You may have noticed a slight drop in the quantity of blog postings around here lately. That’s due to a number of factors — my general laziness being the predominant one. But in my defense, I’m also on a deadline crunch. I’m writing an article about the future of the news media for Currents magazine, published by the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education (CASE), and I’ve been up to my ears researching what the experts and futurists have to say and conducting a couple of interviews.
I’ve found some interesting stuff online about the future of the news media, especially as it pertains to the concept of citizen journalism. Here are a few I found especially helpful.
Future of PR. This is a wiki for discussions about, well, the future of PR, among those in colleges and universities interested in the subject. It’s facilitated by Dan Forbush of ProfNet/PRNewswire. Dan and others in the wiki have assembled a host of good information about where things are headed in PR, marketing and media.
The American Press Institute Media Center‘s Digital Think site. This is the digital storytelling link I pointed to last Friday. Lots of good stuff there; much to assimilate.
We Media — the website for last October’s We Media conference, put on by the API Media Center. This is a good site about citizen (or participatory, or peer-to-peer, or grassroots, or open-source) journalism, and it links to a good 66-page primer (PDF) on the topic. The book is now two years old and slightly dated, but it is well researched and fairly well written. The authors wax a bit pedantic in a couple of the chapters, but overall it’s a good start for anyone interested in grassroots journalism.
Journalism.org, creators of the annual State of the News Media report.
EPIC 2015 — a dystopic vision of the future mediascape, and the eeriest Flash movie I’ve seen in some time. Definitely worth the eight minutes if you’ve got the time to spare. The first couple of minutes rehashes the past decade, but after that, this vision of the future is very 1984-esque. I’m interviewing one of the creators this afternoon.
There’s much more, but those are the highlights.
Now all I’ve got to do is pull all this research together in 1,500 words. Piece of cake. But the blogging will probably have to be put on hold while I mix the cake ingredients.
blogging, citizen journalism, Internet, news
Andy writes! 