All Posts Tagged With: "journalism now"

On the latest Journalism Now Podcast (where I’m one of the regulars), we interviewed Jacob Colker, founder of a very cool “micro-volunteering” service using the iPhone (and the web).

The Extraordinaries is a brilliant concept in empowering the crowd to do good things. Foremost, the idea is to allow people to use the little bits of spare time they have (riding the bus home, waiting at the DMV, waiting for the movie to start, etc.) to do small bits of volunteering using the Extraordinaries iPhone app. Examples include tagging photos for the Smithsonian or other museums. The San Diego Voice investigative news website is asking people to use the app to record location and photos of city agencies and buildings wasting water during the current drought period.

This app and model of micro-volunteering has potentially huge implications for journalism. Reporters and editors should be thinking about how Colker’s project can help them improve and expand their reporting and research projects. I hope you’ll listen to the interview.

The new Journalism Now Podcast I mentioned previously is now online with podcast No. 1. The eight panelists (including me) and host David Stanton all introduce themselves for this first episode, then finally get into actually discussing some issues and predictions.

We’re all participating using Skype, and the audio and levels aren’t perfect on this first one. But it’s our first attempt, so know that we’ll surely improve the sound quality. We’ll be doing these podcasts weekly, produced by and with support from the University of Florida and the Poynter Institute.

This afternoon I took part in the first-ever recording of the “Journalism Now Podcast,” which is a weekly online roundtable discussion covering “multimedia, data and social aspects of modern news.”

Podcast founder and host David Stanton, who teaches digital journalism at the University of Florida’s College of Journalism and Communications, has invited eight digital media and multimedia experts to a weekly chat about the media issues of the day. I’m sure all of us won’t make it every week (Steve Yelvington went missing today due to a firewall issue with Skype), so it’ll be a rotating cast of characters.

I’m not exactly sure when podcast No. 1 will go up, but Stanton thought possibly as early as Sunday. I’ll let you know.

The podcast is a joint project of U of F and the Poynter Institute. Representing Poynter on the panel is Ellyn Angelotti, the Institute’s interactivity editor. And there are a couple Poynter staff alums: Paige West, now at MSNBC.com, and me. (Full list of panelists are listed on the main podcast page.)