You've likely read some of Demand's content without realizing it. Founded in 2006, the company runs a slew of popular Internet portals, including eHow.com Cracked.com and Livestrong.com that receive 100 million hits a month — more traffic than any of the digital properties of Disney, NBC, ESPN or, yes, Time Inc. The company, based in Santa Monica, Calif., is also directing an army of freelancers to write stories that appear in traditional media outlets, most notably in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution's weekly travel section, and a Demand executive says more deals with large off-line brands will be announced soon.

Demotix is a new type of wire service designed to make it easier for international news stories by citizen journalists and freelance reporters to make it into the mainstream media.

The U.K. company is essentially a user-friendly middleman. For instance, a photographer in Afghanistan with an image of a car bombing can log in to the Demotix website and upload an image with caption info; Demotix reviews it and pushes it to the company's feed.

Then, news outlets like The Wall Street Journal, the Times of London and The Telegraph, etc., subscribe to the feed, just like they do for established news agencies like the Associated Press and Reuters, and buy stories and assets they deem important.

Just a little more than a year ago, I went into the office of the Austin American-Statesman's Internet managing editor and asked whether I could start using Twitter to engage the social media community. I got the green light that day, and I have been tweeting as the voice of @statesman nearly every day since (in my own voice as opposed to using an RSS feed). We have more than 50 Twitter accounts run by newsroom folks, engaging people on a variety of topics.

Looking back on that year, here are five things that I have learned

It is 2006, late in the year. A reporter stands on a rocky hillside near the city of Kandahar in southern Afghanistan and points a wobbly camera at dark-clad gunmen ranged at a distance before him. They've wrapped the tails of their turbans to mask their faces. They carry their Kalashnikovs at the ready. The reporter shouts a question: "Does the Taliban receive support from Pakistan?"

As the camera jumps about to find the Talib who is speaking, a translator voices his answer: "Yes, Pakistan stands with us. On the other side of the border, we have our offices there. Some people in Pakistan is supporting us and the government of Pakistan does not say anything to us. They provide us with everything."

If at all possible, don't go into education journalism or stay there long. It's among the lowest-prestige beats in a newsroom, and will require you to endure your editors' and colleagues' inane stories about their childhood experiences in school (or the experiences of their children). You will be looked down on by your peers, and even your parents. No matter that schools are important, and everywhere, and sometimes what goes down in them is pretty damn amazing. The beat might keep you employed for a few extra months, but it's not worth it.

If you were a professional journalist and I asked you, "what does mainstream media provide that the crowd can't?" I have some guesses about what I might hear in your answer: It's more credible, more comprehensive, fact-checked, less biased, professionally composed, more knowledgeable, presented in the larger context, and more reliable, to name a few.

But wait! It's a trick question, and not just because there are countless examples of all classes of reporting from both mainstream and creek media. The trick is epistemological: The existence or non-existence of these qualities on either side is practically meaningless if nobody can prove they exist to the audience.

When she headed the Huffington Post's "OfftheBus" project, Amanda Michel led a nationwide team of citizen reporters as they looked into stories of the 2008 presidential election that weren't covered by the media. Her work landed her a position as ProPublica's editor of distributed reporting.

At the Aspen Ideas Festival this week, Andrew Sullivan said, "Journalism has become too much about journalists."

True. It's not just that newspapers are covering their own demise as thoroughly as Michael Jackson's. This is about the mythology that news needs newspapers – that without them, it's not news.

A Denver-focused daily Web magazine led by former staffers of the defunct Rocky Mountain News and others plans to officially launch Monday.

A dozen equity owners, about a dozen freelancers and partner blogs are providing content for the Rocky Mountain Independent.

Alison van Diggelen took all this business about anyone being a citizen journalist seriously.

She's not the sort to register with Blogger to start tapping out essays on the battles between California gray squirrels and the pesky blue jays in her verdant backyard.

Instead, through preparation, determination and an irresistible charm, she's become a one-woman media machine in Silicon Valley.

An Associated Press reporter's official reprimand over an innocuous comment on his Facebook page has sparked the ire of union officials. They are now demanding that AP clarify its ethics guidelines and are also urging reporters to watch who they add to their friends lists.

"We have seen about six Facebook problems over the last two months, with employees — maybe managers you have as friends — reporting potential issues to management," union guild chief Kevin Keane wrote in a memo to union members last week. "You must be careful who you allow on as friends."

It was all-too-familiar for those who recall the run-up to the Iraq war when scary front-page New York Times stories would be cited by Dick Cheney as proof that we needed to oust Saddam Hussein ASAP. The reminder: A May 21 piece by Elisabeth Bumiller revealing that a not-yet-released Pentagon report declared that 1 in 7 prisoners released from Gitmo had returned to waging "jihad." Today, the Times, finally issued a weighty Editors' Note correcting the article's two main assertions, long after bloggers and others (myself included) had attacked it.

[Greg Mitchell is the editor of Editor & Publisher]

They sat near different ends of a long table Thursday: a former Justice Department official who leaked information on Bush's warrantless domestic spying program to the New York Times, and a former Army scientist who was wrongly linked to the 2001 anthrax attacks by different, but equally-anonymous, government sources.

You couldn't ask for a starker example of everything good and bad about journalists' use of anonymous sources in Washington, and both men have had their lives changed by their experiences.

