Citizen Journalists of India

Yuva Parliament Chandigarh Live Debate

2009-05-09T11:26:00.000-07:00

Live and open debate is the first pre-condition of a healthy democracy, but to organize this in India is tough job. Today in Chandigarh Young under banner of Yuva Parliament have tried to do this at government museum auditorium in Sector 10, Chandigarh.

I entered into hall after many pulls and bulls, as venue was circled by supporters of Congress, BJP and BSP.

The dais was occupied by Congress Party Candidate, Pawan Kumar Bansal, BJP candidate Satya pal Jain, BSP’s Harmohan Dhawan and Ajay Goyal, an Independent.

Even the attempt by Chandigarh based young was recommendable but all good work done by them turned futile when youth agenda and options for them was sideline by three candidates belonging to three national parties, as most of them they either tried to show their achievements.

An alone candidate, who really had come to speak on only youth issue with solution driven approach was , an independent , Ajay Goyal, who with his first sentence of his introduction steal the show , when he asked to fix retirement age in Indian politics to provide options for generation next to try their lucks in political arena.

The show started well but first round of the degeneration begun as questions were asked to full fill the political motives in disguise of audience by political workers of political parities.

The BJP and Congress candidates openly questioned the affiliation of questioners while answering their replies after that show inverted into real political drama in non political forum, where BJP candidate Satya pal Jain who had maximum numbers of his supporters in audiences, which was strictly regulated by organizers.

Only this behavior of them made this noble show at the end political show when BJP’s Satyapal Jain waved news papers cutting to down play Congress candidate Pawn Bansal.

Where as BSP candidate Harmohan Dhawan marked his presence, all three candidates belonging to national parties just came with their past records with any precise future agenda for youth of city beautiful.

Again here Ajay Goyal, an independent also remained at advantage position, who not only addressed youth issue but expressed precise grass root level application agenda for Chandigarh and added many fans fare in youth attending the live open debate.

Why every debate in Indian democracy ends in political drama, when our political leaders will understand the hard work done by progressive citizens like “Yuva Parliament” and behave like our representatives not our masters?

Chandigarh, city beautiful, a first dream taken by Independent India has chance to teach Indian Democracy a sensible lesson But today we have lost the chance.

But the good started by generation next of Chandigarh should be carry forwarded so that hope always remains alive for change in India in general and Chandigarh in specific.

Citizens Minus Media of Indian Democracy: Star News

2009-05-07T11:35:00.000-07:00

Two pillars of India democracy, Politics and Media Joined in City beautiful at Lake club lawn on Thursday evening to make joke of world largest democracy.

I really felt ashamed that I have witnessed the whole through my naked eyes in a Programme, “Kyon Banega Pradhan Mantri” by Star News, An Indian Hindi News Channel.

I went to spot as I am researching and working of democratic process of City beautiful, Chandigarh in ongoing Lok Sabha Elections 2009 from day first, but after reaching on the avenue, I was first to reach at 7 PM where as it was started, better to say ordered to take off after it was well managed to favor a particular party candidate.

The atmosphere at spot of event was like a political rally, which was sponsored by Star News in the name of who will be the next Prime Minister of India.

All three candidates of national parties were invited by Hindi news channel to attend live debate which was always dead debate because presenters of news channel were more interested some else motive than to know who will be next Prime Minister of India , which was the tag line of its programme.

The event was so badly managed that in most of time ruled by supporters BSP party, who were in out numbers than else.

One thing worried me as a citizen of Chandigarh that presence of bouncers or musclemen in this media organized event and poorly guarded by Chandigarh police.

Feeling the generating heat, I left my seat in audience and took aerial seat as body language expert to gaze the mockery of Indian democracy in Hands of Indian media in the name of professionally dead programme named “Khon Banega Pradhan Mantri” Title.

If such a open and ugly Media tamasha in the name of Prime Minister of India is being allowed than integrity and prestige of PM India will surely at losing end, which I request election commission of India to look into seriously.

At last one thing happened when an independent candidate, Ajay Goyal, who was sitting in front row and watching the whole process not only openly blamed star news journalists about their biased usage of Media to felicitate a particular candidate and not given him a chance.

The Congress, whose candidate had decided not to attend and BJP’s Satya Pal Jain also shared similar views on the utility such political sponsored to enhanced the application of true democracy in India.

Last not the least, Today’s experience of India media playing in hands of Politicians has forced me to redefine the definition of four pillars of Indian democracy, and inspired me to do some research, weather such sponsored pillars can benefit Indian citizens some where.

May God Save my City, My India from these Tumbling pillars???

Chandigarh Elections 2009: Representatives without Democratic Beauty

2009-04-12T21:05:00.000-07:00

On Sunday, I was on my cut off day from my routine working, as I have to concentrate on my Researches on Monday on wards, so did seminar and all free patrolling of Chandigarh with my old friends of my school.

During my free patrolling of Chandigarh, I came to knew that, city beautiful is not responding to Indian democracy as it has in cases of infrastructural, comer's and educational has shown.

As, I am well aware about on going elections for Indian Lok sabha on the corners,rest of Indian cities are well painted and motivated by Indian festival of democracy,(I usually call), as in festival every body wants to take joy out of festival in their own ways, like that democratic elections in India are similar to all Indian festivals like Diwali,Holi, Id, etc. but difference is in duration of festival.

But my City beautiful is not taking part in this more than month long Indian democracy festival, That stunned me.

Question came to my mind, that without much participation of Chandigarh sectoral population in democratic elections, are person representing City beautiful truly represents Chandigarh?

2008-06-22T04:02:00.000-07:00

Citizen journalism: What And Why??

2007-12-26T10:13:00.000-08:00

he citizen journalism refers to a wide range of activities in which everyday people contribute information or commentary about news events. Over the years, citizen journalism has benefited
from the development of various technologies, including the printing press—which provided a medium for the pamphleteers of the 17th and 18th centuries—the telegraph, tape recorders, and
television, each of which offered new opportunities for people to participate in sharing news and commentary.

With the birth of digital technologies, people now have unprecedented access to the tools of production and dissemination. Citizen journalism encompasses content ranging from user-submitted reviews on a Web site about movies to wiki-based news. Some sites only run stories written by users, while many traditional news outlets now accept comments and even news stories from readers.
The notion of citizen journalism implies a difference, however, between simply offering one’s musings on a topic and developing a balanced story that will be genuinely useful to readers.

The citizen journalism sites is long and includes sites limited to nonprofessional reporting, such as NowPublic and CyberJournalist, and divisions of traditional media companies that feature citizen journalism, such as CNN’s I-Reporter.

Some people use blogs, wikis, digital storytelling applications, photo- and video-sharing sites, and other online media as vehicles for citizen journalism efforts. Many projects take a local
approach, centering on news about a city or even a specific neighborhood, or focus on special-interest topics, such as financial matters or gender issues.

Many academic programs combine the study of traditional journalism with new media, and these programs typically address issues of citizen voices in reporting. Some institutions sponsor initiatives that focus directly on citizen journalism and other forms of user-created content.

Scoop08, founded by students at Yale University and Andover, is a Web site devoted to coverage of the 2008 presidential election. It bills itself as “the first-ever daily national student
newspaper,” with hundreds of high school and college students across the country submitting stories about the election.

Citizen journalism And Accuracy

2007-12-09T10:51:00.000-08:00

Media Fact CheckerGiven a list of myths and actual facts, users are given the chance to pick out the true information and separate it from misinterpreted data. ResponsibleOpposing.com's Media Fact Checker presents journalists and writers with examples of media hoaxes and exaggerations that are easily debunked through fact checking.
Poynter Online: Getting it Right - A Passion for AccuracyPoynter Online offers not only many accuracy guidelines but also personal anecdotes and links to other websites to promote improved accuracy practices. In this article, Chip Scanlan offers practical advice to fellow journalists to increase the accuracy level of any piece.
O'Reilly Digital Media: 10 Journalism Tips for E-WritersEven online journalists and bloggers sometimes need pointers on how to write a better story. These tips offer advice on accuracy and organization as well as several other related topics
Is That a Fact?Though designed primarily for students, journalists of any age can stand to benefit from the pointers and advice offered by Classroomtools.com. In addition, the site also offers 13 how-to examples of fact-checking and accuracy tests.
Accuracy in MediaAccuracy in Media strives "for fairness, balance and accuracy in news reporting" and posts several stories a week on various topics that illustrate this commitment. Unlike other sites, this page and its related content are best used as examples of accuracy in the media rather than as a collection of helpful hints and tips.
Delusions of AccuracyIn an article for the Columbia Journalism Review, Ariel Hart suggests we should become more comfortable with the fact that we make mistakes - and more open about admitting and correcting them.

Independence in the Citizen journalism gives creditability to your Reporting

2007-12-07T21:20:00.000-08:00

Independence is perhaps the most under appreciated hallmark of good journalism. What does it mean to be independent? We put the question to thought leaders in citizen media and traditional journalism. This section also provides resources and guides to achieving independent reporting.

We do know this: Honorable journalism means following the story where it leads. When media are consolidated into a few big companies or are under the thumb of governments, this cannot happen.

It is simple to be independent online. Just start a blog. But no one should imagine that the same pressures from businesses and governments will not apply when a blogger tries to make a living at his or her new trade.

News Corp to tap US faith market with takeover of Beliefnet website

2007-12-07T21:10:00.000-08:00

News Corporation, parent company of The Times, bought the leading American religious website Beliefnet yesterday in an effort to tap the faith market in a country where 88 per cent of the population say that they pray regularly.

Beliefnet, formed eight years ago, attracts 3.1 million monthly users. It was sold by its founder Steve Waldman, who wanted to find a big media company willing to provide investment that the standalone business could not afford. No transaction price was disclosed.

Mr Waldman said in a video posted on the company’s website that he had received several approaches from large media companies, which “have come to realise that there is a thirst for information and services about spirituality”, although he said that he was “in no rush to sell”.

News Corp is perhaps best-known for its newspapers, with titles such as The Sun and the New York Post, and mass entertainment through the 20th Century Fox film studio. However, the media group also owns a handful of faith-based businesses, including Zondervan, the largest Christian publisher in the United States, and Fox Faith, which makes faith-based films.

Their presence in the company’s portfolio helped to persuade Mr Waldman to sell. He described News Corp as owning a number of “high-quality companies that produce religious and spiritual content”.

Appealing to a Christian audience is big business in the United States, where films such as Walt Disney’s The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe are marketed, at least partly, at a Christian audience. Mel Gibson’s 2004 film The Passion of Christ earned $611 million (£295 million) worldwide despite an uncompromising narrative, of which $370 million was taken in the United States.

Beliefnet describes itself as the “largest online community” for spirituality and sends out daily e-mail newsletters to 11 million addresses. It aims to be independent of any religious organisation or movement and provides content aimed at more than merely a Christian audience.

The website will be absorbed into News Corp’s Fox Entertainment Group, owner of the Hollywood film studio, rather than its Fox Interactive Media division, which is the group that includes MySpace, the social networking website.

Dan Fawcett, president of Fox Digital Media, said that the company hoped to grow Beliefnet “across a broader media canvas”. Beliefnet is trying to develop its social networking technology aimed at the website’s users and in future the effort could see it sharing techniques with MySpace.

Wearing technology on your sleeve

2007-11-28T20:24:00.000-08:00

You think the switch from typewriter to computer was a revolution? The next stage could see many of us interacting with computers inserted into our very clothes. A new project is exploring a range of applications where wearable technology could significantly improve productivity and even help save lives.

