Maka-Maka is Google's Answer to Face Book After Failure to Acquire It

Google may have lost the bidding war to invest in Facebook, but it is preparing its own major assault on the social networking scene. It goes by the codename “Maka-Maka” inside the Googleplex (or, perhaps, “Makamaka”).

Maka-Maka encompasses Google’s grand plan to build a social layer across all of its applications. Some details about Maka-Maka have already leaked out, particularly how Google plans to use the feed engine that powers Google Reader (known internally as Reactor) to create “activity streams” for other applications akin to Facebook’s news and mini feeds. But Maka-Maka goes well beyond that.

Maka-Maka will be unveiled in stages. The first peek will come in early November. As we reported previously, Google is planning to “out open” Facebook with a new set of APIs that developers can use to build apps for its social network Orkut, iGoogle, and eventually other applications as well. To recap what we wrote earlier:

Google will announce a new set of APIs on November 5 that will allow developers to leverage Google’s social graph data. They’ll start with Orkut and iGoogle (Google’s personalized home page), and expand from there to include Gmail, Google Talk and other Google services over time.

On November 5 we’ll likely see third party iGoogle gadgets that leverage Orkut’s social graph information - the most basic implementation of what Google is planning. . . . Google is also considering allowing third parties to join the party at the other end of the platform - meaning other social networks (think Bebo, Friendster, Twitter, Digg and thousands of others) to give access to their user data to developers through those same APIs.

We’ve now learned that the original November 5 date Google is shooting for may be delayed. “They need more time,” says one outside developer working on the project. “It is a challenge for them,” confirms another. Still, the expectation right now is that some announcement will be made the week of November 5 (perhaps the 8th or the 9th), and will most likely be limited to Google’s existing social network, Orkut. The APIs will be announced, along with as many as 50 partners that have created applications on top of the APIs. (Most of the top app developers for Facebook will be included—think RockYou, Slide, iLike, SocialMedia, etc.—and a few new ones as well).

All eyes will be on Google, but don’t expect anything too earth-shattering straight out of the gate. Many of these apps will be copycats of what is already available on Facebook (just as the very first apps on Facebook were ported over from other parts of the Web). This first go-round, Google will just be trying to match Facebook’s ante. Remember, even on Facebook, the best apps didn’t emerge on Day One. And now Facebook has a six-month lead.

The bigger challenge for Google in the U.S. is Orkut itself. While there may be 24.6 million monthly visitors to Orkut worldwide, only 500,000 of those are here in the U.S., according to comScore. Cool social apps aren’t much good if none of your friends use them.

That’s where the bigger plan for Maka-Maka comes into play. Maka-Maka is very strategic for Google. Responsibility for it goes all the way up to Jeff Huber, the VP of engineering in charge of all of Google’s apps. Huber is on record as saying that the way Google plans to compete is by using the Web as the platform instead of trying to lock developers into Google’s own platform. One way it will do that from the start is by creating two-way APIs so that any app created for Google can be taken to other Websites. (Whether this will extend to actual user profile data within Orkut or elsewhere inside Google remains to be seen because of privacy issues, but the apps themselves will be portable). And data from other social sites will be able to be imported into Google’s social apps as well.

The bigger vision is to combine all of Google’s apps and services through Maka-Maka. Google already has so much data on you, depending on how many Google apps you already use. It just needs to bring everything together. Your contacts are in Gmail. Your feeds are in Google Reader. Your IM buddy list is in Gtalk. Your upcoming events are in Google Calendar. Your widgets are in iGoogle. And don’t forget about your search history. Overtime, Google will connect all of these together in different ways, along with data about you from other social services across the Web, and give developers access to the social layer tying all of these apps together underneath. The real killer app for Google is not to turn Orkut into a Facebook clone. It is to turn every Google app into a social application without you even noticing that you’ve joined yet another social network

Murdoch, a Folk Hero in Silicon Eyes on Future of Media

At the Web 2.0 Summit a few weeks ago, MySpace held an after-party at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. With a guest list of Silicon Valley luminaries and a party room redone in white — carpet, chairs, table and yes, mostly people — it was a very post-modern indication that MySpace, the social network owned by the News Corporation, was ready to engage with its brethren to the north by opening an office here.

Half an hour into the party, there was a ripple of excitement, and people started murmuring and pointing toward the door. When the crowd parted, I expected to see Mark Zuckerberg, the young overlord of Facebook, or Steve Ballmer, the battle-hardened Microsoft veteran. Then again, this is a MySpace party, so maybe Britney Spears or Lindsay Lohan? Instead, it was Rupert Murdoch — old school, old media, and at 76, just plain old.

From the reaction of the crowd, it might as well have been Lindsay Lohan. He was overwhelmed by an immediate onrush of hospitality as the geekerati lined up to get a word with him.

Back East, the elites generally regard Mr. Murdoch, most especially with his purchase of The Wall Street Journal, as if a particularly unpleasant coup was under way. He is treated much the way he is in London (where he has owned The Times for more than 20 years), as an immigrant, a man of suspect values and provenance, even though he runs a $70 billion diversified media company.

In the United States, Mr. Murdoch’s appeal is thought to work in the heartland, where Fox News takes aim. But on the left coast, Mr. Murdoch is truly among friends. The attendees at the Web 2.0 conference know him as the ultimate market timer, the guy who swooped in out of nowhere and bought MySpace for $580 million two years ago, before its audience doubled and before social networks became the platform of the future. And this was before Facebook got a valuation of $15 billion via an investment from Microsoft on Wednesday.

“This is not just another rich guy — there are a lot of those around here,” said John Battelle, one of the summit’s hosts. “He built News Corp. from not much, with his own two hands, and this is a room full of entrepreneurs. The other thing this room respects is intelligence, and they can tell he is smart, really smart, not just from what he says, but what he has done with MySpace.”

The same characteristics that make Mr. Murdoch a nonmember of the club in the East — a lack of correctness and, occasionally, business civility — make him something of a folk hero in the context of the new economy, which is peopled by insurgents who see him as a fellow pirate, even though he already captains a giant ship.

In a joint interview on the stage of the summit with Chris DeWolfe, a MySpace founder, earlier that night, Mr. Murdoch brandished both humility and hubris. He said that the folks at News Corporation were “trainees” when it came to new media but added elsewhere that CNBC was “half dead,” that MySpace was probably worth 30 times what he had paid for it, and he all but licked his lips when he responded to a question about whether he would like to use The Wall Street Journal to “kill” The New York Times.

“That would be nice,” he said.

At a conference where most chief executives proceeded with euphemistic elegance — Mr. Ballmer stonewalled questions about negotiating for a piece of Facebook even as the deal was being consummated and gave a long answer to a question about Google without mentioning its name — Mr. Murdoch answered almost every question put to him, often naming names and frankly laying out his ambitions. He was a hit in the room and the belle of the ball afterward.

And in a move that plays like raw meat in this lion’s cage of developers, Mr. DeWolfe and Mr. Murdoch said MySpace would open the platform to applications or so-called widgets from outside programmers, a decision Facebook made in the spring.

“He is candid and he is aggressive,” said Jason Calacanis, who sold his start-up, Weblogs, to AOL for a reported $25 million two years ago. “He said during the discussion that he basically wanted to crush The New York Times and crush CNBC. When do you hear somebody in that kind of position being so candid?”

It’s not just Mr. Murdoch’s aggression the audience responds to. In a speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors in 2005, Mr. Murdoch suggested that newspapers were “immigrants” to the digital space who needed to learn from “natives.”

