media

Story of 'Jena 6' ignites alternative newscape

If you search the New York Times or the LA Times for "Mychal Bell" you won't find a single article, but the 17 year-old African American is currently facing up to 22 years after being convicted by an all-white jury for aggravated battery and conspiracy to commit aggravated battery. Bell and five others were originally charged with attempted murder for their role in a fight with a white high school student.

Known as the "Jena Six," their story has all the characteristics of what you would expect to find in a high school history text profiling the racial tension in the South during the 1950s, but as a current event it has been completely ignored by the mainstream press though it has been covered by many independent media outlets.

Why is this? Does the mainstream media not want to acknowledge the grim reality that racism continues to plague our country? Or has our news media collectively decided that celebrities are the ones worth covering?

Facebook attributes earlier outage to technical glitch

Facebook representatives have responded to inquiries about why exactly the site was totally down for about an hour and a half today--it was a bug, they say, not a hacking problem or a server outage.

"This morning, we temporarily took down the Facebook site to fix a bug we identified earlier today," the company statement read. "This was not the result of a security breach. Specifically, the bug caused some third-party proxy servers to cache otherwise inaccessible content. The result was that an isolated group of users could see some pages that were not intended for them. … Read more

Report: Facebook axes third-party app Audio over copyright issues

VentureBeat reports that Facebook has removed a popular application from its third-party developer platform over potential copyright issues. The application, called Audio, allowed users to upload MP3 files and share them with their friends--yup, that's a recipe for copyright disaster.

Facebook had already axed the app once before, according to the article. It appears that Audio had been created by a single developer, not an existing company.

<>As VentureBeat's Eric Eldon points out, this shows that Facebook is taking terms-of-service violations seriously when it comes to the Platform, which was launched in late May and catapulted … Read more

NowPublic jumps into the public eye--but how will it turn out?

In a quintessentially Web 2.0 case of "If it got funding, it must be worth a look," user-generated news site NowPublic hauled in $10.6 million in series A venture capital funding earlier this week, and now the blog community has pounced on it with accolades and criticism alike. NowPublic, in case you haven't checked it out yet, is a "citizen journalism" site devoted to bringing you news of the user-generated variety--all stories and accompanying photos, videos, and other multimedia are contributed by fellow NowPublic readers. Then, much like Digg, which remains the top … Read more

Facebook experiencing 'upgrade' outages

Tried to visit Facebook today and had no luck? It appears that the social-networking site has been experiencing some growing pains. No one in CNET News.com's newsroom was able to access the site starting around 10 a.m. PDT.

Some experienced a time-out while others were met with the message "We're upgrading. We'll be back soon."

Is Facebook down for you? Working for you? Redirecting to MySpace.com? (Just kidding.) Let us know.

UPDATE (11:24 AM PT): Facebook has updated its home page with a new message that says "Facebook is temporarily … Read more

Dear Editor, check out this video of my cat

The actual merit of this month's CNN-YouTube Democratic debate has proven arguable, but it at least appears to have been influential, as more and more "traditional" news outlets are turning to the power of YouTube and its ilk as a way to breathe some new life into participatory citizenship.

One CNET News.com editor directed me to a relatively new feature offered by the online operations of the California regional paper Contra Costa Times--"Your Views," which allows users to submit their own photos, videos, and cartoons. The whole system is provided by a … Read more

Associated Press cuts new-media news service

This one's kind of a bitter irony. We've all been reading over and over about how traditional news outlets are turning to the Web in order to boost readership and advertising revenue in the face of a well-documented decline in print media (Wired magazine has a feature in this month's issue about newspaper chain Gannett's attempt to modernize). But in this case, it's the other way around: The Associated Press, according to a report on Friday evening, has announced that it's axing its youth-oriented, blog- and video-heavy ASAP news portal because it proved to … Read more

Visual: How not to use Facebook

I count this as one of social networking blog Mashable's greatest accomplishments: installing as many Facebook Platform applications as possible onto a single profile and then taking a screenshot.

I've copy-pasted the screenshot below, but I'm warning you, it's enormous. Scroll down at your own risk.… Read more

News anchors break from the script

Nearly three million people have watched on You Tube as Mika Brzezinski refuses to report on the Paris Hilton story; until yesterday I was not one of those people. I had heard about the encounter and rejoiced in her defiance, but I only stumbled onto the clip after reading Taking the Lead over at the Stop Big Media blog which is published through Free Press. Actually watching the event unfold went well beyond reading about it, and I was shocked to see the rest of the news team's reaction to her actions.

Despite the way Joe Scarborough mocked his colleague for taking the initiative, Jack Cafferty at CNN's the Situation Room has followed suit. During a recent broadcast, Cafferty asked the operator of his teleprompter, "I wonder if we can get the Lindsay Lohan DUI arrest out of the teleprompter and put my script in it, is that possible?" Seconds later Cafferty concluded, "Apparently it's not."

Study: Web-based instant messaging is growing fast

Who needs downloads? Not instant-messaging fans, apparently, according to Nielsen NetRatings. The online division of the legendary statistics-crunching company just released a study that tracks the fastest-growing instant-messaging software products from August 2006 to June 2007, and the results indicate that Web-based is the way to go.

The most rapidly growing IM client, according to the study, is Meebo, which launched just over a year ago. The fact that it's so new may be partially responsible for its rapid growth--354 percent from August 2006 to June 2007. But Meebo also packs a double punch: not only is it Web-based … Read more