Ventura County Star's citizen journalism specialist

Howard Owens, director of new media for E.W. Scripps' Ventura County Star, posted this notice on the online-news list today:

Our online editor, Alicia Hoffman, will be adding the role of citizen journalism/user-content specialist to her duties. We see blogs, forums, photo blogs and other forms of citizen journalism as a significant part of the online news world. Our readers want to be part of the process of sharing the news and shaping the news. Technology is giving them the tools to do it, and as Dan Gillmor has pointed out, our readers often know more than we do. They can also be more places than we can. And, they also know what interests them and what news they want in ways that traditional, top-down journalism might miss. We need to give appropriate attention to this growing facet of our business. Alicia's primary duties as online editor do not change, but the focus of her job will be different. She will pay close attention to how we're interacting with our readers and the content and business opportunities that emerge, and help to shape our evolving strategy. She will guide us in the world of "journalism as a conversation" as we develop VenturaCountyStar.com as the online community center for Ventura County. Our current plan is to grow organically in this area rather than push any one big initiative. We have blogs, forums and photo blogs now. We will work to grow these and help promote citizen journalism in Ventura County.

Bravo! Under Howard's stewardship, it's likely this role will be a meaningful one.

Craigslist to launch citizen journalism site?

Internetnews.com: Does Craigslist compete with newspapers for ad dollars? "The bigger problems for the papers are trust," says founder Craig Newmark. Also: Craigslist may launch "something in citizen journalism."

TakeBacktheNews: another participatory journalism attempt

From CyberJournalist.net via Mitch Ratcliffe today:

Another participatory journalism attempt, TakeBackTheNews.com, has launched. (Yes, it's getting hard to keep track of all of them...)

This one so far seems to be mostly a blog summarizing mainstream media articles. But the site has more ambitious goals. Individuals are encouraged to participate in the following roles at TakeBackTheNews.com:

• General Content Contributors, who submit interesting news-of-the-day items covering various topics
• Topic-Specific Content Contributors, who focus on a particular topic or content area and submit news items relating to it
• Op-Ed Contributors, who submit original opinion pieces
Contributing Bloggers, who submit takes on the latest news and increase blog exposure
• Editors, established contributors who may apply for or be recruited to serve as volunteer editors

Editors will review all editorial submissions for purposes of appropriateness and clarity before publishing content online.

From the new site:

TakeBackTheNews.com is a grassroots effort enabling news consumers to determine for themselves which stories and topics are worthy of attention, to share that news with others and to have a say in specific coverage and news in general. TBTN serves not only as a rich source of news — with round-the-clock updates and live news feeds — but also as a meeting place for news junkies of all stripes.

Far too much reliance on mainstream news, but looks to be a site worth keeping an eye on.

An open blog, Christo, and Central Park

This from Andy Carvin, program director, Education Development Center's Center for Media & Community:

I just wanted to let you know about a new blog I've set up called The Gates @ Central Park.

The blog covers the upcoming Central Park art project, The Gates, by the artist Christo. For two weeks in February, Christo will decorate Central Park with more than 7,000 gates sporting saffron flags.

I've set up the site as an open blog and mobcast. It's an open blog in the sense that anyone can post to it; I've created an email address that anyone can use to post their thoughts about The Gates. They can also post photos as email attachments. It's also a "mobcast," which plays on the ideas of mobile podcasting and smart mobs. The site allows anyone to call a phone number, input the site's login and PIN, and post a voicemail directly to the blog, which is then made available as an podcast through its RSS feed.

I tried out my first mobcast a couple of weeks ago at the Berkman blogging conference at Harvard, and it worked well, so this time I'm opening it up to the public. I'm hoping people who attend The Gates will
want to post their ideas and images to the site, and add to an online dialogue about the event and public art in general.

Sounds like a great project. If I were visiting New York next month, I'd take part. But it will still be fun to peek in from afar.

Shafer disses the grassroots media revolution

I missed all the hullabaloo earlier this week about Jack Shafer's column in Slate, Blog Overkill, which declared the grassroots media revolution to be bogus.

Like Jack (who's a friend), I don't believe that the new kids on the media block will vanquish the old guard. But I think he underestimates the gathering force of the forces at the grassroots.

Ten minutes ago, we just did our first test of a video posted to Ourmedia. It worked. This -- and thousands of other efforts just like it -- will be bigger than anything Jack can envision, I sincerely believe.

Paper looks for greater reader involvement

The Business Journal, North Carolina:

News & Record Editor John Robinson says he wants a revolution. Online, at least.

He and other editors plan to overhaul the paper's Web site to allow far more interaction between readers and the newsroom. Some observers say the plans break new ground in journalism and the daily newspaper business, taking the Triad's largest paper into virgin territory in an attempt to transform its relationship with the community. ...

Another example of citizens journalism

I just posted a new entry at the Media Center's morph blog on Another voice in the mediasphere — a look at a new example of citizens journalism by Logan Darrow, who runs a conservative news outfit called the Lexington League.

We the military?

Gloria Pan at the Media Center's morph blog:

This week’s New Yorker magazine includes an article by Dan Baum, entitled, "Battle Lessons: What the generals don’t know." It talks about how information is shared in the military and how officers are using the Internet as a tool and resource in waging the Iraqi war. As I was reading it, I was struck again and again by its parallels with what’s happening in media today. Replace key words like "Military Brass" with "Big Media" and "junior officers" with "audiences," and you get basically the same story. This is a pattern that must be repeating itself over and over again as society transitions to the age of We Media. ...

Does big news trump copyright?

Fascinating discussion going on over at Don't Lose the Question: Can grassroots news sites ignore copyright during a big news story like the tsunami?

Citizens journalism in Santa Fe

I'm fairly amazed at how little time I have to post to any of my three blogs this week, as we ramp up to the launch of Ourmedia later this month.

Meantime, I'm guest-blogging over at Morph, the blog of the American Press Institute's Media Center, and have this update about citizens journalism in Santa Fe.

Reporting on the birth of triplets

Derrick Oien at user generated content writes about the recent birth of his triplets and how the mediasphere now allows him to communicate his family's news with others almost instantly. Excerpt:

As I waited in the prep room with my wife, I was armed with the same DVCam, a Sony Cybershot camera, and a Sony Ericsson P910. As we waited for the appointed time for the c-section, I periodically snapped pictures with the cell phone and immediately posted them to Flickr. I had told friends and family to look at my blog on the photostream section and they could see the event happen in as real time as I could provide. Periodically I fired up Opera on my cell phone and added some blog posts for commentary.

During the delivery we filmed a good portion of the time immediately after the babies arrived with the DVCam and then resumed stills with the cell phone and the camera. That night as I returned home I uploaded images from the camera to Flickr and then used the cross posting capabilities to post back on blogspot.

During this time period I had as many visits to my blog as I have had when I have had posts covered by Unmediated or Waxy or Dave Winer. Theses were not bloggers, rather they were family and friends sharing in a real time way an event that we wanted to share with others.

During the holidays in between feedings I reflected on how transformative this ability to use network connected personal media devices to create information to share with others. When you consider this type of activity and blogging and podcasting and a host of other activities, I think that we are clearly at the dawn of a period where media turns in on itself and we all become Real Time Media Producers and Consumers or Real Time Media Prosumers. ...

Wikipedia and the cult of anti-elitism

Clay Shirky at Many to Many:

Of course librarians, teachers, and academics don’t like the Wikipedia. It works without privilege, which is inimical to the way those professions operate.

This is not some easily fixed cosmetic flaw, it is the Wikipedia’s driving force. You can see the reactionary core of the academy playing out in the horror around Google digitizing books held at Harvard and the Library of Congress — the NY Times published a number of letters by people insisting that real scholarship would still only be possible when done in real libraries. The physical book, the hushed tones, the monastic dedication, and (unspoken) the barriers to use, these are all essential characteristics of the academy today. ...

Video blogs break out with tsunami scenes

From today's Wall Street Journal: Video Blogs Break Out With Tsunami Scenes.

When twenty-one-year-old Jordan Golson launched his Web diary, or blog, in early December, his conservative views on news and politics weren't exactly in demand, attracting about 10 surfers a day. But by last Thursday, he was struggling to keep his site named "Cheese and Crackers" up and running as it racked up 640,000 hits.

The difference: tsunami videos.

Mr. Golson's site -- at jlgolson.blogspot.com -- is just one of dozens of locations on the Internet hosting amateur videos of the Indian Ocean disaster. Many have been deluged with visitors eager to see more of the gripping footage than TV offers, or to watch videos over and over again on their own time. Some of these "video blogs," like Mr. Golson's, are pre-existing text blogs, which typically include commentary and views on current events.

Others have just sprung up in the last week. WaveofDestruction.org, created by an Australian blogger to host tsunami videos, logged 682,366 unique visitors from last Wednesday through Sunday morning, and has more than 25 amateur videos of the impact so far.

"The ease of putting something online is pretty much instant," says Geoffrey Huntley, the founder of Wave of Destruction. "At a media company, I'm sure there are channels you have to go through -- copyright, legal, editorial, etc. Blogging is instant."

Even before the tsunami, media watchers had predicted that 2005 would be a big year for video blogging, also known as vlogging. Jay Rosen, chair of the Department of Journalism at New York University and a media blogger himself, says the unique videos of the waves hitting shore could be a "breakthrough" event for the Web. ...

The rise of personal media

During the next month, I'll be guest-blogging on Morph, the weblog of The Media Center of the American Press Institute.

Susan Mernit recruited an all-star lineup to take part in this fete of group guest-blogging. Here's the lineup:

Mondays: JD Lasica (New Media Musings, Darknet, Ourmedia)

Tuesdays: Tim Porter (First Draft): Newspaper biz

Wednesdays: Tony Gentile (Buzzhit): The business of blogging and big company activities

Thursdays: Tom Biro (The Media Drop): Open media and transparency

Fridays: Susan Mernit (Susan Mernit's Blog): Tech watch, interesting new companies

Three out of five of us -- me, Tim Porter and Tom Biro -- are members of the Media Bloggers Association. Nice to be in such esteemed company.

My first post today talks about the personal media revolution, and asks how traditional media outlets can get in the game if they're to remain relevant.

Dan Gillmor on Grassroots Journalism

Dan Gillmor has officially launched his new life: Dan Gillmor on Grassroots Journalism, a new blog on TypePad. I've just added it to my blogroll.

For the first time in two decades I'm not on the payroll of a large media corporation. As of today I'm on the payroll of a one-person company, comprised of me, but media is still on my agenda. ...

For the immediate future I plan to use this blog to ponder the present and future of grassroots journalism; to begin to figure out what we might do together in this new world; and, in general, to have the kind of conversation that this huge topic requires.

Dan's last column in the San Jose Mercury News appears tomorrow. Good luck, Dan. Looking forward to collaborating on the participatory media front.

(A few minutes after I posted this, I spoke with Dan by phone. He has some interesting things lined up, including a possible grassroots journalism summit/roundtable coming sometime down the road that he'll announce.)

Publish your media to the Internet Archive

The coding whizzes at Creative Commons -- chiefly Nathan Yergler -- have finished work on a version 1.0 release of the Creative Commons Publisher tool, which lets anyone attach a Creative Commons license to his or her media for sharing it in the Internet Archive. Works on PCs or Macs. Congrats! This is a cool Web-based drag-and-drop tool that lets you avoid ftp and all that other crud.

I'll be meeting with Nathan and Mike Linksvayer on Tuesday to discuss adapting this tool for Ourmedia.

Zack's advice on open source journalism

Zack Rosen of Civic Space sits in at his uncle Jay's PressThink and offers some advice for news organizations in the age of citizens journalism.

Online video and Ourmedia

Video blogging has just busted out into the national spotlight.

Heather Green in the new issue of Business Week: Online Video: The Sequel. Video blogs are proliferating, thanks to improved distribution technology, and mainstream companies are taking notice. I managed to get a plug in there for Ourmedia:

Welcome to the latest Net phenomenon: video blogs, or what some folks call vlogs. Thousands of ordinary (and some downright nutty) people have begun posting a cornucopia of video fare online, from self-indulgent art clips and earnest citizen journalism to sly political commentary (see BW Online, 12/29/04, "Let a Million Videos Bloom Online"). Experimentation is the rule, and eccentrics outnumber serious practitioners.

But amid the chaos, glimpses of a commercial future are starting to emerge, including a revival of online video distribution, using vlogs to sell ads, and corporate sites designed to reach out to customers and suppliers. ...

The vlog phenomenon has stirred up a wave of creativity at grassroots groups and companies alike. Online video sites, such as Undergroundfilm, are adding blogging sections. Ourmedia, an online showcase for digital content, is expected to launch early this month [January]. It will provide free storage and blogging room for creative types such as New York indie musician Sam Bisbee, whose music video will be available for free. "You see video bubbling up all over the Web," says J.D. Lasica, who runs Ourmedia. "My thought was to gather it all in one place."

Here's Heather's companion piece, Let a Million Videos Bloom Online. The grassroots movement to post visual blogs makes astonishing viewing, and vlogs' rising audiences may give them an increasing impact. Excerpt:

In Boston, Steve Garfield is practicing his own brand of citizen journalism. His video reports at stevegarfield.blogs.com/videoblog are as local as they come, ranging from coverage of this summer's Democratic National Convention to a video of a downed power line on his street. At human-dog.com, run by Chris Weagel, a St. Clair Shores (Mich.) video producer, visitors can watch a spare, silent film showing an anonymous person removing a John Kerry yard sign from its metal posts after the Presidential election and taping an upside-down flag in its place.

Ryan Hodson, a 25-year-old film editor, specializes in videos that mingle the absurd with oddly touching insights. In one clip, she tours her house. In the kitchen, the camera focuses on a pot on a stove as Hodson describes the night her roommate tried to cook Dinty Moore Stew without -- as the camera pans up to recreate -- pouring the food out of the can. In another video, she created split-screen montages of her brother racing bicycles, showing him crashing, and then out ahead of the pack.

The trio are among the pioneers spearheading a fast-evolving grassroots movement. It's an amazing process to watch as creative pockets begin to interact around the country. Garfield, Hodson, and Weagel are all part of a Yahoo! (YHOO ) group dedicated to video blogging that was formed in June by Jay Dedman, a New Yorker who works at a public-access TV station.

In turn, that Yahoo group began working in late summer with Ourmedia, a new site backed by a who's who of bloggers and grassroots media advocates. Intended to be a showplace for digital content, Ourmedia is being given free storage space by the Internet Archive, a nonprofit digital library backed by the entrepreneur Brewster Kahle.

Ourmedia is also tapping into the publishing and copyright licensing tools developed by Creative Commons, another grassroots nonprofit founded by Lawrence Lessig, a Stanford Law School professor and one of America's best known commentators on intellectual-property issues.

The links among the various groups don't stop there. Yahoo, which unveiled a video search service earlier this month, is working with Ourmedia, Creative Commons, and commercial sites such as indie-film service AtomFilms to develop a video version of Really Simple Syndication, or RSS.

We'll see what Jay has to say, but you couldn't really ask for a more glowing pair of articles. (And Heather's the bomb.)

Citizens journalism tops the year's media news

Mark Glaser in OJR writes a year-in-review piece titled, "Bloggers, Citizen[s] Media and Rather's Fall." Mark writes, "2004 was the year the power started shifting, that the Little People, if you will, started to tell the gods of media what the public really wanted." Jay Rosen, Steve Rubel, Neil Budde, Robert Coxl and others hold forth on the year's most important developments in the media realm related to the Internet and technology. (Note to the OJR style gurus: it's citizens media, citizens journalism, not citizen.)

Leaving old media for citizens media

South Korea's OhmyNews has an interview with author, journalist and new media pioneer Dan Gillmor: What's Next for Dan Gillmor? The tech writer talks to OMNI about his plans to leave old media for a new media venture. Excerpt:

OhmyNews: OK, let's get straight to it: What's your media venture all about?

Dan Gillmor: That's what we're figuring out (laughter). I'm not saying this to be evasive, but it's so early that I just don't have the specifics in place. But I do know that I want to avoid "left vs. right" and I do hope to work on something that involves our economic system and how we can work out some of the problems we have. But it just feels to me like it's a trap to get into a leftwing-rightwing debate right now.

There are lots of people already doing that quite well, and I also want to bring, as (OhmyNews) did, the understanding that professional journalists have actually learned a few things over the years -- things that actually work and we shouldn't just throw out those things that work as we go into this new era of citizen journalism. We should apply the best lessons from professional journalism -- which is not to say replicate it - but to combine the best of the old with that wonderful energy and excitement out there in the grassroots. I think that would be wonderful if I could pull that off.