He seems to have gotten the hang of things pretty quickly, telling the Web 2.0 crowd, “No one delivers huge audiences anymore.” One of the conference’s themes was that advertisers, who will finance things as diverse as cellphones and desktop applications, are no longer after just eyeballs, but consumer behavior, too.

For a so-called old media company, News Corporation has done significant work to move from taking orders for mass inventory to offering focused buys with specific audience characteristics. Mr. Murdoch recently bragged at a conference about being able to deliver, say, all the optometrists in the London area — which is very Web 2.0, as they say.

I waited my turn in the queue at the party, and Mr. DeWolfe, who had just signed a deal for two more years with News Corporation, made an introduction. Amid the throbbing house music, Mr. Murdoch and I chatted briefly about his purchase of The Wall Street Journal, which will be completed in December.

Perhaps in an effort to keep cognitive dissonance at bay, the journalists I know at The Journal have changed posture from doomsaying to a growing curiosity about what it will be like to work for someone who actually wants to invest in newspapers. I mentioned as much to Mr. Murdoch. “That is the sense I am getting,” he said.

I also joked that he might have to cut a lot of checks to compete with my employer for national and international news, adding that this has been a tough business of late. But he insisted there was “plenty of room for growth” in the newspapers.

“We can’t wait to get started,” he said.

Others can’t wait either. “Who isn’t interested in seeing some other newspaper people who want to fight and do bold things?” Mr. Calacanis observed. “Murdoch is someone who is actually investing in newspapers. Even you have to be rooting for that.”

Source :nytimes.com

Citizen Journalists of India is eforts to educate citizens on Citizen Media In India

Citizen journalists of india blog is not a simple blog but is is the online white board for citizens who want to be the citizen journalist. But does not know how to start and where to start. So please be the part of citizen journalists of India movement and get inform and spread information on citizen media in india.

An citizen Journalist of India

Citizen journalism vs. professional journalism

Citizen journalism, a concept at which mainstream news organizations used to turn up their nose, has been documented and praised enough that they are now paying attention. But do professional journalists and news organizations really have anything to be worried about?

Professional amateurs

The popular vlog Rocketboom did an interview with XML guru Dave Winer in which he gave his take on journalism: "Amateur is not below professional. It's just another way of doing (media). The root of the word amateur is love, and someone who does something for love is an amateur. Someone who does something to pay the bills is a professional. The amateurs have [more integrity than] the professionals. If you're an amateur you have less conflict of interest and less reason not to tell your truth than if you have to pay the bills and please somebody else."

What Dave has to say may be true in theory, but in reality it doesn’t fly. Amateurs can’t really dedicate themselves to performing thorough journalism because the fact is they have to pay the bills doing their own profession. After that job is done, they can entertain themselves however they would like and many in recent years have taken up reading, writing and commenting in the blogosphere.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with this, but it is exactly this practice that is today hailed as “Citizen Journalism” which really has nothing at all to do with journalism.

Think quickly about the top political blogs on the Internet. They have massive followings, enough to allow their authors to support themselves and then some. But do they do any real journalism? No. They are just commentary on what’s in the Mainstream Media. Educated and insightful commentary, no doubt. Often better than MSM editorials. But just commentary.

Amy Gahran at Poynter picked up the Winer interview and had her own take: “I think this basic question -- what constitutes integrity in media? -- cuts straight to the heart of the discomfort that many traditional journalists experience when they consider the booming field of citizen journalism and grassroots media. We journalists generally prize integrity. Certain core values and practices of traditional (professional) journalism -- such as objectivity, accuracy, corroboration, avoiding conflicts of interest, transparency, editorial oversight, etc. -- exist in order to enhance our integrity and thus earn the audience's trust.” She later declares, “amateurs can learn to produce high-quality news content.”

Let’s dissect Gahran:

First of all, the “field of citizen journalism and grassroots media” is not “booming.” Who some would consider to be the father of citizen journalism, Dan Gillmor, is changing course after his first attempt as an independent citizen journalism because he did not receive the rate of participation for which he had hoped and he was not able to make it profitable (see “paying the bills”).

Backfence, the start-up citJ project which is taking over Gillmor’s blog has seen tepid results at best.
Even Wikipedia, which isn’t particularly citizen journalism but runs along the same lines, doesn’t produce the kind of dedication one might expect: the Economist (print edition) is the latest to point out that of Wikipedia's millions of users, there is a core of “a few hundred committed volunteers” editing entries.

Secondly, amateurs could definitely “learn to produce high-quality news content,” as Gahran insists. But what’s the point of investing all of that time and money unless they wanted to become actual journalists from which they could draw the paycheck to pay the bills?

And of course the principles of journalism that she lists have little to nothing to do with amateur citizen journalists (bloggers):

• Objectivity: blogs are inherently biased
• Accuracy: bloggers don’t really report so what’s there to be accurate about?
• Corroboration: blogging and commenting are one-man shows…
• Avoid conflicts of interest: …one-man shows with a personal motive.
• Transparency: Bloggers are pretty good at this by linking to background material, but some still post and comment anonymously.
• Editorial oversight: against the whole concept of a blog
  

So it looks like not only do amateurs have a long way to go to do real journalism, but that if they are ever to do real journalism, they’ll no longer be amateurs. Professionals have nothing to worry about.

Source: Poynter

How bloggers can become good journalists

10 journalism tips for bloggers, podcasters and other e-writers

By Spencer Critchley

Blogs, podcasts and e-newsletters make it easy for anyone to be a journalist. But just as the debut of desktop publishing led to some very ugly documents, these newer tools are spawning some very sloppy journalism, which does no good for the reputation of participatory media. Here are some tips on how good journalists do useful work:

1. Respect the value of people's time.

Anyone who publishes is making a deal with their audience: This will be more rewarding than real life would have been. Know your point, get to it quickly, and make your content dense with value. We live in a narcissistic age, and free access to world-wide distribution is not helping. We all need to remember: It's not fascinating just because I said it.

2. Have a strong focus, and relate everything to it.

A good focus is a simple idea that people care about--in a newspaper story, it's the lede. It's a hard discipline to learn, but you can really only get one good idea across in any one article or program--everything else either supports and develops that idea, or it conflicts with and confuses it. Think of Beethoven's Fifth as a model: the whole first movement is based on four notes.

3. Look for the heat in your subject.

Appeal is emotional, not intellectual. Even theoretical physicists get excited more by primal motives like pursuit, struggle and triumph than they do by abstract concepts. This primacy of emotion is routinely abused in mass media--hence the prevalence of sex, death, greed and vanity--but you don't have to go that far, just look for what people will really care about in your content and use that as a guide. For example, this headline and first sentence draws you into a recent Scientific American blog about a primitive member of the genus Hibbertopterus:

Supersized Water Scorpion Strolled Scotland's Shores
The other day I had an unfortunate run-in with a cockroach in my apartment...

4. Whatever your subject, write about people, physical objects and actions.

These are what engage the imagination and the emotions, and concentrating on them has the added benefit of aiding clarity (see next item). Avoid abstractions, generalities, jargon and cliches.

5. Use plain speech, and talk like a real person.

Too many people have been trained to use big words and complicated sentences to build an edifice to hide behind. If a simpler word can be used with no loss of meaning, use it. Same goes for fewer words vs. more. If you can't say it plainly, that may mean you don't understand it well enough yet.

6. Avoid adjectives and adverbs wherever possible.

They seldom have any impact. It works much better to find the right nouns and verbs. As Mark Twain said, "If you find an adjective, kill it." Try it, you'll be amazed at the difference it makes. Compare "The widow Douglas was sanctimonious and hypocritical" with the way Twain wrote it in The Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn:

The widow she cried over me, and called me a poor lost lamb, and she called me a lot of other names, too, but she never meant no harm by it.

