Thursday, October 11, 2007
Ford Foundation provides $200K to seed "news literacy" center at Stony Brook
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003646835
Published: September 26, 2007 1:45 PM ET
Klurfeld of 'Newsday' to Head News Literacy Center
By Joe Strupp
Editor & Publisher Online
NEW YORK -- Editorial Page Editor Jim Klurfeld of Newsday in Melville, N.Y., will serve as interim director of what is being touted as the nation's first News Literacy Center at Stony Brook University in Stony Brook, N,Y.
In a release Wednesday, the university announced the formation of the new center "designed to educate current and future news consumers on how to judge the credibility and reliability of news." The project is being funded in part from a $200,000 grant of the Ford Foundation.
"The Center will act as a resource center for universities across the U.S., develop curriculum for high school instruction and secondary teacher training programs, and design conferences, seminars, lectures, and workshops that will bring together scholars and journalists to explore issues related to the reliability of news from print, broadcast, and the web," the release added. "Last year, with a $1.7 million grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, Stony Brook created one of the nation's first courses in News Literacy that the University expects to teach to 10,000 students over the next four years."
Klurfeld, who is joining the School of Journalism as a visiting professor, has been named interim director, said Stony Brook University President Shirley Strum Kenny. "Jim Klurfeld is just the right person to lead this new Center," Kenny said. "His commitment to truth and accuracy was the hallmark of his outstanding career in journalism. Under his leadership, this unique effort will have a lasting impact on students, teachers, and the public."
Adds Howard Schneider, Dean of the School of Journalism, who will serve as Executive Director of the new center: "The goal is to equip the next generation of news consumers with the ability to judge for themselves what information they can trust and what information is suspect," said. "We want to create more informed citizens and sustain quality journalism at the same time."
The center will "develop a pilot program for the public, act as a clearinghouse for 'best practices,' design and develop a center web site, and extend the News Literacy program to high school students," the release stated. "We are going through a media revolution and it's critical that students are equipped to deal with that revolution," Klurfeld said in a statement. "I'm excited about the challenge of starting Stony Brook.s Center for News Literacy and believe we can make it into a resource for educators not just on Long Island but throughout the country."
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Joe Strupp (jstrupp@editorandpublisher.com) is a senior editor at E&P.
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The article above is copyrighted material, the use of which may not have specifically authorized by the copyright owner. The material is made available in an effort to advance understanding of political, economic, democracy, First Amendment, technology, journalism, community and justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' as provided by Section 107 of U.S. Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Chapter 1, Section 107, the material above is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this blog for purposes beyond fair use, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.
Tuesday, October 09, 2007
LATIMES: Newspapers, bloggers now on same page
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-newsblogs9oct09,1,3678198.story
POSTED: October 9, 2007
From the Los Angeles Times
HEADLINE: Newspapers, bloggers now on same page
Journalistic websites see amateur scribes as partners, not rivals. They
increase coverage and may share revenue.
By Alana Semuels (alana.semuels@latimes.com)
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
Once upon a time, newspapers wanted nothing to do with bloggers, those amateurs who opined on anything that caught their fancy, whether it was interesting, or accurate, or not.
That was then. Now newspaper websites, desperate for readers and revenue, are increasingly in cahoots with bloggers, posting and plugging them and even sharing advertising revenue. Purists may sniff at these online liaisons but, as the print newspaper industry shrinks, they may be inevitable.
"Any new information source is a potential competitor to a local newspaper. Smart newspapers are figuring out they don't have to fight with those competitors -- they can make alliances with them," said Robert Niles, editor of the Online Journalism Review, which is published by the USC Annenberg School for Communication.
This year, the Washington Post added a sponsored blog roll to its website, a directory of links to blogs that specialize in travel, technology, health and more. If the Post sells an ad on the blog roll's main page, the bloggers split the money with the newspaper. So far, about 100 bloggers have signed up.
To Caroline Little, the chief executive of Washingtonpost Newsweek Interactive, the ad network is good business. Most ad buyers don't want to take the time to buy space on dozens of different blogs, she said, and the staff-driven side of the website often doesn't have enough stories about technology, business or health for advertisers looking to place ads near that content. With the blog roll, the Post can grab ad revenue that might have gone elsewhere. "It's about figuring out how to monetize other people's content," Little said.