Assimilate, assimilate!” You trekkies out there will recognise the Borg mantra for the bloodcurdling ‘assimilation’ of humans by machines. On the other side of the sci-fi divide, many may recall Star Wars’ recently revived Darth Vader, the half-man, half-machine dark lord of intergalactic evil.

From science fiction to science fact, the pairing of man and machine has always been at the forefront of our fears of what the technological future might have in store. But it has also been the basis of many of our conceptions for dealing with the challenges of the future: efficient multi-medial communications, improved ecologically friendly transport and revolutionary medical applications. After all, for every space villain there is a light sabre ready to be used to chop his head off.

Today’s instances of the association between man and technology are perhaps not as impressive to the jaded cinemagoer, but just as ambitious for the impact they could have on our daily lives. The focus, though, is perhaps not so much on assimilation as it is on integration and usability European researchers have been carrying out wide-ranging testing of new wearable technology with applications in a variety of fields and with the potential of protecting and even saving lives. The vital innovation is that the technology facilitates a new form of human-computer interaction comprising small, easily accessible body-worn computers that are always on and always responsive.

If you have a desktop application, then there is always a screen, a keyboard and a computer unit, but if you have a wearable computing solution, then it can be completely different,” says Michael Lawo, technical manager of the wearIT(at)work project. “You can have speech control in one instance, gesture control in another, though the application should always be the same,” he says. The Open Wearable Computing Framework being developed essentially comprises a central, easily wearable and hardware-independent computing unit which gives access to an ICT environment. Some of the basic components include wireless communication, positioning systems, speech recognition, interface devices, and low-level software platforms or toolboxes allowing these features to work together.

New paradigm
The pattern of this EU-funded project is woven as much out of applications as it is technology. It uses a number of commercial, off-the-shelf components and brings them together to create a new tool with the potential to revolutionise the way we work.
“Wearable computing is a completely new working paradigm,” says Lawo. “It is a technology which can support you in a particular environment. Instead of working at the computer, you are directly supported by the technology, a bit like when you are driving a car and you get information from the navigation system supporting you in your primary tasks.”

WearIT(at)work, the largest civilian wearable computing effort worldwide, is currently being tested in four different fields. These include aircraft maintenance, emergency response, car production and healthcare. Pilot projects in the areas of bush-fire prevention, e-inclusion and cultural heritage have also recently been launched.

In most cases, the technology is being applied to people who are not accustomed to using computers at the workplace, such as blue-collar workers. “The basic idea was to make the technology available to the workers and directly improve productivity,” says Lawo.

“We address fields where there are no similar applications today. Take the example of an aircraft technician. There is a person doing paperwork who has to find the relevant documentation on a computer. He has to find the aircraft maintenance manual and the parts manual, and produce a printout. These documents are handed over to the technician who then goes to the aircraft to do his work. He then has to write a report on a sheet of paper. And that is the way things work today. What we are doing is giving the worker support and direct access to the ICT system from the workplace. We get rid of the paper.”

Working with fire

With a considerable number of applications potentially possible, perhaps the most challenging test case for the project is the one involving emergency response teams, in collaboration with the Paris Fire Brigade. The technology helps support the communication, collaboration and information processes of rescue forces.

The efficiency and safety of firemen can be considerably improved by a number of light, easy-to-use and resistant devices, such as biosensors monitoring their physiological condition and improved localisation of hazards, personnel and retreat paths.

The technology has largely been well received by workers. “They recognise that this is a new technology where you can monitor working activities, but they do not hesitate to use it, and they see the advantage of it,” says Lawo.

Difficulties might nonetheless emerge in the future. “As soon as you come to the actual introduction of the technology and start negotiating with the unions, privacy will undoubtedly be an issue,” says Lawo.

WearIT(at)work already has some 42 partners, including IT giants Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard and Siemens, but Lawo says the project is always on the lookout for new ventures.

“Research will continue for components or for positioning systems. There is a lot of further research that can be carried out, but you can basically already do quite a lot with the application and with the technology that already exist,” he confirms.

Testing is due to continue until mid-2008 and will be followed by an initial 12-month period where the focus will shift to exploitation. “What we really want to do is introduce the system into everyday working methods,” says Lawo.

Transparency is the Third Principle of Citizen Journalism

2007-11-18T04:20:00.000-08:00

What skin do you have in the game? Bloggers consider transparency one of the guiding principles they live by. Citizen journalists, too, should follow this simple rule: Disclose, disclose, disclose. Reveal your motives, your background, your financial interests in writing about a subject.
While no one can plausibly argue with the idea that journalists need to disclose certain things, such as financial conflicts of interest, a reasonable question is how much we need to disclose. Should journalists of all kinds be expected to make their lives open books? How open?
Personal biases, even unconscious ones, affect the journalist as well. Example: An American from a middle-class background is brought up in with certain beliefs that many folks in other lands (and some in the United States) flatly reject. We need to be aware of the things we take for granted.
Another way to be transparent is how we present a story. We should link to source material as much as possible, bolstering what we tell people with close-to-the-ground facts and data

The People Formerly Known as the Audience

2007-11-18T01:48:00.000-08:00

The people formerly known as the audience wish to inform media people of our existence, and of a shift in power that goes with the platform shift you’ve all heard about.

Think of passengers on your ship who got a boat of their own. The writing readers. The viewers who picked up a camera. The formerly atomized listeners who with modest effort can connect with each other and gain the means to speak— to the world, as it were.

