A old brazilian fanzine - Scream & Yell

by Marcelo Costa*

The fanzines, magazines made by fans, appeared in the 20th century, treating first about comics and sci-fi, but its popularization occurred at the top of the punk wave, when some kids discovered that the blank sheet of paper could be an important opportunity to talk with the world. And thus began: mimeographed fanzines about music that used the collage as a tool and the creativity as an art form. These sheets were distributed at concerts, places of common interest (shops, markets, squares) or also mailed and creating a network of contact that strengthened over the years due to word of mouth.

But although today there are several paper fanzines, the scheme had been its space amplified with the emergence of the internet – in general – and blogs – in particular. In the early 21st century, dozens of webzines (internet fanzines) have taken the digital network to disseminate information. These webzines were like electronic journals trying to embrace several areas of culture. Now, the scene seems to be changed. The number of webzines decreased, and the thematic blogs increased. Blogs, which began its history as a personal diary for each person (who used to use a MSWord blank sheet to talk about day by day events), changed its direction and, as fanziners, bloggers now use the new tools of blogging to focus on a specific subject. The blogger stops writing day by day events (or even write, but not usually) and starts to be dedicated for a subject that loves – performing the role of a fan. So the thematic blogs appeared and, with a deeper look, begin to occupy the fanzine space or rather become converted in the new fanzines. The author uses that space to talk about something that is a fan, that admires. And on MSWord  blank sheet began to discuss ideas, which may encompass the triumvirate of culture journalism (movies, music, literature), and expand to places with no control.

A Google search can give us a little idea of the magnitude of the reach of blogs: there are blogs dedicated to Barbie doll, world currencies, Parnassian poetry and Mexican soap operas. Dozens of bloggers analyze automobilists racing (Formula One is the most popular theme, but there is still space for bikes and other categories), comics, TV shows, politics (very interesting in campaign time), food (which in addition to revenue dishes also present restaurants analysis with good tips) and architecture. Three of the themes of the moment seem to be Fashion, Beer and Travel. The author starts an account on a blog, for example, to report his experiences in Europe. It is the blank sheet being used as a communication media with the world. Time before it was a clean sheet of paper. Now, it is a sheet on a computer screen that once applied to the blog puts the person in contact with the world. The mail was and is fundamental to the dissemination of the fanzine on paper, the communication between reader and fanziner. The blog, in turn, further tightens the reader of the blogger (the new fanziner) via comments boxes, a democratic space used for critics analysis and questions and/or additions to the subject discussed. It’s a new reality, a new way to communicate. Or, like the old advertising says: the world in a touch of mouse. Really.

* Marcelo Costa , at Scream & Yell and IG  

Translated by Alexandre Luchese

@osestrangeiros

NYT site traffic in the Michael Jackson death

by

Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg*

A hallmark of good journalism is the ability to take a large amount of information and pick out only the pieces that truly matter. Sometimes this means finding one valuable nugget–for instance, choosing a single indicator that sums up the agony of an economic crisis. However, there are themes so complex that no single number can do them justice; themes where hundreds of numbers are needed to give readers context. Enter data visualization.

Data visualization is a technology that transforms numbers into interactive images, making them easily accessible and providing context. Imagine you’d like to give readers a sense of how the stock market is doing, sector by sector, company by company. You’d have to know the stock price and market value for every company, how these prices are changing (are they going up or down? by how much?), and which companies belong to which sectors. That’s hundreds, if not thousands, of numbers. In the “old” days (a decade ago!) newspaper printed huge tables of these numbers in small print.

These pages were a kind of graveyard for information: although readers could look up individual stocks, they had no way of seeing a broader view. Data visualization allows you to “paint a picture” of the stock market showing all of these numbers at once. Martin Wattenberg did just that back in 1999 when he created the Map of the Market, a live web-based visualization of all companies listed on the Nasdaq:

HERE’S  A POSSIBLE CAPTION: The Map of the Market shows hundreds of publicly traded companies. Gainers are green, losers are in red. Similar companies are near each other, forming a kind of weather map of the financial news.

