Citizen Paine | Citizen Journalism

Nashville TV station trains amateur bloggers

When a news web site educates citizen journalists it has a two-fold benefit: The amateurs will improve their skills, and they're likely to think of submitting to the site that trained them when they create content worth publishing. So, kudos to WKRN-TV for the Video 101 session it conducted Saturday. (Link props to Buzz Machine.)

Brittney, posting on the Nashville is Talking blog, said:

The purpose was to give "citizen journalists" some tips on how to best shoot video for stories they want to tell. Whether it is your son's baseball game or a tornado or some sort of disaster. ... I learned a lot as they talked about how to steady your shots, how to take static pictures a viewer can comfortably watch.

Participant Rex Hammock wrote:

Here is what you should do if you want to get video on TV:
1. Hold the camera still.
2. Don't move the camera around.
3. Don't narrate the video with comments like, "this is a tornado hitting a cow."

More at timmorgan.com and Chasing the Dragon's Tale.

About 20 local bloggers signed up to participate, according to Terry Heaton, a WKRN consultant.

More:
Education and training
Video

New citizen journalism project, 'I, Reporter,' coming soon

Amy Gahran, author of Contentious, announces plans for "I, Reporter," a project that will include a weblog about citizen journalism and deployment of a citizen journalism team to cover a Boulder, Colo., development proposal.

Gahran, a regular contributor to the E-Media Tidbits column on Poynter Online, says "I, Reporter," will include a training component for citizens and for news organizations.

Some of the most effective journalism of the future could come from direct and indirect collaboration between citizen and pro journalists. Efforts such as "I, Reporter" can show how each role can complement the other, making collaboration possible.

Gahran is right on target with some comments about the state of citizen journalism today:

"Some traditional news organizations are involved with citJ projects and sites. That can help – as long as they don’t try to ghettoize or undermine it. The more passively managed efforts rarely attract many postings or traffic. ... Beyond infrastructure, news orgs usually offer little or no guidance, mentoring, or training for citizen journalists. Nor do they typically highlight citJ efforts, online or via print or broadcast. This is probably why citizen-generated content is typically minimal on such sites. ...

"Perhaps the thorniest issue is how closely citJ should emulate the objectives, format, and style of traditional journalism. For instance, in the citJ realm transparency is usually considered more crucial than objectivity. Many news professionals who’ve labored for years in traditional journalism have a particularly hard time with this."

The goals Gahran has set for  "I, Reporter" and the citizen journalism team make this effort worth watching.

Today's MySpacer users, tomorrow's muckrakers

I found out this weekend that the 13-year-old, who I already knew was an underage MySpace user (you're supposed to be 16), had set up the 8-year-old with a site. Yeah, I was a bit ticked, but it also made me think about how instinctive citizen journalism will be for their generation when they become adults.

The people driving citizen journalism today, for the most part, came of age well before the World Wide Web was a vehicle for news. While for some of us, it may be second-nature to publish our thoughts when we want and how we want, it doesn't come naturally for most adults in 2005.

For kids, it does.

And MySpace seems to be getting something right. It had 15.5 million unique visitors in May compared with 1 million in June 2004, according to Bambi Francisco's MarketWatch article (registration) on Friday.

From the Piper Jaffray Global Internet Summit  last week, John Batelle describes "a really interesting and entertaining panel of teenagers who told us how they use media ... . All of them used MySpace, it was pretty much a clean sweep. None of them used anything else for social networking and the like."

The attraction comes from the ability not only to post to one's own MySpace site but to use the social networking aspects, which enable teens to interact on each other's sites.

When I was a teen, we used the telephone to get into each other's lives. Now teens are in each other's faces constantly via IM and networks like MySpace and Xanga. Fast forward 20 years and imagine them as adults who own homes and have kids. Imagine them taking the communication skills they're honing today and applying them to a fight over a local development proposal or a school board election. Not only will they have more sophisticated tools, but they'll be more likely to use them than today's adults would be.