Now we understand that met with ringing statements like these many media people want to cry out in the name of reason herself: If all would speak who shall be left to listen? Can you at least tell us that?
The people formerly known as the audience do not believe this problem—too many speakers!—is our problem. Now for anyone in your circle still wondering who we are, a formal definition might go like this:
The people formerly known as the audience are those who were on the receiving end of a media system that ran one way, in a broadcasting pattern, with high entry fees and a few firms competing to speak very loudly while the rest of the population listened in isolation from one another— and who today are not in a situation like that at all.
Once they were your printing presses; now that humble device, the blog, has given the press to us. That’s why blogs have been called little First Amendment machines. They extend freedom of the press to more actors.
Once it was your radio station, broadcasting on your frequency. Now that brilliant invention, podcasting, gives radio to us. And we have found more uses for it than you did.
Shooting, editing and distributing video once belonged to you, Big Media. Only you could afford to reach a TV audience built in your own image. Now video is coming into the user’s hands, and audience-building by former members of the audience is alive and well on the Web.
You were once (exclusively) the editors of the news, choosing what ran on the front page. Now we can edit the news, and our choices send items to our own front pages.
A highly centralized media system had connected people “up” to big social agencies and centers of power but not “across” to each other. Now the horizontal flow, citizen-to-citizen, is as real and consequential as the vertical one.
The “former audience” is Dan Gillmor’s term for us. (He’s one of our discoverers and champions.) It refers to the owners and operators of tools that were one exclusively used by media people to capture and hold their attention.
Jeff Jarvis, a former media executive, has written a law about us. “Give the people control of media, they will use it. The corollary: Don’t give the people control of media, and you will lose. Whenever citizens can exercise control, they will.”
Look, media people. We are still perfectly content to listen to our radios while driving, sit passively in the darkness of the local multiplex, watch TV while motionless and glassy-eyed in bed, and read silently to ourselves as we always have.
Should we attend the theatre, we are unlikely to storm the stage for purposes of putting on our own production. We feel there is nothing wrong with old style, one-way, top-down media consumption. Big Media pleasures will not be denied us. You provide them, we’ll consume them and you can have yourselves a nice little business.
But we’re not on your clock any more. Tom Curley, CEO of the Associated Press, has explained this to his people. “The users are deciding what the point of their engagement will be — what application, what device, what time, what place.”
We graduate from wanting media when we want it, to wanting it without the filler, to wanting media to be way better than it is, to publishing and broadcasting ourselves when it meets a need or sounds like fun.
Mark Thompson, director general of the BBC, has a term for us: The Active Audience (“who doesn’t want to just sit there but to take part, debate, create, communicate, share.”)
Another of your big shots, Rupert Murdoch, told American newspaper editors about us: “They want control over their media, instead of being controlled by it.”
Dave Winer, one of the founders of blogging, said it back in 1994: “Once the users take control, they never give it back.”
Online, we tend to form user communities around our favorite spaces. Tom Glocer, head of your Reuters, recognized it: “If you want to attract a community around you, you must offer them something original and of a quality that they can react to and incorporate in their creative work.”
We think you’re getting the idea, media people. If not from us, then from your own kind describing the same shifts.
The people formerly known as the audience would like to say a special word to those working in the media who, in the intensity of their commercial vision, had taken to calling us “eyeballs,” as in: “There is always a new challenge coming along for the eyeballs of our customers.” (John Fithian, president of the National Association of Theater Owners in the U.S.)
Or: “We already own the eyeballs on the television screen. We want to make sure we own the eyeballs on the computer screen.” (Ann Kirschner, vice president for programming and media development for the National Football League.)
Fithian, Kirschner and company should know that such fantastic delusions (“we own the eyeballs…”) were the historical products of a media system that gave its operators an exaggerated sense of their own power and mastery over others. New media is undoing all that, which makes us smile.
You don’t own the eyeballs. You don’t own the press, which is now divided into pro and amateur zones. You don’t control production on the new platform, which isn’t one-way. There’s a new balance of power between you and us.
The people formerly known as the audience are simply the public made realer, less fictional, more able, less predictable. You should welcome that, media people. But whether you do or not we want you to know we’re here.
After Matter: Notes, reactions & links
I have been using the phrase, the people formerly known as the audience, for a while. But I had never tried to define it. This post came out of reflections after BloggerCon IV (June 23-24, “empowering the users”) and in anticipation of the Media Giraffe conference (June 28-July 1, “Sharing News & Information in a Connected World”) but also in the course of writing Web Users Open the Gates (Washingtonpost.com, June 19).
“Guys, citizen’s media isn’t fairy dust that you can sprinkle on an existing program and make it magically interactive, bloggy and web 2.0 compliant.” Ethan Zuckerman is talking to American Public Media’s “Marketplace” on how not to approach the former audience:
So let’s get this straight - Marketplace isn’t able to answer email from listeners, even when those listeners are offering to help them work on getting a former contributor out of prison. But Marketplace is interested in having me fill out a 19-field form so they can contact me via email and, if neccesary, call me for a quick soundbyte on an upcoming story.
Dave Winer gets lyrical at Scripting News (July 1):
We live in the age that Emerson predicted, self-reliance. Make your own music and your own products. Everyone gets to be creative. The brains are in what we used to call the audience. No more looking up to the ivory tower for all fulfillment. Thank god we don’t all have to be as beautiful as Farah Fawcett and Christopher Reeve. Everyone gets to sing. Users and developers party together.
Amy Gahran at Poynter about TPFKATA: “Seriously: News pros should be watching and joining this conversation.” Amy also points to a BlogPulse tool for tracking the ripples outward from this post.
Ripple: At the Associated Press Managing Editors website, Mark Briggs of the (Tacoma, WA) News Tribune says to fellow editors:
You need to read the post – and the comments – to understand what is happening “out there.” The audience is off the sidelines and in the game and is going to play. It’s up to you to play with it in a way that benefits everyone.
They used to be our most loyal customers. Fine Young Journalist, commenting on this study by a Harvard master’s student (“Emerging Collaborative News Models and the Future of News”) says about the users of Digg.com, Slashdot.org and other wisdom-of-the-crowd sites… “These aren’t just the people formerly known as the audience, they’re the people formerly known as our audience.”
Should you be in the immediate vicinity, I will be performing this post on Nantucket Island, July 26 at Nantucket Antheneum (8:00-9:30 pm, Great Hall) as part of the Geschke Lecture Series. If you are a blogger and want to attend, e-mail me.
Doc Searls is right that power “shifting,” while crudely accurate, is less than apt for my case. Power is expanding and dispersing because broader participation makes for a “bigger” press. Doc:
The expansion of authorship from few to many is a postive-sum development. So is the expansion of authority and influence that naturally grows in a market constantly enlarged by broader participation, and not merely by a growing choice of “content.”
There are lots of ways for “old” media to adapt to the new system. “Unfortunately, few or none of them are in the toolboxes of the old system.” Read his response to TPFKATA. And Doc returns to the subject here.
Ripples… Stowe Boyd: “Once power migrates to the edge, the edglings are unlikely to give it back.”
Jeremie at Temporally Relevant likes the term: “To be an edgling is to share and participate with your peers through open technology.”
Stowe Boyd’s follow-up post, Edglings: A Well-Ordered Humanism and The Future Of Everything (July 11).
Personally, I favor the term Edgling because I want to move away from media metaphors, and use economic or sociological ones. This is not about who is “producing content” and who is “consuming” it: which is the basic paradigm of media thinking. Instead, it is about control moving from the central, large, mass-market organizations — which includes media companies, but also other large organizations, like government, religious organizations, and so on — out to the individuals — we, the people — at the edge.
As power moves from the center to the edge the “Centroids” — those that hold with the centralized power of an industrial era — will scream about all the negatives that they perceive in the out-of-control future that threatens the basis of their worldview. But the Edglings will find it liberating to get out of the stranglehold on information, communication, and the marketplace that centralized organizations attempt to impose.
The Edglings vs. the Centroids. I like it.
“The concept of audience remains valid.” At First Draft, Tim Porter responds to this post:
We are all each other’s audience. A good listener is an audience. So is a critic. Or someone who clicks on someone else’s Flickr photo. The publisher-audience relationship remains, but today it is a loop, not a pipe.
I agree with Tim. The audience hasn’t “gone away.” Porter: “The ‘audience’ is out there. Journalists need to be out there, too.”
Here’s the link to a French translation of this post: Le peuple jadis connu sous le nom d’audience. And here’s a response in French to the French translation.
Other reactions of note:
Ulises Ali Mejias of Teachers College at Columbia University: “Are we really talking about a community of producers, or a mass of producers? Put differently: Is production the new consumption? My argument is that TPFKATA function as a mass of producers…” (And see this Doc Searls reply to Mejias.)
Young PR professional Jeffrey Team at Inside the Cubicle: “Well Jay, the demise of the audience is not confined to journalism, it is pervasive in all communications…I am on a personal crusade to get the public relations industry to move away from the term target audience and instead think about communities of interest.”
Independent journalist Dave LaFontaine: “I can’t help but notice that when it comes to the actual, hard data on what sites people spend the majority of their time at … well, folks, it’s the Usual Suspects. Big media.”
Dave Cormier at his Education blog: “The revolution, if there is ever to be one, is going to take years of concerted effort. I applaud Mr. Rosen for his manifesto, I worry that too many people think we have already won.”
Andrew Cline at Rhetorica: “Exactly who are these people? It seems to me they are not the majority that makes up the semi-fictional ‘mass’ audience or the thing called ‘the public’ that so interested John Dewey and Walter Lippmann.”
Tom Matrullo at IMproPRieTies: “There is much to be said for the repeating of a theme or set of key ideas, encoded in such a way as both to pique attention and to convey to the already clued-in that a certain set of assumptions about speaking, writing, community formation, were in play, harboring large shifts in power, control, and dominance.”
Jon Husband at Wierarchy: “I notice two things …1 … the antibodies and immune system are really big, and are spread out everywhere; 2 … in addition to rejecting the foreign substance/bodies/players, the extant system is also trying to swallow ‘it’ … eat it so that the fever will be killed.”
Scott Walters asks how this post connects to the world of theatre, while elearnspace says, “I’m waiting for a similar announcement from learners in corporate and higher education,” and this blog (“advocacy strategy for the age of connectivity”) says “Rosen’s riff on the Audience is directly related to the way advocacy and organizing groups think about members and supporters.”
J-school student Ryan Sholin imagines a career path in journalism starting with “the community editor’s position.”
Wherein it’s my job to bootstrap the newspaper’s online connections to local bloggers and community members, launch hyperlocal sites comprised mostly of stories written by The People Formerly Known As The Audience, and manage them. This means learning some more web design and coding to modify some existing open source software, but the hard part is getting the community (and the editors) to see your newspaper as a place for participation.
From the incomparable Cursor, Media Patrol column, June 27 edition:
A new hire by Sen. Hillary Clinton, “to help improve [her] image among liberal bloggers,” is called “a major coup.”
Whereas to Billmon’s eye, ‘The Swiftboating of Kos’ is “starting to look more and more like a coordinated effort,” Ralph Nader finds that “after a while a chronically humorous way of looking at politics becomes a distraction,” as the nation’s political life assumes the binary position year after year.
A Texas governor’s race poll finds incumbent Gov. Rick Perry leading the pack — and Independent candidate Kinky Friedman in second place.
As Fox News employees are allowed to hear the whip cracking, ‘The People Formerly Known as the Audience’ proclaim “a shift in power that goes with the platform shift you’ve heard about.”
The Economist in April 2006:
Almost everywhere, download speeds (from the internet to the user) are many times faster than upload speeds (from user to network). This is because the corporate giants that built these pipes assumed that the internet would simply be another distribution pipe for themselves or their partners in the media industry. Even today, they can barely conceive of a scenario in which users might put as much into the network as they take out.
Exactly this, however, is starting to happen.
Seth Finkelstein dissents in the comments at Dan Gillmor’s blog:
Dan, we’re still the audience. If you don’t like my comment, you can personally attack me to a number of readers that is orders of magnitude more than I could realistically reach myself. I have no effective way to reply. That’s “audience”.
If I do volunteer journalism, but it is not propagated by A-list gatekeepers, and not appealing enough for the popular sites, it’ll be ignored. That’s “audience”.
And what happens if the professional journalist just doesn’t care if he or she gets it wrong, as long as it brings in the crowd? That’s “audience”.
Like the news media, Seth is an inflater of the balloons he pops. He refutes propositions I haven’t made: that the audience is no more, that media power has been equalized.
As I wrote in the comments to another poster:
The post I wrote does not say “the people” have the power now, and the media lost theirs. It says there’s been a shift in power. (And there has, but only a partial one.) It also speaks of a new “balance of power,” which is another way of talking about a limited change.
I’m not claiming that the power shift is total, or even decisive. Only that it’s signficant, and changes the equation.
Exclusive influence, monopoly position, the right to dictate terms, dynastic continuity, priestly authority, guild conditions for limiting competition— these have been lost, not the entrenched media’s social and market power, which as you say remain considerable.

Transparency is the Basis of Citizen Journalism

2007-11-15T10:20:00.000-08:00

While no one can plausibly argue with the idea that journalists need to disclose certain things, such as financial conflicts of interest, a reasonable question is how much we need to disclose. Should journalists of all kinds be expected to make their lives open books? How open?

Personal biases, even unconscious ones, affect the journalist as well. Example: An American from a middle-class background is brought up in with certain beliefs that many folks in other lands (and some in the United States) flatly reject. We need to be aware of the things we take for granted.
Another way to be transparent is how we present a story. We should link to source material as much as possible, bolstering what we tell people with close-to-the-ground facts and data.

Citizen Journalism

Fairness in citizen Journalism makes it tool to social development

2007-11-15T10:16:00.000-08:00

Fairness is a must for all good citizen journalism. Whether you are presenting a balanced story or arguing from a point of view, your readers will feel cheated if you slant the facts or present opposing opinions disingenuously. This section offers guidance on how to play fair.

Fairness is also about letting people respond when they believe you are wrong, even if you do not agree. It also means listening to different viewpoints and incorporating them into the citizen journalism. It does not mean parroting lies or distortions to achieve that lazy equivalence that leads some journalists to get opposing quotes when the facts overwhelmingly support one side.

Ultimately, fairness emerges from a state of mind. We should be aware of what drives us, and always be willing to listen to those who disagree. The first rule of having a conversation is to listen — we can learn more from people who think we're wrong than from those who agree with what we've said.

Citizen journalism: Inside information vs. outside perspective

2007-11-13T10:19:00.000-08:00

Type the words citizen journalism into Google, and you'll get roughly 17 million results. And each will have a different definition for the term.

The discussion of the topic generally centres around blogs. Now, blogs are sort of online diary, right? Sometimes that means you're talking about just how cute your toy poodle is -- day after day after day. Entry 3368: "Toy poodle still cute! Click for video!" But sometimes a blog is a hard-hitting political report. Entry 665: "Congressman found with cute poodle!" Or it's a discussion of physics. "Entry 3.14: MA=Poodles." Or maybe it's even breaking news before the big news giants report it. "Breaking: Poodle joke stretched too far!"

Today's blog is yesterday's newspaper
So this has people all up in arms. How do you tell the "real" journalists from the amateurs if everyone can publish with pretty layouts and impressive typefaces? Whom can you trust? This debate doesn't seem much different from the kerfuffle around newspapers and broadsheets at their birth. Journalism today is much different than it's been throughout most of its history.

You see, big newspapers grew from citizens with printing presses into big companies. The same will happen -- no, is happening -- to blogs. In fact, it's happening at an accelerated rate. It already happened to Web sites as the term was used in, say, 1994. In 1994, a Web site was a very academic or possibly personal thing to have. By 1999, it was a business venture. (By 2001, it was out of business, but you get the idea.) The blog is just a very special kind of Web site.

Insiders vs. outsiders
By accelerating the process of involvement and innovation in publishing, the Web brings into focus a cycle that I think bears directly on the idea of citizen journalism. You see, journalists are citizens. What I think people mean by citizen journalism is regular Joes with Web sites, as opposed to folks who are employed by big media companies. There are insiders, and there are outsiders. Outsiders eventually can become insiders, and less often, insiders fall to become outsiders again.

Outsiders aren't in the know. They don't necessarily have contacts, but maybe they're smart and they're observant. These are the ones mainstream media fear and deride. They don't have qualifications. They often don't have all the facts. What they do have is perspective. They aren't disproportionately swayed by the events of the things they discuss. An outsider often points out simple contradictions that insiders can't see or perhaps can see but defend irrationally. On the other hand, outsiders can also be barking lunatics.

An insider is in the know. An insider has contacts and knows the facts. An insider greets the outsider's criticisms with a smile and a somewhat condescending "Well, it's not that simple." Insiders aren't just inside the industry, they're often top journalists. They have the inside info, they know the rumours, they understand how things really work and they can explain away the seeming contradictions pointed out by the naive outsider. They often lack perspective, too. They can be affected by whatever it is they cover to the point of becoming unable to spot all the flaws or see through bad arguments and specious justifications.

Blogs are just tools
It's worth pointing out that these days many of the insiders have blogs. Writing a blog doesn't make you an insider or an outsider, as much as some insiders would like it to work that way. It's just a tool of expression that tends to be used more often by the outsiders at this point.

The joy of free expression and the great creative product of a free society is the interplay between the insiders and the outsiders. The outsiders cry foul and expose great hidden truths and often have the effect of keeping things honest. The insiders protect the system against excesses of the outsiders' ignorance or misunderstanding. It's a natural system of checks and balances that the Web helps along by levelling the playing field a little more. The insiders aren't the only ones with printing presses anymore.

