Living Above the Fold

Whenever news breaks, the first people on the ground, before reporters arrive, are ordinary folks with cameras. Citizen journalists have played an important role in getting us the first glimpses of developing news, from the London transit bombings to the Southeast Asian tsunami to the Virginia Tech massacre. With the advent of YouTube as a hub for video-sharing, there’s finally a venue outside the mainstream media where amateur journalists can distribute their videos to a wide audience.

While professional journalists have used the service to distribute documentaries, the nature of citizen reporting on YouTube still remains very time-and-location specific, more a matter of catching an event, something fleeting and out of context, than of telling the story behind it. Last week, YouTube announced Project: Report, a journalism contest that aims to change that.

Can Pulitzer Contest Boost Serious Journalism on YouTube? (PBS Mediashift, September 25, 2008)

World War II veteran and former Nazi hunter Michel Thomas passionately defended his life, denouncing as “lies” a newspaper article he said had defamed him, at a mock trial at Boalt Hall earlier this month. The trial, sponsored by the School of Journalism and the Boalt Hall School of Law, pitted freedom of the press against a person’s right to preserve his good reputation.

One More Attempt to Clear His name (Berkeleyan, April 16, 2003)