BBC starts GPS-based citizen journalism experiment

mocoNews.net: BBC Starts Citizen Journalism Meets GPS Experiment.

Time overlooks citizen media sites

Good point from John at open parenthesis about Time's Person of the Year story, published yesterday:

Where were the links to places like OurMedia, NewAssignment, The Independent Media Center, and the Center for Citizen Media?

What happened to the many seizing power from the few? Is it expecting too much from a mainstream media story about user contributed content that it would point the way towards something better than just America’s Funniest Videos without a decent editor?

Eyewitness journalists

Washington Post Foreign Service: Regular Folks, Shooting History. Digital Technology Makes 'Citizen Journalists' Out of Eyewitnesses Eager to Click and Post. (Photo of Imelda Marcos, transmitted by the AP)

The rapid rise of digital technology, which enables ordinary people almost anywhere to record images and post them quickly on the Internet, is changing the way the world witnesses history, not to mention the dependable misbehavior of celebrities. Events that once were recorded only by human memory may now endure in full, pixelated detail, available in seconds around the globe. ...

McClatchy buys citizen media sites

McClatchy Newspapers, my old employer, today bought two of my favorite citizen media sites, FresnoFamous.com and ModestoFamous.com, founded by Jarah Euston. The sites are in cities where McClatchy operates daily newspapers. Congrats, Jarah! (pictured above with moi)

Courts are asked to crack down on bloggers

USA Today: Courts are asked to crack down on bloggers. Excerpt:

Legal analysts say the lawsuits are challenging a mind-set that has long surrounded blogging: that most bloggers essentially are "judgment-proof" because they — unlike traditional media such as newspapers, magazines and television outlets — often are ordinary citizens who don't have a lot of money. Recent lawsuits by Banks and others who say they have had their reputations harmed or their privacy violated have been aimed not just at cash awards but also at silencing their critics.

"Bloggers didn't think they could be subject to libel," says Eric Robinson, a Media Law Resource Center attorney. "You take what is on your mind, type it and post it." ...

Connections, conversation is king

Bambi Francisco at AlwaysOn: Yahoo dispels first-mover myth.

It's not so much the aggregated or licensed content, or even the original content that's king anymore. User-generated content is king.

In the Internet era, it's not about getting millions to read articles from a few paid experts. It's about making millions of people volunteer experts. It's not about getting millions to watch one program with a few stars. It's about getting a few people to watch millions of programs with millions of stars.

Moreover, it's not just about getting users to express themselves, but providing the means to let users connect with each other. ...

Software for citizen journalists goes open source

Word comes that a publishing system, NewsCloud, was released today as an open-source media platform.

Trust in the age of citizen journalism

Tom Glocer's blog: Trust in the Age of Citizen Journalism. Speech given in Tel Aviv by Reuters chief executive Tom Glocer: The world we live in today is one in which everyone is a consumer, everyone a distributor, everyone an aggregator, everyone a producer. News organizations must realize everyone is both a potential partner and competitor. For too long the public has been a face without a voice; the Internet has changed all that. Thanks to MediaBistro for the pointer.

At Reuters we announced last week a groundbreaking agreement with Yahoo, parent of Flickr, to encourage amateur photographers to tag and submit their photographs to Reuters – to put them to work as super stringers.

For me the advantage of the Internet is just that. It’s about the return of the conversation, something we lost with the advent of mass broadcast communication. 

The ancient Greeks regarded dialogue as the most effective means of communication- a two way conversation – a Socratic dialog at its best.   The development of print, and more significantly television, dampened that conversation.  It replaced it with a one-way broadcast model.

The world we live in today is one in which everyone is a consumer, everyone a distributor, everyone an aggregator, everyone a producer.

We live in the era of the two-way pipe.

News organizations must realize everyone is both a potential partner and competitor. A 19-year-old sitting in a dorm room cranking out gossip, a well-established journalist blogging for her news organization, or a respected academic all have equal right to have a voice.  Whether they have an equal voice is another matter.

For too long the public has been a face without a voice, a simple and unheard recipient of media reports, television footage and news pictures. The internet has changed all that, giving access to all voices on all sides of any debate. ...

Good stuff.

Wikipedia founder remakes Web publishing economics

Reuters:

Free software is about to get freer.

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales said on Monday his for-profit company, Wikia Inc., is ready to give away -- for free -- all the software, computing, storage and network access that Web site builders need to create community collaboration sites.

Wikia, a commercial counterpart to the non-profit Wikipedia, will go even further to provide customers -- bloggers or other operators who meet its criteria for popular Web sites -- 100 percent of any advertising revenue from the sites they build.

Wow, this is big news — an important step forward for the nascent participatory media movement.

'Please don't call it Citizen Journalism'

NowPublic, the grassroots media site out of Vancouver that enlists people to share their newsworthy photos, unveiled a very cool new look today. Tagline: fresh, crowd-powered media. (Disclosure: I'm on their Advisory Board.)

I met for a coffee the other day with co-founder Michael Tippett, who flew down from Vancouver for some meetings in the Valley. Also videotaped him, but for the moment I can't get it off my camera phone. Mike just penned the following, which I agree with:

Please don't call it Citizen Journalism

When you build a bookshelf you don't think of yourself as a citizen carpenter - you just need a place to put your books.   The same is true for news.  When I tell a friend about something I saw while walking to work I don’t imagine myself sitting in front of a teleprompter.  I am telling a story because I want to express myself.  To think of people who have something to say as journalists is the wrong starting point.  Sharing your photos, videos, stories and reading lists are natural impulses.  Journalism has nothing to do with it.  More often than not people are sharing what they know because it's fun.  Good journalism through fun … that's our secret motto.  Shhhh, don’t tell anyone they’re actually doing journalism.

The demise of the professional photojournalist

Dan Gillmor at the Center for Citizen Media: The demise of the professional photojournalist. (Video above: UCLA police taser a student.) Excerpt:

The pros have a problem. They can’t possibly compete in the media-sphere of the future. We’re entering a world of ubiquitous media creation and access. When the tools of creation and access are so profoundly democratized, and when updated business models connect the best creators with potential customers, many if not most of the pros will fight a losing battle to save their careers. ...

In a world of ubiquitous media tools, which is almost here, someone will be on the spot every time.

And there will be business models and methods to support their work.

Today, YouTube is the site of choice for all kinds of videos, including newsworthy ones such as the recent abuse-by-taser of the student at the University of California, Los Angeles (more than 764,000 viewings as of today), and the racist nightclub rantings of Michael “Kramer” Richards (more than 1.2 million viewings). Both were captured by mobile-phone video cameras.

Others will make their way to sites like the newly announced projects such as YouWitness News (a joint project of Yahoo and Reuters), or operations like Scoopt or NowPublic. ...

