Journalism in the Hands of the Neighborhood

JOURNALISM IN THE HANDS OF THE NEIGHBORHOOD
[SOURCE: New York Times, AUTHOR: Noam Cohen]
Citizen journalism has become the faddish name for the effort to encourage regular folk to use the Internet to report the news directly, but Todd Wolfson, a doctoral candidate at the University of Pennsylvania and one of the organizers of the Media Mobilizing Project in Philadelphia, has a point: many of the people whom his organization and an immigrant rights group, Juntos, are teaching to make video reports for streaming on the Internet are not citizens. Many are not even legal residents. The hope, however, is that they can be journalists. The classes are supported by a $150,000 news challenge grant from the Knight Foundation in Miami, which is donating a total of $25 million over five years “for innovative ideas using digital experiments to transform community news.” Gary Kebbel, the administrator of the Knight Foundation news challenge grants, said the promise of wider access to the Internet means there “should be good content for communities, by the communities.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/10/technology/10link.html?ref=todayspaper
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