MGP2006: Democracy & Independence -- Sharing News & Politics in a Connected World

Lisa Williams looking for help on Placeblogger project

MGP2006 alum Lisa Williams, who is getting started on a $200,000+
project
(funded by a Knight Brothers 21st Century News Challenge grant) is looking for help. She is planning to build tools that will graft onto her Placeblogger.com site and help to create a geo-location system for local online community blogs. She writes in an email posting:

"Looking for a few good bloggers . . . to join the effort to bring news into the 21st century. I'm looking for someone to work on a project. Know someone who knows a lot about online community and wants to get a chance to build what they've been blogging about? . . . Programming experience isn't required -- but understanding programmers and wanting them to succeed is."

Contact Lisa at: lisa@cadence90.com. She and her project are located in
suburban Boston.

Jeff Jarvis wraps up layoffs at the Greensboro paper

Jeff Jarvis (MGP2006 alum) has posted a wrapup on the layoffs announced
last week at the Greensboro News & Record. He juxtaposes his comments with
those of the paper's blogging editor. There's also a link to a terrific
slide show from the Lawrence Journal-World folks summarizing their deep
efforts to be digital:

THE JARVIS POST:
http://www.buzzmachine.com/2007/06/09/reinventing-before-resizing-newspapers/

THE LAWRENCE SLIDESHOW:
http://www.slideshare.net/simon/doing-local-right

Mizzou's Bentley finds vibrant blog activity at KTVI Fox St. Louis

MGP-JTM alum Clyde Bentley spent a couple of days at the Fox network affiliate in St. Louis,  KTVI, and appears to describe a vibrant blog ecosystem which he says is not really political but is more populated by, in his words, "are family-oriented moms."  He says MyFoxSTL has 13,600 registered users, more than 9,000 of whom have active blogs.  The station's website breaks them down by overall topics like entertain, news, weather, traffic, sports and music. A quick look at the news blogs suggests many are far from anything that has been historically called journalism.

McManus reports on copy-desk centralization by MediaNews

MGP2006 alumnus John McManus reports on moves to create a single copy desk serving most Bay Area papers owned by MediaNews Group in a post on his GradeTheNews website. The report includes a point-by-point rebuttal by MediaNews Editor Kevin Keane, as well as several quotes from MediaNews insiders -- given anonymity by McManus -- who claim moral is poor at the chain.

ORIGINAL URL: http://www.gradethenews.org/2007/bowman.htm