You may be thinking this is specialized stuff, fit only for covering financial markets and economic news. Not so. News outlets today are starting to cover everything from wars and natural disasters to pop culture with data visualization. The New York Times is probably the leader in this space at present, employing over 30 people in its graphics department. The team has editorial freedom to pursue its own articles and has visualized a wide range of topics, from the Iraq war to memorializing Michael Jackson’s death. These visualizations allow readers to learn more about the subject at hand than they would just by reading the accompanying article. In the Michael Jackson visualization, for example, readers could see his top hits over time and compare those to the hits from ten other music groups, from the Beatles to U2. This sort of overview contextualizes Michael Jackson’s musical production and helps illustrate how important he was in the world of pop music.

In Brazil, some newspapers have started to follow suit. O Estadão has visualized grim subjects such as murders in major cities as well as more upbeat themes such as Brazil’s historical performance in World Cups. Unlike the NY Times, Estadão has relied on both in-house and externally created graphics. Being able to use third-party visualization tools is a recent development. Freely available web-based tools such as Many Eyes and Tableau Public were designed to allow anyone to upload data, visualize, and share interactive graphics for free. Journalists have taken notice and have started experimenting with different options for making data-rich stories easily available to readers. These visualization platforms are easy to use, don’t require programming skills and provide professionals with a wide range of techniques to display anything from a table of numbers to entire collections of text.

If creating visualizations from scratch is your cup of tea, you’ll encounter a range of technical options. Processing, a set of Java libraries, was built to make interactive graphics programming more accessible. Flash is another popular choice for online interactive work and libraries like Flare have brought it closer to the world of data visualization. Finally, Javascript is all the rage these days because it runs on every browser as well as mobile platforms such as Apple’s iPad.

Whether you tune in to visualization because governments are mandating more transparency and open data or because you’d like to give readers a deeper storytelling experience, journalistic visualization is here to stay. We are just at the beginning of exploring what it means to tell stories with data. How will you help it evolve?

* Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg are the founders of Flowing Media. Before founding Flowing Media in 2010, Viégas and Wattenberg led IBM’s Visual Communication Lab. Their landmark system Many Eyes was the first to put powerful visualization tools in the hands of a general audience. Their vision of democratizing visualization has empowered journalists, businesspeople, and scientists to tell stories with data.

by
Tiago Doria *

A key feature of internet is low cost, which not only makes room for new publications from entering the market, but also enhances trials. One that comes calling more attention is the mix of games and journalism, so-called NewsGames.

The concept of NewsGames appeared around the year 2003, and refers to games made based on news or some event in progress. The Spanish journal El PAís was responsible for publishing one of the first – the Play Madrid about the terrorist attacks in Madrid, Spain in 2004. A few days after the tragedy, the game was already in the air.

Shortly thereafter, the New York Times, with Food Import Folly, on the lack of oversight on food imports in the U.S.. In this case, the interesting NewsGames this is the fact that a newspaper’s editorial transformed into play. Then in 2007, CNN came out with the Presidential Pong, where you play tennis with the pre-candidate for the U.S. presidency. Each have their skills developed in accordance with the progress of the election campaign in the offline world.

NewsGames around, there has been an ecosystem of researchers, professionals and businesses. A key is Newsgaming, founded in 2003 by Gonzalo Frasca, at the time, CNN’s Spanish journalist and editor of Ludology.org, a site focused on academic studies of games.

Another is the Persuasive Games, already known in the midst of designing educational games.

Working with timelines is a major challenge for anyone producing NewsGames. As the game is based on an event in progress or recently finished, their development must be fast. You need a nearly perfect interplay between the editorial staff and technology, tripe in online journalism as important as a cameraman and reporter in television journalism.

In most games do not try to be objective. Try to show an imprint of a vehicle.

