UPI Reinvents Itself With New Generation of Students Online

1

• UPI Reinvents Itself With New Generation of
  Students Online

2

• KNOXVILLE, Tenn-- That "other" wire service-- the
  one that you heard about one day in school, but
  rarely saw- United Press International (UPI) is
  back!
• As the Intercollegiate Online News Network
  (ICONN) is born this week here on the University
  of Tennessee campus, it appears an older
  journalism player is going through its own
  reincarnation. Tonight, we got a view of that as
  Michael Marshall, editor of UPI, shared a little
  bit of the vision for UPI-University, a major
  initiative of the soon-to-be 102-year-old news
  agency.

3

• "We're finding a way to adjust our traditional
  values to a totally different environment," said
  Marshall, who plans to give more concrete details
  about UPI-U during his presentation tomorrow.
  "We're no longer a news agency in a traditional
  sense.
• Today's college students are a big part of an
  effort by United Press International to shift the
  focus to more serious journalism.
• As what Marshall termed 'a national and
  international showcase for young journalists,"
  UPI-U is one way the agency is responding to
  respond to citizen journalism with news and
  information that is credible and reliable.

4

• Formerly a news agency for afternoon newspapers,
  which began to go away in the 1980s with the
  proliferation of afternoon newscasts, UPI has
  been under serveral ownership changes before its
  purchase by News World Communications.
• According to the mediaowners.com Web site, News
  World Comunications' owns the American news
  agency United Press International (Upi), acquired
  in 2000. Its flagship newspaper is the Washington
  Times, founded in 1982. Other newspapers
  published by News World include The Middle East
  Times (Egypt), Segye Ilbo (Korea) and Sekai Nippo
  (Japan). It also publishes magazines (Insight,
  The World I, and Washington Golf Monthly).

5

• MY TAKE
• The one thing that bothered me about Marshall's
  remarks tonight was his assumption that there's
  something wrong with Citizen Journalism.
• "The problem with citizen journalism Upi is the
  whole issue of credibility," said Marshall.
• I don't happen to subscribe to the view that all
  or most citizen journalism is unreliable.
  Instead, I happen to believe that it is our role
  as journalists in 2009 to embrace the role that
  citizen journalists can have in our information
  gathering. Properly trained, they become our
  co-laborers in the practice.

6

• What some have called the "pro-am" model of
  journalism is a cutting edge way to re-shape our
  view of citizen journalists.
• To the extent possible, we should help those
  citizens who want to do journalism to know how to
  practice it in a ethical manner.
• Source http//ow.ly/NtzZ309CExG