Slashdot Mirror
Dan Gillmor Launches Grassroots Journalism
kbahey writes "
Most Slashdotters know Dan Gillmor from his San Jose Mercury days, with lots of article on technology over the years, from the dot-com era down to now. As has been rumored before, Dan has left the SJ Mercury to found a 'grassroots journalism' project. Well, it is here, and called the Bayosphere. The site is powered by Drupal, an open source Content Management System. Jay Campbell, Dan's Technologist, writes about why they chose Drupal. "
When are the 'osphere's going to die?
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
any comments?
I hope the project enjoyes higher quality editing than the grassroots journalism project that is slashdot.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
So in case you missed it, this is infact TFA: Why Drupal.
Worth noting is the update at the end of the article: Update: killes points out at Drupal.org, "Chris Messina (a.k.a factoryjoe) has spend long hours with Dan to convince him to use Drupal. Thanks Chris." Indeed.
Update: killes points out at Drupal.org, "Chris Messina (a.k.a factoryjoe) has spend long hours with Dan to convince him to use Drupal. Thanks Chris." Indeed.
looks more like they needed serious persuading to choose it.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
I am the submitter of the article and here is the correct text. It was fine when I submitted it.
kbahey writes " Most Slashdotters know Dan Gillmor from his San Jose Mercury days, with lots of article on technology over the years, from the dot-com era down to now. As has been rumored before, Dan has left the SJ Mercury to found a "grass roots journalism" project. Well, it is here, and called the Bayosphere. The site is powered by Drupal, an open source Content Management System. Jay Campbell, Dan's Technologist, writes about why they chose Drupal. "
2bits.com, Inc: Drupal, WordPress, and LAMP performance tuning.
I never realized that local california papers had such high readership in Bangalore or Boston or all the many other places /. readers read.
It seems that a lot of sites are starting to use Drupal for its ease of use and functionality. TWiT (This Week in Tech), a site and radio show created by Leo Laporte that includes many of the former "The Screen Savers" cast from TechTV, uses Drupal, and the site looks great.
- Speed: the "new" in news.
- Accuracy: avoids all those silly retractions, libel, etc.
- Relevance: Information that is meaningful or interesting or useful to the reader.
- Depth: not popular among the CNN/USAToday set, but much needed.
Does the net help?- Speed: yes! two words: global bandwidth
- Accuracy: Maybe: Distributed information gathering and rapid feedback help jointly edit/discredit stories. But the process can also feed a "tyranny of the majority" group delusion.
- Relevance: Yes: feedback scoring mechanisms (such as
/. moderation system) help good stories bubble-up and bad stories drop to invisibility.
- Depth: Yes: Wiki-like group editing can add depth, although it may be too slow for "news" stories (more appropriate for feature articles and thought pieces).
Overall, I'd say that grassroots journalism could be good journalism if the system can create the self-regulatory structures needed. Something like (but better than)Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
It couldn't be any worse than what the big names in media do already. Newsweek played a major role in spreading a story about a soldier trying to flush part of the Koran down the toilet in gitmo. Just one little problem: Newsweek's "source" was an anonymous phone call from someone alleging to be a government official who paraphrased what they claimed was a report to be issued. They never even read an excerpt of the report to the Newsweek reporter and what did they do? They pounced on this "story" (as in a complete fiction) and now 9 people in Afghanistan are dead because the riot that Newsweek helped start got so out of control that the small fledgling Afghani government had to use a lot of force to stop huge crowds of rioting students and other civilians.
The news media can talk about blogging killing the media, but bloggers haven't contributed to people being killed yet. The mainstream media on the other hand, has. So much for the much vaunted "accountability" that is supposed to separate blogging from "journalism" these days. That's what's always cited by the media as the important difference. While I don't trust bloggers either for objective reporting of the facts, can anyone seriously say that the professional media cares about the truth any more than bloggers do?
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
...they would open up the submission queue and editorial process to the users like slashcode sites like plastic. Their editorial standards are superior to Slashdot in every way. I suspect the current editors will have much explaining to do when the grassroots editorial quality shot way up compared to the paid participants. I suspect this is why this dream will never happen.
If you want to contribute, you can submit a story right away, or you can learn more about writing news stories the wiki way.
Wikinews is run by a non-profit organization, the Wikimedia Foundation, which also runs Wikipedia, Wikibooks, Wikisource, Wiktionary, Wikiquote, and the Wikimedia Commons, a media repository with almost 100,000 free content images, videos and sounds.