Is it so sad that the professionals will have more trouble making a living this way in coming years? To them, it must be — and I have friends in the business, which makes this painful to write in some ways.

To the rest of us, as long as we get the trustworthy news we need, the trend is more positive.

I agree. I, too, have many photojournalist friends in the news business. Their work will continue to be important, but increasingly, they will no longer be the first eyewitnesses on the scene of a news story.

Yahoo partners with Reuters on eyewitness news

Reuters: Yahoo partners with Reuters on eyewitness news.

Yahoo Inc., in partnership with Reuters, is inviting the public to contribute eyewitness photos and videos of news events, in the latest move to turn spectators into on-the-spot journalists.

The Internet media company said it has created a news contribution system called You Witness and is working with news and information company Reuters Group Plc, which will edit and distribute selected photos to other news outlets.

Yahoo plans to run selected images contributed by users as part of topical packages on Yahoo News, which currently offers news from dozens of professional news organizations including Associated Press, CNN and Reuters.

With hundreds of millions of camera phones in circulation, consumers are able to take high-quality photos and videos.

The South Asian tsunami, the London Underground bombings and the impact of Hurricane Katrina on New Orleans have showcased the power of people who happen to be in the wrong place at the right time to capture history as it happens.

"There is already a lot of quality amateur journalism being created by our users," said Scott Moore, head of news and information at Yahoo Media Group. "Yahoo needed a more efficient process for soliciting and publishing user-contributed photos and video."

While focused initially on news, Yahoo aims to expand the You Witness system to solicit user contributions for sports, entertainment and other sections of its site, a spokesman for the Sunnyvale, California-based company said.

Yahoo and London-based Reuters are working out a plan to compensate contributors when their images are selected for commercial syndication, the two companies said.

Meantime, look for some exciting new things from citizen media site NowPublic in the next day or two.

Gannett looks to 'mojos' for local online news

Washington Post: Gannett Looks to 'Mojos' for Local Online News

The Fort Myers News-Press is deploying more than a dozen "mojos" -- mobile journalists -- that don't have an office or even a cubicle, but use their car as a newsroom. Owner Gannett hopes the mojos' local focus will drive readers to its community-specific Web sites. 

Thanks to IWantMedia for the pointer.

Scoopt woos Flickr users

Scoopt woos Flickr users.

User-created Web content soars

Hollywood Reporter: User-created Web content soars. Increasing numbers of Americans are posting their own content online, says a new USC-Annenberg Digital Future Project survey.

NewsTrust launches

Fabrice Florin, the founder, announced that NewsTrust just launched its beta website today. It's a community-driven guide to good journalism. The site now has more than 1,600 members. Worth a look. 

A citizen media newspaper for LA

BrooWaha, "a collaborative online newspaper that gives ordinary readers a chance to participate and share their knowledge," is a new citizen media newspaper covering the Los Angeles region.

Says founder Ariel Vardi: "The idea behind this website is to provide a platform for amateur journalists on which they can post their articles and get some exposure. Their work is rewarded by what we call popularity points. The ratings readers give you along with a number of other factors determine your popularity. The more points you have, the more weight you are given in the organization of the newspaper: your articles will be more likely to reach the headlines, your votes will have more impact. We are growing pretty fast and constantly looking for new authors. ... We have started with L.A. but other U.S. cities will follow by the end of the year."

An ambitious undertaking. I wish them well, and I'll keep checking back.

How participation is changing the face of media

My friend Steve Borsch, head of Marketing Directions, has just released as a PDF a cool whitepaper on Rise of the Participation Culture.

A case study in customer generated advertising

Frank Rose has a piece in the December issue of Wired magazine about Chevrolet asking Web users to make their own video spots for the Tahoe.

A visit to the Reichstag

From IndyMedia contributor Brian Thomas, a video essay about the Reichstag and about a people's confronting their past. I don't agree with all the political views expressed here, but it's well done. YouTube | hi-quality QuickTime 7

A 'professional-amateur' journalist

At Press Think, Jay Rosen has a two-part interview with John McQuaid, who left his job as an investigative reporter for the New Orleans Times-Picayune for a gig doing explanatory journalism for NewAssignment.Net.

Google's data or yours?

From Dan Gillmor at the Center for Citizen Media:

A Couple of Post-Election Thoughts. Excerpt:

The collaborative nature of the online medium got a workout in several journalistic ways. Perhaps the most notable was Talking Points Memo’s Josh Marshall’s brilliant gathering of string on what turned out to be a last-second bit of trickery — not the only thing of its kind by the two parties, but one of the most notable — the now-notorious Republican “robo-calling” stunt where automatic phone dialers inundated voters with repeated calls that appeared, at first glance, to come from Democrats — a tactic quite plainly designed to annoy voters, not educate them.

Marshall, more than any other journalist, blew the whistle on this stunt — and, moreover, he led the charge to persuade the traditional media to wake up and cover what plainly was a big story. I strongly doubt that this story would have been in the major newspapers and on TV had Marshall not done this work.

Agreed.

Your Data or Google’s? Some Small Progress. Excerpt:

When you upload your videos to places like Google, YouTube (now part of Google) and other sites; when a blog-hosting company keeps your blog for you; when you entrust what you’ve created to others — it’s vital to ensure that your data is yours. Your ISP doesn’t own it. You do.

Google takes the position that while it’s your data, Google has the right to hang onto it essentially forever, and then to mine the data and use it to create better advertising. I find that more than a little creepy, and I think you should, too.

I'm not sure what Dan's getting at here. You upload your video, Google's servers store them for free for as long as you keep it there, and it earns revenues around it through ads, which you know about in the first place. I'd like to see a revenue split with the video creator, but there's nothing creepy about this.

New West's political coming of age

In providing up-to-the-minute, late-breaking news about the latest developments in the Montana Senate race last night and this morning -- Democrat Jon Tester won a nail-biter -- I think the citizen media site New West thumped the hell out of Montana's newspapers.

Republican voter suppression -- catch 'em on tape

The National Republican Campaign Committee is using the sleazeball tactic of using robo-calling to harass voters. Writes Josh Marshall: "These are the harassing calls paid for by the NRCC made to appear that they're from the Democratic campaign. And a lot of angry voters are getting fooled by the scam, it seems."

He offers a quick how-to on how to record and then digitize harassing phone calls so you can email them to us or post them on the web.

Indiana Free Press

At Indiana Free Press, kpaul mallasch has gotten permission from 10 websites to aggregate their RSS feeds under one site. To my mind, the more aggregation, the better.

CIA using Wikipedia's software

SF Chronicle: U.S. using Wikipedia software for intelligence reports.

The CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies have created a new computer system that uses software from a popular Internet encyclopedia site to gather input on sensitive topics from analysts across the spy community, part of an effort to fix problems that plagued prewar estimates on Iraq.

