FACT CHECK — Abercrombie: 'We're The Only Species That Make Judgments On Ourselves' - Fact Check. "This is, again, only my opinion — I think these gorillas are seeing that there's danger being perpetrated on them in these particular areas, and because of that, they're gradually migrating to these safer zones. " Assuming the apes are, in fact, changing their behavior based off their environment, they're not alone. "When human measures for intelligence are applied to other species, dolphins come in just behind humans in brainpower," Discovery News reported last year. "Dolphins demonstrate skills and awareness previously thought to be present only in humans. " The article discusses research by Lori Marino, a lecturer in neuroscience and behavioral biology at Emory University.
According to Marino, dolphins are capable of human-like skills. "These include mirror self-recognition, cultural learning, comprehension of symbol-based communication systems, and an understanding of abstract concepts," the article states. But is this the type of self-judgment Abercrombie was referring to? (Re)Structuring Journalism. Health Draws a Community Together Online.
In April 2010, The World Company, a family-owned news organization in Lawrence, Kansas (population 88,000), launched WellCommons, created to be the community's health site. While it's difficult to determine the "first" in anything digital, WellCommons is certainly among the pioneers in marrying journalism and social media—and making it work for reporters and citizens alike.
Here are a few of its elements heading us in this direction: Community Engagement: WellCommons provides a look at what journalism can be when integrated with social media. Using a content management system (CMS) that we developed, our site eliminates the barriers that have separated journalists from community members. Niche Journalism: In addition to its main site for the Lawrence Journal-World, LJWorld.com, The World Company already has two niche websites—KUSports.com and lawrence.com, an entertainment site—developed in the late 1990's and mid-2000's, respectively.
Getting Started Building Trust What does this mean? Cal-Adapt. Coming soon! Cal-Adapt's "Historic Photo Hunt" will give users an opportunity to help scientists monitor changes in the landscape over time. Much like a geocache, we will provide coordinates that may be used to navigate to the recorded location of a California landscape photo taken by USGS in the 1920’s and 30’s.
These recorded locations are close, but not exact as they were drawn on a topo map by the original photographers in the field. The challenge will be to find the exact place that the original photographer was standing in order to reproduce the same shot today. The photos that we will be hosting for this activity are a part of the Wieslander Vegetation Type Mapping (VTM) Project.
You can view an excellent example of this activity in Noah Wasserman’s 100 Years in Tuolumne site. About Us | Cool California. What is CoolCalifornia.org's mission? Our mission is to provide all Californians with the tools they need to take action to protect the climate and keep California cool. Why was CoolCalifornia.org developed? CoolCalifornia.org’s partner organizations seek to empower Californians to improve the State’s future and protect its environment. CoolCalifornia.org is THE new one-stop-shop for all Californians - packed with quick, easy-to-use and reliable tools that all Californians need to save money and reduce their impact on the climate. Who developed CoolCalifornia.org? The founding partners include State Government Agencies, Universities, and Next10, a nonprofit organization. Tool Development and Collaboration CoolCalifornia.org has worked with the following partners to develop portions of the site and tools:
Reporting Pushes Past Language and Ethnic Divides. Present and past: Alhambra Source editor Daniela Gerson is a community journalist as was the late Warner Jenkins, editor of the now-defunct Alhambra Post-Advocate, whom the city honored with a statue. Photo by Tom Shea. Municipal elections were canceled last fall in Alhambra, California, a predominantly Asian and Latino city located about eight miles east of downtown Los Angeles. This is the first time that people there can remember this happening. City officials say this means that residents are satisfied; why else would no one have challenged any of the five incumbents on the city council and school board who were up for re-election?
But many residents—the majority of whom are foreign born—are unaware of the city's governing processes. Nor do they feel a strong sense of belonging to this place. One reason they might feel this way is the longtime absence of a single news source available to all of Alhambra's residents. Knitting Communities Together This is not a simple task. LAT on Patch.com. Patch.com can blow you away with numbers. From about 50 outposts a year ago, the company now has 827 hyper-local websites spread across 20 states. Nearly 1,000 journalists post 5,000 articles a day. That's one every 12 seconds. In addition, Patch has added 2,000 bloggers, for a total stable of nearly 6,000.