In Brazil, in 2008, the G1 did some experiments with the format and launched AudioPops, a game where you have to discover, through speeches and recent, who are the leading figures in international politics.

But the most interesting came from the magazine’s website Superinteressante that, in the beginning of 2009, launched the game Mafia, in which the reader is a character infiltrated the global mafias. The intention was to show how such organizations operate.

The NewsGames eventually bring an educational and entertaining character back to journalism. There is a format which replaced earlier ones. Rather, it is more a way of presenting news. Another option, less bureaucratic, the readers / users of a news site.

However, not all flowers in NewsGames. There is much debate on how to separate entertainment and journalism, not to mix the two areas or avoid it all does not end in mere pyrotechnics. Anyway, features a new format full of questions and challenges.

* Tiago Doria, journalist and media researcher.

por
Rodolfo Araújo*

I recently wrote about the phenomenon of Violence daily common, highlighting how the media makes real atrocities in banal events , daily absolutely. Traditional vehicles and premium programs exploit personal tragedies and collective pain, packing them into this with no shame nor embarrassment.

At the same time, the proliferation of attractions of this nature reveals the growing acceptance in society for this type of entertainment aimed at the spectacle of the world. An apparently normal reaction, characteristic of free markets contemporaries, where corporations offer what the consumer demand, in quantities and configurations consistent with what society behaves. Just as the bakery of his corner, automakers and drug dealers.
In Origin of Wealth: Evolution, Complexity, and the Radical Remaking of Economics (Harvard Business Press, 2007), Eric Beinhocker offers an evolutionary approach to how we see the economy. This look works for macro analysis, also, parts of economic systems, for example, the media. According Beinhocker movements evolutionists go through three major stages: innovation, selection and replication.

Of the early hominid grunts in African savannas, to Gutenberg’s printing press and the advent of Internet, communication experiences innovations not only in technology but also on Social, and both influenced one to another one. While some creations perish by the way, other triumph is chosen and passed on to subsequent generations. In the next step, the innovations have established their use amplified, copied and imitated becoming many times the new standard. A process widely and commonly known in the literature as corporate competition
Overexposure of privacy and exploitation of the sordid details of bizarre crimes, which now fill the media, are also fruits of similar process. Rooted in innovations such as Big Brother, the series Faces of Death or championships MMA, gossiping and glamorization of violence were selected by popular fetish in having free access to audiovisual information about others, either in joy or sorrow – with special preferably the latter, however.

As the focus of evolutionary Beinhocker such innovations have been supported by new technologies Physical – such as the proliferation of digital cameras, increasingly powerful, smaller and cheaper and easier storage, transmission and dissemination of data – Social and – as the growing acceptance scandals and the gradual reduction of social decency, requiring Bizarre increasingly rugged.
Highlight grotesque behavior – is a parricide or debauchery of the star of fashion – carries components of social degradation, to the extent that such actions pose inside our homes, with an air of banal events, almost commonplace. In the same way that newspapers do not publish stories of suicides – to prevent imitation – should remove homicides. After all, you are not skeptical to learn that in most countries, suicides are more frequent than homicides? Probably most of the massacres perpetrated by snipers would not happen if that was not guaranteed highlighted in newspapers, where perpetrators seek their morbid posthumous fame.

Before readers rush to identify traces of censorship in my text, I warn that society is based around the restrictions on individual rights in the name of collective benefits. The freedom – particularly of expression – serves the public interest by ensuring access to relevant information especially in monitoring and control of public institutions, to impose limits on the power. This has nothing to do with the paparazzi the right to work, or photos smuggled from the inert body of a little girl . Which the public interest in the belly of Ronaldo (brazilian soccer player) or bruising of a dead child?

As a market economy selects what arrives at your fingertips and allows, as it were, the media becomes this monster surreal, it has a responsibility also impose their limits and reject that which is harmful, regardless of the time frame analyzed – is French bread, cars or cocaine.

