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); 12.4MB; 4:52; 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’s the same depressing facts and it rarely has much to do with ordinary people’s lives."

Gary Chapman of the University of Texas, Austin:

The Internet is 37 years old. The Net just passed 1 billion users, but that's still only 16% of the world’s population. The Internet is found in all countries except North Korea. Increasingly, people all over the world are turning to the Internet as their primary source of information. In the U.S., people spend more time on the Internet than they do watching TV.

For me, the highlights of the forum came after the day's sessions, in meeting highly committed, extraordinary individuals from places like Nepal, Japan, Chile, Canada, Brazil and elsewhere. The breadth and scope of this movement is truly astonishing. Plus, we had a grand time bonding, sight-seeing, hitting local restaurants, beaches and karaoke bars. Great trip.

At the International Citizen Reporters' Forum

I'm here in Seoul, South Korea, at the International Citizen Reporters' Forum. Got in last evening after an 11-hour flight from San Francisco. About 100 participants here, from places as diverse as Cameroon, Japan, Argentina, the US, Nepal and Australia. This is my first time in Asia, believe it or not.

Here are some photos on Flickr.

The conference is being put on by OhmyNews, the granddaddy of citizens' media sites, now over 6 years old.

I just finished participating in the opening panel, Citizen Journalism and Technology, alongside Craig Newmark of Craigslist and Cryan Nunez, technology manager of Witness.org and moderator Amit Asaravala, editorial chief of TechSoup. The session was videotaped, so I'll post a pointer if and when it goes up. Spent some time talking about Drupal and some of the 400 other content management systems.

But mostly I mentioned the new approach we're taking with Ourmedia and invited conference participants (and others reading this post) to work with us so that we can showcase your users' works of grassroots media on our front page while keeping the media file on your own servers. We especially want to highlight international contributions of citizens' media from sites and blogs that may not get a lot of visibility.

Dan Gillmor of the Center for Citizen Media, Ethan Zuckerman of Global Voices and Tim Lord of Slashdot are among those here.

Ethan's talking now. He's one of the founders of Global Voices, which is now getting about a million visitors a month. They put up a wiki that allows people in different countries to suggest the best blogs in that nation, such as Cambodia. They're increasingly showing home-grown podcasts, pulling together different podcasts from sources around the world. (It's a great site, check it out.) Their correspondent filmmaker-blogger Hao Wu was just released Tuesday by the Chinese authorities after five months in jail.

I'm meeting a lot of great folks here so won't blog most of the sessions I'm attending. For that, look particularly to Ethan's blog and other bloggers.

By the way, yesterday there were huge anti-FTA protests in downtown Seoul led by labor unions, with more than 50,000 demonstrators. Chuck Olsen, blogger and Rocketboom correspondent, has photos and is working on a video.

Flying to Citizen Reporters' Forum

I'm flying out to Seoul, South Korea, in a couple of hours to participate in the International Citizen Reporters' Forum being put on by OhmyNews. Should be a blast.

Outcome of the Transmission Global Online Video Forum

Ourmedia was invited to attend the Transmission Global Online Video Gathering on June 7-10 in Rome, but we couldn't make it because it was held the same week as Vloggercon. I organized a Citizens Media Summit in San Francisco in May 2005 attended by 36 people, so I’m a softie for these kind of efforts.

Anna Helme, who works with an Australian online video distribution project currently in development called EngageMedia (a site that looks really interesting), did much of the organizing for Transmission. Anna writes:

The Transmission wiki contains mp3 recordings of some sessions.

Here is a photo essay put together by Jerry from Asia247 on his blog.

Some of the proposals made for working together after Transmission can be found here. Mainly they involve making sure we can share and syndicate content, pooling help and tutorials resources, pooling database info such as screening organisations internationally, developing the Transmission network further and attempting to avoid re-inventing the wheel or doubling up on development work.

My own ideas are available as a PDF attached to the bottom of my blog here. It remains to be seen which of these proposals are taken up and put into practice. I think most of us left feeling quite inspired, and knowing more from being able to get inside each others projects for a few days.

Sounds similar in some ways with what we’re trying to do with the Open Media Coalition, only with a greater social justice/political bent.

Here's Zoe Young’s lengthier report from Transmission:

Transmission is a gathering of video makers, programmers and web producers developing online video distribution as a tool for social justice and media democracy. A host of initiatives have sprung up across the globe in recent years that seek to mix media activism with increasing access to broadband, new video encoding advances, content management systems, RSS, p2p and free software. These technologies and projects are converging to democratise access to video distribution on a global level, challenge the dominance of top-down broadcast media and give voice to range of critical social and environmental issues.

The aims of the Transmission meeting were to
• increase communication between projects
• build relationships between projects working on different aspects of distribution
• improve knowledge and skills of participants
• assess and compare the current tools and projects in a constructive yet self-critical environment
• investigate possibilities of technical collaboration and consider possibilities of common platforms

More info here

Participation:
Around 30 participants in the event came mainly from Western Europe but also from North America, Malaysia, Argentina, Korea, Hungary, and Australia, the home country of the main organisers Andrew, Anna and Andy of Engagemedia. Their main local contact was Agnese of Candida TV. There was a mix of highly technical code developers, online video project managers, indymedia and other online network types.

For a full list of participating projects see here.

For notes on project summaries presented to the meeting see here.

For documentation of the sessions see the Transmission wiki's main page.

Outcomes:

The real outcomes of the meeting have yet to be discerned, it was more the beginning of a process than a one-off event with immediate products. However, for me the most potent new directions were:

1. Building a go-faster network for online social social justice video projects

The chance for related projects to collaborate and evolve away from ‘reinventing wheels’ by all doing the same ‘online publishing’ task and instead evolve towards putting existing ‘wheels’ together to build a functional set of ‘vehicles’ to move forward more effectively as a community. This involves common projects like sharing software (eg, building on the materials in the new ‘NGO in a Box’ CD release), jointly developing documentation and help files in ‘wikibooks’, including shared development of work processes for translation and subtitling, and developing missing technical tools (eg, to enable automatic distributed online transcoding of uploaded video into different formats, and to enable different content management systems to ‘talk’ to each other using ‘APIs’, currently in development by a group of Transmission programmers.)

“NGO-in-a-box offers Free and Open Source software (F/OSS), tailored to the needs of NGOs” http://ngoinabox.org/
wikibooks pages on internet video http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Video#Internet_Video,
wikibooks pages on subtitling http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Video#Subtitles

2. Learning to ask the right questions …

3. Agreeing on terms, establishing context and standardising identification for automated media exchange networks to take shape.

A ‘common metadata standard’ could enable more effective media information sharing and aggregation (a). This ideal aims at attaching data fields to online video that contain not only the usual ‘title’, ‘producer’, ‘length’ ‘language’, ‘description’, ‘tags’, ‘license’ etc, but also ‘appropriate use’ (b) and a ‘unique identification code’ for each new piece of media published by participating organisations (c).

a. ‘common metadata standard’
through collaboration between projects represented at Transmission, a group of evolving, regional and/or issue-based online media projects could in theory negotiate and agree on a minimum set of information that any piece of online media should carry with it. This information would allow that piece of media to be searched, categorised and channeled through RSS feeds etc to wherever it wants to be seen/heard. Part of this process would involve negotiating a (non-binding) ‘cloud’ of common subject ‘tags’ to define uploaded media content, tags which would then form the basis for generating issue-based media feeds within and between online video projects and portals.

For example, say FOEI produced a video covering local perspectives and human rights abuse at a protest against the environmental impacts of a World Bank-funded dam project in Uganda. This video could be uploaded using exequo.org, participatoryculture.org’s ‘broadcast machine’ or similar online publishing service, accompanied by a complete set of metadata including subject tags such as ‘human rights’, ‘dam’, ‘World Bank’ ‘Uganda’ etc. Details of such a video and the chance to download it could then, in theory and where appropriate, be channeled via media RSS feed to Witness.org’s new hub for online human rights video, ifiwatch.tv’s portal to video critical of the IFIs, Pampazuka news’ vodcasts on African real world politics, FOEI’s ‘community testimonies’ portal, and anywhere else that chose to feature a feed of information on videos in their issue areas. If however such a video dealt with a similar situation only located in Laos rather than Uganda, info would not automatically flow to Pambazuka news, but instead to Asia247, which features feeds of video reports from the Asian region. And if there were no human rights abuses at the demo, and so the ‘human rights’ box was not ticked in the upload form, Witness.org would not automatically be channeled the media RSS feed, or if the World Bank or other IFI was not backing the project, and the ‘ifi’ field was left blank, ifiwatch.tv would be out of the loop.

For this to happen, all the involved projects would need to be using CMSs [content management systems] that recognised the tags listed above, as well as any others that relate to their work. Their use of these tags would not have to be at all exclusive, each organisation would be free to adopt or abandon any tags they chose, but to channel and receive video automatically they would have to be using a more or less commensurable ‘cloud’ of basic common tags with others in this network. I wonder if other networks are already thinking about doing this? perhaps oneworld tv? I would like to take this idea forward with anyone interested among the networks I’m sending this report to, obviously with help (not least from radical librarians?) if possible!

b. ‘appropriate use’
Some video is not suitable for every audience. It may be material that should only be made available in a targetted way for use as evidence in court cases, or to present to parliamentarians in a quest for accountability. Perhaps it is footage of rape or violence, which could be misused for pornographic purposes or to foment ethnic or other strife. Even peaceful protest footage can be inappropriate to screen if presented out of context. Other material is designed to introduce people new to issues, while more expects a basic understanding of a field. some material could be cynically entertaining about serious issues and therefore alienating to (say) religious audiences, and/or most suitable for educational use. Some reports are roughly cut latest news, not designed to be ‘evergreen’ for long term use, but possible to be recut at a later date into a fuller video or film.

In this context, participants in Transmission decided to create a field in a common metadata standard referring to the appropriate use of the material. This could be an ethical restriction on distribution, or simply advice on how it might best be presented. This advice would be displayed in the first frame of any encoded video that is published online. At the same time, the meeting decided to encourage a culture in emerging web video communities of responsible editing for the web, for example blurring faces where necessary andor using ostentatious time code to ensure that video of contentious events cannot be taken from the net and re-edited to bear false witness. This is a big and important set of issues which deserves more space than I have here, and more discussion than we were able to have at Transmission. Brian Nunez at Witness.org is the main contact for this ongoing discussion since it is a particularly important issue in their work.

Notes from the First do no harm workshop

c. ‘unique identification code’
A widely recognised ‘identification code’ for each piece of online media would enable content management systems (CMSs) to deal more easily with information about that media. It could be generated automatically by each publishing organisation in the network, and would then facilitate communication between different databases and CMSs. It would be functionally equivalent to a barcode for commercial products. At Transmission the proposal was to create a system for projects participating in the network to adopt a system of identifiers known as FPID, a File Publishing Identifier, (or Forte Prenestino Identifer). Andycat is the contact.

Other exciting projects and ideas emerging from Transmission include:
• a common aggregating site for all participating projects’ media outputs;
• collaboration on trainings for video on the web, including development of the culture of responsibility
• collaboration on regional or otherwise themed DVDs combining a range of media outputs from the network;
• shared and mutual publicity for our projects in the mainstream media;
• and a campaign against official moves in the US to create a ‘two speed internet’ favouring big corporations and government over the people who have made the net what it is today.....
• For inspiration, it is worth noting that in Korea, independent online video services such as Jimbonet and Chamseasan regularly distribute material to up to half a million people, and with only two full time staff, Asia 247 is a dynamic force for change in the balance of the media conversation in Asia.

DIY journalism

AlterNet: Citizen journalism at its best. An all volunteer newspaper run by Liberian refugees helped their communities more than the writers ever imagined.

New City Chicago: DIY Media. The Daily News makes its case for online citizen journalism.

Steve Outing at E&P: How to Make Your Web Site More Conversational.

MediaLife: OhmyNews, where the readers report. In J schools they call it citizen journalism.

Yahoo wants citizen journalism

Red Herring: Yahoo Wants Citizen Journalism. Inspired by the amateur video that chronicled the London bombings, the portal firm is seeking more.

Yahoo News, one of the world’s most popular news aggregation sites, plans to launch a citizen video-journalist news service at the end of June that will act as a collection and publication site for news videos generated by the public.

Sources involved in discussions with Yahoo News said the project, which has been in development for months, will introduce an upload capability that will take the PC out of the connectivity loop, so amateur video journalists can upload footage directly from the location of the event.

Great news.

ArmchairGM: citizen sports

New kid on the block: ArmchairGM, a Digg-like sports site where the readers write the stories and encyclopedia.

Trust online requires a more open newsroom

UK's Online Press Gazette: Trust online requires a more open newsroom. Excerpt:

News has become a conversation and journalists have lost their monopoly as both news gatherers/reporters and as commentators.

The Asian tsunami, the London July bombs and the Buncefield explosion all proved the macabre truth that in the right situation, anyone and everyone could be a newsgatherer.

If the Web 2.0 predictions of web gurus such as Tim O'Reilly had been fulfilled, the world would have got to know about events such as those through dumb — although actually rather clever — platforms, linking the world's citizens peer-to-peer, bypassing clunking "big media".

Trouble was, in 2005 big journalism came into its own and showed it was, after all, capable of absorbing user-generated content, disseminating it within a structure and giving it meaning. ...

Participatory media in India

A new citizen journalism site that I just learned about, out of India: Merinews, dubbed "India's first participatory media platform." Looks like a high-quality effort.

Rethinking the economics of collaboration

In 1996 I wrote a piece in the American Journalism Review headlined Net Gain that included a passage about Steve Rosenbaum, then the brains behind MTV's "MTV News Unfiltered."

So it was great, after nine years, to meet Steve face to face at Vloggercon on Sunday (when we both appeared on panels opposite each other).

Here's a piece that appeared today (with some coding that I corrected) in Steve's Magnify Media:

Peer Production: Rethinking the Economics of Collaboration

By Steve Rosenbaum

Back in the good old days, productions were like families. People joined together with a common goal -- to make a film -- and they worked hard to make that goal into a finished film.

As pressure on costs has increased, and the fees that freelancers earn in reality TV have risen, however, documentary production has become a more complex economic arrangement.

But technology and passion have helped to relight the content-driven world of doc production. Now, thanks to the ubiquity of tools, there is a future just around the corner, in which the key word is "collaboration." This future is exciting and empowering, and the elements are visible if you look for them.

Remote production teams used to be impossible (we've all FedEx'd tape back and forth to an editor who's been working remotely). That kind of long-distance affair makes it difficult to keep a team�s vision in focus. But today, Internet-based collaboration tools are on the horizon. Crafty Mac users have already figured out that you can hook your DV camera up to iChat and play rough cuts across the Net in real time to a partner across the world.

And that's just the beginning. Many of the staples of current production are likely to change as travel is replaced by multi-camera shooter/producer teams being hired on location. This new form of peer production allows for a larger group of filmmakers to work in a collaborative fashion to help one another achieve their goals. This nascent movement allows a filmmaker in New York to reach out to a filmmaker in San Francisco and request help shooting a West Coast interview for a film being completed in New York. That door swings both ways, of course.

In the new world of peer production, the edit room will exist in a virtual space, a Web-based edit platform that invites multiple editors, shared rough cuts and real-time collaboration among team members.

Every portion of the filmmaking process will move into this shared creative space, with tasks like logging quickly taken up by teams of screener/loggers. One remote logging tool, www.LogXchange.com, a free tool we�re developing, is one of several that are likely to add fuel to the fire of a remote filmmaker workplace. At the same time, shared storage and distribution sites like www.Video.Google.com, www.OurMedia.org and www.InternetArchive.org will make low-cost -- or no-cost -- storage available to media-makers around the world.

The empowerment of a new community of media-makers is likely to be scary to some. It does mean that the pond just got bigger. But think about how much time we as filmmakers spend selling, raising money, cutting corners and thinking about the economics of what we do.

Imagine if we could add to our world the ethos that is currently exploding in the software community, as open source software is created by teams of passionate volunteers. Within this community there is an understanding that work is done for a variety of reasons. Some work is done to fuel one's creative, social or political passions. Other work is done to pay bills.

And lastly, some work is bartered with others to help the community as a whole. Imagine if you found that DA Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus needed a pick-up shot of Al Franken's hometown in Minneapolis? Would you grab a camera and shoot it for them? Sure you would. You'd be proud to have your name associated with them and their work. You're getting paid�just not in dollars. You're getting paid in karma, in credits and in pride.

