Its formal appearance on August 20, 2013, went pretty much unnoticed or at least unreported by our local skewsmedia, but there’s a new player on the international news scene in the United States.

It’s Al Jazeera America.  Call it AJAM.

Yes, there is a definite image issue AJAM must overcome.  After the attack on September 11, 2001, Al Jazeera Arabic was clearly the mouthpiece for al Qaeda.  It is owned by Qatar.   Similar to NPR and the BBC, AJAM is effectively funded by a private charitable foundation, the royal family of Qatar.  Still, AJAM’s staff is primarily from the United States, and most of them came from US news media (not automatically a reassuring credential…).

It will be interesting to see if AJAM can establish itself as an independent and reliable news medium among the many US skewsmedia who long ago walked away from any semblance of journalistic integrity in international news reporting.

Yesterday’s rush by alleged news media to put the wrong information out first was excoriated by today’s New York Times article titled The F.B.I. Criticizes the News Media After Several Mistaken Reports of an Arrest.

The Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism lists nine core principles for providing “…citizens with accurate and reliable information they need to function in a free society.”

Yesterday’s travesty by various skewsmedia managed to mangle the first three of those principles with no difficulty at all.

In a March 30th comment on her Facebook page, former Spokesman-Review reporter Taryn Thompson offers some experienced and interesting insight about local news media including anonymous blog comments in news stories.

Here is a reprint of her comment used with her permission.

Do you believe in principle that anonymous blog comments should or should not be included in news stories?  If you do, what do you believe they add?

Would you still comment on OpenCdA if you had to attach your true name to your comment?  Why?

There is a new website, Chuckle Berries Online, that focuses on factions in the Kootenai County Republican Party.  The website’s tagline is “… because liberals make us laugh!”

In February we pointed OpenCdA readers to another website, Disclosure Kootenai County.

Weblogs like Chuckle Berries Online, Disclosure Kootenai County, and OpenCdA exist partly because our local news/views/skews media fail to deliver information that people want and in some cases need to be better informed citizens.  The dead-tree journalists are whistling past the graveyard replete with headstones of deceased newspapers.   Weblogs do not represent a threat to the socially acceptable J-school journalists.  Many are an effort to nudge dead-tree journalism away from its death march.