Pierre Omidyar, Investigative Journalism

The extraordinary promise of the new Greenwald-Omidyar venture: Columbia Journalism Review: "This is the best news journalism has seen in a long, long time."

Pierre Omidyar, Investigative Journalism’s New Patron Saint - The Daily Beast: " . . . John Temple, for one, insists Omidyar is the real deal. As the son of two people who left a country riven by political oppression and religious fanaticism, “he really believes in the American Constitution and wants to see it upheld and the promise of America fulfilled. He is an immigrant and, like many of us in journalism, part of his motivation is he cares about the quality of our community and our country and thinks that journalism has a role in setting the tone. And he’s passionate about that. . . ." (read more at link above)

more news below



Obama's Chilling Effect on Free Speech, Free Press

Obama appears not to have learned much about the Constitution at Harvard Law --

News from The Associated Press: ""In the Obama administration's Washington, government officials are increasingly afraid to talk to the press," wrote Downie, now a journalism professor at Arizona State University. "The administration's war on leaks and other efforts to control information are the most aggressive I've seen since the Nixon administration, when I was one of the editors involved in The Washington Post's investigation of Watergate.""

more news below



Laura Poitras, NSA, NSA Utah Data Center

magazine / issue / Laura Poitras filming NSA Utah Data Center construction site | MOUSSE CONTEMPORARY ART MAGAZINE: "A renowned documentary filmmaker, and recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship in 2012, among numerous other awards, Poitras is known for films that evoke complex political realities through personal stories. For the past decade she has focused on a trilogy of feature-length documentaries about America post-9/11. My Country My Country (2006), set in Baghdad during the 2005 elections, and The Oath (2010), filmed in Yemen and Guantanamo Bay, will be followed by a film that returns to the US to examine the ways the government has turned towards and against its own citizens through surveillance. I first started following Poitras’ work in 2003, when I saw Flag Wars, an incredibly moving film about gentrification in Columbus, Ohio told through the city’s residents. The film demonstrates the same intense commitment, critical analysis and emotional power evident in all her work. . . ." (read more at link above)

more news below



Images, Viral on Google+

How Images Become Viral on Google+ | MIT Technology Review: "Finally, they looked at how their virality indexes are correlated with each other.  They say that the plusone and replied to indices are highly correlated while the reshared index appears to be independent of these. “We hypothesize that plusoners and replies can be considered as a form of endorsement, while reshares are a form of self-representation,” they say."

more news below



The History of News, In Under Two Minutes, On Film

Delivering the News, All of It, in 2 Minutes - The company Prologue did the title sequence for “The Fifth Estate,” a movie about Julian Assange and WikiLeaks.

Creating a Prologue for ‘Fifth Estate’ - NYTimes.com: "Mr. Condon takes titles seriously — so much so that he put the opening sequence of “The Fifth Estate” in motion even before he started shooting the film in Belgium last year. The idea was to tell the entire history of news — from Paleolithic cave paintings 17,000 years ago to today — in under two minutes." (read more at link above)

more news below



New York Times Takes On the Perilous Task of Innovation in a Digital Age

Perilous Task of Innovation in a Digital Age - NYTimes.com: "EXPERIMENTS IN ADVERTISING Take traditional advertising and put it in the digital space, and what you often get is either annoying (people can’t wait to close the ad) or invisible (people look right past it). What’s the answer? “Native advertising” — in which advertising is presented to mimic the appeal of editorial content — is all the rage elsewhere. The Times, so far, has only dipped its toe in that water but continues to explore new advertising ideas, including “micro sites” devoted to specific advertisers."

more news below



Mobile Digital Publishing, Killing Media ROI

Mobile Is Killing Media – and Here's What We Need to Do About It / Say Daily: "Digital publishing is headed off a cliff if we don’t get back behind the wheel. There's a five fold gap between mobile revenue and desktop revenue for the same page. In other words, for every page viewed on a mobile device, publishers currently see only 20 percent of the revenue they’d receive from a desktop visit. What makes that gap even starker is how quickly it’s happening. By the second half of next year, we predict that greater than half of all time spent with online content will happen on a mobile device. On the industry’s current course, that’s a recipe for disaster. . . ." (read more at link above)

more news below



Another Paywall Falls, Readers Don't Want to Pay for Online News

Another wall tumbles: The Dallas Morning News dismantles its paywall, tries to sell premium features instead — paidContent: "Readers don’t want to pay for news online - Moroney said that research the newspaper did with print subscribers showed that what readers were willing to pay for wasn’t the actual content itself, but the method of delivery — that is, the printed newspaper. When offered the exact same content online for a price that was 90-percent less than the average print subscription rate, only five percent of readers said they were interested."

more news below



New York Times, Pimp, Pump, Dump

Meet Silicon Valley's Top VC Publicist... -SVW: "When New York Times tech reporter Quentin Hardy told Wennmachers that he thought Nicira was too wonky for a long story, she asked him out to lunch at Boulevard to make her case for the company… After Hardy's story - headlined "Startup Nicira plans to disrupt networking giants" - Nicira, which had initially been valued at $500 million, was bought by VMware for $1.26 billion. I think that Quentin Hardy might not be pleased about this account of being dined at one of San Francisco's top restaurants and then pumping out a winning article. "

more news below



Seymour Hersh, Obama, NSA, Pathetic American News Media

Seymour Hersh on Obama, NSA and the 'pathetic' American media | Media | theguardian.com: "The Obama administration lies systematically, he (Seymour Hersh) claims, yet none of the leviathans of American media, the TV networks or big print titles, challenge him.

"It's pathetic, they are more than obsequious, they are afraid to pick on this guy [Obama]," he declares in an interview with the Guardian.

"It used to be when you were in a situation when something very dramatic happened, the president and the minions around the president had control of the narrative, you would pretty much know they would do the best they could to tell the story straight. Now that doesn't happen any more. . . ." (read more at link above)

more news below



Mediagazer

publishing - Google News

self-publish - Google News

content creation - Google News

content curation - Google News