If you think this system doesn't work, just take a look at the web browser FireFox, the bittorrent driven Broadcast Machine (http://participatoryculture.org/bm) -- any blog you like or any piece of open-source software that you use. Creative people create because it�s what we do. Rethinking the economics of collaboration is one step toward an emerging world in which documentaries become an even larger part of the editorial fabric of our daily lives. And that's a future worth working toward.

Wikipedia and its anyone-can-edit policy

The latest on the collaborative editing front: NY Times: Growing Wikipedia Revises Its 'Anyone Can Edit' Policy. Excerpt:

At its core, Wikipedia is not just a reference work but also an online community that has built itself a bureaucracy of sorts — one that, in response to well-publicized problems with some entries, has recently grown more elaborate. It has a clear power structure that gives volunteer administrators the authority to exercise editorial control, delete unsuitable articles and protect those that are vulnerable to vandalism.

Those measures can put some entries outside of the "anyone can edit" realm. The list changes rapidly, but as of yesterday, the entries for Einstein and Ms. Aguilera were among 82 that administrators had "protected" from all editing, mostly because of repeated vandalism or disputes over what should be said. Another 179 entries — including those for George W. Bush, Islam and Adolf Hitler — were "semi-protected," open to editing only by people who had been registered at the site for at least four days. (See a List of Protected Entries)

While these measures may appear to undermine the site's democratic principles, Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia's founder, notes that protection is usually temporary and affects a tiny fraction of the 1.2 million entries on the English-language site.

"Protection is a tool for quality control, but it hardly defines Wikipedia," Mr. Wales said. "What does define Wikipedia is the volunteer community and the open participation." ...

Viral video: Use it to your advantage

Two posts of particular interest by Amy Gahran in this week's E-Media Tidbits:

Viral Video: You Can't Beat It, Leverage It.

I think there's something schizophrenic and just plain inefficient about encouraging viral video on some cases while slapping it down in others.

I'd suggest that mainstream media companies might have more to gain by making and offering ready-made, shareable audio/video clips of highlights of their content (even the hits) as soon as a show airs, or maybe even before. Mention as the show airs (maybe via scrolling text or a special announcement) that these clips are available. Make it easy for people to download and share those clips.

Absolutely. A point I made in Darknet.

Reinvent Journalism by Looking Outside the Newsroom

Check out: Constructing a framework to enable an open source reinvention of journalism. ...

Of course, the term "open source" is rather fuzzy and abused in the context of media and journalism. It wouldn't be my first choice -- but then, it's not my paper. Most of what Witt discusses involves citizen journalism and other kinds of participatory, conversational, or collaborative media.

Backfence in Palo Alto

San Jose Business Journal: Backfence launches a local citizen journalism site in Palo Alto, Calif.

Citizen journalist not forced to give up video

San Francisco Chronicle: Journalist not forced to give up video.

A freelance journalist who faced a possible jail sentence for refusing to surrender video footage of a July 2005 clash between San Francisco police and anarchist demonstrators was abruptly released from a subpoena by federal prosecutors Thursday, his lawyer said.

Josh Wolf, 24, was ordered by U.S. District Judge William Alsup in a closed-door hearing earlier in the day to turn over the video and answer questions before a federal grand jury investigating the alleged vandalism of a police car, said attorney Ben Rosenfeld. Rosenfeld said Wolf was then questioned before the grand jury, and he insisted that he had a constitutional right to remain silent and to discuss the questions with his lawyers, and finally was told by a prosecutor, without explanation, that he was free to go. ...

As I wrote in April, I thought Josh should surrender his tape -- but I also thought it was his decision to make.

The age of 'democratization of news' is here

A somewhat uncritical look at citizen journalism from South Korea's OhmyNews: Breaking News Boosts Spread of Citizen Journalism. The age of 'democratization of news' is here.

Kori in Wikipedia

A Wikipedia writer asked if they could use my photo of MPAA VP of corporate communications Kori Bernards in a new entry, and I said yes, of course. Took the shot during our panel at SXSW Interactive in March.

Le pouvoir passe aux mains des créateurs de contenus

The French newspaper Les Echos just published a Q&A I did with a reporter there about the personal media revolution. It's not online, but I persuaded them to send me a PDF of the page, and I uploaded it to Ourmedia.

I can't read French, but for those of you who can, have at it. (Ourmedia page | PDF doc)

Court hands victory to online journalists

Editorial in the San Jose Mercury News, following the appeals court ruling in the Apple case that I blogged here on Saturday: Court hands victory to online journalists.

It doesn't matter if you are wearing pajamas or a shirt and slacks, writing for a blog or a newspaper. If you are practicing journalism -- gathering and disseminating information -- you are entitled to the legal and First Amendment protections long enjoyed by journalists.

That, in a nutshell, is what a state Appeals Court decided unanimously Friday when it denied Apple Computer's request to force online publishers to reveal the sources who leaked inside information about an upcoming product. The broad, 69-page ruling goes a long way toward putting online and offline journalism on the same legal footing in California. The ruling also reverses a misguided lower court decision that would have had a chilling effect on all journalists. And in an aspect of the decision that received less publicity, it strengthens the privacy of e-mail.

On all those counts, it was a victory for the free flow of information that's essential to a free society.

Apple went to court two years ago to unmask those who leaked internal documents detailing an unreleased digital music device for its GarageBand software. The company said it was entitled to get the identities of the leakers from the online news sites so it could protect its trade secrets.

Journalists are typically protected from having to reveal their confidential sources, both by the First Amendment and the California Constitution, and the case was seen as a test of whether bloggers and other online journalists enjoyed those protections. ...

Absolutely right. Congratulations to the Merc for recognizing the bigger picture.

Beach Blanket blogging

Blogger-author Kevin Smokler relates:

I recently got a call from the publicist of Beach Blanket Babylon, which has been running at Club Fugazi in North Beach [in San Francisco] since Jesus was a pup. They're dying to get more natives, more young people, more tech savvy folk to come see the show. So based on the work I did for the Film Festival, the folks at BBB want me to assemble a group of bloggers to come see the show. On them. The perks:

1. Free front row section seats to Beach Blanket Babylon

2. We get to stick around afterward and tour the theatre.

3. I'm 99% sure they'll let us try on the hats.

4. I'm working on letting us interview cast members too.

As always, a free ticket does not mean you must write nice things about the show on your blog. But you must write something. So if you have no intention of posting about the experience, please do not accept a ticket.

Finally, I've seen BBB. It's cornier than Iowa. If corny isn't your thing and you know it, please don't take a ticket just so you can trash the show.

Our date is Wed, July 5th. I've got 20 free tickets so first come first served. Claim them now.

I saw BBB almost 20 years ago at the Fugazi. My friend loved it; I was underwhelmed. If you like kitsch, you'll like it. Contact Kevin here.

Citizen journalism: Best practices

OhMyNews selects the theme of Citizen journalism: Best practices for its 2nd International Citizen Reporters' Forum.

$1.4 million in funding for NowPublic

NowPublic, the participatory news network, just announced that it has closed a $1.4 million (USD) round of angel funding. The deal was led by Brightspark Ventures of Toronto along side several veteran angel investors including members of the New York Angels and current and former executives from Nokia, Register.com, Infospace, Microsoft, Alliance Atlantis and Warner Bros. Television. I'm on NowPublic's advisory board, so this comes as welcome news.

Make shareholders citizen journalists

Dan Gillmor at the relatively new Center for Citizen Media blog: Stock Option Scandal: Make Shareholders Citizen Journalists.

First Amendment win for bloggers

San Jose Mercury News: Apple loses case against bloggers. From the article:

Applying traditional First Amendment protections to the exploding universe of online journalism, a state appeals court on Friday rejected Apple Computer's bid to unearth the identities of individuals who leaked inside information on a new company product to bloggers.

In a 69-page ruling, the San Jose-based 6th District Court of Appeal broke new ground by concluding that bloggers and Web masters enjoy the same protections against divulging confidential sources as established media organizations. Civil liberties groups and journalism organizations have argued that online journalists need to protect the confidentiality of sources just as much as traditional media, such as the New York Times and CNN.

Journalists covet the ability to protect the identity of sources as a key to gathering news. The appeals court's firm endorsement of journalistic shields for online media sets up what could be a crucial First Amendment showdown in the California Supreme Court if Apple continues to press its case.

Apple triggered the closely watched case two years ago when the company went to court to pry loose the identities of individuals who leaked internal company documents on a new product called ``Asteroid'' to three Web pages devoted to Apple-related news. Among other things, the plans for Asteroid, including an exact drawing of the yet-to-be released digital music device, were posted on a Web site called PowerPage, operated by Pennsylvania blogger Jason O'Grady.

Apple has argued that it is entitled to the identities of the bloggers' sources in order to protect its trade secrets and punish anybody who stole and distributed them. A Santa Clara County judge sided with Apple last year, but the appeals court overturned that decision Friday.

The 6th District, in a unanimous three-justice ruling, rejected Apple's argument that bloggers are not covered by California and federal laws protecting the confidentiality of journalists' sources and should not be afforded the same protections as traditional news organizations.

``We decline the implicit invitation to embroil ourselves in questions of what constitutes `legitimate journalism,' '' Justice Conrad Rushing wrote for the court. ``The shield law is intended to protect the gathering and dissemination of news, and that is what petitioners did here. We can think of no workable test or principle that would distinguish `legitimate' from `illegitimate' news.''

``Any attempt by the courts to draw such a distinction would imperil a fundamental purpose of the First Amendment,'' the justices added. ...

Eugene Volokh, a University of California-Los Angeles law professor who runs a popular law blog, said the court ``got this absolutely right.''

``This means that if a journalist receives information from a source, it doesn't matter if they publish that on a Web site or in a newspaper or they are talking about it on the radio,'' added Lauren Gelman, assistant director of Stanford Law School's Center for Internet and Society.

Adds Kos:

This is new legal territory, and courts around the country, including the feds, can and will look to this decision for guidance as similar cases arise in their jurisdictions. Coming in the heels of the FEC's decisions to grant bloggers and other internet media practicioners the media exemption, a solid body of law is being developed upholding the principles that citizen media deserves the same First Amendment protections as "professional" journalists.

Here's the PDF of the decision. Here's the EFF's reaction.

This is a hugely important victory for bloggers and grassroots media. As Eugene V. put it, the court got it exactly right. Let's hope it becomes a precedent for other jurisdictions as well. And let's hope Apple drops this ridiculous attempt to shake down amateur journalists, because the California Supreme Court would likely vote to affirm this landmark decision.

Q&A at WorldChanging

At WorldChanging, Micki Krimmel has an interview with me about citizens media and Ourmedia. Excerpt:

One of the big changes we want to make on Ourmedia in the next few months is to make it more of a community-centric site. The world doesn’t need another YouTube. I’m not picking on You Tube, but they’re the ones who are getting all the attention today. There are plenty of sites now where you can just upload your funny video, right? We want to get to a place where more people can feel like they’re doing something - they’re creating video for a social purpose. So, if your passion is all about local politics or the environment or energy or global warming, you should be able to share your thoughts in a text blog or video or podcast.

Citizens reporters forum

Last June, Oh Yeon Ho, founder and CEO of the pioneering South Korean online news publication OhmyNews, welcomed a global gathering of citizens media representatives to Seoul.

This July 12-15, OhmyNews is doing it again, with a kicker: They're paying for round-trip air fare and deluxe hotel accommodations for three representatives from Ourmedia. (I'll be attending, plus two others.)

If you've done some citizen journalism for Ourmedia and want to attend, drop me an email. (I may not get back to you right away; i'll be on the road to Italy and Cannes starting mid-week this week.)

Mr. Oh writes: "The door is wide open again this year to new media practitioners and citizen reporters around the world. Building upon the success we saw last year, we are aiming to invite the who 's who of citizen journalism to Seoul and identify the best practices forward in this still-fledgling field."

Sounds exciting. Between the OhmyNews International Citizen Reporters' Forum, the AlwaysOn Innovation Summit and BlogHer, July is gonna be just crazy.

The do-it-yourself video revolution

Today's San Francisco Chronicle: Video bloggers claim spotlight. Online diaries looking a lot like television.

Headline aside -- online video and videoblogs decidedly do not look like television -- Ellen Lee nicely captures some of the currents of the online video revolution, led by people like my friends Jay Dedman and Ryanne Hodson, pictured above, neither of whom watches much if any TV anymore. Excerpt:

No longer satisfied with transcribing through just words or photographs in their online diaries, thousands of Web loggers, or bloggers, have turned to video blogging. In place of text, or sometimes in addition to it, "vloggers" use film clips. The clips last a few seconds to a few minutes and are archived one after another in chronological order, the most recent first.

They represent the latest means in catching fragments of life, made possible now that more and more people have access to high-speed Internet service and the necessary equipment, basically a camcorder, a computer and cheap, sometimes even free, software and storage services.

The community is diverse. There's the soccer mom in Plano, Texas, who records her two children, ages 5 and 7, as they bake a bagel pizza, play softball and hang out with their grandfather. There's a Peace Corps worker in Botswana who shows the daily life of people in the village of Nata. Hollywood actor-comedian Tom Green offers the TomGreen.com Channel, narrating, with his deadpan, irreverent humor, as he makes an appearance on the Carson Daly television show, hangs out with pal and skateboarder Tony Hawk and drives around Los Angeles.

"The everyday events in our life are special," said Dedman, who along with Hodson was one of the earliest video bloggers, starting back in 2004. "They're not dramatic, Hollywood moments."

In less than two years, the number of video blogs, also known as vlogs and video podcasts, has exploded from a handful to more than 7,000, according to video blogging directory Mefeedia. "It's Jerry Time!" -- which consists by a single, fortysomething man's rants on life -- was even nominated for a special Emmy award this year, although it lost to an AOL production. And next month, hundreds of vloggers from around the world plan to converge in San Francisco for a conference dubbed Vloggercon. ...

video blogging has some distinguishing characteristics. Vlogs build on the trend started by blogs, which have become a digital means of self-expression, publishing and communication. "Video bloggers are serious about video as a way of social expression," said J.D. Lasica, co-founder of Ourmedia, a site that lets users store multimedia files. "They don't just upload a video and walk away from it."

Related: a podcast with reporters Ellen Lee and Benny Evangelista discussing video blogging.

Firefox flicks

Not often that productive days are also fun, but that was the case Thursday when I talked shop with podcaster Dale Willman of Fieldnotes.tv and video site architect Todd Siegel over lunch and then headed over to a panel discussion and screening of 20 creative, clever 30-second spots for Firefox — created by users, natch.

You can see the Firefox Flicks entries online here. I liked:

Xraalthraal and John
Smells Terrific
Song and Dance
and:
Weeeeeee! (which I don't see online)

BTW, user-generated promos seem to be all the rage. See the page of video promos for the Vloggercon conference.

Singapore cracks down on blogs, podcasts

At MediaShift, Mark Glaser looks at how the Singaporean government is trying to silence political speech on blogs and podcasts.

Citizen film reviewers in the house?

Kevin Smokler is looking for citizen journalists to attend and review at least two films as part of the San Francisco International Film Festival, running now through May 4. He has 30 press passes to dispense to bloggers, podcasters and vloggers from the Bay Area. (Wish I could attend, but can't this year.) Anyone interested? Let Kevin know at smokler at gmail.com.

Should Josh Wolf turn over his tape?

SF Weekly: Should journalist Josh Wolf be afraid? The Assistant U.S. Attorney, the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force, and the SFPD want to get their hands on a video shot by a San Francisco blogger.

At times, Josh Wolf is a journalist. At others, he's a blogger, an activist, or an anarchist. At this particular time, one thing's for certain: He's got a videotape the federal government wants.

The 23-year-old San Franciscan possesses a tape that Assistant U.S. Attorney Jeffrey Finigan deems essential to a grand jury investigation of a protest last July that resulted in injuries to two San Francisco Police Department officers.

To Wolf, the government subpoena of his tape represents a threat to his ability to gather news as an independent reporter. He believes it's yet another reel cast in a Justice Department fishing expedition that will stop at nothing to put his activist compatriots behind bars.

To the government, however, Wolf is a misguided, self-important young radical withholding evidence without legal justification. Regardless of the outcome, Wolf's predicament raises questions about how much information journalists should turn over to the federal government, and how the legal system handles those who draw little distinction between citizen journalism and citizen activism.

