Citizen journalism website gets multi-million-dollar boost

Posted on breitbart.com (2007-07-30)

NowPublic announced Monday that the fast-growing citizen journalism website has scored 10.6 million dollars (US) in financing to fuel its drive to become the world's largest news agency.

The Vancouver-based start-up says it is growing at a rate of 35 percent monthly and has nearly 120,000 contributing "reporters" in more than 140 countries.

In part of a trend referred to as "citizen journalism," NowPublic lets anyone with digital cameras or a camera-enable mobile telephones upload images or news snippets for dissemination via the Internet.

Time Magazine lists NowPublic among its top 50 websites of 2007.

"I promise you, in 18 months NowPublic will be, by reach, the largest news agency in the world," said start-up co-founder Len Brody.

The rest of the story: breitbart.com

Huffington Post matures into online force

As HuffPo retools its focus, PR is helping to reposition it for online and offline media outlets

by Hamilton Nolan (PR Week 2007-7-30)

Coming soon to The Huffington Post: corporate leaders?

It seems counterintuitive that HuffPo - once pigeonholed as the "liberal Drudge Report," now evolving into a full-fledged online news and opinion clearinghouse - could play host to the musings of business leaders who would not be surprised to find their capitalist predilections railed against by the site's commenters.

However, the two-year-old site, which Technorati ranks as one of the top five blogs on the Web, is aggressively pushing to establish itself as a premier national forum for thoughts and opinions of all stripes.

"The site has more of the urgency that newspapers traditionally had before they were overtaken, in terms of urgency, by 24/7 news online," says Arianna Huffington, the site's founder, namesake, and chief networker and promoter. "We present the news in a way that's accurate, fact-checked, and fair, but has a point of view."

The rest of the story: PRWeek

Taking on the Media: There’s No News in the ‘Birmingham News’

By Scott Horton (Harpers.org)

Back in the eighties, I used to train aspiring young Kremlinologists in the art of reading and understanding Soviet newspapers. As they used to say “there’s no truth in Pravda (truth), and there’s no news in Izvestia (news),” but actually you could learn a lot studying their weaselly distortions of fact. The most revealing thing was often not what was said, but rather was left unsaid. Today’s Birmingham News offers a piece in the best tradition of Pravda, showing us that the old Communist journalism may have gone to its grave in Moscow, but it’s thriving in the Heart of Dixie.

The rest of the story: Harper's

Documentary filmmaker Michael Moore criticizes CNN...on CNN

Sicko director Michael Moore blasts CNN host Wolf Blitzer and resident medical commentator Dr. Sanjay Gupta for what Moore regards as the distorted coverage on the network of both the war in Iraq and the issue of health care (at the end of the segment, watch CNN try to put Moore in place before the next segment by contextualizing him with an irrelevant reference to Venezuela prez Hugo Chavez).

- Moore and Blitzer:
<http://youtube.com/watch?v=6TR1SG8WDbU>

- Sanjay Gupta's 'Sicko Reality Check':
<http://www.crooksandliars.com/>

- Moore's rebuttal to the 'Sicko Reality Check':
<http://www.michaelmoore.com/>

Interest growing in plight of journalist held at Gitmo

Why have detainees been held at Guantánamo for six years without a mechanism to fairly determine whether they belong there?

From Prisoner 345: What happened to Al Jazeera’s Sami al-Haj in the July/August 2007 edition of the Columbia Journalism Review:

"Despite the novelty of [Sami] al-Haj’s status as the only journalist inside Guantánamo, it was a long time before he attracted much media attention. At first, even Al Jazeera was reluctant to cover his story. 'Up until around 2003, the air was very tense. You didn’t really want to investigate it too much,' said Ahmad Ibrahim, an Al Jazeera producer who has researched al-Haj’s case. 'At least to a lot of people around the world, holding people was probably justifiable due to the enormity of 9/11. And in the Arab world, the situation at Guantánamo was difficult to comprehend or believe, even that any kind of torture would be perpetrated by the U.S. A lot of people didn’t comprehend what Guantánamo stood for, and the legal arguments that were used to justify it.' In 2005, Ibrahim invited Stafford Smith to Al Jazeera’s headquarters in Doha. 'That’s when the big interest in Sami and his plight started.'

"Since then, al-Haj has become a cause célèbre in the Arab world. Ibrahim made a forty-five-minute documentary about him, Prisoner 345, and Al Jazeera regularly reports on his case. Al-Haj has also been featured in several stories in the British press. But despite repeated efforts by Ibrahim and Stafford Smith, there was until very recently almost no coverage of al-Haj in the U.S., apart from a New York Times column last October by Nicholas Kristof. Al Jazeera 'is still perceived in a very negative way' in the U.S., said Joel Campagna of the Committee to Protect Journalists. 'I think that has made people pause when looking at this case.'

"But while some journalists may distrust Al Jazeera, or may have believed Donald Rumsfeld’s discredited claim that the inmates represented the 'worst of the worst,' others may have avoided writing about detainees like al-Haj because of a more mundane bias: the simple difficulty of reporting about Guantánamo. It’s often been noted that the lopsided legal process fashioned by the Bush administration makes it virtually impossible for detainees to defend themselves. A lesser noticed consequence is that the withholding of evidence makes it impossible for journalists to write a conventionally 'balanced' story about individual detainees—and hence, they are less likely to write about them at all. While researching this piece, for instance, I’ve had plenty of access to al-Haj’s lawyer and to Al Jazeera, but none to the Department of Defense or al-Haj himself. This imbalance is uncomfortable, but to be deterred by it would be to miss the point. The central question underlying the case of al-Haj and the other detainees is not their guilt or innocence, but why they have been held at Guantánamo for six years without a mechanism to fairly determine whether they belong there."

The rest of the story: The Columbia Journalism Review

The Press Is Free for Them What Owns It

Undercover, under fire
The Washington press corps is too busy cozying up to the people it covers to get at the truth.
by Ken Silverstein, the Washington editor of Harper's Magazine (LATimes 2007-06-30)

"EARLIER THIS YEAR, I put on a brand-new tailored suit, picked up a sleek leather briefcase and headed to downtown Washington for meetings with some of the city's most prominent lobbyists. I had contacted their firms several weeks earlier, pretending to be the representative of a London-based energy company with business interests in Turkmenistan. I told them I wanted to hire the services of a firm to burnish that country's image.

"I didn't mention that Turkmenistan is run by an ugly, neo-Stalinist regime. They surely knew that, and besides, they didn't care. As I explained in this month's issue of Harper's Magazine, the lobbyists I met at Cassidy & Associates and APCO were more than eager to help out. In exchange for fees of up to $1.5 million a year, they offered to send congressional delegations to Turkmenistan and write and plant opinion pieces in newspapers under the names of academics and think-tank experts they would recruit. They even offered to set up supposedly 'independent' media events in Washington that would promote Turkmenistan (the agenda and speakers would actually be determined by the lobbyists)."

The rest of the story: The Los Angeles Times.