news stories, or what Rumsfeld calls "known knowns."
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But because reporters have only 24 hours a day to perform their labors, they frequently rely on a fudge factor to mask their failure to transform a known unknown into a known known. They employ the catchphrase, "While accurate numbers are hard to come by. …"

Reporters so depend on this phrase that if you type it—or a variant of it, such as "precise numbers are hard to find"—into Nexis, your computer will catch fire. At the very least, your Nexis screen will beg you to refine your search terms to reduce the returns from the many thousands to the hundreds.
Related in Slate
In 2006, Jack Shafer looked at the estimates of how many words H.L. Mencken wrote in his career. In 2010, he asked Tim Shriver to get off Rahm Emanuel's case for using the word retard as a pejorative.

Not every journalist who uses the phrase should be shot. For example, a reporter has my blessing to use it when he needs to acknowledge that the precise number of illegal immigrants is not known because, after all, illegal immigrants refuse to sit still for a census. Likewise, a story about the size of the historical cinema box office can get away with using it because accurate records weren't kept in the old days. But even then, he should say, "The numbers haven't been tabulated" instead of they're "hard to find," because "hard to find" implies that if he had only looked harder, he would have found them.
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But these are the exceptions. Usually when a journalist drops the phrase into his story it's because 1) he couldn't be bothered to find the number; 2) nobody has tabulated the number because nobody cares, and if the reporter writes that, he'll undermine the thesis of his piece; or 3) the story's editor insisted at the 11th hour on a number and the fudge phrase was the only thing that could be plugged into the hole.

Numbers are hard to come by pops up in lots of bogus trend stories, that genre of journalistic fraud that I've savaged repeatedly in this column. In bogus trend pieces, the phrase is almost a "tell," signaling that the publication knows that it's guilty of trying to document something as a trend when only the loosest anecdotal evidence exists to support the idea. In nonbogus trend stories, journalists use the phrase to caulk over gaps in their reporting.

Among the things whose enumeration was too difficult to pin down in 2010 were wood-fired hot-tub sales figures (New York Times, Oct. 21), the global sales of video games (New York Times, Sept. 20), dollars spent on tailgate parties (Kansas City Star, Sept. 25), the number of golfers on high-school teams (Boston Globe, April 15), the size of Brazil's acai export market (New York Times, Feb. 24), and the number of 3-D cinema screens (USA Today, Feb. 2).

Going back to 2009, the press used the dodge while discussing the number of flip-flop sandals produced (International Herald Tribune, Dec. 9); the size of the e-book reader business (New York Times, Oct. 7); sales of Nancy Drew books (New York Times, July 19); the cost of building transmission lines for wind farms east of the Rockies (Chicago Tribune, May 5); the size of Hispanic representation in corporate boardrooms, senior management, and economic-development organizations (Plain Dealer, April 19); the number of fishermen who have left the occupation (USA Today, April 9); and the number of coffee-shop employees nationally (Boston Globe, Jan. 22).

And in 2008, it was used to couch the known unknown-ness of the declining costs of solar energy systems (New York Times, Oct. 5), the number of gelato shops in the United States (New York Times, Sept. 4), the national sales figures for gelato (Dallas Morning News, July 19), and the annual number of boogie-board and surfing accidents (Virginian-Pilot, Aug. 12).

For the purpose of an elegant finish to this piece, I wish that Nexis had revealed me as one of the guilty so I could humbly attack myself. I'm not so lucky. A handful of my Slate colleagues, however, lapsed in that direction. I am as filled with forgiveness for them as I am with relief for myself.

As journalistic ills go, this one is no cancer, but it's often a symptom of journalists who chased a story and didn't catch it.Numbers Are Hard To Come By, Part 2
More about what journalists write when they encounter known unknowns.
By Jack ShaferPosted Thursday, March 24, 2011, at 6:56 PM ET

Numbers Illustration.Everybody cuts corners. Take me, for example. Today I could be writing a critique of the Libyan war coverage. I could be assessing the disaster reporting from Japan or essaying on the difficulties of getting the Syrian uprising story.

But instead of doing anything ambitious or worthy of your time, I'm going to rewrite (I mean update!) a piece I wrote in November, "Numbers Are Hard To Come By."

On the chance that you missed that piece, it's about how news outlets habitually cut corners in their reporting when they can't find solid data that support their theses but still want to run the story. They grab the nearest available—or most frequently repeated figure—and couch it with the phrase "numbers are hard to come by."
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This sort of number-fudging would be praise-worthy if the next sentence out of reporters' word processors was "And because there are no good numbers, we won't bother to generalize on the topic." But I've yet to see a reporter do this, if only because it's too easy to build an audience-pleasing story on soft numbers.