Two American reporters for Current TV are being tried in North Korea on Thursday. They're accused of crossing into the country illegally and engaging in "hostile acts."

In 2003 Newsweek reporter Michael Isikoff interviewed me for, and then published a story on the FBI translation program. His report knowingly omitted crucial facts, directly relevant cases, witness statements and confirmed official reports, while advancing the FBI's already-discredited point of view...

We all have been tirelessly screaming about issues related to Congressional leaders abdicating their main responsibility of 'oversight.' We have been outraged for way too long at seeing 'no' accountability whatsoever in many known cases of extreme wrongdoing. I, and many of you, believe that the biggest reason for this was, and still is, the lack of true journalism and media coverage --- which acts as the necessary pressure and catalyst for those spineless politicians on the Hill and in the Executive branch. Or, at least it's supposed to. So, in our book, the MSM have been the main culprit.

Well, here is a chance to turn the tables.

Communities across America are suffering through a crisis that could leave a dramatically diminished version of democracy in its wake. It is not the economic meltdown, although the crisis is related to the broader day of reckoning that appears to have arrived. The crisis of which we speak involves more than mere economics. Journalism is collapsing, and with it comes the most serious threat in our lifetimes to self-government and the rule of law as it has been understood here in the United States.

The Guardian won four awards at the British Press Awards last night, including website of the year. It was the second successive year that guardian.co.uk was judged to be the best newspaper website. The paper also won awards for digital journalist, interviewer and columnist of the year.

Consolidating its position at the cutting edge of new media technology, the Guardian today announces that it will become the first newspaper in the world to be published exclusively via Twitter, the sensationally popular social networking service that has transformed online communication.

Noting the imminent death of newspapers is all the rage, fast becoming one of the reigning clichés of the day. I beg to differ, but not for the self-interested reasons one might imagine. To explain, I'd like to tell a story—a newspaper story.

What the election said about the soul of the country was that Obama's race wasn't a barrier to being elected, not that it was the reason for his victory.

Of course, the unrelenting focus on historic firsts is easier than pointing out that a majority of Americans voted for Obama because they were fed up with the politics and policies of the Bush era, they wanted to proud of their country again, and they thought Obama was the guy who could fix things. But that's not exactly a unifying positive theme, so commentators are sticking to the "first black president!" one.

"To all young journalists trying to cope with these troubling times I say: Keep on reporting, reporting, reporting, writing, writing, writing, and editing, editing, editing. Start a blog, send me a link, and I'll try to promote your work. Build your personal brand."

Vice President Dick Cheney said that the prizes won by the New York Times for uncovering the Bush administration were "aggravating" to him, and cautioned the incoming administration on the lessons he's learned in office.

Cheney said the domestic spying program "really worked" and provided valuable intelligence. "But then it became public," Cheney said during an interview on conservative radio host Bill Bennett's show. "The New York Times broke the story I think in December of '05, won the Pulitzer for it, which always aggravated me."

On Thursday, The New York Times will launch a new, crack environmental reporting unit that will pull in eight specialized reporters from the Science, National, Metro, Foreign, and Business desks in a bid for richer, more prominent coverage.

In the usual process, the US government -- and media here -- are playing down questions about whether Israel overreacted in its massive air strikes on Gaza, while the foreign press, and even Haaretz in Israel, carries more balanced accounts. The early reports on Sunday already reveal the bombing of a TV station and mosque and preparations for an invasion.

The backlash from the "intelligence community" over John Brennan's withdrawal -- which pro-Brennan sources are now claiming was actually forced on Brennan by the Obama team -- continues to intensify. Just marvel at how coordinated (and patently inaccurate) their messaging is, and -- more significantly -- how easily they can implant their message into establishment media outlets far and wide, which uncritically publish what they're told from their cherished "intelligence sources" and without even the pretense of verifying whether any of it is true and/or hearing any divergent views...

Well before this year's economic collapse, business journalists shined a spotlight on serious problems in the US economy. But regulators and members of the public didn't pay much attention.

In the early weeks of October, as the American financial crisis intensified, everyone from former Lehman Brothers CEO Richard Fuld to Advertising Age media critic Simon Dumenco took shots at the business press, pummeling its reporters and editors for failing to anticipate the looming economic collapse.

Project Censored has released its annual (and forward-looking) list of the "Top 25 Censored Stories for 2009."

The internet is full of photojournalists that are capturing the world in new and innovative ways. The following sites are showcasing the best of the medium and are an inspiration to professional and aspiring news photographers everywhere:

Brian Lamb sees "the handwriting on the wall" for the cable network he founded, C-SPAN, as well as the rest of television news—and it's called the Internet. "[President-elect] Barack Obama has already started it," he said, by shifting from a weekly radio address to a weekly video address posted to YouTube.

Mr. Lamb delivered the James L. Loper Lecture in Public Service Broadcasting Thursday at USC, sponsored by the USC Annenberg Center on Communication Leadership.

Actually, he admitted, on the topic of the future of TV news, "I have no idea where it's going. I knew where it was going 30 years ago," when he started C-SPAN.

There isn't much difference between what appears in a small newspaper's print edition and online. Many photographs make it online that don't make it to print, and the AP stories are usually a widget feed from the AP. However, in order to maximize search engine traffic and the reader's satisfaction, newspapers need to rethink their approach to online content.