When printing began, the monarchies feared it greatly because the printers were outsiders at the time. They weren't priests or rulers. They were tinkerers. It was a new technology implemented by a class that could potentially expose abuses. Quickly the establishment learned to use it to its own ends. Now the newspapers, while still employing a few outsiders, have become insiders of the establishment themselves and logically fear the outsider bloggers.

The cycle repeats
Blogs are already becoming mainstream and will eventually become the province of the insiders. But the ease of publishing will leave plenty of room for outsider blogs. They'll end up in a situation similar to that of Web sites in general. A collection of big Web sites dominate the traffic, but cool new ideas do break through from small operators. In the future, a few big blogs will gather most of the attention, but smaller blogs will still be able to bust into the pack every so often. In the process, though, blogs will no longer be cool tools for outsiders, just because they're blogs. They will also be the tools of the insiders.

But it won't end there. In fact, all this crazy Web 2.0 talk probably has the seeds of the next wave. We'll see a new technology/model/tool arrive that the outsider will dominate at first. The insiders, bloggers or not, will fear it, and the whole cycle will repeat. And it's a good thing that it will. The world gets a little bit better and a little bit more open every time it does,

Citizen journalism' battles the Chinese censors

2007-11-13T10:07:00.001-08:00

n the strictly controlled media world of communist China, "citizen journalism" is beating a way through censorship, breaking taboos and offering a pressure valve for social tensions.

In one striking example this month, the Internet was largely responsible for breaking open a slave scandal in two Chinese provinces that some local authorities had been complicit in.

A letter posted on the Internet by 400 parents of children working as slaves in brickyards was the trigger for the national press to finally report on the scandal that some rights groups say had been going on for years.

The parents' Internet posting was part of a growing phenomenon for marginalised people in China who can not otherwise have their complaints addressed by the traditional, government-controlled press.

"The phenomenon of 'citizen journalism' suddenly arrived several years ago," said Beijing-based dissident Liu Xiaobo, who was one of the student leaders of the 1989 Tiananmen democracy protests.

"Since the appearance of blogs in particular, every blog is a new platform for the spread of information."

He cited the example of a couple in the southwestern city of Chongqing who became known as the "Stubborn Nails" in April because they refused to leave their home until they received adequate compensation from the property developer who wanted them out.

They quickly became household names in China -- and symbols of resistance against greedy land developers and corrupt local authorities -- mainly thanks to Internet postings.

"That case was first revealed through blogs," Liu said.

Also in Chongqing, parts of the city were this month set on fire following the beating of flower sellers by the "chengguan", city police charged with "cleaning up" the city's roads.

Witnesses to the beatings had appealed to local television journalists, but nothing was broadcast.

The incident only became known outside the city thanks to photos and stories published on the Internet, sparking anger among China's netizens.

"It's fascism," said one, while another mocked: "The inhabitants of Chongqing are truly naive, the Chinese media is all controlled by the Communist Party, they decide what people know."

Several days later, another blunder by the "chengguan" -- this time in Zhengzhou in central Henan province, again targeted at a street seller -- provoked further riots.

The image of protesters surrounding a police car, captured by a mobile phone, made its way round the world, after being posted on Chinese movie sharing site Tudou, then reposted on YouTube.

Elsewhere across China, protesters often seek to post photos or videos of unrest on the Internet to counter the versions from the state-run press and local authorities, who usually downplay or deny the events.

Recognising the threat of China's growing online community, Chinese President Hu Jintao called in January for the Internet to be "purified", and the government has since launched a number of online crackdowns.

"The department of propaganda has sent out regulations to try and control the opinions being spread on the Internet, but every citizen has the right to criticise or to take part in public affairs on the Internet," said Zhu Dake, a professor at Shanghai Tongji University.

"The government has to accept the criticisms of the people, it can no longer react crudely like in the past."

Julien Pain, who monitors Internet freedom issues for Reporters Without Borders, is less optimistic.

"One cannot truly say that the Internet in China is becoming more and more free, because at the same time as the development of citizen journalists, the government finds ways of blocking or censoring content," Pain said.

Reporters Without Borders, which labels the Chinese government an "enemy of the Internet," says about 50 cyber dissidents are currently behind bars in China.

The Second Principle of Citizen Journalism

2007-11-10T11:29:00.000-08:00

Thoroughness
What is the difference between speculation and solid reporting, between passing along unverified rumors and nailing down your facts? Very often it comes down to thoroughness. This section offers advice on how to go the extra yard to inform your readers.

Professional reporters try to learn as much as they can about a topic. It's better to know much more than you publish than to leave big holes in your story. The best citizen journalist always want to make one more call, check with one more source. (And the last question to ask at all interviews is, "Who else should I talk with about this?")

In a Web-enabled world, thoroughness means more than asking questions of the people in our address books. It also means asking our readers for your input. Professionals tend not to do this; citizen journalists can be less concerned with competitive issues and more concerned with getting it right.

Principles of Citizen Journalism

2007-11-10T11:24:00.000-08:00

Accuracy
Accuracy is the starting point for all good Citizen journalism. Get your facts right, then check them again. Know where to look to verify claims or to separate fact from fiction.
Being factual has many dimensions. For example, on the Web it's especially valuable to say what you don’t know, not just what you do — and to ask readers to fill you in as well. Accuracy means correcting what you get wrong, and doing it promptly.

Who's afraid of Google?

2007-11-01T21:53:00.000-07:00

The world's internet superpower faces testing times

RARELY if ever has a company risen so fast in so many ways as Google, the world's most popular search engine. This is true by just about any measure: the growth in its market value and revenues; the number of people clicking in search of news, the nearest pizza parlour or a satellite image of their neighbour's garden; the volume of its advertisers; or the number of its lawyers and lobbyists.

Such an ascent is enough to evoke concerns—both paranoid and justified. The list of constituencies that hate or fear Google grows by the week. Television networks, book publishers and newspaper owners feel that Google has grown by using their content without paying for it. Telecoms firms such as America's AT&T and Verizon are miffed that Google prospers, in their eyes, by free-riding on the bandwidth that they provide; and it is about to bid against them in a forthcoming auction for radio spectrum. Many small firms hate Google because they relied on exploiting its search formulas to win prime positions in its rankings, but dropped to the internet's equivalent of Hades after Google tweaked these algorithms.

And now come the politicians. Libertarians dislike Google's deal with China's censors. Conservatives moan about its uncensored videos. But the big new fear is to do with the privacy of its users. Google's business model (see article) assumes that people will entrust it with ever more information about their lives, to be stored in the company's “cloud” of remote computers. These data begin with the logs of a user's searches (in effect, a record of his interests) and his responses to advertisements. Often they extend to the user's e-mail, calendar, contacts, documents, spreadsheets, photos and videos. They could soon include even the user's medical records and precise location (determined from his mobile phone).

More JP Morgan than Bill Gates

Google is often compared to Microsoft (another enemy, incidentally); but its evolution is actually closer to that of the banking industry. Just as financial institutions grew to become repositories of people's money, and thus guardians of private information about their finances, Google is now turning into a custodian of a far wider and more intimate range of information about individuals. Yes, this applies also to rivals such as Yahoo! and Microsoft. But Google, through the sheer speed with which it accumulates the treasure of information, will be the one to test the limits of what society can tolerate.

It does not help that Google is often seen as arrogant. Granted, this complaint often comes from sour-grapes rivals. But many others are put off by Google's cocksure assertion of its own holiness, as if it merited unquestioning trust. This after all is the firm that chose “Don't be evil” as its corporate motto and that explicitly intones that its goal is “not to make money”, as its boss, Eric Schmidt, puts it, but “to change the world”. Its ownership structure is set up to protect that vision.

Ironically, there is something rather cloudlike about the multiple complaints surrounding Google. The issues are best parted into two cumuli: a set of “public” arguments about how to regulate Google; and a set of “private” ones for Google's managers, to do with the strategy the firm needs to get through the coming storm. On both counts, Google—contrary to its own propaganda—is much better judged as being just like any other “evil” money-grabbing company.

Grab the money

That is because, from the public point of view, the main contribution of all companies to society comes from making profits, not giving things away. Google is a good example of this. Its “goodness” stems less from all that guff about corporate altruism than from Adam Smith's invisible hand. It provides a service that others find very useful—namely helping people to find information (at no charge) and letting advertisers promote their wares to those people in a finely targeted way.

Given this, the onus of proof is with Google's would-be prosecutors to prove it is doing something wrong. On antitrust, the price that Google charges its advertisers is set by auction, so its monopolistic clout is limited; and it has yet to use its dominance in one market to muscle into others in the way Microsoft did. The same presumption of innocence goes for copyright and privacy. Google's book-search product, for instance, arguably helps rather than hurts publishers and authors by rescuing books from obscurity and encouraging readers to buy copyrighted works. And, despite Big Brotherish talk about knowing what choices people will be making tomorrow, Google has not betrayed the trust of its users over their privacy. If anything, it has been better than its rivals in standing up to prying governments in both America and China.

That said, conflicts of interest will become inevitable—especially with privacy. Google in effect controls a dial that, as it sells ever more services to you, could move in two directions. Set to one side, Google could voluntarily destroy very quickly any user data that it collects. That would assure privacy, but it would limit Google's profits from selling to advertisers information about what you are doing, and make those services less useful. If the dial is set to the other side and Google hangs on to the information, the services will be more useful, but some dreadful intrusions into privacy could occur.

The answer, as with banks in the past, must lie somewhere in the middle; and the right point for the dial is likely to change, as circumstances change. That will be the main public interest in Google. But, as the bankers (and Bill Gates) can attest, public scrutiny also creates a private challenge for Google's managers: how should they present their case?

One obvious strategy is to allay concerns over Google's trustworthiness by becoming more transparent and opening up more of its processes and plans to scrutiny. But it also needs a deeper change of heart. Pretending that, just because your founders are nice young men and you give away lots of services, society has no right to question your motives no longer seems sensible. Google is a capitalist tool—and a useful one. Better, surely, to face the coming storm on that foundation, than on a trite slogan that could be your undoing.

Source: From The Economist

Media companies have high hopes that hyperlocal news online will bolster their newspapers’ futures.

2007-11-01T00:20:00.000-07:00

t seemed like a good idea at the time. With blogging flourishing and citizen journalism just budding, Mark Potts and Susan DeFife thought they had a winning formula for a new kind of journalistic enterprise. One evening in the summer of 2004, they sketched out their common vision: A series of hyperlocal, news-oriented Web sites whose tone and content--news, commentary, blogs, photos, calendar listings--would be supplied primarily by the people who knew each community best, its residents. By May of 2005, the venture, dubbed Backfence.com, was up and running, with sites serving two affluent Virginia towns in Washington D.C.'s suburbs, McLean and Reston.

The idea of virtual town squares seemed so promising that within months Potts (a veteran reporter and editor at the Washington Post and cofounder of its digital division) and DeFife (founder and chief executive of Womenconnect.com for women in business) had attracted $3 million from two venture capital firms, including one headed by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar. The money funded an expansion program that would have made Starbucks proud (see "Dotcom Bloom," June/July 2005). By early 2007, Backfence had grown to 13 sites serving towns around Washington, Chicago and the San Francisco Bay area. The partners began talking about creating as many as 160 sites in 16 markets.

