Top Ten Journalism Pieces

New York University’s Carter Journalism Institute chose the top ten journalism pieces from January 1, 2000 to December 31, 2009. The winning pieces are:

1. The New York Times',"A Nation Challenged," Fall 2001
2. Adrian Nicole LeBlanc's, Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx, 2003
3. Lawrence Wright's, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, 2006
4. Alex Blumberg and Adam Davidson's, This American Life & NPR: "The Giant Pool of Money," May 2008
5. C.J. Chivers (reporter), Dexter Filkins (reporter) and Tyler Hicks' (photographer), The New York Times, 2003-2009
6. Jane Mayer's, The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals, 2008
7. Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, 2001.
8. The Times-Picayune staff's, New Orleans, La. Coverage of Hurricane Katrina, August-December 2005
9. Anne Hull, Dana Priest (reporters) and Michel du Cille's, (photographer)"Soldiers Face Neglect, Frustration at Army's Top Medical Facility," February 2007, The Washington Post
10. Walter Robinson, Michael Rezendes, Sacha Pfeiffer, Matt Carroll, Stephen Kurkjian, Tom Farragher, Michael Paulson, Kevin Cullen, Ben Bradlee Jr., Mark Morrow's, "Abuse in the Catholic Church," The Boston Globe, 2002

Descriptions of each piece can be found here.

Faculty from the institute, as well as other journalist, including: Wall Street Journal editorial board member Dorothy Rabinowitz; Morley Safer of “60 Minutes”; and Pulitzer-Prize-winning reporter Leon Dash, a professor of journalism at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign comprised the panel that determined the winners. The top ten pieces reflect the passage of time from 2000 - 2009.

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New Platform for Real-Time News

Kommons - Trustworthy news in real-time from Vadim Lavrusik on Vimeo.

Cody Brown, a senior at New York University and founder of NYU Local, is at it again. He's come up with a new idea for social media called Kommons.

Brown is still putting together the finished product, but it seems to be similar to Twitter with a twist of Wikipedia.

The idea is that instead of having a few major voices in Twitter giving you news, you can belong to a specific community on Kommons where the news pertains to you. You can also edit and add to certain posts like a Wikipedia page. Instead of using hash tags like Twitter, the @ symbol will be used to create these Wiki-like pages.

Brown plans on making the first community within Kommons for students and faculty at NYU.

A big part Brown's idea is to make sure people aren't anonymous on Kommons like they can be on Twitter. In an article posted by Vadim Lavrusik on his blog, Brown says that "if news reporting in real-time is to improve, genuine identity must be established."

It really seems like this idea may catch on. Just imagine a Twitter-like feed with the editing capabilities of Wikipedia for the Des Moines area. Reporters could even use it to find great stories. My only question is how long until the public gets to try it out?

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