All the more reason for us to teach kids not only how to do research online but also how to publish online. And to teach them why a MySpace might not be the best thing for an 8-year-old.

Training civic leaders to blog

Public Journalism Network talks to the project leader of citizen journalism web site Northfield.org, raising the question of whether local news media should provide blogger space for civic leaders.

According to PJNet, Griff Wigley "cautioned that successful bloggers feel a direct connection and responsibility to their readers that might be difficult to recreate if the blog were part of a news organization site."

Donica H. Mensing, writing for PJNet, asks:

Do news organization have a role in sponsoring community weblogs such as this one, completely separate from a main news site? Encouraging community leaders to blog? Sponsoring server space or providing training? If news organizations claim a role in democracy, then couldn't facilitating citizen discourse, fact gathering and reporting, such as found on Northfield.org, be a natural expression of journalism?

Northfield.org's effort goes beyond the citizen journalism projects that some MSM have launched in recent months, working directly with civic leaders to help them set up blogs. Then, as Mensing notes, the latest headlines from those civic leaders' blogs are displayed via RSS on the Northfield.org home page.

The bloggers include two planning commission members, a school board member, a state house representative, a county commissioner, a city councilman and a police chief. All but the state house rep and the police chief have comments enabled on the blogs. Ray Cox, the state house rep, sure likes to post lots of photos of himself, including one that's a photo of a photo.

Freedom of off-campus publishing comes with a price

A combination of cuts in high school journalism programs and the ease of web publishing could start driving more students away from traditional student newspapers. Especially if more administrators start clamping down as a couple principals in Georgia and California have recently.

The web offers opportunities for end-runs around campus censorship, but future student journalists may miss out on the positive influences of faculty advisers. If that happens, others will have to step forward to guide them.

When a Georgia principal halted publication of a school paper in May, the students took their battle online and posted the final issue and an email trail. Now, a similar battle is brewing in Bakersfield, Calif., where a school principal felt an edition about gay students on campus would be too incendiary. The East Bakersfield High School student staff has filed suit with the backing of the ACLU and lost their first round. If they feel they've lost their voice in The Kernal, perhaps, they too may be tempted to dodge the school's red tape and create their own independent publication.

Interestingly, the Bakersfield Californian in its coverage (registration required) of the lawsuit has published redacted versions of the student paper, using the legal filings.

The Pebblebrook High School principal in Georgia canceled the journalism class to fund other programs and stopped students from publishing the final issue of BrookSpeak. The principal announced those decisions after complaining about the paper's focus on negative issues.

The National Scholastic Press Association reported in 2003 that the number of journalism courses offered in California had dropped more than 10 percent since 1996. In California, given the condition of the state budget and poor financing for public education, it's quite likely the number is even lower now and will continue to drop. According to a survey produced by John S. and James L. Knight Foundation’s High School Initiative this year, "Of the high schools that do not offer student newspapers, 40 percent have eliminated student papers within the past five years. Of those, 68 percent now have no media."

Meanwhile, it seems like every middle school student has a MySpace or Xanga site. These sites tend to be more about who likes whom and who wears what than about any substantive issues (at least in the mind of this 44-year-old, but what do I know?). If, when today's middle schoolers get to high school, they want to tackle bigger issues and don't have an outlet for publishing a student newspaper, what will they do? They'll put up a blog or find some other citizen journalism outlet.

Off-campus publishing gives students lots of freedom, but if faculty advisers disappear completely, that will be a loss. I'm sure there are some crappy advisers, but student journalists often have great things to say about their advisers. Read the BrookSpeak email trail and see how Pebblebrook High's Jonathan Stroud stood up for his students.

Mike Orren of Pegasus News, which plans to launch a citizen journalism project later this year, wrote the school principal and offered to provide advice to student journalists by phone or email. That's generous of Mike, who was in attendance last month when citizen media pioneers met in the Bay Area to talk about issues involving the training of citizen journalists. That discussion at some point should include a component specifically targeted at high school citizen journalists who are publishing independently.