Online marketing specialist Mitch Joel knows how to get Google hits. Dubbed the "rock star of digital marketing" by Marketing magazine, he is an expert at helping websites get a bigger hit of Google juice, i.e.: making the website attractive to the search engine and therefore bringing in more traffic. Google itself recognized his talent, inviting Joel to its corporate headquarters, the Googleplex in Mountain View, to explain the ins and outs of online marketing to companies like Wal-mart, Costco, Sears, and Sephora.

Type "newspaper industry" into Google News and there's nothing but bad news. Everything from falling profits and job losses to trying to figure out their footing in the new media world.

It has become an interesting industry to follow in terms of Marketing, Communication, Advertising and Media. In late October I published this Blog posting: New Media Might Not Be Able To Save The Newspaper Industry after the Newspaper Association of America issued a press release that newspaper Websites attracted over 41% of all Internet users and served over 3.5 billion pageviews per month, but were still struggling with how to monetize their properties.

Pat Buchanan is defending Hillary Clinton, the Guardian is scooping on US political news, and now this, perhaps the ultimate WTF moment in media this week: Lefty, anti-corporate folksinger Ani DiFranco performed two songs for Wall Street Journal editorial staff today, right before deadline, we hear.

Last week, Robert Niles argued that news organizations should be in the business of creating "killer apps". Put another way, there is a need to develop tools that hew to the content rather than the other way around. But creating the functionality Robert describes takes a closer connection between news thinking and tech thinking than is possible within news organizations' traditional structures and skill sets.

Nicholas Kristof and William Kristol both write regular columns about politics and policy for the New York Times op-ed page. But one is a journalist (Kristof) and the other is a political operative who last summer was listed by a Council on Foreign Relations report as an informal part of John McCain's foreign-policy brain trust (Kristol). The latter, writing once a week since January, has had five published corrections for errors of fact in his column; the former, writing twice a week in that same period, has had no published corrections but did take the extraordinary step of using an entire column to apologize to Steven J. Hatfill, the scientist who was named (and recently exonerated) by the government as the leading suspect in the 2001 anthrax attacks; in 2002, Kristof had written columns urging closer scrutiny of the then-anonymous "person of interest" who turned out to be Hatfill.

When Michael Paulson began covering religion for The Boston Globe eight years ago, the paper had no blogs or online video, he did almost no outside speaking work, and the paper's Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of the Catholic church sex scandal was still years away. Today, Paulson finds himself going well beyond the straight news stories of the print edition — to more analysis, public speaking and commentary, and, in just the past few months, a religion-focused blog.

He's not alone. While Paulson, 43, contends the objective approach to reporting is maintained on all fronts, he says that keeping up in so many journalistic outlets can be difficult: "There is a difference between being analytical and being opinionated. A blog is much more challenging because it is first-person. It is very fast, and in the world of blogging, most bloggers are offering opinions all the time. When newspapers add the format of blogging, I am not allowed the leeway of the traditional blogger."

As the traditional news business model continues to stumble, people most fear losing investigative and enterprise reporting -- especially on the local level. This type of journalism is notoriously difficult, time-consuming, risky, and costly. It's not something that amateurs or concerned citizens can readily handle. If we want it to continue, we need new ways to support it.

That's what David Cohn is trying to do with Spot.Us, which launched yesterday. This project, funded by the Knight News Challenge, is attempting to support local investigative journalism through crowdfunding.

It was Nieman reunion time last weekend, and the honored veterans of journalism were gathered in the very shadow of Harvard. Our panel was called: "Voices from the New World of Journalism."

"I think we're fooling ourselves a little bit in how much change is needed," Michael Skoler of American Public Media said. The needed transformation lies well beyond the use of new tools. "People expect to share information." But that goes against our ethos – getting the scoop, keeping it exclusive. Nor does allowing people to participate in – not just respond to -- our work come naturally. "Deep in our souls we feel like that's dumbing down our journalism. I would argue that it's smartening it up."

The New York Times' Vivian Schiller has jumped to National Public Radio as president and chief executive officer, effective Jan. 5, 2009. She succeeds Dennis Haarsager, who served as interim CEO since March.

Her appointment, announced Tuesday (Nov 11), is the result of an eighth-month search process conducted by NPR's board of directors.

President Bush was re-elected in 2004 with 286 electoral votes, the smallest popular-vote margin since 1976 (excluding the 2000 election) and the lowest electoral vote count for an incumbent president's re-election since 1916. Nevertheless, many in the media were quick to echo Vice President Dick Cheney's assertion that "the nation" gave Bush "a mandate." It remains to be seen whether the media will apply the same standard in assessing the results of the 2008 election.

The Western media has recently outdone itself in censoring important stories - stories which contradict the policies and interests the media seeks to uphold. Western publics have been systematically misled in recent weeks on vital issues related to war-and-peace, human rights, the financial crisis, and more. Only a few examples can be set out here. But it should be enough to indicate the extent to which world reality is being filtered by the media.

I don't believe it's possible to say anything about it that could be more offensive than repeating it, so as an act of kindness to its writer, let's move on. The piece in question concerns a recent decision in the law courts that calling an Irish woman a "@!$%#ing leprechaun" does not constitute racially aggravated harassment.