One final statistic: After Patch headquarters in New York put out a call on Twitter (echoing my own) for feedback, it came trickling in. This seemed to confirm, along with weeks of poking around several of the websites, a certain profile of Patch.com sites: very much a work in progress, still unknown in many homes. That summation might describe a lot of traditional small-town newspapers. When I first checked in with Patch a year ago, I had my doubts about whether its formatted, franchise-style approach would produce enough novel information to attract readers and, importantly, the advertisers needed to keep the thing rolling for the long haul.
Marcellus Shale from The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Website tracks shale drillers. A group of researchers, software developers and environmentalists has introduced an online tool designed to track what's happening in Pennsylvania's rapidly expanding natural gas industry. FracTracker.org is not a typical website, packed with data that a user must examine to get information, according to its backers.
Instead, the site is interactive, giving searchers data, and the ability to map information, interact with other interested parties, and contribute to by adding data and photographs. "We saw there was a need for citizen surveillance, for monitoring a whole new industry, with the Marcellus shale," said Chuck Christen, operations director for the Center for Healthy Environments and Communities, part of the University of Pittsburgh's Graduate School of Public Health.
The Marcellus shale is an underground formation that covers about 65,000 square miles and covers all of parts of seven states, including Pennsylvania, West Virginia and New York. TribLive commenting policy. Highlights from SXSW: 7 steps to building trust and credibility with an online audience. Doreen Marchionni spent the last four years studying how journalists can boost their credibility and engagement with digital audiences.
She found the simple secret: Interact online and be human. However, she says, it takes more than simply having a Twitter account and posting story links. “When your audience is able to participate and influence the outcome of a story,” that is conversational journalism, she told me by phone last week. Marchionni, who studied the topic for her Ph.D. at the University of Missouri in 2009, now teaches at Pacific Lutheran University, and is an editor at The Seattle Times. She discusses the findings of her doctoral dissertation Tuesday at SXSW. Her presentation will focus on practical tips newsrooms can take to increase interaction, trust and audience for news websites. Below are her suggestions for journalists.
Use the tools of the Internet to commit journalism. Reporters need to be on Facebook, Twitter and other social networks. Don’t forget to close the loop. Five Things AOL’s Patch Is Doing Right. Patch has gotten somewhat of a bad reputation in journalism circles — remember when USC journalism professor Robert Hernandez asked Tim Armstrong if Patch is “evil” at 2010′s Online News Association conference? For those of you who have been living under a rock, Patch is AOL’s local news initiative that now has more than 500 sites in 20 different states. Some newspapers feel threatened by a big tech company, some say it’s a waste of money, some say Patch is exploitive of its staff– but maybe it’s just too early to tell whether Patch is really going to make a big impact in hyperlocal news. Despite the criticisms, I’ve lately noticed a few things that Patch is doing right to serve its communities.
So whether you disagree with Patch or not, there’s a a thing or two you can learn from them about transparency and openness. 1. If you’re unfamiliar with how Patch works, each community has a local editor. 2. 3. Suggesting tips for the editors is easy. 4. 5. The Community Information Toolkit, Version 1.0. Curbwise.com - Douglas County home sales and property valuations. Visualizing California Climate Change | KQED's Climate Watch. An engrossing one-stop shop for California’s climate future goes online If you’re like me, and you spend a good part of every day thinking about climate change and California, you may have already lost yourself in the treasure trove of climate data and mapping fun that is Cal-Adapt, a comprehensive series of online tools just released by the California Natural Resources Agency and the California Energy Commission. And if you’re not like me, it’s still worth checking out. Built by UC Berkeley’s Geospatial Innovation Facility, Cal-Adapt is designed to aid local and regional planners in preparing to adapt to climate change by providing scientific data from institutions like Scripps Institute of Oceanography, U.S.
Geological Survey, UC Merced, and the Pacific Institute, and integrating it with mapping and charting capabilities from Google. One tool allows you to quickly see climate projections for their regions. Times launching database that maps, analyzes crime reports across L.A. County. For car thieves working the streets of Los Angeles County, few stretches of pavement are more attractive than the two blocks of Alondra Boulevard that run from the 605 Freeway to Studebaker Road. At least 20 vehicles were stolen there in a recent six-month period. Across town, a block of Wilcox Avenue just north of Hollywood Boulevard has been the scene of more than a dozen burglaries. And the Mid-Wilshire neighborhood, which typically sees three violent crimes a week, had a recent spike of nine assaults and robberies.
