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Citizen Journalism

Examiner.com writers can save their work using this screen-scraper script written for the purpose

Submitted by David Herron on Sun, 2016-07-03 23:15

I've been writing for Examiner.com for over 7 years, and with the news that they're going to shut down I needed to retrieve over 540 articles to repost them on my own website. Lesson learned - it's better to own your own platform than to write for someone elses platform. Anyway, the result is a Node.js script I'm calling articlescraper. The purpose is to traverse an index page that might be split over multiple pages, then extract the articles from the pages linked from the index.

Learning from this week’s crash course in citizen journalism

Submitted by David Herron on Mon, 2012-07-23 00:00

As newspapers and other traditional media outlets continue to lay off reporters and even shut down their printing presses, one of the big questions has been what will fill the gap that is left — where will the journalism come from?

Could Kickstarter be used to crowdfund journalism?

Submitted by David Herron on Mon, 2012-07-23 00:00

Curious idea - use of crowdfunding systems like Kickstarter to raise funds enabling journalists to cover stories. I suppose the result would be people paying for stories they'd like to be covered.

Writing the news we want to be true, or writing the news that is

Submitted by David Herron on Sun, 2011-12-04 00:00

Many of us are concerned about Tibet, China's control over that country, the many Tibetans killed by the Chinese government, the exile of Tibets government, the usurpation of Tibetan Buddhism by China and so forth.   So when a friend pointed me at a News article titled "China agrees to give Tibet back to the Tibetans" which started off by saying that "In an unprecedented announcement, President Hu Jintao of the Peoples Republic of China has announced the long-desired return of the

Green Transportation Examiner - my main social media for social good project

Submitted by David Herron on Mon, 2010-11-22 00:00

For a year and a half I’ve been privileged with the role of Journalist, covering the greening of our transportation system. My main gig is on examiner.com with the title Green Transportation Examiner. Examiner.com operates a “citizen journalist” organization with 10’s of thousands of people writing on whatever special topic floats their own boat, and I am one of them. I’m currently learning how to utilize social media networks in promoting the journalist work I’m doing with examiner.com.