The new system, called "Intellipedia" because it is built on open-source software from the Wikipedia Web site, was launched earlier this year. It is already being used to assemble intelligence reports on Nigeria and other subjects, according to U.S. intelligence officials who discussed the initiative in detail for the first time Tuesday.

Ask your questions about bloggers and Election Day

Center for Citizen Media:

Election Day Bloggers' Legal Guide: Your Questions

Lots of bloggers are planning to cover the 2006 general elections on November 7. But what are the legal issues that you need to understand?

Such as: Can you be in the voting area except to vote? (Not in Delaware) Can you ask people how they voted? (Not within 50 ft of polling place in Rhode Island). Can you take photos? (In CA it is illegal to photograph, videotape or otherwise record a voter entering or leaving a polling place). And so on.

Student Fellows at Stanford University Law School's Center for Internet and Society will be answering those kinds of questions and more in coming days. Do you have one? Ask it here.

Bloggers and the FOIA

The EFF has published an FAQ on how bloggers can use the Freedom of Information Act.

Alliance for Community Media gathering

Had an engaging time yesterday at the Alliance for Community Media, Western Region, annual conference in San Jose, Calif. Spoke at ACM for the second year in a row. As I told the two dozen participants in the videoblogging session, ACM's philosophy is more closely attuned to that of Ourmedia than nearly any other group out there. Here's a schedule of topics tackled and conference tracks during the past two days.

Met a lot of great people there, and hope we can collaborate on some community media projects in the months ahead. Outhink's videobloggers will be posting video from various sessions on its Spinflow blog.

Users take part in Election '06 via video

Sunday NY Times: Scary, Like Funny Scary.

It’s not that campaign ads are so nasty. They are always nasty, brutish and 30 seconds long. If anything, the scare tactics that loomed so large in the 2002 election in the wake of 9/11 now seem passé. This time around, many of the most powerful political ads are funny — 2006 marks the Comedy Centralization of politics.

Some are playful, others are mean-spirited, snarky and downright scurrilous. But the new breed of humorous ads don’t just mock the opponent, many of them wink at the absurdity of the entire campaign process.

It’s not so surprising. In a culture where growing numbers of viewers say they get their news from “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart” and “The Colbert Report,” and at a time when anything shocking or amusing on television can be downloaded and e-mailed instantly, candidates are co-opting the YouTube revolution.

Please. This is not the YouTube revolution. Call it the personal media revolution, or the participatory media revolution, or the citizen media revolution. Just don't name it for a for-profit company built on piracy.

The future of citizen journalism

I just got back from an afternoon in the Valley where I appeared at SD Forum: The Business of New Media on a panel about citizen journalism and citizen media. It was actually more interesting and provocative than most panels on the topic. (It was videotaped, so I'll post a link when it goes online.)

Some highlights:

Mark Pincus, saying that Knight Ridder should have offered a billion dollars to buy Craigslist. And saying, "The sooner the Washington Post and New York Times die, the better." (I took issue with Mark.) He later amended that to say he was talking about their business models.

Leonard Brody of NowPublic: "Journalists are becoming more important than they ever have been," because reporters (both the pros and trained amateurs) have the skills to report about the important issues affecting society.

Dan Gillmor of the Center for Citizen Media about the public taking on a larger responsbility as media creators and consumers: "It's about being knowledgeably skeptical and needing to know how to do original reporting. ... A fundamental skepticism will be the first principle of citizen media in the future."

'Citizen journalism: The future of media'

I'll be speaking today in Santa Clara, Calif., at SD Forum: The Business of New Media, at 4:15 pm on a panel with the overblown title "Citizen Journalism: The future of media." Other panelists are:

Len Brody, NowPublic
Eric Case, Blogger, Google (youtube)
Dan Gillmor, Director, Center for Citizen Media
Mark Pincus, Co-founder, Tribe

Should be fun, and enlightening.

VoteGuide: the community dissects a congressional race

A new project, VoteGuide, takes a look at issues in California's 11th Congressional district. It's a non-partisan "interactive community participation portal," launched by the Center for Citizen Media, that invites the public to report on and analyze the race between Richard Pombo and Jerry McNerney. Here, for example, is a Flickr pool devoted to District 11.

BusinessPOV: Citizen journalism in Chicago

A new citizen journalism site in Chicago: Business POV. Former reporter Mark Scheffler is executive producer. It's an online forum for original, locally produced 2- to 5-minute video  segments about interesting Chicago companies, products and players. The site's focus is on entrepreneurship, innovation and under-the-radar  economic activity around the city.

The site is free and updated each weekday. Segments are tightly edited and subject-driven — no voice-overs or on-camera reporters. In addition to interviews, most segments feature b-roll, multiple perspectives  and creative camera work, giving them a unique documentary-style aesthetic.

Some recent stories:

—How a local entrepreneur landed $50 million in private equity
—Where to find the appropriate sourcing factories in China
—How an iconoclastic Chicago artist prices his work
—What computer scientists at Northwestern's InfoLab are working on

In many cases, a single reporter is in charge of producing, shooting and editing their own segments for posting a few days later. Sounds ambitious. I'll be checking back regularly.

Citizenbay, a new citizen journalism site

From a spokesperson for Citizenbay:

Citizenbay.com has just launched and is a user-generated site for local information. There are channels for each city and within these channels users can post local news, events, and classified, forming communities. What makes this site unique is that users vote on stories and each day, the authors of the top 10 stories in each primary city are rewarded with payments of up to $10 for their work.

Now writers have incentive to post quality content and post often, which may have been missing in past citizen journalism sites. It combines the voting of Digg, the draw of local news, and the reward of the micro-payment model which has worked so well for stock photography sites.

Bloggers doing collaborative journalism

In E-Media Tidbits, Amy Gahran has an item on bloggers playing a role as citizen reporters in doing collaborative follow-ups to mainstream journalists' reporting.

Flavors of participatory media

Here's the 5-minute music video I put together for the Idea Festival called Flavors of participatory media. It shows the wide range of citizen media — videoblogs, podcasts, citizen media sites, place sites, photo sharing sites, mash-ups — and carries a message: There's far more to this revolution than lip syncing on YouTube. (Ourmedia page | watch video)

Format: MPEG-4 (iPod compatible); 13MB; 5:01; Ourmedia page | watch video; video quality: ** (out of 5)

Highlight tool lets you reblog easily

NowPublic has just introduced a cool new highlight tool that allows users to capture a piece of relevant text from the Web, add a headline and comment and post it not only to NowPublic but also to their own blog. Mathew Ingram has more here. (Disclosure: I'm on the Board of Advisors of NowPublic.)