But while there are laws that institutional, social and market for regular consumption, it does not absolve of guilt the side responsible for their production. The role of the journalist and the editor becomes therefore critical in this process of disinfecting a medium without boundaries. Although they respond to incentives in your industry – ultimately, the audience – they must also obey your instincts and values. Otherwise, they run the risk of ratifying the famous words of Adlai Stevenson: “A newspaper editor is someone who separates the wheat from the chaff – and prints the chaff.”

* Rodolfo Araujo writes to Voce SA and Não Posso Evitar.

Robert Anton Wilson

by
Alexandre Petillo*

I’m an old-fashioned guy. I open the screen in Word and choose the font “Verdana” to write. It’s an old habit, I think I carry a few years ago. I remember that early in his career, had a meeting with a wise friend and he told me it was fad to write in “Verdana”, because he had “a face of modernity.” I thought cool, and today only write with this source. Modern superstition, don’t judge me.

Beats a miss this time. It was great being able to communicate instantly with others through a small program called ICQ . Seems like just yesterday I was with a friend at Porto Alegre, chill out, curing a hangover, there by noon when we began to hear the legendary program “Cafezinho” (damn, I forgot the name of the radio, the program still exists), that is hilarious . In the program, the guys commenting on the beginning of ICQ and wondered about the name. I C Q . I seek you. I want you. Wow, what a name well built, I thought at the time. Does anyone still remember ICQ? Someone still uses ICQ?

Porto Alegre, Brazil. I love this city. It is there that left a bunch of crazy that was a kind of culture fanzine that arrived in the box e-mails of a hundreds brazilians. It was a huge message. The email brought tales, stories, interviews, experiments, madness. This is the “Cardoso online”. I expected every Tuesdays and Thursdays, crazy, obsessed, by the arrival of the edition of COL. And he read, everything. Texts huge. If it were print, gave some 50 pages, below. And every day, the number of subscribers of Col increased only . I was pleased to write to some figures – I keep, print, folder, good memories. The cool thing is that looking at today, many good people doing good stuff in Brazil writes on col. Cardoso himself, Clarah Averbuck, Daniel Galera, Daniel Pellizzari, all staff of “Livros do Mal”. And today, there is a cd like MTV Bandas Gauchas ( bands from Porto Alegre), is because these bands knew Brazil through accurate reports of COL.

If nothing else, I was also addicted to such a Digestivo Cultural, which was done in São Paulo brought criticism and acidic, well-built body. Today is the big point of the culture of the Brazilian Internet, no doubt. And the acid criticism, thank God, continue.

Is that remote epoch also another crazy journalist named Alexandre Matias, who was an online version of their pages of “Trabalho Sujo”. Then did the 1999, a site whose motto was “it would be updated every blessed day.” Crazy. Finding a site with new texts every single day is something crazy. “These guys must work horrors,” I thought. It is discovered that boiling scribes and big people too thin, elegant and heartfelt, like Fabio Bianchini and Cecilia Gianetti.
I remember I read a text from Matias (huge for a change) about a band that, according to the activist said, mixed with dashes of country soul. At the time the dollar was worth a real (Brazilian money) . I could buy the imported disk, if I lived in the big city. But I didn’t live. So a friend told me about a program called Napster. In my humble dial-up (which was nice, after my friend Carlinhos Falcatrua discovered a provider that accepts collect calls), so I downloaded the Napster. In the wonderful average of two songs per night, so I downloaded the disk (Nixon) of this band (Lambchop) that mixed country with soul. Nor was all this, but gave way to dive into a sea of rarities and other sounds, beats and pulses. Anyone out there remember Napster? Someone came to use Napster? I am getting old …

Carried away by the amount of information and mazes, a friend, he only made one site. Only he knew how to build a website. Invited a bunch of cronies to write. I talked about movies – did not know and still know little, but gave few pitacos funny. As only he could move the thing, had biweekly updates. And he pierced the early morning updating.

