Category Archives: Media

Media literacy in the digital age

As a journalist, I often get asked whether the proliferation of news sources online (newspapers’ websites, blogs, aggregators…)  is indeed harming journalism. It will certainly take a while for news organizations to figure out a new business model and for other structures to be put in place to create a balance between traditional reporting, citizen [...]
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What’s behind the recent changes at Good magazine?

I just opened the new issue of Good magazine — the magazine with the best paper smell — and was surprised by the answer give to the first letter to the editor. Our big focus is on doing more with less — which is why we’ve shifted from six issues a year to being a quarterly, [...]
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Informapping

Check out Informapping, a very nice effort to look at the news globally and sort out the huge amount of information that’s offered to us. Informapping is the project of Francois Patry, Art Director at the Lemieux Bédard ad agency.
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Two business models for newspapers

The traditional newspaper is dying, and two recent opinion articles in the Guardian call for new business models to be implemented. Bruce Ackerman’s choice is for national endowments, that would be mainly targeted at investigative journalism, since  “Each national endowment would subsidise investigations on a strict mathematical formula based on the number of citizens who actually [...]
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Toward an online, local and non-profit journalism

Information is now a public service as much as it’s a commodity. It should be thought of the same way as education, health care. It’s one of the things you need to operate a civil society, and the market isn’t doing it very well. This quote from Buzz Woolley, president of VoiceofSanDiego, can be found at [...]
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Hire a community reporter through crowdfunding

Citizens of the San Francisco Bay area can now hire journalists to investigate issues relevant to their community. Spot Us, a new nonprofit initiative, uses the principle of crowdfunding by allowing people to vote for and finance story ideas that they judge interesting. The articles are then posted on the website and given or sold [...]
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The BPP is cancelled. What went wrong here?

NPR cancelled the Bryant Park Project after only nine months of existence. The announcement was made last week and the last show will be aired tomorrow morning. The BPP was launched as an attempt to draw a younger audience. Its tone is light and conversational and its news stories deal with various subjects such as politics, culture and [...]
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Climate change for journalists 101

Have you ever felt confused by all the differing information about climate change presented in the news? That’s totally normal, since journalists themselves don’t always know how to tackle the problem. Which expert do you listen to? How do you know that an information is credible and can be published? How do you stay away [...]
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New and serious media: will it work?

ProPublica is now up and running. This new online news resource was put together by a team of journalists coming from some of the most respectable newspapers in the United States. The website was created in reaction to the increasing lack of quality investigative reporting in the media. It relies on private funding — philantropic [...]
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Why the US media is showing less

Check this video of Alisa Miller, head of Public Radio International, on TED. She talks about the distortion of world news coverage in America in a pretty compelling way.
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