Stripping Commenters of Anonymity

After about a year of allowing site visitors to comment on any story, The Sacramento Bee in California is reworking its commenting policy. 

At first the paper allowed commenters to hide behind pseudonyms.  However, to a few people's surprise, this freed some commenters to earn the rather mild title from staffers of "provocateur"...

Props to Mother Jones for Its Blog Outreach

When I referred to a post in which journalism professor Jay Rosen of New York University expressed concern over how Mother Jones addressed the political web in its package "Politics 2.0" I was surprised that Clara Jeffery, one of the magazine's co-editors, commented on my post (and then another time). ...

Ben Hammersley’s BBC Social Network Aggregator

When I first heard that the BBC assigned a reporter, Ben Hammersley, to report about Turkey's elections via several social networks, I wondered how the Beeb would present the reporting. 

Would it just leave all the information at the individual sites and hope that people would navigate to the other reporting? ...

Apple iPhone: Get in Line or Wait for Version 2.0?

With all the hype surrounding tomorrow's release of Apple's iPhone, I had to throw my two cents in.  There are reports that both praise and criticize Apple's newest addition to its family of trendy tech products, and both sides have some good points.  The pro-iPhone camp is excited about having a sleek,...

Mother Jones Questions Open Source Politics

New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen harangues Mother Jones, the left-leaning investigatory magazine, for its feature package titled "Politics 2.0" in which it basically asks, "Are we entering a new era of digital democracy-or just being conned by a bunch of smooth-talking geeks?"

Rosen, an open source advocate, accuses that "The Mother Jones editors had a great story about politics and the web within their grasp,...