mediagiraffe

AUDIO: Sorting out the ethical issues for blogging

Two key members of the Online News Association are seeking to draft ethical guidelines for news bloggers and held an town-meeting style session to hash out ideas. Listen to the discussion on Thurs., Oct. 18, 2007, at the ONA's annual meeting in Toronto. The session leaders were Anthony Moore, an ONA director and managing editor, interactive for the Dallas Morning News (left, in photo); and Tom Reagan, NPR in-house blogger and a former ONA executive director. Listen to the audio:

Boston Alliance for Community Journalism open-source website

Pete Stidman was wrapping up his first year as a reporter for the community weekly, the Jamaica Plain Gazette, when he aligned with other neighborhood reporters. They've formed the Alliance for Community Jounalism with three goals for 2007: <li>Develop news websites in collaboration with outlets that foster greater interactivity and civic involvement within neighborhoods. <li>Create a citywide online resource (BostonBee.com) highlighting neighborhood and ethnic news websites and blogs. <li>Host the first in a series of nitty-gritty local-reporting workshops. The first collaborative website is http://www.jpgazette.com . The aggregation website, http://www.BostonBee.com , is entering development.
Stidman described the project at the New England News Forum event at the Boston Public Library on Thurs., May 17, 2007. Click on the carat on the left of the bar below the photo to launch a short video.

Pete Stidman, 617-620-1989
email: stidman@gmail.com   

Jim Caralis describes the OpenMass public database website

Jim Caralis left a job as an engineer for one of the largest proprietary content database companies to start a consulting practice. But then he decided he could offer the public a no-cost way to get access to Massachusetts government documents. He described OpenMass.org, his new website, at a meeting of the New England News Forum, May 17, 2007 at the Boston Public Library. Watch the video, below, and read more at: http://newshare.typepad.com/nenf/2007/04/caralis_betas_o.html

AUDIO: Courtney Lowery, NewWest co-founder, outlines the business in talk at J-Lab's citizen-jouranalism summit Oct. 5, 2006, Washington, D.C.

Courtney Lowery, managing editor and co-founder with Jonathan Weber of the New West Network, described the business of the regional news blog for the Rocky Mountain region in a talkOct. 5, 2006, at the J-Lab Citizen Media Summit in Washington, D.C. NewWest is venture-capital funded, has three full-time employees and 12 paid contributors in major cities of the American West. It projects profitability in two years, based on a combination of advertisements, the inauguration of a print magazine in 2007, staging conferences and running ancillary businesses, such as an indoor-place advertising business recently purchased.  Lowery describes the mission of NewWest as sharing information about core cultural, economic and environmental issues for the Rockies.  What drives traffic to the site is "killer stories," she says, and constant updating of web pages with fresh material.

DOWNLOAD/LISTEN to an excerpt of Lowery's talk (23 mins.; 10.3MB, MP3):
Download new-west-courtney-lowery-10-05-06.mp3

Cit-J in Review: OlyBlog, Chi-Town Daily News and Muncie Free Press

Along with some of the discussion about citizen journalism at last week's We Media global forum in London, the BBC/Reuters/Media Center poll made it pretty clear that most people still trust the MSM over blogs.  Yet over the past month or so I've come acorss some citizen journalism efforts right in the U.S. that bear mention for their efforts:

OlyBlog is a cit-j site out of Olympia, Washington.  Founded by Rick McKinnon, it's entirely citizen generated--one can either post to their own blog, or email news to Rick.  OlyBlog also aggregates from a number of different sources--including other blogs (which is how I found them--or they found me.)  OlyBlog provides two functions that many in the cit-j dialogs feel are important--focus on hyper-local content and filtering via aggregating--and becomes a one-stop spot for trusted local and global information.

Chi-Town Daily News  is a beautiful cit-j effort out of Chicago.  Their About page explains how they are written "by and for Chicago residents" and encourages citizen involvement.  Noticing how there's been a drift to the suburbs in local newspaper coverage (almost the opposite of what's happened in areas like Washington D.C., serviced by Backfence.com) Chi-Town Daily focuses on the city, city events, and news in city neighborhoods.  Debuting in Dec '05, it's a great effort worth watching (thanks Mark Hamilton)

Muncie Free Press is the brainchild of journalist K. Paul Mallasch and is a wonderfully eclectic cit-j site covering both town-and-gown (Muncie, the surrounding towns, and Ball St. U)  Muncie has *one* newspaper, so what KPaul is doing becomes a vital forum for this part of the U.S.  In the sidebar, MFP is explained as "more than just news - it's a conversation."  Check out the sidebars--both Activities and Recent Blogs-- to see where the conversation's happening.  KPaul's passion for journalism overflows into the group blog Journalism Hope (also a worthy read.)

Whenever I read criticism of cit-j efforts, I think to myself how so many of the critics don't seem to appreciate what motivates people to undertake cit-j efforts--and am always taken by the tone that seems to insist the people should ask permission from MSM. Do we, as a society, always need permission from the Powers That Be before the people decide to take initiatives to meet the underserved needs of their communiites?  The folks at OlyBlog,  Chi-Town Daily News, and  Muncie Free Press have provided their own unique answers that are worth a second look. 

Slow Going for Citizen Journalism in the U.K.