7. Opinions are not facts, even your opinions.

Opinions make personal journalism lively. But be sure you know the difference between opinion and fact, and make it clear to your readers as well. It's all too easy to jump to conclusions when you're predisposed to believe something. This is the source of deluges of unreliable information on the Web.

8. Identify your sources.

Just asserting a fact is unpersuasive -- even in ALL CAPS with lots of exclamation marks!!! -- and it contributes nothing to a discussion. Your audience needs to know where this information comes from, so they can judge its credibility.

9. Identify interests.

If someone appears to be an expert, that's one thing. If they also have a financial or other interest in you believing their version of reality, that's another. Be skeptical. Good journalists have to assume that everyone, even people they like, may be lying.

10. Fact-check.

Reputable pro media outlets use professional fact checkers, and they still manage to make mistakes frequently. People may be citing you as a source, so try to get the details right. Related to this: spell-check!

Citizen journalism questions and answers

What is citizen journalism?

It is community news and information shared online and/or in print, with contributions written by users and readers. It can be any combination of text, image, audio file, podcast or video. Stories typically include user comments, fostering additional discussion.

What else is it called?

Grassroots journalism, community news, we media, open source journalism, folk journalism, bottom-up journalism, etc.

How does citizen journalism differ from citizens media?

Citizen journalism is a narrow subset of citizens media. Citizen journalism chiefly centers on covering news and events in your community, whether it's a major news event that someone captures on a camera phone, or a podcast of a political rally, or coverage of a swim meet or little league game. Often, citizen journalism can fill in the gap in local news coverage that newspapers have abandoned.

Citizens media covers a wider swath. It includes any kind of user-created content — from whimsical videos to music to short stories — and isn't confined to news or journalism.

What do I need to get started in citizen journalism?

You can contribute to an existing website or start your own site or publication. There are hundreds of citizen journalism sites, ranging from hyper-local sites that cover a community — such as Baristanet or iBrattleboro or the New Haven Independent — to broader efforts such as NowPublic or South Korea's OhmyNews. CyberJournalist.net carries a lengthy list of citizens media projects.

The tools are quite simple and relatively inexpensive. To have a citizen journalism site you will need a Content Management System (CMS), a server to host the site, a domain name, and an Internet connection.

What is a content management system?

It is software that handles the basic tasks of a community site, like story submissions, comments, a calendar of events, links, and administrative tasks such as managing user names and passwords. There are a number of CMS packages that are open source and available to use for free. Geeklog, PHPNuke and Drupal (which runs Ourmedia) are three examples.

What human resources do I need?

To run a site, you will need at least one moderator/editor. It helps to have a web programmer who is familiar with installing scripts on servers. It is handy to have someone who is good at web graphics and design.

Once you get going, your audience will expect your site to be available 365 days a year, 24 hours a day. You may want additional moderators to help ease the time burden.

You need an active and engaged audience of contributors for the site to be successful.

How do I attract users?

Think about the people who would find a platform to break news most useful, and target them first. Activists, nonprofit groups, cultural organizations, and people who already blog are good places to start. Send them an email about your project, and invite them to contribute. When they do, make sure they get comments. Comments are the currency of a citizen journalism site (unless your site pays its contributors, like OhmyNews or Gather.com).

Unless your community is very Internet-savvy and has many local blogs that will link to you, offline marketing for a local community journalism site may be your best bet. Print up postcards and pass out buttons, stickers or any other swag you can think of. Clever T-shirts help. Try to partner with other exisiting local media, and connect with the local colleges and community centers.

What is a typical day like for a moderator?

It will vary, but usually the day begins with checking the site to see what submissions and comments have been added. Stories get approved and posted. Comments get read and, if necessary, deleted. This cycle is repeated throughout the day — midday, late afternoon, early evening, late evening. There are sometimes questions from users about the site or a request for a new password that must be handled.

What is a bad day like?

Get up to find the site has been hit by a spam bot, leaving links to Cialis ads on hundreds of stories that must be deleted. Or, a user has made an offensive comment and one must deal with the aftermath of apologies and patching things up. Or, get up to find the site is down, forcing you to spend hours with your tech team and hosting company to figure out what brought on the crash. Meanwhile, users are IMing you messages like, "I think the site is down."

What is a great day like?

A user of the site breaks a story with solid coverage of an event or issue that concerns them, leading to good discussion and possible community action.

How does citizen journalism mesh with traditional media?

Traditional media are intrigued by grassroots journalism. Some reporters use citizen journalism sites to get ideas for stories to follow up on. Some reporters participate by contributing facts or information they've learned about a story. Citizen journalism
site users read traditional media and comment on things they have read. The two can peacefully co-exist and support one another.

By Christopher Grotke, Mediagiraffe
and Jarah Euston, FresnoFamous

The 11 Layers of Citizen Journalism

"Citizen journalism." It's one of the hottest buzzwords in the news business these days. Many news executives are probably thinking about implementing some sort of citizen-journalism initiative; a small but growing number have already done so.

But there's plenty of confusion about citizen journalism. What exactly is it? Is this something that's going to be essential to the future prosperity of news companies?

In my conversations and communications with editors, I sense plenty of confusion about the concept. There's enthusiasm about experimenting in some quarters -- about harnessing the power of an audience permitted for the first time to truly participate in the news media. But mostly I hear concern and healthy skepticism.

This article is designed to help publishers and editors understand citizen journalism and how it might be incorporated into their Web sites and legacy media. We'll look at how news organizations can employ the citizen-journalism concept, and we'll approach it by looking at the different levels or layers available. Citizen journalism isn't one simple concept that can be applied universally by all news organizations. It's much more complex, with many potential variations.

So let's explore the possibilities, from dipping a toe into the waters of participatory journalism to embracing citizen reporting with your organization's full involvement. We'll start out slow and build toward the most radical visions of what's possible.

1. The first step: Opening up to public comment

For some publishers skittish about allowing anyone to publish under their brand name, enabling readers to attach comments to articles on the Web represents a start. At its simplest level, user comments offer the opportunity for readers to react to, criticize, praise or add to what's published by professional journalists. If you look at news Web sites that allow user comments (and at this writing, it's still a small minority of all news sites), you'll see a mix of user reactions within article comments. But almost universally, you'll see occasional reader comments that add to what's published. Readers routinely use such comments to bring up some point that was missed by the writer, or add new information that the reporter didn't know about. Such readers can make the original story better.

Which content should be open to reader comments? Blogs traditionally have included reader comments (though even some of the most popular independent blogs eschew them; e.g., Instapundit), so that's a no-brainer. Some sites -- including Poynter Online, where you're reading this -- support user comments on all articles. Do that and you're on your way toward the citizen-journalism experience.

But why not go further; think outside the box a bit? Consider allowing reader comments on things like calendar listings, obituaries, letters to the editor, even classified ads. Let's think about this: Why does a letter to the editor from a member of the public have to stop with that letter? Why not allow it to spark an online conversation? Comments on a calendar listing might attract citizen reviews from people who've seen a speaker or performer before (an interesting and useful public service). Obituary comments will draw remembrances from people who knew the deceased.

Even allowing comments on classified ads -- especially if they are in categories where sellers don't pay for the ad -- can be a fascinating exercise and a potentially good public service.

A few words of caution: Some news Web sites have had trouble with readers posting objectionable content in comment areas. This can be at least partially avoided by requiring users to register with the site and submit their names and e-mail addresses before being allowed to post comments, and by establishing a system that makes it easy for site users to report objectionable comments.