The Mail, which is either a better satirical newspaper than the Onion, or utterly devoid of self-awareness, is delighted that "common sense prevailed" because any other decision would have been "political correctness gone mad". Unusually, the effect of the decision on the value of your house or the likelihood that reading this liberal codswallop is giving you cancer RIGHT NOW is passed over in silence.

The CU School of Journalism and Mass Communication has received $110,000 in grant money from the McCormick Foundation of Chicago to explore "citizen journalism" in the media environment.

"The whole notion of trained professionals is crumbling," said Paul Voakes, Dean of CU's School of Journalism and Mass Communication. "We're asking the question 'Can citizen journalism have a purpose?'"

Voakes said that the project, titled "Resolving Door," will attempt to explore the media's role in forming community while addressing the potential impact that non-professionals may have on the newsroom of the future.

10 ridiculously cheap, relatively easy, small steps you can take to change an old school newsroom culture to be more forward thinking and web friendly.

You can't force change but you can make smaller changes to re-educate people, open up communication lines, get them thinking about innovation, help erode resistance and bring about the evolution. Here are some things we've done at the Post-Dispatch since I've joined to help change the newsroom culture.

A US-based Nigerian news blogger is being held without charge by Nigeria's secret service.

Jonathan Elendu was taken into custody on Saturday when he arrived in the capital, Abuja, on a family visit.

The State Security Service (SSS) has refused to allow his lawyers access to him and denied him a medical visit.

It's possible that the minor-party candidates in the 2008 election are suggesting programs that will one day seem as indispensable as Debs and Wallace's ideas. If so, you won't hear about them from the corporate media.

The Democracy Now! host says that all charges against her and her producers have been dropped, but "it has a chilling effect on our ability to report."

On the daily radio and television program Democracy Now!, Amy Goodman and co-host Juan Gonzalez offer an alternative to war and election coverage from the mainstream media. Instead of relying on pundits, the pair seek out ordinary people who are affected by U.S. foreign policy.

Democracy Now! is carried by more than 750 public-access radio and television stations across the country — though not in Memphis — and the show also airs on Dish Network's Free Speech TV and Direct TV's Link TV.

As far as television news is concerned, Bob Barr and Ralph Nader aren't presidential candidates but faces on milk cartons. Nader, an independent, and Barr, a Libertarian, are both on the ballot in 45 states. What they aren't on: TV. The lefty media critics at Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting issued a study Tuesday that says the three broadcast-network news divisions -- ABC, NBC and CBS -- have mentioned Barr and Nader a total of 31 times all year along. (In poor Nader's case, two of the mentions came when he was the punchline in jokes by late-night comedians that were included in newscasts.)

In an online Q&A session on the Washington Post's site yesterday, reporter Dana Milbank said that the Secret Service, in collaboration with campaign officials, had been blocking the press from conducting interviews in the crowds at rallies for Gov. Sarah Palin. Milbank was asked a question about a campaign event in Scranton, Pa. (A local newspaper reported that a member of the crowd had yelled "Kill him!" at a mention of Sen. Barack Obama, and the Secret Service had said publicly that the report had no basis.)

Here's what Milbank said

Every so often, a famous actor or producer will contact Seymour Hersh, wanting to make a movie about his most famous story: his single-handed uncovering, in 1969, of the My Lai massacre, in which an American platoon stormed a village in South Vietnam and, finding only its elderly, women and children, launched into a frenzy of shooting, stabbing and gang-raping. It won him a Pulitzer prize and hastened the end of the Vietnam war. Mostly, they come to see him in his office in downtown Washington, a two-room suite that he has occupied for the past 17 years. Do they like what they see? You bet they do, even if the movie has yet to be made.

The much-anticipated first Application Programming Interface (API) from the New York Times went live today, according to a post on the company's blog Open - All the code that's fit to printf(). First up is a campaign finance data API and next is a movie review API. Also available is a database management program initially developed for internal use at the NY Times.

The Times quietly announced in May that it would soon be publishing APIs, which are means by which outside developers can access NY Times data for use in other applications, interfaces and mashups. We believe that steps like this are going to prove key if big media is to thrive in the future.

The murder of Russian citizen journalist Magomed Yevloyev is a very important story.

It carries two chilling warnings.

The first warning concerns the serious turn for the worst in post-Soviet Russia.

There is a lot going bad inside of Russia, and the fallout is going to impact the USA and the Western Alliance in dangerous and unpredictable ways; especially, if the heavy-handed and the war-mongering retain power in Beltwayistan.

The second warning concerns the serious turn for the worst in post-9/11 USA.

The US mainstream news media failed us on the election theft crisis of 2000, the aftermath of 9/11, the ramp-up to the invasion and occupation of Iraq, the election theft crisis of 2004, the ginned-up debate about Global Warming, and the many withering attacks on the US Constitution, the Geneva Accords and other vital documents that define who we are and what we stand for as nation.

As the UK economy suffers its worst crisis in 60 years and some of the world's biggest private financial institutions crumble beneath the crash of the U.S. housing market, we can't help but reflect on the notion of enlightened anxiety.

That's a phrase Dale used in the introduction to our original We Media report, published more than five years ago. It's the sick feeling you get when you put together what you know with what you don't know. It's the downside of the connected society: we have access to more information than ever and it makes us crazy.

