Andy Newman is the editor of the Fort Greene/Clinton Hill version of “The Local,� a newly minted hyper-local blogging experiment by The New York Times. “I’m about as newbie as you get,� he admitted when asked about previous blogging experience. He’s so new, in fact, that he spent the bet...

On Wednesday, Columbia University’s Center on African American Politics and Society will sponsor a public lecture, “Studying Race in the Age of Obama.� I had planned to attend the lecture; instead, I’ll be in DC. President Barack Obama, a Columbia grad, had this to say about race in, well, t...

sxc.hu I’ve lost count of the number of newspapers which have gone under since the beginning of the year. We’re not even through the first quarter of the year and yet, many (except those in the business who are desperately staying on top of every single death)  have simply stopped count...

As cell phone cameras and palm-sized videocams have become cheap and ubiquitous, there is little if anything that is immune from being documented and displayed on the web, as numerous celebrities and sports stars have learned to their regret. In the realm of hard news, the result is that citizen jou...

Andy Warhol famously said, “In the future everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.� In the age of the Internet, a TV rant can give birth to a “new revolution.� A new Rasmussen poll found that 54 percent of Americans “say no bailouts period.� Conservatives are tapping into that anger...

Media baron Rupert Murdoch is in a fight that he had hoped to avoid. In a statement, Murdoch apologized: We ran a cartoon that offended many people. Today I want to personally apologize to any reader who felt offended, and even insulted. Over the past couple of days, I have spoken to a number of peo...

In his address to a joint session of Congress, President Barack Obama sought to reassure an anxious nation: But while our economy may be weakened and our confidence shaken; though we are living through difficult and uncertain times, tonight I want every American to know this: We will rebuild, we wil...

Ah, controversy. Now, it’s with Yelp, the mega online review site.  On Wednesday, the East Bay Express, an alternative newspaper that covers Alameda and Contra Costa counties in California, published a very provocative article , “Yelp and the business of extortion 2.0″ on the sa...

Tavis Smiley’s 10th annual State of the Black Union will be held next weekend in Los Angeles. In these difficult economic times, the attendees can save money by reading a new report from the Center for American Progress. The report, “Minorities and the Labor Market in the Recession by the Number...

Following Getty Images' decision to close its citizen journalism arm Scoopt, the venture's founder Kyle MacRae explained in an interview why "the dedicated cit-j agency model isn't the way forward." His reasoning was that even though many members of the public may well be on a breaking news scene wi...