Student blogger scoops the media

Florida's Weekly Planet:

On Aug. 30, the Florida Democratic Party registered the domain name scottmaddox2006. com for its chairman, former Tallahassee mayor and gubernatorial wannabe Scott Maddox, to reserve that website name should Maddox actually make the race.Maddox paid the $35 registration fee himself, a party spokeswoman later told reporters. But the move raised concerns among Democrats about a looming conflict of interest. Might the chairman end up fighting for a nomination against others in his party?

This story hit mainstream newspapers statewide, but not because of the Tallahassee press corps' investigative prowess.

No, the fact that Maddox, other Democratic staffers and Lt. Gov. Toni Jennings had registered website names for future campaigns came from a Florida State University student named Mike, who broke the story in his blog, Florida News (www.flnews.blogspot.com).

"I'm really just an FSU student with no real qualifications," Mike said in an e-mail (he declined to give his full name or to provide more personal details about himself). "I just happen to read all of the Florida newspapers and a lot of books on politics and campaigns."

The domain story is the first major instance of Florida political blog news forcing its way into the mainstream news mechanism. It represents, to some degree, a breakthrough for Florida poli-blogging.

"He did a very obvious thing, just an obvious way of seeing who is laying [political] foundations," said Mark Lane, a columnist for the Daytona Beach News-Journal who follows political blogs in Florida and writes one, too, Flablog (www.flablog.net). Obvious, but missed by the Tallahassee press corps, Lane added. ...

A new community photo blog

I'm a big fan of online publications reaching out to their local communities in new ways to get them directly involved in the mediasphere. So it came as welcomed news when one of my favorite new photo-sharing sites, Buzznet, teamed up with the Venture County Star to create a new community photo blog (www.vcstar.buzznet.com).

The site offers local readers and other site visitors the ability to post and discuss photos of subjects in Venture County, giving them the abilityl to document their local community.

For those who don't know about it, Buzznet.com is an online community photo blog that lets people from all over the world communicate with each other through pictures. Visitors can even search for pics based on keywords associated with the photo. Tags are the swag, man.

Citizen journalism

Here's Wikipedia's ever-changing take on citizen journalism:

Citizen journalism, also known as "participatory journalism" is the act of citizens "playing an active role in the process of collecting, reporting, analyzing and disseminating news and information," according to the seminal report, We Media: How Audiences are Shaping the Future of News and Information, by Shayne Bowman and Chris Willis. They say, "The intent of this participation is to provide independent, reliable, accurate, wide-ranging and relevant information that a democracy requires." ...

Wikinews trumpets online revolution

Jemima Kiss in Britain's dotJournalism: Wikinews trumpets online revolution. Excerpt:

Citizen journalism is set to be a major force in online news and traditional news organisations better listen up, says founder of fledging open news project Wikinews.

Erik Moeller, journalist and open source software advocate, has ambitious expectations for Wikinews.

"I would compare its current state to the first days of the open source Linux operating system, which has been created by volunteer programmers from around the world," Mr. Moeller told dotJournalism. ...

Ourmedia as a podcast portal

I spent a half hour on the phone this afternoon with Doug Kaye, the brilliant and talented workhorse behind IT Conversations.

We'd like to bring you into that conversation.

Doug has been a longstanding participant in the soon-to-launch Ourmedia project (docs here) as a member of our wiki.

We agreed that while other forms of personal media like photographs already have a compelling home on sites like Flickr, there is currently no equivalent for Internet audio and podcasting.

Doug has lately been stretching IT Conversations into new directions, going beyond tech talk into other spheres. Says Doug:

The most popular content, for example, has been the Pop!Tech sessions (Malcolm Gladwell, Thomas Barnett, etc.) I particularly like giving a forum to these big-ideas people. My guidelines have been that the programs must be educational, inspirational or entertaining in addition to meeting minimum quality standards. But I'm producing programs such as "Voices in Your Head" (interviews with SciFi writers) and more.

It's all volunteer work for Doug -- a labor of love.

Doug pointed out that while Audiofeast.com (a site I'd never heard of) just pulled down $10 million in VC money, and the Net is abuzz with rumors of commercialized podcasting startups, there is no central hub and hosting service for podcasts.

Ourmedia offers that -- and solves the affordability problem with free storage and free bandwidth. As Doug points out, that can be a real life-saver, when bandwidth bills can ding you for hundreds of dollars if your podcast gets a push in the blogosphere.

Doug and I share the view that we need to help sustain a culture of free, open, accessible podcasting for all, with podcasts freely shareable under a Creative Commons share-alike license.

Ourmedia sounds like the logical place to house such an operation -- a place where podcasters can come, upload their podcasts (for free), form communities around them (for free), exchange tips and best practices, and obtain a full directory of available podcasts.

Who would like to help Doug and us help build out the audio portion of Ourmedia into a sort of podcast portal?

Podcast Central, anyone?

(Note: At this point, Ourmedia remains an all-volunteer, open-source media project. You'll be credited on our Credits page, get a dose of online fame, and receive lots of good juju.)

A home-brew iPod ad

Wired News:

School teacher George Masters has the marketing world abuzz with a homemade ad for Apple Computer's iPod that is rapidly "going viral."

To some experts, Masters' ad heralds the future of advertising. Homemade ads will play a big part in marketing, just like blogging is shaking up the news.

Masters' 60-second animated ad features flying iPods, pulsing hearts and swirling '70s psychedelia. It's set to the beat of "Tiny Machine" by '80s pop band the Darling Buds. (You can see the ad here).

Masters quietly posted the spot to his site a few weeks ago. It received moderate traffic until it was picked up by several blogs last week. In a matter of days, the ad has been watched more than 37,000 times, and is making the rounds on blogs and e-mail.

Gillmor leaving Mercury News

This announcement appeared in this morning's San Jose Mercury News about the dean of grassroots journalism:

Dan Gillmor, longtime technology columnist for the Mercury News, said Thursday that he will be leaving the paper at the end of this month.

Gillmor, an advocate for grassroots journalism, will be working on a start-up venture that aims to make it easier for the public to report and publish on the Internet.

``Something powerful is happening, it's in the early stages and I have a chance to help figure this out,'' Gillmor said. ``I hate the idea of leaving. But I'd hate not trying this even more.''

WestBerkeley.com launches

Yet another community site, WestBerkeley.com, launched on the Web tonight. (My, we're getting niche.) I met some of the founders at a party in Berkeley (CA) tonight.

Flickr a hit with bloggers

Wired News:

When bombs went off in Jakarta, Indonesia, in September, CNN.com readers weren't the first to know. Instead, members of Flickr, an online photo service, were among the very earliest to see pictures of what had happened.

"There were photos on Flickr before even any news stories," said Caterina Fake, a Flickr co-founder. "Within the hour, three Flickr users who happened to be in Jakarta had uploaded photos."

Flickr is a new breed of photo site offered by Vancouver's Ludicorp. It takes the online posting capability offered by photo printing sites like Ofoto or Snapfish and adds a palette of features that make images easier to share. ...

A participatory book project

Robert Scoble and Shel Israel are working together on a new blog book and doing it with the readers.

Will the Constitution protect citizen journalists?

Eugene Volokh, the conservative UCLA law professor, offers an op-ed piece in Thursday's New York Times, arguing that bloggers deserve the same First Amendment protections the press is entitled to. He's right.

Thanks to Steve Rubel for the pointer.

The future of digital media

If you missed this interview of Jeff Jarvis by Ernie Miller on Corante last week, you should check it out: The future of digital media. Excerpt:

Though I do believe that big media has a great deal to learn from citizens' media -- if they'll listen -- I also believe there are lessons old media can teach the new. Some bloggers may not want to hear that, but I think it is the responsibility of established media to share those lessons with those who'll listen.

Some of the lessons are quite practical: Journalism -- and legal -- experts should be teaching bloggers about protecting themselves in the arenas of libel and copyright. And it's important to add that big media should see bloggers as colleagues and help extend such protections as shield laws to them, for what happens to bloggers could happen to journalists and vice versa. Journalists also can teach bloggers how to use the Freedom of Information Act to dog government. I'd even say that some bloggers would benefit from learning how to write better headlines and leads and nut graphs, as we quaintly call them.

Are blogs the future of journalism?

Slashdot: Are Blogs the Future of Journalism? "Let's hope not."

Can wikis build a new kind of journalism?

TechNewsWorld: Open-Source News? Wiki Builds a New Kind of Journalism. More on the launch of Wikinews. Excerpt:

"Wikis encourage multiple points of view and have a strong neutrality policy," Jimmy Wales, co-founder of the Wikipedia, told TechNewsWorld.

"We hopeful that we will get a high quality synthesis of the news," he said.

That's quite different from blogs, he maintained, which are like the editorial pages of the Internet. "A blog is one person's analysis of the news," he said.

With a blog, people create communities around themselves, added Ross Mayfield, CEO of SocialText, a Palo Alto, California, maker of collaborative software for the enterprise Relevant Products/Services from Sprint -- With Sprint, business is beautiful., which incorporates Wiki and blog technology.

"Wikis are more about group voice than individual voice," he told TechNewsWorld. ...

"You have an open, collaborative practice for developing content that works because the barriers are very low for anyone to make a contribution," he added. "So you end up getting a more diverse body of participants."

Student journalist blogs from award show

Susan Tam, a student journalist in her senior year at the University of Southern California, is blogging live this week from the red carpet at the Family Television Awards at the Beverly Hilton in Los Angeles. The Family TV Awards, hosted by Lori Loughlin of The WB series “Summerland,” recognizes the shows, writers and producers who exemplify creative excellence in family friendly programming. The awards take place this Wednesday night but air Dec. 9 at 9 p.m. on The WB Network.

This spring, Tam will receive her degree in print journalism with a minor in Natural Sciences. She is planning on pursuing a career in photojournalism after graduating. She currently works on staff at the Santa Monica Daily Press and also wrote for and associate edited USC's Daily Trojan.

Thanks to Steve Rubel for the info.

The grassroots media revolution

Jay Dedman, a key member of ourmedia, blogs about FeedsterTV, a new site that offers one way to let us watch all that Internet video in the years ahead. Writes Jay:

Right now, the only way to watch videoblogs is to go to each individual blog and watch each individual video. As of November 2004, there is no way to see videos all in one place. It's as if when I want to hear a story, I got to run around town to each person's apartment to hear the story. I want a stage where we can all come together and tell stories to each other. ...

Bonus links:

Blogdigger, offering the latest posts with media "enclosures."

iPodder.net, showcasing the podcasting revolution.

Engadget: How to podcast (which I previously linked to).

Wikipedia does the news

Joanna Glasner in Wired News: The folks behind the open-source reference site that's challenging the encyclopedia industry decide to give journalism a go. Through the experimental Wikinews site, anyone can take a stab at being a reporter. Excerpt:

Alex Halavais, graduate director for the informatics school at the University at Buffalo, said in an e-mail interview that Wikinews has much in common with two other efforts at citizen journalism, Indymedia.org and South Korea's OhmyNews.

However, Halavais believes Wikinews' emphasis on neutrality places it a step apart from the Independent Media Center, which typically has a left-wing viewpoint, and OhmyNews, which allows authors to editorialize.

"Compared to these two models, Wikinews feels much more like an effort at traditional journalism, though the journalists may be amateurs," Halavais said.

Wikinews is here. I wish them well with the project -- it looks very much like the Open News Wire project that Kuro5hin founder Rusty Foster and I were discussing launching a couple of years ago -- with the difference that Wikipedia has a built-in user base to rely upon.

Blogging and journalism

Tech Central Station on blogging and journalism. Excerpt:

These days, enjoyable sport can be had observing the ongoing battle royale between the staid defenders of traditional journalism on the one side, and the young punks known as bloggers on the other. (Full disclosure: I am of course a card-carrying member of the latter, young punk, category -- or would be, if we had cards, which we don't). Old media journalists have spent many barrels of ink gnashing their teeth and decrying the barbarian hordes of bloggers, and equally as many bits have been spent in spirited rejoinders from the blogger camp.

Look closer at the two sides, however, and you'll find that there's far more crossbreeding going on between these particular Capulets and Montagues than you might expect from all the hue and cry. The reality is that the line between "blogger" and "journalist" -- and between "amateur" and "pro" -- is already extremely fuzzy. And if you think things are blurred now: well, just wait a little while longer, because soon enough, things are going to start to really get interesting. ...

Tribute to a teacher

Phil Shapiro offers a QuickTime tribute to a favorite teacher.

Portland Communique seeking support

The One True b!X has been plying the waters of grassroots citizens media for some time now, offering valuable insights and contributions to the conversation even as he's been covering the local Portland city scene for the past two years.

Now, he's looking for some financial support.

The local Portland newspaper Willamette Week has included b!X and his Portland Communique in their annual give guide (under "community").

b!X has already announced that he may have to shut down his Portland Communique weblog at the end of December unless it begins to generate some revenue. The Communique – an experiment in amateur journalism and hobbyist reporting – has become a fixture in the local media scene, read by City Council members, City Hall staffers, local political reporters and columnists, and general local political junkies. Willamette Week (and its readers in a separate poll) named it best local weblog, and The Oregonian published a front-page profile on him and what he does with the site.

He's not looking for Andrew Sullivan-type dollars. A few bucks here or there would help. Give, if you can spare anything, to support this worthy effort in grassroots journalism.

ourmedia: 'a free content sharing' system

Robin Good has some kind words about ourmedia on his Masterofnewmedia blog.

Under the Ourmedia flag a small group of brave and visionary independent thinkers, technologists and change agents has gotten together to create what will very soon be the largest public open access archive for all grassroots creative multimedia content.

This is very, very major news and it should be welcome with the best fanfare possible.

Not only we are deeply in need of such a free content sharing infrastructure, which must be tightly connected with the licensing options offered by the Creative Commons, the Public Domain and the traditional Copyright licensing scheme, but we have been missing the understanding of how much creative potential this Ourmedia creature may in turn unleash.

Ourmedia wants users to be able to create photo albums and digital jukeboxes by tapping into the content in ourmedia's databases.

For instance, a blogger who writes about film criticism might set up an area of his blog that lets users call up amateur or independent films culled from Ourmedia multimedia library.

The idea, in short, is to create the world's largest collection of home-brew media -- video, audio, photos, anything a creator wants to share with a global audience -- which people can generally freely share with each other. ...

Talk about disruptive? Get some thermonuclear seat belts brother.

If we accomplish one-tenth of what Robin is excited about, we'll really have something. The public alpha site's launch is taking longer than we imagined (surprise), but we're getting there, bit by bit.

Distributed reporting

Mark Tapscott, director of the Center for Media and Public Policy at the Heritage Foundation, has begun blogging, and has this thoughtful post on distributed reporting, following postings on the subject by Jay Rosen and Jeff Jarvis.

The news as conversation

Jeff Jarvis in Sunday's Philadelphia Inquirer: The news as conversation. In keeping the media on their toes, bloggers have changed the relationship between the public and those who provide the news.

With the election over, some have speculated - or perhaps hoped - that bloggers would fade away like a canceled reality show.

No such luck, folks. We're here to stay.

Blogging - or what I like to call, more broadly, citizens' media - is simply the product of history's easiest publishing tool connected to history's best distribution network, the Internet. Yet because it allows anyone to publish to the world, it changes the fundamental relationship of citizens and media, politics, government, marketing, academe and the world. Citizens' media give the people a voice and power and, most important, control. And once we have it, we won't let it go.

Akimbo breaks ground with Internet TV

Mike Langberg in the San Jose Mercury News: Akimbo breaks ground with Internet TV service.

Langberg concludes: "Akimbo, to me, seems destined to be one of those pioneers with a clear vision of the promised land, nevertheless doomed to die in the desert on the way there." I'm not so sure. As long as Akimbo doesn't rely chiefly on "content" from the major media companies and broadens its offerings to include compelling grassroots video, it should do just fine.

Quick update on ourmedia

Here's a quick update on ourmedia:

We're opened up our developer wiki, so a log-in and password are no longer required. Feel free to stop by or to  invite anyone you know in the tech, education, library and law fields to check it out and see if they want to help build the global home for grassroots media in conjunction with the Internet Archive.

If you're interested, stop by on IRC for a chat tomorrow (Sunday) at 3 pm Eastern, noon Pacific time, to discuss the project, including conversations about the site's UI, metadata tagging, the upload tool and more. Instructions here.

