Markmedia

Timeline: (the threat to) media freedom around the world

Societies, communities, journalists, activists, all of us in fact, face the problem of attacks on media freedom.
The excellent journalism resource Journalism.co.uk has a continuously updated time line of media freedom abuses, using the free timeline service Dipity.

These timelines are easy to do, can be automatically updated through RSS or manually and can be an open resource allowing your community to make updates. And yes, its free.

aggregate collate curate factuate: A future for news?

I am popping up a quick post thats too long for a tweet but too short for a "real" post. See it as a post in development :-)

I have been following two events and the way they have been covered - The Guardian coverage of Iran and the party leader debate at the Swedish parliament. 

The party leader debate was followed live by a group of columnists and pundits [English translation] who gave their take on it. The blurb promised to fact check in real time. What we got was just a number of comments from "experts" posted live as single postings with no links to any background and very little interaction. A laudable effort in many ways but really, just more of the same in a better package.

The Guardian on the other hand tried something new. They colated as much of the flood of info from all available social media sources and then entered into a conversation with the stream. They fact checked, gave background, did "traditional" journalism. 

This could point to a future role for journalists. A partner in the developing stories. The story presents the flood.  People involved can give the individual perspective, the emotion, the powerful inside insight. The "journalist" has the resources to give the "helicopter view", the context, check the facts and linkk to other individuals. Interactive on so many levels.

Its just the beginning of a new era for journalism. A hopeful one I believe.

Axel Andèn has a good article on this in Swedish