Though many facts are disputed, all parties agree that Wolf videotaped a July 8, 2006 [they mean 2005], protest march in San Francisco against the G8 Summit taking place in Scotland. At previous protests, Wolf had attended as an advocate for a cause, but this time he went as a journalist, gathering footage for his videoblog, "The Revolution Will Be Televised" (www.joshwolf.net).

"Most of the time I go out, I feel like I'm a fly on the wall," Wolf says. "Whether or not I agree with what they're doing, my role is to document it."

On the portion of Wolf's video that he released publicly, dozens of protesters, some dressed in black and wearing face masks, marched down the street in the Mission carrying signs and placards with anticapitalist, anti-government slogans or bearing the logo of the group Anarchist Action. Around dusk, things went awry; the tape shows marchers setting off fireworks and dragging metal newsstand boxes into the street to block traffic. ...

Wolf doesn't want to give up the complete, unedited version of the tape. He believes the federal government is indiscriminately monitoring antiwar groups under suspicion of terrorism, and as a journalist he shouldn't be forced to surrender unused footage in support of that investigation. He won't say, though, what's on the 15 or more minutes of the confidential portion of video. ...

Two weeks ago, Wolf's pro-bono lawyers argued a motion in federal court to quash the subpoena before Judge Maria-Elena James. They claimed that Wolf is protected by California's shield law, which allows journalists to maintain confidential unpublished information obtained during newsgathering. The law lets journalists cast a wide net in reporting, even though they may end up seeing or hearing actions that are illegal. Granting the government widespread power to request unused recordings, Wolf's lawyers argued, would turn journalists into an arm of the Justice Department, creating a chilling effect among citizens, thereby violating their First Amendment rights of free speech and assembly.

Of course, this contention assumed that Wolf, a self-appointed citizen-journalist, is every bit as much a "professional" as the men and women with years of experience and an editor reviewing their copy — something that's still a matter of debate among the media. Nevertheless, as more Americans become self-appointed citizen journalists, with camera phones and digital cameras and even cheap handheld video cameras, more "news" will come from people like Wolf. ...

Actually, no. No one is claiming that Wolf is acting as a "professional." But the millions of us who believe in the concept of citizen journalism believe that journalism is not restricted to an elite caste of professionals practicing journalism as a black art. Journalism historically is open to anyone who possesses the tools and skill sets to pass along newsworthy events he or she has witnessed. Wolf was surely acting as a journalist here. (The resulting footage resulted in All Empires Must Fall, a video account of the protest on Ourmedia.)

Here's another example of how citizen journalism is taking center stage in the legal arena. Of course, Josh Wolf, as an Internet publisher, might well decide to turn over his videotape, as other publishers sometimes do.

Wales discusses political bias on Wikipedia

At MediaShift, Mark Glaser continues "Wikipedia Week" at PBS.org with a debate between Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales and blogger Robert Cox.

I know both Jimmy and Robert personally so don't really want to get in the middle of this. Suffice to say that after reading Mark's piece and the Wikipedia entry, the disputed neutrality page on the site, and Robert's Olbermann Watch site, I've taken out a TiVo season pass to Countdown With Keith Olbermann on MSNBC.

If journalism suffers from an institutional malaise, it's because we have too few journalists like Olbermann who are willing to speak truth to power.

Citizen photography at the San Jose Merc

Interesting promotional banner across the top of today's San Jose Mercury News:

SHARE YOUR NEWS PHOTOS
Video, too -- find our new blog at www.mercurynews.com

This wouldn't by any chance be related to this week's purchase of citizen journalism site Bayosphere (run by former Merc business writer Dan Gillmor) by Backfence, would it?

The "Featured Photos" page at the Merc is co-branded with Buzznet.com. And while I greatly admire the Buzznet folks, this seems like an odd partnership. NowPublic.com, or even Ourmedia, seems like a more logical partner for citizen journalism.

Upcoming events: Vloggercon, Bloggercon and more

I'm getting a breather between conferences, so if you've been trying to reach me and your email is among the 3,000 unread messages in my in-box, try me again. Meantime, here's some of what's dead ahead:

OnHollywood

What: Silicon Valley's tech crowd meets Hollywood's entertainment crowd. About 500 people expected. I'll be moderating the opening panel, "Is the Web the new Hollywood?"

When: May 2-4

Where: Hotel Roosevelt, Hollywood

Price: about $1,250

url: alwayson

Comment: It'll be interesting to see the SV-Hollywood dynamic. Plus, I'm told there'll be a cool pool party.

We Media Global Forum

What: The Media Center sponsors its annual We Media event dissecting the citizens media movement. This year it's in London. Can't go because of the conflict with OnHollywood.

When: May 3-4

Where: BBC and Reuters facilities in London

Price: $795 US

url: www.mediacenter.org/wemedia06/

Comment: I would have loved to attend this event, which is always richly rewarding. The forum includes a worldwide BBC radio broadcast originated as part of the program, with lots of opportunity throughout for online participation. This year's forum focus is trust.

Not attending (because I'll be out of the country): Beyond Broadcast: Reinventing Public Media in a Participatory Culture.

Vloggercon

What: The 2nd annual videoblogging conference will attract vloggers, video aficionados, filmmakers and other media makers. I'll be moderating one panel.

When: June 10-11

Where: Swedish American Hall, San Francisco

Price: $40-$60 (though no vlogger will be turned away)

url: www.vloggercon.com

Comment: Please come out! This will be a fun, lively and entertaining gathering of the creative folks who are at the forefront of tomorrow's media.

BloggerCon IV

What: Last week Dave Winer announced that the latest installment of BloggerCon will take place in two months.

When: the week of June 19

Where: San Francisco

Price: free admission

url: www.bloggercon.org

Comment: I always love BloggerCon. I'll be there this year, barring scheduling clashes. Hope Dave's aware that Supernova is being held the same week.

Supernova

What: Gathering of Tech business folks to talk Web 2.0, Ajax and new stuff on the horizon.

When: June 21-23

Where: Wharton West and Palace Hotel, San Francisco

Price: $1,695-$2,495

url: www.supernova2006.com/

Comment: I hope to attend.

Gnomedex

What: Influencers, bloggers, entrepreneurs and tech enthusiasts mingle and make geek love.

When: June 29 - July 1

Where: Bell Harbor Conference Center, Seattle

Price: $499

url: www.gnomedex.com/

Comment: The flat-out best geek fest of the year. I’ll be there.

Democracy and Independence

What: The conference’s subtitle is “Sharing of News in a Connected World." Leading thinkers in the transition from legacy media to grassroots media nd new media.

When: June 29 - July 2

Where: UMass, Amherst

Price: $225

url: www.mediagiraffe.org/conference.html

Comment: I was invited to lead a session track and would have loved to attend, were it not for Gnomedex taking place at the same time.

Later in the year:

July 12-15, OhmyNews citizen journalism forum, Seoul, South Korea

July 25-27, AlwaysOn Innovation Summit @ Stanford University

July 28-29, BlogHer, one of my favorite events of the year.

Sept. 29-30, Podcast and Portable Media Expo, Ontario, Calif.

Oct. 12-14, Idea Festival, Louisville, Ky., where I'll be speaking on a panel.

Nov. 7-9, Web 2.0, San Francisco.

I've gravitated toward grassroots media and the tech world in recent years so now only rarely attend traditional media conferences such as the Editor & Publisher and MediaWeek Interactive Media Conference and Tradeshow next month.

MySpace, Wikipedia cope with growing pains

Mark Glaser at MediaShift:

MySpace, Wikipedia Cope With Growing Pains

Also: Wikipedia Bias. Is There a Neutral View on George W. Bush?

Bayosphere, Backfence and fostering community

Dan Gillmor's Bayosphere is now a part of Backfence.

Here's Dan's explanation.

Here's some short coverage by E&P.

I know, like and respect Mark and Susan over at Backfence, so it'll be fun to see where this goes. I'm not yet a firm believer in the idea of a network of hyper-local news sites as a business model, but it's still early in the game, and if anyone can make this work, these folks can.

Meantime, Kevin Anderson has this over at Corante: The challenge of fostering community.

The programme I work on at the BBC, World Have Your Say, launched its blog now just about a month ago. ... How do I help foster a sense of community using this blog wed to a radio programme with millions of listeners around the world?

Court to rule on bloggers' First Amendment rights

I'm sooooooooo tired of the are-or-aren't-bloggers-journalists? question. But the press continues to be riveted by the issue. ABCNews.com: Apple Lawsuit Could Define Cyber 'Journalists.' California lawsuit could determine First Amendment rights of bloggers.

The hurly-burly of Wikipedia's citizen participation

Social media cynic Andrew Orlowski in the UK's Guardian: A thirst for knowledge. Wikipedia and other online databases provide a soupy morass of information, but where can we find the variety of views that leads to wisdom ?

Wikicities becomes Wikia

Wikia, Inc. has just received $4 million Series A financing and has relaunched Wikicities as Wikia.com. Congratulations, folks! Here's a press release about
the news.

A podcast about participatory culture

Bill Densmore, director/editor of the Media Giraffe Project and Vice President of Media Activism and Reform for the Action Coalition for Media Education, speaks with Nicholas Reville of the Participatory Culture Foundation. Listen here.

Thanks to Colin Rhinesmith for the pointer.

All the news that's fit to upload

UK's The Guardian: Picture all the news that's fit to upload. It is difficult to avoid the hype about citizen journalism, the process whereby bloggers and people with cameraphones can report news from the grassroots that old media cannot reach. Excerpt:

The first rule of citizen journalism. It is not something you can seek out; it is thrust upon you. ...

The point is that we are only at the start of what may turn out to be a grassroots revolution. It is rare for the average person to witness a major incident, but there will be hundreds of others there with cameraphones at the ready. As phones become more powerful and easier to use - Samsung's latest models include one with a 10-megapixel camera and another with eight megapixels and room for 2,000 music tracks - so will photo-journalism improve. Many websites including the BBC and the Guardian already accept news clips from viewers.

In the US, currenttv.com is a TV channel partly created by those who watch it. They submit videos and vote on what should be included on the channel. Last week Softbank, the Japanese company that bought an early stake in Yahoo, paid $11m for 12.95% of Korea's pioneering OhmyNews citizens' journal. It will use the money as a stepping stone for international expansion. Video is the hottest thing on the web at the moment. Goodness knows where it will be in 10 years' time.

Related, at BBC News: Dan Gillmor responds to e-mails from readers about the first of his columns on how technology has revolutionized public participation in the media.

Newsrooms and bloggers: Let's get along

Amy Gahran at E-Media Tidbits:

San Francisco Chronicle columnist Alan T. Saracevic is weary of bloggers and news professionals trashing each other. In his March 19 column "Can't the media all get along?" He offered a simple example of how both sides can come together to understand, support and enhance each other. ...

Do you have Democracy Player?

Have you downloaded your copy of participatoryculture's Democracy Player yet?

Wikipedia: 1 million articles served

Wikipedia recently served up its 1 millionth article. The NY Times' Randall Stross remains skeptical.

A podcast about Web 2.0

A second podcast went up today, this one by Drew Olanoff of The Blog Factory. In this 20-minute podcast, we talk about Darknet, Ourmedia, Web 2.0, citizens media and where podcasting and blogging are going.

Podcast on citizens media

J.D. Lasica, blogger, author, and journalist, goes On the Record…Online with host Eric Schwartzman at the New Communications Forum in Palo Alto, Calif., in this podcast conducted last week to discuss working as a journalist in the mainstream media, citizen journalism and citizen media, and the effects the new media have upon traditional journalism.

When we become the media

Over at the Participant.net See It Now group blog, I posted this:

I've been spending a lot of time with young, Net-savvy users lately. Will these young people join traditional news organizations, or will they take a different route to participating in the media?

Increasingly, the answer is the latter.

Fewer young people are looking to join newspaper newsrooms, given the economic upheavals ahead for the industry and the unwelcoming culture that infests newsrooms' approach to youths.

More and more young people are feeling alienated and put off by the mainstream media. This week's Sacramento Bee ran a story titled, No room for news.  Today's tech-savvy youths lack an appetite for traditional media.  Excerpt:

"It's more interesting for me to log on to (Internet) forum boards and see what other people ... are saying about current events than listen to a report on the news for two minutes that isn't very informative at all," says Taylor Wang, a 23-year-old senior at UC Davis.

Avi Ehrlich, a senior journalism major at CSUS, put it more bluntly: "We get exactly what we want when we want it instead of somebody deciding for us what we need."

I suspect they're dead on.

We're living in a transitional time in which we're moving away from a media culture of top-down, tightly controlled, formulaic, father-knows-best news structures to one that is more open, democratic, distributed, inclusive, informal and collaborative.

Let's call it citizens media. Big-J Journalists often look askance at such grassroots efforts, but the same forces that have spurred the creation of 28 million weblogs are now playing out in fascinating ways across the landscape:

At Ourmedia.org,  80,000 people have published nearly 150,000 works of personal media in just 11 months. At South Korea's OhmyNews, 40,000 citizen journalists take part in the news equation. Citizens have crafted 750,000 articles for Wikipedia and its companion citizen journalism site, WikiNews.

Hyperlocal news sites such as Baristanet, Coastsider, IBrattleboro, FreeNewMexican, GoSkokie, H2Otown, Muncie Free Press, Benicia News and many others continue to flourish, based on the passions and interests of a small number of citizen publishers. CurrentTV is based on the arresting idea that we the people can create our own media. Participant Productions is channeling the same energy into Hollywood films and a series of blogs to engage the citizenry.

I turn regularly to citizen media sites such as Flickr, NowPublic and Metafilter to immerse myself in community media, grassroots creativity and competing points of view. Jeff Jarvis recently examined the role of Howard Stern’s Howard 100 as alternative news. Grassroots media activists are playing an active role in filling the gaps left by the mainstream media’s coverage of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina for the people of Louisiana. Others have formed meet-up groups to collaborate in making media. Dan Gillmor has created a Center for Citizen Media that holds promise as a hub for collaboration and new ideas.

The mainstream media need to learn how to embrace these emerging media forms rather than how to route around them. These independent outlets bring a passion, fresh voice, ingenuity and conscience to their work, something that a large portion of the public believe traditional news organizations have lost.

Millions of people believe that traditional media institutions have failed them in protecting the public interest and covering stories that hold meaning for them. Increasingly, they will turn to the Internet -- and in many ways create their own news-making apparatus.

Citizen-j site OhmyNews gets $11 million

As Dick Enberg would say, Oh my!

The 6-year-old South Korean citizen journalism site OhmyNews has just received an $11 million investment from Softbank.

You can pay $895 to access the story on Dow Jones' VentureWire.

Or you can read about it for free at Red Herring.

Citizen sleuthing: a cautionary tale for the media

Wow, this is fascinating.

Washington Post reporter Brian Krebs wrote this article, "Invasion of the Computer Snatchers," about hackers hijacking thousands of PCs to spy on users, shake down online businesses, steal identities and send spam. The article ran an image of a hacker interviewed for the piece but concealed his identity.

Or did it?

The Fishbowl tells the tale:

The Perils of Metadata

The Washington Post publishes an extended interview with a botnet-running hacker, known only as 0×80:

The young hacker… has agreed to be interviewed only if he isn’t identified by name or home town…

The article still has a lot of magazine-style colour:

Tall and lanky, with hair that falls down to his eyebrows, 0×80 almost never looks you in the eye when he talks, his accent a slurry of heavy Southern drawl and Midwestern nasality. He lives with his folks in a small town in Middle America. The nearest businesses are a used-car lot, a gas station / convenience store and a strip club, where 0×80 says he recently dropped $800 for an hour alone in a VIP room with several dancers.

There’s also an artfully disguised photo, presumably of 0×80:

[The Post subsequently removed this image from its website.]

With all this detail (and more) about 0×80’s circumstances and history, it’s a good thing the Post is keeping his identity secret. In a small town of a few thousand people, it would otherwise be pretty easy to track the hacker down from his description.

The article is then linked from Slashdot, where an astute commenter downloads the image and checks out the EXIF IPTC data:

Location: Roland OK

Roland [Oklahoma] is indeed a piece of small-town Middle America, population 3,000. Another commenter quickly finds the most likely used car lot, gas station and strip club.

I think there’s a lesson in there somewhere.

