…citizen journalism is red hot with Associated Content landing $10 million in financing today from Canaan Partners, and NowPublic pulling in $10.6 million in financing from Rho Ventures on Monday (this time last year, OhMyNews landed $11 million from SoftBank).

Technorati : citizenjournalism
Del.icio.us : citizen journalism

Vermont Climate Witness. To create a map-based interactive experience to track how residents see climate change affecting the state’s economy, from fall foliage and maple syrup to skiing. Tamarack Productions, a nonprofit environmental awareness organization, will work with the Vermont Natural Resources Council to develop user content and create Google Map mash-ups to help users visualize weather data and real-time weather indicators.

Northwest Community Radio Network Collaborative Newscast. To launch an hour-long, weekly newscast culled from the best public affairs programming produced by more than 40, often-isolated community, college and independent radio stations throughout the Pacific Northwest. Seattle-based Reclaim the Media will use the newscast to anchor a new content-sharing network that will expand the pool of regional news and programming for local audiences.

Saint Paul City Newsdesk. To create and pay for a network of citizen journalists to cover neighborhood and municipal news for use by media outlets throughout the Twin Cities. Network stories, videos and radio pieces will be published on the St. Paul Neighborhood Network cable-access television web site and on the Twin Cities Daily Planet site.

New Castle News Forum. To create a weekly cyber newspaper built from citizen-generated content for the town of New Castle in West Chester County, N.Y., which has lost its local newspaper. The project is spearheaded by local volunteers under the auspices of the Friends of the Chappaqua Library.

Neighbor to Neighbor. Cambridge Community Television will embed citizen journalists in each of the five neighborhoods of Cambridge, Mass., to report on local issues and events, feature local viewpoints, and facilitate participation in local issues. Five neighborhood segments will be produced and edited into a monthly 30-minute program to air four times each week, streamed live on CCTV’s web site and archived. Segments will be incorporated in the Cambridge Media Map.

Bilingual Interactive Environmental Journalism. To develop bilingual news and interactive narratives for OurTahoe.org to help the Spanish-speaking residents of the Lake Tahoe Basin understand environmental threats to the area. The Reynolds School of Journalism at the University of Nevada-Reno will spearhead content creation and solicitation through its Graduate Program in Interactive Environmental Journalism, aided by local newspaper partners.

Neo-News Network. To build a news and information hotline for Gary, Ind., accessed via web, phone, mobile text messaging and listservs to supplement available media. Content will be generated by students and young professionals and coordinated by the Central District Organization, a group led by young professionals who have returned to Gary to live.

Fulton Hill Interactive Portal. To train local citizen journalists and build a news and information portal for Fulton Hill, a low-income neighborhood in Richmond, Va. Virginia Commonwealth University’s School of Mass Communications will work with the Fulton Hill Neighborhood Resource Center to help local residents produce stories, photos, audio, video and a Fulton Hill wiki.

Building Blocks. To launch a news and information site to inform New York City residents about major real estate development projects that affect their neighborhoods. Spearheaded by the Pratt Center for Community Development, the project will initially provide news articles, Q&As, public hearing calendars and discussion forums focusing on the redevelopment of Coney Island in Brooklyn, the reuse of the Kingsbridge Armory in the Bronx, and the expansion of Columbia University onto a 17-block area of Harlem in Manhattan.

News Desk on Access SF. To train San Francisco nonprofits to produce a monthly community news program with a neighborhood focus for cable access television and video blogs. Five special interest desks will produce stories targeting youth, LGBT issues, arts and culture, age and disabilities, and multi-lingual stories. Each special interest desk will have its own video blog, supported by Access SF, the city’s community television corporation.

Technorati : J-Lab, NewVoices, citizenmedia, citj
Del.icio.us : J-Lab, NewVoices, citizenmedia, citj

Technorati : Rosen, gift economy, newassignment.net
Del.icio.us : Rosen, gift economy, newassignment.net
Ice Rocket : Rosen, gift economy, newassignment.net
Flickr : Rosen, gift economy, newassignment.net
Zooomr : Rosen, gift economy, newassignment.net
Buzznet : Rosen, gift economy, newassignment.net

The Dartmouth Image Science Group is…releasing a series of tools that will enable law enforcement officials, scientists and media outlets to detect photo fraud more easily…

The story adds that:

His work with video and audio files, so far, is fairly preliminary…

GUEST COLUMN

Prison abuse impossible to downplay

By LEONARD WITT
Special to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Published on: 05/11/2004

Last week, addressing the atrocities in the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich wrote in the Wall Street Journal, “Any effort by the anti-American left or the Arab media to generalize the acts of a few into an attack on America, or on America’s armed forces, should be repudiated and condemned.” At about the same time Rush Limbaugh was making these statements:

“This is no different than what happens at the skull-and-bones initiation. Maybe the people who executed this pulled off a brilliant maneuver. Nobody got hurt. Nobody got physically injured. But boy, there was a lot of humiliation of people who are trying to kill us — in ways they hold dear. Sounds pretty effective to me if you look at us in the right context.