The riveting excerpts below are from the revealing accounts of 20 award-winning journalists in the highly acclaimed book Into the Buzzsaw. These courageous writers were prevented by corporate media ownership from reporting major news stories. Some were even fired or laid off. They have won numerous awards, including several Emmys and a Pulitzer. Join in building a better world by helping to spread this news across the land.

The very notion of the "Liberal Media" is one of the most inane myths in American politics -- something spat out and repeated in the lowest right-wing sewers for so long that it has become conventional wisdom -- but Halperin's frequent vouching for that myth, in his role of "journalist," illustrates all one needs to know about him. The media's contempt for both John Kerry and Al Gore was matched only by their reverence for George Bush's swagger. The first several months of media coverage this year was dominated by Jerimiah Wright, lapel pins, bowling scores, Bittergate and elitism. And it is highly unlikely that there has even been a time in American history when the media was as subservient to Government as they were during the Bush era. It's literally hard to imagine a claim that ought to be more discredited in general than the notion of the "liberal media" and its "anti-Republican bias."

Following up on this weekend's extreme raids on various homes, at least 50 people were arrested here today in St. Paul, Minnesota. Beginning last night, St. Paul was the most militarized I have ever seen an American city be, even more so than Manhattan in the week of 9/11 -- with troops of federal, state and local law enforcement agents marching around with riot gear, machine guns, and tear gas cannisters, shouting military chants and marching in military formations. Humvees and law enforcement officers with rifles were posted on various buildings and balconies. Numerous protesters and observers were tear gassed and injured. I'll have video of the day's events posted shortly.

[*Note: Free Day Pass may/may not be required to access content at Salon. See: bugmenot.com for anonymous logins/passwords.]

According to I-Witness reporter Eileen Clancy, an FBI agent came to Mike Whalen's house on Iglehart Avenue this morning, looking for an individual who was not present at the time. This afternoon, police broke into the house with guns drawn, detaining Whalen and the journalists for hours as dozens of reporters from all over the country stood outside, kept on the opposite side of the street by police orders. The six people inside the house—and one legal observer who came outside to try to talk to police—were handcuffed during the search of the house.

Legal observer Sarah Coffey answered reporters' questions in front of the Iglehart residence, as police looked on.

Journalists inside the home included Clancy and Elizabeth Press, a news producer for Democracy Now. Journalists outside included Amy Goodman, host of Democracy Now and a camera crew.

There are apparently 15,000 journalists attending the Democratic National Convention. Here is what some of them are doing:

14,000 are wearing terrible suits.

7,500 aren't doing much at all. This isn't surprising. Only a small number of reporters actually have a reason to be here. The rest are conventioneering—seeing old friends, eating Democratic-themed menu items ("Barack Obama's Turkey Chili") in pandering local restaurants, brandishing their press passes at all comers, looking for free things, and spending about 14 percent of their time trying to rustle up enough stories to justify their presence to their editors. These reporters are the ones mostly writing about themselves, or their friends, or their experiences exploring Denver with their friends ("I was enjoying some turkey chili with David Broder yesterday…"). At least they're open about the fact that they're enjoying themselves.

Flip on CNN or surf to your favorite mainstream news site — try the L.A. Times for starters — and prepare to be inundated with information from the Democratic National Convention. For the next two weeks as the conventions run their course, you can expect a heavy dose of every minute detail, including what the presidential candidate's siblings have to say and the age-old mystery of whether Secret Service operatives can stop a tornado (hint: They can't).

Social media like YouTube and Fark.com will afford you no escape, either. Let's look at how Web 2.0 is crashing the parties.

The first working day of a party convention is never going to be a comfortable one. Credentials will be misplaced, procedures will be unknown, and routes will be circuitous, often ending in the wrong place.

Even convention luminaries like Joe Scarborough, Al Sharpton and Bill Kristol got caught up in security hiccups in the morning, but they took it in good humor because it rarely ends in tears. Convention veterans know that it takes awhile for the temporary village of a huge event to assemble itself.

As Comedy Central's "Daily Show" descends on Denver for four days of coverage, Jon Stewart took after the "established" media for getting too cozy with candidates and regurgitating campaign spin when it comes to political coverage.

In a breakfast with reporters, Stewart directed most of his ire at the 24-hour cable news networks, which he called "gerbil wheels," and said the media at-large had "abdicated" to what he called the "slow-witted beast."

President Bush's top advisers would recommend he veto a Senate bill to protect reporters from having to reveal their sources, Attorney General Michael Mukasey and National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell said Friday.

In a letter to Senate Democrats, Mukasey and McConnell reiterated their stance that a media shield law could harm national security and encourage more leaks of classified information.

The "Free Flow of Information Act," proposed by Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., did not come up for a vote before lawmakers adjourned for the summer.

In many ways, Robert Scheer's career encapsulates the long march of progressive journalism in postwar America. After an early stint at Ramparts, he moved from Playboy to the Los Angeles Times (from which he was defenestrated in 2005, after nearly three decades at the paper).

Howard Rheingold describes the process he used to design a Social Media classroom in this 8 minute video.

CNN has launched a new online tool to show readers how stories have developed during reporting.

The BackStory feature shows significant events in the development of a news item as a slideshow, which can be scrolled through by the reader.

Early on in any journalist's career, the young reporter is besieged by advice from all sides. Flacks, sources and run-of-the-mill busybodies will pound on the phone about why the reporter isn't covering this or that story. And then, a sage editor will appear and counsel the newbie: "We decide what the news is."