The future of citizens media

Ernest Miller interviews Jeff Jarvis, who shares his vision for the future of grassroots media over at Corante. At least I think he does -- Corante's servers have been down the past few hours.

They're back up now. Speaking of Corante, they have a much-improved new look, a number of new columnists, a new seminar series, and a new partnership with CNET/ZDNet, among other things. Congrats.

Grassroots media and international affairs

From Dan Gillmor today:

Daniel Drezner and Henry Farrell have written a well-reasoned piece in Foreign Affairs about the intersection of grassroots media and international affairs.

Blogs as participatory media

I'm quoted in this Dateline Alabama article:  'Blogs' Inject Mainstream Media with Public Participation.

Citizen journalist at a murder scene

Ken Smith points us to the latest episode of citizens journalism -- yesterday's publication of a photo of a murdered Dutch filmmaker taken by a passer-by with a camera phone who arrived at the scene before the professional photographers. He had the only photo taken before the body was covered.

Reuters has an article about this episode on ZDNet UK.

Newspapers and other media are starting to tap into the rich vein of information that can be provided by a public increasingly armed with camera-equipped phones

Twice in one month the biggest Dutch newspaper has published front-page pictures shot by amateur photographers using their mobile phones, showing how advances in technology can assist traditional media in gathering news.

The De Telegraaf daily newspaper, with a circulation of close to 800,000 copies, on Wednesday published a picture of the dead filmmaker and columnist Theo van Gogh, whom police say was probably killed by an Islamic militant.

Passerby Aron Boskma took a picture with his mobile phone at the scene of the crime in Amsterdam. News photographers arrived only after the body had been covered, leaving Boskma's picture the only one showing knives plunged into van Gogh's body.

"This picture was the story. There was a discussion if we should use it, but everyone who would have had this picture would have published it," Telegraaf pictures editor Peter Schoonen said. ...

We'll be seeing many, many more examples of this in the years ahead, so much so that it will soon become routine and the act of citizen journalism no longer newsworthy.

If anyone spots a link to the actual photo, please post it below.

Citizens Media: the Fifth Estate

From the fevered mind of Steve Rubel:

The Financial Times says there is a new player in the media business. It is staffed by millions of people all round the world, creates mountains of varied content, is highly trusted by its readership, is growing exponentially and has a zero overhead. It's called Citizen's Media or Consumer Generated Media and is the result of cheap, accessible digital publishing tools being available to a mass market for the first time.

Excerpt:

Citizen’s Media has gradually created a group of independently-minded critics who constantly publish their views to faithful audiences. They can be thought of as the '5th estate'. And if there is a story to tell they will publish and be damned. ...

It’s not all about blogs. Podcasting is the new audio cousin of weblogs which allows individuals to publish (podcast) their own DIY radioshows, on whatever subject they choose. It uses a combination of audio files and RSS syndication to create an audience. This means consumers can download shows directly to their MP3 players and time-shift their listening to when it suits them. And guess what ? There’s no advertising.

Actually, the Fifth Estate probably isn't the right term. Citizens media is about storming the walled gardens and sacred temples of the first four estates and taking back our democracy, our media, our right to be heard.

Weapons of Mass Seduction

Lie Girls: not-so-innocent "girls" telling dirty, nasty, shameless political lies. "Call now to enter our fantasy world of spin."

Citizen journalism on MSNBC.com on election day

Steve Yelvington in E-Media Tidbits today:

On election night here in the U.S., MSNBC will be wall-to-wall with bloggers and MSNBC.com will be wall-to-wall with blogs. In addition to its staff-produced blogs from Keith Olbermann, Chris Matthews, Joe Scarborough, and Dan Abrams, MSNBC will be hosting "Citizen Journalists," which it describes as "viewers and netizens helping us document this historical day through their own personal blogging."

Meeker: keep an eye on user-generated content

From Susan Mernit today:

Morgan Stanley analyiste Mary Meeker's issued a new report, and it's worth a long PDF download. An Update from the Digital World, October 2004 expands on the message that accessing information online is becoming easier. Meeker & company write:

"Three factors are combining to drive online momentum: 1) rising usage of RSS (Really Simple Syndication) by content providers as a standard distribution platform for online content; 2) ramp in creation of blogs and other user-generated content and 3) Yahoo!?s easy-to-use integration of RSS feeds with My Yahoo!."

And:

"We believe ongoing improvements in the following areas will be important to watch: 1) search; 2) personalization; 3) user-generated content (including blogs, reviews, images and audio); 4) music; 5) short- and long-form video; and 6) accessibility(including mobile devices and the PC desktop)."

And:

"Web-based user-generated content is at the heart of some of the most relevant and fastest growing applications we have seen on the Web (including eBay user feedback and message boards, Yahoo! movie reviews, fantasy sports game play, and blogs)."

As election nears, Web's grass roots still growing

CNET News.com: As election nears, Web's grass roots still growing. Excerpt:

Perhaps the most technology-centric efforts produced by either of the sites were the news feeds they created to serve as companions to the televised debates. Whereas in years past campaigners rushed to the fax machines during debates to send detailed candidate position statements and rebuttals to pools of journalists, the two sites offered direct feeds to voters in 2004. The Bush team created an online tool that pushed such information in real time to Web sites and Web logs, or blogs, that signed up for the news, while the Kerry campaign offered a similar service that provided e-mail responses to interested parties.

According to John Tedesco, an associate professor of communications at Virginia Tech and the author of "Changing the Channel: Use of the Internet for communicating about politics," the debate feeds are evidence of how online campaigns are circumventing traditional sources of campaign information, such as television or print news, a trend he expects to grow in future elections. ...

Tedesco says that in the future candidates will try to drive voters to their sites as a substitute for other forms of news media, which he sees the public increasingly labeling as biased. By encouraging people to get their news straight from their candidates, he contends, the Web will become an even more powerful campaign tool.

Bottom-up journalism busting out

Mark Glaser in OJR tackles a subject near and dear to my heart: bottom-up, open source, hyperlocal citizens journalism. Excerpt:

"We are the traditional journalism model turned upside down," [Northwest Voice Mary Lou] Fulton told me via e-mail. "Instead of being the gatekeeper, telling people that what's important to them 'isn't news,' we're just opening up the gates and letting people come on in. We are a better community newspaper for having thousands of readers who serve as the eyes and ears for the Voice, rather than having everything filtered through the views of a small group of reporters and editors."

Local news ventures will get $1 million in seed money

J-Lab: The Institute for Interactive Journalism today announced it will launch a pioneering program to seed community news ventures around the country with a new $1 million grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

Over the next two years, the New Voices project will help fund the start-up of 20 micro-local, news projects; support them with an educational Web site, in collaboration with the Poynter Institute's News University; and help foster their sustainability through small second-year grants.

More info here. Great news for niche, local independent news sites — even one- or two-person operations, presumably. I spoke with Jan Schaffer, the J-Lab's exec director, about this last week, and we'll be exploring ways for the New Voices project to work hand in hand with ourmedia.

Creative Commons' new look

Creative Commons has redesigned its website. Nice! I spoke this afternoon with Mike Linksvayer, one of CC's master coders, who'll be helping us with ourmedia.

The Bush vs. Cheney Debate

Another grassroots media mashup: The Bush vs. Cheney Debate. Bravo! And thanks to Sim Sadler for contributing it to the soon-to-launch ourmedia.

OhmyNews goes global

Want to join the OhmyNews participatory journalism bandwagon?

Just under 100 OMNI citizen reporters send stories from such nations as Iran, Colombia, England, Japan and Germany. OMNI hopes to have built a global network of 1,000 correspondents by the end of next year. This web of citizen reporters will be the linchpin of a formidable news organization.

An introduction to podcasts

The LA Times offers an introduction to podcasts — blog-based homemade radio shows. More at Darknet.

A DIY political commentary site

An important new site went live today called p2p-Politics.org. I'd heard about it Friday at the Internet Archive.

The site, a cooperative venture of the Archive and Creative Commons, lets individuals post video spots for or against the presidential candidates.

So far, scores of clips supporting John Kerry (thanks, in part, to all those "Bush in 30 Seconds" MoveOn ads) and no pro-Bush or pro-Nader spots. Congrats to J. Christopher Garcia and Aaron Swartz for the programming magic and to Larry Lessig and Brewster Kahle for brainstorming the site. Larry has more here.

A spoof of media mendacity

Freepress.net has this animated spoof of the presidential debates — with the corporate news media coming off as the real losers for playing up triviality, ignoring the real issues and keeping the public in the dark. You can subscribe to Freepress here or sign up for their effort to reform the media.

Independent media tribes

Reason Online managing editor Jesse Walker in Chronicles magazine: Independent Media Tribes.

The Independent Media Center, as Indymedia is officially known, is one of the most successful publishing projects online, a sprawling network of radical amateur journalists that is open to virtually anyone with a keyboard. There are at least 135 local Independent Media Centers in over 40 countries; most are in the United States and Europe, but they have also appeared everywhere from Beirut to Bolivia, Nigeria to Jakarta, Chiapas to Thunder Bay. (As I write, the lead story on the IMC's main
site announces that its African affiliates just met in Senegal.) Its admirers often ignore its faults, while its enemies love to tar the whole network with the most galling activities on its fringes; whether you are an admirer or an enemy usually depends on whether you share the network's leftist politics.

It is useful, however, to strip away the ideological baggage and set aside what you might think of the IMC's content. Indymedia offers a radically different model for producing and distributing journalism,
with a very different hierarchy of standards from what you find at CBS or the New York Times. It has changed the face of the alternative press; and, just as important, it is rapidly being superseded by newer, more promising models. Its successes and failures should interest anyone who wants a more pluralistic media landscape. ...

'We Media' report gets a Creative Commons license

The American Press Institute yesterday released the 2003 We Media report under a Creative Commons license. That means you can freely copy, share, excerpt and translate the report about participatory media for any noncommercial purpose, such as teaching in the classroom, for free. A journalism professor at a university in Colombia is now translating the whitepaper into Spanish. Great news!

The Big Tail rules

If there was one overarching theme that came out of last week's Web 2.0 conference, it was the forming consensus in techland that the Long Tail -- the millions of bloggers and alternative media sources at the tail end of the mediasphere -- matters in aggregate more than the major publishers, even as big media continues to dominate in circulation, Web traffic and mass-market metrics.

What I didn't know (because I'm weeks behind on my magazine reading) is that Wired magazine editor-in-chief Chris Anderson has a brilliant look at this phenomenon in an article in the October issue titled, The Long Tail, subtitled: Forget squeezing millions from a few megahits at the top of the charts. The future of entertainment is in the millions of niche markets at the shallow end of the bitstream.

It's prescient, groundbreaking and important, so go read it.

WELL dissects 'We the Media'

The WELL, of which I've been a member for lo these many years, is discussing Dan Gillmor's new book We the Media. Christian Crumlish is leading the discussion.

More grassroots creativity

Remember Jib-Jab, the online duo who created a swirl of controversy when the EFF had to go to court to protect their "This Land Is My Land" political satire?

Well, Gregg and Evan Spiridellis are back with an equally inventive Flash animation, It's good to be in DC!, featuring John Edwards in a bikini brief and Dick Cheney giving the finger. The movie debuted The Tonight Show Thursday night. This time, the creators stuck to a song safely in the public domain, "Dixie." Besides selling the premiere rights to Leno's show, the brothers Spiridellis are also selling the two short animations on DVD for $9.99, hawking shirts and coffee mugs, and selling downloads of the two animations for $2.99 -- an interesting concept, given that they're already cached as a free progressive download (unless I'm missing something).

Both "This Land" (viewed more than 50 million times) and "It's good to be in DC!" can be seen online at Jib-Jab or at AtomFilms.

As Steve Outing writes, "It's yet another example of exceptional content bubbling up to mainstream status via the Internet."

Of course, it's the creativity that's the important thing; mainstream fame is a nice bonus, though.

Cuban bypasses big media with his own blog

In his latest article on OJR, Mark Glaser has a nifty Q&A with billionaire, Dallas Mavs owner and reality TV star Mark Cuban, who's using his blog to strike back at journalists, Donald Trump and people who don't get his TV show (like Mark). BlogMaverick is part of the WeblogsInc network.

I don't always like Cuban's courtside manner (hey, I'm a Sacramento Kings fan), but I've always admired his passion, honesty, contrarian vision and business sense that challenges the conventional wisdom. I'm sorry I missed his talk last night at Web 2.0, but Denise has a nice summary.

Brokaw, Jennings, Cronkite diss citizen journalists

CNET News.com: Network news anchors Tom Brokaw and Peter Jennings, perhaps sensing the day of reckoning coming soon for traditional network newscasts, lashed out at citizen bloggers and defended colleague Dan Rather in a spirited roundtable discussion Saturday about CBS News' mishandling of the altered Bush National Guard records.

"What I think is highly inappropriate is what's going on across the Internet, a kind of political jihad," Brokaw said during a panel on which he appeared with Rather and Jennings. "It is certainly an attempt to demonize CBS News, and it goes well beyond any factual information a lot of them has, the kind of demagoguery that is unleashed out there." ...

Jennings [added:] "I think the attack on CBS is an attack on mainstream media, an attack on the so-called 'liberal media.' To me, when you make a mistake, you apologize. You go back and review your standards."

On a similar note, Staci Kramer of OJR reports, Walter Cronkite told the annual Society of Professional Journalists convention:

"I cannot understand how the Internet should have gotten so entirely oblivious to the whole theory of libel and slander," Cronkite said. "How is it possible for these people to get on the air with any allegation they want to make, any statement they want to make, as if it were true, as if they were journalists, which they are clearly not? They are scandalmongers."

Let's hope it's the heat of the moment that prevents these esteemed veteran journalists from seeing the valuable role citizen bloggers are playing in this election.

ourmedia: a call for entries

We're about a month away from the beta launch of ourmedia.org. (See the item below.) The goal is to create a global repository of shared grassroots media.

We have a number of media items or collections in hand, but we need more to fill out the site.

Here's our first pass at material that have been suggested for the first iteration of ourmedia:

Digital stories
Original music
Photo galleries
Video diaries
Music videos
Digital books
Home-made video
Remixes
Independent films
Student works
Instructional video
Documentaries
Political ads
Animation
Editorial cartoons
News footage
Parodies
Artwork
Fiction
Non-fiction
Children's tales
Interviews (audio)
Book reading (audio)
Oral history (audio)

Please contact me if you have created any digital works that fall into any of the above categories (or similar topic areas) and would be willing to show them off to a global audiences. Creative Commons licenses are preferred, but fully copyrighted works accepted as well.

We especially need multimedia works: digital stories, original music, digital photo galleries/collections, video diary entries, home-made video, etc. You'll see how it looks (including title, credit, links back to your site) before it goes live.

Here's more information for content creators interested in ourmedia. And if you'd like to join our wiki, let me know.

ourmedia needs a tagline

We're only a few weeks away from the beta website for ourmedia.org, which I announced here when it was still called the Open Media project.

We've made remarkable progress in the past two months, working in a wiki to tackle issues related to the law, technology, and cultural values attached to content sharing.

We've made remarkable progress in lining up an open-source content management platform (Drupal) and in getting design help to make this vision a reality.

Now we need two last things -- from you.

First, a tagline. And second, more content. (See item above.)

Metaphors are important. From the beginning, those of us working on the ourmedia project have been describing it as a global repository, as a network, a library, etc. The idea, in short, is to create the world's largest collection of home-brew media -- video, audio, photos, anything a creator wants to share with a global audience -- which people can generally freely share with each other.

Many websites and companies have taglines to go along with their names, to help convey the essence of what the outfit does in a quick phrase. (Slashdot: news for nerds ... The Daily Show: the most trusted name in fake news ... Bounty: the quicker picker-upper. You get the idea.)

So, we are now opening up the floor for nominations! What should ourmedia's tagline be? It would appear beneath the ourmedia logotype in the main banner, now being designed.

The only requirements are that it should be short, memorable, original, convey the essence of our project, and shouldn't be under trademark.

Here are a few ideas to kick this off:

ourmedia
the global library for grassroots creativity

ourmedia
the global library for home-brew media

ourmedia
the grassroots media channel

ourmedia
the global library for shared culture

ourmedia
sharing grassroots media with a global audience

Other ideas? Post them here, or email me. If yours is chosen, you'll win fame and a free dinner at the next bloggers outing in your area.