I remember I was at that time, a bunch of friends, who suggested that a light would be nice to make a website with just photos of people in nightclubs, on records. This friend a webmaster, said it was nonsense. “Who will go online to browse the photo itself?”. Nobody. So we opened a briefcase on Yahoo (remember that? Still exists), where he offered to archive our photos and he wanted to, went there and saved. Genial.

Instant communication. Cultural revolutions per email. Exchange of music online. Virtual file photo. Chat rooms. And that was just the beginning. Later still came streaming video. Internet phone. Blogs. Fotologs. Google. Orkut. That, in only ten years.

This conversation reminds me of a madman that wise old Matias wrote about in his site. It is the philosopher Robert Wilson. He left with the theory of Jesus Jumper. Basically, Wilson conceptualizes the “Jesus” of his theory as a unit of knowledge of scientific facts known to humanity in the year that Jesus Christ was born. Wilson accounts for the accumulation of science in the following centuries and sets the year 1500 as the point at which mankind has doubled its knowledge about the starting date – two Jesus.

The next time a doubling of new knowledge occurs: 250 years later, just before the French Revolution. Then another 150 years and humanity has, through the Industrial Revolution, eight Jesus. Then follows the pattern: Jesus in August 1900, 16 in 1950 Jesus, Jesus 32 in 1960, 128 Jesus in 1973, 512 in 1982. I’m bad at math, but this last decade of the commercial Internet, it is a few hundred of Jesus. Or not.

No matter. Undefined concepts are held in Century XXI. What excites is that all this is only the beginning. Probably Jesus born every Day.

* ALEXANDRE Petillo is a journalist. In fact, I would be Casagrande ( a famous soccer player), but ended in journalism at the legendary “Notícias Populares”. Today I’m a coordinator of TV shows at the Vanguarda Network, an affiliate Globo the biggest channel of Brazil.

A Press Journal campaign to reach blog readers

by
Tiago Dória*

It’s almost a dead end the growth of personal brands in journalism. With the growth of blogs, social networks and microblogging platforms, has been way more appealing and easier for journalists to develop their own personal brand and audience.

The idea is that journalists Look upon blogs, social networks and microblogging not only as tools of reporting, but also mechanisms for building your own brand.

In 2009, the State of News Media Report has noted the growth of personal branding as one of the major trends in journalism. Through blogs, search engines and social networks the reader would, increasingly, moving from institutional to personal brands in journalism.
An example of the growth of personal brands in journalism is on Twitter. The microblogging service consists of various brands competing attention, what makes a journalist often has more followers than the profile of the vehicle for which they work.

Something, of course, throws a big challenge for companies in journalism. Encourage or minimize the growth of these personal marks above institutional brands?

If we look closely is something that, indeed, has existed for a long time in journalism. We have columnists who ship books and carry their own audience. What happens is that, nowadays, with the growing and high turnover in business and “life of a freelance” becoming a common dynamic between communications professionals to develop their own brand, its own public, has been shown increasingly attractive to journalists.

Another factor that weighs the need to develop your own personal brand and online is that, increasingly, social networking platforms and search engines are becoming reputation systems. People look at social networks and search engines, information and references, or personal data about other people. So for a journalist who wants to be relevant, have a voice in these environments is essential.

However, developing its own brand name is no big deal. It is governed by the same principles by which you builds your reputation among friends and colleagues in the physical world – natural, safety and consistency.

Finally, develop and manage their own personal brand, digital reputation is one of the new skills that the journalist should have. It seems to be a problem? I do not see that way, but as opportunity.

I say this from experience. For nearly seven years, while some saw blogging as a problem, just a passing fancy, I saw an opportunity. And it was through this publishing tool that could build much of my reputation in the field of journalism.

A good way street.

