PJNet

The Public Journalism or Civic Journalism movement started 20 years ago and grew out of repulsion to the sleaze and trivia of that 1988 Presidential election. Back then it was a few lone voices like Jay Rosen, Buzz Merritt and Cole Campbell who tried to wake up the news media folks about their errant ways.
If […]

Usually when we think of citizen journalists, we think of amateurs; the paid journalists are the professionals. That’s the pro/am model as Jay Rosen helped frame it. But Will Riley, a doctoral student studying digital media at Georgia Tech, defines it differently. For him, on the one hand, you could have well trained professional citizen journalists and, on the […]

Jay Rosen has an excellent piece  about the media’s presidential primary horse-race mentality. However, he reminds us that collectively the media is not human and has no mentality at all. It has no mind thus is not easy to change.
That’s excellent point number one, excellent point number two for me is that the media’s so called experts are not […]

Adam Weinstein, in the January/February 2008 Issue of Mother Jones, writes about the dangers of citizen journalism  with his central warning being that “…newspapers may be taken in by crackpots and sly marketers…”
However, if you are one of the many serious thinkers who believe citizen journalism has merit,  you would be left with the impression that Weinstein himself is […]

Shelby Highsmith is Georgia’s MTV citizen journalist. He provides a little tell-all of what his training was like, and, hey, look what they provided for his backpack journalism:
There’s the Canon SD1000 for stills (the same model I already carry everywhere); a nice Panasonic 3-chip camcorder (consumer, not pro-sumer…we need to remain portable, you know); shotgun […]