Meantime, from the Toronto Globe and Mail: The crowd sourcerer. Excerpt:

The June issue of Wired magazine coined an interesting buzzword: "crowdsourcing." It's like outsourcing, but with a large number of unpaid or low-paid amateurs.

For Mike Tippett, it forms the basis of what he wants to accomplish. NowPublic.com, the Vancouver-based news site he built on that notion, is the result. It opened for business on the Web a little more than a year ago, and is now ramping up its marketing and outreach.

"What I want to accomplish is simple," he said. "I want to build the largest news organization in the world."

So far, Tippett can claim some 30,000 reporters, who are really not more than registered contributing members working without a newsroom and on their own deadlines. They can write and post their news stories, cellphone-camera pictures or videos, or something they read on-line elsewhere (with attribution) about what they consider to be important news. One New York City woman produces professional-looking man-in-the-street interviews, and posts them on the site.

Essentially, it's a marriage of social networking and blogging, with a the shimmer of up-to-the-minute news.

Tippet throws around words such as "citizen journalism" and "democracy," saying he does not interfere with posters — no editor filters it, and nothing is taken down (unless it violates the law). What original content members post on NowPublic.com is covered by Creative Commons, a copyright licensing system developed for the digital world that allows copyright holders to set their own terms.

It's the journalism equivalent of open-source software, such as Linux, which relies on an unorganized and unpaid army of developers, each contributing to the quality of the product. It worked for software, and it's working for Wikipedia.org, so why not news? ...

itizen journalism is gaining a foothold on the Web — Sourcewatch.org lists 32 such websites — mainly because people have learned that they must develop a healthy skepticism about what they read, coupled with a mistrust of traditional media.

It's his approach to crowdsourcing, Tippett says, that citizen journalism develops its trust. NowPublic.com brings back the traditional notion of a hierarchy of news stories, but this time stories are ranked by the site's members. The more comments added to a story, he says, the greater importance it develops, and the higher up it goes on the site. Moreover, a story gains authority as more people support it, Tippett says. "It's the power of the crowd." ...

Blogger's investigation ousts Swedish official

Vincent J. Maher at E-Media Tidbits: Blogger's Investigation Ousts Swedish Minister for Foreign Trade.

Garfield videoblogs Massachusetts' next governor

Blogger and citizen reporter Steve Garfield has a series of videos he captured of Deval Patrick, the Democratic candidate who's ahead in the race to become the next governor of Massachusetts. Check out Patrick's Just Words speech, for example. Nice work, Steve!

Wolf soon to be longest-jailed journalist in US history

San Francisco Chronicle: Citizen journalist Josh Wolf is close to becoming longest-jailed journalist in US history.

Place blogs

E-Media Tidbits today:

If you're a journalist seeking a take on a particular locale, it often pays to scan blogs focused on that town, such as this one on Albuquerque, N.M. Now, there's a great tool on the way that'll make it easier to track down such so-called "placeblogs."

Placeblogger.com (under construction) is the brainchild of Lisa Williams, who hosts a popular placeblog of her own at H20Town, about goings-on in Watertown, Mass. Williams gave a sneak-peek of the new placeblogger.com site Oct. 5 at the Citizen Media Summit II sponsored by J-Lab and Online News Association.

Among the site's features will be an RSS feed allowing users to aggregate headlines and other content based on geography. Here's an advance look at the site's home page via Williams' Flickr site.

Williams maintains placeblogs are unique sites that are about the "lived experience of a place," rather than the "news" of a place. And their growth is explosive -- 648 at last count.

While she's not so certain about their near-term commercial viability, Williams believes such sites have blossomed because they can be maintained by a relatively small number of consistent contributors. She acknowledges, though, that they may rely heavily on hitting what she characterized as a "demographic hotspot." These often are communities with a population range of 20,000-70,000, which can be economically difficult for mainstream media to cover but which have enough scale to create a natural pool of blog participants.

Should corporations control online discussion?

Steve Anderson of COAnews at Canada's Rabble News: Should corporations control online discussion? The reason participatory citizen media have been so popular and successful is partly due to the fact that their platforms have been relatively independent of corporate control; therefore, they have allowed people to espouse independent points of view. Excerpt:

The good news is that there are some great participatory websites that are currently run by organizations with a public interest mandate. One example is OurMedia.org, which is an online community “that freely hosts grassroots video, audio, music, photos, text and public domain works.” OurMedia is the open source equivalent of YouTube.

Another great project is SourceWatch, which is a citizen run directory that focuses on documenting the developments in the public relations/media industry. At SourceWatch citizens collaboratively research and write investigative articles. SourceWatch is a project of the non-profit Centre For Media and Democracy, which has other interesting projects as well.

If you're looking for a good blog community, I would recommend the recently revamped community at Free Speech TV, or the always provocative GNN.

Jay Rosen on citizen journalism

Slashdot: Citizen Journalism Expert Jay Rosen Answers Your Questions. Excerpt:

I like that Bluffton Today tried to go Lessig on the news industry. It ditched the read only platform and re-built on read/write. Yelvington said at the launch: "Everyone gets a blog. Not just staffers, but everyone in the community. LeMonde (France) and the Mail and Guardian (South Africa) are doing this, too." Giving everyone a blog may be an obvious idea. But it's a different track. "Everyone gets a photo gallery. Everyone can contribute events to a shared public community calendar...." The site was built on Drupal technology. It had free classifieds. It was different.

Amanda gets homey with Scriggity

Amanda Congdon hits Pennsylvania on her trip across America, and gets homey with Drew Olanoff and his Scriggity podcast network ("your news, our spin"), which trumpets the idea that even mundane, everyday stories are interesting to some people.

Baristanet chroncles a town's architectural shift

The Sunday NY Times has a nice piece on North Jersey citizen media site Baristanet: A Town’s Architectural Shift, Chronicled Online.

1st Amendment Coalition

Just got back from the California First Amendment Coalition event at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, where I met Milo Radulovich (pictured above), who rose to fame in the 1950s after Edward R. Murrow called out Joseph McCarthy. Radulovich's story was the centerpiece of the 2005 George Clooney film "Good Night, and Good Luck."

Also met Daniel Ellsberg, who authored and released the Pentagon Papers — about 30 years after the last time I met him at Rutgers.

Here are nine photos from the event.

Participated on the panel "Blogging and Citizen Journalism" with Daniel Weintraub, Lisa Stone, Kevin Bankston and moderator Dan Gillmor, talking about the rise of participatory media.

Your guide to citizen journalism

At PBS's MediaShift blog, Mark Glaser has Your guide to citizen journalism, a look at the grassroots media movement, complete with historical background, arguments on
terminology, and plenty of links and resources.

Knight pledges $5 million to community news projects

Received this word today:

The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation today launched the Knight Brothers 21st Century News Challenge, investing as much as $5 million in its first year in community news projects that best use the digital world to connect people to the real world.

