Discussion Questions

1. Do you read print newspapers? Do you read online newspapers - if yes, in what way/form?

2. How has the web changed newspapers and journalism?

3. Why are newspapers in trouble?

4. Would it matter if we had a world without traditional journalism/newspapers?

5. What are newspapers for - what should they do?

6. Rosen thinks it's a mistake to think of newspaper readers as an audience - why?

7. What do you think of his 4 examples/pieces of evidence for the emergence of a new, democratic journalism?

8. Rosen cites traditional criticisms of bloggers as news makers (p 2 - they are parasites, etc). He also

quotes Markov who says if new forms of journalism don't evolve into substantial institutions, this will be a 

problem, and they won't do real journalism.  What do you think of Markov's claim?

9. Rosen argues that blogging solves the problem of a "free press belonging to the person who owns one."

10. List major strengths and weaknesses of Rosen's article.

Articles, Posts & Debates on Blogs, Journalism & the Future of News

Debates, Roundtables & Collections about Blogging, Journalism, & the Future of News

• EDGE DEBATE: 3 writers respond to Shirky’s “Newspapers & Thinking the Unthinkable”
  http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/shirky09/shirky09_index.html
  Harvard's Nieman Center Report on New News:
  News in the Age of Now By Nicholas Carr
  There’s More to Being a Journalist Than Hitting the ‘Publish’ Button By Douglas Rushkoff
  Categorizing What Works—So We Can Apply Those Lessons to Future Endeavors By Michele McLellan
  Establishing a Digital Value for Watchdog Reporting By Stephen Janis
  A Message for Journalists: It’s Time to Flex Old Muscles in New Ways By Ken Doctor
  Twitter: Can It Be a Reliable Source of News? By Janic Tremblay
  YouTube’s Ecosystem for News By Steve Grove
  Video Games: What They Can Teach Us About Audience Engagement By James Paul Gee
  News-Focused Game Playing: Is It a Good Way to Engage People in an Issue? By Nora Paul and Kathleen A. Hansen
  Playing the News Moves Into the Classroom By Nora Paul and Kathleen A. Hansen
• Newspapers & the Net Forum - hosted by Nick Carr and Encyclopedia Britannica  "Throughout this forum assorted writers, journalists, bloggers, and media scholars will discuss and debate the state of newspapers in the digital age"
• Debate between Jay Rosen & Nicholas Carr on whether the internet is improving journalism, sponsored by The Economist magazine.
  Carr:  The internet, by altering the underlying economics of the news business, has thinned the ranks of professional journalists. Has the net created other modes of reporting to fill the gap? The answer, alas, is equally straightforward: no.
  Rosen: The internet is improving journalism by driving towards zero the costs of getting it to people, and by vastly reducing the capital requirements for quality production. This has opened the market to more players, allowing more ideas to be tried.
• "Rosen's Flying Seminar In The Future of News" - a collection of prominent writers, academics and bloggers discuss the future of news
• Joshua Benton's Top 10 Blogs on the Future Of Journalism
• "Into the Blogosphere," a collection of 2004 articles put together by a group of rhetoricians that explores "discursive, visual, social, and other communicative features of weblogs"

Key Organizations, Writers and Bloggers

• Harvard's Niemann Journalism Lab
• MediaShift

Articles/Posts About Blogging, Journalism & News

• Jay Rosen, "Why “Bloggers vs. Journalists” is Still With Us" and "The Twisted Psychology of Bloggers vs. Journalists: My Talk at South By Southwest"
• Jay Rosen, The Weblog: An Extremely Democratic Form in Journalism (chapter for Rosen's Extreme Democracy: The Book)
• Jay Rosen "Where's the Business Model For News?"  "The people formerly known as the audience," and "A blog is a little first amendment machine"
• Nicholas Carr, "Popping Jay Rosen's news bubble"
• Zivkovic, "Defining the Journalism vs. Blogging Debate, with a Science Reporting angle"
• Melissa Bell, Journalists vs. Bloggers, Objectivity vs. Voice: picking the wrong battles
• Salmon, "How Blogs have Changed journalism"
• Lasica, "Blogs & Journalism Need Each Other"
• Lehman, "Amateur Hour: Journalism without Journalists"
• Eric Alterman, "Out of Print: The death and life of the American newspaper"
• Shirky, "Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable"

