June 2006

OhMyNews headlines coming to International Herald Tribune

2006-06-01

By Robert Niles: The Guardian reports that the New York Times-owned International Herald Tribune has cut a deal with South Korean grassroots journalism site OhMyNews to feature OhMyNews headlines on the IHT website and, possibly in the future, articles in the paper.

From the Guardian report:

It is not yet clear whether such articles will be treated in a similar manner to those from established news agencies such as Reuters and the Associated Press, but sources close to the negotiations believe it is likely that the newspaper itself could run such stories in the near future.

OhMyNews claims more than 40,000 contributors and is said to be negotiating syndication deals with other media companies.

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Local weatherman turns to Web to share unusual weather theory

2006-06-05

By Cameron Bird: Scott Stevens may be best known (or unknown) as an Idahoan meteorologist turned conspiracy theorist, but his online labor of love, Weather Wars has transformed him into an Internet-stationed social activist.

The simply-designed site is a collection of links to news stories and personal entries that revolve around a seemingly fringe message. Stevens’ claim: that The Powers That Be harness the technology to control the world’s climate and with it, are engaging in international warfare.

"I’m using the site as a tool to point out the obvious," he said. "I have to present the information in a simple manner because the manipulation of our weather is obvious once you choose to look."

Stevens said he doesn’t expect people to take his word for it, but rather, for his claims to trigger a sense of "intellectual curiosity."

His own inquisitiveness drove him to quit his day job as a local weatherman last year and commit full-time to research and Webmastering.

After this transition, and even more so after he attributed Hurricane Katrina to Japanese weather-manipulation weaponry, Stevens started to turn heads in the media. He’s been a guest on Coast to Coast AM, The O’Reilly Factor and some 30 other shows. He has also been the subject of print media news features.

The response of personalities and journalists has been hesitant, he said, but ultimately affirmative.

"They’re always a little skeptical at first, but once I give them the clues that I use to follow the rabbit down the hole, then they come out going, 'Oh my, there is something to this.'"

Stevens said he hopes to gain as much readership as possible and for believers in his proposed theories to put more pressure on the government to take weather-manipulation seriously.

He cited a bill moving its way through Congress that would establish a national weather modification policy without oversight from experts and a realistic view of how advanced the technology currently is.

"There are not many topics that affect as many people at the same time as our environment. It’s absolutely essential that if we can control our environment that it’s done for the betterment of mankind ... I suppose I’m the right messenger for the right message," he said.

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Deadlines approach for Knight-Batten, ONA awards

2006-06-08

By Robert Niles: Deadlines come next week for two major journalism awards.

Entrants for the Knight-Batten Awards must get their snail-mailed application to the University of Maryland by June 15. The Knight-Batten Awards for Innovations in Journalism are administered by J-Lab: The Institute for Interactive Journalism at the University of Maryland's Philip Merrill College of Journalism.

The deadline for the Online News Association's Online Journalism Awards is also June 15, but those entries are submitted online, allowing journalists and extra few days to get their entries together. The Online Journalism Awards are administered by the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California, which also publishes OJR.

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Kosmix.com paints Web searches in shades of gray

2006-06-19

By Micah Ailetcher: New search engine Kosmix.com is taking a different approach to the typical Internet search by categorizing its results.

Rather then presenting search results in a standard list form that can be thousands of answers long, the results are organized and sorted into different categories.

The goal, according to product manager Mark Johnson, is to provide better answers. By presenting the search results in categories, Johnson feels that they have an advantage by allowing the user "to see the data in a lot of different ways." In this way, they see themselves more as a "compliment to something like Google or Yahoo" rather than a replacement.

For example, Kosmix’s U.S. Politics search engine categorizes its results as "Conservative," "Liberal," "Libertarian," or "Political News." The site currently hosts five different search engines: Health, Video Games, Finance, Travel and U.S. Politics.

Kosmix started with its Health search engine. A query in this engine, for example, for breast cancer produces results that are identified as "Basic Information," "Expert Information," "Message Boards," "Blogs," "Alternative Medicine" and over a dozen other categories.

The right side of the results page presents Websites in the familiar search engine format, which includes the individual Website’s category in Kosmix in addition to the Website’s summary so users will know before they navigate away to a web page whether it is classified as a "Quiz" about breast cancer or as the findings from a "Clinical Trial."

