I’m honored to say that I’ve been invited to be part of an annual
Stanford John S. Knight Journalism Fellowships program this coming
week.  The topic of the event is “#Hashtagged: How Social Media are
Revolutionizing the News” and the other speakers are from NPR, Google
and Yahoo; we’re going to be talking about the impact of social media on
news, a subhect dear to my heart.

The symposium is being help on Thursday, May 17th, on the Stanford Campus; deets here: http://comm.stanford.edu/mcclatchy/

Besides me, the other speakers are:
Krishna Bharat,
distinguished scientist and founder of Google News, an automated news
service aggregating more than 50,000 sources, with more than 72 editions
in more than 30 languages. He is on the John S. Knight Journalism
Fellowships Board of Visitors.

Andy Carvin,
senior strategist, NPR Social Media Desk. During the Arab Spring,
Carvin developed a large following on Twitter who came to rely on his
messages and retweets of news and information developing in the
uprisings.

Sheigh Crabtree,
lead editor and strategist for social, Yahoo! News and Yahoo! Finance.
Crabtree has extensive expertise as an interactive strategist, editor
and producer.  Before joining Yahoo! she was executive editor of
UberMedia and has journalism experience with the Los Angeles Times and
the Hollywood Reporter.

James Bettinger,
director of the John S. Knight Journalism Fellowships at Stanford, will
moderate the symposium, which is  open to the public and The symposium,
part of a series that began in 1964, is sponsored by the Department of
Communication. It will be in the Vidalakis Room of the Schwab
Residential Center.

The symposium is open to the public and will be followed by a reception. http://comm.stanford.edu/mcclatchy/

I’d
like to think that I was invited to speak because of the great job the
Oakland Local team has done in using social media both to source the
news and community voices and because of our use of social media to
cover local issues with national interest, including Occupy Oakland, the
trial of Johannes Mehserle and the killing of Oscar Grant, and the
recent shooting death of Alan Blueford, a young man shot and killed last
week by an Oakland police officer.  The format of the symposium is
informal, but I’ll be preparing some comments/thoughts to post here to
complement the talk.

Thank you so much, John S. Knight Journalism Fellowships at Stanford, I am honored.