* Tiago Doria, journalist and media researcher

www.jornalismodigital.org

by
André Deak*

Rodolfo Walsh, Ryszard Kapuscinski, Joel Silveira, Gay Talese, Truman Capote excuse me, but even new journalism is something else. Using the tools of literature was a great thing – in the 60s. Today, almost 50 years after the first literary stories, the new journalism is still causing fetish universities. But there is a new frontier forward, with infinite good tools to tell stories, many of them have not even discovered. We’re talking about the boundaries of digital.

Some will say that journalism is journalism, as always, the good old journalism, and the rest is eye candy. Turns out this is not so. First, because journalism as we know it today, with ethical rules, there is even only a few decades ago. In Brazil, the code of ethics of the profession is the 80. And if we go back a little before, also remember that there was a guy who went out to the street to pick the stories – the reporter – and the guy who was in writing, good writing in Portuguese, editor. Reporter did not necessarily know Portuguese.

Not today, so that the function of journalists change. With the transformation of atoms into bits, things get more complex. We close this change reporters multimedia, convergence, new narratives. Since the ability to take pictures on a cell phone, type in 140 characters, shooting and editing videos is something that a child ever does, it’s hard to imagine that this is not a prerequisite when these children are leading a newsroom. And that can be viewed in two ways.

One is to consider it a problem: he thinks that will live as they lived journalists in recent decades – can become very good at a specialty, develop skills of reporting or editing (in the text, radio or TV), a career Monomedia.

Another way is to see the opportunity. Those who see well can do everything that makes up the subject, but also have the chance to create a new way of doing journalism. Reinventing journalism. Using tools from other fields, merge the media, interactive experience, the power of networking and collaboration. Create something that never existed. A new language. A new journalism. Nobody knows yet what that will be. The paths are not traced.

Andrew DeVigal, Adrian Holovaty, Brian Storm, Felipe Lloreda and Alberto Cairo are among those that practice the best of this new new journalism. There are names less well known. Perhaps because there is more room for one or Talese Capote – half a dozen names that reinvented journalism. Or maybe because now we can all do that.

* André Deak is Director of Multimedia at FLi, journalist, worked for over 10 years with online journalism. Carried reports of almost all countries of South America and Western Europe. Co-organizer of the book Voices of Democracy (2007), the NGO Intervozes. He was executive editor of multimedia in the process of restating Agency Brazil until 2007. The next year, communications manager of CPFL Cultura. Freelancer for magazines Rolling Stone, Carta Capital, Dear Friends, Education, Journal Forum and others. Vladimir Herzog Award 2008, Internet category. Courses and lectures about online journalism and interactive narratives (USP, UFSC, PUC-SP, Casper Libero, Communicate, Journals Associates, Abraji, Editora Abril, among others). Master student of the ECA-USP in the area of social communication interfaces.

by Stivers

by
*Denis Russo Burgierman

In the midst of this very complicated discussion about whether journalism is dying or not, I suddenly realized a previous question: after all, what is journalism?

From what I learned in the years when I was an executive at a important media company, journalism is an activity that is part of an industry. The industry is called “publishing.

Publishing, in short, is the industry that sells ads, determines and organizes information and then sells publications containing information mixed with ads.

Journalism is the soul of “publishing”. Or, a less romantic version, is the bait. It works like this: I savor that fabulous story and wonderfully informative and I am so enraptured that when I least expect it … Bam!! I was hooked by an ad for beer! Hmmm, that thirst! And so the big media companies join the buck fortune grateful to the reader and the advertiser can pay for its imposing buildings and the bonuses of their executives.

Is that journalism? It is the job of framing ads with useful information and enjoyable?

If it is bad news. Although it now looks good this Brazil growing, and the media are earning a lot of money with the rise of the middle class, there are dark clouds on the horizon as well. And they herald a storm so terrible as that is already sweeping the rich countries, where newspapers are dying like flies.

