Why I’m Tracking Journalist Arrests at Occupy Protests - http://bit.ly/rIyGKr
by Me

“I’m tracking these journalist arrests because I’m concerned about the state of the First Amendment, and our willingness as a public and a democracy to defend it. These arrests are a symptom of a larger debate about how we understand the First Amendment in a digital age, as the institutions that traditionally embodied those freedoms shift and change. As more and more of our speech moves online and over mobile networks, and as our press is distributed across vast human and technological networks, we need to contend with new kinds of First Amendment issues."
 

A Guide to the Occupy Wall Street API, Or Why the Nerdiest Way to Think About OWS Is So Useful - http://bit.ly/s06gYM

by Alexis Madrigal 

"What an API does, in essence, is make it easy for the information a service contains to be integrated with the wider Internet. So, to make the metaphor here clear, Occupy Wall Street today can be seen like the early days of Twitter.com. Nearly everyone accessed Twitter information through clients developed by people outside the Twitter HQ. These co-developers made Twitter vastly more useful by adding their own ideas to the basic functionality of the social network. These developers don't have to take in all of OWS data or use all of the strategies developed at OWS. Instead, they can choose the most useful information streams for their own individual applications (i.e. occupations, memes, websites, essays, policy papers)."

How Storifying Occupy Wall Street Saved The News - http://rww.to/rwmVTU
by Jon Mitchell

"But for the Monday night raid at Zuccotti Park, and indeed for much of the Occupation, Storify has come into its own as the social news curation tool par excellence. In fact, thanks to the media blackout Monday night, some of the most important news outlets in the country would not have had a story if not for Storify.

"All news is social now," says Storify CEO and co-founder Burt Herman. Whoever's on the ground is the reporter, and whoever's curating on the Web is the editor. It doesn't matter who is whom. "We always talk about quoting from the original sources, from politicians, companies and everybody else, but now the journalists who are normally reporting are the sources.""

What happens when journalism is everywhere? - http://bit.ly/tcbQYP

by Mathew Ingram 

"The disruption of journalism thanks to the “democracy of distribution” (as Om has called it) is also one of the reasons why laws like the Stop Online Piracy Act are a real danger. What if a site like WikiLeaks or a citizen-journalism service is accused of using copyrighted material in a news report? Their site could be removed from the internet and shut down by payment companies (as WikiLeaks has been) without even a court hearing to prove their guilt. Freedom of the press becomes a lot more important when everyone is the press — or rather, when the internet itself becomes the press.

So what does the world look like when journalism is everywhere? We are beginning to find out. And while it may be a frightening prospect if you are a traditional media company, there is a lot to be optimistic about if you are just interested in the news. A world where everyone is a journalist may be a bit more chaotic and a bit more complicated than the one we are used to, but it will also be a bit more free, and that is clearly a good thing."

Occupy PressThink: Tim Pool - http://bit.ly/tpWxuJ
by Jay Rosen

"This might be a good time to mention that Tim Pool is clearly an activist and supporter of Occupy Wall Street as well as a reporter of it. If you believe those things can’t possibly go together, fine, I know where you’re coming from. But don’t expect me to freak out or even care that you wouldn’t call Pool a journalist. As I’ve said before, we should focus less on “who’s a journalist” and more on valid acts of journalism. When we can recognize the act, the “who” becomes easier: anyone committing the act!

When young people ask me what they should do if they want to become a journalist, here is what I normally tell them: the most important thing is not to go to J-school, or start a blog, or get a newspaper to hire you (though all those things are good!) but to get yourself into a “journalistic situation.” A journalistic situation is when a live community is depending on you for regular reports about some unfolding thing that clearly matters to them.

If you really want to be a journalist the best experience you can have is to be depended on by people who need you as their eyes and ears, their interviewer, their man or woman in the field. Tim Pool: he’s in a journalistic situation, classically so. And I bet he’s learning a lot from it."

Image as interest: How the Pepper Spray Cop could change the trajectory of Occupy Wall Street - http://bit.ly/ttaNJv 

by Megan Garber

"The image — and its subsequent meme-ification — marked the moment when the Occupy movement expanded its purview: It moved beyond its concern with economic justice to espouse, simply, justice. It became as much about inequality as a kind of Platonic concern as it is about income inequality as a practical one. It became, in other words, something more than a political movement.

It’s the image that demands, in trending topic terms, attention. ... And it also demands participation. A key feature of the Epiphanator, the mechanism of press-mediated storytelling that defined our sense of the world for so long, is its impulse to organize time itself into discrete artifacts. Journalists tend to be obsessed with beginnings and, even more importantly, endings."