The News Challenge is looking to fund new ideas, prototypes, products and leadership initiatives that use innovative news methods to help citizens better connect within their communities.

The competition is open to anyone, not just the journalism community.

“News and information are the glue that binds communities. We want to help today’s high-tech news do in the 21st century what the Knight brothers’ newspapers did this past century,” said Alberto Ibargüen, president of Knight Foundation. ...

If the quality of entries warrant it, the foundation may spend as much as $25 million during the next five years in the search for bold community news experiments.

“We’d like to encourage the newest ways for people to pursue a great American tradition: the fair, accurate, contextual search for the truth,” said Eric Newton, Knight’s director of Journalism Initiatives. “We want to help the citizens of this new century get the news they need to run their governments and their lives.’

The Challenge web site, with an online application form, is at www.newschallenge.org. The competition will accept applications through Dec. 31, and expects to begin announcing winners in the spring of 2007.

Gary Kebbel at the Knight Foundation told me about this a few weeks ago. Exciting!

Global Voices wins Batten award

Global Voices Online has won the Grand Prize for Innovations in Journalism from the Knight-Batten Foundation. Here's Rebecca MacKinnon's blog, with a photo. Congrats, kids!

Wikipedia vs. Britannica

E-Media Tidbits: Today, WSJ.com published a debate between Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales and Britannica editor-in-chief Dale Hoiber.

Malaysian cellphone video captures police excess

From Rebecca MacKinnon of GlobalVoices: Malaysian cellphone video captures police excess.

The wiki that edited me

Wired News: The Wiki That Edited Me.

Vita.mn: Doings in the Twin Cities

Do you like hyper-local citizen media sites, aka place blogs? Here's a new one, out of the Twin Cities in Minnesota: Vita.mn. From the site:

Vita.mn is your ultimate guide to what's going on in the Twin Cities, where you can connect with other locals to share thoughts and recommendations on hotspots and happenings.

It's brought to you by Matt Thompson, of EPIC 2015 fame. Thanks to Jarah Euston of FresnoFamous for the heads up.

Two takes on citizen journalism

OhmyNews: Citizen Journalism Not About 'Amateurs' or 'Pros.'

OhmyNews: Selling Citizen Journalism to the Masses.

Multilingual citizen media

From Rebecca MacKinnon of Global Voices: Hong Kong-based Interlocals.net: Multilingual citizen media. Another worthy addition.

Wiki journalism experiment

Amy Gahran in E-Media Tidbits: Wiki Journalism Experiment.

Wired News is trying something I find very interesting. Reporter Ryan Singel had an assignment for an article about wikis -- a type of site where users are invited to easily edit and change the content, such as Wikipedia. So Singel did his research and turned in a 1,059-word first draft.

After discussion with editors, Wired News then took Singel's unedited draft, posted it to a wiki, and invited readers and experts to "whip it into shape." ...

I'm glad to see a mainstream news organization use wikis so creatively and constructively in the journalistic process. Wikis are great for projects where the goal is comprehensiveness, inclusiveness, or consensus.

As the painfully ill-conceived L.A. Times wikitorial fiasco showed, a wiki is not the right tool to foster discussion on hot-button public controversies.

Whistleblower turns to grassroots media site

CBS News:

In a crudely produced 10-minute video, engineer and former Lockheed Martin project manager Michael DeKort charges there were serious flaws in some work done by Lockheed to upgrade security on Coast Guard vessels.

He calls it a waste of tax dollars that jeopardizes the safety of Americans.

[I]t isn't all that unusual for whistleblowers to find it tough to get noticed.

What is unusual is how DeKort is getting his message out.

He went through his company's chain of command. He called the Navy. He even went to Congress. But he says things seemed stalled until he videotaped his allegations and posted them on the popular Web site, YouTube. ...

Welcome to the emerging world of citizen media.

Lauren Gelman on copyright and personal media

Here's a 6-minute video interview with Lauren Gelman, associate director of Stanford's Center for Internet and Society, about copyright, fair use and grassroots media. Conducted at the recent BlogHer conference in San Jose, Calif. (Ourmedia page | watch video)

Format: MPEG-4 (iPod compatible); 16.1MB; 6:29; Ourmedia page | watch video; video quality: **** (out of 5)

Mark Cuban's Sharesleuth: Teetering on ethical edge?

Mark Glaser's latest piece just went up on PBS MediaShift, this time a look at Mark Cuban's latest maverick project, Sharesleuth.com. The site's editor Chris Carey (formerly of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch) investigates sketchy business practices at companies and digs up dirt on them mainly from public sources. The business model for Sharesleuth is unusual in that Cuban will
take positions in the companies covered. He shorted the stock for Xethanol before Carey's expose came out, hoping to eventually fund Sharesleuth through these stock positions.

But journalists and financial bloggers have cried foul, saying while Sharesleuth's business model might be legal, there are conflicts of interest with betting on the subjects of your investigative journalism. Cuban denies there are ethical problems, and says he's not out to manipulate the market, and defends his new way of doing journalism:

"We aren't writing reports to move stocks. We are writing reports to report the facts. Chris [Carey] hears that from me all the time. If I traded on price movements, then there might be an issue. I don't. I don't pump and dump [tout the stock, then sell it], and we don't skunk and dump. I put on a position and stay with it till there is a material change in operations of the company. I don't cover or sell my position based on reaction to this or any article in the media."

Absolutely fascinating, and there are still models for citizen journalism yet to be uncovered. But I'm with Jeff Jarvis on this one. Says Jarvis:

"By turning this into a personal and shady profit center, by trying to play the bad boy in this arena as [Cuban] does in the basketball arena, he harmed his endeavor, his reputation, and even the nascent movement in independent journalism. Just so he could make a few bucks. Now that's what I call dumb money."

New citizen journalism site makes debut

The Los Angeles Daily News launched a citizen journalism site today as part of the Yourhub network.

ePluribus Media Journal

Way cool site I just tripped across: ePluribus Media Journal: Citizen journalism for the people, by the people.

Pluribus Media is a cooperative of citizen volunteers dedicated to researching issues of common concern and encouraging the highest standards of ethics and journalism.

The ePluribus Media community is a 501(c)(4) tax-exempt, non-partisan organization.

I'll be following them regularly from now on.

Bloggers amplified senator's racial slur

Virginian-Pilot via San Jose Merc: Bloggers amplified senator's racial slur.

Sen. George Allen looked into an amateur videographer's camera Friday, smiled to the crowd, and asked the audience to ``give a welcome to Macaca, here.''

Allen then pointed at an Indian-American staffer working for his opponent in this year's Senate race. Macaca, in some contexts, is an obscure racial slur, and also a genus of monkey.