More from p2pnet.net: Washington Post blows source ID.

Citizen Craig on citizen journalism

City Pages Blotter: Citizen Craig on citizen journalism.

Jarvis scopes out the Howard 100

At Buzzmachine, Jeff Jarvis visits the newsroom of the Howard [Stern] 100, on Sirius Radio. An interesting look at "the new news."

Jeff also has a column about this at the Guardian UK, but I haven't been able to get past their registration gate. Thankfully, Jeff republishes it here.

Bayosphere's legacy

Seattle Post-Intelligencer: While the failure of Bayosphere is hardly an indictment of citizen journalism, it is an object lesson in what's needed to make a citizen j. effort work.

A citizen journalism site in Israel

Journalism.co.uk: Citizen journalism gives an alternative voice to Israel

Recently in OJR

Recently in the Online Journalism Review:

What are the lessons from Dan Gillmor's Bayosphere?
What went wrong at the ambitious community journalism site? And what does it mean for grassroots sites in general?
By Tom Grubisich

How to make Wikipedia better (and why we should)
Commentary: A critic has six suggestions to improve accuracy and accountability at the free online encyclopedia.
By Ray Grieselhuber

New media age, new marketing strategies
'Journalism business' doesn't have to be an oxymoron, three case studies show.
By Amos Gelb

'Citizen witness' code eviscerated

Journalism.co.uk:

The National Union of Journalists' code of practice for citizen journalists is being dutifully and systematically dissected by high profile web journalists, variously labelling it 'braindead', 'impractical' and a 'bloody awful mess'.

A barrage of criticism came from Emily Bell, Simon Waldman and Jeff Jarvis at Guardian Unlimited and assistant editor Neil McIntosh gave the code a particularly brutal fisking on his blog.

Most of the code's critics feel it is designed primarily to protect the interests of traditional media - something that those involved in the exploratory world of web publishing naturally resist. ...

The evisceration of this abomination was well-deserved.

Dan Gillmor finds his center

At PBS.org's MediaShift, Mark Glaser has a Q&A with citizens media pioneer Dan Gillmor. Dan details for the first time some of his goals for the new Center for Citizen Media.

Witness putting tools for empowerment online

Over the past couple of months, I've been having discussions with the good folks at Witness.org about how Witness and Ourmedia could work together. Witness has announced an ambitious plan to build a set of publishing tools that would let those in repressive or abusive conditions shine a spotlight on what's happening in their countries. We already have parts of that publishing infrastructure built, so it makes sense to join forces.

Tonight on PBS's "Charlie Rose," Witness founder Peter Gabriel (above) and executive director Gillian Caldwell spoke eloquently about their stirring vision, which is now within reach. I transcribed this exchange:

Peter Gabriel: Part of the original mission [at Witness] was to get cameras out to the world, but in a way, cameras are traveling out to the world anyway disguised inside phones. And in, say, Orwell’s vision in 1984, one of the means through which those in power controlled those who weren’t, was through observation, and in a way it’s trying to flip that on its head. If we get cameras out everywhere, perhaps through observation, the small guy, the little guy, can keep an eye on those in power—

Charlie Rose: It’s like the little guy watching Big Brother.

Gabriel: Exactly. You know, the whole Internet revolution is about putting power down at the bottom rather than just up at the top. So we’re now at a real point of transition, and the dream is that we can have a website where anyone who is desperate and suffering that has images can get them uploaded. Effectively there would be a new human right: If you suffer abuse, you get your story recorded, seen and heard. ...

The dream for Witness.org has always been to be a service to all those in the human rights movement rather than a competitor.

Gillian also showed off a new book I need to get: Video for Change : A How-To Guide on Using Video in Advocacy and Activism.

Citizen journalism slow to catch fire

Marketwatch: Citizen journalism slow to catch fire. Excerpt:

Al Gore's Current, which is a television show that's predicted to have 50% of its content produced by viewers in the future, has some advertisers unnerved because the audience-generated content lacks credibility.

I'm sure it's still early for such democratic, bottoms-up endeavors. And, I don't doubt that in five years or a decade newspapers and TV news will be redefined and will have incorporated such audience participation features.

As Paul Saffo, a technology forecaster at the Institute for the Future, once said: "In a In a two-year period, less happens than we would have thought and in a 10-year period, more happens than we could ever imagined."

So, for now, traditional media isn't dead. But it definitely is becoming less relevant.

New at 49media

49media, which offers links to web pages, blog posts, audio, video and other files on the Net, has added some new functionality. Users can now add thumbnail links and also start "link groups" where they can collect and rank links.

NowPublic's new look

NowPublic, the citizens media site whose members contribute mostly photos and text (and some video), just launched a redesign. Much more inviting and intuitive -- check it out.

Disclaimer: I'm on the Board of Advisors for NowPublic, as well as the Center for Citizen Media, LibraryCity and a startup business that hasn't gone public yet.

Wikipedia seeks support

Wikipedia is looking for financial support. And deserves it. Writes co-founder Jimmy Wales:

Wikipedia is based on a very radical idea, the realization of the dreams most of us have always had for what the Internet can and should become. Thousands of people, all over the world, from all cultures, working together in harmony to freely share clear, factual, unbiased information… a simple and pure desire to make the world a better place. ...

Thanks to the wonderful volunteers who have created and managed this vast resource, we are now one of the top 30 websites in the world… and traffic growth continues. ... In 2005, we achieved 6-fold growth in pageviews with spending of less than $750,000. ...

Taran Rampersad has some thoughts on revenue models, including this interesting idea: to show advertising only to non-registered users.

Lessons in citizen journalism

BusinessWeek Online: Dan Gillmor: The Rough Road to Citizen Journalism. In which Dan sums up the lessons he learned in "the experiment with Bayosphere."

Is the Web the new Hollywood?

Heather Green in BusinessWeek Online: Is the Web the New Hollywood? The Internet is becoming a breeding ground for filmmakers and TV producers in both the indie-video and mainstream worlds.

After years of hype, the Internet as TV is finally coming into its own. Never before has the opportunity been so great to take programming straight to the audience, circumventing the traditional film-industry production and distribution system. Until now, clever animated shorts or video clips that made a splash online have trod a well-worn path straight to TV, showing up on MTV, the Tonight Show, or even commercials. ...

Why now? The widespread adoption of high-speed Internet access is part of the reason. But just as important is the proliferation of affordable digital cameras and portable media players. Then there is the explosion of startups that provide publishing, advertising, and hosting services and software for video producers. And Google (GOOG), Yahoo! (YHOO), Microsoft (MSFT), Time Warner's (TWX) AOL and Apple's iTunes are all setting up online marketplaces where video producers can peddle videos free or for a fee. ...

Related: Three-minute moguls

NewsBump, where readers are in charge

Paul Knapp has launched NewsBump, a news and current affairs site where users determine the ranked display of the stories, something that Digg, Kuro5hin and NowPublic currently do, though it's an idea that goes back at least to MIT's fishWrap in 1992. "It's news by democracy," Paul says.

I suspect we'll be seeing dozens of such sites in the near future now that the users want to exercise increasing control over the editorial process.

Current's story and journalism guides

CurrentTV just launched a new online Storytelling Guide with Robert Redford, Dave Eggers, Ira Glass, and lots more.

And here's a Sean Penn video on Current's journalism standards.

Citizen media seminar

The Media Center at API is sponsoring Citizen Media: Engaging an Empowered Audience from April 2 to 5, 2006. Pricey for individuals ($1,350 for early-bird registration), but well worth it for news organizations, if past Media Center events are a guide. Mary Lou Fulton, Elizabeth Osder, Jan Schaffer, Dale Peskin and Andrew Nachison are among those on tap.

Citizen journalists: Any time, any place, anywhere

Britain's The Independent: Citizen journalists: Any time, any place, anywhere. Citizen journalists took some of the most dramatic images of recent news events. Are they a threat to the professionals?

The Conversations Network

Doug Kaye of IT Conversations, who might be the inventor of podcasting (but isn't about to duke it out with two other podcasting godfathers), announces the birth of a major new development in the citizens media movement:

The Conversations Network.

Check it out! Eventually, Doug foresees an army of hundreds or thousands of citizen journalists recording public events. Congrats, Doug.

Can Wikipedia survive its own success?

Knowledge@Wharton: Can Wikipedia Survive Its Own Success?

James Frey's fabrication

Leslie Guttman told me about this Monday — seemed incredible then, and still does:

The Smoking Gun: The Man Who Conned Oprah. "Book Club" author's best-selling nonfiction memoir filled with fabrications, falsehoods, other fakery, TSG probe finds.

A six-week investigation by The Smoking Gun reveals that there may be a lot less to love about Frey's runaway hit, which has sold more than 3.5 million copies and, thanks to Winfrey, has sat atop The New York Times nonfiction paperback best seller list for the past 15 weeks. ...

Police reports, court records, interviews with law enforcement personnel, and other sources have put the lie to many key sections of Frey's book. The 36-year-old author, these documents and interviews show, wholly fabricated or wildly embellished details of his purported criminal career, jail terms, and status as an outlaw "wanted in three states."

In additon to these rap sheet creations, Frey also invented a role for himself in a deadly train accident that cost the lives of two female high school students. In what may be his book's most crass flight from reality, Frey remarkably appropriates and manipulates details of the incident so he can falsely portray himself as the tragedy's third victim. It's a cynical and offensive ploy that has left one of the victims' parents bewildered. "As far as I know, he had nothing to do with the accident," said the mother of one of the dead girls.

First off, wow, what a disappointment. Frey's book has been on my reading list for a few weeks now.

Second, if The Smoking Gun's reporting holds up, it will be one of the most compelling examples of investigative reporting at the grassroots level. Yes, TSG has funding and a small staff, but any blogger or team of bloggers could have done the same, with the same journalist skill sets.

Frey is on CNN's "Larry King Live" now (repeats at midnight ET), saying, "It's been a very, very trying week." Haven't heard any mea culpas yet.

More links from Gawker.

Later: Larry King lobbed quite a few softballs -- which is why people are so willing to come onto his show, I suppose -- and even let Frey's mother appear. (Here's a shocker: "I stand by my son!") But there was this interesting exchange:

Larry King: There's a story around that you offered this to a lot of publishers as fiction. It was turned down, and then you changed it. Is that true?

Frey: We initially shopped the book as a novel. It was turned down by a number of publishers as a novel or as a nonfiction book. ... Nan Talese ... thought the best thing to do was to publish it as a memoir.

King: Why did you shop it as a novel if it wasn't?

Frey: I think of the book as working in a long tradition that great American writers have done in the past, people like Hemingway and Fitzgerald and Kerouac and Charles Bukowski.

King: But they all said fiction.

Frey: Yeah, they did. At the time they lived, the genre of memoir didn't exist.

Frey went on and on during the interview about how he stands behind the "essential truth" of his memoir, but he didn't deny The Smoking Gun's chief findings: that he never was in a melee with police, wasn't arrested for smoking crack, wasn't arrested for felony DUI, and on and on. This strikes me as going well beyond artistic license into fabrication.

The audience is the content

Jean K. Min, director of OhmyNews International, has a commentary in India Infoline: Journalism as a conversation.

What happens on OhmyNews is an intensely interactive online conversation. Citizen reporters have to persuade OhmyNews’ front-line copy editors to have their stories accepted in the first place. As much as 30 percent of daily submissions are rejected for various reasons such as poor sentence construction, factual errors, or its lack of news value. After stories are accepted and edited, then placed in a more prominent space, usually within minutes they draw scores of readers’ feedback. When the story is controversial, as in the case of Goh’s, the number of readers’ comments can shoot up to hundreds and even thousands.

This feedback from readers, coupled with editorial advice by OhmyNews’ copy editors, gives citizen reporters invaluable lessons in writing. A quick online search through the OhmyNews database yields 500 to 600 stories for some of our diligent citizen reporters and the difference of quality between their first and more recent writing is remarkable. Nearly 70 OhmyNews citizen reporters now have contracts to write books. If you believe, as I do, that an adequate level of writing skills is an important ability for citizens to have in a civil democracy, then OhmyNews’ citizen reporters can proudly be named the most capable practitioners of “the Emersonian vision of an expressive society.”

The New York Times – and many other prominent news organizations – appear to consider the Web as simply another format in which to sell their news content. They sold the news once in the paper medium, now they will sell it again to an online audience and increase the return on their investment. For OhmyNews, the Web is seen neither as a channel for information flow nor as a pipeline for news delivery. It is a playground for our readers, a cyberspace for Netizens. ...

Only as an afterthought did it dawn on us that the audience is the real content on the Web. Like any nimble disk jockey in a cool nightclub in town would do, we gave them a place to hang out and mingle in with the brightest minds in Korean cyberspace. One survey by a major Korean portal revealed nearly 40 percent of users’ daily mouse clicks on it were for user-generated content, such as readers’ comments and blog posts. A similar result was also found for OhmyNews. OhmyNews readers generate on average somewhere between 30 to 50 percent of daily traffic on the Web site through their participation in various online forums (other than their reading of the news). This is surely a wealth of eyeballs that any shrewd advertiser would salivate for. The “audience as the content” model makes a lot of sense for our business as well. ...

Four classes of citizen journalists

Bertrand Pecquerie writes that 2005 sorted out four classes of citizen journalists.

Post-TV media

LA Weekly: 5 Transmissions From the Post-TV Frontier.

Television has been getting a much-needed makeover this year, thanks in part to the advent of new portable video-playing devices. The networks are scrambling to jump on the bandwagon by offering to sell episodes of various existing shows, and new companies like Lime are forming to create "next generation" media. But far more interesting is the explosion of independently produced video blogs offering lots of surprisingly great amateur video material. Add that to the always-improving peer-to-peer file-sharing networks such as BitTorrent and Veoh, which collect and efficiently distribute high-quality video, and video-hosting sites like YouTube and Ourmedia, which help disseminate it easily, and you get an explosion of media made by the people for the people. TV is unidirectional and devoted to its advertisers; post-TV media are made for and distributed among communities of user/producers in many-to-many networks that open things up. ...

2005 - Year of the Digital Citizen

New on NowPublic: 2005 - Year of the Digital Citizen (in photos).

Ode to Flickr

Just came across this wonderful original song and video -- a musical ode to Flickr, using Creative Commons licenses, created by Jonathan Coulton. It's just the sort of mash-up we want to encourage with Ourmedia. And it's yet another reason to support Creative Commons before the year is out.

Citizen journalism in action

From Paul Grabowicz at E-Media Tidbits:

When Seattle-area media needed to capture the scene inside an Alaska Airlines plane that made an emergency landing at the local airport, they turned to passengers -- not just for interviews but for images of the frightening experience captured by the passengers on their video and cell-phone cameras.

Passenger Jeremy Hermanns posted on his blog photos he took with his cell-phone camera, along with a narrative about what it was like inside the cabin (which also prompted a big discussion in the comments section of his blog). Local news outlets, such as the Seattle Times and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, published some of Hermanns' pictures with their news stories.

Another passenger, Damon Zwicker, shot scenes inside the cabin on his video camera. That footage was aired on TV station KOMO.

With more and more people using digital recording devices, maybe it's time for media companies to start creating "citizen multimedia editor" positions. That person's job would be to reach out to people in the community and help them report, edit, and post their first-person multimedia stories, both on the news site and on their own blogs. And not only on big breaking news stories, but on all aspects of community coverage.

GetLocalNews charts new course

What's new with GetLocalNews.com, one of the first hyperlocal news aggregation sites? Well, for one thing, it's selling a slew of CityNameNews domain names.

Moblogged photo nominated TIME best photo

Michael Tippett of NowPublic notes that a 'moblogged' photo was nominated as a best photo of the year by Time magazine -- the emblematic shot taken by Adam Stacey with his camera phone minutes after a terrorist bomb went off in the London subway.

It's pretty stunning that Gamma would reproduce the image without Stacey's permission. Maybe they'll know now that a work licensed under Creative Commons doesn't mean it's fair game for commercial use.

Adds Tippett:

We are quickly approaching a time when all big stories will be broken by citizen reporters and these accidental bystanders will need tools that let them distribute their work to news organizations while still protecting their rights. This is the first high profile case but there will be others. Photo sharing is a good thing but citizen reporters need to make use of tools that protect the copyright owner while serving the general public.

Node101: a citizens media effort

Because this blog's readership has only a small percentage of videobloggers, I thought I'd pass along word of an important new citizens media venture: Node101.