Slashdot 'editors' aren't really editors in the traditional sense of journalism editors, not even close really. They are just story approvers, who approve a story if they feel it is of interest to the general Slashdot crowd.
The stories are just headlines and blurbs that link to an actual journalistic piece located on some other site.
Slashdot's motto should be, We don't make the news, we don't report the news, we collect the news.
FYI: poster is referring to my earlier posts against Greasemonkey. See my user page for links. :-)
Anyway, I got a giggle out of this comment...
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
Focus can be a good thing. When I look at the Wikinews home page right now, I see an eclectic mix of headlines that look as though they might have been ripped from a combination of Reuters and Slashdot, but really not much of interest to me.
This is intended as a constructive question: what is it that's going to bring readers back to Wikinews day after day? What can they expect to see? If the answer is a fairly random collection of stories on any possible topic, why do you think that's better than sites which do focus more closely on particular regions or topics?
Most of the best real-life examples of journalism are either topic-focused or region focused. It's difficult to be the best at everything.
Yes, Wikinews precedes this, and has a larger scope. There is also a quite large and serious grass-roots news effort, Indymedia, with branches and local reporters in the US, UK, and (I gather) many other countries.
Problem is... how many of them have RSS? Wikinews doesn't seem to, which is why I'd forgotten all about it until you mentioned it. The idea of a web-based news service without RSS is a bit pointless, never mind a news service that aims to be innovative. Hopefully they'll get that sorted soon :)
Outside of the single most established Korean based OhMyNews most, if not all of the citizen reporting web sites I've looked at, including WikiNews, have had a hard time gaining traction. I'm not sure why they're having such trouble, particularly given the popularity of WikiPedia, but it is clear however that the movement is beginning to take off, and here to stay. News will never be the same - and imho that is a VERY good thing!
What I really like about NowPublic, and what imho differentiates it from the other sites, is that the site is NOT trying to be the hub of citizen reporting itself - it's trying to create a toolset to facilitate citizen reporting. Through creative commons licensing and their really nifty 'SmartMedia' technology their goal is to facilitate the spread of newsworthy information created by people like you and I (though admittedly they need to do a MUCH better job of communicating this). Anyone (you don't need to be a member) can use the content posted on NowPublic. So if you have a blog and are writing a story and you need/want pictures or video you can use existing or request new photos/audio/video from NP members.
Being a photographer, I like the fact that through their SmartMedia my photos always show my name, and provide a way to contact me directly (actually had one person offer me a gig through this already!!) - this is all done through the image itself ensuring that anyone who uses my photos attributes it back to me (anyone who has posted a good pic to the web has most likely had it ripped off and should really apperciate this new idea). Additionally, anyone who sees the photo on any site can in turn copy it and put it on their site... it's really a great promotional vehicle for photographers. But my favorite bit is that every story is implicitly a request for citizen coverage - if you want to see a local perspective on a story, simply post it to the site. In effect every story is actually an assignment - you now have an army of people, soon to be larger than any major media organization willing to go out and get coverage of the story for you! As a photog, I'll never be at a loss for photos ideas again!
They are currently running a contest, awarding cash prizes to encourage people to go out and take photographs of newsworthy events. Their Citizen Photojournalism Awards were created to encourage people to go out and cover news stories. Any newsworthy photo uploaded to NowPublic is eligible for weekly $100 cash awards and there is a $500 grand prize. I'm hoping I win something so I can get that fish eye lens I've been drooling over.
Fast-forward to 2004 (or 2005 I guess), and we have an internet news/media that does not have to remain persistant (like paper). Despite the valiant efforts of the Wayback Machine, Google Cache, etc., the vision in Orwell's book can actually happen!
Although slightly off-topic, it is food for thought.....
Here's the BBC's reporting on "Saddam's Bomb".
But now we get to hear "Bush lied!!!!" every time the subject of any conversation turns to Iraqi WMD. But in March 2001 the Beeb itself was sensationalizing Iraqi WMDs.
For those of you looking for an Open Source CMS system, you may also want to consider Xaraya (which sprang out of the PostNuke project). Xaraya is currently closing in on its 1.0 release, and we've been running a site successfully since the 0.9.9 version. Extensibility in the form of modules and hooks feature prominently in Xaraya as well. And if you're still confused about which CMS system to pick (or want to be confused!), take a look at cmsmatrix.org.
Whoever Has the Most Toys Wins!
