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The media becomes an activist for democracy
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Feb. 4, 2014, 1:37 p.m.
LINK: www.youtube.com  ➚   |   Posted by: Joshua Benton   |   February 4, 2014

Andy Carvin, the social media guy at NPR for the past several years, is moving to First Look Media, the Omidyar/Greenwald startup.

My role at First Look is still being fleshed out, but my initial goal is to help them craft a newsroom where engaging the public is a fundamental aspect of everything we do. From in-depth accountability journalism to building new reporting tools, there’s so much we can gain from working with the public, tapping into their wide range of experiences and expertise.

In addition to my social media work at First Look, I’m also hoping to spend more time practicing journalism on issues like human rights, Internet freedom and protest movements around the world. If you’ve enjoyed my work using social media to cover the Arab Spring, stay tuned — I’m just getting warmed up.

This is as good a time as any to post a video I’ve been meaning to post for a while — Andy’s presentation at News Foo last November, a five-minute run through the language journalists use in breaking news. It’s entertaining — parsing “confirmed” vs. “reported” vs. “alleged” — but it’s also an quick, interesting detour into the linguistic concept of evidentiality.

You can also see the dummy Twitter feed Andy was showing through the talk.

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The media becomes an activist for democracy
“We cannot be neutral about this, by definition. A free press that doesn’t agitate for democracy is an oxymoron.”
Embracing influencers as allies
“News organizations will increasingly rely on digital creators not just as amplifiers but as integral partners in storytelling.”
Action over analysis
“We’ve overindexed on problem articulation, to the point of problem admiring. The risk is that we are analyzing ourselves into inaction and irrelevance.”