The remark could blemish Allen's presidential aspirations and create a distraction for his campaign for much of the week as he seeks re-election against Democrat Jim Webb, political analysts said. ...

By Wednesday afternoon [on YouTube], Allen's footage was the most-watched of the day -- with more than 77,000 views.

The online magazine Slate asked in its lead headline Wednesday, ``Is George Allen too stupid to be president?''

Citizen-powered media track legislation

Tri-Valley Herald: Online muckrakers track money-padding legislation. Citizen-powered media project may create next Woodward or Bernstein.

The Sunlight Foundation, a Washington, D,C-based organization pushing for more transparency in government, launched its Exposing Earmarks project Tuesday; it posted an online database of more than1,800 anonymous line-items in the 2007 House spending bill for the departments of Labor, Health and Human Services and Education.

Anyone can download a spreadsheet detailing the $495,435,100 in discretionary spending attached to the bill, or click on a Google map where a larger dollar sign indicates a larger amount of money set aside for a local program. Site postings encourage citizens to find the earmarks in their town and call their congressional representatives to ask them to explain.

We need to get more people involved in governance, especially in opening up government, said Zephyr Teachout, the Sunlight Foundations national director. Congressmen arent going to do it on their own — citizens are going to have to demand it. ...

Zephyr's a friend, and I'm glad to see the Sunlight Foundation take off in such a positive way.

The YouTube election

Sunday New York Times: The YouTube Election.

August, usually the sleepiest month in politics, has suddenly become raucous, thanks in part to YouTube, the vast videosharing Web site.

Last week, Senator George Allen, the Virginia Republican, was caught on tape at a campaign event twice calling a college student of Indian descent a “macaca,” an obscure racial slur.

The student, working for the opposing campaign, taped the comments, and the video quickly appeared on YouTube, where it rocketed to the top of the site’s most-viewed list. It then bounced from the Web to the front page of The Washington Post to cable and network television news shows. Despite two public apologies by Senator Allen, and his aides’ quick explanations for how the strange word tumbled out, political analysts rushed to downgrade Mr. Allen’s stock as a leading contender for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination. ...

YouTube may be changing the political process in more profound ways, for good and perhaps not for the better, according to strategists in both parties. If campaigns resemble reality television, where any moment of a candidate’s life can be captured on film and posted on the Web, will the last shreds of authenticity be stripped from our public officials? Will candidates be pushed further into a scripted bubble? In short, will YouTube democratize politics, or destroy it? ...

Some political analysts say that YouTube could force candidates to stop being so artificial, since they know their true personalities will come out anyway. ...

But others see a future where politicians are more vapid and risk averse than ever. Matthew Dowd, a longtime strategist for President Bush who is now a partner in a social networking Internet venture, Hot Soup, looks at the YouTube-ization of politics, and sees the death of spontaneity. ...

The explosion of instant video may also put pressure on the news media. In the old days, the Allen video would not have been available for all to see. “Imagine this happened 10 years ago,” Mr. Wolfson said. “We had video and trackers then. But you had to get it to a TV station or newspaper. You had to persuade them to run a story on it. This allows you to avoid the middleman.”

What the article doesn't say, of course, is that there are hundreds of video hosting sites online, not just YouTube.

Citizen journalism documentary

The 15-minute documentary Citizen Journalism: From Pamphlet to Blog is now available online.

Citizen journalism: A Nepali perspective

Deepak Adhikari, a citizen reporter with OhmyNews and a
Nepali blogger, has an interview with Nepali journalist and professor Dharma Adhikari about blogs, citizen journalism and mainstream media.

Also see my recent video interview with Nepali citizen reporter Bhuwan Thapaliya.

Web 2.0 approach to political video

Sim Sadler's new project, Take Back the Capitol, takes an open-source approach by running a video clip contest to encourage people to submit short video clips aiming at the political party that controls Washington. Sadler will then edit the clips into a rallying-cry music video to be distributed ahead of the November congressional election. Sounds intriguing.

Social media and the London terrorist plot

Toronto Globe & Mail: Social media and the London terrorist plot.

Bloggers uncover manipulated news photos

NY Times: Bloggers Drive Inquiry on How Altered Images Saw Print.

[Adnan] Hajj, a Lebanese photographer based in the Middle East, may not be familiar to many newspaper readers. But thanks to the swift justice of the Internet, he has been charged, tried and convicted of improperly altering photographs he took for Reuters. The pictures ran on the Reuters news service on Saturday, and were discovered almost instantly by bloggers to have been manipulated. Reuters then announced on Sunday that it had fired the freelancer. Executives said yesterday that they were still investigating why they had not discovered the manipulation before the pictures were disseminated to newspapers.

The matter has created an uproar on the Internet, where many bloggers see an anti-Israel bias in Mr. Hajj’s manipulations, which made the damage from Israeli strikes into Beirut appear worse than the original pictures had. One intensified and replicated plumes of smoke from smoldering debris. In another, he changed an image of an Israeli plane to make it look as if it had dropped three flares instead of one. ...

Al Gore spoof on YouTube not so amateurish

ABC News: Al Gore YouTube Spoof Not So Amateurish. Republican PR firm said to be behind 'Inconvenient Truth' spoof.

A tiny little movie making fun of Al Gore, supposedly made by an amateur filmmaker, recently appeared on the popular Web site YouTube.com.

At first blush, the spoof seemed like a scrappy little homemade film poking fun at Gore and his anti-global warming crusade.

In the movie, Gore is seen boring an army of penguins with his lecture and blaming global warming for everything, including Lindsay Lohan's thinness.

But when the Wall Street Journal tried to find the guy who posted the film "Al Gore's Penguin Army" — listed on YouTube as a 29-year-old — they found the movie didn't come from an amateur working out of his basement.

The film actually came from a slick Republican public relations firm called DCI, which just happens to have oil giant Exxon as a client. ...

Coverage of Wikimania

The New York Times covers the second annual Wikimania conference, with 400 Wikipedia enthusiasts, in Boston this past weekend.

New Yorker dismisses citizen journalism (do we care?)

Several people mentioned this New Yorker article to me: Amateur Hour: Journalism without journalists, by Nicholas Lemann. It's in my mailbox at home, but I'll post what others have said about it:

Chris Nolan at Spot-On:

Lemann, dean of the Columbia Journalism School, a well-awarded writer and solid political journalist, ... talked about how no important national reporting was getting done on-line. It's small beer, he said, comparing a group of post - most written by women, oddly enough - to church newsletters. It's not important, he says, again and again.

Listen carefully. In both cases - Lemann and his antithesis the Geeks - you'll hear the complacent sound of of the insider explaining why his clubhouse can't possible admit just anyone who applies.

Madison Guy in Letter from Here: "Come on, Nick! Open your eyes. If all you're seeing is unfiltered, trivial gossip, that's because you seem to find it reassuring to find just that. There's a whole world out there, connecting in ways it never has before ..."