Ironic that Dan Gillmore worked at the SJ Mercury News, that wonderful source of journalistic integrity that brought us the "CIA created crack cocaine" story.
Just one little problem: Newsweek's "source" was an anonymous phone call from someone alleging to be a government official who paraphrased what they claimed was a report to be issued.
c le/2005/05/15/AR2005051500605.html
Wrong. The source was indeed a government official, who was asked in person to verify the story. He did.
You are wrong on so many levels on this. Shame on you.
Coverage here:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/arti
I spent a few hours yesterday cleaning up either factually incorrect or hopelessly biased articles on Wikipedia yesterday. Either the posters were misinformed or had a huge ax to grind, and what they were posting were outright lies. We're not even talking controversial stuff here; we're talking basic facts that are not in dispute.
If you want to push citizen media, you need to do it right. And so far Wikipedia is light years away from what it needs to be a credible source; I don't imagine Wikinews to be any better.
No offense, but everything on Wikinews seems to be recycled from other existing news stories.
Take, for example, the brilliant piece of writing on the finger some woman found in a bowl of Wendy's chili. It was written over the weekend. The police made an arrest on this May 11, so the news was several days old. And all it did was rewrite the articles where reporters already went out and did the work of interviewing people.
What's the point? Why do I need some loser geek to rewrite the news for me? When I want a truffle, all I care about is the truffle -- I really don't care to know about the pigs uprooting it. And in this case Wikinews is nothing more than the pig uprooting the truffle. The "author" added nothing to the story but a rewrite in order to skirt copyright laws.
The Drupal website has a list of sites running Drupal. The list is dynamically generated by one of the Drupal modules. Any site that enables this module appears almost immediately. Pretty good for improving your search engine ranking.
Should this be read as "Dan Gillmor was laid off by the Mercury News and is now just another blogger?"
When Al Qaeda members are caught, they'll claim anything to discredit the US. Thanks for playing their game.
Yet recently declassified court documents allege that, as far back as 2002, some of Guantanamo's staff cursed Allah, threw Korans into toilets, mocked prisoners during prayers and deliberately took away prisoners' pants knowing that Muslims can't pray unless covered.
Quick! Call a WAAAAMBULANCE! It's so HORRIBLE!!! Someone may have cursed their god!!!
Seriously, you also seem to have a problem understanding the word "allege". Please note that the article you quote doesn't mention at all who's doing the "alleging", now does it?
I'd "allege" you're an idiot, but you've already demonstrated that "beyond a reasonable doubt". You dumbass dhimmi-wanna-be.
From an Al Qaeda training manual:
IF AN INDICTMENT IS ISSUED AND THE TRIAL, BEGINS, THE BROTHER HAS TO PAY ATTENTION TO THE FOLLOWING:
1. At the beginning of the trial, once more the brothers must insist on proving that torture was inflicted on them by State Security [investigators] before the judge.
2. Complain [to the court] of mistreatment while in prison.
3. Make arrangements for the brother's defense with the attorney, whether he was retained by the brother's family or court-appointed.
4. The brother has to do his best to know the names of the state security officers, who participated in his torture and mention their names to the judge. [These names may be obtained from brothers who had to deal with those officers in previous cases.]
5. Some brothers may tell and may be lured by the state security investigators to testify against the brothers [i.e. affirmation witness], either by not keeping them together in the same prison during the trials, or by letting them talk to the media. In this case,they have to be treated gently, and should be offered good advice, good treatment, and pray that God may guide them.
6. During the trial, the court has to be notified of any mistreatment of the brothers inside the prison.
Lies about Iraqi nuclear weapons.
There are fixed facts in this world, like the seating capacity of a soccer stadium, that are not open to interpretation.
And for those of us living in the real world, there are fixed facts that simply cannot be explained away. That was the case here.
The Wiki was a pure pile of crap. And your answer that _everything_ is ultimately subjective is an even bigger load of crap.
What the article fails to mention is that picking a CMS is only about 20% of the problem, and its the 20% that's the least important. The real trouble/problem/goal is to create an online community (like I'm doing with VirtuaTrainer ) that draws people in and makes them want to stay.
see list of site /.ers know. Because the followed a link from /., saw the site, didnt care to read it and posted a comment on slash anyway abut the site.
;-)
At least I have "read" drupal
-- for undocumented cisco commands, take a peek @ dotu
Ho-hum another blog hoping that shakespere will get shat out from a million monkey's behinds.
For some real grass-roots journalism: http://www.thetyee.ca/