Collaborative online news production: Introducing Open Park

Now that the spring semester is in full swing, I thought I would write a little Intro about my project for the Center for Future Civic Media [C4FCM] where I work as a Research Assistant, and the ideas and ideals behind it.

For those who are unfamiliar with the project - Phase I, defining the new professional journalistic practice of collaborating with colleagues and competitors on news stories, was conducted in the fall semester. Its results were the subject of my final paper for the C4FCM, as well as for the CMS class 'Media in Cultural Context, which is accessible in the Projects section of this site.
The Projects section also details Phase II, which focuses on refining the functions of an effective model for collective news-reporting by testing in the community what works and what doesn't with concrete real life-based collaborative news-writing experiments.

Let us hope that this will apply to all aspects of media coverage...
Hopefully this review is a good sign.

Gates orders review of policy barring military-coffin photos

By The Associated Press
02.11.09

WASHINGTON — Defense Secretary Robert Gates ordered a review yesterday of a Pentagon policy banning media from taking pictures of flag-draped coffins of U.S. military dead, signaling he was open to overturning the policy to better honor fallen soldiers.

At least two Democratic senators have called on President Barack Obama to let news photographers attend ceremonies at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware and other military facilities when military remains are returned to the United States. Obama told reporters at his Feb. 9 news conference that he was reviewing the ban.

"If the needs of the families can be met, and the privacy concerns can be addressed, the more honor we can accord these fallen heroes, the better," Gates told reporters at a Pentagon news conference yesterday. "So I'm pretty open to whatever the results of this review may be."

I personally have my doubts on the merits and sustainability of obsessive focus on the local, and worse, on the latest born of 'cool' beats, the 'hyperlocal'...

But the World Economic Forum's proposal for "a new global, independent news and information service whose role is to inform, educate and improve the state of the world," to quote its report, leaves me with plenty of questions. To start with, about its independence, as a quick look at who is on its Council on the Future of Media may prompt one to raise such questions...

Here is the link to the WEF's 4-page proposal, entitled "Future of Media," which starts on page 180:
http://www.weforum.org/pdf/globalagenda.pdf

followed here below by a review of the WEF's recommendation based on a report by Cliff Kincaid of of Accuracy in Media, much of which I agree with.
What do you think?

Emerging global elite to use new global media to educate 'global citizens'

Novaya Gazeta, one of Russia's few remaining independent newspapers, is burying this month its fifth murdered journalist in the past eight years. [see AP and Moscow Times stories here below].

I wish I could say these are rare and unusually horrifying events, but I used to read about such news on a weekly, if not daily basis throughout my eight years in Moscow as a foreign correspondent. [Arguably it's a big country - 9 time zones, but still...].

Many Eyes, a shared data and information visualization technology from the Visual Communications Lab at IBM Research, offers some fun ways to see the most commonly used words in President Obama's inaugural address.

You can look at the speech as a text cloud ...

.. or a word tree.

Perhaps because Obama has been compared to John F. Kennedy quite often, someone has recently posted Kennedy's 1961 inaugural address on the site.

Many Eyes allows users to publicly post data sets to visualize them in different ways. Incidentally, the technology is also powering the New York Times' Visualization Lab.