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.