In a world where information is excessive, it is becoming difficult to charge for it, especially when it comes to information industrially produced: large-scale standardized. In a world where the consumer is losing the ingenuity and can filter information, it is becoming difficult to convince advertisers that the ad simply hide it inside the worm journalistic hook to customers. If these two problems are not resolved, bye bye publishing: after all, the money from the audience and advertiser’s money are their only two sources of revenue.

It is the death of journalism then?
No. It is, perhaps, the death of the industry which, over the last century, argued journalism. Rest in peace, publishing. Be missed.
It turns out that, while publishing collapses, will emerge millions of opportunities. When large industries that are relevant services collapse, make room for innovative people proposing different things. We are entering a time of experimentation, invention, novelty.

Even so, I decided to leave the mainstream media. After 10 years in Editora Abril, today I work in a small company called Webcitizen, whose simple goal is to transform the world using information. (If you want to know some of our projects, you can find them on the web: www.votenaweb.com.br, www.issonaoenormal.com.br, www.tedxsaopaulo.com.br)

Working here on the outside of the mainstream media is quite different from working there. Now that my work is no longer the haven of an industry, the struggle was harder. I lost some privileges – easy access to respondents at the mere mention of the name of the publication, for example. Now, every new project we invent, have to convince the interviewees that we are serious, we know what we’re doing, that is worth spending time with us.

Another privilege is lost easy access to the reader. While he has a relationship with the magazine where I worked, was always willing to listen. Any minute phrases that I write there automatically earned an audience of hundreds of thousands. Now, out here, I’m one voice among millions in the cacophony of the Internet. If what I write is relevant wonder. If not, will be solemnly ignored.

This new experience makes me think hard about the question put in the title of this paper: What is journalism?

Journalism is not only the activity of an industry.

Journalism is an attitude: it is to be curious about the world, is to be humble is to ask questions and be transparent in disseminating information, revealing the most of all interests involved.

I do not know how it will be the future of journalism. Indeed, in no longer know what is journalism: that word no longer means almost nothing to me. I do not know if amateur bloggers journalists are more or less than professional reporters who do nothing but reproduce press releases. I do not know if the word “journalism” is used in 10 years. I do not know if every newspaper in the world will fail or if some will reinvent itself in time

I do not know if the business model of large media companies will be sufficient to sustain the impressive buildings and bonuses of executives.
But one thing I know, will still need people who have the attitude of a journalist.
If I were giving advice only, it would be this: focus on attitude, not the business model.

* Dennis Russo is a journalist. He worked as Director of Writing magazine Superinteressante and was in charge of special projects of Editora Abril. Despite being “a press guy,” as they say, inherited from the interaction of cyber Silicon Valley more than the habit of dominating the world. Today is Director of Content WebCitizen, a company that proposes to stimulate civic engagement and bring together citizens and their governments through the digital culture.

New Journalist

What?

The project is a collection of texts about the new abilities that the modern journalist must have. The proposal is similar to the  e-book “to understand the Internet” -http://www.next.icict.fiocruz.br/arquivos/Para+entender+a+Internet.pdf – of a brazilian journalist, Juliano Spyer. This previous one was developed in collaborative way, mixing texts of journalists and researchers, all enthusiastic of the digital culture. “New Journalists” will be focusing on the journalism issues.

Why?

We believe that a compilation of texts of new journalists becomes pertinent and necessary to the new students. The schools of journalism can not adapt fast enough to the changes. We want to expose the new journalists to an updated vision of the profession.

Who?

The project we propose is working with professionals in prominence in the Brazilian media which are lined up with the idea of collaborative journalism and free culture. The view of those who work day-by-day with news offices and media institutions, professionals who are in the epicenter of the changes. Journalists that also enjoy the freedom of their personal blogs/sites where they produce in in the conventional work.

How?

The project will gather articles on new practical knowledge of journalism that came up with the advent of web and new technologies as the mobile medias.The invited journalists will be responsible for the writing. The result will be distributed with creative commons licence, without longing for no commercial end, only educational. At first, it will be published in the blog’s project and later on a ebook in English and Portuguese.