And then? And then the bottom dropped out. Backfence's rapid expansion burned up its $3 million war chest. The partners have split; Backfence's staff, which once numbered as many as 25, was laid off. The company's online communities are largely ghost towns now. "We ran out of money," says a somewhat chastened Potts today. "And we ran out of runway."

The failure of Backfence may offer no greater lesson than the old one about pioneers being the ones with arrows in their backs. New ventures fail all the time. But it could also sound a cautionary note about the present--and immediate future--of hyperlocal news sites. As big-media companies and entrepreneurs alike rush into the hyperlocal arena (see "Really Local," April/May), it's worth pausing and asking: Is there a real business in this kind of business?

So far--and admittedly it's still very early --the answer is no. A few of the estimated 500 or so "local-local" news sites claim to show a profit, but the overwhelming majority lose money, according to the first comprehensive survey of the field. The survey, conducted by J-Lab: The Institute for Interactive Journalism (affiliated with the University of Maryland's Philip Merrill College of Journalism, as is AJR), documents a journalism movement that is simultaneously thriving and highly tenuous. While independent sites such as WestportNow.com (Connecticut), iBrattleboro.com (Vermont) and VillageSoup.com (Maine) have sparked useful civic debates and prodded established media outlets to compete more vigorously, the field as a whole is so far financially marginal. As the report puts it, "their business models remain deeply uncertain."

In fact, many operators don't really have a business model. The first wave of hyperlocal sites has featured seat-of-the-pants operations, staffed part-time by dedicated volunteers, community activists and impassioned gadflies. About half of the 141 respondents to the J-Lab survey said they didn't need to earn revenue to stay afloat, thanks to self-funding and volunteer labor. A full 80 percent said their sites either weren't covering their operating costs--or that they just weren't sure. Only 10 of the 141 said they were breaking even or earning a profit.

This is why industry observers such as Peter Krasilovsky remain skeptical: "I don't really see a model right now that allows [hyperlocal sites] to build up a sales staff and an editor beyond a very limited point," says Krasilovsky, a consultant and blogger (Localonliner.com).

Then again, money isn't necessarily the issue, says Jan Schaffer, J-Lab's executive director and the author of a report accompanying the survey. "When they talk about success, they're not talking about revenue," she says. "They're talking about the impact they've had on their communities." She adds, "I'm not sure in this iteration, these [operators] see themselves as making big salaries and having big offices. I'm not saying it won't happen somewhere down the road, but in this iteration it isn't there yet."

These days, the category's shining star--the anti-Backfence--is Baristanet.com, a scrappy, snarky local-news-and-commentary site that covers the tony New York City suburbs of Montclair and Bloomfield in New Jersey. Co-owned by a novelist (Debbie Galant) and a journalist (Liz George), Baristanet is by all appearances thriving just three years after its founding. Its mix of news stories big (the arrest of a local murder suspect) and small (a debate over artificial turf at a local playing field) as well as reader-supplied commentary and photos attracts about 80,000 unique visitors a month, according to co-owner George. It's also selling ads--to local supermarkets, real-estate agents and restaurants. Baristanet has gotten so much buzz that Galant and George have recently branched out as consultants to other hyperlocal entrepreneurs.

But Baristanet (the name was picked to conjure news "baristas" serving up daily scoops) isn't exactly a big business. In fact, it's just barely a small one. The site generated about $60,000 in revenue last year. That's enough for Galant and George to hire a full-time freelance editor and a few part-time employees. Although George projects revenue of $100,000 this year, Baristanet isn't close to generating enough profit to support its owners, who aren't quitting their regular jobs. "As soon as the money's there, I'll commit to it" full-time, says George, a special sections editor at New York's Daily News. "We're growing, but we're not there yet."

Despite such modest returns, mainstream news organizations seem determined to enter the field. Sparked by such early hyperlocal innovators as the Journal-World (www2.ljworld.com) in Lawrence, Kansas, and the Rocky Mountain News in Denver (YourHub.com), established media companies see hyperlocalism as a way to win back lost readers and to target mom-and-pop advertisers who can't afford to, or simply don't want to, reach every household in a region. New entrants include Gannett, the nation's largest newspaper chain, and the Chicago Tribune, which in April launched Triblocal.com, aimed at nine towns in the southern and western suburbs.

The Tribune's foray into the burbs is "a way to make the [paper] more relevant to people who are farther and farther away from the central city," says Ted Biedron, who heads Chicagoland Publishing Co., the Tribune subsidiary overseeing the project. "Every major metro paper," he adds, "has this issue." True, but the Tribune isn't making any bold pronouncements about Triblocal, including revenue projections. The project seems modest so far: Triblocal has hired only four journalists to collect and organize material for the eight towns it is initially targeting online.

But Biedron notes that the project may prove more successful as an offline venture than an online one. This summer, the company will "reverse publish" its hyperlocal content, creating tabloid papers that will be inserted into copies of the Tribune bound for the distant towns.

A more ambitious hyperlocal effort is unfolding in my backyard, via my employer, the Washington Post. A 10-member team at Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive, the company's online division, has been working since October on the first of what it hopes will be a series of "microsites" covering the Post's home circulation area. The first such site, scheduled to go up in June, will target Loudoun County, Virginia (population: 255,518), a sprawling, exurban locale about 40 miles from downtown Washington. This is, in many ways, uncharted territory for the Post, which has tended to train its journalistic resources on Washington's government institutions, war zones and exotic foreign capitals.

WPNI picked Loudoun for its first hyperlocal effort because of the county's growth rate and affluence--its median household income of $98,483 is among the highest in the nation--and because Loudoun has just one moderately large municipality, Leesburg. This means that Loudoun's many subdivisions receive services from the county government, giving an otherwise disconnected place a common identity. Or so the folks at WPNI hope.

"What we're struggling with, and every major paper is struggling with, is how to reach our audience on a granular level, in a way we've never reached them before," says Jonathan Krim, WPNI's assistant managing editor for local and a co-leader on the Loudoun project. "People in the community want to know when that danged Dunkin' Donuts is finally going to move in. Or why there isn't a stoplight at the intersection where there have been a lot of accidents. There's a whole range of stories that, let's face it, a lot of newspapers and Web sites aren't engaged in, but that we know are really important to readers."

The Post already prints two Loudoun Extra sections a week with a staff of four reporters. But LoudounExtra.com, as the new microsite will be called, will also rely on its own "citizen army," as Krim puts it--a network of bloggers and amateur contributors who live in the county.

The site will also have several new features that the printed paper can't match. Rob Curley, WPNI's vice president of product development, takes on a nearly evangelical fervor as he talks up what he's got in store. Whipping out his ever-present Apple laptop and clicking frantically, he shows off a database that includes panoramic photos of every high school football field in the county; click on sections of the grandstands and you can see the sight lines to the field. There will be podcasts of some local church sermons, real-time accounts of high-school games and highly detailed restaurant guides, too. "You want to know which [county] restaurants are open after 11 p.m. on a Thursday? Boom! There you go!" he says, triumphantly displaying such a list.

Curley, a much-heralded veteran of similar projects at the Journal-World and at Florida's Naples Daily News, says newspapers can't afford not to add such bells and whistles.

"As my publisher in Lawrence used to say, 'Newspapers have to start driving with their brights on,'" he says. "My gut feeling is that a lot of newspapers aren't doing that right now.

I don't know what it is about the newspaper industry, but it has a way of taking great ideas and making them into OK ideas."

But let's get back to the bottom line again and ask a simple question: Will initiatives like LoudounExtra.com have much of an impact on a newspaper that generated about

$675 million last year from print and online ads? Will such efforts add up to much for an industry that seems to be grasping daily for the lifeboats?

Krim is hesitant. "We don't really know yet," he answers.

Still, he adds, "It's important to do this, even if it isn't a panacea. No one thing is going to change [the newspaper industry's] future. But a lot of things might. That's why we have to do this, even if we can't say for certain what kind of business success we might have. It's part of our mission. It has to be part of our mission in serving our readers and our communities. Do we hope, at the very least, that people looking at LoudounExtra.com will give the Washington Post a second look? Sure we do."

There are, of course, some good reasons for modesty. The Post, after all, isn't the first media company to discover Loudoun County. In addition to a local radio station, Yellow Pages publishers and coupon mailers, LoudounExtra.com will have to compete for local advertising with no fewer than 11 weekly newspapers, says Paul Smith, the executive editor of the county's biggest weekly, the Loudoun Times-Mirror.

Smith points out that most of the weeklies have larger editorial and sales staffs than the Post in Loudoun (the Times-Mirror has 15 full- and part-time newsroom employees). What's more, the weeklies have an unquantifiable advantage over the big-city paper: local brand names and strong ties to the community. The Times-Mirror, for one, can trace its founding to 1798.

"The Washington Post is a great paper," says Smith. "I love to read it every morning. But sometimes when you're a little bigger, you think bigger is better. It's not necessarily so." Online restaurant guides are nice, but Smith says bread-and-butter news still sells: "Can they cover the school board meetings?" he asks. "Can they go to local sporting events? Because people still want to read about those things."

Mark Potts, late of Backfence.com, can tell you all about the pitfalls of hyperlocal journalism. Although Backfence had its internal stresses, with the partners clashing over strategy (DeFife eventually resigned because of them), the company had two basic structural problems: getting the word out and getting the money in.

Raising awareness among residents of a community was a constant challenge, he says, particularly since Backfence's competitors were reluctant to sell advertising to a would-be rival. So, Potts and DeFife tried grassroots promotion, such as handing out flyers at civic events and speaking to community groups. But such efforts are difficult to sustain. "Where we fell down was getting the initial traffic in," he says. "When it works, it's mind-blowing. But it takes time to build, and it's difficult if you don't have a big media organization behind you."

Attracting local advertisers wasn't really an issue; Backfence had more than 400 of them on its many sites. "We were happy with the advertising we got, but it didn't grow as quickly as we thought it would," Potts says. Some ads sold for as little as $50. Laments Potts, "Small businesspeople just don't have a lot of money to spend" on advertising. (Indeed, Krasilovsky, the industry consultant, estimates that two-thirds of small businesses don't even advertise in traditional Yellow Pages books, let alone online.)

But Potts remains optimistic. "I believe there's huge pent-up demand for this," he says. "It's still a good idea. And it's going to happen. It's just a question of where and who and how all the pieces come together."

He thinks hyperlocal news sites will succeed if they can keep operating costs to a rock-bottom minimum, and if the sites are clustered--that is, strung together over a wide territory. That way, he says, a publisher won't be dependent on ads from just the local pizza parlor or the neighborhood dry cleaner. With enough "mass," a hyperlocal publisher might even attract regional and national advertisers, too.

It's a paradoxical notion, one that seems to strike at the whole notion of "hyperlocal" journalism: To stay very small, you may have to get very big.

Citizen journalism works best when it has a good story to tel

2007-11-01T00:16:00.000-07:00

Way back in 2005, when the Web 2.0 boom was just beginning, a number of new ventures were launched under the rubric of "citizen journalism" and "hyperlocal publishing”. While the details differed greatly, all these companies aimed to build new types of publications by encouraging citizen participation and providing online information and services that were not readily available on the local level. My company, NewWest.Net, was among that generation of start-ups. So was a company called Backfence.com, which announced last week that it was shutting down.

Backfence attracted a fair amount of attention in its brief life, mainly because it raised $3 million in venture capital and counted a well-regarded Washington Post editor as one of its founders. Now that it's failed, it's also attracting a lot of attention from people who are trying to figure out what's working and what's not in this new area of media. Some say Backfence was a good idea that was badly executed; others say it's proof that there's no money in local online media, or that the sector isn't appropriate for venture capital funding structures; still others suggest it's proof that citizen journalism doesn't work.

