Let's Talk: Journalism and Social Media
From blogs to vlogs, Facebook to MySpace, Twitter to Flickr, Delicious to reddit, words and images bounce around the globe, spreading wide and fast. Journalists are adapting to the ever-shifting terrain carved out of these conversations. In this issue they describe changes in how they work and what they produce, explore emerging ethical issues, and propose principles of active engagement. In Words & Reflections, essays touch on foreign news reporting, Afghanistan, netroots, objectivity, journalists’ political leanings, and Cold War spies.
The Knight News Challenge describes Rosenberg’s MediaBugs project:
All journalists make mistakes, but they sometimes view admitting errors as a mark of shame. MediaBugs aims to change this climate, by promoting transparency and providing recognition for those who admit and fix their mistakes. … Comments will be tracked to see if they create a conversation between the reporter and the person who submitted the error, and then show whether corrections or changes resulted.
MediaBugs will launch a pilot project in the San Francisco Bay Area in late 2009 or early 2010, and once it begins people will be able report errors in any news report—online and offline.