Jon Lebkowsky on Journalism 2.0:

It's pointless for those of us who are stewing in the rich juices within the blogosphere stewpot to spend energy wrangling with those who stand outside, watching the pot boil, reluctant to jump in.

However there are a good couple of follow-up posts, from Jay Rosen and Rebecca MacKinnon, that I should mention here.

In "The Pros Gonna Blog You Under the Table," Jay Rosen questions the contention within some circles that professional journalists are inherently better at the blog sorta thing; that independent blogging will collapse and the web will become an "ordinary media space." ...

Rebecca, in "'Real' Journalism on the Read-Write Web," responds to Nick Lemann's concluding statement in his New Yorker piece, "As journalism moves to the Internet, the main project ought to be moving reporters there, not stripping them away." Rebecca agrees ...

Rebecca points to another excellent responses to Lemann's piece, written by Jeff Jarvis, a successful convert from traditional to citizen media. Jeff writes about "Bigger, Better Journalism," providing a list of new possibilities for journalism on the web.

Wikipedia roundup

From Siva at Sivacracy:

There has been a lot of Wikipedia coverage of late, which I'll try to condense into one post.

For starters,  New Yorker readers can appreciate the Annals of Information piece, "Know It All," which delves into the bureaucracy and social dynamics of the organization.   According to a recent Los Angeles Times article, "Divine Inspiration From the Masses," this approach is influencing all realms of human knowledge from science to religion.  The LAT also ran an Op-Ed piece, "Why Wiki Can Drive You Wacky." There was a story in the Associated Press, which was picked up by Wired, about founder Jimmy Wales desire to focus right now on quality not quantity.  See "Toward a Better Wikipedia" for details about the planned changes, which include a more user-friendly interface with less code for novices to grapple with.

For those who want to see some more substantive criticism, take a while to ponder "Digital Maoism: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism," which takes the celebration of the hive mentality to task.  Then check out "Can History Be Open Source?  Wikipedia and the Future of the Past" from the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University (the people who brought us the excellent student-friendly Liberty, Equality, Fraternity: Exploring the French Revolution).

Stephen Colbert also weighs in on Wikipedia via YouTube.  You can see him spar with an angry Wikipedian as well.

Letting consumers make their own ads

NY Times: Leave It to the Professionals? Hey, Let Consumers Make Their Own Ads. Excerpt:

The so-called Web 2.0 phenomenon, reflected in the popularity of social networking sites like MySpace.com and video-sharing services like YouTube.com, has created a new breed of amateur creators of advertising. ...

For user-generated content to spread further into mainstream advertising, executives say a few practical issues, like intellectual property rights and compensation, will have to be sorted out.

For now, most video-sharing sites require contributors to sign over all rights to the content, though Revver.com, for instance, gives back a percentage of any ad revenue a video earns.

Some ad executives also say user-generated content could turn out to be a trend, like reality television, that wanes once the novelty wears off. On the other hand, the business magazine Fast Company warned recently that the trend could spread so fast that advertising “creatives” would be extinct a decade from now, replaced by amateurs churning out their own ads.

Can donation-funded citizen journalsm work?

At E-Media Tidbits, Amy Gahran has the latest on Jay Rosen's NewAssignment.net project -- a very interesting new donation-funded enterprise journalism effort.

Blogger Josh Wolf jailed

I've come to known Josh Wolf pretty well over the past year -- he runs the Bay Area Media Makers meetup group, and I opened up a RunTV account for him on behalf of Peralta television and Ourmedia -- so it's certainly shocking to see that he's become the first blogger/citizen journalist jailed by a federal judge, for refusing to turn over his videotape of a street protest last summer.

Here's Time on Blogging all the way to jail.

The most recent posting on Josh's blog? "Josh is in jail and this is his mom." Attorneys don't come cheap, and i just donated to his Legal Defense Fund, linked off of his blog and the Free Josh Wolf website. If you want to write Josh, here are the regulations covering letters to federal prisons. Josh can be mailed up to three paperbacks at a time, and can have up to 12 books in his cell at any time, though they must be mailed from an approved vendor like Amazon or BarnesandNoble.com.

On NPR's 'Talk of the Nation' today

I'm about to go on National Public Radio's Talk of the Nation. Today's hourlong program is about war news: the conflict in the Middle East and the Iraq war, and I'll be coming in to discuss citizen journalism and user-created videos from the scenes of the carnage.

I'll post a link to the podcast when it goes up.

Later: OK, my segment's over now. It's been an interesting discussion, especially given that Talk of the Nation is what I consider the premier talk radio show anywhere.

I ran out of time so didn't get to say this: You have to wonder if the Vietnam war would have gone on for 12 years if the Internet had been around. There would have been a much more realistic view of what the battlefield feels like, and public opinion may well have hardened against the war had we seen the carnage being wreaked on that small nation.

Still later: The podcast is up: An Online View of War in the Middle East. (Click on the Listen button.) Pretty interesting discussion, actually.

Should community news sites pay editors?

Mark Glaser's latest in-depth piece at MediaShift looks at the public offer by Jason Calacanis at Netscape to pay heavy users of rival social bookmarking sites such as Digg and Reddit to work for him. Execs at Digg and Reddit aren't worried about the offer, though some of their top users are weighing the offer to pay them $1,000 per month. Meanwhile Netscape has had some rough spots converting its site from a typical portal to a community-generated news site.

Grassroots video reports from Lebanon

I'm quoted in this Associated Press article today: Online videos offer raw view of fighting in Lebanon. Excerpt:

The rapid development of video-sharing sites such as YouTube is giving computer users the chance to see unfiltered images of how the fighting between Israel and Lebanon is affecting people caught in the middle. ...

"They're getting an unfiltered experience," said J.D. Lasica, co-founder of the Web site Ourmedia. "We're used to the idea of neatly packaged presentations by traditional media, and this is like the events are happening in your backyard."

