Mediactive. Gillmor, Dan (2010). Self-published under Creative Commons license. pp. 183.

Journalism is broken, and with Mediactive, Dan Gillmor aims to fix it. But he doesn’t start where you would expect—with a new financial model for the digital age.

He starts with educating the audience. After all, classic, “capital J” journalism is but a small part of the information we consume. Gillmor correctly aims more broadly, including blogs, targeted e-mails, user-generated content—the entire rabble of the web today. His goal is to help us become active users of mediated information. His principles? Be skeptical. Exercise judgment. Open your mind. Keep asking questions. Learn media techniques. In essence, the media consumer needs to think like a journalist, curate his or her own feed, and create meaning from examination of layers of linked sources. Gillmor then offers specific tools to navigate the Internet, from basic search and RSS to specific ways to evaluate the credibility of web-based information. It’s a useful primer in media literacy, especially useful to young audiences whose first instinct is to just “Google it.”  [Read more...]