I don't want to paint this as easy. As media Web sites that allow comments have learned, you do need to watch what people post. The key may be to realize that opening up to reader comments requires vigilance, even if the number of problems you are likely to encounter may be slim.

Still, many publishers seemingly remain reluctant to take this first step into citizen journalism. Even The Northwest Voice, a stand-alone citizen-journalism Web site and newspaper owned by The Bakersfield Californian, which I'll mention in the layers below, doesn't allow reader comments. Two-way conversation is an imperative characteristic of most citizen journalism, yet it appears to remain threatening to many people in the journalism and publishing professions.

Examples:

InsideVC.com (Ventura County Star, Calif.).

Poynter Online (The Poynter Institute's Web site).

ZDNet.com.

2. Second step: The citizen add-on reporter

A small step up the ladder is to recruit citizen add-on contributions for stories written by professional journalists. I mean more than just adding a "User Comments" link. I mean that with selected stories, solicit information and experiences from members of the public, and add them to the main story to enhance it.

Here's an example: A series of car break-ins is occurring at trailhead parking lots in your area. A reporter writes a short article about the problem, identifying some of the locations of the vandalism. As a sidebar to the conventionally written story, trail users are invited to post their experiences of having their cars broken into, including submitting photos.

This approach turns a standard 10-inch minor article into an ongoing story, with victims or witnesses to the crimes contributing information and news over a longer time period. (Until the culprit is caught and the story fades.) The information from the public serves as a warning to other trail users about which parking lots have had break-in problems. The public-submitted information could even be crafted by the news staff into an online map of crime reports, featuring victims' self-reports and photos.

(This is another one of those areas that requires vigilance. Imagine, for example, if someone posted a note with a photo of someone apparently breaking into a car, and the suspect was identifiable. If that person was an innocent car owner who locked his keys in the car ... well, you can imagine the libel threat.)

Many (but certainly not all) stories can benefit from this treatment. A story, say, about bicyclists being harassed by motorists is the ideal type of story to solicit reports from the public.

Such an approach to citizen contributions isn't something you'll want to do on every news story, but, when appropriate, it's a great way to offer the community better and deeper coverage than is possible with a lone professional reporter. So look for stories that can benefit from the citizen add-on approach.

Examples: If you know of any news sites employing this approach, please e-mail me.

3. Now we're getting serious: Open-source reporting

If you're willing to take yet another step up the ladder of citizen journalism, consider what's sometimes referred to as "open-source" or "participatory" journalism or reporting. This is another one of those techniques that you'll use once in a while, when appropriate to a particular story or project.

The term generally is understood to mean a collaboration between a professional journalist and his/her readers on a story, where readers who are knowledgeable on the topic are asked to contribute their expertise, ask questions to provide guidance to the reporter, or even do actual reporting which will be included in the final journalistic product.

There are various approaches that a reporter can take under the umbrella of this general model. One would be to announce up front that you are working on a particular story, and ask readers to guide you. An example would be if you have an interview scheduled with a famous politician or celebrity. Announce that you want to go into the interview armed with questions submitted by your readers. Pick out the best ones, add your own, then do the interview.

Take it a step further: Distribute a draft of your article before "official" publication to the readers who've helped you out, getting feedback to "perfect" the article before it gets wide readership. Reporters who publish on Web sites or on blogs can do this by publishing a draft online, getting public feedback, then later publishing the polished version on the Web as well as then publishing in a print edition.

An alternative to simply taking readers' advice and incorporating it into the article invisibly is to build specific suggestions into the story and give the readers credit. One technique involves adding pop-up notes on a story that highlight reader ideas; these can appear when a Web site reader mouses over a "hot" word or phrase.

More advanced forms of open-source reporting involve a collaboration between writer and readers. This could take the form of requesting that readers with knowledge or involvement in a topic do actual reporting, which is then incorporated into the final published story. Payment for readers' work might be as simple as credit in the finished article, or event actual cash payment. Obviously, it will behoove the reporter to double-check reader reporting so as not to get duped.

Also (perhaps) fitting in this category of citizen journalism is the reader panel. Some newspapers have developed databases of volunteer readers willing to be interviewed by reporters. When a writer needs to find a group of sources to be interviewed for a story project, he/she can search the database for certain characteristics and contact them. Or reader-panel members can be used in some of the ways described in the paragraphs above.

Examples:

The Spokesman-Review/APME reader panel.

If you know of any other news sites deploying this approach, please e-mail me.

4. The citizen bloghouse

Blogging started out as an "everyman" phenomenon (and now, it seems, almost everyone has a blog), but then professional journalists took up the form, too. But the real promise of blogs remains with the non-journalists, for whom blogging has given a powerful and inexpensive publishing tool to reach out to the world with their stories and thoughts.

A great way to get citizens involved in a news Web site is to simply invite them to blog for it. A number of news sites do this now, and some citizen blogs are consistently interesting reads.

A couple different approaches work for citizen blogs on news Web sites. The first is simply to invite anyone who's interested to start a blog, by offering a blog hosting service. (Try using a service like Blogdigger Local to find local bloggers to invite.) What can turn into a long list of citizen blogs are listed by category on a blog table of contents page. And a main citizen-blogs page can highlight new posts to the various blogs as they are published. Or site editors can watch the citizen blog postings and select the best to be highlighted on the main blog page. Yet another interesting approach is an aggregator application which creates a sort of Über-blog featuring the newest entries from a variety of citizen blogs, continuously updated.

Your community might already have a Web site that's aggregating local blogs (like Greensboro101.com or Rex Sorgatz's MNSpeak.com Aggregator) -- in which case, perhaps there are partnership opportunities to be explored.

The other model is to be selective, inviting people who you think would be good additions to the Web site to start blogging under your news site's brand name. This might mean seeking out local people who already have independent blogs and encouraging them to move over to the news Web site -- perhaps with enticements such as free hosting, promises of promotion to increase their blog audience and visibility, or even money. Or accept "applications" from bloggers, saying you'll choose the best to be published on your site (and perhaps paying them a modest fee).

If your site takes the selective approach, it's worth thinking about what topics the blogs might cover. The best strategy may be to have citizen blogs that complement what the news staff produces. A great promise of citizen blogs is that they can cover topics and areas uncovered by or too narrow to warrant the interest of the news staff. If your newspaper, say, has a small sports staff, citizen bloggers who are passionate about minor sports can fill in the gaps, ensuring that sports like trail running and girls' softball get at least some coverage. If your news organization doesn't provide much coverage of pets, consider finding a local veterinarian or animal trainer who might like to start a blog.

One word of caution, however: Citizen bloggers, because they're usually volunteers, can't be counted on to keep a blog filled with content consistently or for very long. Most news Web sites that have used citizen bloggers report that the blogs tend to be short-lived; starting out strong is common, followed by less-frequent posting, then complete inactivity. Paying citizen bloggers -- even if it's a token amount, or in the form of prizes or "goodies" -- might help to alleviate this problem.

Examples:

Bluffton (S.C.) Today Community Blogs.

Lawrence.com Blogs (The Lawrence Journal-World, Kansas).

The Denver Post Bloghouse.

NJ.com Weblogs.

5. Newsroom citizen 'transparency' blogs

A specific type of citizen blog deserves its own category here. It plays on the notion of news organization "transparency," or sharing the inner workings of the newsroom with readers or viewers. This involves inviting a reader or readers to blog with public complaints, criticism, or praise for the news organization's ongoing work. A reader panel can be empowered via a publicly accessible blog to serve as citizen ombudsmen, of a sort, offering public commentary on how the news organization is performing.

