Matthew Ingram believes the cover-up of David Rohde’s kidnap made ‘things harder not just for future kidnapping victims such as Rohde, but for newspapers and other mainstream media outlets as a whole.’
Ingram responds to criticism in the comments below the post.
Also see: NYTimes.com: ‘Keeping News of Kidnapping Off Wikipedia’
Use of Twitter by mainstream media outlets has been much discussed in regards to recent reportage from Iran. Multimedia journalist Alex Wood provides a blog post with some good links and thoughts about hashtags and information spread. Particularly interesting is this part:
“[D]ig a little deeper into the statistics, and you find that over 50 per cent of tweets about IranElection are not first hand information. Twitter allows users to repeat other people’s tweets and send them on to their friends, who can then go on and repeat this to their friends. There is no control mechanism for fact or fiction and misinformation can spread quickly, especially in times of conflict.”
Demotix – the website which aims to match citizen journalists with mainstream media outlets – has been given a slick new look:
The ‘user-generated newswire’ splits revenues from content between citizen journalists and publishers and now features a handy ‘news by continent’ search.
In an interview with Journalism.co.uk, Demotix founder Turi Munthe said the site was aimed at both amateurs and professional freelance journalists and could help combat the ‘mass shrinkage’ of foreign news coverage by media organisations.
“We want to bring professionals back in and broker deals for their images all over the world. Professionals will lead Demotix; they will lead the aspirations of all our street journalists,” he said.
“By creating a website that everyone can access in many ways we give a megaphone to the person on the street where ever they are. Demotix sees itself as standing on the lines of free speech.”