But I don't think any of these are exactly the right lessons. I think the problem with Backfence, and with a number of the other early experiments in online community journalism, is that they aren't quite "about" anything. They have no editorial angle on the world, no story they are trying to tell, and thus they become a boring hodge-podge of information titbits. In the rush to reinvent local journalism, the journalism piece is getting lost.

To back up for a minute: Backfence.com aimed to build local sites in mostly suburban towns around the country, beginning with two in Virginia. Local citizens would be invited to submit stories about the happenings in their town – things too small to command the attention of professional journalists, perhaps, but important enough if you live in the town. Local businesses would have an easy, low-cost way to advertise, both via Yellow Page-style listings and traditional web banner ads. Local residents could find the Little League scores, or share their photos of a family wedding, or gossip about the city council, or opine about which businesses served them best. The problem was that Backfence put up the sites – and nobody came. As it turned out, it's hard to get people to write stories or even share gossip on a local website. They certainly won't do it if there is no audience, creating the classic chicken-and-egg dilemma. Plus, people who are already active participants in online conversations already have their own communities – be it on Facebook or MySpace or Yahoo! Groups or the local biking club's list serve. People who are not active online take a lot of convincing.

The "if you build it they will come" approach most definitely does not work when it comes to local online media and citizen journalism.

Furthermore, Backfence and others were oddly positioned in that they were trying to do several very different things from the outset. They were trying to compete with Google, the Yellow Pages, and scads of other directory, classified and search services in helping people to find an apartment or a pizza joint or a plumber. They were trying to compete with the Facebook and MySpace and a flood of specialised social networking sites and blog communities in helping people to connect with one another. And they were trying to compete with newspapers and local TV and radio in reporting news in their communities.

It is possible to do several of these things at once – but only if one of those things is initially drawing the audience that might then be interested in the other things. The reason newspapers became the source for classified advertising is because they had the distribution to get the ads in front of people; they had the distribution because people wanted to read the news.

Virtually every successful web media business, even ones that are now very broad, got to where they are because they had a strong editorial proposition that drove readership and created a community. Craigslist was originally about finding apartments in San Francisco. Facebook was about learning more about your college classmates (in case you wanted to date one of them.) Daily Kos was about Democratic electoral politics. Gawker was about Manhattan media gossip. And so on.

Journalists are often the first to forget that creating community via publishing is not something that came with the internet era, or something that requires cutting edge Web 2.0 tools. It's something that great magazines and newspapers have been doing for 100 years – by having an appealing and unique editorial proposition.

NewWest.Net is about growth and change in the Rocky Mountain West in all of its dimensions: political, cultural, social and economic. We have hyper-local sites in seven towns, and while they offer many different things they are all informed by our over-riding interest. That editorial proposition – which we pursue via a hybrid of professional and citizen journalism – is what motivates people to be a part of NewWest.Net. And once you've got people involved, there are lots of ways to "monetise" (hint: it's not all about advertising).

I always appreciate people taking a swing at things and I think Backfence was a brave pioneer. But let's not learn the wrong lessons from its demise. It's not enough to give people a place to talk. There has to be something to talk about.

By

Jonathan Weber is the founder and editor in chief of NewWest.Net, a regional news service focused on the Rocky Mountain West in the United States. He was previously the co-founder and editor in chief of the Industry Standard

MSNBC buys Newsvine as a route into citizen journalism

2007-11-01T00:10:00.000-07:00

News company MSNBC (which is owned by Microsoft and NBC Universal) has bought Newsvine, its first acquisition after 11 years in business. According to MSNBC's own reporter, Newsvine is "a small but innovative player in what is known as 'participatory journalism'."

Rex Sorgatz, Executive Producer of MSNBC.com, writing on his personal blog, says:

the gist is this: we plan to leave Newsvine alone -- learn from it, integrate little pieces of it, watch it grow. The site will continue to run independently with Mike at the helm; meanwhile, we will incrementally find sensible ways to integrate the "social thinking" of Newsvine into the "big media thinking" of MSNBC.com.

I'm convinced that Newsvine represents a different way of thinking about traditional media -- as merger of gathering, interacting, and consuming. By positing news as an ecosystem rather than a hierarchy, the philosophy of Newsvine is actually an old one. News has always been conversational, but only recently have we begun to rediscover the tools to bring it back to its networked mode. Mike and his team have built an amazing site, and we are excited to turn some of our large audience onto it.

Newsvine is rather small -- half a dozen people -- so I reckon it will need to keep its distance to avoid being crushed

You Tube and my Space where are they heading for??

2007-11-01T00:02:00.000-07:00

In a matter of months, this online phenomenon went from zero users to millions. It was hugely popular with media-loving teens and young adults, whose participation drew in even more people. And for many, it became a daily obsession.

In 1999, the phenomenon was called Napster, a service that allowed users to swap songs through the Internet. Two years later, a pair of competing file-sharing networks -- Morpheus and Kazaa -- enjoyed a similarly meteoric rise. In 2005, a new version arrived -- this time in the form of the social-networking site MySpace (and, in a more modest way, Facebook), which allowed people to post profiles to the Web and communicate with friends through them. This year's model is the video-sharing site YouTube. As of October, MySpace had almost 50 million users, according to Nielsen//NetRatings, making it the runaway king of social networks. YouTube, meanwhile, had 30 million users, making it the most popular user-generated video site.

The two companies differ in fundamental ways from their file- sharing predecessors, but their popularity flows in part from the same source: a supply of free media contributed by users. On YouTube, it is video clips; on MySpace, it is clips (often provided through links to YouTube) and music. In fact, the two sites each show more videos than any Web site except Yahoo, according to a recent study by comScore Media Metrix, which tracks online activity.

And now, with both sites drawing flak from copyright holders, the question is whether they'll follow their predecessors' rapid path downward too. The descent of the file-sharing companies was fueled mainly by their inability to satisfy the demand for free downloads that they had stoked. When the courts ordered the original Napster to prevent users from downloading copyrighted songs, for instance, it lost more than 60 percent of its audience in five months, according to comScore Media Metrix. It never recovered.

MySpace and YouTube are in a different position legally and economically. They're Web sites, not software programs designed to copy digital files (so the companies can argue that they are protected from liability by special rules for Internet providers.) And their owners -- News Corp. and Google, respectively -- have very deep pockets and can afford to fight any challenges.

Still, the communities they have created rely to a great extent on users' ability to express themselves through media, and frequently the copyrights to that media are owned by a major music company, TV network or studio. While arguing that they aren't liable for their users' infringements, the companies also have tried to placate copyright owners by striking deals to share revenue with them (e.g., YouTube's deals with Warner Music Group and Universal Music Group) or sell their content (e.g., MySpace's deal with Snocap to help sell songs from unsigned artists). But the major labels and studios have not been mollified and have continued to press the companies to block copyrighted works from being posted on their sites unless specifically authorized. YouTube is developing technology to do just that.

Depending on how restrictive copyright owners decide to be, MySpace and YouTube could face a Hobson's choice. If they accede to the demands of Hollywood and the record labels and allow only a fraction of their works to be posted, users might be driven away because they can't express themselves the way they want to. And as their audiences thin, so will the glue that binds many users. It's the "network effect" in reverse: As users leave, the sites' breadth diminishes, prompting more people to go elsewhere.

Alternatively, MySpace and YouTube could refuse and continue letting users post whatever songs or clips they please, removing material only if the copyright holder complains. Some copyright specialists argue that MySpace and YouTube are shielded by the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which exempts Internet service providers from liability as long as they remove infringing material when asked. But other experts disagree, saying the exemption doesn't apply to MySpace and YouTube. Universal Music Group, among others, doesn't believe it does; it sued MySpace and News Corp. for copyright infringement Nov. 17.

It's ironic to see News Corp., whose 20th Century Fox movie studio helped bring the lawsuits against Kazaa, Morpheus and numerous individual file-sharers, on the defensive. At the same time, it's refreshing to see an important copyright-law case litigated by parties with comparable resources on both sides, rather than having the entertainment industry pound away at much smaller figures.

The best result would be for Universal and its entertainment brethren to work out a way with MySpace and YouTube to turn people's enthusiasm for posting songs and clips into a robust revenue stream - - assuming that the sites can gin up enough money to make everybody happy. In another parallel with the original Napster, MySpace and YouTube haven't found a way yet to generate much revenue from advertisers or users. And the longer that remains true, the greater the chance that the companies will meet the same fate.
by
John Healey is an editorial writer for the Los Angeles Times

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

2007-10-31T03:54:00.001-07:00

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

2007-10-31T02:52:00.000-07:00

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

2007-10-30T06:45:00.000-07:00

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

2007-10-30T00:01:00.001-07:00

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

Citizen journalism resources

2007-10-29T23:54:00.000-07:00

Accuracy & fact-checking

Tips for Fact Checking - Web style Guide
Northern Ireland's government gives advice on fact checking and ways to improve accuracy. Specifically, tips are offered for self-editing and fact checking, with emphasis on providing documentation and correctly publishing sources.

ASNE handbook - Accuracy section
As part of the American Society of Newspaper Editor's handbook on journalism, the "Details Matter" section is presented as a combination of personal anecdotes, advice and techniques to improve journalistic accuracy. Featured are checklists for writers to reference while putting together a story, as well as fact-checking statistics and help.

American Press Institute Fact-Checking Resources
Here’s a collection of links to resources that aid in fact checking. Though mainly pertaining to political issues and politicians, also included are language, biographical and geographical reference tools.

Fact Checking Tips and Pitfalls
Aimed primarily at reporters, but also journalists and writers of all backgrounds, The News and Observer, a North Carolina newspaper, presents a checklist of accuracy tips as well as potential pitfalls. The newspaper encourages journalists to "find a routine" for fact-checking that "works for you," while offering general background information as well.

Fact Checkers and Copy Editors
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's Park Library offers advice on "smart, safe and efficient fact checking" to encourage greater accuracy. Offering advice on how to carry out research, websites to find resources and links to professional fact checkers, this presentation offers a wealth of resources.

My Research Needs Dot Com
Here’s a fee-based service for new and aspiring writers that offers them the chance to work with a professional fact checker. Katrina O’Brien offers fact checking, research, interview, image search and several other background investigation services.

Fast Fact Check
The library in Arlington, Virginia, offers a list of resources for quick fact checking, mostly of a political nature. Categories of resources include political information, directories, and reference books and websites.

Poynter Online: Getting it Right - A Passion for Accuracy
Poynter Online offers not only many accuracy guidelines but also personal anecdotes and links to other websites to promote improved accuracy practices. In this article, Chip Scanlan offers practical advice to fellow journalists to increase the accuracy level of any piece.

O'Reilly Digital Media: 10 Journalism Tips for E-Writers
Even online journalists and bloggers sometimes need pointers on how to write a better story. These tips offer advice on accuracy and organization as well as several other related topics.

Publicity Hound's Accuracy Tips
A short article that contains relevant tips for those engaging in interviews with contacts. Pre- and post-interview guidelines and checklists along with corresponding links to other helpful material are provided, as is a collection of suggestions about how a journalist should carry him/herself during an interview.

Is That a Fact?
Though designed primarily for students, journalists of any age can stand to benefit from the pointers and advice offered by Classroomtools.com. In addition, the site also offers 13 how-to examples of fact-checking and accuracy tests.

