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…

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…

From the Daily Caller:

“A strike called by unpaid Huffington Post contributors received a major boost Wednesday with a call to arms released by the national Newspaper Guild.

Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2011/03/17/newspaper-guild-huffington-post-strike/#ixzz1GzrPFstL
call to arms released by the national Newspaper Guild.

The industry association called on contributors not currently on strike to cease contributions and asked members to help by “shining a light on the unprofessional and unethical practices of this company.”

The Newspaper Guild boasts 26,000 members and is affiliated with the Communications Workers of America (CWA). The CWA is affiliated with the AFL-CIO.

The strike was called earlier this year by the membership of Visual Art Source, whose 50 members had previously contributed content for free to the site.

“Just as we would ask writers to stand fast and not cross a physical picket line, we ask that they honor this electronic picket line,” wrote the Guild.

“This is about supporting the quality and integrity of a vehicle for progressive expression, to actually help Huffington Post succeed, but on the right terms,” wrote the Guild. “We call on Arianna Huffington to demonstrate her commitment to the working class she so ardently champions in her writing.”

Read more: here…
Read the Newspaper Guild letter here…

(From TechCrunch

“Techcrunch is off the market. Huffington Post won’t be the first $1 billion independent new media company. So who else is left to give us hope that blogging can be the savior of declining old media? It might be Bleacher Report. The sports site is coming off a huge 2010 and a banner January: Unique users grew to nearly 20 million per month, and it’s now the fourth largest sports destination according to comScore, not including roll-up fan sites….more here…

AOL, the online media company that has recently snatched several smaller content firms, has agreed to purchase news blog service The Huffington Post for $315 million, the two companies announced Monday.

The companies said Arianna Huffington, The Huffington Post’s co-founder and editor-in-chief, will be named president and editor-in-chief of The Huffington Post Media Group, which will include all Huffington Post and AOL content.

Huffington Post is known for its political coverage, with a left-of-center bent, as well as blogging about sports, entertainment and local news in selective markets.

An executive on an AOL-Huffington Post call with reporters said that Huffington sales are expected to reach $50 million in 2011. Huffington says her company is profitable.

From Valleywag:

“Rupert Murdoch and his team at News Corp, plus third-string Apple executive Eddy Cue, just unveiled the much-hyped iPad newspaper, The Daily, in New York. It’s got video, big pictures, embedded Twitter, and updates that “break in” to the app. The newspaper, which should be in the iPad App Store presently, will cost 19 cents per day; Murdoch said he spent $13 million to get the thing going. Murdoch: “The Daily is not a legacy brand moving to the internet world… in this exciting new era we believe The Daily will be the model for how stories are told and consumed.”

Some of the perks of “The Daily:

* 360 degree photographs you can pan and tilt
* High definition video (illustrated by a story on inmates at Angola prison making toys for children)
* Up to 100 pages of content per day
* “The Carousel,” in which stories are represented by thumbnail “tiles” that are easily swiped through, read in “shuffle” mode, and summarized by audio and video anchors
* Link sharing on Twitter and Facebook. Links can be shared and read by non-subscribers for free, but non-subscribers can’t see index or other navigation web pages that display the other stories
* Icons, bullet points, and timeline items that can be tapped to show additional information in small animated text bubbles
* Updates throughout the day, streaming news tickers, and updates that “can break into the app any time we want.”

Read more here

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