A milder form of this is the editor's blog -- typically written by a paper's top editor and explaining the inner workings of the newsroom and discussing how specific editorial decisions are made -- along with reader comments, so that the editor has a public dialog with his/her blog readers.

Example:

SpokesmanReview.com's "News Is a Conversation" blog.

6. The stand-alone citizen-journalism site: Edited version

OK, now we're swimming in the deep end. This next step involves establishing a stand-alone citizen-journalism Web site that is separate from the core news brand. It means establishing a news-oriented Web site that is comprised entirely or nearly entirely of contributions from the community.

Most such sites focus on local news -- very local news. Citizen contributors can submit whatever they want, from an account of a kids' soccer game, to observations from an audience member at last night's city council meeting, to an opinion piece by a state legislator, to a high-school student telling of her prom-night experience. The site's editors monitor and perform a modest degree of editing to submissions, in order to maintain some degree of "editorial integrity" of content placed under the publisher's brand name.

Photos are also a big appeal of such sites. You'll find citizen-submitted shots of pets, cars, vacations, kids graduating...

If that sounds like a big mish-mash of not-that-interesting content, you're right. But that doesn't mean this is a bad idea. Rather, it means that editors of such local citizen-journalism sites need to guide community members into making quality submissions -- to educate them about what's worth sharing with their fellow citizens. That can mean recruiting community leaders, event organizers, and just plain interesting people to contribute to the site. It can mean guiding submissions by, for example, promoting an upcoming event and urging that participants take photographs and submit them, and write up their experiences.

And in this model, the site's editors also perform a line-editing role, ensuring that content is up to at least a minimal level of quality. (Correct spelling, proper grammar, attention paid to potential libel issues.)

The other imperative with such sites is to create a homepage and section pages that highlight the best of citizen coverage. Since much of user-submitted content can be deadly dull to most of the audience, a page that simply lists everything people submitted by date -- no matter how bad -- can be about as exciting as reading a press-release wire. But if site editors are doing their job well in terms of recruiting and educating citizen journalists, there should be enough compelling content within the submissions pool to populate a homepage that will engage site visitors.

An advantage of sites like this is that citizens can cover issues and events that local mainstream media ignore. If you as a community member think that your fellow citizens should know about a stop sign that was knocked down and the county government won't fix, then this is an outlet to publicize news that's not big enough to get on the radar screen of the local newspaper or TV news outlets. Citizens likewise have a way to publicize big stories that local media outlets are avoiding. Got a complaint about the local press? Go around them.

Examples:

MyMissourian (Columbia, Mo., student-run site).

WestportNow (Westport, Conn., independent site).

iBrattleboro.com (Brattleboro, Vt., independent site).

Greensboro (N.C.) News & Record YourNews (sub-site of main news Web site).

7. The stand-alone citizen-journalism site: Unedited version

This model is identical to No. 6 above, except that citizen submissions are not edited. What people write goes on the site: blemishes, misspellings and all.

With this model of stand-alone citizen-journalism site, it is important to have safeguards against inappropriate content being posted. Having a site editor review all submissions as soon as possible after they've been automatically published is ideal -- but impractical, of course, since editors do have to sleep and posting by the public is possible 24 hours a day.

A more practical model is to include "Report Misconduct" buttons on every citizen-submitted story and photograph. Users click these when they spot something inappropriate, and a message is sent to site editors so someone can take a look, and take action if necessary. Also worth considering is having a script written that automatically takes down an item when, say, at least three people click the misconduct button -- a safeguard that will come in handy in the middle of the night.

Why would site editors want to keep their hands off and not even fix obvious errors? Well, for one thing, this approach is more in the spirit of citizen journalism -- let them be what they are (amateur writers, community members), rather than try to turn every contributor into a mini-journalist. Make the site more about community and less about "journalism."

Then there's the legal angle. I'm not a lawyer and I'd urge you to consult one for specific advice, but a citizen-journalism Web site publisher may be on safer legal ground by not being in a position of editing every submission. Should an editor spot a user-submitted article that's potentially libelous (and thus violates the site's terms of service), then of course remove it. But by screening every submission for potential libel before publication, the site will have greater liability should something get through that results in a lawsuit.

Examples:

Backfence.com (U.S. nationwide, with current beta sites in Reston and McLean, Va.).

GoSkokie (Skokie, Ill., student-run site).

GetLocalNews.com (large network of community citizen-journalism Web sites around the U.S.).

NewWest (news site covering the Rocky Mountain region; mostly by professional journalists but with a stand-alone "Citizen Journalism" area).

DailyHeights.com (neighborhood citizen-journalism site for the Prospect Heights neighborhood in Brooklyn, N.Y.).

8. Add a print edition

For this model, take either No. 6 or No. 7 above (stand-alone citizen-journalism Web site, either with edited submissions or a hands-off editing approach) and add a print edition. A number of newspapers have tried this, using a print edition distributed freely once a week as an insert into a traditional daily or weekly paper, or as a stand-alone print product delivered to people's doorsteps and/or delivered to local retailers and placed in news boxes for consumers to pick up.

Content for these print special editions is typically comprised primarily of the best content submitted to the citizen-journalism Web site. This can be categorized in a similar way as the traditional newspaper: weddings, deaths, business, sports, opinion, people, features, food, etc. Photo features -- especially the best photos from all the people who attended a local event, for example -- can be particularly compelling content for such print editions.

Most stand-alone citizen-journalism sites, even those that choose not to edit submissions before they go live online, do exercise at least some editing prior to print publication. The print edition will look more credible if misspellings are avoided and proper grammar is used. But even print editors should avoid editing out the flavor of the citizen submissions; keep editing to the bare minimum.

A print component can help entice "trusted" contributors to sign up for voluntary writing duty: youth and community group leaders, religious leaders, coaches, politicians, etc. Especially in a citizen-journalism initiative's early days, the prospect of a volunteer's writing turning up in a newspaper can be more appealing than writing for a still-obscure Web site.

For now, at least, such print editions often are seen as the primary revenue source for newspapers venturing into citizen journalism. Typically, advertising rates are significantly lower than in the newspaper itself or on its Web site, so the combined print-online combo citizen-journalism site can be appealing to small businesses that otherwise couldn't afford to advertise with the newspaper.

However, there is a school of thought that having a print edition as part of a citizen-journalism venture is sort of "retrograde." It adds significant costs that shouldn't be underestimated, and, the argument goes, print can't begin to capture what's most interesting about the citizen-journalism concept because it isn't an interactive, two-way medium like online.

Examples:

MyTown (The Daily Camera, Boulder, Colo.).

Neighbors (The Dallas Morning News, Texas).

Northwest Voice (The Bakersfield Californian).

YourHub (Rocky Mountain News, Denver, Colo.).

Bluffton Today (South Carolina; daily print edition, so it fits in this category, but also in No. 9 below).

9. The hybrid: Pro + citizen journalism

The next step up the ladder creates a news organization that combines citizen journalism with the work of professionals. South Korean site OhmyNews is the best example of this approach. It has recruited, to date, some 38,000 "citizen reporters," who contribute articles for review by OhmyNews' editorial staff. A small team of professional reporters also create content for the site. Citizen reports account for about 70 percent of the site's content, and pro reporters create the rest, so the emphasis clearly is on the citizen.

Not everything submitted by the citizen reporters is accepted for publication on OhmyNews. And some of the contributors who submit quality content are paid modest fees for their writing and/or photography. This is a different approach than is taken by most U.S. citizen-journalism sites, which rarely pay for submissions. OhmyNews treats its citizen reporters as though they are journalists (albeit low-paid ones).