Node101 is a series of one-person or two-person endeavors to train people to create personal media. Ourmedia will be working closely with Node101 over the coming year, first on a personal media event during Macworld Expo in San Francisco on Jan. 10 and later, in June, at the second VloggerCon conference.

Jay Dedman posted a recap the other day on the videoblogging list he founded:

You may know of the project some of us started in the late summer: Node101.org. These are videoblogging workshops that people can attend to get live training. It's all being done on a volunteer basis, using available resources in each local area.

In the past 4 months, we've found that the Nodes are are becoming extremely popular. Michael Verdi runs the San Antonio node out of a non-profit he works with. Jan does a travelling Node. Markus runs it out of a dojo attached to his house in Ojai, Calif. Schlomo Rabinowitz uses a video center in San Francisco. Ryan Hodson and I do it in a friend's storefront in downtown Manhattan.

Every Node is run differently, but we've all found that little communities are forming. For instance, Ryan and I meet Sat/Sun from 2-5pm. Many people bring their own laptops, we have some old donated computers available, we have wi-fi. It's easy for us since we would be hanging out at home anyway videoblogging. Now we do it in a public space so other people can learn. Most people come in with specific questions, after having seen freevlog.org, and some we start from scratch.

The other Nodes have their own style appropriate to their time and resources. The point is that this online group is important, but creating physical meeting spaces is another important step.

If anyone on this list in interested in starting a Node, email me off list and we brainstorm some options depending on what you have available.

How citizens media is changing traditional media

The Portable Media Expo and Podcasting Conference in Ontario, Calif., a little while back posted podcasts of the sessions. Here is the podcast of the panel I participated in: How Citizens Media Is Changing the Face of Traditional Media (mp3). With me were moderator/podcaster John Furrier and podcaster/videoblogger Eric Rice. Lots of other sessions worth a listen, such as the keynotes by Leo Laporte and Jason Calacanis.

New directions in citizens media

From Steve Outing at E-Media Tidbits:

Chris Willis and Shayne Bowman, of We Media report fame, have written a thoughtful essay for Harvard's Nieman Reports that's worth your time. The overall topic is the future of media and how traditional organizations like newspapers and news broadcasters can adapt to this rapidly changing media environment (and how they're in large part failing now). But the main focus is on "citizen media."

The duo seems pretty much of the same mind as me when it comes to this topic. They write: "Citizen media represents not the end of journalism or news media companies but a shift in where value is being created. In the traditional broadcast model, value was created solely by the newspaper or TV station. In the future, more of the value will come from creating an infrastructure for citizen participation and nurturing trusted communities."

This essay also will be part of We Media 2.0, an update of their 2003 report that's due out in January or February.

Looking forward to seeing the update of the report. (I edited the original report.)

On participatory journalism

I recently did a Q&A with a journalism graduate student at the University of Kansas about participatory journalism. (The typos are theirs.)

Gillmor announces Center for Citizen Media

On his Bayosphere blog a couple of hours ago, Dan Gillmor announced his Next Big Thing: the Center for Citizen Media, a program "to study, encourage and help enable the emergent grassroots media sphere, with a major focus on citizen journalism," in conjunction with the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism and Harvard's Berkman Center.

Congrats, Dan! Important work, and no one more qualified to take it on.

Photos of NYC transit strike

Citizen journalism: From Adam Fields, photos on Flickr of the New York City transit strike.

Wikipedia alternative aims to be 'PBS of the Web'

CNET News.com: Wikipedia alternative aims to be 'PBS of the Web'

A new online information service launching in early 2006 aims to build on the model of free online encyclopedia Wikipedia by inviting acknowledged experts in a range of subjects to review material contributed by the general public.

Called Digital Universe, the project is the brainchild of, among others, USWeb founder Joe Firmage and Larry Sanger, one of Wikipedia's earliest creators.

By providing a service they're calling "the PBS of the Web," the Digital Universe team hopes to create a new era of free and open access to wide swaths of information on virtually any topic. ...

Interviewed on 'Moblog Nation'

I'm interviewed by Laura Burstein, host of "Moblog Nation" (and a correspondent for Inside Mac Radio), about how moblogging fits into the grassroots media movement. I you haven't heard it, the "Moblog Nation" podcast is aimed at camera phone users and photo bloggers. Here's the mp3 podcast, and their home page.

I met Laura at the Portable Media Expo in Ontario, Calif., last month, and we connected by phone when I was in a coat closet at Harvard's Berkman Center. (Don't ask.)

Study: User-submitted content as reliable as edited content

E-Media Tidbits:

Recently, Wikipedia has been criticized for being unreliable as vandals have just as free access to edit articles in the open-source encyclopedia as any expert. It seems natural that there would be more errors in Wikipedia than in other "edited" sources.

But now a study by the journal Nature shows that Wikipedia is very close to being as reliable as Encyclopedia Britannica. A group of experts was asked to peer-review 42 scientific articles. They were not told about the original source of the articles.

The experts found four serious errors in each encyclopedia. When it came to factual errors, omissions, and misleading statements, there were three in each Encyclopedia Britannica article and four in each Wikipedia article.

Personally, I don't believe this study should be taken as the final proof that Wikipedia is always better than other sources -- or 100-percent reliable. Far from it. It may simply be that scientific articles attract fewer vandals than political articles. But I see no danger in this. The general public already knows that Wikipedia should be read with this in mind.

What the Nature study does show is that "the general public" can generate content that is just as reliable as edited content. And that's indeed worth remembering when considering "user-submitted content" in general.

Jimmy Wales on the Seigenthaler affair

Media Giraffe Project editor Bill Densmore interviews Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales about the John Seigenthaler incident (audio).

Topix gets into citizen journalism

San Jose Mercury News: Online news site to invite readers to post content, add comments.

Personal media: A visual collage

I made a 4-minute collage of photographs and video in a new piece titled Personal media: A visual collage.

It's set to copyrighted music by Alex Woodard (used with permission), with photos taken by me and also drawn from PDPhoto.org, Ourmedia and Flickr. Vlogging superstars Michael Verdi and Steve Garfield make an appearance.

Check it out -- this is a photo slide show style of media that Apple incorporated into iPhoto but we haven't seen too much of online. Once Ourmedia gets its Remix Center and Learning Center up next year, this should become much easier to do.

(3:55 long, 11.3 MB MPEG-4; Ourmedia page | watch video)

Technorati tags: collage, slide show, photos, videoblogging, personal media

Wikipedia and citizen editing

By now you've probably heard the reports that Wikipedia will be tightening up on its rules to allow only registered members to create new articles (though any anonymous troll can still edit an article). Marc Canter and I wrestled with this early on at Ourmedia.org and decided to allow only registered users to publish media or comment on other people's media. Identity creates community; anonymity can damage it.

Dana Blankenhorn praises Wikipedia for its fast response to the John Seigenthaler character-assassination miscue. But Digital Podcast News has this: Podshow Founder Actions Lead To Questions About Wikipedia Credibility. Plus:

CNET News.com: Growing pains for Wikipedia.

Podcast News: Wikipedia Caught in Podfather Turf War.

Wikipedia: Transcript of Jimmy Wales and John Seigenthaler on CNN.

News.com's executive editor: Perspective: Wikipedia and the nature of truth.

Steve Rubel at WebProNews: Wikipedia is the next Google.

eGov Monitor: Wikipedia: the dawn of democratic media?

Editor and Publisher: The danger of Wikipedia.

Mail & Guardian: Can you trust Wikipedia?

News.com: How much do you trust Wikipedia?

How much do I trust Wikipedia? A lot -- though not completely, and not to the exclusion of other news and information sources. But what source would you trust completely?

Looking at Backfence seven months on

At PressThink, Liz George of Baristanet reviews Backfence.com Seven Months After Launch. Thanks to Steve Outing for the pointer and summary.

Video of Amanda Congdon of 'Rocketboom'

At the Symposium on Social Architecture at Harvard Law School's Berkman Center on Nov. 15, I put together a panel to talk about participatory media. One of the panelists was Amanda Congdon, host of Rocketboom, whom I had a terrific time talking with.

"Rocketboom" is one of the breakout successes of the very young Internet TV industry. They've already turned down a buyout offer from a major media conglomerate you've heard of.

In this 7-minute video I shot with Amanda after our panel (19.6mb MPEG-4), she talks about the show's genesis, its formula for success, and how you, too, can make your mark in the personal media revolution. (Ourmedia page | watch video)

Technorati tags: Rocketboom, Amanda Congdon, video, Internet TV

Interviewed on Evil Genius Chronicles podcast

Dave Slusher of the Evil Genius Chronicles podcast (worth listening to on the basis of the title alone) interviewed me at the Portable Media Expo down in the Southland (actually, east of LA) on Nov. 11 and just posted the episode. About halfway through I babble on about citizens media, Ourmedia, a new Learning Center, and other stuff.

Mostly, I talk about how short-form video is going to reign supreme on the video iPod and other portable video devices. Here's the mp3 and Dave's blog post. As Dave says, "I have a greater affinity for citizen-produced media than media-produced media." Right on, bro.

Stay tuned for a video about "Rocketboom" later today.

The power of participatory journalism

The power of participatory journalism hits home in India.

3 good ones from OJR

Three articles in the Online Journalism Review from the past week are all worth a read:

New tools, standards needed to grow the Web's grassroots, by Robert Niles. OJR's editor has started a new blog, and is asking for help in developing new data format standards and collection tools to encourage grassroots reporting.

Flickr, Buzznet expand citizens' role in visual journalism, by Mark Glaser. Traditional journalists and newspaper sites tap into online photo communities to gather visual research and allow readers to contribute and interact. It’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Is the British blogosphere lagging behind? by Paul Berger. An opinionated media and a less polarized political climate means U.K. bloggers don’t fill the same role as in the U.S. But Britblogs may have found a niche.

The emperor has no pajamas

More on the Open Source Media imbroglio from Temple Stark.

Craiglist aims for citizen journalism

WebProNews: Craigslist Aims For Community Journalism.

Sounds great. I just hope Craig Newmark & the smart people at Craigslist will take a more expansive approach to citizens media by letting the Craigslist community participate in the full gamut of community media rather than an attempt to get into a narrowly focused journalism/news-gathering effort.

Quest for the universal wiki

Sydney Morning Herald: Wikimedia board member and Ourmedia Advisory Board member Angela Beesley is in Australia this month to address the X|Media|Lab international digital media conference and production workshop, running at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image in Federation Square, Melbourne, in conjunction with the Melbourne On Screen Festival. The conference brings together new media experts in film, television, internet, media and digital content to debate the "Future of Media" and explore the opportunities for producing commercial media content.

'Open Source Media'? Yawn

Corante's Stowe Boyd meets the launch/rebranding of Open Source Media (formerly Pajamas Media) with a big yawn.

Sorry, but $3.5 mill in VC funding and a party at the Rockefeller Center doesn't get you legitimacy in my book.

CNET's News.com, meanwhile, has Open Source Media group met with harsh criticism.

By the way, the nonprofit production company of which Stowe speaks is not Ourmedia but rather Chris Lydon's Open Source Radio program. We welcome all manner of open media projects to the game, as long as they're legitimate and sincere about advancing the citizens media revolution, rather than simply doing it to make a buck.

This weekend I hope to post a list of open media projects we support.

We media -- and mainstream media

Today I had lunch with Andrew Nachison and Dale Peskin of the Media Center, who commissioned the "We Media" report that laid out the contours of the citizens media movement.

For those who missed it, Wednesday's "NewsHour" on PBS contained a good roundup of the "We Media" revolution, throwing a spotlight on Jan Schaffer of J-Lab; the citizen journalism publication The Forum in Deerfield, NH; Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia and WikiNews, and Current TV. Here's audio of the segment.

Terence Smith pointed out that Wikipedia gets 2 billion page views a month -- more than the New York Times, LA Times, Washington Post and USA Today combined.

"News organizations need to do a lot more experimentation -- throw stuff up on the wall, see what sticks," Jan advised online news sites.

Meantime, today the NewsHour had another interesting media story, focusing on the role the Washington Post's Bob Woodward played in the Valerie Plame case. As he told his editor, Leonard Downie, "I explained in detail that I was trying to protect my sources. That's job No. 1 in a case like this. ... I'm in the habit of keeping secrets."

Say what? I thought journalists were in the habit of informing the public, especially in an explosive story like this.

Woodward's behavior is inexplicable, bordering on the inexcusable, and points up once again the all-too-familiar cozy relationship between the Washington press corps and the powers that be -- at the expense of an informed public. Matt Welch at Reason Hit 'n' Run aptly calls Woodward "Little Mister Run Amok."

As Tom Rosenstiel said on the segment today, "The reporter owes his or her allegiance to the reader, to the public. ... If they're ever in a situation where they're not acting on behalf of the public, then they're acting unprofessionally, they've crossed a line. ... The growing distrust of the press boils down to two things: One, that news companies do what they do for money, and they think that individual journalists act out of their own self-interest and career aggrandizement. And the cozy relationship goes to the heart of this, and is part of why a new generation of news consumers is going to alternative sources that are more in sync with them, whether it's bloggers of 'The Daily Show.' If they see journalists as part of the inside establishment, as part of them rather than as part of us, that's really an element in the breakdown of trust." Dead on.

It's an outrage that we still don't know the original source who fed Valerie Plame's name to Judith Miller, Robert Novak and now Bob Woodward. A federal shield law for journalists? The media has set back that cause by 20 years.

The segment was supposed to go up on the NewsHour's Media Watch page three hours ago, but hasn't yet.

Are blogs news? Topix says yes

Topix CEO Rich Skrenta passes along word that the local news aggregation service Topix has begun including 15,000 blogs in its crawling/tagging engine. "Blog posts are being categorized into our 30,000 local feeds as well as our 300,000 subject feeds. Our search results now include blog results, and posts should show up on our site and search index within 1-3 minutes of being crawled."

Yep, New Media Musings postings now show up in Topix.

Transparency in citizen journalism

At I, Reporter, Amy Gahran outlines an approach for increasing transparency in citizen-contributed news stories. Some very good suggestions here that a cit-j publication of any size should heed.

Shield laws, access should extend to citizen journalists

Watched and enjoyed tonight's "NewsHour With Jim Lehrer," with coverage of the ongoing controversy over whether the press deserves a special privilege to protect confidential sources (yes, it does) and under what circumstances (not in every case). Here's a transcript of the segment.

Great to see Jeff Jarvis in fine form as a self-described blogger and citizen journalist. Here's his writeup on Buzzmachine about his appearance. And here's his related column in the Guardian UK about the changing nature of secrets online.

From time to time, Jeff has expressed ambivalence about confidentiality and whether press privileges should extend to bloggers. He repeated that ambivalence tonight, saying that he didn't know if everyone engaging in journalism should be covered (smartly, he talked about the act of journalism, not who should be deemed a journalist). If the right extends to all of us (people like Tony Soprano, he said), then it extends to none of us.

Well, no.

As I wrote on Jeff's blog, the First Amendment applies to all of us, miscreants included.

And press protections should apply to anyone who is practicing journalism, miscreant Tony Soprano bloggers included.

As I said last week in Santa Barbara, I think access looms as a potentially larger issue than shield laws about confidential sources. When a news event happens, will only sanctioned journalists from the mainstream media be allowed access to the scene or access to official sources of information? Or will we begin tearing down that artificial wall?

Let's connect the dots and follow it to its logical conclusion: Citizens engaging in random acts of journalism deserve the same protections under the law as mainstream media journalists.

Another community site sighting

The latest citizen journalism/community site spotted: The New Haven Independent. Founding editor Paul Bass is interviewed about it here.

'Standalone journalism does not work'

Tom Foremski at New Communications Blogzine writes obliquely about an incident he and Dan Gillmor blogged about and then concludes, "Standalone journalism does not work."

Couldn't disagree more, but head on over and see if you think Tom makes his case.

'We Media' conference in audio

For those who missed the Media Center's We Media conference in New York on Oct. 5, they've put up a nice, concise, attractive page that lets you listen to audio of the sessions.

A blogger on the Congressional beat

Mark Tapscott of The Heritage Foundation points out that Tim Chapman has become the first full-time Congressional blogger with his Townhall Capitol Report. Says Mark, "I am sure you will agree that this is an important milestone for the continuing development of citizen journalism. Capitol Report should prove useful to folks on all sides of the public policy debate." Agreed.

