mass media

This Friday, Unified Taxi Workers Alliance (UTWA) President Ron Blount will stand trial in a court of law. Let’s hope that the courtroom is a more balanced venue than the mass media, which has had Ron on trial for quite some time. Case in point: The last time UTWA held a rally, hundreds came out to demand that the Philadelphia Parking Authority (PPA) stop their unjust practice of drive-by ticketing.

"How do we build upon the existing infrastructure to develop a strong powerful and prepared progressive media echo chamber that has the capacity to respond effectively to these kinds of attacks?"

When we think of King, what do we think about? Bus boycotts, great speaker, leader of the civil rights movement, but we never stop to think who is telling his story. At a young age I was taught that King was a civil rights activists and a civil rights activist only. What I did not know was that King understood that it was not just a colored person problem. It was bigger than that it was a poor person problem. So lets think when King begun to speak out against the Vietnam War. All of a sudden, the media turned on him.

In the recent edition of Times Magazine Matt Vilano looks at the role computer nerds can play in saving journalism. The piece details the forward looking work of the Knight Foundation and allied journalism schools like Northwestern's Medill, which have created specialized degrees in journalism for software programmers, in order to find solutions to the crisis in journalism. The assumption is that whiz kid programmers are going to develop software, like Everyblock, that will make journalism both relevant and financially solvent in the age of the Internet.