This approach appears to be potentially profitable. OhmyNews, which is five years old, says that it made about US$400,000 in 2004, two-thirds of which from advertising. While it started out as a Korean media venture, the company has created an international edition and recruits citizen journalists from around the world to participate. It's possible that OhmyNews represents a new kind of media organization that will rival traditional "pro-only" news outlets.

BlufftonToday.com, a South Carolina news Web site that's part of the Morris Communications news empire, also represents a melding of professional journalism and citizen participation. The Web site is dominated by citizen submissions -- mostly in the forms of blogs and photo albums -- and community members talking to each other, along with some staff-produced content. Accompanying the Web site is the daily Bluffton Today print edition (which is why I also listed it in layer No. 8 above), the main newspaper for the small town of Bluffton, population 1,600. The 32-page edition is delivered free to the town's homes. The print edition is comprised of the work of staff journalists, but also includes citizen submissions -- and the intent is to grow citizen content in print over time.

This site is interesting because the site's creators decided to "turn the traditional community newspaper model on its head," where the citizen-driven Web site drives content to the print edition. It is an example of a small town that has a principal news organization offering up a mix of professional and citizen news coverage. Could this be the future of small-town news?

Examples:

Bluffton Today (South Carolina; it also fits in layer No. 8 above, since it has a print edition).

OhmyNews.com.

Greensboro (N.C.) News & Record YourNews (this forward-thinking newspaper initiative seems to be heading in the direction of this degree of pro-journalist and community-member integration).

10. Integrating citizen and pro journalism under one roof

Now we enter the world of theory, because I've yet to find anyone taking this bold step yet. Imagine, then, a news Web site comprised of reports by professional journalists directly alongside submissions from everyday citizens. This is slightly different than No. 9, above, because on any one page there will be a mix of professionally written (paid) and citizen-submitted (free) content -- labeled appropriately so that the reader knows what he/she is getting -- rather than the more typical walling-off of citizen content as a way of differentiating it from the work of professionals.

(OhmyNews and Bluffton Today come close to this, and Greensboro's News & Record perhaps is heading in this direction.)

Here are some examples of how this might look:

• A "lifestyles" section might have a traditional feature article, while nearby is a report on a society event written by an attendee.
• A food section might include links to not only a restaurant review by a professional staff critic, but also customer reviews of that and other local eateries. A staff food editor's column might be placed on the same page as recipes submitted by readers.
• A report by a city hall correspondent might be accompanied by opinion pieces by citizens commenting on the outcome of an issue decided by the city council.

The key to making this work is the labeling of the respective content. "By Joe Jones, Chronicle staff reporter" and "By Sam Smith, Citizen contributor" makes the difference between the two authors obvious. The former should offer some level of trust that what appears under Jones' byline is professionally reported and credible. Smith's content indeed may by just as good and credible, but the reader must understand that the news organization does not accredit his content in the same way -- and should take care in trusting what's been written.

It's this vision of citizen journalism complementing and adding to professional journalism that is so compelling -- at least in theory. Few news organizations have the staff manpower to cover everything that their readers are interested in, but by tapping the volunteer (or cheap) resources of the citizenry, a news organization can potentially provide coverage down to the Little League team and church-group level, as well as offer better and more diverse coverage of larger issues by bringing in more voices and perspectives.

This is the model that perhaps gets closest to what citizens'-media pioneers like Jeff Jarvis and Dan Gillmor espouse: When news becomes a conversation, and not just a lecture. It's professional journalist and community member sharing the online media publishing space, to the benefit of the audience.

In these early days of citizen journalism -- especially in the U.S. -- publishers seem skittish about this combining of pro and amateur/citizen content. They're more likely to wall off citizen submissions, as though they shouldn't "contaminate" the work of the professionals. I suspect that that attitude will wear off in time, and that this complementary approach will bring professional and citizen closer together -- to the ultimate benefit of the audience.

Examples: If you know of any news sites employing this approach, please e-mail me.

11. Wiki journalism: Where the readers are editors

Finally, in the "way out there" category, comes wiki news. The most well known example is the WikiNews site, a spinoff of the famed Wikipedia public encyclopedia, which allows anyone to write and post a news story, and anyone to edit any story that's been posted. It's an experimental concept operating on the theory that the knowledge and intelligence of the group can produce credible, well-balanced news accounts.

The jury is still out on whether or not WikiNews will work, but the wiki model does seem to succeed with Wikipedia. The online encyclopedia is now one of the top information sources on the Web, and its entries are, for the most part, accurate and useful. WikiNews, at this writing, is a less compelling service.

Traditional news organizations are unlikely to copy WikiNews, but the wiki concept might be useful to them in certain situations. For example, an obituary might work as a wiki. A family member might write the initial article, then friends and family add remembrances, photos, etc. The big worry that editors have about wikis is that people will use it inappropriately, and while that's certainly possible, the experience at Wikipedia would seem to indicate that that's unlikely. In the case of an obituary, a family member likely would monitor what people add, removing anything inappropriate.

News Web sites might better experiment with information rather than news. A city guide that's part of a news Web site, for instance, could benefit from the public being allowed to build on it and improve it over time. Backfence.com, a network of micro-local news citizen-journalism Web sites, utilizes the wiki concept in its Community Guides sections.

Going this far with citizen journalism will take some guts -- and a change in thinking. It means moving far down the continuum of journalist-reader interaction, allowing an unprecedented loss of control of the editorial product.

Examples:

WikiNews.

Backfence.com Community Guide (small component of Web site).

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Can the public’s media literacy really revamp blog credibility?

While many newspapers now understand the importance of collaboration with blogs and citizen journalism, the public still often doubts the credibility of new media. Rightly so, in some cases. So traditional media can use their credibility – ‘media literacy’ – to their advantage by orienting the public towards trustworthy blogs.

"In a few years, it is going to be a no-brainer for local publications to have a window into what's happening in the local blogosphere as a way to attract readers and to build partnership with local bloggers," says Dave Mastio, editor of BlogNetNews.com.

The Knoxville News-Sentinel partnered with the BlogNetNews to direct online readers to local blogs that are relevant and reliable. Although most people are now used to the idea of blogs, few trust them off the bat.

“These people still want gatekeepers, and they want those gatekeepers to come from the mainstream (read: recognizable) media,” says Steve Klein, Poynter Institute.

“Everything you read in a blog or wiki may not be true. That is in equal part the consumer's responsibility as a media-literate citizen.”

It’s true that the consumer is partly responsible for his or her news judgment. But to say that this responsibility should be equal to that of an author presenting unverified information as fact? Risky.

Nonetheless, there’s everything to gain by raising the public’s media literacy. But that won’t be simply done through journalism programs focusing on teaching media literacy to students. (Student) journalists may use professional guidelines when they blog, but the reality is that many bloggers will neither learn nor care to follow these guidelines. Because a good share of bloggers simply don’t perceive their work as fulfilling a journalistic mission.

Source: Poynter Institute

A blogger’s opinion: when citizen journalism outpaces traditional media

At a session on blogging held during the Highway Africa conference in Grahamstown, Tanzanian blogger Ndesanjo Macha said that print newspapers must keep up with new communication technologies and the rise of citizen journalism.

"Everyone is becoming a journalist today. With a mobile phone in your hand, you can record news events and text the same to your friends and newsrooms; or even better still download the same to a blog", said Ndesanjo.

He cited a few examples when bloggers reported the news faster – sometimes better - than traditional media.

"In June this year, a member of parliament in Tanzania passed away, at night there was a lot of mobile reporting, we were all reporters and by the time media houses picked the story, it was no news at all," said Ndesanjo.