Accuracy in Media
Accuracy in Media strives "for fairness, balance and accuracy in news reporting" and posts several stories a week on various topics that illustrate this commitment. Unlike other sites, this page and its related content are best used as examples of accuracy in the media rather than as a collection of helpful hints and tips.

Delusions of Accuracy
In an article for the Columbia Journalism Review, Ariel Hart suggests we should become more comfortable with the fact that we make mistakes - and more open about admitting and correcting them.

Thoroughness

J-Lab
J-Lab says it "helps news organizations and citizens use new information ideas ... to develop new ways for people to engage in critical public policy issues." To this end, the site provides case studies of political issues from the media (many of these are multi-media and interactive), as well as blogs and podcasts with a similar function. Additionally, a half dozen examples of participatory content on websites are listed as a means of providing an example for those seeking to take the Web to the next level.

Brandeis University's Institute for Investigative Journalism
Brandeis University's Institute for Investigative Journalism provides case studies for citizen journalists who seek to promote thoroughness and accuracy in their work. Additionally, the site offers a special section for students, along with areas of emphasis that include political/social/gender justice projects and an examination of flaws in the mainstream media. Offline, the Institute also has internships devoted to budding citizen journalists, and offers programs in which students can learn more about investigative journalism and research techniques.

Diversity Toolbox
The Society of Professional Journalists provides a list of tips and recommendations for journalists trying to provide fair and balanced coverage of any story. "This is not at all about being politically correct; it’s about doing good journalism. Fair, accurate, balanced, solid and thorough journalism."

Journalism and Mass Communication Resources
Combining links from dozens of websites and listing them under several distinct categories (CyberJournalism, Gender relations, Media Law, etc.), this site at the University of Iowa is an excellent starting point for citizen journalists who seek to learn more about the subjects of their stories. The wealth of links listed here provide a useful resource for the promotion of thorough and accurate writing.

Research Databases from CSU Long Beach
Though designed primarily for CSU Long Beach students, this site serves as a guide for various internet resources, databases to locate articles, and other research tools. The goal of the site is to "provide a comprehensive starting point for research in the field of journalism," and to promote thoroughness in citizen journalism.

Research in Journalism and Communication, University of Oregon
This site is a repository for other databases that can help journalists in researching the topics of their stories. Pointers include not only web resources but also links to databases for finding scholarly articles, contacting experts and doing basic background research on almost any topic.

Journalistic Research at University of Oregon
Research is integral to maintaining journalistic thoroughness, and this site provides (in PDF form) a list of tips as well as a walk-through of how to compile information that can be used to write an article or story. The document contains not only a list of questions that can be used as a guide for obtaining relevant and practical background material but also a list of potential research tools and tips.

Journalist Express
The Journalist Express serves as a central collection of links to various news organizations and websites that can be used to obtain background information for a news article or story. Though the sources presented here are mainly in the mainstream media, a few citizen journalism and other sites are also present.

CyberJournalist.net SuperSearch
CyberJournalist.net's SuperSearch feature allows users to easily comb through encyclopedia, major news sites, citizen journalist sites or major search engines to find out more about a subject. By condensing so many resources into a single page, the SuperSearch tool can be extremely useful for performing background research on almost any topic.

Web Resources for Journalists
Unlike other resource mongers, this site has links to online resources only. These range in type from search engines, to reporting tools, to legal resources to the Internet Movie DataBase (IMDB). All are potentially useful tools for ensuring a greater degree of thoroughness and accuracy in citizen journalism.

Completeness and Exclusion in Journalism Ethics
This site provides a case study in which journalistic integrity and thoroughness were not maintained, and serves as an example of "what not to do." While the article itself originates from the Journal of Mass Media Ethics, its implications and high regard for journalistic integrity are universal and equally applicable today.

Webtips
This site contains the "25 most useful resources" for journalists seeking to improve the depth and accuracy of their stories. For journalists looking to learn more about their quarry or to find out background material, the site is equally valuable. Setting Webtips apart from other collections of links is its list of hints and tips that accompany each link.

Web Resources for Newsrooms
Though ostensibly designed with TV news reporting in mind, this site provides a plethora of online research tools to aid journalists in any field to better find what they need. The databases include UC's Datamine, guides to almanacs and encyclopedias, and the requisite search tool for use with mass media news sites.

Journalism Publications and Resources for Writers
With a small collection of links to various international newspapers, the Sun Oasis site is best suited to journalists seeking to write or learn more about international affairs. The site also has a special resource section devoted to 9/11 that contains links to articles and resources regarding both the attack and the war on terrorism.

Journalism Research Pages
The API provides a list of citizen journalist pages for reference purposes and to help writers learn about current events without the bias of the mass media. The collection is especially notable for its emphasis on facilitating independent resources rather than CNN or other "big name" sites.

nuzGeeks.com
NuzGeeks provides a database of videos, articles and other publications devoted to improving thoroughness in citizen journalism and exposing shortcomings in the mass media. Its strongest point is the inclusion of audio and video tools to help facilitate an understanding of what's needed in citizen journalism.

No Frills Jumplist
As produced by San Francisco State University's Journalism School, the No Frills Jumplist provides links to online reference works, local government websites, a "people finder" link and links to most major news media organizations. In addition, it links to sites designed to specifically help journalists achieve the goal of more balanced and thorough reporting.

Fairness

Webdiary Ethics
An Austrialian blogger presents his professional journalistic code of ethics in this piece. Though placed in the "Fairness" section, this article could rightly be placed under almost any of our modules due to its emphasis on all five principles that we hope citizen journalists will internalize. The code of ethics as presented here is in the form of two lists: one that the author expects from himself as a journalist, and the other of what he expects from his contacts. All tips presented are useful and encourage respect and fairness toward sources and fellow journalists alike.

ASNE: JVI Values: Fairness and Balance
The American Society of Newspaper Editors provides a list of ways providing fairness and balance in citizen journalism. Also provided are tips for aspiring journalists and professionals, as well as ways of improving balanced coverage in of controversial topics in the media.

Rethinking Objectivity
As authors such as Dan Gillmor maintain, objectivity in news reporting is nearly impossible to achieve. This article explores the ramifications of this perspective against the backdrop of the war on terror and other contemporary news issues. The piece’s author, Brent Cunningham, does not entirely dismiss the importance of objectivity to journalism (citizen and otherwise) but instead calls for a different kind of objectivity when pursuing highly contested media events.

Journalism and Objectivity
Fairness, journalism and objectivity are deconstructed from the point of view of a journalist blogger in this erudite essay. A comparison between forms of objectivity and fairness in more traditional forms of media and contemporary, internet journalism are presented as well.

Fairness.com
Fairness.com is an overarching website that includes dozens of links to news stories with case studies in media fairness. In their own words, "Fairness.com provides database resources, message boards, and searchable article links for exploring virtually any fairness-related topic."

Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting
This website features articles exploring fairness in several categories, with dozens of real-life examples of unfair or unbalanced reporting. Topics include the war in Iraq, the conflict in the Middle East, and immigration in the United States. In addition to these case studies, the site also serves as a repository for articles in the media that are critical of current mass media biases.

AIM: Accuracy In Media
AIM is a citizen media group designed to encourage accuracy and balance in mass media as well as among grassroots groups. AIM provides case studies and commentaries as well as a host of regular columnists and blogs regarding the aforementioned journalistic practices. Though it lacks any list of tips for journalists seeking fairness and balance, the site makes up for this in the sheer volume and number of columns and examples presented.

Rhetorica: Media and Political Bias
Rhetorica is devoted to detecting bias in the media and in politics. The site offers a checklist of "Critical Questions for Detecting Bias" as well as a structural breakdown of types of bias in the mass media. In addition, a theoretical approach to bias prevention and a raison d'etre for the practice of fairness assertion are offered.

The Hill.com: Media fairness and elections
The Hill, the newspaper for and about Congress, presents a series of examples exposing and explaining political biases in the media, with commentary from both the conservative and liberal sides of the issue.

Common Dreams: Fairness and accuracy in reporting
Common Dreams offers another example of bias in the mass media from a political perspective. The media advisory presented here addresses problems with coverage of the Iraq War and examines the American response to revelations that Iraq did not possess weapons of mass destruction.

The Free Press
The Free Press is an online news magazine devoted to promoting fairness in the media and to producing its own articles that meet a high degree of accuracy and balance. Putting out its own "columns and dispatches," the Free Press addresses the issues of journalistic integrity while also presenting numerous case studies that demonstrate what to do and what not to do as a journalist.

Media Research Center
The Media Research Center offers not only case studies in media bias, but also assessments and extensive analyses of topics related to media balance and bias. Their "Media Bias Basics" walk users through the finer points of fairness in the media and each offers an extensive study on each topic complete with statistics and history. Notably, the site also offers a wealth of case studies in media bias through the use of posting videos, an exceptionally useful multimedia tool. The videos can be found here.

Fairpress.org: Citizens Coalition for Responsible Media
Fairpress.org examines bias in the media through blogs, case studies and the "Media Bias Outrage of the Week," a column devoted to pointing out the most egregious acts of unbalanced coverage in the mass media. Notably, these also take the form of both video feeds and written articles, enhancing the multimedia quality of the site.

Media Awareness Network: How to Detect Bias in the News
Unlike other sites devoted to asserting and pointing out media biases, the Media Awareness Network instead offers guidelines and tips for aspiring journalists seeking to eliminate bias in their work, while also offering a checklist of ways in which both journalists and observers can find bias in the newspaper and online. Though the link here is only to a checklist/handout, other, similar articles are also available from the handout's parent site.

AlterNet
AlterNet.org, a venerable site for exploring bias and accuracy problems with the mass media, has added a new dimension with AlterNet Video, a section of the site devoted to exposing bias from a multimedia perspective. The site may be useful not only in disseminating case studies in media biases, but also as a teaching tool, as the site provides a daily stream of articles and blogs devoted to the same ends.

Transparency

Our Media Voice: Campaign for Accountability
With a focus on broadcast television, Our Media Voice points out bias in the mainstream media, as well as instances in which transparency is absent. "Our media, owned by only a handful of conglomerates, has a profound influence upon our society. They have created a universal culture that shapes how we see our world and drives public opinion and public policy," the site says. Unlike other media outlets, Our Media Voice also promotes citizen journalism through an emphasis on feedback from readers and journalists alike.

CyberJournalist.net: Media Transparency
Here’s a repository of resources for citizen journalists looking for more information in transparency in the mass media and among fellow bloggers and other citizen journalists. Additionally, the site features case studies as well as news articles related to the topics of transparency in blogging and citizen media reports.

Media Matters
Media Matters is a progressive website that aims to "systematically monitor a cross section of print, broadcast, cable, radio and Internet media outlets for conservative misinformation" and bias. To this end, the site presents numerous examples of conservative influence over the mainstream media through several different forms of presentation: video, audio and print. These case studies are integral to citizen journalists seeking to point out (or avoid) the biases inherent in the mainstream media.

FEMA's Dirty Little Secret
A trailer park housing refugees in the wake of Hurricane Katrina serves as a backdrop for this case study, as it examines the topic of transparency in news reports originating with the federal government. As part of the interview, the issue of press freedom is delved into, and readers can choose mp3, streaming video or written transcripts as their medium of choice for learning more.

SPJ: Freedom of Information
This section of the Society of Professional Journalists’ website is devoted to opening government records to scrutiny. To this end, it provides links and resources to journalists regarding government cover-ups and the like. The site also provides a case study of reporters covering stories in prisons as a means of demonstrating a lack of transparency and how to get around it.

