The Rise of Citizen Journalism

With news coming out that the Boston Globe may be pushed to chapter 11, and the fact that several big name newspapers across the country are shutting down or switching format (the Christian Science Monitor went online only) I've been thinking about the decline of journalism of the past. Television journalism, with some obvious exceptions, focuses a lot of its time on sensational stories and gotcha journalism. My favorite thing lately is WHDH and the Fox boston affiliate going after public employees that are making decent money... by working over 100 hours a week - vilifying them for busting there asses to provide for their families and providing vital public services at the same time.

To me, the best journalism has always been one of the strong suits of the major newspapers. Writers that are able to get to the heart of the issue and know the inside actors and can actually get some access to their subject matter. It's not "gotcha" journalism in the sense that it is meant to be in-depth with analysis of subject matter, not a quick hit on some unsuspecting bus driver who happens to be 50 with 4 kids under the age of 18. Instead of trying to evoke rage among subscribers, it tries to find answers, reasons, draw connections, and provide explanations for the question at hand. These stories fall in many categories: human interest, business, politics, science & health, you name it. The point of this post is that I'm worried that we may be losing high quality journalism in the mass media.

One of the investigative journalism programs on tv is Front Line. Their programming is done by WGBH in Boston and is top notch, I've seen and heard of many of their programs used in academic settings. A loss of funding for that program would be a big blow to investigative journalism on tv. 

What would fill the void if major publishers like the Globe went under? Would blogs have the same effect? I don't think so. 

While we've seen a large jump in citizen journalists and bloggers, I don't think that most have connections and access to produce content of the same caliber as traditional journalists with big name outfits do. I also don't see most bloggers willing to invest the time and effort into this kind of thing. Blogs are typically narrow in scope and have no funding for these kind of things.

Enter: Arianna Huffington and the Huffington Post.

This past Sunday the Huffington Post announced their new investigative journalism fund. Their mission statement is essentially to combat the consolidation of newspapers and the cutting of investigative journalism by hiring laid off reporters and providing resources for staff members to conduct quality investigative journalism. They also want the citizen journalist to submit their own pitches and story ideas, and they'll be picking up many of them I'm sure. 

One issue that I see with this is the ideological bent of the HuffPo (as its known). Being a far left blog it's easy to dismiss all of their content as ideological in nature, and in general being opinion oriented. Perhaps this is an opportunity for some rebranding for them, and to tap into another audience that they may not be reaching with their current format. Maybe its just a great idea to help preserve some of the best journalism out there and provide a way for these laid off writers with a way of maintaining cash flow. Either way, I think we come out ahead as the reader. 

So what do you think about the fall of print journalism, the rise of the citizen journalist, and the merits of blog based investigative reporting?

Hiring Yourself: Website design made easy still sucks

This makes the 3rd installment in my little series here about this stupid idea I had that is slowly but surely becoming a pain in the ass. 

After looking over all of my coding platform options and discussing it with my tech consiglieri (again, props to AJ), I've decided to go with Drupal as my platform of choice. This beat out Wordpress, Joomla, and Soapblox for the right to serve my needs. Integral to this choice was the ability to customize the layout and content. A huge plus to this is Drupal's modular design and the amount of support that is out there for it. Drupal developers have created thousands of modules that you can easily integrate into your website. There are hundreds of themes/layouts out there as well, you just have to put it together, customize, and configure. 

Sounds easy right? Well, it was thanks to a great website called Learn by the drop.com. Learn by the drop features some great video tutorials that make it pretty easy to get a quick site going, and I've been using this to slap together a test site that I'm going to use on the 2nd domain that I bought for a resume site. 

This is fantastic until you need to do something outside of what's discussed there. Then its all trial and error and constantly fucking shit up. Which is expected, but when you're fumbling around trying to get a browse button for image upload and you end up breaking things, that's not so fun. This is complicated by a round about administrator interface that seems straight forward but actually isn't. Supposedly, this is being addressed with version 7 of Drupal that is currently in development.

Drupal has a lot of potential for what I want to do. It seems I've lost my ability to pick up new computer things with ease. I'm gonna stick with it though, and try to make progress. More updates to come.

Hiring Yourself

My fall semester of Senior year at Clark was supposed to be spent entirely on courses for a minor in Entreprenuership and business courses. I've always wanted to be my own boss to some extent and I figured if it were to ever happen I should probably know how to write a business plan and navigate a startup. Unfortunately, that summer I took an internship on the campaign in NH and got sucked in for the entire semester and took the Fall off from school. I learned a lot but not about starting a business. 

Lately, this job hunting business has me looking at all my options, including going into business for myself. One thing that I've been reading about is passive income. Basically, work you do once that grows as an investment. One of these is writing a book. Costs nothing to write, and I have a lot of free time, so why not? They say that you should write what you know so I've begun doing some mind mapping for a book about volunteer recruiting, refining techniques, and building a self sustaining organization of volunteers for non-profits, small campaigns, and local committees. 

My opposition research has shown that there is a bit of a gap in this area of literature. There hasn't been a book written on volunteer recruiting since 2004. What this means is that there's a big opening for someone like myself to write about the techniques used on the various campaigns in 2007-2008. 

The various incarnations of this idea that I've been toying with for the past couple days has brought me to the conclusion that a website on this topic is both viable, but with back up tools such as a book/ebook, and seminars/workshops I could turn this into a real business or consulting firm. I'll probably be using this as a sounding board as I flesh out my ideas and move forward on this project. At the very least it is giving me a chance to expand my portfolio and develop some skills that I can bring to a job once I get hired if this doesn't fully pan out. 

Personal Finances

Ever since I got out of high school there has been one thing that I've wished I had: personal finance education. About half way through my JR year of college I realized that I have no idea how to manage my own money. Aside from one survey course in economics, all of my education related to money has come from AP news articles and wikipedia. Given that the bulk of our lives are spent trying to produce money, maintain it, and grow it, wouldn't you think that we should know more about how we do that?

Over the past several months I've taken some simple steps to get a better handle on my finances and spending. In 2006, I switched entirely over to Bank of America, mainly because at the time I was going to Texas for an internship and Cape Cod 5 just doesn't seem to have ATMs there yet (I hear in the next couple months, or maybe it was eons..). Well, BoA turned out to be a good decision, I've got free checking, 0%apr on my credit card over a year later (I'm not gonna ask and jinx it), and free online bill pay. Perhaps the most useful tool I've gotten out of it is the online banking. Sure, I used it with CC5 in the past, but BoA has a much more evolved set of tools that allow you to better see your transactions and analyze your financial situation much more readily. If you're thinking about switching to a nationwide bank, I'd recomment them.

Something else I've done to help educate myself on personal finance is to beging reading several finance blogs. Some of my favorites of these include: The Simple Dollar, Lazyman and Money, Free from Broke, and The Tao of Making Money. These all vary in their interests and there are plent of other sources out there, but these are some pretty good general interest personal finance blogs that I've found some helpful articles on. One great thing I got from these is the 100% free credit report site CreditKarma.com. Unlike Freecreditreport.com, it's actually free and pretty helpful. They make their money through suggestions for other services, but if you just ignore that its a pretty great site.

Today I started using Mint.com which has turned out to be pretty fantastic. If you're looking for a utility to see your entire cashflow, it categorizes all expenditures and graphs it, and gives you budgeting tools. So far I think it's pretty fantastic. Once I get into online stock trading (whenever that is) it should be that much more useful for keeping track of my portfolio. It's completely safe and worth checking out.