“We had these pictures of homoeroticism that look like standard good old American pornography, the MTV awards, the Britney Spears and Madonna concerts or whatever, and yet the libs upset about the mistreatment of these prisons thought nothing of sitting back while mass graves were being filled with 300,000 to 500,000 Iraqis during the Saddam Hussein’s regime.”

Both Limbaugh and Gingrich want to define condemnation of these most heinous acts in terms of liberal outrage. However, the most damning piece of writing I have read about this incident was not written by the liberal press. It was written by Major General Antonio M. Taguba, whose U.S. command mandate was to find out what was happening in side Abu Ghraib.

The 53-page report, which was obtained by Seymour Hersh for the New Yorker magazine, lists the affronts that took place, including:

“Breaking chemical lights and pouring the phosphoric liquid on detainees; pouring cold water on naked detainees; beating detainees with a broom handle and a chair; threatening male detainees with rape; allowing a military police guard to stitch the wound of a detainee who was injured after being slammed against the wall in his cell; sodomizing a detainee with a chemical light and perhaps a broomstick, and using military working dogs to frighten and intimidate detainees with threats of attack, and in one instance actually biting a detainee.”

Gingrich further minimizes what happened in Iraq by saying although they were terrible acts, they were carried out by “a very small number of Americans.”

However, on the same day his opinion piece ran in the Wall Street Journal, the Journal itself posted a story highlighting a 24-page report compiled by the International Committee of the Red Cross.

The story reads: “The February report, reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, presents a portrait of prisoner treatment in Iraq that is at odds with statements by administration officials that abuse wasn’t condoned by military commanders and was limited to a handful of low-ranking soldiers.

“Instead, the report says, information gathered by the ICRC ’suggested the use of ill treatment against persons deprived of their liberty went beyond exceptional cases and might be considered a practice tolerated by’ coalition forces.”

What Limbaugh equates to frat hazing, I think every American — right, left or center –must equate with the worst of concentration camp treatment and condemn it loudly without fear of being labeled anti-American because, in fact, not speaking out and not expressing outrage is the most anti-American act each of us could take.

——————————————————————————–

Leonard Witt is a professor of communication at Kennesaw State University

Minnesota Public Radio’s groundbreaking concept “Public Insight Journalism” already is bringing new jobs into the MPR newsroom as it tries to tap the collective thinking power of its entire audience. Michael Skoler, managing director of news at MPR, explains how it works in this special Leonard Witt IM Interview.

Key Quote: If “establishment” media organizations can plug into the energy and wisdom of the collective brain of the public, we’ll bring the strength of traditional journalism — editorial judgment, fact-checking, truth-seeking — into a new age of better, more trusted news coverage. If we don’t do this, I think the unfiltered, weblog-type model of journalism will overtake traditional media …Michael Skoler

By the way I have not forgotten this site. I just have been putting my energies into the PJNet.org, which, of course, crosses over collective audience, bigger brain thinking.

My ideas were triggered by his Frontline/World investigative documentary on PBS about the wreck of the Prestige and its massive oil spill off the northern coast of Spain.

I promised in my blog that I would contact Schapiro and see what he thinks. Well I did and he responded. Here is part of what he wrote in an exchange at the Frontline comments website:

…having the ability to shine the light on abusers of the system could go a long way toward clearing up some of the more flagrant abuses of the system. Your idea of a steady web-log is an inspired one — though I would caution you as to how difficult it may be to actually find the abundance of information that’s necessary. One place to start is an interesting and very useful Web site, www.equasis.org -which provides a rendering of who, at least on paper, is the owner and manager of most every ship at sea…

Of course, the theory might be good, now the question is who and how does an idea like this get started. Ideas are cheap, execution is dear.

The University of Missouri’s Journalism School received a $31 grant to improve the interaction of journalism and democracy. Speaking for my work in public and participatory journalism, I said: