Nobility is the First Estate, the Church is the Second, the People are the Third… and Journalism was always thought to be the Fourth Estate. As newspapers began losing interest in being a watchdog for the people and - instead - focusing on profitability, publishers began looking at journalism ...

OffTheBus was an alternative journalism project designed to cover last year’s US presidential campaign in a way that conventional journalists could not. Based at huffingtonpost.com, OffTheBus recruited 12,000 citizen journalists, guided by a handful of professional editors. Sometimes the amate...

This is a 1976 Cultural Revolution poster from chineseposters.net. It celebrates Chairman Mao's 1966 call to arms: "bombard the headquarters." He egged on the Red Guards to go after corrupt and venal officials who: "...have stood facts on their head and juggled black and white, en...

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...

It was a nice surprise last week to hear podcasting event pioneer Brian Russell being interviewed on American Public Media’s Marketplace program. As you may remember, Russell organized one of the first “open space” podcasting conferences, PodcasterCon, back in January 2006 (about 8...

Roundup: • Alana Taylor at PBS's MediaShift blog: Journalists Still a-Twitter About Social Media. Excerpt: Twitter is popular not just because it allows journalists to crowdsource with thousands of people or because it's a fun way of amassing followers and inflating egos. It also gives reporters a...

President Obama says he intends to listen to others as he formulates U.S. foreign policy. I've proposed that as part of his China policy,  the Obama administration should use the Internet to engage in conversation with the Chinese people, not just its leaders and elites.  What do you...

(Cross-posted from the Huffington Post) Dear President Obama, Welcome to U.S.-China relations! You didn't even mention China in your inaugural address, but the Chinese censors still took it personally. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner's remarks in his confirmation hearing about currency manip...

Republican blogger and strategist Patrick Ruffini is looking for “a few good bloggers” to help cover local political races and grassroots initiatives from a conservative perspective. “Project Battleground” is Ruffini’s initiative to gather activist bloggers and conserva...

This amazing picture is worth more than a thousand words I could write about how much things have changed in just a few short years. How many potential citizen journalists here? Everybody. UPDATE: Ryan rightly notes in the comments that this was at the Youth Ball....