ReadWriteWeb: Why Wikipedia Should Be Trusted As A Breaking News Source

Posted on 16 March, 2010 by Martin Stabe

"Moka Pantages, the communications officer for the WikiMedia Foundation ... discuss[ed] how the Wikipedia community addressed the 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai. ... by the end of the first day of the Wikipedia article's life, it had been edited more than 360 times, by 70 different editors referring to 28 separate sources from news outlets around the web. ... 'There's no real-time reporting going on in Wikipedia, it's real-time aggregation,' Pantages said. So the very first level of information vetting, which happens at the reporting level, has already taken place by the time it reaches the site."

open Democracy: Journalism’s many crises

Posted on 23 May, 2009 by Martin Stabe

Todd Gitlin: "Four wolves have arrived at the door of American journalism simultaneously while a fifth has already been lurking for some time. One is the precipitous decline in the circulation of newspapers. The second is the decline in advertising revenue, which, combined with the first, has badly damaged the profitability of newspapers. The third, contributing to the first, is the diffusion of attention. The fourth is the more elusive crisis of authority. The fifth, a perennial - so much so as to be perhaps a condition more than a crisis - is journalism’s inability or unwillingness to penetrate the veil of obfuscation behind which power conducts its risky business. "

Guardian: What, exactly, is the PCC for?

Posted on 9 February, 2009 by Martin Stabe

Peter Wilby: "Big American newspapers and magazines go to immense lengths to report responsibly and accurately, demanding multiple sources for stories, employing fact-checkers and making public apologies when, for example, they got it wrong over WMDs in Iraq. That hasn't saved them from circulation declines that are, if anything, steeper than those of Fleet Street. Nor has it saved them from the distrust of many Americans, with the right particularly accusing them of being parties to a liberal conspiracy."

News Credit: Making news more transparent

Posted on 2 January, 2009 by Martin Stabe

"News credit uses microformats with some specific enhancements to allow journalists, and those producing journalism, to embed basic information to their news articles online which can help the public establish an article’s authorship and provenance. This information is not pejorative or judgmental, rather the basic who, what, when and where of a news article. The equivalent, if you like, of ingredients of the side of a food packet - giving people the information they need to enable them to make informed choices."

currybetdotnet: Here we go again…not that bloggers vs journalists debate

Posted on 21 May, 2008 by Martin Stabe

"There still seems to be an assumption amongst 'proper' journalists that anyone who blogs is doing so because they want to be a journalist. This is demonstrably untrue."

currybetdotnet; Can you trust going to a ‘Can you trust the media?’ event for a good debate?

Posted on 2 May, 2008 by Martin Stabe

Martin Belam: "For someone who mostly makes her living writing opinion pieces, [Yasmin Alibhai-Brown] skates on thin ice when she basically dismisses anyone else who writes self-taught opinion on the basis that they do it outside the old mainstream media