Forbes on participatory media

Forbes.com reviews Dan Gillmor's We the Media. Excerpt:

What makes the CBS story [on George Bush's National Guard records] so tantalizing is that "lay people"--call them readers or viewers or just plain old ordinary Joes and Janes, anyone but professional journalists--were the truth squad. A few people who knew a lot about typewriter fonts began asking well-informed questions the online journals known as blogs. A decade ago, these people might have shared their musings with their friends or in a letter to a local newspaper. (The newspaper, of course, might have ignored it.) But these days, it takes no more clicks to reach a blog as it does to reach CBS's own Web site. And in a matter of days, the questions raised in those blogs forced CBS to 'fess up that it didn't have its facts nailed down.

In his timely new book, We the Media: Grassroots Journalism By the People, For the People (O'Reilly Media, $24.95), San Jose Mercury News columnist Dan Gillmor describes how blogs and other Internet technologies are changing the very nature of journalism. "Tomorrow's news reporting and production will be more of a conversation, or a seminar. The lines will blur between producers and consumers, changing the role of both," Gillmor writes. ...

Photos of Youth Media Festival

On Thursday night, Sept. 30, I trekked into San Francisco for the second annual International Youth Media Festival, sponsored by the SalesForce.com Foundation, which has done a masterful job of promoting digital creativity around the globe.

Here's a photo gallery of 11 photos I took.

The 90-minute program, held before a packed house at the Herbst Theater in San Francisco, showcased one outstanding short film after another, all created by young people ages 10-18. Each had the audience clapping rhythmically at the amazing music or sitting captivated for short documentaries on teenage cutting (by Girls Xpress! of London), gun violence (by the Downtown Community Television Center of New York), homelessness (by a San Francisco group) or life in an Israeli development that borders Gaza (by the Gvanim Association).

My favorites were the poignant entry by Girls Xpress! and the opening finger-snapping dance movie, "Inertia," done by San Francisco's Youth Sounds Factory. Both will doubtless win some additional awards.

Outstanding. You can see the movie clips online at youthspace.net.

We hope to talk with the good folks at the SalesForce.com Foundation over the coming weeks about collaboration opportunities with ourmedia.org, just as we've been able to work with other organizations involved with grassroots media, such as Youth Media Exchange, Undergroundfilm.org, OurTV and the Wikimedia Foundation.

Susan reports on today's X1 flight

Susan Kitchens headed out to the Mojave Desert to witness the 6 a.m. launch of the Ansari X Prize X1 private space flight. She has five pages of photos and commentary. Nice job, Susan.

Ofbyandfor and open source democracy

Ofbyandfor.org: Mitch Kapor on open source democracy:

In the last several years, my experience in learning about and working with the open source software community has taught me a few things that might be very helpful in revitalizing our politics. First and foremost the whole concept of open and equal access to information could do wonders for our politics.

Secondly, placing information in the open, allowing people to debate both general and very specific aspects of software, and then creating a process for decision making about implementation could be very important lessons when transferred to politics. It's neither easy not simple to do this, but clearly worthwhile. ...

I just came across Ofbyandfor for the first time -- a thoughtful, noise-free group blog worth visiting for Kapor's postings alone. They just had their first live event -- Kapor interviewing Joe Trippi -- and now author William Greider is on deck tonight. Impressive.

Just as interesting as the content, though, is the site structure. Zack Rosen wrote last Wednesday:

This site runs on CivicSpace, a Drupal based open-source civic organizing platform that I help create. We are assembling a killer toolkit for organizing and mobilzing communities through the web. It will do everything from multi-user peer moderated web logging to contact and donation management to meetup style event organizing. But the twist that will change the world is the ability communities will have to link their CivicSpace sites together (through web standard XML) and share user profiles, site content, and event information. The software is open-source and built on top of a proven and widely adopted platform, but will also be avaliable as a service much like TypePad and Blogger.

Blogs look burly after kicking sand on CBS

Christian Science Monitor: Blogs look burly after kicking sand on CBS. Bloggers enjoy a moment of glory after pooling their expertise to uncover the truth about the forged memos on Bush's service record.  Excerpt:

Blogs' watchdog role will continue to influence newsrooms, says Kelly McBride, a member of the ethics faculty at the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Fla.  

"We have known that our credibility is eroding," says Ms. McBride. "We have been slow to change our practices, slow to eliminate or minimize the use of anonymous sources, to diversify our staff so that we accurately reflect the population that we serve.... It's possible that with this new uprising of criticism, that the mainstream media will react quicker on those issues."

ourmedia vs. commercial photo sites

In the Wall Street Journal the other day, Walter Mossberg had this: Logging On to the Family Album (subscription not needed, I think; I subscribe to the WSJ so can't tell).

So you got a new digital camera, you've been snapping away, and now you want to show all your great new photos to your friends and family. But the pictures live in your personal computer. So what's the best way to share them.

Soon, the answer will be: ourmedia.org. But good ol' Walt doesn't know that.

Storage is another vital issue. How many pictures will a site accept? Will your digital photos be erased after a certain time, or are they safely saved on one of these online sites? Shutterfly, Yahoo and AOL have similar policies: free, unlimited storage of photos that won't be deleted. Yahoo and AOL require that you sign in at least once every six months for your pictures to remain in the archive. Ofoto requires users to make an online purchase of prints or some other merchandise at least once a year after the first year in order to keep photos on its site.

Again, ourmedia (formerly Open Media) will let you store your photos for free, forever, without you signing on ever again, without you making an online purchase.

Stay tuned.

A changing of the gatekeepers

Belmont University blogger Dr. Sybril Bennett cites the We Media report (which Shayne, Chris and I worked on last year) in her commentary on the CBS News/forged documents affair.

In terms of gatekeeping and agenda setting, the information dissemination monopoly once enjoyed by the traditional media (television, radio, newspapers and magazines) has been broken by the virtual media (Internet, satellite and digital technologies). The virtual system of checks and balances, the Internet, is being used by millions of people including advocacy groups and webloggers (those who may cover stories or just react to them and provide substantive information, links, etc to support and/or challenge the information presented). Bloggers, for short, are creating an international system of independent information allowing the consumer to make an informed decision. Most state their personal biases so that the information is placed in its proper context.

Private citizens can now investigate a news story on their own. This participatory revolution in journalism is chronicled in a report called We Media: How audiences are shaping the future of news and information, produced by the Media Center at the American Press Institute. Here is a quote from the report:

"The venerable profession of journalism finds itself at a rare moment in history where, for the first time, its hegemony as a gatekeeper of the news is threatened by not just new technology and competitors but, potentially, by the audience it serves."

The blogosphere as editor

Gabe writes to tell me about memeorandum, a news aggregation site that presents an automated hourly synopsis of the latest online news and opinion (courtesy of Technorati), combining weblog commentary (from both the right and left) with traditional news reports.

Says Gabe: "You might be interested in watching how political stories are selected when bloggers become the unwitting editors."

Later, a correction: Gabe writes, "My software doesn't use Technorati. I spider and parse the blogs and news myself. I just meant the concept is similar to Technorati's but with some new ideas mixed in."

Iranian bloggers lodge protest

In Mark Glaser's latest article in the Online Journalism Review, he looks at the crackdown on bloggers and journalists in Iran, with arrests and reformist sites being blocked. Iranian bloggers have staged a major protest online, posting material from the blocked sites.

Key quote from Kayvan Hosseini, an Iranian journalist and broadcaster based in Prague: "I think the second revolution in Iran will happen with the Internet and many people in Iran believe the Internet is a good place to exercise democracy."

Don't praise the bloggers

Tom Watson has a thoughtful take on the blogosphere popping the champagne corks over the CBS bogus memos affair when we're losing sight of the bigger picture.

There's been plenty of back-slapping in the past few days among bloggers for picking apart Dan Rather's flimsy and utterly un-newsworthy story on George Bush's already well-documented abandonment of the National Guard -in my opinion, way too much self satisfaction.

All blogging has done that I can see in terms of this year's election is to help entrench the pathetic moral relativism that cripples mainstream media, especially the flavor found on television "news." The pro-Bush and anti-Bush bloggers that dominate the scene merely make the talk show hosts adhere to their cowardly 50/50 doctrine. And this allows for liars like the Swift Boaters to float untruths that are then portrayed - in terms of talking time - as at least half true. ...

The coming death of old media?

At ABCNews.com, former Forbes ASAP magazine editor-at-large Michael S. Malone writes that big media may be dying while the blogosphere grows in importance. (Warning: 7-second forced display ad that you can't close.) Excerpt:

This not the way the press is supposed to behave. The First Amendment gave us journalists unique and unprecedented freedoms — but those freedoms came with equally great responsibilities. I can forgive the story itself — I well know what it's like to be on a big investigation, and how the taste for blood can make you do crazy things — and settle for the censure of and an apology from Rather and CBS. But there's no forgiving the subsequent cover-up.

The heroes of this story are, of course, the denizens of the blogosphere. The Pajama Press has won. They have been the welcome counterweight to the increasingly unbalanced message being purveyed by the MSM this political season. I've written a lot about these folks in the last few months, mostly with admiration, but mixed with a little fear. Their power and influence has been building now for several years. ...

Rathergate is proving to be the apotheosis of the New Media. It was certainly unexpected, but these changings of the guard always are, as we in the tech world know well. And this, too, of course, is a technology-driven revolution in journalism taking place right before our eyes.

You are going to hear a lot about this changing of the media guard in the days and weeks to come.

Try years.

This is an important piece, for while many of us in the blogosphere have written about the ascendant power of citizens media, few in big media have acknowledged the trend.

Malone asks, "now is the time to ask if the Pajama Press can, in its present form, supplant — better yet, improve upon — the existing mainstream press?"

He also predicts -- wrongly, I think -- that within the next year the blogosphere will establish "professional standards and organizations" (not likely) and aggregate "into larger sites that can generate enough revenues to pay for permanent jobs and dedicated reporters" (if he means full-time jobs, that's years away at best).

Let's ditch Malone's cutesy phrase, the Pajama Press; that aside, it's not yet time to bury big media. Mend it, reform it, yes, but as we've said before, participatory media will rise up alongside traditional media, and they'll become increasingly dependent on each other. As Joe Trippi says in the current issue of Wired magazine, "The blogosphere has become fundamental -- the plankton of the information ecology."

Yes, brawls will break out -- usually occasioned by big media arrogance, as in Rathergate -- but few bloggers I know believe it will be a better world if newspapers, magazines and TV networks disappeared from the face of the earth.

Wikipedia and blogs

David Weinberger at Many2Many wonders: Why do all Wikipedia articles sound the same while every blog sounds different?

Gillmor on new media

Jay Rosen interviews Dan Gillmor about new media and We Media. Dan riffs a bit on new business prospects for new media:

Gillmor: I think that organizations like the Times are caught between two worlds. The Times' archives are behind this "pay wall." And that's a real moneymaker for them. But there are some sites that are pay-per-view from the get-go, like The Wall Street Journal, which for all practical purposes does not exist in Google. But at some point I think most news sites are going to say, "We can do better on revenue by making all of the archives available for free with perma-links, with the bargain being that we will have targeted advertising." When you do a search on keywords there will be things popping up in the story or alongside the story that are like Google's ad sense, or whatever comes along that is better than Google ad sense. And we may find out � I'm speculating, I don't have a model for this, that keywords and ads are a more profitable way for traditional organizations to monetize what is quite expensive to produce. ...

Hypergene on emerging media

At the American Press Institute Media Center seminar I attended earlier this week, the We Media report came up several times. And now I see that the report's authors, Shayne Bowman and Chris Willis, are back blogging up a storm over at Hypergene.

Chris or Shayne (I wish they'd sign their names :) ) writes about the CNN article I mentioned earlier this week, "Will cyber journalists turn the tables on big media?," and concludes that one premise the writer sets up is faulty: It's not a matter of which side is winning; it's really about participatory media forming a symbiotic relationship with big media, forcing the big boys to include us in the conversation. I think that's right, although the practitioners of citizens media can be forgiven if they get the impression that big media (a la CBS's response to the critiques in the blogosphere) don't really want to be part of any conversation, for that would imply a dialogue among equals.

In You Call That News? I Don't, the Hypergene guys point to Bryan Keefer of Spinsanity, who writes a smart, direct, and insightful open letter to big media about how it should be changing for newer, younger audiences. Excerpt:

The media’s obsession with getting the latest minutiae about John Kerry and the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, or the latest gossipy tidbits about President Bush’s alleged past drug use, is misplaced. The endless he said/he said reporting and the airtime given to questionable allegations highlight the reason why so many young people like myself are turning away from mainstream outlets such as newspapers and network newscasts. Instead, we’re increasingly choosing to get our news and analysis from the Internet and even turning to unconventional outlets like Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show” in pursuit of the straight story.

Dead on.

They also cite author Douglas Rushkoff talking about The Real Threat of Blogs to big media. Rushkoff writes:

I believe that the most dangerous thing about blogs to the status quo is that so many of them exist for reasons other than to make money. A thriving community of people who are engaged for free, to me, have a certain authority that people doing things for money don't.

And finally, they point to Jon Stewart talking about the role of The Daily Show and saying, "Anybody with a Web site is part of the real media."

Scamming the media

From author William Rivers Pitt at truthout.org today: Scamming the Media, Parlock Style:

Meet Phil Parlock. Parlock is a family man and a staunch Republican. Parlock has a very sad story to tell about how rotten Kerry supporters are. You see, they made his little girl cry.

Parlock was at a rally on Thursday to greet Vice Presidential candidate John Edwards, who was on a swing through West Virginia and Ohio. Parlock brought his three children and a Bush/Cheney sign to show support for his beloved President. According to him, a Kerry-supporting union guy wearing an IUPAT shirt ripped up the Bush sign his little girl was carrying, making her cry.

Terrible, right? A sign that our national politics have descended into these kind of brutish tactics, right? An embarrassing incident for the Kerry campaign, right? The media certainly thinks so, and has dutifully reported on the incident.

For the third time.

A report from the Charleston Daily Mail, August 27, 1996:

"The Huntington man said he was knocked to the ground by a Clinton supporter when he tried to display a sign that read 'Remember Vince Foster,' the deputy White House counsel who committed suicide in a Washington, D.C., park. His death has become the subject of much debate among Clinton opponents...Parlock said some of the crowd tried to make other anti-Clinton demonstrators feel unwelcome. He estimated that about 150 Dole supporters attended the rally, but their signs couldn't be seen for most of the rally."

A report from the Charleston Daily Mail, October 28, 2000:

Phil Parlock didn't expect to need all 12 of the Bush-Cheney signs he and his son Louis smuggled in their socks and pockets into the rally for Vice President Al Gore. But each time they raised a sign, someone would grab it out of their hands, the two Huntington residents said. And sometimes it got physical. 'I expected some people to take our signs,' said Louis, 12. 'But I did not expect people to practically attack us.' The two said they didn't go to the Friday morning rally to start trouble."

For the third Presidential election in a row, poor Phil Parlock has been abused by terrible Democrats while trying to support the Republican candidate, and while trying to introduce his children to the art of retail politics. Is this just a string of bad luck for Phil?

I doubt it. It seems a great deal more certain that Mr. Parlock is a serial disruptor who has managed to convinced the easily-duped mainstream media on three separate occasions that he was attacked by Democrats. Only a truly hard-core fanatic would pull a stunt like this, and Parlock certainly appears to fit the bill…

Carolyn Kay of MakeThemAccountable.com adroitly adds:

The manner in which this story came to light is a lesson in modern journalism. The mainstream fellows simply reported the Parlock perspective, but it was an intrepid band of online newshounds - bloggers Rising Hegemon and Atrios, who picked up on the work of one Rezmutt, member of the forums at DemocraticUnderground.com - who pieced together the strange coincidences surrounding these Parlock incidents. Once upon a time, stories like this would get missed. The internet has created a whole new phenomenon. If the mainstream media wants to avoid being embarrassed, they might want to think about paying attention to this brave new world of investigative journalism.

Grassroots culture, available to all

Jay Dedman, who started a video blogging mailing list and joined our ourmedia grassroots-media effort, has a posting today: Who the hell is Brewster Kahle (and why is he doing such extraordinary things for our culture)? Jay writes:

The concept is this: anyone who makes video/photos/songs can store their stuff for FREE on their servers FOREVER. Why? Because they believe that what we make is important to history or something.

Actually, we believe it's important to culture (as well as history).

Our open source group is working with Brewster and his team to create an even more intuitive and easy-to-use set of tools that will allow millions of people to share the personal media they're creating.

