Iran protest after the election: Photos like these are being compiled and posted on Flickr by an Iranian-Canadian citizen named Faramarz. He writes: "My intent is not to take credit for these works, but to share them under fair-use and bring more exposure to the crises."
Hello readers ---

After nearly 30 years in print journalism, most of it right here at the Anchorage Daily News, I'm currently out of the daily journalism business. However, I'm still fascinated and curious to know where these information-delivery upheavals will take us. Every community needs local news; where will we get ours? What makes a healthy news ecology? Once the dust settles, will Anchorage and Alaska end up with a good one? Who is responsible for making sure we end up with a vital, independent and informative service?

I spend a fair amount of time following new media and social media trends. I'm curious how other communities are coping with these changes. How is their local newspaper and public TV and radio doing? How about their commercial broadcasters? What are local bloggers and citizen news sites offering in the mix?

Are people tuning in, shifting allegiances, or zoning out? What kind of blogging community is developing outside mainstream media? Are there conducive partnerships developing between traditional journalists and citizen journalists that are working to the benefit of the community? Where, how and why are they working?

I don't promise answers or silver bullets. This is an evolving situation and a time of great experimentation. But I will try and shine spotlights on some progressive endeavors around Alaska, the United States and the world, and include what users think of them. I'll share interviews with some of the innovators about where they think we may be headed.

Iranian protestors and social media

While a leap away from Anchorage and community journalism, the citizen coverage of news events in Iran this past week has been truly remarkable. While MSM journalists were confined by the goverment to their offices, marchers were shooting video on cell phones and sending Twitter messages to the world.

Reporting is still emerging on all this, but here is one site, Mashable: The Social Media Guide, that compiled 10 citizen-shot videos that detail a worsening scenario. Be warned, the 9th video is graphic and disturbing, involving the death of a young woman right before your eyes. A commentor on this video writes that it was filmed by a friend standing beside him. The writer says he is a doctor, "so I rushed to try and save her. But the impact of the gunshot was so fierce that the bullet had blasted inside the victim's chest and she died in less than 2 minutes...Please let the world know...."

A second post on this same blog offers tips on how to follow Iran events via social media like Twitter, Flickr and You Tube. Here you can learn what a Twitter "hash tag" is and how it lets you dial in to a stream of communication over a topic. The top hash tags being used by people talking about Iran events, reports the piece, are #IranElection, @Ahmadinejad, #Mousavi and #Tehran.

And finally, some perspective on the use of social media in this crisis. Here is an analysis piece pointed to by Jay Rosen and Ethan Zuckerman, written by Anne-Marie Corley for MIT's Technology Review, called The Web vs. the Republic of Iran. (This site seems glitchy; it went up and down several times while I worked with it. You may need to try several times before it comes up.)

Certainly a grim situation, but we know more because ordinary people are offering eye-witness reports.