On the left side of the results page is a list of links that allows the user to display the search results by a specific category. For example, this can be helpful if a user only needs to view the results for breast cancer that are categorized as "Symptoms."

With its patent-pending algorithms, or as Johnson calls it, their "secret juice," Kosmix crawls the web and classifies different sites by the different "signals" that they provide. There is an amount of subjectivity involved in classifying sites as "Liberal" or "Expert Information," but once a classification is made, the algorithm moves on to classify new sites by looking at things such as what classified sites the unclassified site is often linked to.

"When you are dealing with a very nuanced subject, like politics, there are always going to be gray areas," Johnson said.

These "gray areas" are exactly where Kosmix sees itself coming into play by helping the user to sort out the type of Website that they are looking for in the search stage. "In some cases, the algorithm can do a much better job than we can in figuring out [a Website’s] subtlety," Johnson explained.

Kosmix hopes to add more categories to its search results. For the U.S. Politics engine, one consideration is a "Green Party" category. The Video Game and Finance engines are the latest additions to the site, but Kosmix is hoping to add more diversity to their search engines.

"The endgame is clear," Johnson said. "The goal is to categorize the entire Internet. Eventually, no matter what query you type in, we will have the categories that are appropriate for it."

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Question of the day: When should newsrooms ever block websites?

2006-06-21

By Robert Niles: Just curious here, but under what conditions would a professional newsroom ever have need to block its journalists' access to a website?

Kevin Roderick details how the Los Angeles Times is blocking newsroom access to certain websites here and here. (On the topic of blocking websites, the state of Kentucky appears to be blocking on state computers liberal websites that have been critical of its GOP governor, too. It's not the news business, but certainly that's a significant and emerging national news story.)

Certainly, businesses have the right to control what information its employees access using company property (including computers and networks). And I'll concede that a news business might want to restrict non-editorial employees' access to sites that contain illegal content or services or that promote a hostile work environment.

But journalists need access to information. All information. I'd love to hear from OJR readers their experiences with -- and opinions on -- newsroom Web filtering software.

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Former Chicago Tribune reporter takes it to the street

2006-06-28

By Geoff Rynex: Geoff Dougherty had had enough.

No more working hard to uncover a story, sometimes for a year, only to have it pulled at the last minute.

No more bosses. No more corporate interests getting in the way of solid investigative journalism.

No more Chicago Tribune.

After more than a decade in the mainstream media, Dougherty decided to call it quits at the Tribune last Novembver and start up his own news organization. The website he created took the name of a legendary Chicago paper: the Daily News.

With the Chi-Town Daily News, Dougherty saw an opportunity to do everything he thought the mainstream media was failing to do, especially in the realm of the Internet.

"That’s really where the future of the industry lies, so my thought was 'Well, rather than wait around ten years to see how that develops, why not actually be in a position to develop it?'" Dougherty said.

In the mainstream media, Dougherty saw a trend of newspapers striving to meet the demands of Wall Street at the expense of the readers and at the cost of quality. He was dismayed to see newsrooms cutting staff and stories in order to maximize profits.

"There’s an assumption embedded in that which is that people are so dumb that they’re not going to notice that it’s a worse product," he said. "But that’s clearly not true. They are noticing that it’s a worse product because they’re not buying it anymore."

So how will the Daily News revive and innovate the news? Along with a non-profit corporate model run by PublicMedia Inc., of which Dougherty is the CEO, his plan is to include hyper-local coverage reported by citizen-journalists and to spark discussion about local issues on blogs.

"To tap into that knowledge base and create a dialogue rather than a one-way flow of information I think is a great and powerful thing," Dougherty said.

But Dougherty's website takes advantage of more than just citizen journalism and news blogs. The Daily News hyper-local coverage includes podcasts about Chicago sports teams and the local music scene, RSS feeds, and plans are in the works for a cooking blog.

The key to the Daily News’ success however, aside from staying on the cutting edge of media, will be an unusual dedication to local news.

Dougherty concedes that papers like the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune will keep the market in national and statewide coverage, but believes that the Daily News will become the destination for in-depth local news in Chicago. Dougherty hopes soon to have a dedicated citizen journalist in every neighborhood of the city.

"It empowers people to take action to make their lives better and the government more responsive. I think this kind of reporting is the most important kind of reporting we can do."

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