Tuesday, June 16, 2009

May-June 2009 Issue Now Available

This May-June issue of The Convergence Newsletter looks at how convergence is serving some local communities.

Leading off is an interview with Mike Orren, founder and president of Pegasus News, a Dallas-Fort Worth online publication founded in 2005. Pegasus offers people the opportunity to localize their news, and, if they desire, to be unfettered citizen journalists, reporting the news as they see it. Orren tells The Convergence Newsletter that to be a successful online news source you need to offer your reader more than just news.

Doug Fisher of the University of South Carolina, and executive editor of TCN, says you can save the money you'd spend on some of those "secrets of social media" training sessions. He explains some simple truths he has learned from creating Hartsville Today, a three-year-old experiment in online community news and social networking.

Finally we bring you Douglas Starr, a former Associated Press journalist and now a media professor at Texas A&M, who stresses the importance a free press plays in today’s society. Starr encourages readers to seek out all forms of media and apply it daily in making informed social decisions. He says a free press serves communities and aids all in becoming better citizens.


Click here to read the May-June 2009 Issue.

Recent and archived issues of The Convergence Newsletter

Monday, June 15, 2009

May-June 2009: Community Companions: Pegasus News and Dallas-Fort Worth

Mike Orren is the founder and president of Pegasus News, a Dallas-Fort Worth online news site. The Convergence Newsletter interviewed Orren and discussed with him how Pegasus News is incorporating citizen journalism in the coverage of both local and regional news.

Click here to read the full article.

Recent and archived issues of The Convergence Newsletter

May-June 2009: Building Community Online

A lot has been learned from Hartsville Today, created by the University of South Carolina journalism school more than three years ago in partnership with a twice-weekly newspaper and with a New Voices grant from J-Lab. The site now has about 1,600 registered members in a market area of about 20,000, and far more people in the area visit the site regularly, based on our IP address logs. University of South Carolina Professor Doug Fisher discusses ways in which newspapers can utilize digital media to interact and reach out to readers.

Click here to read the full article.

Recent and archived issues of The Convergence Newsletter

May-June 2009: The Future of the U.S. and Newspapers

The United States is in jeopardy. Many newspapers have gone out of business and the rest are in deplorable condition. If the news media shut down, the United States will no longer boast government of the people, by the people, for the people. The government will be in charge because there will be no free criticism of the government, no uncensored report on what the government is doing. Douglas Perret Starr argues there are three things that must be done to save newspapers.

Click here to read the full article.

Recent and archived issues of The Convergence Newsletter

May-June 2009: Conferences and Training

Read the conference and training schedule of the May-June issue here.

Recent and archived issues of The Convergence Newsletter