In another case, bloggers were quick to catch the controversial remarks of a politician at a birthday dinner. Newspapers and other media only picked up the story after it had caused uproar in the blogosphere.

Although Ndesanjo’s view is very much citizen journalism-centric, traditional media must by all means keep up with the rapidly evolving media landscape.

In some situations, bloggers or citizen journalists will be the first to uncover a newsworthy issue. But it’s up to newspapers to quickly pick up on it and develop the lead into a professional news story.

Source: Allafrica.com

Japanese are among the world’s biggest blog adepts

Japanese are among the world’s biggest blog adepts – a third of the world’s blogosphere is written in Japanese. Alongside the blog craze, IZA.net.jp, a participatory journalism site, registered the strongest website growth between May and June 2007, up 52%.

IZA.ne.jp has 3.46 million unique visitors monthly. It was founded by the press group Sankei in June 2006.

IZA’s content is a mix of newspaper articles from the press group, journalist blogs, and readers’ blogs. Its business model is based on advertising, premium content and other services.

The growth of IZA was fueled by numerous scandals on the political scene, but also by Japan’s general adoption of user-generated content.

According to a study conducted by Edelman in summer 2006, 74% of Japanese Web users read blogs at least once a week (compared to 22% of French users).

There were an estimated 8.68 million bloggers in Japan in March 2006.

FC2.com, a blog aggregator, had the fifth largest traffic nationwide in June 2007 (25.5 million unique visitors), behind Yahoo, Google, Microsoft and Rakuten Inc, according to ComScore.

Source: Journal du Net

US: Bush met bloggers for press conference

Instead of speaking to traditional White House reporters, American President George Bush held a round-table interview with 10 bloggers who specialize in military issues. As bloggers increase their credentials, these press conferences will also give rise to ethical concerns.

Two of the 10 bloggers participated from Baghdad through a video link.

"More and more we are engaging in the new-media world, and these are influential people who have a big following," said Kevin F. Sullivan, the White House communications chief.

According to the Post, there wasn’t much news that resulted from the conference, but this first-of-its-kind experiment gave the White House the opportunity to try new communication channels.

“The hour-long meeting in the Roosevelt Room offered Bush another opportunity to break through what he sees as the filter of the traditional news media, while also reaching out to the providers of a new source of information,” reported the Post.

The blogs represented at the meeting were generally pro-Bush and pro-military (and were selected by the White House), and this was visible in the reports that ensued. So this press conference also raises questions as to the validity or credibility of media coverage, if such proceedings become the norm.

Second effect of inviting bloggers: the reports were more emotionally-driven and portrayed Bush under a more humane light, which wouldn’t be apparent in a newspaper article.

Thirdly, blog readers may be more sensitive to blog articles written by an author they can identify with than with the seemingly objective voice of a journalist. So although blogs are generally less trusted than newspapers, a reader’s opinion might be more easily swayed by a blog account.

If the White House deems these effects are suitable for its public image, it wouldn’t be surprising to see more press conferences held with bloggers, rather than newspaper journalists.

Source: Washington Post through I Want Media

User-generated content pales against that of professionals

The "world's first Internet television network, ManiaTV, closed its doors to user generated content (UGC). Could it be because UGC just can't compete with professional content? What can newspapers learn?

It's not just because of the extreme popularity of YouTube that ManiaTV stopped accepting submissions by anyone. It's more because the site realized that there was little demand for UGC on what is supposed to be a site revolving around professionally produced entertainment.

Google is even experimenting with ads on YouTube, but mainly on professionally produced videos. Apart from this, the algorithms being written for copyright protection and the lawsuits being threatened show just how much professional content was being posted to YouTube. Some surveys showed that users were searching more for professional material such as The Daily Show than the random dog on a skateboard (some help on the source please, I can't find it!)

All this just goes to confirm that professionally produced material is still where most people pay attention. The UGC you find on the likes of YouTube may be entertaining and competing for eyeballs. But when it comes to news video, large media organizations with the proper resources will still be referred to first.

Newspapers are at a particular advantage in that their essence is well-investigated stories that take much investment to produce. For instance, one of the first purely UGC sites for reporting, Backfence, closed over the summer. Pro-am journalism is also off to a shaky start.

UGC will still be used when it adds value, such as footage from someone's digital camera when they are in the right place at the right time to catch a breaking event. But this added value is for editors at major media organizations to decide.

In my tours around the global newspaper industry, virtually every newsroom has told me that they are not threatened by UGC, that their professional journalism still embodies the values that it should. They do, however, welcome it for the added value mentioned above.

But most amateur UGC will more than likely remain isolated to websites that are specifically made for it, such as YouTube, as long as they are financially sustainable. It will be curious to see if YouTube remains a viable enterprise as more professional media organizations pull their content, publishing it on their own copyrighted sites with their own advertising.

Source: Business Week

Citizen journalism an innovative and powerful tool to knowledge based society

Citizen journalism an innovative and powerful tool to knowledge based society Information is the basis of knowledge. When any information we know is processed and lodged in our minds became knowledge. We are rapidly proceeding towards knowledge society in information era. To acquire verities of knowledge on different subjects, the future dreamed knowledge society will require multi levels information delivery systems. The Contemporary media and other information channels and sources could not alone meet the demands of information, so knowledge societal ethics ask every citizen to contribute his or her share to make this society reality.

In contemporary journalism gate keepings are done at every level in name of editorial reviews, and premium membership. But citizen journalism is trying to remove all such gate keepings from journalism because in knowledge society every citizen is a torch carrier of information. In true spirit lesser gate keeping will be the guarantee of high valued citizen journalism .Knowledge society can not will be developed in computers or other electronics gadgets but only and only in human minds, so without equal participations of each and every minds, big or small. We couldn’t dream of our future .The free, fair and fast (3F) 4 all should be the main ethics of citizen journalism.

To understand the definition and scope of citizen journalism one should go to the roots of traditional journalism. The journalism was developed and lived with human from Stone Age to computer age but its nature and scope were different in every age of human development. In stone age journalism was in form of verbal intra personal as requirements of that age were geographical and anatomical .Than came the mechanical/technological age, when wheel started to turned the development of mankind, in this age print and electronic journalism had made its presence because machine produced products made free economics traveling around the world cutting across the geographical barriers.
The information era popularly called information revolution, knowledge based society will be its bio product. To meet the future demand of information revolution, journalism has to change its contemporary form to basics, from where it had started participation of all as it were in Stone

Age when every human had to act as journalist to make information flow in his or her society. Again in information revolution every citizen has to make his or her informatory contribution. The citizen journalism has emerged as an innovative and powerful tool for common citizens to deliver their shares in shaping knowledge based society in or around them.
Young Indian Research Journalists has launched their community news portal

Did Assignment Zero Fail? A Look Back, and Lessons Learned

Ambitions ran high when Wired joined forces in January with new media incubator NewAssignment.net to try a novel experiment in pro-am journalism.

Our goal: Have a crowd of volunteers write the definitive report on how crowds of volunteers are upending established businesses, from software to encyclopedias and beyond.

Citizen media initiatives are a hot topic in the media, and the new project, christened Assignment Zero, was widely reported. The New York Times gave it a lengthy, if skeptical, treatment. Would the crowd prove too tough to manage, the reporter asked?

Six months later, the jury is in, and the answer is mostly yes. Although Assignment Zero produced a strong body of work, consisting of seven original essays and some 80 Q&As, the real value of the exercise was discovery. We learned a lot about how crowds come together, and what's required to organize them well. But many of the lessons came too late to help Assignment Zero.