The partnership has boosted ad revenue, she said, although the money made from selling blog roll ads isn't a significant part of online income, at least not yet. A spokeswoman for Adify, a San Bruno, Calif., company that supplies ad network technology to the Post, said the blog roll had increased the site's audience by more than 50%. Little couldn't confirm that.
Britain's Guardian newspaper and Hoy, a Spanish-language daily in Los Angeles (owned by Times parent Tribune Co.), have also set up networks that sell ads on smaller sites and share ad income with blogs.
Other papers are expanding coverage -- and, they hope, drawing traffic -- by posting the work of local bloggers. The Houston Chronicle, for one, has recruited 50 reader-bloggers whose commentary appears its website. A note at the top of the readers' blog page reads: "Our members are responsible for this content, which is not edited by the Chronicle." Among the recent blog headlines: "Breastfeeding is obscene?"
Scott Clark, vice president and editor of Chron.com, said readers' blogs had expanded coverage. "Many of our readers have specialized knowledge and passions," he said. "By adding them to our site, we tremendously expand the scope of information that we're able to provide."
The blurred lines make many uneasy. "There's a lot of uninformed opinion on the Internet and not a lot of solid reporting," said Fred Brown, vice chairman of the Society of Professional Journalists' ethics committee and a columnist at the Denver Post. A professional journalist "respects the truth and lives up to standards of ethics. Certainly that isn't the case in the blogosphere."
Newspapers should make a clear distinction between staff-written and blogger-generated material as a service to their readers, said David Ardia, director of the Citizen Media Law Project at Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet & Society. But what if a blogger gets a fact wrong or makes a defamatory comment about someone?
Newspapers have to be careful, but federal law generally protects a website owner from postings by its users. As long as employees of a newspaper site have nothing to do with a blogger's work, Ardia said, the newspaper is probably protected, because it is simply posting content produced by an outsider.
At the same time, the law allows newspapers to act as good Samaritans to protect their readers, and Kinsey Wilson, executive editor of USA Today, said his paper had been doing just that. It removes from its website "anything brought to our attention that violates our terms of use, including personal attacks, hate speech, obscenities, plagiarism, as well as potentially libelous or defamatory material," Wilson wrote in an e-mail.
The USA Today site has run excerpts from such blogs as College Football Resource and A Socialite's Life, the latter a gossip site that discusses and mocks fashion, celebrities and the media. Wilson said in an interview that the industry wasn't adopting blogs in place of traditional reporting but in addition to it. In any event, he said, newspapers can't afford to think about distributing information the way they used to. "The walled garden is dead. We're living in an era of distributed content," he said. One important role of a newspaper nowadays is to sift through rafts of information online, he said, and help readers use it.
Some popular blogs have been "absorbed," to use the New York Times' term, into mainstream media sites. Freakonomics, a blog about economic thinking in everyday situations, runs on the New York Times site, and its authors share the ad revenue. Stephen J. Dubner, a Freakonomics coauthor, said the partnership provided an opportunity to be featured on one of the most prominent newspaper sites in the world "with all the readership and support that comes along with it." The blog gets more traffic on the Times site than it did when it was accessible only at Freakonomics.com, he said. Unlike before, now it can make money. With the funds, the Freakonomics authors are sprucing up the blog, adding a full-time editor and filmmaker.
Most bloggers are paid little, if anything, for the thousands of words they type. Teaming up with a newspaper is a way to establish credibility, said Dave Panos, the CEO of Pluck, which distributes blog content to a handful of newspaper sites, including USA Today's, through a service called BlogBurst. "Being picked up by the mainstream media," he said, "is the highest form of flattery."
Copyright 2007 Los Angeles Times
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The article above is copyrighted material, the use of which may not have specifically authorized by the copyright owner. The material is made available in an effort to advance understanding of political, economic, democracy, First Amendment, technology, journalism, community and justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' as provided by Section 107 of U.S. Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Chapter 1, Section 107, the material above is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this blog for purposes beyond fair use, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.