Academic Articles on Blogging, Journalism & News

• Jason Gallo, Weblog Journalism: Between Infiltration and Integration
• "The Value of Networked Journalism" Charlie Beckett.
• "What is the Online Public Sphere Good For?"  Matthew Hindman.  Mostly about the democratic potential of blogs.
  "Inclusiveness is precisely what the online public sphere lacks. Part of the problem is the extraordinary concentration of links and traffic online traffic. For example, several observers have suggested that a groupof “A-list” political bloggers attract disproportionate attention. I argue here that even the emergence of a blogging “A-list” barely scratches the surface of online inequality."
• Cite-u-like bibliographic collection of research on blogs (you can enter other search terms, for example "blogs and journalism"
• Bibliography of research on blogs (from librarian's perspective)

Blogs as Part of the new Journalism

• The Voice of San Diego in considered a possible model of new kinds of journalism that explore different kinds of funding, engage audiences differently and make innovative use of social media, including blogs. Here's the wikipedia description of Voice of San Diego
• SD Union Tribune - includes journalists, community, guest local area blogs. http://weblog.signonsandiego.com/news/weblogs/index.html
• Washington Post has Opinion section called "Columns and Blogs" http://blog.washingtonpost.com/the-trail/ Columns and blog entries have section at bottom that says "Share This: Technorati talk bubble Technorati Tag in Del.icio.us Digg This" that embeds all news stories in blogosphere  http://voices.washingtonpost.com/the-trail/2008/10/27/mccain_gives_economy_speech_in.html#more
• The New York Times lists those articles it has produced that are most blogged,e.g. http://www.nytimes.com/gst/mostblogged.html
• EXAMPLE - I read Paul Krugman, and I can track the discussions people are having about his latest op-ed, here: http://www.blogrunner.com/snapshot/D/5/3/the_widening_gyre/
• Or X Science Monitor: http://www.blogrunner.com/snapshot/D/1/4/christian_science_monitor_to_publish_online_only/ 

Interviews/Video of Key figures Debating Blogs

• Alterman (5 minutes)  http://ninetythrees.com/newspapers/eric-alterman-on-the-future-of-newspapers-march-2009/
• Shirky – what will come after newspapers? http://www.niemanlab.org/2009/09/clay-shirky-let-a-thousand-flowers-bloom-to-replace-newspapers-dont-build-a-paywall-around-a-public-good/    
  

Blogs & Journalism 2.0

• "The Value of Networked Journalism" Charlie Beckett. A report written for the Value of Networked Journalism conference at the London School of Economics, 11 June 2010. Sponsored by and the BBC College of Journalism
• Journalism 2.0: A digital literacy guide for the information age http://www.kcnn.org/resources/journalism_20/
• Journalism 2.0 Blog http://www.journalism20.com/blog/
• Social Media Handbook for Public Media
• EXAMPLE Using Blogsearch to search for journalism 2.0

Citizen Journalism

• OPEN SALON http://open.salon.com/cover.php
• List of Participatory News Media sites http://www.dmoz.org/News/Media/Participatory//
• http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=List_of_citizen_journalism_websites
• Oh My News http://english.ohmynews.com/

COMMUNITY/CIVIC MEDIA

• Knight Citizen News Network http://www.kcnn.org/site/
• INSTITUTE FOR INTERACTIVE JOURNALISM http://www.j-lab.org/
• Video and audio interviews with leaders in citizen media http://www.kcnn.org/principles/interviews
• A rich educational resource for everything you wanted to know about user-created video, audio, and other forms of citizens' media. http://www.ourmedia.org/learning-center

Blogs and War

• http://www.milblogging.com/ - read blogs, see videos, listen to songs, etc.

How to Track and Search Blogs

• http://technorati.com/ tracks most popular blogs and blog entries
• http://blogsearch.google.com/ let's you see what bloggers are saying about news stories.
• Example blogsearch Journalism 2.0
• http://www.blogrunner.com/ - read an article, then enter the url in blogrunner and see what people are saying about it.
• http://www.blogpulse.com/
• http://www.wikio.com/
• http://www.blogged.com/
• http://www.techmeme.com/
• http://digg.com/

Wiki Tools

Wiki vision http://www.lkozma.net/wpv/index.html

Flickr Vision http://flickrvision.com/

WIKISCANNER http://wikiscanner.virgil.gr/

Wikis and the heavy metal umlaut

http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/gems/umlaut.html

Demetri Martin parodies social networks

DMITRI MARTIN TRENDSPOTTING

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VpcvR1tIBfQ

http://www.poetv.com/video.php?vid=25779