Citizen journalism and readability

There's an interesting back and forth between two observers of citizen journalism.

Steve Outing's latest column in Editor & Publisher: Can 'Citizen Journalists' Really Produce Readable Content?

John Temple, editor and publisher of Rocky Mountain News, which owns and operates the citizens media site YourHub.com, responds to Outing's criticisms.

And Outing responds to Temple at the bottom of this page.

Should news organizations train citizen journalists?

Interesting item by Steve Outing at E-Media Tidbits today:

Should news organizations offer training to "citizen journalists," people who they'd like to contribute content to their citJ initiatives? That sounds like a good idea, but some citJ experts have suggested that perhaps that's not the wisest approach. Backfence.com co-founder Mark Potts recently told me: "I'd argue that the notion that people have to be somehow 'trained' to create citizens' media is journalist-think, and even a little arrogant." He says none of his sites' users have asked for training.

Jack Driscoll, visiting scholar at the MIT Media Lab and former editor of the Boston Globe, offers what I think is a nice alternative. "The best training takes place in the citizen journalists' midst," he wrote in an e-mail. So, if you are a news organization experimenting with citJ, think about organizing or facilitating citizen writers' groups, where interested amateur writers get together to share ideas and learn from each other -- sort of a book group-like meeting. ...

Well, two points here. A better setting would be a community/social networking space rather than a physical space, given the likelihood that most of those participating will not be from the same immediate area.

And, more importantly, like it or not, the vast majority of citizen journalists are not going to look to the mainstream media to take their cues from. They will, however, look to successful writers, bloggers and researchers among their peers.

We'll be creating a digital media learning center on Ourmedia, and we hope to include a section on citizen journalism.

Can you trust Wikipedia?

At E-Media Tidbits, Matthew Buckland asks -- following the Guardian UK's article Can you trust Wikipedia? -- why the panel of experts didn't test the accuracy of some print encyclopedia entries. Good question.

Can you trust Wikipedia? The answer, of course, is yes -- sometimes, to some degree, but not as your only source of information. It's only going to get wider, deeper, richer and better with time.

Should citizen journalists have access rights?

Some of you may have heard of the Photogapher's Right, a guide to your right as a photographer in public places by attorney Bert P. Krages II.

Well, videoblogger Pete Prodoehl, in a post on the videobloggers mailing list titled Are We The Media?, relates this episode today:

Yesterday I was shooting some video and walked into a university. I was told by an employee "I don't mean to ruin your fun, but you can't film in here." (She may have said 'videotape' instead of film, I'm not 100% sure, I just remember I was told I had to stop shooting.)

I noticed later that the fine folks from the local TV station were allowed to shoot inside, where I was not allowed to.

So, that brings up some questions in my mind.

Were the media given 'special priviledges' ordinary people are not?

Could the fact that it was a university have been in my favor? Don't my taxes help pay for it?

Is there "Videographer's Rights" document, like the Photographer's rights? Would it apply?

I was following what became a news event -- this is backed up by the fact that the local TV folks were there. I can't help but feel like I'm the little guy who got squashed by Big Media.

It's a legitimate question. In my view, citizen journalists should have the same rights of access afforded news crews from the mainstream media.

A second citizens media summit

Today was the day-long Citizens Media Summit sponsored by J-Lab at the University of Maryland -- more traditional media-oriented than the citizens media summit I helped organize out West in May.

Would love to hear what came out of it.

'An Internet fed mostly by amateurs is frightening'

The headline of Mike Langberg's column in today's San Jose Mercury News says it all: 'An Internet fed mostly by amateurs is frightening.' He cites author-blogger Nicholas G. Carr, who doesn't seem to understand Web 2.0 very well, and then goes off on a rant against the amateurization of the Web and the rise of collaborative media efforts like Wikipedia:

I'm very much on Carr's side of the fence. I don't want to read blogs by political extremists, listen to podcasts recorded by droning amateurs, or watch videos produced by talentless would-be directors -- even though the Internet makes all that possible.

I want to get my news from highly skilled professionals, listen to music by the world's most brilliant performers and composers, and be entertained by big-budget Hollywood extravaganzas.

Of course, I'm biased. I make my living writing this column, and my paycheck is threatened if everyone decides freely available blogs -- even at lesser quality -- are an acceptable substitute.

Carr concludes: ``The layoffs we've recently seen at major newspapers may just be the beginning, and those layoffs should be cause not for self-satisfied snickering but for despair. Implicit in the ecstatic visions of Web 2.0 is the hegemony of the amateur. I for one can't imagine anything more frightening.''

Amen.

For years, Mike's former colleague, Dan Gillmor, and I have been saying that the emerging mediasphere is to be celebrated for the wealth and diversity of viewpoints and reportage that amateurs bring to the table. We're always click to add that this does not herald the downfall or marginalization of mainstream media, but rather the elevation of a new media form.

This kind of us-against-them rhetoric only exacerbates the increasing irrelevance of like-minded voices in the mainstream media who are trying to hold back the tide.

Who will help with Ourmedia's next projects?

Wow, just got out of the Open Media Developers Summit at NYU in Greenwich Village. About 70 developers, filmmakers, citizens media advocates and other creative people came together, exchanged ideas, and agreed to continue the conversation.

Ourmedia received an extraordinarily warm reception there.

I'm in a taxi as I write this (don't think it's wired for wifi), but should be able to file from the JetBlue hub at JFK.

Among the people I finally had a chance to meet in person: Clay Shirky (finally!! -- especially given the fact that he's quoted on at least eight pages of "Darknet"), Lucas Gonze (the playlist king -- see Webjay), Kent Bye (the Echo Chamber Project, which I blogged about below), Jim Vinson of DivX, Peter van Dyk (MeFeedia), Kenyatta Cheese, and Drazin Pantic. Also was great to see Mary Hodder, Jay Dedman, Ryan Hodson, Elizabeth Osder, and a host of others.

I showed the flag for Ourmedia and reminded folks of the project's original name -- Open Media (open-media.org) -- before we changed it when I discovered that "Open Media" was a trademarked term. Also mentioned that I sponsored a Citizens media summit in San Francisco in May that had very similar goals.

I came to this gathering with three goals in mind. One was to look for a CTO for Ourmedia -- we're in the process of getting funded and have a six-figure salary set aside in our 2006 budget for a kick-ass getting-your-hands-dirty-with Drupal tech nerd and open-standards evangelist. So if you know of anyone who fits the bill, send her or him my way.

The second goal was to connect with forward-thinking folks on the open-media front lines of corporate America, and I had some good conversations with reps from Nokia, Reuters, DivX and Yahoo! about how they might be able to support and work with citizens media efforts like Ourmedia.

The third, perhaps most important goal was to explore ways to bring these open media projects together in real terms, both on the development side (code and content) but also with the goal of creating real interoperability between these open media repositories. During the closing summing-up, I cited three opportunities for collaboration between the attendees. And we hope you, dear reader, will also volunteer to hop aboard these projects:

1. Learning Center: One of the key new initiatives dead ahead for Ourmedia is the creation of a digital media learning center and open knowledge base. The idea is simple: Ourmedia has been focused on creating a community space around sharing personal media. Now we want to get involved in helping people create media.

Want to learn how to create a podcast? Boom, here's a quick tutorial. How about creating a videoblog and getting it syndicated and hooked up to iTunes? We'll tell you how. Want to learn about digital storytelling? We'll provide a step-by-step process.

The Learning Center will begin with links to existing efforts in the field, such as vblog and Node101 and FireAnt and other grassroots efforts. We're currently forming a discussion group and wiki to bring professors and students at educational institutions into the process (we hope Stanford, NYU, USC, Harvard, Duke and others become involved).

We'll also be calling up experts in various areas (know your mpeg4 codecs? know how to take a great digital photo? we want to hear from you) and calling upon the wisdom of the community in creating user-generated content. Everyone who contributes will be recognized and credited for your contributions (unless you insist on anonymity).

2. Remix Center: I'm passionate about the idea of creating an area for people to come to legally download video, audio and photographs that can be downloaded for remixing. I believe there's a creative ferment and energy just waiting to explode around this idea. We'll be collaborating with Creative Commons, Drupal developers, open-source code jockeys, artists, content creators and others in the coming weeks and months to make it happen. If you support Remix Culture, please join our effort.

3. Open registry: Marc Canter and I have been talking for some time about creating a global registry project to interconnect open media repositories, so that users can easily access hundreds of thousands and soon to be millions of grassroots media works -- our content, not the inaccessible stuff locked away behind DRM and paid archives.

Charles Nesson, founder of Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society, has a lofty vision of a Digital Library of Alexandria -- and wants to hold a conference or summit next year to start hammering out a game plan for interoperability. Charles wants to help forge a massive mirrored database that interconnects not just citizens media repositories but hundreds of major libraries as well -- making nearly all the world's knowledge available at the click of a mouse. It's an extraordinary opportunity and challenge.

In the short run, I told the group, let's begin the journey. Let's take a few strides down that road by building a modest glue factory so that we can start bonding these repositories (Ourmedia, NowPublic.com, Undergroundfilm.org, etc.) to each other so that users can access personal media and create media jukeboxes and image albums and directories regardless of what servers they're located on.

Interested in climbing aboard the citizens media bandwagon? It's still early. Let me know.

There. Not bad for a taxi ride.

Technorati tags: openmediasummit, omds, HonorTagJournalism

Newest from the Echo Chamber Project Vlog

I missed the latest installment last week by documentary filmmaker Kent Bye in his Echo Chamber Project Vlog -- Episode 3, in which he interviewed participants at the Media Center's We Media conference in New York, including Tom Curley, Richard Sambrook, Susan Mernit and Merrill Brown.

Episode 2, with interviews conducted at the Personal Democracy conference, is here.

I'm looking forward to meeting Kent this weekend at the Open Media Developers Summit at NYU.

Tools for citizen journalists

I just received an email from the wonderful Micki Krimmel of Participant Productions, the organization behind the release of the new George Clooney movie "Good Night, and Good Luck," and this week's release of "North Country," starring Charlize Theron (above). I saw a preview screening of "North Country" in Berkeley last night and liked it, though I wonder if reviewers and audiences may find it too didactic and dark. The Berkeley crowd was certainly appreciative, with a couple of call-outs from the audience during key scenes.

Participant has set up a first-rate group blog about the two films and is trying to use the blog as a vehicle for social change, so all of you are invited to head over there and post comments and observations. (I'm guest-blogging at the See It Now blog.)

As much as I admire Participant's work, I don't think, however, that it will become a place where people upload works of citizen journalism, as they're trying to do here with citizen audio reports. Maybe I'm wrong — time will tell — but it strikes me as more realistic to build a Participant Productions area within an existing citizens media framework, like Ourmedia or NowPublic. We hope to work with groups and causes like this in the months ahead.

It's also interesting to see Participant link to the Society of Professional Journalists' Code of Ethics — I'm heading up the standards committee of the Media Bloggers Association, and we've found the SPJ code isn't really applicable to bloggers or citizens media. (I'll be writing more about this in a couple of weeks.)

Finally, Participant also links to Journalism.org, an estimable site run by my friends at the Project for Excellence in Journalism. But if you call up their Tools for Citizens, you get:

- How to Talk to the News Media

- How to Write a Letter to the Editor

- How to Find the Right Person to Contact [at a news organization]

- Getting Stories on Local TV News

... and so on. This just isn't good enough in the year 2005. We need tools for people to create their own media, their own TV shows, their own podcasts.

We'll be doing that at Ourmedia. Let me know if you want to help.

Yahoo adds bloggers to news pages

Yahoo! said on Monday it will begin featuring the work of bloggers side by side with the work of professional journalists, leveling distinctions between the two, Reuters reports.

Blogs will now appear alongside mainstream news sources when people conduct searches on Yahoo's news site, the company said. The blogs will appear in a box alongside the results from Yahoo's 6,500 traditional news sources. The blog results will be ranked according to their relevancy to the news. Yahoo will also display photos from its photo-sharing service Flickr if they are relevant, the San Jose Merc reports today.

Weblogs Inc. sale: a 'tipping point' for we media?

I'm quoted in this Publish.com article: Blog Acquisitions Signal Tipping Point for User-Generated Content.

Will news giants survive 'citizen journalism'?

From India's newKerala.com: Will news giants survive 'citizen journalism'?

Experts in Britain and the US are no longer sure if the major news providers will survive these trends. Many wonder if news giants such as Fox and CNN will still be around after 20 years.

A tour of citizen journalism sites

Tom Grubisich in the Online Journalism Revew: Grassroots journalism: Actual content vs. shining ideal. Community news sites get a lot of hype, but can they produce quality journalism? A survey, from pineapple salsa to virtual village greens.

Take a look at the comments, which are generally more thoughtful than the main article.

Terry Heaton didn't much care for the piece.

Traditional media experiment with citizen journalism

I'm quoted in this Associated Press story today about citizens media: Traditional media experiment with citizens as news producers.

MSNBC invited viewers to share photos of their interactions with the late Pope John Paul II, while The Spokesman-Review in Spokane, Wash., anointed eight readers with the power to publicly criticize the newspaper's coverage on its very Web site.

Newspapers in Greensboro, N.C., and Boulder, Colo., are even letting citizens write their own news stories - on weddings, awards, even a missing cat named Banjo. Most go on the Web, but the best of the "hyper-local" news stories get printed.

Traditional news organizations are dipping their toes in citizen journalism, engaging readers and viewers in news production with the help of the Internet, camera phones and other technologies.

Yet there's frustrations in some circles that so-called mainstream media aren't going far and fast enough.

"It sort of requires a rethinking of the entire traditional news process, and that's hard for news organizations to do," said J.D. Lasica, a veteran journalist who co-founded Ourmedia.org, where citizens freely exchange digital works. "In citizen journalism the traditional gatekeeper role of the journalist is thrown out the window."

Esquire's experiment in citizen editing

CNET News.com: When Esquire magazine writer A.J. Jacobs decided to do an article about the freely distributable and freely editable online encyclopedia Wikipedia, he took an innovative approach: He posted a crummy, error-laden draft of the story to the site.

We photojournalism

Forbes: The future of photojournalism.

A picture may be worth a thousand words, but some enterprising people are hoping some pictures may also be worth a thousand dollars.

The key is the budding citizen photojournalist. Regular folks, armed with digital cameras or camera phones, who happen to be in the right place at the right time are finding a national outlet for capturing breaking news. Now, several startup companies are hoping to capitalize on the trend. The latest of these is Spy Media, which will launch its service today.

Based on the idea that anyone has the ability to take a quality photo and that amateurs should be compensated, the companies believe they're carving out a new and potentially lucrative market.

“We think it's insulting that citizen journalists aren’t being paid,” says Brian Quinn, who along with his father, Tom, former president of Novell, co-founded the company. It's an automated photo-news service for buying and selling photos.

Spy Media joins Scotland-based Scoopt, which launched shortly after this summer's London bombings. It is another service that helps amateurs sell their photos and videos. Co-founder Kyle MacRae, a former journalist, says the company has about 2,750 members. Scoopt reportedly has sold only a few photos, though MacRae says the company is "way ahead of where they expected to be."

Cell Journalist is new citizen-photojournalism Web site with big ambitions. The company says it expects to sign up 6,000 people within six weeks.

It’s a new idea being driven in part by the increasing popularity of high-resolution camera phones. According to ABI Research,1.3-megapixel camera phones will become the standard by early next year. That's not sharp enough for a glossy magazine but more than adequate for Web sites. InfoTrends estimates that more than 650 million camera phones will be sold globally by 2008.

That’s a lot of potential citizen photojournalists. Brian Quinn says he first proposed his concept a year and a half ago in his senior thesis at business school. And Parker Polidor of Cell Journalist says he conceived the idea before he was aware of similar companies. “As far as I knew, I thought it was unique,” he says.

To ensure legitimacy, each service requires detailed registration from its contributors, who then upload their pictures from camera phones or digital cameras.

Cell Journalist and Scoopt scan each picture and often talk with the photographer to determine authenticity, but Spy Media’s process is automated. “We don’t censor,” Brian Quinn says. “News is like fish. It goes bad quickly. It needs to be available immediately.”

Scoopt claims exclusive ownership of an image for three months and then acts like an agent, looking at each photo individually and haggling with photo editors over price. Cell Journalist offers a flat fee of $50 every time an image is used and holds exclusive rights to the photo for 96 hours.