That truism still attains; it's just the meaning of the pronoun has changed. Yes, we decide what is news as long as "we" now includes every sentient human with access to a mouse, a remote or a cellphone.

I've recently been reading Making Online News -- a book of ethnographic studies of online news production. Tucked towards the back of the book is a chapter called "The Routines of Blogging" by Wilson Lowrey and John Latta. This is one of the few studies I've seen that examines the work practices of bloggers (specifically, political bloggers), rather than journalists.

Their findings support what I've increasingly suspected about popular blogs: "The more relevant bloggers become in terms of audience and influence, the more their production routines resemble those of professional journalists."

For a number of months now, the online magazine Salon has been building a hosted blog network/media hub called open.salon.com, which is expected to launch officially this morning. According to a blog post by Open Salon director Kerry Lauerman a few weeks ago, the network has attracted about 1,300 bloggers while it was in beta.

"What's the business model?" It's a question I hear again and again at meetings and events. The existing model for newspapers is quickly unraveling, so we need a 'new new thing' to serve some of the vital functions that newspapers used to.

Whatever that new new thing may be, it is supposed to have a business model: a business model is what separates the well-meaning amateur from the sustainable enterprise. It is vital for securing loans or venture capital. You can't be serious about sustaining a venture unless you have a plan for a business that will sustain that venture.

Except that maybe you can.

It's not just that world events are ignored in favour of celebrity gossip. News anchors skew the facts to provoke debate.

For years it has been a joke that news in the United States is terrible: obsessed with trivia and celebrity; fronted by Botox bimbos; forever interviewing citizens about some artefact of small-town life when a major news story is breaking elsewhere.

Well, the truth is that it's far, far worse than that. There are a multitude of news channels - CNN, MSNBC, CBS, NBC, PBS, Fox. But after an hour of flipping between them during lunchtime last week, this was the sum total of information gleaned: there are two US presidential candidates; they have produced campaign ads; people have made video parodies and posted them on the internet; a US TV news host appeared on a US TV chatshow last night; and someone said something controversial (read ignorant) on a different TV show the day before.

In the meantime, one of the most sought-after war criminals in the world had been arrested and sent for trial; several new scientific breakthroughs had been announced; Zimbabwe edged carefully toward shared government; the Indian government dealt with votes of no-confidence and terrorist attacks; and countless other real stories came and went. For millions of Americans, these events appeared as 15-word tickertapes at the bottom of their 36-inch widescreen TVs.

Access to the wider internet is a problem for journalists at the Beijing Olympics - and for the Chinese people. But there is an initiative to bypass the barriers...

It was John Gilmore, founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who said that the internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it. For years, the Chinese authorities have done their best to prove him wrong. Now, with the Beijing Olympics upon us, a group of hackers has launched an attempt to stamp out censorship there - and they want your help to do it.

This week the Chaos Computer Club, a German-based hacking group, used its website, ccc.de, to launch a toolkit designed to help journalists reporting from the Olympics to get uncensored access to western websites. The toolkit will be made available to journalists on a USB key that the CCC is calling the Freedom Stick.

In the first presidential election since the death of Hunter S. Thompson, we finally realize what we've lost .

And so we find ourselves, one week after what would have been the good doctor's 71st birthday (July 18), muddling through the first post–Hunter S. Thompson presidential election. We find ourselves missing his political voice — and wishing he was around to see the Crawford crowd finally slink away.

In Gonzo, Thompson's first wife, Sandy, rues his suicide. It was not a "courageous act," as some called it, she says. It was cowardly. And it robbed America of an inimitable voice at a crucial moment. "This is a time when a together Hunter Thompson could make a difference in this country."

Recently I've had the pleasure of meeting several journalists, some of them staff writers for papers and one or two freelancers who do various types of reporting.

Scott Horton: There's this lady named Sibel Edmonds, and she lived in Iran and Turkey and moved to the US, became a US citizen and after the attacks of September 11 she heard FBI agents on TV saying 'We need translators, we need help here, we're at war against the enemy and so forth and we need to be able to translate what they're saying to each other on the telephone.'

So she did her patriotic duty and volunteered. Actually, they already had her application from before and had lost it in the paper work or something, so they fast tracked her right into the translation department, and, my best understanding, I think she only worked in the translation department as a contractor for the FBI translation department between September 11 to early spring of 2002. That was it. Not even half a year.

Yet, apparently, during the time that Mrs. Edmonds spent there, working at the FBI, doing these translations, she found out some things that people with power would prefer that she hadn't found out. Now, there's big news, she's willing to spill her guts, defy her gag order, and tell everything she knows to any major TV outlet in the US who will sign a contract with her, promising to air the entire segment unedited, and here to discuss this is my friend Luke Ryland, he goes by 'Lukery' in the blogosphere, and he runs Let Sibel Edmonds Speak. blogspot.com. You can sometimes find him posting up at my blog, TheStressBlog as well. Welcome to the show, Luke.

Luke Ryland: GDay Scott.

As news organizations slash budgets and scale back bureaus, CNN is expanding—except not in real life.

In the week of Nov. 5, the news giant is set to open a news-gathering outpost in Second Life. And unlike news service Reuters, which embedded a real reporter in the online virtual world last year, CNN will rely on Second Life "residents" to do all the legwork.

