Strutting onto the stage at this week's Arab Media Forum (AMF) to a burst of applause and cheers, Egyptian satirist Bassem Youssef had a captive audie...

I believe that people such as Julian Assange, movements such as Occupy Wall Street and those behind the Arab Spring, actually want change for a better, not worse and more chaotic, world. But their image and their hard work is being hijacked and manipulated.

Now that the GOP presidential race is starting in earnest here is some advice for Iowans, and anyone else in other states, who might want to volunteer for do-it-yourself journalism as part of the Huffington Post's Off the Bus 2012 project.

In some very real ways, citizen journalists are the only journalists left. Nobody cares about local politics like local citizens. Nobody can. The adage is true for a reason; all politics is local.

The newsroom concept is an idea that has been catching on in countless communities where hyperlocal news is now king.

The real issue with the language of the proposed New York shield law is less the law per se than placing a definition of a journalist on the books.

Citizen journalists must not give in to the urge to un-take a photo, to click delete and banish the evidence for the parts of a story that shame them, their cause, their friends, their country, their species.

I hope that 2009 will be the year when creators of valuable content start charging and readers begin paying for the journalism they want.

I would worry about what these sites said about me and how they were monitored. Users post anonymously, and there are no checks and balances to investigate if any of the claims are valid.

In March 2008, I asked readers of HuffPost to reach out to reporters and bloggers to help tell the story of Turk Sabri Bogday, who at the time faced unjust execution in Saudi Arabia.

Twitter is a subset of new media. Your evening news and morning papers aren't quite there, lacking internet technologies, commenting, and synchronous interactivity.

We need a press powerful enough to rival other power centers, like government and the corporate state. And we desperately need a new economic structure to save newspapers.