My partner in this effort, Marc Canter, is back from Europe this weekend, and then we'll be able to kick this into high gear. I'll be posting an update on ourmedia (formerly Open Media) soon. We hope to have our beta website up by the end of October.

Will cyber journalists turn the tables on big media?

Christine Boese in CNN.com:

I've been reading a new book by Dan Gillmor called "We the Media." Actually, I'm reading the e-book, but I already know I will pony up for the print version as well. ...

The main point of "We the Media" is ...: Journalism is a conversation in this era of the citizen journalist working in dialogue with other citizen journalists. ...

What happens when the audience talks back? The Howard Dean campaign was the first to harness that powerful blog energy as well as other online tools such as "Meetups." Campaigns at all levels have discovered how much more quickly small campaign contributions add up when collected online.

Gillmor could be anticipating the power of citizen journalists, rather than noting their arrival. I believe we are still deep in the power struggle between top-down message control and interactive reader/journalists getting to know their political candidates the way kids get to know the backwoods.

I'm still not sure which side is winning.

Bloggers key to uncovering falsity of Bush memos

In today's San Jose Mercury News, Dan Gillmor recounts the series of events that led to the blogosphere's unmasking of the apparent fraud behind the Bush National Guard memos. He says bloggers shouldn't pat themselves on the back too hard -- traditional media would have rooted out the fraud with time -- but correctly notes:

Regardless of what one thinks of the bloggers' politics, they advanced the memo story. And they did it fast -- no doubt more quickly than the mass media would have done. ...

Journalists have demanded more transparency of others. Now, thanks to the ability of large numbers of people to dissect our work in public and in something close to real time, they're demanding more of us. We'd better get used to it.

Here's more on the subject from Doc Searls, Jay Rosen and Chris Nolan.

Bush memos 'fake but accurate'

Breaking news from the NY Times: Memos on Bush Are Fake but Accurate, Typist Says.

Meantime, I attended a conference today where one of the participants (can't tell you who) predicted that Dan Rather will be out of a job within six months, a la Howell Raines, because of his intemperate response to bloggers breaking the news that the Bush National Guard records were forgeries. On CBS yesterday, he criticized those who were focusing on the bogus records rather than the underlying truthfulness of the accusations made in them about Bush disobeying a direct order. That's a pretty amazing stance: Ignore the evidence we provided -- ignore those pesky bloggers who insist on fact-checking everyone's ass.

This was a major coup by citizens media.

DivX CEO: the grassroots video revolution is coming

A few minutes ago, Engadget published my interview with Shahi Ghanem and Jordan Greenhall, the president and CEO of the innovative 4-year-old San Diego startup DivXNetworks.

Here's one excerpt that speaks to my heart:

What is the 10,000-foot view of some of the possibilities that codec technologies like DivX hold out for home entertainment? Will we see a grassroots video movement, for example?

Greenhall:  ... Compression makes the Internet economically viable. No matter how good your broadcast is, it only has the ability to deliver out a certain amount of content in temporal fashion. I turn on my satellite receiver, I’ve got 30 channels. But those 30 selections serve 10 million people, so they’re going to be very generic, and I don’t get a lot of control over the programming. If I start to use recording technology like PVR and TiVo, I can time shift that, but my selections are still based on the economics of mass media. But if you start layering in the Internet, you can do one-to-one communication. You don’t have to get out to an audience of a million in order to be viable, you can get out to an audience of six and be viable, depending on what you want to accomplish. So that signals the ability to deliver very narrowly tailored content out to individuals. People will be able to slice and dice what they consume - and somebody has to produce all that content. Now I have the ability to create and publish content at a very high level and deliver it to millions or to one person. So you’ve got hundreds of millions of potential publishers.

Archiving everyday life

From TrendCentral:

Young people are consumed with archiving their lives through various means, whether it be a LiveJournal blog or an old-fashioned scrapbook. But they’re not just keeping track of what happened on their summer vacation; they’re seemingly turning the events of last weekend, or even last night, into a type of history for themselves and their circle of friends. Half of a night out is often spent documenting it. The ability to capture a memory with friends onto a phone and play it back immediately has turned reminiscing into a party pastime.

Nokia is getting in on this trend with a new mobile phone program called Lifeblog that automatically archives and organizes all mobile communications (e.g. text messages, sent photos and videos) for users to save, edit, search, and browse. ...

When parody spreads like a virus

New on OJR:

Six Simple Steps (and One Hard One) For Grand Old Parody Online
by Mark Glaser
For those who can't take the news too seriously, parody sites have thrived. Here's a primer on how you can make your timely online comedy spread like a virus. Consider JibJab's "This Land Is Your Land."

Political Advertising: All's Fair in 'Wild West' Aura of the Net
By Mark Thompson
Web publishers would welcome a post-convention gold rush of soft money ads, but critics worry about unregulated mudslinging. Others take a wait-and-see attitude to Web ad reform.

Participatory media and Election 2004

The American Press Institute's Media Center presents "We Media: The Impact of Participatory Media on Election 2004," a public webcast focused on the impact of new technologies and participatory media on the Nov. 2 U.S. elections.

Jason McCabe Calacanis, founder of the Weblogs, Inc. Network, hosts a high-level panel of media thinkers and leaders in this exploration of the intersection of media, technology and society.

Webcast details:

When: Tuesday, Oct. 5, 2004, 2-3 pm Eastern

General registration fee: $95 until Sept. 27, $125 after then. Educators, bloggers, students and non-profits fee: $25.

For more information and to register, head here.

Seattle Times' experiment in citizens journalism

Via Steve Rubel:

The Seattle Times has started a participatory journalism blog where a dozen voters under-35 from across the region and across the political spectrum will share their election-season experiences. More details here.

Young want political news served with a side of irony

I'm quoted in an article by Erika Chavez in today's Sacramento Bee: Young want political news served with a side of irony. 'The Daily Show' tops the menu, plus blogs and e-mail.

Dan Bricklin and Moulitsas Zuniga, who runs DailyKos.com, are among the other folks interviewed.

Grassroots and big media coverage of today's protest march

The Los Angeles Times has a wonderful photo gallery of today's protest march in New York, which drew between 120,000 and 500,000 peaceful demonstrators.

The New York Times' account of the rally is here.

It's the biggest protest march in New York City in decades -- and not a word of it on Google News's front page until a few minutes ago.

Meantime, Matt Haughey rounds up some examples of grassroots media: people reporting on the event without the mainstream media's filter.

all Flickr photos tagged with rnc, rncwatch.typepad.com, Technorati search for New York City ("rnc" was too short to search), Buzznet's No RNC photostream, rnc convention bloggers, WeSeeRNC moblog, all del.icio.us links tagged with rnc, Indymedia's RNC coverage, and Google News search for rnc.

It's like rolling your own newspaper.

Wikipedia vs. the clueless reporter

Mike Masnick at Techdirt talks about the sad case of Wikipedia vs. the clueless newspaper reporter.

Photos of the Critical Mass protest

My friend Pascal Wassam has some great photos of last night's Critical Mass bike ride and protest in New York, which resulted in a number of arrests.

MoveOn and the politics of grassroots mobilization

Gary Wolf in Wired magazine: A quiet couple in Berkeley, California, got sick of being ignored by the system. So they built a new one. How MoveOn.org changed the face of fund raising, brought P2P to political advertising and reinvented grass-roots activism.

Iraq's soldier-bloggers face military scrutiny

Well, this can't be good news for citizen journalism. The Pentagon has discovered blogs.

From Sheila Lennon via NPR: Iraq's soldier-bloggers face military scrutiny.

A do-it-yourself political video

I'm a big fan of grassroots, do-it-yourself political videos, and just came across a new one (thanks to Jesse Walker): It's a lie, a Bush-bashing Flash movie with a solid beat.

Anyone know if the soundtrack is a copyrighted song or original music?

Olympic mistake: Banning blogging

Dan Gillmor has a spot-on item today: Olympic-Sized Arrogance.

AP: Olympians largely barred from blogging. Athletes may be the center of attention at the Olympic Games, but don't expect to hear directly from them online -- or see snapshots or video they've taken.

This is about greed, nothing more and nothing less. It is about the historically corrupt International Olympic Committee's desire to please the giant media organizations to which it has sold "rights" to tell and show the world what is happening.

The irony here is that the olympic officials are inadvertently telling us something about the future of journalism, though I'm certain they don't understand it themselves, in the context of their heavy-handed (and probably illegal) action. Because the more that regular folks -- OK, that's a stretch for the athletes -- put their own work on the Web or send it to each other by other means, the more they are becoming some of tomorrow's journalists.

I'm with Dan. The Olympic Committee -- also guilty of unparalleled commercialism during these Games -- needs to be brought down a few pegs by citizen journalists.

Gillmor in online chat

Dan Gillmor appeared in an online chat at the Guardian UK yesterday and discussed grassroots media, among other things.

By the way, I like the Washington Post's chat transcripts better than the cluttered Guardian transcripts.

Hurricane Charley up close

In Orlando, Buzz has some posts about his up-close encounter with Hurricane Charley.

Meantime, Raven at DaytonaBeach-live.com, the Internet's only around-the-clock English-language Internet TV station, filmed 55 minutes of Hurricane Charley ripping across Main Street in Daytona Beach on Friday night. Footage includes gas station roof and pumps being ripped off from the high winds. He's putting it on a loop that will repeat over the next day or two.

Bloggers, big media and influence

I have my second post as a guest-blogger over at The Industry Standard.

It takes a look at the amazing chart that tracks the influence of bloggers and media publications in the blogosphere.

And if you want to drill down deeper, I posted the raw numbers from the Top 40 sites with the most in-bound links here.

Harnessing 'hyperlocal' citizens’ media

"Hyperlocal Citizens’ Media: Connecting Communities, Improving Journalism, Building Democracy" is a new research & development project conducted by six master's students majoring in new-media journalism at the Medill School of Journalism.

Writes their instructor, Rich Gordon, in E-Media Tidbits the other day:

It documents their experience building GoSkokie.com, a website seeking to cover a nearby suburb by tapping residents to provide as much of the content as possible. Along the way, the students researched similar sites throughout the nation, most of which have launched within the past year. They also learned a lot about the challenges involved in turning site visitors into content contributors. But one of the main things they learned was that free, open-source software makes creating these sites practical even for people with only modest technical skills. Expect even more of these sites in the future -- whether or not media companies get involved with them. The report can be downloaded (free of charge) here (PDF).

Why some readers trust bloggers over journalists

An article I wrote for OJR about why some people trust bloggers more than mainstream journalists has just gone live:

Transparency Begets Trust in the Ever-Expanding Blogosphere

The openness of Weblogs could help explain why many readers find them more credible than traditional media. Can mainstream journalists learn from their cutting-edge cousins?

And don't miss this fascinating accompanying chart, with data supplied by Technorati, that hasn't appeared anywhere else on the Web: Who has the ear of the blogosphere?

(Wired magazine two weeks ago published a similar chart, with a different slant, but it's not online.)

Jeff Jarvis and David Sifry and Mary Hodder of Technorati are the main parties who preach the virtues of transparency, why it works in the blogosphere, and how mainstream news sites could benefit from the practice.

Excerpt:

"The Web is not chiefly about a library or a news stand," Sifry says. "You have to start thinking about the Web as this humongous event stream. The Web is a set of ongoing conversations that weave together into this new kind of omnipresent social fabric." ...

Jarvis agrees. "We are witnessing the growth of a culture of transparency," he says. "Bloggers are more trusted, I think, because they are human and too often news organizations are not. Bloggers tell you who they are (usually) and what their backgrounds and biases are and their readers can judge them and engage with them on a personal level. News organizations are big and often monolithic and are reluctant to admit let alone share perspective or agendas."

The craft of journalism itself is undergoing a shift as we move toward a more pliable online model. "Bloggers see news as a conversation," he says. "It's not over when it's in print; it's not fishwrap. News improves and the facts and the truth come closer when the discussion begins ..."

Well articulated.

Later: I was wondering whether to post the full text of the email Jeff Jarvis sent me, but Jeff saved me the trouble.

Also, see BlueHereNow's pointer to Richard Edelman's Trust Barometer (a Word doc), which shows people are more likely to believe friends and family than the mainstream media.

Tim Porter weighs in smartly:

The most important lesson mainstream journalists can learn from bloggers is that to gain trust from their readers they must put trust in their readers. Open up the journalistic process. Share the sources. Give the public more space in the paper (or, as the Bakersfield Californiann is doing with the Northwest Voice, let them write part of the paper themselves.)

Journalists saying, "Trust me, I'm a pro," doesn't work any longer. Saying, "I'm a pro so I'm going to trust you," just might.

Must-download TV

Farhad Manjoo in Salon: Must-download TV. The latest developments in TV-show-trading technology mean you don't need TiVo to watch what you want, when you want.

We're all journalists now

In Wired News, Xeni Jardin has a Q&A with Dan Gillmor, who argues in his new book We the Media that journalism is stronger than ever because of the Web. But Hollywood is strengthening its grasp on copyrights, threatening speech and freedom. Excerpt:

Gillmor: I'm worried, because the forces of centralization are winning almost all of the legal and political fights so far. Note the state attorneys general letter to the P2P folks -- full of misinformation and bizarre interpretations of reality, but part of the copyright cartel's war on all forms of media it can't control.

The problem, as Lawrence Lessig and others have noted, is that absolute control is contrary to what users/customers must have -- for example, to retain both some level of freedom and the ability to create new works that quote from older works. I hope this comes out right in the end, but I'm not counting on it at the moment.

I'm glad Dan is an ally in this important fight for citizens' digital rights.

Wondir: more than another expert site

Allen Searls -- son of tech rock star Doc Searls -- is the VP of community for Wondir Inc. Allen wrote, telling me about his really intriguing and praiseworthy service, which relies on a distributed network of smart people who chip in answers to users' questions.

I asked Allen how Wondir differs from the kinds of expert sites we've seen over the past few years, such as Abuzz and Google Answers, and he's got a good answer. Essentially, it comes down to this:

1. Wondir is free.

2. Wondir is live. ...

3. Wondir is for everyone. ...

4. Wondir is a cinch to use. ...

Sounds pretty good. I'll be stopping by regularly, because I have lots of questions.

Yahoo's push for push-button publishing

Earlier this year, Yahoo! began a really cool beta project that pulls RSS feeds into headline summaries on a Yahoo news page. Take a look.

To advance the cause of push-button publishing, they've created easy "add to my" subscribe buttons that are appearing all over the web. Says Yahoo biz dev guy Don Loeb: "We're trying to do everything we can to help bring RSS to the masses."

Here's the link to the page with the muy easy instructions on how to add the Yahoo icon to your pages so the millions of Yahoo users can spot it. (Mine is near the bottom of the right rail.)

Some Q&As on Open Media

Hey, Sheila gave the Open Media project a nice writeup -- and even finagled a blurb on the front page of projo.com. Way cool.

She asked me a few questions to elucidate the Open Media concept, and I replied, thinking I was answering her and not being interviewed. Luckily, nothing embarrassing in there.

Later: Marc has some better answers than I gave.

Vote for best Bush switchers ad

From the MoveOn PAC: Vote now for best Real People ad.

When we asked MoveOn members last month for their stories for a real people ad campaign, we got hundreds of responses from members – Republicans, Democrats and Independents – who voted for George Bush in 2000, but will be voting for Kerry in 2004. These stories of disaffection are the most powerful statements we’ve found about the failed Bush presidency. Academy award-winning documentary film director Errol Morris has been interviewing these former Bush voters on camera, and he’s cut seventeen ads that tell their stories.

Help us decide which ads to air during the Republican convention by rating them – and invite your friends to rate them too!

The servers are pretty busy now, but this is terrific grassroots political action, in the same vein as the Bush in 30 Seconds contest earlier this year.

I'm guessing it's still an open question regarding whether the broadcast or cable networks will air these during the Republican convention. How about it, Fox? Will you turn down good money and robust political discourse because of corporate ties to the Republican Party?

Thanks to Steve Garfield for the pointer.

Ready for the visual Web?

The late, great business magazine The Industry Standard (I wrote a couple of articles for them) was resurrected some time ago in the form of a weblog. Today I began guest-blogging over there.

In Ready for the visual Web?, I riff on the uptick on video bloggers, new developments in the space, and why it all matters. Excerpt:

What everyone seems to agree on is this: The visual Web will not be television but a new media form that takes its shape from its Internet underpinnings. There won’t be one way of telling stories, creating short-form movies, or capturing real life.