How Mass Media Simulate Political Transparency
This academic essay from Yale University examines the lack of transparency in the mass media. Through the use of case studies and examples (with special emphasis on political scandals), the site demonstrates the causes and effects of a lack of transparency in the major news reporting organizations in the United States.

Media Transparency: The Money Behind Conservative Media
Media Transparency lists articles citing sources of funding for Republican and conservative Christian groups, and demonstrates through case studies the negative effects this funding has on mainstream media outlets. Additionally, the site provides a history of conservative manipulation of the media and a database containing hundreds of grants given by conservative organizations to media groups and think tanks.

Transparency Now
An eclectic mix of video, sound and written articles, Transparency Now examines the issues of funding and bias in film/TV as well as the press. Composed almost entirely of former journalist Ken Sanes' essays, the site also contains examinations of pop culture in relation to American society as a special section devoted to simulation and transparency in the mass media.

Accuracy, Transparency and Fairness
Using Indonesia as a case study of a nation in which the accuracy, transparency and fairness journalism are not present in journalism outlets, UCLA's AsiaMedia institute gives tips and pointers to journalists in the United States through the use of the Indonesian media as a foil. Though brief, the article also chronicles why bias occurs as well as its effects on the public when media transparency is non-existent.

Case Study in Media Corruption
Though difficult to understand for those not directly involved with internal medicine, presented here is a "case study of media corruption" with regards to the pharmaceutical industry and Readers Digest. It examines the links between funding of advertisements and the featuring of books that promote advertisers' products in the magazine.

Methods and Bias of the Media
In this essay, Kuro5hin.org poster Michael Leza examines bias in the media through a comparison of mainstream sitcoms and other fictional, staged television programs. "What many of these same people are not aware of (and how could they be?) is that when they sit down to watch the nightly news, or their favorite artificial news-flavored product, they are in fact watching a show that has been just as managed, planned, and scripted as any episode of Seinfeld was."

Center for Media and Democracy
Investigative journalism and the influence of politics on mass media are the focus of the CMD. As part of its PR Watch tool, the CMD presents case studies of journalism in which bias and a lack of transparency are both evident and detrimental. The site says, "The nonprofit Center for Media and Democracy strengthens participatory democracy by investigating and exposing public relations spin and propaganda, and by promoting media literacy and citizen journalism, media 'of, by and for the people.'"

Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America
Both accuracy and transparency are of paramount importance in citizen journalism, and this site attempts to tackle both these issues in regard to journalism and the Middle East. Despite its geographic focus, the site is a virtual repository for case studies of mass media biases.

Reporting Wars
Reporting Wars targets media bias with a special eye on current events in Iraq and the United States. Additionally, and perhaps more helpfully, the site presents on its homepage a side-by-side comparison of headlines from various newsgroups reporting on the same events. Evidence of slanting the news is laid bare, and each example can readily be used as a case study to show the lack of transparency in the mainstream media.

Media Lens
Similar to many other sites on this list, Media Lens focuses on "correcting the distorted vision of the corporate media" in major stories around the world. Specifically, the site targets the BBC, though it also offers criticism of the U.S. news media and offers tips and insights from a number of bloggers whose works are posted on the site.

What's Wrong With the News?
Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting offers a critical assessment of the mainstream media, dividing examples of bias and a lack of transparency into nine categories as well as case studies and analyses of bias, though the site does not offer any specific tips for citizen journalists regarding transparency.

Blinded by Science
The article offers a case study in science and political bias carrying over into and adversely affecting the mass media. Chiefly, it discusses the problems of politicized reporting and issues of bias, accuracy and corruption in the media from a scientist's perspective.

Podcasting as a Weapon for the Right
From mediatransparency.org comes this single case study that analyzes the possibility that the media, while embracing new technology on par with that of citizen journalists, is simultaneously falling prey to the same conservative groups who exacerbated a lack of transparency in radio. The issue should be of concern to citizen journalists not only because it deals with the compromising of a medium long known for its progressive outlook but also because it demonstrates the inability of mass media to escape bias regardless of technological advancements.

Journalism, Transparency and the Public Trust
Here’s an academic analysis of transparency in the mass media, and its effects on the public. Most importantly, the study deals with the issues of blogs and transparency. It also includes recommendations for improving transparency in the media and examines the implications of a public that has no access to a dialogue with the mass media.

Independence

The Memory Hole
The Memory Hole is a collection of case studies dealing with government shortcomings and corporate fraud and whose goal is to preserve information for journalists that would otherwise be either lost or unreleased. To this end, the site contains numerous "government files, corporate memos, police reports, congressional testimony" and similar documents. Additionally, the Memory Hole seeks to preserve independent journalism that is allowed to be critical of the government and those in power.

Freedom Forum
Freedom Forum, a nonpartisan foundation dedicated to a free press and free speech, collects and analyzes articles gleaned from the mainstream media. Its utility as a repository of articles is aided in part by the fact that the site also has a separate set of links related to the upholding of First Amendment rights and journalistic independence. With additional links to the First Amendment Center and Newsroom Diversity Programs, the site provides services to journalists aside from research tools.

Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press
Focusing mainly on journalists themselves rather than the stories they cover, the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press promotes journalistic integrity and independence in the face of intimidation from the mass media and the government. Mainly a collection of articles related to journalists and their exploits, the site also provides guidelines on how to access juvenile courts and electronic records, a guide to state-by-state phone taping laws and other sections that may be helpful to journalists seeking greater independence.

Poynter Online: The Value of Independence
Poynter author Bob Steele gives advice and pointers to journalists seeking to promote a higher degree of independence in their work. Pulling from two sources, including from the Society of Professional Journalists, Steele offers citizen journalists advice on what it means to be an independent reporter and steps that can be taken to enhancing credibility while also upholding ethical journalistic standards.

The Ethics of Civic Journalism: Independence as the Guide
The relationship between journalists and the public they serve is examined in this article, which raises the questions, "Should reporters be investigators of system failure or initiators of solutions? Should journalists be detached observers or activist participants?" and gives advice on how journalism can best meet the needs of an author's home community. Through championing an approach that is independent both of the government and the petty disputes some journalists become bogged down in, author Bob Steele hopes to reinvigorate public trust and faith in journalists.

Journalism Tools
Journalism.org has an extensive section of tools for citizens, professional journalists, students and teachers on independence and the other foundation topics. While not focused on citizen media, these link provide advice and examples from professionals and major media organizations such as CBS that are easily adaptable.

Inside BBC Journalism: Independence
As part of its series on journalistic integrity and ethics, the BBC presents this module on independence, which chronicles the importance of the ideal as applied to the BBC's many reporters. As related through numerous case studies, the section "examines how BBC journalists strive to make programmes independently of commercial, political and other interests" in order to provide the public with a factual, unbiased view on world events.

Journalistic Integrity and Independence of the Press
Journalistic independence is applied to Africa through two case studies in this document from Stanhopecentre.org that chronicles the struggle to first create and then preserve an independent media in three east African nations. The document contains a list of duties for independent journalists.

The Fund for Independence in Journalism
A non-profit organization aimed at providing for and supporting investigative reporting, the Fund for Independence in Journalism helps fund various programs designed to counter the efforts of the mainstream media to introduce bias into journalism. The site provides a list of facts, each of which chronicles an instance in which politics took precedence over journalistic integrity and the news story that emerged was steeped in bias. The site also chronicles press intimidation, control of information and sponsored news.

A Handbook of Reuters Journalism
Reuters provides its own guidelines and advice for journalists seeking to provide balanced and independent reporting of current events. Independence is "crucial to Reuters' ability to report on companies, institutions and individuals in the financial markets, many of whom are also their customers, without regard for anything other than accuracy, balance and the truth." As with the guidelines set forth by CBS, these are not originally designed with citizen journalists in mind, though they are readily applicable.

Digital Independence
While most sites promote the formation or upkeep of independent media outlets, the Digitalindies.com site serves as a helpful resource for independent and citizen journalists. The small site is devoted primarily to two topics: globalization blowback and independent media. With its emphasis on digital media, however, the site's true value lies in its collection of links to other resources that might be of use to citizen journalists.

The Media's Independence Problem
As part of the World Policy Journal, author Jonathan Mermin uses the 2003 invasion of Iraq as an example of non-independent media and the problems associated with having journalists colluding with the military and government when writing their stories or reporting. Focusing on the First Amendment’s provision for an independent press, Mermin explores the journey of the American mass media from an independent entity to one dependent on the government for its information and funding.

The Rise of Media Independence
This article by blogger-journalist Doc Searls in the technology publication Linux Journal is important for its examination of media as a one- or two-way interaction between journalists and the public. While the author encourages efforts to increase media independence, he also recognizes that today's media is anything but that and makes suggestions for reforms. The article is also important for its emphasis on news that can be consumed or produced with equal ease, a topic of definite interest and importance to citizen journalists.

Media Independence: Is Self-Regulation an Answer, from worldbank.org
In light of the problems associated with government-regulated media, the World Bank explores the possibility of self-regulation among media outlets as a means of creating a responsible press corps in developing nations. Though not aimed primarily at U.S. citizen journalists who focus on domestic issues, the article does make a number of insights into citizen journalism in the developing world and the need for a responsible cadre of journalists to accurately and responsibly serve the populations of developing nations.

Celebrating Media Independence
An editorial in the alternative publication the Berkeley Daily Planet, this piece decries criticism of articles in the New York Times that are themselves highly critical of the Bush administration's policies after 9/11. The author calls for greater oversight of politicians and a loosening of the reins currently used to keep the mass media in the service of those in power. Though it features no pointers or tips, the essay is valuable for its insights into the contemporary media's role in restricting public information access.

Independent Media Center
The Independent Media Center describes itself as "a collective of independent media organizations and hundreds of journalists offering grassroots, non-corporate coverage." The site both encourages and provides examples of independent news media that are not part of larger media conglomerates, and also features an option that allows users to publish their own stories or videos on the site, a priceless tool for citizen journalists seeking to get their story out.

The Big Ten at thenation.com
The Nation provides a list of the 10 largest media conglomerates, including any subsidiaries.

Other citizen media resources

J-Learning
Numerous online journalism tutorials related to reporting and the Web.

News U
Run by the non-profit Poynter Institute, it has a number of good, free online journalism courses open to everyone.

Personal Media Learning Center
A good resource containing interviews with citizen media pioneers, summaries of media law and more.

EditTeach.org
A site funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation with many resources for editors, as well as a growing online section.

Investigative Reporters Resource Center
The center offers tips on developing leads and using public records. You can also buy cleaned public data from them if you’re interested. Check out the IRE listserv as well.

Reporters Cookbook
A wiki with how-tos, particularly related to computer-assisted reporting.

Florida Public Records Handbook
In this valuable handbook, Joe Adams highlights Florida stories that have used public records in them.

How bloggers can become good journalists

2007-10-29T23:50:00.000-07:00

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

2007-10-29T23:45:00.000-07:00

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

2007-10-29T23:35:00.000-07:00

"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).

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

2007-10-29T23:14:00.000-07:00

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

2007-10-29T23:13:00.001-07:00

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

2007-10-29T23:10:00.000-07:00

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

2007-10-29T23:08:00.001-07:00

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

2007-10-29T23:03:00.000-07:00

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

2007-10-29T06:38:00.000-07:00

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

2007-10-29T05:07:00.000-07:00

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

2007-10-29T04:58:00.000-07:00

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?

2007-10-29T04:02:00.000-07:00

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

2007-10-29T03:39:00.000-07:00

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

2007-10-29T02:45:00.000-07:00

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