Podcasting pioneer Dave Winer is taking TechCrunch to task over a linkbait article on the Fort Hood tragedy. TechCrunch’s Paul Carr argues that the Fort Hood tragedy shows that citizen journalism is worthless: For all the sound and fury, citizen journalism once again did nothing but spread misinformation at a time when thousands people with […]

On Sunday, American journalists Laura Ling and Euna Lee were sentenced by a North Korean court to 12 years of “reform through labour” for an unspecified “grave crime” and for allegedly entering the country illegally, according to Reporters Without Borders. The two journalists for Current TV were arrested in March, The Guardian reports, while filming […]

Open Sound New Orleans is a cool Internet audio project, described as “a collaborative soundmap of the city.”

The site invites New Orleanians to share the recorded sounds of their lives.

Recording equipment is loaned to community organizations, neighborhood groups, and individuals to facilitate a wide range of “dispatches” from around the city. Sounds are archived and organized geographically on a soundmap of the city.

The Committee to Protect Bloggers is reporting that blogger Omid Reza Mir Sayafi has died in prison in Iran. Omid was sentenced in December to three years in jail.  Omid was accused of “insulting Iranian religious leaders and spreading propaganda” against the Iranian state. Human Rights Activists in Iran (translated from Arabic by Hamid Tehrani […]

When tragedy strikes, the 24-hour news networks are there, to bring you the catastrophe in immediate, agonizing detail. But Thursday night, when a Continental Airlines commuter plane crashed near Buffalo, NY, the major networks’ coverage didn’t come from a local affiliate camera crew dispatched to the scene. News networks, including Fox News, CNN, MSNBC and […]

For the past week, our local newspapers and television have been preoccupied with three main themes: feel-good features about Christmas, horror stories about murderous ex-husbands dressed like Santa Claus, and expanded coverage of multiple waves of bad weather (snow, fog, ice, snow, and ice-jammed flash flooding). Pushed to the margins of the news (here, at […]

YouTube has partnered with PBS to ask Americans to share their Election Day voting experiences on a new YouTube video channel, Video Your Vote. The initiative hopes to educate voters on the entire process and a wide array of issues associated with voting in America, while enabling the world to watch pivotal moments in this […]

As mainstream media promotes itself to new heights (depths?) over the upcoming summer Olympic Games in Beijing, and with the International Olympic Committee raising hackles with its severe restrictions on blogging, podcasting and new media, it seemed like a good time to look at citizen media efforts coming from China itself. This week’s edition of […]

YouTube’s newly-minted News Manager Olivia M. has announced the launch of a citizen journalism channel on the site, called Citizen News. Explains Olivia, the proliferation of inexpensive and easy-to-use media tools (blog engines, video cameras, multi-function mobile phones, etc.) has sparked a boom in user-generated news coverage. “[T]here’s an amazing amount of news being reported […]

The Citizen Media Law Project has published a free online legal guide. The Citizen Media Law Project (CMLP) is jointly affiliated with Harvard Law School‚Äôs Berkman Center for Internet & Society, a research center founded to “explore cyberspace, share in its study, and help pioneer its development,” and the Center for Citizen Media, an initiative […]