Journalism faces a crisis around the world and unless it's fixed, society is in big trouble, American scholar and media activist Robert McChesney says.

"The market's not going to solve the problem.... The technology's not going to rescue us."

Great journalism requires resources, institutional support, well-paid journalists and competition, McChesney told an audience at the Simon Fraser University downtown campus Saturday.

Like its forerunners, the FEMA fakery isn't just spin but something worse. It's government-sponsored propaganda. When the Chinese and other global miscreants practice it, we condemn it. When the Bush administration does it, it seems to blend into the background of disinformation and outright untruths that have damaged the president's credibility at home and, more ominously, overseas.

News outlets including CNN, the Associated Press, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times uncritically quoted White House spokeswoman Dana Perino's response to a question about an October 23 Federal Emergency Management Agency press conference, in which the questions were asked by FEMA staffers playing reporters. Perino said of the conference, "It is not a practice that we would employ here at the White House and we certainly don't condone it." But these news outlets failed to note previous Bush administration scandals involving "fake" reporting.

Ninety years after Walter Lippmann first railed against the complicity of the media in wartime propaganda, we're back at ground zero.

Walter Lippmann (1889-1974) was the most influential American journalist of the 20th century. Born into one of the German-Jewish "Our Crowd" families of New York City, he began his career as a cub reporter for Lincoln Steffens, the crusading investigative journalist, then became one of the original editors of the New Republic, and was recruited to write speeches for President Woodrow Wilson and help formulate his plan to make the world "safe for democracy," the Fourteen Points. In the 1920s, Lippmann became editorial director of the New York World, then a major daily newspaper with a Democratic orientation. When it folded, the New York Herald Tribune offered him a column, which, with the Washington Post, served as his journalistic base for almost 50 years.

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It appears the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has found the answer to nosy reporters in the two years since Hurricane Katrina: have a press conference and have your own people ask the questions.

ProPublica, the newest player on the investigative journalism beat, aims to produce "the very special piece," in the words of Paul Steiger, the former managing editor of The Wall Street Journal, who will oversee the operation as editor in chief. To do so, Mr. Steiger will deploy two dozen reporters and editors. He'll then offer that work as exclusives to news outlets around the country. "We would submit to their vetting process, their editing process, their legal vetting," Mr. Steiger told Off The Record.

Print newspapers are dying as readers stray to the internet. But is online journalism really ready to take over?

The big Peak Oil conference of the year took place in Houston last week – but before we get to the substance of that, a few words about where we were. It is hard to imagine a more horrifying urban construct than this anti-city in the malarial swamps just off the Gulf of Mexico. And it is hard to conceive of a more desolate and depressing urban district, even of such an anti-city, than the utter wasteland around Houston's convention center.

Thanks to the generosity of alumni Ed and Becky Meek, the University of Mississippi plans to ask the Board of Trustees of State Institutions of Higher Learning to approve the creation of a new School of Journalism, Marketing-Communications and Technology.

The new school will focus on the future of journalism and communications with an emphasis on technology and its impact on society, a unique approach to journalism education among the nation's institutions of higher learning. The Meeks have provided $5.3 million for the school's initial funding, university officials announced Friday.

A long-running dispute between a weekly newspaper in Phoenix and law enforcement officials took a series of sharp turns over the last two days, including the arrest of the newspaper owners, followed by the dismissal of charges against them and an investigation into their paper.

The Online News Association announced the winners of the 2007 OJAs Friday night in Toronto.

The winners were...

The BBC Trust yesterday unanimously approved plans to cut thousands of jobs, sell off its west London headquarters and reduce the number of programmes it makes by a tenth.

The radical overhaul immediately sparked a furious backlash from staff likely to strike within weeks, with feelings running particularly high in the news and factual divisions where job losses will run into four figures.

Sarah Liebowitz was nervous. In the smallish newsroom of the Concord Monitor in New Hampshire in June, a new reporter was about to take his seat at the desk next to hers. State house reporter Liebowitz, at twenty-five, would be nearly thirty-six years younger than the new guy. "I was worried that he'd hear me saying something silly on the phone, or that my messy desk would make him wish he never made the move," she says. The new guy was Mike Pride, and "the move" was his stunning announcement a week earlier that he was going to leave the comfortable corner editor's office that he had occupied for the past twenty-four years and spend his last twelve months before retirement toiling on the newsroom floor, as a sixty-one-year-old reporter.

Paul E Steiger, who was the top editor of The Wall Street Journal for 16 years, and a pair of wealthy Californians are assembling a group of investigative journalists who will give away their work to media outlets.

The nonprofit group, called Pro Publica, will pitch each project to a newspaper or magazine (and occasionally to other media) where the group hopes the work will make the strongest impression. The plan is to do long-term projects, uncovering misdeeds in government, business and organizations.

Monday's New York Post ran a story by bureau chief Charles Hurt blaming a delay on finding information about captured soldiers in Iraq on the privacy framework that protects Americans from unfettered surveillance.

The biting story, based on a leak from an administration-friendly source, blames bureaucratic rules for a 10-hour delay in getting permission for the NSA to set up a wiretap inside American telecom switches to capture Iraqi communications -- hours that could have meant the difference between life and death for the soldiers.