Spy Media charges the photographer a nominal uploading fee (which should deter pornographers) and keeps 35% of the sale price. The photographer sets the price and offers four levels of ownership to buyers, from exclusive rights to one-time download for personal use.

Spy Media’s site is public, meaning anyone can scroll through its library of photos. Cell Journalist requires a monthly subscription that sends alerts to media outlets in specific geographic locations.
...

Blinkx: A citizen journalism moment

Just got back from the daylong Getting Ready for Prime Time: Online Video and the Future of Television conference in Berkeley, CA. Wanted to blog from the event, but the wi-fi was iffy.

I experienced a citizen journalism moment at mid-day when I received an email about Blinkx TV.

If you go to the Blinkx website, you'll see just two mentions of the global enterprise search company Autonomy. (The About page mentions that CEO Suranga Chandratillake worked there for three years. And in a December 2004 story, the Wall Street Journal reported, "Blinkx's TV search (www.blinkx.tv) uses technology licensed from Britain's Autonomy Corp. for analyzing audio tracks of video." But the relationship seems to go much deeper.) Meanwhile, on the Autonomy site, you'll see this page, which makes no mention of any association between Blinkx and Autonomy.

But James Whittaker of the United Kingdom emailed with this report:

As a reader of your blog I have noticed that you seem to be a fan of blinkx. I have also noticed that you have a certain passion for the truth, an open discussion and all things journalistic so I thought you may be interested in what I know about blinkx. As someone who has spent more time than is healthy in the search market I thought that you might like to know that the ‘tiny internet startup’ blinkx is in fact a front for global enterprise search company, stock market listed corporation and dotcom boom darling Autonomy. Whilst blinkx paint themselves as a small company, which is an oem of Autonomy, this is actually completely untrue. Blinkx actually IS Autonomy. The blinkx software has been entirely developed by the Autonomy development teams and cleverly marketed by Autonomy and more importantly is wholly maintained by Autonomy. Suranga Chandratillake and the blinkx brand are merely a clever front. I have had my suspicions for some time, which have been confirmed by an Autonomy employee with a loose tongue. I wasn’t going to do anything but I was forwarded an article in a magazine here in the UK from a marketing magazine (below in italics) and thought that there may be some interest:

Comms mix-up at Autonomy/Blinkx

On a internet we noticed Charlotte Herbert, whom we reported as Marketing Manager for search engine Blinkx last March, was listed as the press contact for software firm Autonomy.

We rang Herbert, who said she hadn’t worked for Blinkx, but that a certain Charlotte Fildes did.

But a message left for Herbert through Autonomy’s switchboard was quickly followed by a call to us from Fildes.

Fildes reassures our confused newsdesk she is not the same person as Herbert, who ‘probably earns more than me’. Glad to see though that communications between Autonomy and its independent business partner, Blinkx, are so seamless.

Maybe Autonomy is deceiving people because they are scared of a repeat of their first attempt at web search, called Kenjin which they released in 2000, saying it was going to be the biggest thing ever, before it was shot down in flames as it didn’t work.

To be honest me and my colleagues think blinkx is similarly flawed – it isn’t scalable (it only searches a very small index of video that Autonomy actually have signed agreements with such as the BBC etc and not the web at all – note how the original web index has disappeared from the site.) Should any major acquirer become involved (as Rupert Murdoch has been hinted at) they would find that the Autonomy infrastructure simply wouldn’t scale to search the web, as it has not been designed to do this. Other points of interest are how come blinkx claims to use ‘contextual search’ (see the white paper on the site) to find you the most relevant answer for the user, which is not true. For example by entering ‘Jackson’ I get results for Michael Jackson, Jackson Hole, Samuel L Jackson, and no option to refine this search even further. It is based merely on on dates and statistics.

Also blinkx claims that it is performing ‘speech to text searches.’ This is again lies. The speech to text is seemingly only performed on a couple of the sources that it is searching, and for the rest it is just performing bog-standard keyword search on terms around the videos (basically on the names of the video.)

I've spoken with Suranga and emailed him a few times over the past few months, and I couldn't let this pass, so I raised it at his session today. He responded by acknowledging, in general terms, the links between Autonomy and blinkx. He basically suggested that blinkx was a spinoff of Autonomy and that Autonomy developed the software, but that blinkx was now a completely separate company.

But it's an important point. Blinkx is constantly portayed as a small, independent company up against search engine giants like Yahoo! and Google. (Indeed, some of the banter at the session today was about underdog Blinkx up against the likes of Yahoo.) If its ties with Autonomy go much deeper -- that is, Autonomy created the software, does the marketing, and works out of the same offices -- then that's a relationship that the tech press needs to look into more closely.

Also, if Suranga would like to provide further details, he's free to email me or post a comment here.

Addendum on Oct. 10: James Whittaker just responded to my query about whether he was satisfied with Suranga's description of the relationship between blinkx and Autonomy. He wrote:

I would have to disagree with him saying blinkx is a spinoff - it is owned 100% by Autonmoy and in my opinion would be better described as a division of autonomy! What else would you call something that is 100% developed, owned and marketed by Autonomy? If you do a google search you can see they are confused about this because blinkx has been called an oem, a spinoff, absolutely nothing to do with autonomy and a whole heap of different things. Does the fact that it is in a different office consitutute it being a spinoff? i think it is a bit smoke and mirrors really.

Today at SearchEngineWatch, Gary Price sheds some more light on the blinkx-Autonomy relationship, including this response from Blinkx CEO Suranga Chandratillake:

Autonomy is not one of blinkx's shareholders. We [blinkx] enjoy a close relationship with them (Autonomy) but that's because (I was there for years (including as US CTO) and have lots of friends there, (b) we are an OEM customer of theirs, and so depend on them in a number of ways technologically. Under the terms of the OEM agreements, under certain circumstances, Autonomy does have an option to invest in blinkx.

In defense of citizen journalism

In Ziff Davis's Publish, Sean Gallagher comes to the defense of citizen journalism after the ill-informed attack on citizen journalism by ZDNet's David Coursey.

Community websites turns residents into journalists

Vermont Guardian: The i’s have it: Community websites turns residents into journalists. Part one of two.

A BBC reporter on citizens media

I interviewed the talented and extremely perceptive BBC technology reporter Jo Twist about the personal media revolution when we attended Gnomedex. Here's the 8-minute video interview in MPEG-4. (Ourmedia page | watch video)

Technorati tags: personal media, grassroots media, citizens media, citizen journalism, Gnomedex, BBC, HonorTagJournalism

Citizen power

I imagine Business Week Online will get a lot of grief from the blogosphere (and deservedly so) for labeling its new 10-part series on the leading lights of the blog world "The Blog Elite."

In part one, Jeff Jarvis of Buzzmachine.com says grassroots movements can devise disaster-relief networks that respond faster than the government. It's an mp3 podcast.

Spy Media: monetizing citizen shutterbugs

A new citizen journalism site launches Oct. 3 called Spy Media. From the site:

Whether you witness a tornado tearing its way through South Dakota, or a celebrity visiting a refugee camp in Eastern Europe, Spy Media is the place for you starting October 3rd. Spy Media will offer consumers and professional photographers around the world the opportunity to make money by capturing news photos. Spy Media is the first web site to offer an automated photo news commerce marketplace that makes selling and buying news photos simple for everyone.

When you see a major or local news event occur:
1. Capture a photo
2. Express what you saw
3. Upload it here

The San Jose outfit will announce more details later this month. It was bound to happen (a UK equivalent launched earlier this summer). Nothing wrong with having an intermediary to negotiate with big media companies on a citizen's behalf. Just as long as they realize that payouts will be a rare thing.

Meantime, my plans for the Grassroots Talent Agency have been put on hold while I focus on fund-raising for Ourmedia.org. Want to support citizens media? Let me know.

Cybil Weigel on amateur filmmaking

When I was down in LA a couple of weeks back, I interviewed my friend, the remarkably talented filmmaker Cybil Weigel, about her latest work in music video, grassroots filmmaking, and her Embeddedin.la project. It's seven minutes long, 25MB, in MPEG-4. (Ourmedia page | watch video)

Technorati tags: filmmaking, citizen journalism, personal media, HonorTagJournalism

Personal media and darknets

In this 4-minute video interview, Outhink CEO Dave Toole discusses the personal media revolution and his company's free, secure collaborative application called SpinXpress (free download for this nifty application that lets you exchange files securely). Interview conducted at the Podcast Hotel conference in Portland, Oregon, on Sept. 7, 2005. (Ourmedia page | watch video)

Technorati tags: darknet, citizens media

Voices from the eye of the storm

NowPublic is seeking to record the oral histories of Hurricane Katrina's survivors.

Eric Rice: 8 minutes about grassroots media

At the Podcast Hotel conference in Portland, Ore., last week, I cornered Eric Rice, co-founder and chief evangelist of Audioblog. In this 8-minute video interview, he holds forth on podcasting, videoblogging, what kind of setup you need, and other aspects of personal media. It's a bit dark because the sun was setting; live and learn. (Ourmedia page | MPEG-4 video)

Technorati tags: podcasting, Podcast Hotel, videoblogging, personal media, HonorTagJournalism

Emergent journalism at NowPublic

Last week I chatted with Corante's Stowe Boyd about the upcoming Social Architecture conference Corante will be sponsoring, and I mentioned the terrific job that NowPublic.com is doing (somewhat suprised to learn that Ourmedia, another Drupal site, has 10 times more members). Stowe, like I, was quite taken with the site and what it represents in the sea change that is shifting editorial control to the user. Excerpt from Stowe's post:

All in all, I am fascinated by what NowPublic represents, on many levels. As a student of citizen journalism, NowPublic represents a great example of the power that social architecture, well-implemented, can put into the hands of everyday people: the power to shape, channel, and make explicit the implicit dialogue that underlies news coverage. As someone tracking the adoption of social architecture, I believe that NowPublic demonstrates the key elements of all future, successful social media, in particular the primacy of emergent, bottom-up characterization by tags and the importance of aggregated social gestures -- in this case "votes". As the president of Corante, I have specific interest in the ways that social architecture principles -- like tag clouds and user ratings -- are likely to become a commonplace in the world of social media, and how quickly we at Corante should be adopting them for our own publishing.

New Orleans daily turns to citizen journalism

Editor & Publisher: New Orleans' NOLA.com Editor Says the Times-Picayune Newsroom is Feeling Post-Katrina 'Paradigm Shift' toward the Web and citizen journalism. Excerpt:

Much of NOLA.com's post-Katrina success has come from the way the community of New Orleans has utilized it. "We're a place where the community can tell its own story," Donley says. "I don't want to overuse the term 'citizen journalism,' but that's what's going on."

Citizens media gets richer

The Online Journalism Review just published my article about how citizens media sites are turning increasingly to rich media -- photos, video, audio -- supplied by users. It focuses on three pioneering citizens media sites: NowPublic, Bluffton Today and New West. Excerpt:

"We believe the real problem plaguing American newspapers and draining the lifeblood out of circulation and readership is that people are no longer primarily focused on their own communities," Steve Yelvington [of Morris Digital Works] says. "You're living in this cable TV world of the outside observer instead of acting as participants. We're trying to make people come out of their gates and become players. We want a participative culture to evolve." ...

"The big news organizations always say, we have journalism school grads and Pulitzer Prize winners and people trained in the craft. Fair enough, but you have two people on the story, and we already may have 20 or 50. What happens when we have 2,000 people covering that story? There will come a point where they can't compete," Michael Tippett of NowPublic says.

MSNBC's citizen journalists reports

Katrina coverage at MSNBC.com: Citizen Journalists Report. Here's a screenshot of the page for posterity.

Meantime, Wikipedia puts Hurricane Katrina in context.

Another stab at citizen journalism

I haven't seen a mention of this at Poynter's E-Media Tidbits or elswhere, so I'll pass along word that the Columbia Record launched the latest online newspaper version of a citizen journalism/community site on Thursday.

From the site of the State newspaper:

Columbia Record reborn as blog

The Columbia Record, which ceased publication in 1988, returns today as a Web site designed to let citizens report directly on community news. ...

OK, but they've got a long way to go to catch up to sites like the Bluffton (S.C.) Today.

Flickr could use an editor

5,469 user-submitted photos of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina so far -- but I wish Flickr had just one editor to surface the best ones.

Technorati tags: Katrina, Hurricane Katrina, Flickr

Video interview with Sarah Lane of G4 TV

One week ago today I appeared on the G4 cable TV network in Los Angeles to talk about "Darknet." Never one to let an opportunity slip by, I brought my camcorder and interviewed Sarah Lane, co-host of the cool tech culture program Attack of the Show (it airs live weekdays at 4 pm PT).

In the piece, Sarah discusses the show, audience participation, the SarahCam — and her appearance in the all-time No. 2 video on Ourmedia. Take a look.

Technorati tags: Sarah Lane, G4 TV

Kaye's Hurricane Katrina Blog

Kaye Trammell, another friend and blogger who's an assistant professor in mass communication at Louisiana State University in in Baton Rouge, La., launched the instantly popular Kaye's Hurricane Katrina Blog to serve as a resource to help people cope with the tragedy.

Kaye's instant blog is a wonderful example of citizen journalism and the kind of personal media service that millions of us are coming to depend on. Thank you, Kaye. Here is some blogosphere discussion about Kaye's Hurricane Blog.

Citizen journalism storm chasers

kpaul mallasch pointed out this video compendium of citizen journalism storm chasers -- people who chronicled the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. It's a Windows Media Video file from Hurricanelivenet.com.

As the narrator says, "Words cannot describe what you're about to see."

Footage of Hurricane Katrina's aftermath

On Ourmedia, Joshua Szentpaly offers some home video footage of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in Florida.

Citizen writers 'prefer offbeat stories'

South Africa's Journalism.co.za:

A recent experiment with a "citizen journalism" site - which combines journalism's rigorous vetting process with the freewheeling nature of blogging - has yielded several new insights, writes Wendy Davis on Online Media Daily.

Among a recent study's conclusions is that consumers who participate in "citizen journalism" sites, also known as "open source" publications, don't want to replicate their more traditional counterparts.

Why everybody is a reporter

Broadcasting Cable: Why Everybody Is a Reporter. Citizen Journalists Go Mainstream.

Paul Chenoweth never leaves home without his digital camera or video camera. A graduate student at Belmont University in Nashville, Tenn., he shoots video and photos around town and posts them to his technology-themed Weblog, Chasing the Dragon’s Tail. Chenoweth is particularly proud of a piece he filmed recently in Rio das Pedras, Brazil, where a group from the local Brentwood Baptist Church helped construct a new church.

Chenoweth is not a reporter or cameraman but a one-man news crew among a growing number of citizen journalists now exploiting the efficiency of cheap, portable gadgets and the instant speed and spread of publishing on the Internet, particularly on Web logs (or blogs). It’s vox populi meets reality TV. ...

In Nashville, WKRN is going a step further. The station not only is soliciting video but is also training locals. In July, it hosted 20 area bloggers, including Chenoweth, for a crash course in video production. At the workshop, station photographers gave instruction on basic videography and critiqued the students’ work. “The biggest problem is that people shoot great images but it’s shaky and they zoom in and out,” says Terry Heaton, a TV-news consultant working with WKRN. “If they find themselves in a spot-news situation, we want it to be usable.” ...

The BBC is incorporating local contributors into its newsrooms. Under a new pilot program, the broadcaster is launching 60 stations and plans to have community reporters generate one-fifth of the content. Michael Rosenblum, a former CBS news executive and news consultant, is working with the BBC on the effort and recommends that American news outlets pursue a similar tactic: “Technical training and baseline journalism training are critical.”

kpaul on citizen journalism

kpaul mallasch of the Muncie Free Press appears on Muncie, Indiana's The Good Beer Show and talks about citizen journalism (MP3).

1,200 sign up for citizen journalism agency in UK

UK's Press Gazette: ‘Citizen journalism’ agency Scoopt signs up 1,200 snappers.

The power of so-called "citizen journalism" was underlined when a new agency for amateur mobile phone photographers attracted 1,200 members in the space of just a week.

Scoopt now has members in 35 countries and is ready to syndicate their work to newspapers and magazines in exchange for a 50/50 cut. Amateur photographers can sign up and submit their images at www.scoopt.com. ...