In a few years, when high-definition camcorders come down to the consumer level, we’ll be awash in startling new forms of video vérité as a grassroots prairie fire in participatory visual media sweeps through the land. By then, the tools will be as easy as point, shoot, upload.

Is the multimedia Web ready for its closeup? It’s getting there.

Home-brew media sites

As part of the Open Media project, we're looking to collaborate with sites that work primarily in the area of grassroots video. In addition to participatory media sites like unmediated (see the "open media" blogroll) and efforts like Creative Commons, here are a few of the home-brew media sites that we know about.

• The Center for Digital Storytelling in Berkeley, Calif., has pioneered the digital storytelling space for the past decade.

• Storylink.org is a digital stories project at MIT that arose out of the academic community. More limited in scope than Open Media, it focuses almost exclusively on 3-to 5-minute digital movies.

• Undergroundfilm.org is a terrific site devoted to independent films that launched in June 2003. Alex Cohen serves as chairman.

• OneWorldTV gives people the tools and training to create and share video stories.

• Open4all.info is Drazen Pantic's effort to empower people to become media outlets.

• DV Guide is the accompanying site to Open4all and requires use of BitTorrent.

• Fanlib: People Powered Entertainment is a tool for storytelling.

• Creativenarrations.net provides support and training to document the unfolding stories in our neighborhoods.

• Campusmoviefest.com is an annual contest for best short film made by a team of college students.

• Youth Media Exchange is a confederation of IndyMedia organizations that Brad DeGraf helped pull together.

• Witness.org is an organization using video and technology to fight for human rights.

• The Independent Media Center is a global organization that relies on citizen-reports to shoot grassroots video.

• FanFilms.com and iFilm.com offer fan films and tribute films.

• "OnScene.com", a new clearinghouse for digital media run by David Schwartz (InfoWorld's Ephraim Schwartz's cousin).

• BrainGlow, the Bay Area Video Coalition, a San Francisco group that shows users how to create their own media.

• TellingStories is a San Francisco startup that sells the tools to let people create personal media.

• VideoBlogging Wiki on Me-TV.org: an open wiki about video blogging.

• ZeD, run by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's new media arm — the tag line is "open source television" — allows members to upload and promote material, from movies to music, and yes, even blog posts. Best material is shown on the ZeD TV show

- Others? Post them here.

Open Media: The Open Source Media Project

For the past few weeks, Marc Canter and I have been working on a new project called Open Media: The Open Source Media Project. It's time to go public.

The idea behind the Open Media project came from a confluence of two things:

- I gave a presentation at the Digital Storytelling Festival in Sedona, Ariz., in June and proposed the creation of a permanent repository for the visual Web, with digital stories as a logical first media form for inclusion. The week before the festival, I got buy-in from Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive, who offered free storage and free bandwidth, "forever," for the project. I registered the domain name open-media.org.

- Long before that, Marc Canter has been touting the notion of open standards, open platforms, open media. He explains the idea in a posting today. I cornered Marc at Supernova in June, mentioned the project, and he immediately jumped in with both feet.

Marc puts it succinctly today: "Basically we're making sure to make it REAL easy for folks to utilize media in their everyday lives, school and work." The goal of Open Media, really, is to foster "a Creative Commons pool of media."

Here's the somewhat more long-winded Mission Statement I scratched out:

We are in the midst of the greatest boon in grassroots creativity in ages. Tools once available only to a professional elite are now being taken up by everyday citizens. Just as weblogs brought millions of people into the media ecosystem, so too are new tools empowering individuals to create video, audio, playlists, and other works of personal media and to share them with a global audience.

The personal media revolution is turning visual. Digital stories, video diaries, documentary journalism, home-brew political ads, music videos, fan films, Flash animations, student films, parodies of Hollywood films — all kinds of short multimedia works have begun to flower. Alas, the most compelling ones are scattered across the Web or hidden away on thousands of PCs, laptops and closed networks. These works deserve a wider audience.

Open-Media.org is an open source media project that seeks to expose, preserve, and advance works of grassroots creativity (chiefly, but not limited to, amateur video). Individuals, communities and organizations have begun telling digital stories that enthrall, entertain and often move audiences to take positive action. Plain text or the cool detachment of "objective" media do not come close to matching the emotional power of multimedia stories laced with personal narrative.

Open Media is three things in one:

• an open-source platform to bring personal media to the desktop;

• a destination Web site, to launch soon at www.open-media.org;

• eventually, it will evolve into a not-for-profit organization dedicated to advancing amateur, hobbyist, semi-professional, and professional visual works and other media.

Unlike other initiatives that are pure-play stand-alone Web sites, Open Media's vision is to bring personal media to millions of desktops through playlists, video jukeboxes, visual albums, and built-in media libraries. Ther epository will run the gamut from Creative Commons-licensed works to public domain works to fully copyrighted works.

Brewster Kahle and his Internet Archive are supporting this project with free storage and bandwidth for grassroots video works. Why a visual repository? Open-Media.org will serve as a central resource to bring grassroots video under one umbrella; it will serve as a learning toolkit on how to create rich and compelling works; it will serve as a community space; and it will serve as an archive so that these works are preserved for the ages. For those who grant permission, it will also serve as a clearinghouse that allows others to search for video, download it, and reuse or remix it, with proper attribution.

Supporting this project are thought leaders in the creative community, technologists, educators, and digital-preservation librarians. Rather than relying on a paid staff, the goal is to build a do-it-yourself platform that lets users anywhere in the world upload material, download shareable media, rank their favorite works, and offer commentary and tutorials. All for free.

Over time, we expect Open-Media.org to grow into the world's largest repository of home-brew media.

Marc and I brought up Open Media at the AlwaysOn conference last month, and promised a public unveiling of the proposal. So here it is.

Ross Mayfield of Socialtext was kind enough to set us up with a private wiki last week so that invited participants can begin hammering out schemas, APIs and UIs. If you're interested in joining, just let me know. In the weeks and months ahead, we hope to enlist thought leaders and key players in the technology, creative, legal, education, and library communities. Creative Commons and the Internet Archive will play indispensable roles in the effort.

We still have a lot to do, and it's too early to say where all this is heading. I hope it plays a part in helping to kick-start the visual Web.

7 journalistic promises of blogs

Leonard Witt on PJNet Today paraphrases Jay Rosen's Seven Journalistic Promises of Blogs.

How P2P home video will challenge the network news

Over at Drazen Pantic's Open4all participatory media site is this recent article: How P2P Home Video will Challenge the Network News. Written for PlaNetWork Journal, it summarizes all the elements needed: the production, publishing, distribution and marketing of home-made video clips via P2P and blog (RSS) platform and stand-alone set-top box.

Miller reviews 'We the Media'

Ernest Miller reviews Dan Gillmor's We the Media over at Slashdot today. 94 responses so far -- few of which, unfortunately, measure up to the glowing words Dan accords Slashdot in his book.

Video blogging begins its ascent

One development that is certain to become a staple of the blogosphere in years ahead is video blogging. Marc Canter riffs on the phenomenon today:

Video has taken a back-burner position (on the Internet) for over 10 years now as dial-up mentality has reigned surpreme. But with broadband surpassing the 50% mark - we now can use video to explain ourselves ...

The video blogging meme is taking off - despite the fact that there are no tools to structure these posts or attach appropriate meta data to these streams. ...

It's this notion of using multimedia to communicate "off the top of your head" that's lighting the fire and video is the very best at capturing that essence. Obviously David Weinberger is a great writer, but when even HE starts video blogging, well then I think it's time for us to take notice of what's going on.

Weinberger's video riposte was in reaction to a CNET column by Charles Cooper, who wrote: "blogging blew its big chance in Beantown" (at the Dem convention). Interesting experiment, David. (Next time, work on the lighting. :~) )

David, from his video commentary, on the prospect of a bloggers receiving credentials at the next Democratic Convention in 2008: "I don't think it'll happen again. ... The blogging will be done by the delegates and the convention staff and the journalists. They won't have to award credentials to a set of bloggers again."

A new magazine on making stuff

Tim O'Reilly (whom I saw Friday night again at Dan G's book party) has a new quarterly magazine coming out early in 2005 called Make.

Make is not another one of those "gadget" magazines that feature products on every page. While we like gadgets as much as the next person, we chose to focus on cool things you can do with technology, not just what to buy.

Sounds great. Even better, BoingBoing's Mark Frauenfelder will be its editor. Mark has more details here. You can sign up for the Make mailing list here.

'We the Media' book party

One of the great things about living in the Bay Area is that it remains ground zero for cutting-edge technologies and social movements, including the personal media revolution (sorry, New York, but you'll catch up). Tonight I attended Dan Gillmor's official book release party for We the Media. (That's Dan in a photo I took one week ago at BlogOn.)

I hope to blog my review of the book sometime in the next week or two. One of the surreal things tonight was reading the book on BART during my train ride into the city -- and then seeing or meeting several of the people Dan wrote about, such as Phil Gomes and Dave Sifry (just back from his stint at CNN during the convention ... more on that in a few days).

But the co-star of the evening was the spanking new Creative Commons
headquarters (in the SOMA district of San Francisco, a half block from where I worked at Microsoft Sidewalk for two years). It's an amazing new space, subsidized by the generosity of Mitch Kapor.

Turning out for the fete were (among scores of others): Larry Lessig, Howard Rheingold, Glenn Otis Brown, Tim O'Reilly, Marc Canter, Fred von Lohmann and Cindy Cohn of EFF, Derek Slater of Berkman fame, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Craig Newmark, Ev Williams, Gary Rivlin, Brian Dear, Scott Rosenberg, Gordon Mohr, and a number of other tech luminaries I didn't get a chance to meet.

Dan tells me there'll be another such gathering in the East Bay.

Congrats, Dan, on a terrific book and on your dedication to the cause of participatory journalism.

Video blogging the convention

I hope we'll see much, much more video blogging in the months and yeara ahead. Mark Glaser's OJR column pointed to Steve Garfield's Video Blog, where he crashed the Democratic convention party and has posted seven video reports so far. Terrific stuff.

Writes Steve today:

I'm working hard to post at least one new video a day.

Video Blogging isn't as easy as posting text and pictures from your cell phone, but by doing a project like this, I hope to help us all figure out the easiest way to get video on a blog.

I've just added Steve to my Open media blogroll there at the left and hope to learn more about his technique.

Found photos

The NY Times has a story on a found photos site. Reproducing any one of these photos without permission is arguably a copyright violation.

So be it. It's another example of the people's media.

MediaChannel at Dem convention

Tim Karr and the team from indie news site MediaChannel.org are at the FleetCenter in Boston, "where American politics is taking a back seat to mainstream media reality," Karr says.

Networks Sleep While The Fleet Center Burns
By Rory O’Connor
Last night, while the networks slept, the cynics wept and the future revealed itself. The occasion was the extraordinary keynote speech by Barack Obama, a formerly obscure Illinois State Senator who is poised to become the most important Democrat in America.

Big Three Networks Dim Lights On Kerry
By Timothy Karr
Karr reveals the findings of a new study of network TV election coverage, which shows a dimming spotlight for Democratic candidate John Kerry. Meanwhile, the Bush campaign has made impressive strides in placing their own candidate before the cameras. Can Kerry recapture the attention of American viewers before voters go to the polls in November?

Six Journalists For Every Delegate -- Covering The Media Circus
By Danny Schechter
The “News Dissector” leaps into the Fleet Center’s media maw to separate news from shmooze.

Bloggers Line Up At Media Buffet
By Nathalie Rothschild
Three dozen or so have descended from above their garages to blog the DNC, sparking much interest but as yet little real news from the floor. Will bloggers beat the traditional journalists to the punch or will they fall into line at the buffet of tightly scripted sound bytes and political bromides?

Dawn Of The Not Dead Yet -- Dems Kick It To The Oldies
By Rory O'Connor
O'Connor sees dead people -- or at least the ghosts of Democratic Party past -- nearly everywhere he turns in Boston, as the Democrats trot out some old favorites (and try to bury others) before Kerry gets his close up.

Neutrality is not core to journalism

Most of us have moved beyond the stale question of who is or isn't a journalist in a world where everyone is a potential publisher, but it still pops up in areas such as deciding which bloggers should get credentials to the national conventions.

My friend Tom Rosenstiel of the Project for Excellence in Journalism has some thoughts on the subject in the Boston Globe and concludes that neutrality or "objectivity" is not a core principle of journalism. "But the commitment to facts, to public consideration, and to independence from faction, is. Anyone can be a journalist and some may be, whether they like it or not."

Thanks to Jim Romenesko for the pointer.

Influence to the edges

At Poynter's Convergence Chaser, Robin Sloan has a nice, pithy summary of the implications for newspapers as influence moves to the edges.

Robin points to Phil Meyer, a Univ. of North Carolina prof and author of the new book The Vanishing Newspaper, who says news organizations are in the influence business, not the information business.

As I'll be writing in a piece for OJR in a couple of weeks, what are the implications of that when bloggers like Instapundit's Glenn Reynolds now draw more traffic than most mid-size newspapers?

On Friday Robin pointed to a related article, from Barron's, titled, "Fighting the Tape: The Print Media's Malaise Runs Deep," whose bottom line was this:

we may have reached a tipping point: The long, long decline of print media (especially newspapers) may soon pick up speed, while the Internet has continued to make huge strides -- even through the dot-com crash -- and will increasingly occupy the high ground.

Check it out. No subscription needed, but it may disappear behind a firewall Friday.

Be your own TV network

Howard Rheingold points to this article by Drazen Pantic: Anybody Can Be TV: How P2P Home Video will Challenge The Network News. To be a real-time video journalist, all you need is a blog, a camcorder, and a laptop with WiFi.

I'm writing about the idea of personal broadcast networks for my upcoming book, Darknet, but it's fascinating to see these ideas already taking root in the blogosphere.

Could OhmyNews work here?

The Guardian UK has an online chat with the founder of South Korea's OhmyNews, a news publication that epitomizes participatory journalism and We media. Can it happen here?

Thanks to Dan for the pointer.

Readers gravitating to open media model

At Thursday night's introductory panel at the BlogOn conference ...

Someone (perhaps John Roberts of CNET) said: "RSS is a Napster for ideas."

Tony Perkins: "I think this is the biggest thing that's ever happened [in media]. Just as big media was bottoming out, bloggers came in and said, Wait a minute, we have something to say here. We'll see the complete blowing apart of the media world and get high quality content that fits in your pocket. …

"In an era where big media has been producing junk food -- when the New York Times pisses you off and you want to talk back or post a comment or contact the writer but can't -- people won't trust brands that don't succumb to the open media model. I think this is happening fast and media that don't open to the open source media concept are going to be voted out."

Listening to Tony, who criticizes the Times from the political right (he prefers Fox News), and hearing from those on the left who criticize the Times for taking an institutional establishment stand, I remember that I used to think the solution for news organizations to play it down the middle. I used to think it was a matter of balance. I don't believe it's that simple anymore. I think it's more about access now. As Tony suggested, people are beginning to resent the top-down megaphone model that doesn't allow for dialogue and conversation and interaction.

Jason McCable Calacanis suggested from the audience that the New York Times will never embrace blogs in a wholesale fashion because of its insistence on fact-checking, a process that often takes hours when the blog audience wants instantaneous access to breaking news in real time.

Christian Crumlish responded that the Times is taking tentative first steps with its campaign blog and similar efforts and that we may see a cross between real-time blogging and traditional reporting by the professional media.

After the session, I finally met face to face with Robert Scoble, the bounce-off-the-walls-with-electric-enthusiasm Microsoftie, who told me that yes, indeed, he checks 1,400 RSS feeds a day (he's also a big fan of this blog). Amazing.

Art mobs

Clive Thompson in Slate: Art Mobs: Can an online crowd create a poem, a novel, or a painting? My experiment with the Darknet wiki is mentioned.

'We, the Media' web site

O'Reilly has launched a beta website for Dan Gillmor's new book about grassroots journalism, We, the Media. A few copies are floating around, and Dan promised me an advance copy soon so I can review it here. I've added the site to the Open media blogroll there at the left.

A conversation with news execs

Jeff Jarvis reports from a media conference in Aspen, Colo., where he met with A-list news execs:

... At our closing session, half the participants said they were awakened about blogs and even frightened of being left behind in this blog thing. In previous sessions like this, I've heard half the big media guys dis and dismiss blogs, but there was none of that here, none of it. The curiousity about blogs ranged from cautious to cordial to rabid. These big media guys (not unlike the mullahs of Iran) realize that blogs are here to stay; we are a force to be reckoned with; and now they're reckoning what to do about it. That is good news for us. It is also good news for the news business. If this leads to openness, transparency, and accountability, then credibility and trust will follow. ...