Hurt's piece, relying on a "senior congressional staffer with access to the classified case" is quite compelling, but would be even more so if it weren't a carefully constructed, politically motivated lie that's already been discredited.

"What news of Rome?" they would ask of those on the Imperial highways. People have an incurable curiosity about the world around them and the earliest sources of news was travelers.

Censorship of the internet in China is becoming more draconian, according to new details of Beijing's online restrictions published by human rights organisations.

The claims come in a report from international journalism watchdog Reporters Sans Frontieres and the China Human Rights Defenders group, which examines the way the Chinese government reacts to free speech on the internet.

Written by an anonymous author who claims to work as a technician inside a Chinese web company, the report details the expanding influence of the country's censorious approach to the internet - and its "appalling" effect on freedom of speech.

Foreign journalists perused the rows of corn and the groves of date palms pregnant with low-hanging fruit here this week, while agents of Syria's ever-present security services stood in the background, watching closely, almost nervously.

"You see — around us are farmers, corn, produce, nothing else," said Ahmed Mehdi, the Deir Zoir director of the Arab Center for the Studies of Arid Zones and Dry Lands, a government agricultural research center, as he led two of the journalists around the facilities.

It was here at this research center in the sleepy Bedouin city of Deir Zoir in eastern Syria that an Israeli journalist reported Israel had conducted an air raid in early September.

Efforts to enact a federal shield law for journalists have passed a critical milestone in the Senate. By a 15-to-2 vote, the Judiciary Committee approved legislation sponsored by Senators Arlen Specter, Republican of Pennsylvania, and Charles Schumer, Democrat of New York, to grant reporters limited protection against being forced to reveal confidential sources in federal court.

The measure, the Free Flow of Information Act, offers reporters and their confidential sources weaker protection in the broad realm of national security than a bill approved by the House Judiciary Committee in August — weaker than we would have liked.

When Joe Cannon, the editor of The Deseret Morning News in (Salt Lake City), Utah, spoke to a secretive Christian networking group last month in Salt Lake City, he said he was searching for grist for his weekly column.

Never mind that the meeting of the Council on National Policy, the group in question, was actually closed to the press, and that he had agreed to keep quiet on what transpired at the event, which included speeches by Vice President Dick Cheney and former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, the presidential candidate.

Much has been written about the CIA cocaine operation at Mena, Arkansas during Bill and Hillary Clinton's watch as governor and first lady of that state in the 1980s. So I wondered why Carl Bernstein left it out of his book on Hillary Clinton, A Woman in Charge, when the argument put forth by Clinton biographer Roger Morris in his book, Partners in Power, was a particularly compelling one about the CIA operation taking place.

I decided to ask Bernstein formally for an explanation about this at his Hillary Clinton booktalk last Friday at the Barnes & Noble bookstore on the Upper West Side, situated a safe distance from the Columbia University and New York University war protest crowds.

Journalists need not fear the emergence of "user generated content" online as a threat to their jobs. Yes, millions of readers now are finding information online from publications that did not exist a decade ago. But none of that content emerged from empty air. Every original article, blog post, comment and wiki entry online originated from some Internet user, somewhere.

Just think of those users as sources. Who is the ideal person to harness all their information and fashion into organized, relevant information for readers?

You, the experienced journalist -- the person who can take 14 pages of notes and sort through them to find the golden nugget that makes a story. Here are some reasons why journalists ought to be the ideal leaders to guide online content communities.

A group representing major Canadian newspapers says media requests for access to government information are being deliberately stymied.

The Canadian Newspaper Association also says its formal complaint about outrageous delays and fees is languishing in a federal ombudsman's office.

"There are two guarantors of the public's right to know in Canada – the media and the information commissioner," said Anne Kothawala, head of the association.

"And when the media are blocked and the commissioner's office is paralyzed, the public's right to know is in trouble," Kothawala told a news conference yesterday.

As someone who has written repeatedly about the myriad failures of the mainstream media, it soothes my potentially wire-tapped soul to know that organizations such as Project Censored are working hard to pick up the slack. They offer many excellent resources, from a long list of news publications not owned by Rupert Murdoch (getting shorter every day, it seems), to a handy corporate/media ownership chart (did you know the Associated Press wire service and Lockheed Martin share board members?), to a study of conservative -- yes, conservative -- bias in the Associated Press wire service (which I'm sure they'll tell you has absolutely, positively nothing to do with the board member from Lockheed Martin, or the three from Mutual Insurance). But perhaps their best and most important work, the work to which I want to draw your attention today, is their list of the top 25 underreported (or, in their words, "censored") stories of 2006-2007.

Richard Mellon Scaife loses roughly 20 million bucks a year on the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. Rupert Murdoch loses, by his own estimation, between $30 million and $50 million a year on the New York Post. Ditto Sun Myung Moon and The Washington Times. None of these are remotely the kind of newspaper that would give anyone pride of ownership or serve to manifest a sense of civic duty. So why do they do it? Because the rest of the world doesn't know any better than to take them seriously.

Fox, on the other hand, does make money; tons of it. Remember poor Bart Simpson: "And then I had this dream that my whole family were just cartoon characters and our success had led to some crazy propaganda network called Fox News." Since money trumps everthing else in Hollywood, Fox will probably get away with its naked political censorship of the Emmys, but it shouldn't...