I wrote Reporters Without Media Mogul Borders as a comment to a post by Sally Baxter Pity the poor journalist… on the blog Australians For Honest Politics. The blog is dedicated to Citizen Journalism.
Reporters Without Media Mogul Borders is an idea which takes into account the rapid move away from old media onto Social Media. The idea is an attempt to introduce participatory and democratic processes into journalism using the new mobile web technologies.
=====================================================================================
Readers by partnering with regional newspapers could be joint commissioners of stories forming a hub interconnected by the web. This hub can be across the country, indeed from across the planet, which can employ reporters to investigate issues of importance to local communities.
Readers would raise funds by crowd sourcing, perhaps using the model that GetUp uses to raise funds for advertisements in old media. Instead of using funds to pay for advertisements the funds would be used to pay for a reporter’s commission to write / investigate story. The local newspaper could provide the administrative infrastructure. There could also be a tiered system of influence in the choice of reporter by readers. For example, a donation of $100 ( or whatever amount) is made would allow the reader to help choose the reporter for the story. Reporters could send their CV / application which would be accessible to the donaters on the web and those who donated the prescribed amount could choose the reporter to do the job by online voting.
People who do not donate can still be engaged in the funding by buying the individual story that has been commissioned by readers like themselves. The model of local action with global transmission already exists with organisations such as Avaaz. We can take the idea of Reporters Without Borders to its logical conclusion – Reporters Without Media Mogul Borders.
Thank you for visiting Journeys and Star Gazing. Here there's stories of my various journeys, some inner but mostly outer; photos, song lyrics, poems, astrological readings and interpretations, I Ching speculations, quotes from people I admire and some cool graphics. There are reflections and archival material on various human rights campaigns I have been involved in over the years. With these, some have a "Star Gazing" interpretive filter. 
Journeys and Star Gazing 
Interesting. Not all my scene but it definitely is interesting. 🙂
Anonymous sets up crowd source alternative website for citizen journos.
https://www.wepay.com/donations/youranonnews
Citizen’s versus(?) Authorised Media: Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea:
Ignorance is the Hand Maiden to Evil. The ideal of Democracy rests on the greater number’s education of the clearest foundations which inform and are informed by records- both naturally occurring and man made. History is not merely the historicism of prejudiced or biased reporting. That which is included in both “arts and letters” constitutes records, tracings, reiterations, images, projections, and so on. These demand a sound comprehension of both literacy, numeracy and symbolic elements, all of which inform the elements of the knowledge system, as a collection or nomenclature of terms defined, indicating both concrete bodies and phenomenal powers and relations which inform our awareness of apparent relative motion and direction, and the intelligibility of implicit actual motion and direction.
When we make a record of an event, we have at our hands, easily accessible tools. The progression of tools used to record information, has addressed the tyranny of space, time and ignorance. It is science rather than art, which begins with the record of basic informational signatures such as the analemma, and arc, and includes measures of angles between external bodies, and locations on the surface of the field identified on the circle of the horizon that has at once informed these progressions, whilst underpinning the primary authority of astronomical information, that has in turn informed our various methods of working with geometry, mathematics, and language which couches our “frame of reference” in the context of information itself. What is witnessed through the lens, of the eye, of the camera, and of a group with many points of view of the same event or subject, constitutes a record of events, that is embodied in the frozen or moving image. Bringing this information to the attention of others, informs populations through either citizens or authorised media channels. The record is not a speculation, or opinion. It is the evidence which remains of events witnessed. It has as much potential significance as all signatures of light and motion. Indeed, signatures of light and motion constitute information. How information is translated, speculated upon, dissected, altered, repackaged, and reprojected, exposes the failure of the individual to comprehend what constitutes FACT, and differentiate FACTS from fictions. Since the advent of the Institute of Public Affairs or IPA, in December 1947, the primary interest has been economic freedom based on concepts of “natural liberty”. From this perspective, IPA reviews in the 60’s negated the strong directive power that the media itself had mustered through the 19th century, which is as much a cause for defensive and offensive behaviours leading to the Atomic Age, and progressive steering of the labor of scientists towards problems which concerned the “Arms Race” or “Space Race”, the latter, a race which informs the probing of the infinitely small, and infinitely large, for information, recorded by our variety of tools. Today however, the mythic realm of science fiction, which projects anticipations of future potentials in technology, drives the nature of society, as much from media directions, as from the imaginations of mathematicians, who commonly fail to comprehend the true geometrical foundations of their language code, which arise from ancient astronomical observations and processes of measurement. The primary attitude cultivated in the 1960’s by the IPA concerned the foundational concept of a “free market”, where media apparently played no role, and so called “natural liberty” was determined by independent wealth generation. They were inherently dismissive of human intellect, yet looked to poetry, the narrative and the creative imagination for signals of genius and inspiration thought to arise from some “other” cause. Logic and reason were not considered to be the cause of great works. Logic was considered merely a tool, supposedly cast in the manner of Russell, and in citing Hume, morality was something external to a rational mind. I would argue that if the true foundations of science, which constitute the RECORDS of illuminated bodies in relative motion to us, and to each other, logic, reason and rationality would prevail, and transcend the “muse” of media projections and the power cultivated by such Moguls of corporate imperialism. Indeed, the projection which breeds this particular mode of thought, is a 19th century projection cast through the media, which denounced all relevance of “unwritten law”, and in turn, of “natural law”, arising from the “record”…….yet it was the concept of being true to the record alone that this particular and highly influential Think Tank upheld as some antidote to speculations and opinions, which actually underpin the directions of the market that they are so engaged in defending. What happened to Australian Education after 1963, is a process of degeneration where the principles that informed both organic chemistry and information science, were ignored, in favor of the “structuralist approach” to material science on the one hand, and its significant dissociation from the “new” science of “process”, “systems” and “direction” couched in evolutionary terms where the “animator” takes the place of the artificer, and the artificer takes the place of the WITNESS who constitutes the SCIENTIST who gathers raw data from the field, which informs the RECORD.
Click to access 1210642914_document_review1963_vol.17no.1.pdf