Israel's first citizen media site

At the International Citizen Reporters' Forum in Seoul a week ago, I conducted this 11-minute video interview with Michael Weiss, co-founder and CEO of Scoop, Israel's first citizen media news site. Among all the sites I saw in depth at the forum for the first time, Scoop impressed me the most. (Ourmedia page | watch video)

Cross-posted to the Real People Network

Format: MPEG-4 (iPod compatible); 29MB; 11:32; Ourmedia page | watch video; video quality: *** (out of 5)

Tags: Scoop, Michael Weiss, Israel, OhmyNews, citizen reporting, citizen journalism, citizen media, video, Real People Network, IPTV, interview

A citizen reporter from Nepal

At the International Citizen Reporters' Forum in Seoul a week ago, I made friends with Bhuwan Thapaliya, a citizen reporter for the South Korean news site OhmyNews and a poet from Nepal. Here, on Muui Island in South Korea, he discusses the situation in Nepal and the global citizen media movement. (Ourmedia page | watch video)

Cross-posted to the Real People Network

Format: MPEG-4 (iPod compatible); 12.4MB; 4:52; Ourmedia page | watch video; video quality: ** (out of 5)

Tags: Bhuwan, Bhuwan Thapaliya, Nepal, OhmyNews, citizen reporting, citizen journalism, citizen media, video, Real People Network, IPTV, interview

Joe Lambert on digital storytelling

I had put off posting this interview I conducted with Joe Lambert, co-founder of the Center for Digital Storytelling in Berkeley, Calif., a while back because it's the most poorly lit interview I've ever done (which is a shame, because the twilight light was amazing just an hour earlier).

But I've long admired Joe, and he always has wise things to say about the digital storytelling movement, as in this 5-minute cilp. (Ourmedia page | watch video)

Cross-posted to the Real People Network

Format: MPEG-4 (iPod compatible); 12MB; 4:41; Ourmedia page | watch video; video quality: * (out of 5)

Tags: stories, storytelling, digital storytelling, Joe Lambert, citizen reporting, citizen journalism, citizen media, video, Digital Storytelling Festival, Real People Network, IPTV, interview

'Users know more than we do' journalism

From Amy Gahran the other day at E-Media Tidbits: Doing "Users-Know-More-Than-We-Do" Journalism.

I just got around to listening to the podcast of the Bloggercon IV session on citizen journalism, held June 23 in San Francisco. Wow! If you want your mind blown in a "what is journalism" way, definitely give this MP3 file a listen. (33 MB, 1 hour 12 minutes)

The great thing about Bloggercon is that it's run on the "unconference" format, where each session has a discussion leader and the attendees speak up and provide the content. NYU professor Jay Rosen led this session, and he warmed it up with a brief chat and a posting in his blog PressThink about Users-Know-More-Than-We-Do Journalism.

That specific type of citizen journalism is especially revolutionary because, as the session discussion revealed, it dispenses with some very basic aspects of the form and practice of journalism. Also called open source journalism, the idea is to enlist large numbers of people in gathering similar types of information to create a collaborative mosaic of news and views.
What's so cool about that? This appproach might yield considerable potential to break news, not just amplify or analyze it.

That session was a fusion generator of brainpower. Almost everyone who spoke up was an online-media luminary. ...

I attended Bloggercon IV, and Amy's right -- the session is well worth a listen.

Baristanet covers a 'microburst'

Debbie Galant, founder of Baristanet, says that the citizen media site shone with its coverage of last night's "microburst" storm -- or upside-down tornado -- which hit Montclair and Bloomfield, NJ, especially hard.

Every phone as a citizen media outlet

New from my compadre Mark Glaser at MediaShift: a look at a project by Stanford fellow Erik Sundelof to create an open platform for cell phone-driven citizen media. His project, still a prototype at InTheFieldOnline.net, has the ambitious goal of creating a simple way for anyone with a camera phone to submit photos, video or text to one central site -- or any blog or site of the user's choosing.

The appeal of collaborative news sites

Center for Citizen Media blog: Why are collaborative news, commenting and blogging sites such as Newsvine, Slashdot and Global Voices attracting users and visitors? Who are these folks? What do they want from their interactions? A new survey — “The Hype vs. Reality vs. What People Value: Emerging Collaborative News Models and the Future of News” — offers some clues.

Video report from South Korea

Here's a short video I made on Muui Island in South Korea at the International Citizen Reporters' Forum put on by the South Korean citizen news site OhmyNews. (Ourmedia page | watch video)

Also from the OhmyNews Citizen Reporters' Forum:

Here are videocasts of nine sessions at the forum.

Click on Session 1 -- Citizen Participation and Technology -- to see the session with me, Craig Newmark and Bryan Nunez. (Boy, I hate these javascript popup videos)

Alexander Krabbe: Where Do You Head, Citizen Journalism?

Exporting Citizen Journalism

Michael Lomas: Citizen Reporters Praise OhmyNews Forum.

When users pick the top stories

Gregory Lamb in today's Christian Science Monitor: What is today's top story online? Click here to decide. Websites apply 'social networking' to the news, letting users prioritize what's important. Excerpt:

"I think people will flock to sites like Digg to supplement their traditional news diets," writes JD Lasica, cofounder and head of Ourmedia.org, in an e-mail. Ourmedia lets visitors post and share their original videos, photos, artwork, and writing.

"Digg started on a shoestring a year and a half ago, and it's astonishing how popular it's become in such a short time," writes Mr. Lasica, a former editor at the Sacramento Bee who now writes about online media. "Like most big ideas, it starts with a 'duh' realization - that users want to be part of the editorial process, and that readers want to see news stories from a wide range of sources." It's all about bringing the audience into the conversation, he notes. "Like it or not, most people just want to read a story and don't really care which news organization first reported it." ...

We've just begun looking into how we can implement audience rankings and ratings on Ourmedia in a way that elevates quality works rather than the schlock.

Final notes from Citizen Reporters' Forum

I'm back from Seoul, South Korea, and seriously jet-lagged (so please forgive the delay in responding to emails). Here are some final notes, which I wasn't able to post before I left:

Best citizen media site

Best citizen media site I was only dimly aware of: Scoop, the first citizen media site in Israel. It launched in January 2006. I met and interviewed Michael Weiss, the co-founder and editor. Some highlights from his talk to the forum:

Israel has 3.6 million internet daily users, out of a population of 7 million; 70 percent have broadband. “Israelis trust Internet news sites more than any other news channel.” The most popular Hebrew news sites are walla (45%), ynet (40%), nrg (36%) and haaretz (12%).

Scoop doesn’t pay contributors, but if you submit 10 items that are published you get a T-shirt; 50, a webcam; 100, a yearly subscription to a daily newspaper.

Why do citizen reporters contribute? For influence, excitement, recognition. You get your own page with a short bio, picture, links, archived stories and blog. A reporter’s zone and reporters forum on the site is open only to the site’s reporters.

The site launched with 250 citizen reporters and now has 800, who contribute an average of two articles a week. Reporters can publish up to two stories a day. The reporter writes the story, but the editors run a cross-check, take third-party responses and search the story’s keywords on Google to suss out plagiarism.

Coming up: ScoopTV, a news oriented video chanel, where users and reporters can send video clips. And Scoop International, exposing Scoop stories to the world and translating foreign stories from other CJ sites.

Other highlights

Eric Larsen, CEO of Flix.dk (Denmark), a Danish platform for citizen reporting that launched in November 2003, said it’s depressing watching the news in Denmark. “Very often it’s the same angle, it