Turi Munthe

Turi Munthe is CEO and Founder of Demotix, the multiple-award winning open newswire, with over 4,000 reporters in 190 countries around the world. The Telegraph describes Demotix as 'Journalism for the 21st Century', and Techcrunch says 'Demotix is reinventing the newswire.' Turi is English-French-Swedish and was brought up in London. He has been a publisher, editor, political analyst, lecturer, journalist and talking head. He has written for many of the world's leading English-language newspapers, appeared on CNN, BBC, NBC, al-Jazeera, Asahi, Reuters, and elsewhere, and has lectured on new media all over the world. He is the author of the Saddam Hussein Reader.

Follow Turi Munthe on Twitter: @turimunthe  or @demotix

TURI'S FAVOURITE SITES

Like everyone else, I get my news in a mangled, unbundled, RSS-ed, smart-phone-app-ed, google-searched chaos. Lots is redundant and copy-pasted across the web, some is brilliant, some is plain wrong. These four sites above go some way towards rebalancing that intake.

GlobalVoices - A global blog aggregator, set up by @ethanz and run by @solanasaurus: in plain English, they have built a community of some of the smartest, most dedicated and committed local bloggers and activists from all over the world, telling their local stories in a local way.

OpenDemocracy is almost the opposite: they're a tech-smart old-fashioned publisher of measured, long-view, highly-reasoned and spectacularly informed comment about the world, written by academics and experts in their fields. And in the process, they've built something of an online debating forum.

The Guardian's Datablog - Simply shows what the next web (HTML5, the 'Semantic Web') will allow us to do as journalists in the future. Data isn't quite everything. But it's certainly the beginning of everything.

Churnalism - Founded and built by my friend @martinjemoore, gives us the tools to see which PR company wrote the front-page article of your favourite newspaper. Frightening!

Twitter.com - Twitter, of course, isn't a website really. It's a tool. And including it here may smack somewhat of obvious-stating. But I am including it because Twitter has grown up. Gone are the 140-character breakfast updates ("gr8 eggs @happyeater off M4! ROFL"), in are the politics, news and revolution. I watched Tunisia and Egypt explode in real time, 24/7, and I watched it on Twitter. Get involved. It's more interesting than the BBC.

Spotify.com - Another App, not a website. But you find it online, and it's your soundtrack. Free music, and lots of it from all over the world, and you learn as you listen too. Demotix phase 2 was built entirely on spotify and nespresso.

Skype.com - VOIP. Aka: Free calls, Free instant messaging, Free video calls, Free video conferencing. All over the world. Free. Skype is to phone sex what IMAX is to pop-up books... But it's also extraordinary for work: we built our first website in Bolivia, on Skype. It wasn't a very good website, but then we built our second website in Colorado, Madrid and Bucharest also on Skype, and it's much better. Which proves Skype wasn't the problem. If email flattened the postal system, Skype has flattened telecomms.

TechCrunch.com and eu.techcrunch.com - For those of you with any interest at all about what your immediate future might look like. This is where you'll see the Facebook-killer get their first mention, and their first round of funding. And check out eu.techcrunch.com, run by the fantastic @MikeButcher, for a look at what's coming to a Venture Capital meeting near you. It's also the only genuinely wry tech blog out there.

The Big Picture - The Boston Globe pioneered this visual format online: huge images of breaking news around the world. Then the New York Times came in and polished the format, the Lens Blog. They're both amazing. Explore.