First Day discussion focuses on values & excellent presentation by New York Times City Room Blog
The Poynter Institute has assembled an amazing group of new media mindsfor their “Sense Making” seminar that’s designed to help identify the new course of media and journalism. Some of those include Drew Curtis of Fark.com, Latoya Peterson of Racialicious.com, Chris Rabb from Afro-Netizen, Alexis Ohanian, co-founder of reddit.com, and many others.
Day 1 started with the group coming up with a list of values to associate with whatever it is that we all do. Some of the words ascribed to our passion for new media/citizen journalism included:
FAIRNESS
EQUALITY
EMPOWERMENT
TRANSPARENCY
ACCOUTABILIBY
HELPING
After an e-presentation by Jim Kennedy, Vice-President/Director of Strategic Planning for the Associated Press, our group broke for lunch. The afternoon session began with an energetic and informative presentation by Sewell Chan, editor of the New York Times City Room Blog. The Times has been in the blogosphere for a couple of years now, which is an eternity in internet terms compared with a lot of other major newspapers.
Sewell shared an insightful interactive tools the Times is using on the web, including a narrative series they’re running called One in 8 Million, which uses the voices of New Yorkers to tell their own story. Please click this link to hear the story of Ra Ruiz as told to the New York Times.
At the end of the day, we went back and came up with questions that we had at this particular junction of journalism. Some of those included:
Who is a journalist?
What new sources of revenue are out there?
What are the ideals of journalism as a practice that benefit a democratic network?
How do you encourage people from marginalized backgrounds to go into journalism?
Today we received a couple of articles to review that talk about this new shift. They’re worth the read.
Old Growth Media and the Future of News