If numbers are so squishy that they require this sort of disclaimer, journalists shouldn't cite them at all. Or, if they insist, the disclaimer should read, "We have no idea what the hell we are talking about." Almost anything would better prepare news consumers for the dollop of dung they're about to be served.

One of the reasons that so many numbers are, as they say, hard to come by is that in so many cases, nobody has the necessary incentive to properly tabulate them. (If this topic makes your bunnies hop, read Max Singer's "The Vitality of Mythical Numbers," Public Interest, Spring 1971; and Peter Reuter's splendid companion piece, "The (Continued) Vitality of Mythical Numbers," Public Interest, Spring 1984.)
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I have no confidence that my ridicule will break the bad habits of my colleagues at the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg News, and other outlets. But that doesn't mean I shouldn't indulge one of my own bad habits of squeezing out easy sequels to previous columns.

So here goes—the recent things in news for which the numbers are hard to come by:

—The number of Japanese elderly living in evacuation centers (believed by some aid workers to be in the majority); Thomson Reuter AlertNet, March 22, 2011

—The number of kidnappings in Mexico ("believed to be in the thousands"), Bakersfield Californian, March 21, 2011

—The number of birds killed by feral cats in Stratford, Ontario (across Canada "untold millions"), Beacon Herald, March 19, 2011

—The number of Christians in Iraq ("as few as 150,000"), Herald (Glasgow, Scotland), March 16, 2011

—The number of Frenchmen living in London ("up to 400,000"), the Economist, March 24, 2011

—The number of guests caught bringing drugs onto cruise ships (one cruise line says 127 last year out of a million-plus), AOL Travel News, Feb. 17, 2011

—The number of sexual crimes involving teachers and students, Chicago Tribune, Feb. 16, 2011

—The number of former homeowners who lost a house to foreclosure or a short sale and have become renters (a "majority"), Contra Costa Times, Feb. 10, 2011

—The number of Down syndrome married couples (one source says it's on the rise), Louisville Courier-Journal, Feb. 10, 2011

—Number of science fairs (on the local level, one source says, "it's on the decline"), New York Times, Feb. 4, 2011

—Number of microcredit clients ("over 600 million"), Atlantic online, Jan. 28, 2011

—Number of threats against members of Congress ("Many members of Congress feel threats against them have increased in recent times"), Wall Street Journal, Jan. 9, 2011

—Number of video porn companies that have "retrenched or disappeared" (no estimate offered), Las Vegas Review-Journal, Jan. 8, 2011

—Numbers of Christians who have left Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, and Palestine (yes, the copy says "Palestine") in the last 20 years ("hundreds of thousands"), Channel 4 News, U.K., Dec. 21, 2010

—Number of rescissions ("Consumer and industry lawyers said rescissions have risen"), Bloomberg News, Dec. 16, 2011,

—Number of e-books sold (no number estimated), Wall Street Journal, Nov. 9, 2010

The diplomatic cables liberated by WikiLeaks prove that journalists aren't the only ones dispensing hard-to-come-by fudge. In this cable, the State Department writes that numbers describing Russian arms sales to China and India "are hard to come by." But they're also said to be "growing."

***

Hard To Come By would be a great title for a porn video. Send mildly salacious porn titles based on the news (no hard-core!) to slate.pressbox@gmail.com. Just so you know, my Twitter feed is G-rated. (E-mail may be quoted by name in "The Fray," Slate's readers' forum; in a future article; or elsewhere unless the writer stipulates otherwise. Permanent disclosure: Slate is owned by the Washington Post Co.)
Related in Slate
"Numbers are hard to come by" stories are a subset of bogus trend stories, a pet peeve of Jack Shafer's. Last year, Shafer pummeled the numbers-are-hard-to-come-by genre. In 2006, he documented the ongoing vitality of mythical numbers.

May this is right but don't really think so:
- TECHNOLOGY -
Times's Online Pay Model Was Years in the
Making
The New York Times's online pay model, which takes effect
on March 28, may be the most watched experiment in American
journalism.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/21/business/media/21times.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha26

Thanks to Markus Leach for the following information:
Reactor 3 is MOX and run on plutonium oxide-not good.