In the 12 weeks the project was open to the public, it suffered from haphazard planning, technological glitches and a general sense of confusion among participants. Crucial staff members were either forced out or resigned in mid-stream, and its ambitious goal — to produce "the most comprehensive knowledge base to date on the scope, limits and best practices of crowdsourcing" — had to be dramatically curtailed in order to yield some tangible results when Assignment Zero ended on June 5.

And yet for all this, it might best be considered a highly satisfying failure. It fell far short of the original aim of producing over 80 feature stories, but in over a dozen interviews conducted by phone and e-mail, contributors uniformly described a positive, “though frequently exasperating,” experience. But then, Assignment Zero was full of contradictions.

Jay Rosen, the NYU journalism professor who initiated the project, has written that only 28 percent of Assignment Zero worked. That’s a sobering assessment, but one that reflects the view expressed by other staffers and contributors. My own view is a little rosier: I found at least three-quarters of the Q&As to be equal to or exceeding the quality of thought and insight found in any national magazine. And if Assignment Zero failed to clear the especially high bar it set for itself, the fact it produced so large a body of work still speaks to the considerable potential of crowdsourced journalism.

“It’s like throwing a party. You program the iPod, mix the punch, dim the lights and at 8 o’clock people show up. And then who knows what is going to happen?” — Lauren Sandler, Assignment Zero editor, to New York Times reporter David Carr

Rosen has been a champion of bringing non-professionals into the production of journalism for years. In 2006 Rosen began conceiving of a vast project that would entail a large number of both professional and amateur contributors. In November, Rosen flew to San Francisco to meet with Wired News editor Evan Hansen. Newly acquired by Conde Nast, the publisher of Wired magazine, Wired.com was looking to experiment broadly and boldly.

So Hansen was looking for a platform to explore citizen journalism, and Rosen was looking for funds to create such a platform. The two decided on the rough scope of a project. It should be called, Rosen decided, Assignment Zero, a name indicative of the still-nascent character of citizen journalism. And the subject Rosen wanted to cover was the crowd itself — the ways in which communities were coming together to create great things. Having coined the word crowdsourcing in a Wired magazine article earlier that year, I was brought in as the Wired writer and representative assigned to the project.

Source: http://www.wired.com/

Warning to abusive bloggers as judge tells site to reveal names

Disgruntled fans of Sheffield Wednesday who vented their dissatisfaction with the football club's bigwigs in anonymous internet postings may face expensive libel claims after the chairman, chief executive and five directors won a high-court ruling last week forcing the owner of a website to reveal their identity.

The case, featuring the website owlstalk.co.uk, is the second within days to highlight the danger of assuming that the apparent cloak of anonymity gives users of internet forums and chatrooms carte blanche to say whatever they like.

In another high court case last week, John Finn, owner of the Sunderland property firm Pallion Housing, admitted just before he was due to be cross-examined that he was responsible for a website hosting a scurrilous internet campaign about a rival housing organisation, Gentoo Group, its employees and owner, Peter Walls.

Exposing the identity of those who post damaging lies in cyberspace is a growth area for libel lawyers.

Dan Tench, of Olswang, the law firm representing Gentoo, said: "This case illustrates an increasingly important legal issue: proving who is responsible for the publication of anonymous material on the internet. This is likely to be a significant issue in defamation cases in the future."

The website Dadsplace, set up to campaign against perceived injustices in the family courts, had a forum where anonymous postings made various accusations against Gentoo, Mr Walls and his staff.

Those posting the comments went to considerable lengths to hide their identity, and Gentoo's lawyers ran up a bill estimated to be about £300,000 - which Mr Finn will now have to pick up, along with any damages awarded - taking the case to court and amassing circumstantial evidence that he was behind the website.

Revealing the Sheffield Wednesday fans was comparatively easy since there was no secret about the website owner. The next move was to apply for a court order requiring him to reveal the identities of "Halfpint" and the other fans behind what the club's lawyers described as a "sustained campaign of vilification". Fans made serious allegations against the club's chairman, Dave Allen, and directors and shareholders.

The club's lawyers asked the judge, Richard Parkes QC, to order disclosure about the identity of 11 fans.

But the judge decided some fans, whose postings were merely "abusive" or likely to be understood as jokes, should keep their anonymity.

The judge ordered that three fans whose postings might "reasonably be understood to allege greed, selfishness, untrustworthiness and dishonest behaviour", should be unmasked. Their right to maintain their anonymity and express themselves freely was outweighed by the directors' entitlement to take action to protect their reputation, he said.

Court orders obliging websites to disclose the identity of users posting anonymous defamatory remarks began in 2001.

Dominic Bray, of K&L Gates, Sheffield Wednesday's solicitors, said: "There seem to be quite a lot of websites that are using their anonymity to make comments about people and think that there shouldn't be any liability for it. But the internet is no different to any other place of publication, and if somebody is making defamatory comments about people then they should be held responsible for it. What these cases do is just confirm that's the law - the law applies to the internet as much as it does to anything else."

Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk

Why journalism matters?

Given that journalism has been with us in one form or another since people recognized a need to share information about themselves with others, it is bewildering that such a question persists.Scholars of journalism are partly responsible for the fact that journalism remains at question and under fire in many collective sensibilities

Have scholars done enough to establish why journalism matters and under which circumstances it matters most? The starting point of this book is to suggest that they have not. And so this book crafts a framework for rethinking journalism, by which it might be better appreciated for what it is, not for what it might be or what it turns into.

Looking anew at what we as scholars have established about journalism and aiming to get the story of journalism’s study told in many of its configurations, the book borrows its title from a phrase coined by James Carey—it begins by “taking journalism seriously.”2

Taking journalism seriously means first of all reviewing the scholarly literature, with an eye to tracking the role that scholars have played in thinking about journalism. How have scholars tended to conceptualize news, news making, journalism, journalists, and the news media? Which explanatory frames have they used to explore journalistic practice? From which fields of inquiry have they borrowed in shaping their assumptions about how journalism works?

And have their studies taken journalism seriously enough? In considering what has been stressed and understated in existing scholarly literature, the book also takes journalism seriously by raising questions about the viability of the field of journalism scholarship.

Its shape today ,its evolution over time, even the challenges it has drawn from elsewhere inthe academy these issues make the politics of inquiry central to the viability of journalism’s study. How have negotiations over what counts as knowledge legitimated certain kinds of scholarship and marginalized others.

Citizen journalism: An Essential Social Responsibility on You

Media since it days has been remained under elite groups of our society. Like capitalists, political and social upper groups.As we are inching towards information age, the definition and scope of media has been changing as per requirement of coming age. Information will be the key to success for all. Thus every one is running for after it from business to social.

Keeping its pace and face with current trends the media has also trying to transform it.This process has given common citizens opportunities to take share in this media transformation world wide because of quantity of information require in coming era forcing big capitalist media to open their gates to common citizens.Now it’ become the social responsibility of every citizens to grasp the opportunities available to them because of this “era transformation”.

Here I would request my citizens’ friends that it’s free for all situations will not last for ever. The Monopolistic behaviors of contemporary media are still hesitating to give direct power to citizens as citizen Journalists. But coming situations are forcing them to open their monopolistic gates for commoner to be the integral parts of new making processes.

Apart from common citizens, it’s a big social obligations on those citizens, who posses the tools and methods of information age i.e. computers and internet connectivity. They should take some lead on these social aspects of citizen journalism and try to secure citizens’ shares in future forms of media.

Welcome to the world of Citizen Journalism In India

All citizen journalist of India are welcome to join us and share your views and actions with us .