These crime hot spots were culled from a new database and crime-mapping program built by the Los Angeles Times that contains information on all serious crimes recorded by the Los Angeles Police Department and the Los Angeles county Sheriff's Department, the two agencies that patrol the vast majority of the county. 10 Common features found on hyperlocal news sites. 2008 and 2009 saw an explosion in the number of hyperlocal news media around the world. Since then, hyperlocal media has matured and many news sites now offer similar features that both distribute and aggregate news from their respective communities. Community voices Hyperlocal news sites often capture the thoughts and voices of their community of readers through blog posts and articles written by citizen journalists or local bloggers. The Seattle PostGlobe is one such hyperlocal site incorporating this approach.
Story submission page Nobody knows more about what’s happening in the community than those who live in it. Many hyperlocals tap into this knowledge by requesting news tips on their site using prominent graphics and submission forms. Fix-it callout In addition to a general call-out for news tips, many sites also ask readers to identify problems in the city or region that need to be fixed. Community calendar Donation page Social media Video Contact page Reader-submitted photos Aggregation. 10 Ways Journalism Around the World Is Being Revived and Reinvented. Prepping for a session for the International Press Institute (IPI) annual congress last week in Vienna, I asked the panelists, among other things, to describe a media trend they find encouraging. In addressing the same question, I found myself hooked by an idea that has no metrics but seems quite real nonetheless: a significant shift in attention from the diminishment of journalism to its rediscovery and reinvention.
This sort of epiphany arrives at different times for different people; many digital pioneers have declared as much for years. The turning point for me came in the 152-page report on the future of news that I edited for IPI along with Poynter Online Director Julie Moos. The report, “Brave News Worlds: Navigating the New Media Landscape,” was published last week. The 42 essays were written by news executives, leaders of nonprofits, digital thought leaders and educators from more than 20 countries. That’s not to say they’ll do that work entirely on their own. Spotted... Innovations in Community News. In February 2009, a month or so after being laid off by the Sunday Rutland Herald and Barre-Montpelier Times Argus, Anne Galloway drove two hours to have dinner with a perfect stranger.
That meeting would ultimately generate for local journalism in Vermont, more than $80,000 in just a matter of months, substantially increase web traffic for a statewide news site and demonstrate to the industry a new sustainability model. At the time, Galloway was busy preparing to launch a news website covering state politics and civic affairs. Bill Schubart, a recently retired, author and serial charitable board member had been plotting the creation of a Vermont Journalism Trust, an effort with some friends to financially support statewide journalism. A mutual acquaintance put the two in touch and they hit it off on the phone immediate. Schubart suggested they continue the conversation over dinner- that night - so Galloway made the two-hour drive to meet with Schubart.
By November 2010, it was official. Journalism Lives - How interactivity is improving the news. ___________Welcome________ David Herzog, Donald W. Reynolds Fellow COLUMBIA, Mo. – Despite a dramatic increase of available information due to the prevalence of the Internet, many important government records and data are still not readily accessible for citizens and journalists to view online. In an effort to improve the transparency in state and local government and encourage the use of data by citizens, journalists and businesses, David Herzog , a 2010-2011 Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute (RJI) Fellow, has created Open Missouri , a website that helps make Missouri government data more accessible to those who wish to access it.
Open Missouri has located more than 135 Missouri state government databases that do not exist anywhere on the Internet. “It is really difficult for journalists and citizens to figure out exactly what data government agencies collect,” Herzog said. “Open Missouri is meant to provide a platform for people who are interested in sharing data,” Herzog said.
About the Donald W. Your Eye on the Capitol. From crowdfunding to data-driven journalism, four ways the Knight News Challenge is shaping the future. True/Slant Tests Web Journalism Model. Sunlight Foundation. User-Generated / Community Content (Transformation Tracker) TEDxPresidio - Robert Rosenthal - Investigative journalism in the 21st Century.