For all who have been looking for realtime radiation data from Japan, you are in luck. Or maybe not, as the data unfortunately indicates nothing good. The System for Prediction of Environment Emergency Dose Information (SPEEDI) releases gamma radiation data online. The site is jittery and apparently not suited for major traffic which is why we represent several screen captures of the data. While it is not surprising that according to the website both Miyagi and Fukushima prefectures are entirely "Under Survey" as it makes sense that the government does not want to generate panic, SPEEDI has disclosed some tell-tale data about cities in Ibaraki prefecture, which is just a hundred or so miles north of Tokyo, and is just south of the ill-fated Fukushima prefecture. And the data is stunning: based on a N, NE and NNE wind direction (where it originates), meaning all coming from Fukushima, with a normal reading in the 80 nGy/h range, the city of Kounosu Naka is at 3,024, Kadobe Naka is at 2,416, Isobe Hitachioota is at 1,213 and many others are in the mid to upper triple digit range! Again, this is based on wind coming out of Fukushima and ultimately headed toward the capital. Indicatively, normal terrestrial plus cosmic gamma radiation is about 80 nGy/h.
Below we present screencaptures as of moments ago, as apparently the Japanese government seems to believe that abnormal gamma radiation levels are perfectly notmal:
A map of all prefectures, showing maximum gamma radation readings. Note Ibaraki at 3,024 nGy/h, and Kanagawa right below it (and downwind) at 224 nGy/h compared to low double digts for all other prefecture.

Not surprisingly, Fukushima is completely N/A, as every single reading is Under Survey, also known as censored.

But the stunner is Ibaraki. We will let this one speak for itself:

As a reference, based on background radiation measurements in the lower atmosphere at different altitudes above sea level up to 1100 m and over the land were made at a temperate latitude (40°) in the Thessaloniki region, North Greece, before and after the Chernobyl accident (26 April 1986), using a portable γ-ray scintillation detector and a Cutie-pie survey meter with an ionization chamber, the average value of the total background radiation at ground level was 87 nGy h-1(10.0 μR h-1, 25 cps), i.e. 60% from terrestrial radiation,55 nGy h-1 (6.3 μR h-1, 15 cps) and 40% from cosmic radiation, 32 nGy h-1 (3.7 μR h-1, 10 cps), before the Chernobyl accident, while, after it, the total background radiation was doubled, due to the long-lived radioactive fallout suspended in the atmosphere and or deposited onto the ground.

As all good journalism should:Former MI6 Chief Credits WikiLeaks With Helping Spark Revolutions
| from the powder-kegs-need-not-apply dept.
| posted by Soulskill on Tuesday March 08, @00:02 (Censorship)
| https://politics.slashdot.org/story/11/03/08/0339232/Former-MI6-Chief-Credits-WikiLeaks-With-Helping-Spark-Revolutions?from=newsletter
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[0]EnergyScholar writes "Sir Richard Dearlove, former Intelligence Chief
of MI6, [1]credits WikiLeaks with helping spark revolutions in the Middle
East, in (what was supposed to be) an off-the-record speech. 'I would
definitely draw parallels at the moment between the wave of political
unrest which is sweeping through the Middle East in a very exciting and
rather extraordinary fashion and also the WikiLeaks phenomenon. Really,
what ties these two events together, and of course a number of other
events, is the diffusion of power, away from the states and the
empowerment of individuals, and small groups of individuals, by
technology,' he said."

Discuss this story at:
https://politics.slashdot.org/story/11/03/08/0339232/Former-MI6-Chief-Credits-WikiLeaks-With-Helping-Spark-Revolutions?from=newsletter#commentlisting

Links:
0. mailto:energyscholar@gmail.com
1. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/03/04/mi6_dearlove_wikileaks/

Well, there you go - Extremists Are Suspected in Killing of Pakistani
Minister
The minister of minorities, Shahbaz Bhatti, a Christian, was
ambushed in an attack similar to the recent killing of
another liberal politician.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/03/world/asia/03pakistan.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha2

Head line writing shouldn't be insipid like the above..why couldn't it say Moderates Are.. or His Mother in law is... and probably the best would be the truth that..There Are No Suspected...

Ridge Meadows Photography{BLOG}: baby Jax and family |Maple Ridge newborn photography

Ridge Meadows Photography{BLOG}: baby Jax and family |Maple Ridge newborn photographyHere are some great pictures of a new member of a family of hero's

The Economist Style Guide'

http://www.mantex.co.uk/2009/06/16/the-economist-style-guide/

The Economist is rightly renowned for the
clarity of its house style. They have an
online service offering advice on good
writing practice.

It includes tips on how to avoid common
errors and solecisms, and an online quiz to
test your writing skills.

http://www.economist.co.uk/research/StyleGuide/

If you want the complete style guide in book
form, have look at the details here -

http://www.mantex.co.uk/2009/06/16/the-economist-style-guide/