A global study into 60 citizen journalism projects in 33 countries found citizen journalism flourished under governments which could be characterized as "soft authoritarianism" regimes such as in Malaysia and South Korea. Professor Michael Bromley from the University of Queensland School of Journalism and Communication told The Australian that citizen journalism flourishes "where there is room to comment and to intervene and to participate but there are strict rules: for example, the media is controlled by the state. That creates a need for it." In repressive countries, such as Burma, there were fewer examples. Citizen journalists, Bromley said, "come out of a history that includes social activism. Bloggers and tweeters [users of micro-blogging site Twitter] can be citizen journalists but it's not just that independent personal view. It's about investigating, going to primary sources, offering your opinion. Often the blogger is the primary source."

As scientific warnings about the potential risks of climate change intensify, governments realize they need to at least be seen as responsive to global warming concerns. But, behind the scenes, many of the world's richest countries are dragging their feet. Some are promoting unproven measures designed to insulate the coal and energy industries from change. Others want to use the global warming crisis as an opportunity to promote nuclear power. Most are balking at committing to substantial cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, despite having signaled their intention to do just that a year ago. To help explain the issues and uncover the behind-the scenes lobbying, the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) is launching the Climate Change portal within the SourceWatch wiki.

The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) conferences -- huge events, attracting some 10,000 people -- aim to create a successor agreement to the Kyoto Protocol, which expires at the end of 2012. Official conference documents are often hard to find and often full of mind-numbing jargon. As a result, it's hard for journalists to track what's going on and harder still for citizens to know what their governments are doing. Between now and the COP15 December 2009 meeting in Copenhagen, CMD staff and citizen editors will build SourceWatch articles on climate change issues, profile the players in the UNFCCC negotiations and unmask corporate and government greenwashing.

One current priority is a series of profiles on the policies and performances of the key richest countries. If you would like to lend a hand, just register on SourceWatch and check out this page on our Climate Change portal. Thanks for your participation!

The New York Times notes, "There are at least two wikis intended to let voters collaborate to collect examples of problems with voting, whether exceptionally long lines or more direct actions meant to scare off voters -- the Voter Suppression Wiki and SourceWatch's Election Protection Wiki. Since 2006, the Video the Vote project has sent out volunteers to monitor voting around the country, and this year the group expects to dispatch at least 2,300 volunteers with cameras in all 50 states to videotape potential trouble spots. ... The ultimate home for much of this content could be the video-sharing giant YouTube, which has created a channel, Video Your Vote, in collaboration with PBS, to encourage submissions. ... While his organization is partnering with YouTube (and received 300 cameras as part of the Video Your Vote project), [project founder Ian] Inaba says he sees their missions as different. 'YouTube is there to generate content, to generate eyeballs,' he said. 'We came at this from more of an election protection framework. We want voters to oversee the election process - it requires citizen oversight.'"

Volunteers at the Center for Media and Democracy's Election Protection Wiki have collected unbelievable reports of voter suppression nationwide in the nine days since it went online.

Among the reports on the EPWiki:

• In Colorado and New Mexico there are not enough voting booths or machines for Election Day.
• Students in Virginia are receiving probing questionnaires from voting officials falsely implying they don't have the right to vote there.
• In Ohio alone, more than 600,000 newly-registered voters are threatened with purging.
• There are reports of sometimes-illegal mass voter roll purges in Michigan, New Mexico, Florida, Georgia, Colorado and other states. Several states are even purging voter rolls of people who are "Bob" on driver's licenses and "Robert" on voter registration forms.
• Officials in Indiana are avoiding setting up polling places in areas of the state heavily populated by minorities.
• The Republican Party in Michigan planned to challenge the registrations of every voter whose home had been foreclosed on recently.
• ACORN, which has been held out as a bogeyman for voter fraud (though only 26 TOTAL cases of voter fraud were prosecuted nationwide from 2002 - 2005), has bad registration rates below the California Republican Party's and a lawsuit alleging fraud in 2004 was dismissed by a judge for lack of merit?
• And, of course, there are ongoing worries across the country about electronic voting machines.

The Election Protection Wiki (at EPWiki.org) is the only website trying to document and centralize these reports, which were found scattered across the Web by volunteers. We are trying to get everything ready so activists, advocates and the media have a central place to go on Election Day for immediate information about these issues.

We need your help to collect more reports. No experience is necessary and CMD staffers are here to help with ready-to-go simple tasks and any support you need. Please join us in protecting the right to vote - go to EPWiki.org and click on "things you can do" to begin.

Remember the New York Times expose on the Pentagon's use of retired military officers who frequently appear as "military analysts" on television and radio news shows? The program was launched in 2002 to help sell the Iraq war, but soon expanded to other controversial issues. Most of the 8,000 pages of internal Pentagon documents used to document the illegal propaganda program haven't been analyzed or reported on. But now, thanks to the Center for Media and Democracy, those documents are now text searchable! Help us dig out the gems in the emails between Pentagon PR staffers, talking points and briefing transcripts. How did the Pentagon use the program to spin Guantanamo Bay or military operations in Afghanistan? Are John McCain or John Murtha mentioned in the Pentagon documents? What about Fox News or PBS? CMD has converted the Pentagon documents so that you can search them by keyword, and posted them on our SourceWatch site. Have a look -- some ideas to help you get started are here -- and post what you find on relevant SourceWatch articles. If this is your first time editing on SourceWatch, you can register here, and learn more about adding information to the site here, here and here. Have fun and thanks for your help!