In a recent report, Reuters U.K. took a look at U.K. citizen journalism efforts and found some major differences between its significance and the significance of its American counterpart:

"It hasn't got a proper foothold here yet -- citizen journalism hasn't carved out a niche for itself like in the United States," Roy Greenslade, a professor of journalism at City University and former editor of the Daily Mirror, told Reuters.

But unlike in the United States, where bloggers have claimed credit for major political upsets, including the resignations of broadcaster Dan Rather and Senate Republican leader Trent Lott, British newspapers remain in charge for now of exposing the misdemeanours of public figures and institutions.

"The citizen journalist here is a snapper who happens to be passing somewhere where something is going on," Greenslade said. "What we haven't developed yet is the citizen journalist who goes out and writes and reports."

And while individuals who publish blogs--which account for most of the citizen journalism efforts in the U.S. outside of dedicated websites such as Backfence.com and iBrattleboro--account for only a small sector of the British populace, Greenslade offers:

"I expect citizen journalism to really take off at regional and local level: citizens reporting about what goes on in their area, on their street."

from Citizen journalism climbing up the media ladder in Reuters U.K.

Topix.net CEO Shares His Views on Citizen Journalism

Mark Glaser of Media Shift recently email interviewed Rick Skrenta, CEO of citizen news aggregator Topix.net on the emergence of citizen journalism on the Topix forums and how something like this might lead to better professional/citizen journalist collaborations: 

Glaser: You become the accidental center for citizen journalism. But one other question: How do you trust the info that you get, the eyewitness reports?

Skrenta: Yeah, that’s always a big question that real journalists ask. The public doesn’t have the same issue though. They’ve gotten savvier. They can appropriately judge the sources of what they read. You read online forums — or blogs for that matter — with a grain of salt, and with skepticism. The public needs to be their own editor.

This mirrors the elimination of the middlemen in other online activities. No more travel agents — we all have to use the seat selectors on Expedia ourselves now, and suffer the consequences if we botch our vacation plans. No more stockbrokers to tell you what to invest in; here’s the Schwab website, read some articles and make your own trades. And here’s a big pile of first source accounts — blogs, press releases, forums, a spectrum of news sites from Fox to the NY Times. Read it all and make up your own mind; everyone has to be their own editor now. . .

Glaser: I understand what you mean about journalists losing their place as the middleman. But then what will be their place in the future? They can’t be completely eliminated, but what happens to them and their authority?

Skrenta: I definitely believe there’s still a role for them. A lot of the story collecting — reporting — simply won’t happen without full time journalists paying attention and doing their jobs. Especially on local politics, investigative journalism, consumer advocacy. I also think there is value to the analysis that good journalism can provide around a story.

But journalists won’t have a monopoly on the newsfeed to the consumer.
They’ll be just another channel.

Continue reading:  If You See News, Where Do You Report It?

Backfence Acquires Bayosphere: Extends Hyperlocal Coverage to Bay Area

Noted citizen journalism advocate Dan Gillmor announced yesterday the merger of his Bayosphere citizen's media site with Reston, Virginia-based hyperlocal citizen's media website Backfence.com.  On Bayosphere and on his new Backfence blog , Gillmor explained the benefits of the merger to the Bayosphere community:

I'm happy that this means the small community we’ve nurtured here has a chance to grow and mature. (There's also some small financial relief for me, as I’ve been covering Bayosphere’s costs for months now.) One of the obvious options was to simply shut it down. We never wanted to do that. But it wouldn't have made sense to keep it going indefinitely, either, without some clearer purpose and direction.

There will be changes, major ones. Backfence is all about local, not global, serving needs that many of us believe has been underserved by traditional media -- for entirely sound business reasons. Take a look around the Backfence sites [link], and you'll see how their tools focus people in a relatively small geographical area on helping each other know what's going on.

Gillmor will contine at Bayosphere: 

I'm going to keep blogging here. The Bay Area has been my home for more than a decade. I'll be aiming my own postings on the technology economy and other facets of our lives here, such as housing and traffic, and hope to keep our conversations, which have sometimes been downright enlightening, as lively as they've been in the past.

Backfence will soon begin efforts to establish citizen journalism sites throughout the Bay Area, the first for Palo Alto, CA.  Backfence CEO Susan DeFife explains the Palo Alto decision:

[Palo Alto] "is the linchpin of Silicon Valley. Its broad collection of community organizations, strong business and commercial base, high Internet penetration and its population base are the kinds of things we look for in deciding where Backfence should open local sites. We’re looking forward to becoming an important part of the Palo Alto community and then launching additional sites in Bay Area communities over the next few months.”

Gillmor was recently profiled in Vermont web alternative weekly Seven Days

RESOURCE: SourceWatch tracks citizen-media initiatives in "wiki" format

SourceWatch.com, the Madison, Wis.-based initiative of the Center for Media & Democracy, a non-profit which watches faux news and the PR industry, has created a wiki page about citizen journalism to which anyone can contribute. [ Visit Website ]

Minneapolis community radio uses J-Lab grant to launch Media Alliance "wire service" for region

AuthorMichael Freese writes at his blog that in Minneapolis, Minn., the Twin Cities Media Alliance and KFAI-FM have launched the Twin Cities Daily Planet, a website ("community newswire") which aggregates and showcases news from community newspapers, websites and blogs in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area. The site also allows citizen contributions. The Daily Planet is funded by J-Lab, the Institute for Interactive Journalism at the University of Maryland. VIEW GIRAFFE PROFILE [ Visit Website ]