We the Media

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We the Media: Grassroots Journalism By the People For the People by Dan Gillmor 299pp, O'Reilly

From a review

"He tells us of OhMyNews.com in South Korea, which has 15,000 "citizen reporters" filing news and comment; and of wikipedia, the online encyclopedia where anyone can write or edit an article, which now has more than one million articles in more than 100 languages. He tells us about bloggers who have bigger audiences than many newspapers, and who have become just as influential as any specialist journalist in their sector. How Russ Kirk of the alternative news site The Memory Hole used the freedom of information act to get photos of dead US soldiers being brought back from Iraq in flag-draped caskets into the public domain; and how bloggers swarmed together to claim the scalp of Trent Lott, the majority leader in the US Senate, after he appeared to wax nostalgic for a racist past at a fellow senator's birthday dinner. Gillmor tells of his own experience as a columnist on the San Jose Mercury, starting to write a blog and dealing with comments and criticisms from his readers, who, he claims, "have made me a better journalist, because they find my mistakes, tell me what I'm missing and help me understand nuances". (http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/politicsphilosophyandsociety/0,6121,1344544,00.html)