I'll soon be announcing a new undertaking called the Grassroots Talent Agency with a different approach -- representing individuals as part of a broader community (videobloggers, podcasters, etc.) rather than targeting mobile phone photographers taking citizen journalism pictures.

Digital Storytelling Fest in 2 months

The Digital Storytelling Festival is two months away! I was a speaker last year in Sedona, and this year I'll be moderating a panel on Digital Culture and Storytelling. The fest is moving to San Francisco this year, and it's one of the best assemblages of creative grassroots media people you'll find anywhere. Details here.

Citizens do media for themselves

The wonderful Jo Twist, technology reporter for BBC News (whom I met at Gnomedex), has a writeup about Ourmedia: Citizens do media for themselves. Excerpt:

There is a big transition happening between traditional, top down media and bubble-up, grassroots, emerging media," says JD Lasica, co-founder of Ourmedia.org, a finalist in the e-inclusion category of the UN's World Summit Awards.

"We want to help that bottom part emerge and flourish. Technology is easier to use and cheap enough to put into the hands of almost anybody with a modest budget."

Part of the reason is the emergence of easy-to-use, multimedia tools for self-publishing, such as blogs or podcasts.

'Breathtakingly creative'

JD Lasica's Ourmedia is a place online where anyone can publish their own digital home movie, music, photos, or even plain old blog for free.

The "free" bit comes courtesy of support from The Internet Archive project. Its mission has been to document and keep a slice of digital life of how the web has evolved over the last decade.

It's a godsend for people who cannot afford spiralling bandwidth costs. JD hopes to take advantage of peer-to-peer file-sharing distribution in the future.

Since its inception in March 2005, not-for-profit Ourmedia has attracted more than 31,000 international members, and now plays host to 22,000 separate pieces of media, from travelogs to tastes of family life.

More than half is video, with video blogs - or vlogs - proving highly popular. Some of it is of "breathtakingly creative", says JD.

It encourages people to upload and publish the content using Creative Commons licences, which means they can decide the terms of use for their material. It also encourages a "remix culture".

"Right now our lead video is blind banjo player in Tibet someone had filmed. This is what we were hoping for; to bring us all into one media village.

"It shows that creativity and entertainment does not have to come from Hollywood and big media, but that we all have this innate talent to tell stories and to entertain each other," says JD. ...

6 videos from BlogHer

I was under the weather last week; otherwise, I would have had these up sooner. Here are the last seven short video interviews I conducted at BlogHer 10 days ago. These are all worth a look. (By the way, 83 percent of the attendees were women):

Halley Suitt, the charming, funny and wise proprietor of Halley's Comment (among many other blogs), talks about building your blog chops to get noticed in the blogosphere. (Ourmedia media | play video)

Jay Rosen of PressThink discusses the two main takeaways he got out of BlogHer: the conference as an affirmation of the increasing importance of blogs among women, and the way many bloggers are dealing with concerns about security. (Ourmedia page | play video)

Lauren Gelman, associate director of the Center for Internet & Society at Stanford Law School, gives a brief summary of what bloggers need to know about how the law can affect them and their blogs. (Ourmedia page | play video)

Jarah Euston talks about her year-and-a-half-old citizen journalism site, FresnoFamous. (Ourmedia page | play video)

Courtney Lowery, managing editor of New West, talks about citizen journalism and BlogHer. (Ourmedia page | play video)

Jory des Jardins, who began blogging a year ago, talks about how she and her two co-founders pulled together BlogHer. (Ourmedia page | play video)

Here are the five BlogHer videos I posted earlier:

Mabel Yee on the 'echo boomers' effect (Ourmedia page | play video)

Heather Armstrong (Dooce): Getting naked on the Internet (Ourmedia page | play video)

Heather Schlegel of kwikreel points out that women bloggers are not hard to find. (Ourmedia page | play video)

Arieanna Foley of Blogaholics Consulting discusses some of the ethical and privacy issues raised at the BlogHer session on citizen journalism. (Ourmedia page | play video)

Lisa Stone discusses the BlogHer conference she co-organized. (Ourmedia page | play video)

Subscribe to my media feed here.

Technorati tags: BlogHer, BlogHerCon

Should news organizations pay for citizen journalism?

At BlogHer on Saturday, Chris Nolan chastized news organizations that open up their websites to users' contributions, but then neglect to pay for it.

Today, Pete Clifton, editor of the BBC News website, takes some flak for not paying for the citizen journalism that users contributed after the London bombings.

Wrote Anthony Singer, from Brussels: "I think the real issue here is that, given that this material has proved to be such a mainstay of coverage of recent major events, why aren't these people being paid for them?"

Clifton answers in part:

People can send us images if they want to, and our experience recently has been that the vast majority of readers simply wanted to share their images and had no interest in making money. Others were very clear that the images were only to be used by us.

We were also besieged by calls from national newspapers asking to use the images. We got in touch with the amateur photographers and asked if they wanted to speak to the newspapers. If they did, we gave them the paper's details and they were free to get on with it. As a public service organisation we do not syndicate for commercial gain - it was not a money-making exercise for us.

If people prefer to look around and see if there is money to be made elsewhere, that's fine by me. We are very clear about the rights we have if images are sent to us at the bottom of this page and the photographer retains the copyright. If people want to be part of the BBC News coverage, and they accept the rights we outline, that is equally fine.

I may be misreading the spirit of all this, but so far it seems that our readers are keen to be involved and to contribute to our newsgathering if they can, and money is not the driver. I don't intend to set up a fund from licence fee payers' money to turn this into a commercial exercise. ...

I'm sympathetic to Chris's POV, but I also see Clifton's. If the BBC assigned a freelancer a job to shoot a photo, that's one thing, but if hundreds of amateur photogs voluntarily send in their photos to the BBC for publication after a newsworthy event, that's quite another.

Perhaps some sort of scale should be in place, though, compensating citizen journalists with a set sum if their image appears on the BBC's front page or section fronts.

One paper opens up

The American Journalism Review has a Q&A with John Robinson, editor of North Carolina's Greensboro News & Record, who talks about his decision to plunge his newsroom headlong into participatory journalism.

Yahoo bets on citizen journalism

At WebProNews.com, Steve Rubel has this: Yahoo Bets On Citizen Journalism.

That's the same signal I'm getting from Yahoo! I was happy to hear last weekend that my old friend and colleague, the media-wise Elizabeth Osder (above), landed a job at Yahoo! News, reporting to former WSJ.com pioneer Neil Budde.

Writes Steve: "I think you're going to see them turn to citizen media and blogs to continue doing what Yahoo does best, differentiating through human aggregation."

We hope to forge further alliances between Ourmedia and Yahoo!, and Elizabeth is smart enough to help us figure out how to do that.

Turning Brits into press photographers

Freelance UK takes a look at a new citizen journalism rights agency called Scoopt.

Brits owning a cameraphone can now make the front pages of national newspapers thanks to Scoopt – the UK’S first ‘citizen journalism agency’ that lets “virtually anybody” sell photos to the press on the same terms as a professional.

Enabled by MMS and mobile e-mail technology, the agency lets phone camera users send in their clips of “any scene” for potential publication in the mainstream media.

It claims to be the first organisation of its kind in the world, and intends to bridge the divide between the roaming British public, and the picture desk of national publications.

According to its founder, Kyle MacRae, the inspiration for Scoopt emerged from the London bombings of July 7 and 21, when images recorded by the general public captured the horror of events as they unfolded.

“Citizen journalism is here to stay and set to change the nature of news,” said MacRae. ...

Prologue to an NPR interview on citizen journalism

Vin Crosbie and OJR's Mark Glaser talk on NPR about citizen journalism. (While I'm a big fan of both Vin and Mark, maybe next time NPR might want to talk with some folks who are actually doing citizen journalism.) Here's Vin's thoughtful prologue to the interview.

The Echo Chamber Project

Now showing on Ourmedia: Echo Chamber Project Vlog Episode 1. This is the first video blog entry about an open source, investigative documentary about how the television news became an uncritical echo chamber to the countdown toward war in Iraq -- and proposed tools for collaborative journalism that can provide some solutions. Featuring: Jay Rosen, Dan Gillmor, Doc Searls, Jonathan Landay, Pamela Hess, Bill Plante, Tom Rosenstiel, Halley Suitt, Marilyn Schlitz and Kent Bye, among others.

As filmmaker Bye says, "Everybody knows the media's screwed up. I wanted to do something about it." He's releasing this open source video under a Creative Commons license, allowing others to remix it. Bravo.

Journalism: It's not just for journalists anymore

Blogger and documentary filmmaker Rory O'Connor at MediaChannel.com: Journalism: It's Not Just for Journalists Anymore. Excerpt:

In America a growing number of citizen-journalists are refugees from the mainstream who have abandoned the media system that once nurtured them. Journalists like Dan Gillmor, until recently a renowned technology writer for the San Jose Mercury-News, and Rebecca McKinnon of CNN have joined the ranks of those seeking a better way of reporting through less hierarchical “distributed information systems.” Gillmor, whose recent book “We The Media” detailed the phenomenon, quit his newspaper column to form Grassroots Media Inc.

Others such as Online Journalism Review columnist J.D. Lasica are trying to take things further. Lasica, whose book “Darknet: Hollywood’s War Against the Digital Generation” focuses on the challenges faced by citizen’s media, is one of the creators of Ourmedia.org, which bills itself as “the Global Home for Grassroots Media.” Ourmedia is a “global community and learning center” dedicated to the idea that compelling grassroots endeavors deserve a wider audience. To facilitate that, it promises to host your media forever — everything from “vlogs” (video blogs) to podcasts to documentary journalism to homemade political ads — all for free.

What does it all mean? Simply this: Journalism is again becoming a democratic medium. “No one owns journalism,” blogger/pundit Jeff Jarvis exults on Buzzmachine. “It is not an official act, a certified act, an expert act, a proprietary act. Anyone can do journalism. Everyone does. Some do it better than others, of course. But everyone does it.” And Jacob Weisberg points out on Slate.com, “If you don’t like this raucous clamor emanating from cyberspace, you’re not really comfortable with democracy.”

'Let's forget about citizen journalism'

Neil McIntosh, an editor at the UK's Guardian, writes: Let's forget about citizen journalism.

McIntosh cites approvingly this comment on another blog: "Weblogs and flickr can complement traditional journalism, but they can't supplant it."

Well, that's absolutely true. And it's what Dan Gillmor and other proponents of the idea have been saying for years and years. Which doesn't in the least undercut the argument that citizens have begun picking up today's gadgets to serve as eyewitnesses to the news and thus to perform real journalism.

Let's not set up a straw man -- citizen journalists overthrowing the professionals -- only to knock him down, although I must admit that the fretting of the old guard about the emerging new order is entertaining to watch.

After tossing darts at Ohmynews and making the mistake of calling the emerging wave of personal publishing "me media" (it's about we, not me), McIntosh starts making sense. He talks about citizen storytelling as a valuable communication form, one that all of us can participate in.

Thanks. Agreed. But we'll dabble in journalism, too, if you don't mind.

More citizen journalism sites spring up

The Washington Post (via Boston.com) has a story on how more citizen journalism sites are springing up, including Your Mom Online.

Citizen journalism, round two

Is the second round of bombings in London reason to doubt the efficacy of citizen journalism? Maybe, says Robert MacMillan of the Washington Post.

The darker side of citizen journalism

Over at Britain's journalism.co.uk, Jemima Kiss weighs in on The darker side of citizen journalism.

Eleanor's first stint as a citizen journalist

I've been doing a bit of citizen journalism lately (Dan Gillmor's trying to shake out the Drupal bugs at Bayosphere; so far, my video there hasn't shown up). Today, the tables are turned.

Citizen journalist Eleanor Kruszewski, an incredibly smart technologist who just began a new job at Yahoo!, interviewed me at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco during the Supernova conference on June 22, 2005 about my new book "Darknet: Hollywood's War Against the Digital Generation." Eleanor actually read the book, agreed to conduct an interview on the spot, and, most important, we had some fun during the 30-minute sit-down.

Here are the two versions on Ourmedia: the somewhat higher-quality 130MB QuickTime video and the faster-download 85MB MPEG-4 video. It might be easier to download one of these to your hard drive rather than clicking it to play.

BBC's Action Network execs come to SF

I spent this afternoon at an interesting meeting at the offices of Public Access Media Center in San Francisco, meeting with a half-dozen folks involved with grassroots media.

The guests of honor were Martin Vogel, director of British Broadcasting Corp.'s Action Network (formerly iCan), and his colleague Anno Mitchell, who heads up Action Network's strategy and development. (They're pictured above.)

Ellison Horne of Celebrating Solutions hosted the event, which was attended by Zane Blaney, executive director of Access SF, Elizabeth Lee, co-founder and editor-in-chief of iTalkNews.com, Brian Shields of KRON4-TV and a few others.

Action Network falls under the BBC umbrella, but it's a relatively independent effort — a community site to "get things done in civic life," as Vogel put it. It's not a discussion forum, it's a community space where people share experiences and advice. About 170,000 people have registered, with about 10 percent of them active members. The site offers tips on, say, how to give a press conference, or how to write to your MP (legislator).

In the debate over whether news organizations ought to edit citizens media submissions or let them speak freely, Action Network comes down squarely on the side I've staked out.

Vogel recounted that early in the venture, the nanny-like guardians of the status quo inside the BBC worried, "What is people posted things that were untrue or biased?" But Action Network took a hands-off policy, letting the users sort it out. "You have to rely on the wisdom of the community," Vogel told us. Added Mitchell: No one is banned from the site based on who you are -- a neo-Nazi is free to post. "We don't care who you are. We care about what you're doing."

Action Network is an important, praiseworthy effort to engage people in public life, and they hope to export it to other countries. Please check it out.

Citizen paparazzi?

Interesting take by Mark Glaser at the Online Journalism Review: Did London bombings turn citizen journalists into citizen paparazzi?

Mark looks at the way some people at the scene of the London bombings were cruelly jockeying for the most gruesome photos on their cameraphones. While some of the first videos and photos from the scene came from survivors and passersby, and media outlets such as the BBC, MSNBC.com, Wikipedia and others relied on fantastic citizen journalism, what happens when the proliferation of cameraphones and videophones turns into ugly invasions of privacy?

Good question. Excerpt:

"It's like the behavior when you see a car wreck on the highway. People stop and gawk. There's a sense that this is some sort of animal behavior that's not entirely compassionate or responsible. The difference here is that people are gawking with this intermediary device. I'm not sure if the people who did this were saying 'I've got to blog this and get it to the BBC!' But when everyone is carrying around these devices and we get used to this intuitive response of just snapping what we see that's of interest -- as surreal and grotesque as that scenario sounds, I imagine we will see a lot more of that." -- Xeni Jardin, co-editor, BoingBoing.net

Brian Braiker offers a different take in Newsweek: History's First New Draft.

What may be most remarkable about the instant proliferation of snapshots by average Joes is how unremarkable it was viewed by the blogging community, says technology journalist Xeni Jardin. Of course cell-phone images proliferated; of course citizen journalism played a significant role in the day’s terrible events. More interesting than widely circulating cell-phone pictures, she says, is the fact that Thursday may have been the first time cell-phone video footage was used so extensively by high-profile media outlets. ...

But perhaps the biggest story on Thursday was Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia that Internet users around the world freely add to and edit. Yesterday’s entry on the London bombings was amended, edited and updated by hundreds of readers no fewer than 2,800 times throughout the day. “It’s very different than what you get on CNN,” explains Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales. “You get background. On TV you see images of blown-up buses, but you don’t have information on the different tube stops.” The entry has photographs, detailed timelines, contact numbers, a complete translated statement by the jihadist group claiming responsibility for the attacks and links to other Wikipedia entries offering context on everything from the London Underground to British Summer Time.

My citizen journalism reports on Bayosphere

I spent all day down in San Jose at IBM's Almaden Research Center doing citizen journalism reports for Dan Gillmor and his Bayosphere site. Here are my two writeups:

The future of portable computing

New Paradigms, part 2

It was a fun, enervating and educational day -- but also a bit exhausting.

Bayosphere is a Drupal site, and I apparently posted the first video they've ever run. Unfortunately, the administrator under-the-hood stuff is very geeky, so Dan is scrambling to rework the code so the site supports QuickTime movies.

Now we're all journalists

The Age (Australia) has an article on the London bombings with the headline: Now we're all journalists.

Indeed.