Niche media is growing while mass media isn't. And the Internet is disrupting the essential roles of media players in the creation, aggregation, and distribution of information.

Lots more, too. Check out Jeff's report.

'Everybody now is a member of the media'

The Business Times (Singapore): 'Everybody now is a member of the media.'

There's a whole proliferation of this, according to Mr Gowing: pictures being sent down telephone lines, people calling up radio and TV stations on their mobiles, people e-mailing stories of what they've seen, people challenging the views put out by governments and backing it up with evidence. Just ordinary people, not professional journalists.

Who will do a better job of covering the conventions?

The LA Times carries another wrongheaded commentary about bloggers at the conventions, from someone who should know better: Alex S. Jones, director of the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government.

In a piece titled, "Bloggers Are the Sizzle, Not the Steak -- Convention seats do not turn Internet gossips into journalists," Jones gives a grudging nod to the idea of inviting bloggers to have a seat at the table, but makes it clear that they are not to be mistaken for the hallowed professionals who practice journalism for mainstream news publications.

Jones huffs:

Bloggers, with few exceptions, don't add reporting to the personal views they post online, and they see journalism as bound by norms and standards that they reject. That encourages these common attributes of the blogosphere: vulgarity, scorching insults, bitter denunciations, one-sided arguments, erroneous assertions and the array of qualities that might be expected from a blustering know-it-all in a bar.

Jones also props up the myth that legions of bloggers want to replace mainstream journalists, when what they really want is to be brought into the conversation.

Mr. Jones, perhaps it's time to step outside your big media hub and see what's really happening in the blogosphere, where the democratic ideals this country was founded on -- robust debate, dissent, and a refreshing, free-flowing exchange of ideas -- is on display every day, if you only knew where to look.

I fully expect the credentialed bloggers at the convention -- including Jay Rosen, Dave Winer, David Weinberger, Rick Heller, Taegan Goddard, Kos and others -- will do a much better job covering the conventions than the cliche-driven, formula-riddled mainstream news media will do.

Later: Sean Bonner has some thoughts on this worth checking out. Jay Rosen also chimes in, as does Jessie Taylor.

Books, reading, and participatory media

Newsweek: Reading's going out of style, even as publishers crank up the number of titles being published. (By the way, it's sad that, as a Newsweek subscriber, I have to use Google Advanced Search to find any Newsweek articles on the MSNBC.com site.)

According to a report on the reading habits of Americans issued last week by the National Endowment for the Arts, at the current rate of loss, "literary reading as a leisure activity will virtually disappear in half a century."

The NEA found that the number of Americans who say they've even opened a single book of fiction, let alone a poem or a play, over the course of a year has declined by 10 percent, from 56.9 percent in 1982 to 46.7 percent today. It gets worse. Young adults between 18 and 34, a category that once claimed the status of most-active readers, is now the lowest, dropping 28 percent since 1982. And by literature, "we're not talking about the number of people who reread Proust," says Dana Gioia, chairman of the NEA. "Literature" means simply any books that people read without guns pointed to their heads. "If people read even three pages of a Harlequin romance, it got counted." ...

Oddly, publishers have responded to the decline in readers by publishing far more titles for people not to read. Two decades ago the number of new books published annually hovered around 60,000, then climbed more than 100,000 in the early '90s. Last year saw a record 164,609 new titles.

It's not so odd, really. The range of topics Americans are interested in is far, far greater today than it was a generation ago. That's what micro-news is all about.

More importantly, though, NEA officials seem to jump to a spurious conclusion:

This study suggests that there are two groups of Americans emerging in this electronic age," says [Dana Gioia, chairman of the NEA]. "The first group takes a very active and engaged attitude toward information and society. The other group are increasingly passive consumers of electronic entertainment. Unfortunately, one group is growing—and it's not the readers."

Thus, Gioia suggests there are those who read (and are thus actively engaged toward information and society), and those who don't (and are thereby passive consumers of entertainment).

I would suggest a different formulation is at work, between those who actively engage digital media (who may or may not be voracious book readers but do other things like create their own media, work with digital photos, create code, publish blogs, shoot video, play games) and those who don't (and are largely passive consumers of entertainment).

Too bad Newsweek didn't find a source to point that out.

'We Media' in Chinese

At Hypergene, Shayne Bowman reports that the We Media report he wrote with Chris Willis (I was the editor) has been getting a lot of traffic of late, thanks to its translation into Chinese by BlogChina.

It's been getting a lot of renewed attention in tech circles, too: Came up at AlwaysOn, and in conjunction with the publication later this month of Dan Gillmor's We, the Media.

Bloggers, journalists and a citizens' media press pool

Ernest Miller, one of the smartest observers of the participatory media scene, has a couple of new posts related to bloggers and journalists.

The first -- The Next Generation of Journalists Will Start as Bloggers -- talks about the generational change inevitable as young journalists start out as bloggers and move into positions of influence in newsrooms. Excerpt:

I expect that in a couple of years or so those who hire novice journalists are going to want to see what sort of blogging experience they have. Nothing says, "I'm a good, disciplined writer" better than several years of good, disciplined writing, such as on a blog.

Of course, this means that these novice journalists are going to enter the profession with habits, both good and bad, as well as certain expectations. Tyro journalists who are used to blogging are going to expect to be able to link. They're going to expect trackbacks and conversations. They're not going to want to state the same facts that everyone else has stated ad nauseum, but only those elements that they can add to the conversation. Because of this, I believe that ultimately, bloggers will change the profession of big media journalism from within to work more cooperatively with blogging.

Dead on.

His second post is a rejoinder to and extension of Susan Mernit's proposals for improving online news coverage of the conventions. In it, he proposes a Citizens' Media Press Pool Fund. He adds by email:

One of the ideas that I think may be interesting in my response is my idea that Google join certain press pools as a representative of Citizens' Media and then publish the resulting material online under a Creative Commons license. If Google (or similar) is not interested, what about the creation of a "Citizens' Media Press Pool Fund" that would raise money to make press pool reports similarly available?

It's likely too late for this years' conventions (the Democratic Convention starts Monday), but we shouldn't need to wait four years, either. Sounds like something Jeff Jarvis should help organize.

Gillmor on blogging and personal journalism

Here is Steve Rubel's interview with Dan Gillmor on the subject of blogging and personal journalism, part of a series for Global PR Blog Week.

Paper experiments with participatory journalism

Jon Dube at CyberJournalist.net offers a good look at the California Bakersfield launching a participatory journalism project. The Northwest Voice lets readers post photos, school events and more. I'd excerpt the article, but you can't copy and paste from the site.

Hope we see much, much more of this in the years ahead.

Thanks to Steve Outing for the pointer.

Why the revolution will not be televised

I hadn't planned on attending AlwaysOn: The Innovation Summit today at Stanford (I'll be here tomorrow), but when I heard Joe Trippi, former campaign manager for Howard Dean, would be speaking, I popped on down. (There's a live webcast for the rest of today and Thursday.)

The panel with AlwaysOn's Tony Perkins moderating and Trippi and San Jose Mercury News columnist Dan Gillmor -- just concluded. Here are some notes from the session:

Joe Trippi: The press was ticked at us not because they didn't like us, but because we didn't feed them. …

Perkins probed the thesis of Gillmor's new book, We, the Media, which is being released this month, and asked about the distribution of media power. "People believe Rupert Murdoch will own all media. These guys will run away with it."

Gillmor: Consolidation of media is dangerous and is a problem as we're on our way to the more widely distributed future. I hope those who do serious journalism like the New York Times do survive and thrive. The big risk is the end to end principle of the Internet. If indeed the duopoly that's emerging -- the cable and phone companies -- start discriminating on content, that would make today's media consolidation look pretty tame. … We'll come to this balance between big media and the grassroots thing.

Perkins asked Trippi about the impact of open source and distributed community on the presidential campaign.

Trippi: We're in 1952 in terms of where the Net is in terms of its impact on politics. Nixon gave his Checkers speech in 1952, and all of a sudden bullshit had meaning. … I think television's just dead. You look at TiVo. It's the same empowerment scheme. It's more than time shifting. We're not going to be watching the same thing as we were before. … The Dean campaign was nothing more than a Checkers speech [in terms of its impact and influence, not in terms of its genuineness]. It took 11 years to get from 1952 to 1963, but now it's not 11 years away, it's a year or two or a few months away.

Perkins asked what happened in the Iowa caucuses.

Trippi: We had lifted off. We had 2,700 email signups in the entire state of Iowa [out of 650,000]. It was the worse possible set of circumstances possible. Most caucus attendees were over age 65. Gephardt ran a zillion ads saying Dean would raise Medicare rates and bankrupt Social Security. That's what happened.

Gillmor: Mutual suicide.

Trippi said that the legacy of the Dean campaign was still impressive. "It's like a small group of us, along with 650,000 Americans, wandered out there and took on the Boston Red Sox and we were ahead for nine innings until they creamed us in the bottom of the 9th."

Gillmor: I want to challenge the idea that what I'm doing or what the Dean campaign did is entirely open source. It's not. But it has important elements of open source. I put up draft chapters of my book on my weblog for readers to comment on. JD Lasica went futher. He put his book up on a wiki for people to actually dive in and edit it. That's really interesting. I'm not sure I'm that brave. [Thanks for the plug, Dan!]

Trippi: I'm thinking of putting the book up [his new book is The Revolution Will Not Be Televised] and asking anyone who participated in the Dean campaign to write their own story and put that out there.

Gillmor: We, the Media is being released under a Creative Commons license, meaning people can reuse it and do anything they want with it as long as it's not for commercial purposes. I suspect people will take it in new directions. I want to see if someone remixes it and comes up with a better book than I did. I suspect they will.

Perkins launched into a critique of television. "On television, we are being fed junk food."

Gillmor: To get something deeper, people have to hunt for it. Destroying with innuendo and lies is a hell of a lot easier than building up.

Trippi: People do want something better. One of the things they want is a community. The Dean campaign came in part out of the bulletin boards in the late '90s.

Perkins: With grassroots participation, will we end up with higher quality discussions about politics between candidates and constituencies? Will we have higher quality content in journalism?

Gillmor: Eventually, sure. One of the things in the Dean campaign that was fascinating was the Dean blog, which was done with a human voice by people inside the campaign, and they became sort of political rock stars within the Dean campaign. … One thing that happened was shutting down the trolls. Someone came up with the idea, 'Every time someone posts a troll, we send funds to the campaign.' That was a pretty creative idea.

[On the AlwaysOn Live Chat, which was being projected onto a large screen next to the stage in real time (nice!), Ross Mayfield posted: "Dan has a big troll problem on his blog now."]

Trippi: We're at the stage where the fourth wave comes, open source. Remember, in 2000 John McCain had the big Internet juggernaut. He had 40,000 people join up over the Internet. Three years later we had meet-ups and blogs and amazing success in online fund-raising. But we're just at the beginning. In 2008, they're going to laugh at what we did.

Perkins criticized the patina of objectivity that the mainstream media adhere to. "The Economist says, 'This is our world view, and this is our opinion.' That's more honest than the New York Times, which I open up and see as no more than a political advertising sheet."

The panelists then began discussing television advertising.

Trippi: I own a TiVo, and once everyone begins to triple time everything on TiVo, you'll see more product placement

Gillmor: Something people want desperately is authenticity. Blogs are growing in popularity because they have an authentic voice. That's why I'm bothered by reality TV, it's fake and it's a closed system. I think there's a hunger for truth and authentic voice.

Perkins: Would you say Michael Powell came off as authentic last night [when we gave the keynote address] and we don't see that translated through the media?

Gillmor: Slick, too. Five years ago you wouldn't have heard those things from an FCC chairman. …

The session wound down from there.

Later: I just published a short photo album of some of Wednesday afternoon's speakers, including Trippi, Perkins, Gillmor, Verisign CEO Stratton Sciavos and AOL search chief Gerry Campbell.

PR, participatory journalism, and transparency

Steve Rubel interviews Jay Rosen in Global PR Blog Week on public relations, participatory journalism, open media and transparency. Wonderful insights here. Excerpt:

STEVE RUBEL: How would you define participatory journalism?

JAY ROSEN: Right now, by what people like Debbie Galant are doing-- hyperlocal journalism, weblog-style. ("NOW SERVING MONTCLAIR, GLEN RIDGE AND BLOOMFIELD.") But really there are hundreds more developments to illustrate. Ask someone like Len Witt of the Public Journalism Network (meeting in Toronto soon about participatory journalism): he's one guy tracking the story as citizens begin to participate in journalism. Or follow JD Lasica, who's not only on the story, but a driver of it with conference talks, articles, books, and a daily weblog-- ideas for use, as this approach is sometimes called. And what Jeff Jarvis is up to in advising a team of students at Northwestern, who created this, and at his Buzzmachine.

Is it more than just blogging? Yes... it's the spirit of participation, which moves people into doing things for themselves, into taking action of some kind, where before they were attentive but inert, or out of it completely, uninvolved. We have seen this force erupt many times in the modern world, this passion to participate.

There is every reason to suppose that it would come 'round in journalism. I mean, why not? Every journalist who's any good will tell you that being a reporter is fun. Plus, a lot of people are fascinated by the news, and what's wrong with it. There are smart people in every corner of this country, many without any professional standing or stake whatsoever--just citizens, right?--who are seriously frustrated by the failures and flaws they see in the American press.

When those people find that the tools for doing journalism, or some activity interpretative of it, are within reach, it's an ignition-- there's a spark. Is it all weblogs? No, participatory zeal is common everywhere, especially in domains of information. ...

The new thing is how, in the online space, bloggers knit the news together with their views and views arriving from elsewhere, and then manage to embed into the Web this second imprint, upon the items that originally struck us as news.

And so you have the first wave (also called a news cycle) and a second that embeds it further into the Web, with interpretations adding to a web of other notes and reactions. How is this possible? Because the bloggers know how to link, and quote, and entice you to look elsewhere, zap around. They're way ahead of the journalists on that. If people in the press would just understand that one fact they would grasp what weblogs are about, and why they're being talked about at all today as "journalism."

Mash-ups as illegal art

Annalee Newitz in AlterNet: Mash-ups: anti-authoritarian folk music for a generation whose 'establishment' is represented by corporate intellectual-property owners.

"We're not supposed to be doing this – it's like prohibition," says Mysterious D, a DJ at San Francisco's all-mash-up club Bootie. "But at the same time, we're not going to be limited by copyright laws when we create something." ...

Australian masher Dsico – who has been repeatedly threatened with legal action for his work – traces the style back to modernist art: "Much as Duchamp once drew a mustache on a copy of the Mona Lisa, bastard pop artists deface mainstream pop music." ...

"I would love to see a form of copyright where as long as money isn't changing hands, everything is up for grabs," San Francisco mash-up DJ Adrian says.

The article also points to Get Your Bootleg On, a British mash-up site that offers instruction on how to make a bootleg as well as litigation horror stories.

Journalist-blogger goes back to Iraq

Mark Glaser's latest just posted on OJR: a look at the latest trip to Iraq by blogger/journalist Chris Allbritton and the challenges he faced juggling duties for a blog audience and being a stringer for Time and the NY Daily News.

SomaFM plays tunes for the whole wide world

While I was out of town, I missed this SF Chronicle story on SomaFM:

In the age of the file sharing, the Recording Industry Association of America and the iPod, the competition for music supremacy has gotten grisly. It's not the least of marvels then that SomaFM, an Internet radio station that broadcasts from a garage in Bernal Heights, beams seven channels of music to the entire planet, past meridians and across the equator and back through modems logged onto somafm.com.

SomaFM, created in 1999 by software developer Rusty Hodge, is the radio outlet for thousands of listeners who connect from Japan, Europe and throughout the United States. Its success suggests you don't need anything much larger than a mouse these days to be heard. ...

Rip, mix, burn, baby

I met Michael Sippey (managing director of Quris) at Supernova for the first time earlier today. He had the best posting of the day on the Supernova blog, so I'll reproduce it here:

Where's the rip, mix & burn?

So I walked in a bit late and may have missed the Big Ideas, but from the 2nd half that I heard the syndication panel just blew it. We need to wake up to the fact that RSS does not equal blogs. If we keep talking about RSS as the equivalent of blogging, then of course we'll be stuck in the same old boring conversations about adoption curves, audience size and whether Jane or Joe blogger will ever be able to have an ad- or subscription-supported business model. What, is this 1996 all over again? We've been down this road before.

