Tired of writing great content online, only to have a mainstream site or blog pick it up, and bury the link back to your own website so that you’re essentially getting ripped off in terms of traffic? Well, other people are tired of this trend as well. Whether you’re a newspaper with a small distribution & website, or a personal blog, you should take interest in this proposed committee. (via NYTimes’ David Carr)

“As words and articles became digitized over the last 15 years, they began to float, there for the plucking and replication elsewhere. Words like “curation” and “aggregation” became the language of the realm, sometimes used as substitutes for describing the actual creation of content. What had once been a craft was rapidly becoming a task. Traditional media organizations watched as others kidnapped their work, not only taking away content but, more and more, taking the audiences with them.

Practitioners of the new order heard the complaints and suggested that mainstream media needed to quit whining and start competing in a changed world, where what’s yours may not be yours anymore if others find a better way to package it. (read more here)“

When an organization creates a video that goes viral by calling for justice against a despicable war criminal (Joseph Kony), a man who’s directly responsible for recruiting child soldiers and over-seeing the murders of countless civilians in Uganda, one can only celebrate their cause.
See the video below:

Sadly, the response to the video has been mixed with ignorant, lazy critics starting to come out of the woodwork against the filmmakers of this video. Instead of thanking the Invisible Children organization for educating them on who exactly Joseph Kony is, they’ve instead questioned the groups fundraising and basically missed the point of the video completely.

What the Invisible Children organization have succeeded in doing is making a war criminal (Joseph Kony) a national priority. That’s not an easy thing to accomplish, and we salute them.

According to Gawker it is. Here’s an interested snippet on the “rise” of “Celebukid Reporters and News-ertainment”

“Even after the rise of cable news and online news, network “news” broadcasts are still the biggest single unified source of news. Far more Americans get their “news” from a TV network “news” operation than from any other particular outlet. Network “news” is, therefore, still quite important.

There are a very limited number of jobs for network “news” journalists. Logic, then, would dictate that those jobs should go to the very best TV journalists in America. Instead, those jobs go to political celebrity children like Chelsea Clinton and Jenna Bush, media celebrity children like Luke Russert, and—perhaps most egregiously—to open political operatives like George Stephanopolous.

Nothing whatsoever can disqualify someone from being hired as a network “news” journalist, except perhaps ugliness.”
More here…

Via Washington
November 5, 2011 – CBS writer, producer, and commentator Andy Rooney passed away Friday evening at the age of 92, only a month after retiring from his long and legendary media career. The precise cause of death was not disclosed, but was reportedly due to unexpected complications that developed after a recent surgical procedure.

Andrew Aitken Rooney first reached Boomer consciousness in the late 1970s. Back in those somewhat more innocent pre-computer, pre-app, pre-iPhone, pre-interactive video days, Rooney materialized seemingly out of the woodwork to become America’s official—but generally beloved—TV social crank. In random bits, week after week, he channeled the public zeitgeist on a variety of disparate topics with uncanny insight. When queried about his success in this role, Rooney hit the nail on the head. “I obviously have a knack for getting on paper what a lot of people have thought and didn’t realize they thought.”

More here…

And the Atlantic is asking why…

“The Occupy Wall Street protests that began in New York City a month ago gained worldwide momentum over the weekend, as hundreds of thousands of demonstrators in nine hundred cities protested corporate greed and wealth inequality. Protesters from London to Sydney echoed the anti-capitalist, populist rhetoric of the Occupy movement in what was deemed a “global day of protest”.

“The unrest comes amid a mounting European sovereign debt crisis, which has contributed to ongoing market volatility and fears of another global economic recession. Governments around the world–particularly in the indebted eurozone periphery–have implemented harsh austerity programs, making economic growth all but impossible. In the United States, anger at Wall Street bankers seen as responsible for the global financial crisis–and at the government, for bailing out the banks with taxpayer money–is exacerbated by a persistently dismal job market.” more here…

(Picture via UPI.com)

Entertainment website Fox News, is taking note of what a respectable, credible journalism website had to say about Jihad “not being a leading cause of death”….from FoxNews.com:

“A new online journalism course on Islam appears to downplay the threat posed by global jihad groups, suggesting reporters keep the death toll from Islamic terrorism in “context” by comparing that toll to the number of people killed every year by malaria, HIV/AIDS and other factors.

“Jihad is not a leading cause of death in the world,” the online course cautions studying journalists.

While that is technically true, researchers at the Culture and Media Institute who examined the online program took exception to that and numerous other claims made in the Poynter News University course.

Dan Gainor, vice president at the institute, said the course is sweeping these threats “under the rug,” while watering down the section on jihad with inappropriate comparisons.

“Infectious disease, we have government structures to prevent that, and that’s great … in radical Islam we have not even one organization but several organizations that are constantly seeking to kill Americans and others too,” he said. “It seems like journalists should not be involved in trying to downplay that.”

Read more from this hilarious entertainment site here…

Also, here’s a list of actual leading causes of death by the CDC here.

According to the PEJ News Coverage Index: August 15-21, 2011

Barack Obama and Rick Perry Drive the Week’s News. Here’s the official breakdown:

The economy and presidential election led the news agenda last week as two men vying for the same job played a dominant role in those narratives — President Barack Obama and Texas Governor Rick Perry.

From August 15-21, the economy was the top story, accounting for 25% of the newshole according to the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism. That marked the ninth straight week the subject has topped the news even as the level of economic coverage dropped for the third consecutive week. More here…

In a desperate, calculated move, Rupert Murdoch has caved into the phone-hacking-scandal fallout further today by shutting News of The World, and they issued a statement:

“The News of the World is in the business of holding others to account,” the statement said, “but it failed when it came to itself.”

The statement acknowledged the gravity of allegations that the paper hacked into the cellphones of celebrities, politicians and even crime and military combat victims in its pursuit of scoops.

Earlier this week, Britain was rocked by reports that a private investigator hired by the tabloid had illegally accessed – and deleted – voicemail messages on the phone of a 13-year-old girl who was kidnapped and later found murdered. Now we can look forward into an investigation and the liability of the newspaper management. More here…

Jane Scott, the legendary journalist who covered four decades of rock ‘n’ roll for The Plain Dealer, died early Monday after a long illness. She was 92. Funeral arrangements are being handled by Busch Funeral Home of Fairview Park. A memorial service will be held at a later date in Cleveland.

Her byline appeared in the newspaper thousands of times, above music features, concert reviews and her long-running “What’s Happening” column in Friday! magazine.

More here…

More info here…