Read a detailed run-down on our blog: civic.mit.edu/blog/mstem/jay-rosens-three-layer-journalism-cake

Co-sponsored by the Center for Civic Media; Comparative Media Studies; Science, Technology, and Society; and the Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies

New communications technologies are revolutionizing our experience of news and information. The avalanche of news, gossip, and citizen reporting available on the web is immensely valuable but also often deeply unreliable. How can professional reporters and editors help to assure that quality journalism will be recognized and valued in our brave new digital world?

In my nearly four years here, I've seen the rise of some great solutions to communications challenges.

MailChimp and other email marketing platforms have made signing up and emailing friends and followers dead simple while avoiding the worst practices that lead to spamhood.

Twitter not only works as a broadcast medium but also makes rebroadcasting more respectable than it had been. (You think I'm kidding, but older professional communications folks still reflexively hesitate, wondering if featuring others' news weakens one's own brand or, worse, constitutes a copyright violation.)

Eventbrite helps manage ticketing and major event promotion without ever having to print out a spreadsheet, set up a cost object, or beg a former cop to help guard a cash box.

What's been the relationship between social media and social movement activity during the current global cycle of protest? Our own Sasha Costanza-Chock says it's time to find out...

Media Culture in the Occupy Movement From the People's Mic to GlobalRevolution.tv

Thursday 5pm @ MIT

Sasha Costanza-Chock is Assistant Professor of Civic Media in the Comparative Media Studies program at MIT. He is a Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, co-principal investigator of the MIT Center for Civic Media, and cofounder of the Occupy Research Network.

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Are you an MIT undergrad with a coding background and interest in media? Check out this great opportunity with the AAGO project:

UROP Positions: MIT Center for Civic Media and the Comparative Media Studies Program
Faculty Supervisor: Prof. James Paradis

Project Title:
Aago: Mobile Media Diaries for Youth Citizen Journalists

One feature of the Center that we love to, well, feature is our completely unique set of courses. This semester we have three of them -- two taught by professor and Center co-principal investigator Sasha Costanza-Chock and the other, in his MIT class debut, by our director Ethan Zuckerman. Registration is still open:

CMS.362 Civic Media Collaborative Design Studio
S. Costanza-Chock
Project-based studio focusing on collaborative design of civic media provides a service-learning opportunity for students interested in working with community organizations. Multidisciplinary teams create civic media projects based on real-world community needs. Covers co-design methods and best practices to include the user community in iterative stages of project ideation, design, implementation, testing, and evaluation. Students taking graduate version complete additional assignments. Limited to 16.

If you follow news about prisoner rights, court rulings and other news about prison issues, join us for this week's Civic Lunch...

Free Civic Lunch This Week

• RSVP for our [free] lunch this week with Paul Wright, editor of Prison Legal News

And more civic media news this week...

"Nutrition Labels for News"

• Matt Stempeck: “Do nutrition labels even work?” A key question before testing nutrition labels for news content

Solitude on the Web

• Nathan Matias asks, Can the Internet be a place for deep personal reflection?

SOPA/PIPA

Back in November, Associate Professor of Civic Media and Center principal investigator Sasha Costanza-Chock spoke with NPR's Brook Gladstone about what comes next for the Occupy movement (image and link courtesy of shass.mit.edu and NPR's On the Media:

Download!

Everything for me this week is relating to the late Vaclav Havel, and this "imbeciles" story makes me think of Havel's 1965 speech/article "On Evasive Thinking".

He opens with an episode from earlier that year when a girl was crushed by a stone window ledge that fell after the state failed to maintain it. Havel tells how the state acknowledged the issue and abstractly promised that things would get better. He tells how spineless writers wrote how wonderful it is that their society was now open enough for criticism.

As in…

A girl being crushed resulted in praise for the very gov't that allowed her to be crushed, because the writers were too chicken to ask the primary question, "Dear gov't, why do our window ledges fall?"

(For MIT undergraduates only.)

With the increasing proliferation of mobile digital media tools and online video distribution, there is a need for secure easy-to-use platforms for sharing and organizing media content among youth. While capturing and tagging digital media with time and location is possible, editing and organizing it for producing seamless narrativesthat can be easily shared online remains complicated. This project seeks to undertake development of mobile tools and online platforms that support young media makers and citizen journalists to create, organize and share digital narratives produced in their own neighborhoods over time, while allowing new forms ofinter-generational learning, location-based storytelling and civicadvocacy.