What I had hoped to hear was some discussion about how XML-based content syndication can create recombinatorial media. As I'm sure everyone here knows, the trend in media consumption is hyper-fragmentation. Cable, web, gaming, music distribution, etc. With time- and context-shifting technologies people are able to create their own real-time media mix -- whether it's the random function on the iPod, or the Tivo to-do list, or the bookmark file, or the email subscription list, or, yes, the XML syndication client.

If XML-based content syndication is only about creating another vehicle for single channel content distribution (and ad distribution, etc.), then YAWN. Formats like RSS & Atom create the possibility for recombinatorial media. If all the RSS/Atom proponents want to use these feeds as a replacement for email, then good luck. You have a hard road ahead. What's needed is some new thinking about rich clients that enable users to create NEW things out of the pub/sub network.

Rip, mix, burn, baby.

Grasping the revolution

At Supernova, Doc Searls mentioned to me that he had posted this the other day after he stumbled upon an old Wired piece by Jon Katz, When Will Old Media Grasp the Revolution?, which in turn was a riff on my 1996 cover story in the American Journalism Review about changes the establishment media needed to make to remain relevant in the digital age. "It's amazing how well it holds up," says the Doc.

Speaking of Supernova, I'll post something on it tonight. Just got back after a 12-hour day there and back, and wi-fi problems prevented posting during the sessions.

'Hyperlocal' news coverage by citizen bloggers

At PJ Net, Griff Wigley had this last week (yes, I'm seriously behind on my links): Hyperlocal coverage of a breaking news event by citizen bloggers in Minnesota.

The fan films strike back

I just tripped across this well-done look at the fan film phenomenon from the Daily Standard: The Fan Films Strike Back. Thanks to digital cinema and the Web, geeks are filming their own "Star Wars" and "Star Trek" stories. And they're pretty close to making something better than the junk their heroes have been dishing out lately.

Open-source book editing

In today's San Jose Mercury News, Michael Bazeley has this: Authors open texts online for others to edit. The article is based on interviews with me and Christian Crumlish about open-source book editing. Michael asked about both my Darknet blog and Darknet wiki, where readers have helped edit the upcoming book Darknet: Remixing the Future of Movies, Music & Television. Excerpt:

``I realized the underlying theme of what I'm writing about is that we're entering an era where creative people are sort of losing control of their work, and it's not all bad,'' Lasica said. ``I wanted to experience that. I didn't want that experience of a big media conglomerate where you say `Take it or leave it.' ''

There was a more practical motivation, too. Lasica's reporting covers a variety of industries, from video gaming to moviemaking. And as he candidly admits, he is not an expert in those areas. The Web site allows industry experts to review his work and offer corrections or insights before the printed copy hits the stores next spring.

``I really do believe . . . that the audience knows more,'' Lasica said. [The ... was: as Dan Gillmor likes to say.]

The wiki experiment is over now. I'm putting the finishing touches on my manuscript this weekend -- after two long years of research, reporting and writing -- and I'll be submitting it to my editor on Monday.

Journalism and blogs in the classroom

Guess my Nieman Reports essay on Journalism and blogs need each other has made it to the Netherlands' classrooms, based on student blogs I spotted here, here and here.

Collaborative online textbook project

From Slashdot today:

rocketjam writes: "OpenTextBook.org is a new project to create a free, open text book 'collaboratively written by anyone on the internet', using a Creative Commons license. Citing the free software development model and the philosophy that underlies much of that effort, OpenTextBook.org's introduction says this philosophy should apply 'at its most basic to the learning of science.' They hope the project will help to counter the current governmental trend of strengthening the scope, duration and rights of intellectual property owners while cutting back on the fair use rights of individuals. The current state of the project is available as a daily snapshot pdf file which contains the introduction to the project and 9 chapters mostly covering math at this time."

Wrapup of Digital Storytelling Festival

Got back last evening from the 7th annual Digital Storytelling Festival in Sedona, Arizona. Ordinarily I would have filed longer posts while I was there, given the terrific wifi setup, but I was so taken in by the presentations that I decided to spend the time between sessions talking with other storytelling aficionados rather than blogging.

Now, normally I'd post a long rundown of all the sessions. But my book deadline is a couple of days away, so I need to summarize quickly here. (Also, apologies if you're one of the 1,000-plus people who've emailed me over the past week; I may not be able to get back to you for a few days.)

My Saturday morning presentation on Open Media was well received, with more than two dozen people coming up afterward and expressing support for the notion of a permanent online repository for visual creativity by amateurs and professionals. More on that in a couple of weeks when I launch a site explaining the project.

Besides taking in the wonders of Sedona with my wife, 5-year-old son and brother George (who drove up from Phoenix), the highlight of the week came over dinner at Javelina Cantina with Thom Gillespie, director of the MIME program at Indiana University, Mark Weaver (a digital storytelling consultant in San Diego) and his partner Lisa Young.

Sunday morning I was one of two dozen people who attended the annual meeting of the Digital Storytelling Association, where we laid out plans to help spur a mass movement of digital video creativity. (The Center for Digital Storytelling explains digital storytelling here.)

The conference was a good mix of high concept and practical application. The personable and very sharp Derrick Story of O'Reilly Media gave a 90-minute presentation on improving your video and audio skills. (I bought his Digital Photography Hacks.) I don't think he'd mind if I reprinted these tips from his talk:

Movie house rules

- capture the best audio possible (sound is more than half the picture)
- may I have a little light please? (video needs a lot of light)
- ack! No backlight! (with camcorder you can lock in exposure on person so it doesn't change when it hits backlighting; there's no lock in in exposure mode with small cameras, but camcorders do have this)
- hold your shots steady
- vary your angle: use 1 or 2 angle changes in a 3-minute movie
- keep it moving
- if you're on camera, smile, for God's sake
- edit with a vengeance
- no loitering: 3 minutes or less
- avoid lengthy titles

Here are some of the sites that were spotlighted throughout the week:

• Storylink (a new academic-oriented site and organizing tool for digital stories created by MIT's Center for Reflective Practice)

• BBC's Capture Wales project

• The National Storytelling Network, which is holding its annual conference in Bellingham, Wash., next month

• Campus MovieFest

• The Australian Centre for the Moving Image

• Bay Area Video Coalition

• Murmur, a fascinating interactive storytelling project in Toronto

• PBS's The New Americans series

• KQED's Coming to California stories

• TV journalist Ronni Bennett's Time Goes By blog

• Listen Up! PBS's Youth Media Network

• a Luna Blue, a stock footage and image library

• iStockPhoto.com, where professional-quality photos can be had for 50 cents to $2 apiece.

• Media That Matters film festival

• Ripple Training (a site for cool tips, tricks and tutorials on Final Cut Pro, Final Cut Pro HD, DVD Studio Pro, LiveType and Sound Track)

• Kenstone.net (amazing tips on Final Cut Pro)

• Free Range Graphics and their Flash movies, such as The Meatrix

• GoldenFleece's Storyatwork (a site devoted to storytelling in business and organizations)

• Cyndi Greening's blog on digital media

• Invent Media

• Third World Majority (a new media training and production resource center dedicated to global justice)

• The Great Canadian Story Engine, a vintage site from CBC's Canadian Film Centre

• All My Life for Sale

And here are a couple of more photos I've added to the Storytelling Festival photo album:

Blogging from Sedona

I'm at the second full day of the 7th annual Digital Storytelling Festival in Sedona, Arizona. It's been a blast, meeting such a wide assortment of filmmakers, artists, and other creative digital ethusiasts from around the country -- indeed, from around the world, with participants from Australia, Canada, Britain and Wales here.

Tomorrow I'm giving my talk on the digital media revolution. In the meantime, here is a photo gallery of some of the participants.

NY Times photos of Kerry & Bush

Tom Holzel of Velocity Associates thinks he has evidence of New York Times "liberal bias" in his analysis of a month's worth of photos of John Kerry and George Bush.

I think what he's discovered is that it's impossible to please 100 percent of the readers. The Times came very close in its photographic inch count. Had Mr. Holzel added up the non-photographic column inches devoted to Kerry and Bush, it's obvious it would have been far more lopsized in President Bush's favor.

President Bush had a bad month. To pretend otherwise by choosing photographs that tell a different story would have been misleading.

I applaud grassroots efforts to keep the mainstream media honest. I just don't believe the indictment is warranted here.

TV news in a postmodern world

The Digital Journalist: TV News in a Postmodern World: Argument Versus Objectivity, by Terry L. Heaton. TV News -- and other forms of journalism of the future -- will steadily drift away from the "professional" standard of objectivity and back to one that regularly incorporates argument into its soul.

Storytelling as participatory media

I've been asked to keynote this year's Digital Storytelling Festival in beautiful Sedona, Arizona. I owe a debt of gratitude to Salon's Scott Rosenberg, who keynoted last year and recommended me this time around.

Some quick background: Founded in 1995 by Dana and Denise Atchley, the Digital Storytelling Conference & Festival immerses participants in the principles and practice of digital storytelling, from fundamentals of dramatic structure, voice, and pacing to the latest digital technologies and software tools. In this richly collaborative environment, participants learn from the top instructors and visionaries in the field, and network with peers who have made digital storytelling an essential tool for success.

The Digital Storytelling Association (isn't that Derek Powazek front and center in the photo?) and the Center for Digital Storytelling are key drivers of the conference/festival. (If you're interested in the topic, I wrote about digital storytelling here, and Hilary McLellan keeps a list of resources and articles here.)

Attendees are flying in from all over the country, as well as Europe. There are still plenty of openings to this first-rate event. Here's the speaker page. I'll be talking about personal filmmaking, participatory media, and copyright law in the digital age.

The blogging never stops

Katie Hafner in today's NY Times: For Some, the Blogging Never Stops. Jeff Jarvis, who's quoted in the article, adds this.

Participatory editing

I'm three weeks away from my book deadline. I need to fact-check numerous passages in the book, while at the same time completing the final chapter.

If someone tracks down this one factoid, I'd be eternally grateful ... and mention you in the Acknowledgments.

There are two versions of this story. One is this:

When Cole Porter was asked which comes first, the lyrics or the melody, he replied, "Neither. The phone call."

The other version is that it was an old music industry saying.

So I need to verify the attribution on this, but also find out if Cole Porter ever said it, even once. Need to know the source of the publication or website you're citing, of course.

Bloggers force changes in big media

Mark Glaser in OJR: To Their Surprise, Bloggers Are Force for Change in Big Media. A parody helps change a corrections policy at The New York Times. An online critic's query ends a career at the Chicago Tribune. Bloggers' scrutiny is making its mark on traditional journalism.

When consumers are creators

Jan Schaffer, executive director of J-Lab: The Institute for Interactive Journalism (and a friend), had this last month, which I had missed: Convergent Audiences: When Consumers are Creators.

[Convergence] puts the focus not on the consumer, our audiences, but on the supplier, the news organizations. It becomes an exercise in Us vs. Them. ...

I think we are focusing on the wrong "C" word. Rather than focus on convergence, we should be focusing on connections and how new digital tools can help us build all kinds of innovative, new connections with our audiences. The potential of new media is not simply more noise but more meaningful interaction and hopefully more meaningful learning.

It's the same point I try to make in chapter 2 of my upcoming book, where I argue that true convergence involves the user.

Homer on citizens media

Just watched Sunday's season finale of The Simpsons on our TiVo. Homer has this to say about all the residents of Springfield starting their own newspapers: "Instead of one big-shot controlling all the media, now there's a thousand freaks Xeroxing their worthless opinions." Ah, citizens media.

US bans camera phones in Iraq

As a number of us predicted earlier this month (including Bernie Goldbach) ...

News.com Australia: US bans camera phones in Iraq.

Mobile phones fitted with digital cameras have been banned in US army installations in Iraq on orders from Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, it was reported.

Quoting a Pentagon source, The Business newspaper said the US Defence Department believes that some of the damning photos of US soldiers abusing Iraqis at Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad were taken with camera phones.

"Digital cameras, camcorders and cellphones with cameras have been prohibited in military compounds in Iraq," it said, adding that a "total ban throughout the US military" is in the works.

This is a travesty, but hardly surprising, given that the Pentagon's aim is to manage the news -- and quash the truth of what's happening on the ground. If participatory media occurs in the military from now on, it will have to take place in the underground, under the threat of court-martial.

Additionally, it prevents families of U.S. troops from keeping in close contact with their loved ones.

Prediction: Almost no one in the mainstream media will raise an objection to this. First, because to do so risks incurring the wrath of the jingoistic right, which has never had a problem with military censorship, even when it turns into a tool of coverups and disinformation. And second, because such examples of citizens media threaten to undercut the news media's traditional role as information messengers and intermediaries.

Later: Sheila writes about it and rightly concludes: "Ban the torture, not the evidence of it."

Well, looks like I'm partly wrong. At Fox News, Greta Van Susteren is troubled by the ban. "I am a bit distressed since I was having the troops send me photos -- great pics -- from Iraq that I have shown you at the end of the show. I am hoping to get around this somehow, since I love showing the many good things our troops are doing in Iraq."

BoingBoing points to this 10-day-old Clarence Page column: Yes to weapons of mass photography.

And Xeni Jardin today updated her entry yesterday on the subject:

This morning, I asked a Defense Department spokesperson whether or not the reports of a phonecam ban were true. This spokesperson said that these reports were technically inaccurate -- that the Pentagon is not issuing a new ban on camera phones per se, but that a Directive 8100.2 was issued on April 14 establishing new restrictions on wireless telecommunications equipment in general. The text of this directive is available online here in PDF format.

On the lighter side, Sheila points to the Daily Farce's report, Donald Rumsfeld Prohibits Use Of Camcorders During Wedding Ceremonies.

The Media Revolt Manifesto

Just came across this from David Neiwert, a pretty sharp freelance journalist up in Seattle: Media Revolt: A Manifesto. Excerpt:

Blogs can and should play the role of central clearing-house for information in the Media Revolt. As the general public realizes that blogs can provide them with vital information they're not getting anywhere else, the audience will build. This includes the whole gamut of information: the factual news about the world, as well as reports on who's misbehaving or committing political atrocities or simply being incompetent; analysis of this information that would be suppressed in mainstream reports; information about planned actions to protest misbehavior; and action and funds needed to enact the needed legislative and structural reforms.

Blogs, in other words, can and should play the role abdicated by the mainstream media both in monitoring their own behavior and ethics, and in providing enough diversity that a wealth of viewpoints are given fair treatment, as in any healthy democratic society, and the public properly served.

His post is long (and politically loaded) but thoughtful. More than 130 readers have commented so far.

The cool kid of micropublishing

Another Nick Denton story sighting, this time from PRWeek, which has a Q&A with the Gawker Media publisher. Among the nuggets:

I try to hire people who aren't going to become insiders too quickly. They're going to think of themselves first as representatives of the readers, rather than representatives of the establishment that lecture their readers. ...

We're going from a world where there were one million writers and nine million wannabe or frustrated writers - people who occasionally wrote "letters to the editor" or complaints to customer service departments. Now those nine million writers are publishing online. Most of the sites that they create are only going to be interesting to their friends and themselves. But new talent wins out, and talented writers are not going to have to go through the media organization mill to [get a chance to] express themselves after 20 years as a reporter when they finally get a picture and bylined column. It's almost impossible in print media for anyone who is young and feisty to express himself or herself. The only time, in traditional media, when you get to express yourself is when you're 60 and no longer have any opinions that speak to the person you once were. Blogs allow those types of writers to circumvent the usual journalistic training program. It allows them to have the voice they have when they're young, without having it knocked out of them.

Twilight of the info middlemen

From Rebecca MacKinnon:

In [Sunday's] New York Times, James Fallows has an article titled "The Twilight of the Information Middlemen": As he introduces blogs to a readership not necessarily familiar with him, he writes: "the Internet's most fascinating impact has been on those who have decided not to charge for their work."

Fallows grasps a key point about weblogs, one worth emphasizing as this medium grows more mainstream: blogging was born out of the desire for free expression and the desire to share one's self-expression freely and easily with others... not out of the desire for profit.

She also has this on Bill Moyers:

Bill Moyers is also a blog fan. At the very end of his recent Fresh Air Interview he says: "I think the internet, the blogging, is the closest we've come in a long time to the history of the American media in the beginning. You know in the 1820's, 1830's all you needed to be a journalist was to buy a press. That's why t