Citizen Paine | Citizen Journalism

Being upfront would muffle the critics

A Milwaukee blogger was put on the defensive after a USA Today article reported that the city of Milwaukee had provided her with internet access and computer equipment. Had Erin Leffelman made that relationship clear on the blog, she wouldn't have become the target of other bloggers and critical comments on her Play in the City blog.

This isn't anything new. The state of Pennsylvania also fails to mention that it's covering the expenses of visitPA.com's Roadtripper bloggers, which I noted last month.

Leffelman and her defenders point to the level of compensation and argue that it's not significant. "I would hardly classify $1,700 of 'in-kind' support to do her job -high speed internet, a gift certificate for technology improvements at Dell or a $200 camera as the type of compensation that would sway anyone’s opinion," Dave Fantle of VISIT Milwaukee writes in a comment on The Blog Herald.

He misses the point, which is really very simple: Be transparent, be honest about your relationships. Otherwise it looks like you're trying to hide something even if you're not.

To Fantle's credit, VISIT Milwaukee's June 20 news release, which he posted on The Blog Herald, did explain the relationship. It also noted, regarding blogs, "Their impact lies largely in their credibility and growing awareness among an increasingly computer-literate world."

Peoria blogger aims to shame

An anoymous blog has its sites set on those people who bring shame to Peoria, Illinois. The Shame on Peoria site launched over the weekend and appears to be affiliated with a second site, Peoria Crack House.

Describing its purpose, Shame on Peoria says:

Peoria and Pekin Illinois recently determined to go after property owners with blighted property, in "shaming" campaigns. Turnabout being fair play some citizens felt the Politicians and Bureaucrats also needed some shaming for their blight on the body politic.

And on Peoria Crack House:

Dedicated to the Buyers and Sellers of Crack Cocaine, who we hope to remove from our community.

As with the Dog Poop Girl incident, here's another example of the public using the internet as a tool for exposing perceived wrongs. Whether this exposure corrects bad behavior, I'm not sure. If it does, it probably will occur indirectly. Someone running a crack house may not shut down just because a blog has mentioned it. But the blog could spur police to act.

Link props: Peoria Pundit and PollyPeoria

Bloggers await FEC decision

At AlterNet, Kelly Hearn's Uncle Sam, Meet the Bloggers is a detailed look at how the Federal Elections Commission is wrestling with the blogosphere.

Hearn says the question of whether to exempt bloggers from campaign finance law is complex:

Without a press exemption, some bloggers might be buried by lawsuits. But what happens if millions of bloggers are suddenly given news media status?

Some say corporations and trade unions will sidestep election law by using the unregulated blogosphere to spend unlimited money on political messages.

Responding to Hearn's piece, Ash Roughani posts this comment:

It seems to me that this issue is being overcomplicated. It can be simplified through the use of analogy. If I write political commentary in my blog, it is no different than if I went out in public and started talking to people about my political positions. This is where blogs should be exempted.

However, the second I get paid by a party, candidate, or committee; this is no longer my personal express advocacy, but rather coordinated activity. I think that anyone who believes in the merits of campaign finance reform would agree that these cases ought to be regulated.

More coverage of this issue in Columbia Journalism Review and the Washington Post. The Post story says the FEC is expected to make a decision in the fall.

Surveillance vs. citizen cameras: checks and balances

Writing about the proliferation of camera phones and security cameras, Washington Post columnist Sebastian Mallaby, in Looking Back at Big Brother, says the technology may not be making us much safer but it is creating new forms of checks and balances:

In the future, when a government accuses someone of wrongdoing on the basis of footage from surveillance cameras, that government better get it right. Chances are the same incident will have been captured by private citizens on camera phones, whose manufacturers expect to sell 186 million units this year.

The proliferation of electronic eyes is probably inevitable, but that's no reason to despair. Governments will watch citizens, but citizens will watch back. More likely than not, the balance of power will shift in favor of the citizens, the inverse of Orwell's prophecy.

Link props: The Open Society Paradox

Micro Persuasion, Philly Future to try 'honor tags'

Steve Rubel at Micro Persuasion is using the honor tag system that Dan Gillmor and Grassroots Media started last week. Rubel says he would like to see the system add another level to hold people accountable for the tags they use:

What HonorTags really lacks right now is some sort of editing/policing system. This way, the community can weed out tag offenders who are inappropriately spam tags. In other words, if Grassroots Media can somehow recreate the same kind of self-policing community that watches over Wikipedia, HonorTags will become a more reliable system. Perhaps some merging with social networks will help facilitate this.

The folks at Philly Future also plan to start testing out honor tags, according to this post at Paradox1x:

... we will use these within Philly Future to help folks identify - for themselves - what they consider the intent of their own writing. I believe it will help readers - and editors - know whether an author wants them to consider a post in different important ways.

Self-tagging is imperfect, for sure. It can be easily abused. And I don't pretend to be an expert on the subject. But I welcome any new tools in my belt that can make life easier. I think this can be one.

Trying to redefine privacy in a transparent society

A followup on "Reporters Are Everywhere": Check out this fascinating commentary at Balkinization titled Of Privacy and Poop: Norm Enforcement Via the Blogosphere.

Writer Daniel Solove looks at the case of a Korean woman who has been humiliated on the internet after someone captured her photo on a subway train when her dog did what dogs do and she refused to clean it up. (Balkinization cites Boing Boing, which got the story from Don Park's Daily Habit.)

Solove writes:

The dog-shit-girl case involves a norm that most people would seemingly agree to – clean up after your dog. Who could argue with that one? But what about when norm enforcement becomes too extreme? Most norm enforcement involves angry scowls or just telling a person off. But having a permanent record of one’s norm violations is upping the sanction to a whole new level. The blogosphere can be a very powerful norm-enforcing tool, allowing bloggers to act as a cyber-posse, tracking down norm violators and branding them with digital scarlet letters.

He suggests that new laws will be part of the answer, but acknowledges that legal efforts face roadblocks:

I believe that, as complicated as it might be, the law must play a role here. The stakes are too important. While entering law into the picture could indeed stifle freedom of discussion on the Internet, allowing excessive norm enforcement can be stifling to freedom as well. ... Could the law provide redress? This is a complicated question; certainly under existing doctrine, making a case would have many hurdles. And some will point to practical problems. Bloggers often don’t have deep pockets. But perhaps the possibility of lawsuits might help shape the norms of the Internet. In the end, I strongly doubt that the law alone can address this problem; but its greatest contribution might be to help along the development of blogging norms that will hopefully prevent more cases such as this one from having crappy endings.

More alarms sounded at Desert of the Mind in a post titled "1984 = S. Korea":

So you have to watch every move you make, because everybody's watching. And that, of course, discourages anyone from standing out, taking a chance, being different in any sort of way. It's a lot safer to conform to the group consensus, to follow the groupthink, to be in the thick of the mob. Because they'll be watching, what you say, and what you do, and what you think. CONFORM OR DIE!

What's really gotten everyone stirred up is the mob mentality that led people not only to out the young woman with photos online but then to try to identify her and her relatives. So, the problem isn't necessarily that the girl was humiliated -- reasonable people could disagree on whether she deserved to have her photo posted online -- but that some people wanted more.

UPDATE: Over at A Networked World, Earl Mardle responding in part to my previous post, counters some of the panic over the loss of privacy. He says the quantity of material on the internet will bury the more mundane invasions of our privacy, and he points out that the loss of privacy cuts both ways, meaning that the mobs will get away with their misdeeds less often:

... we will tend to be protected by the very long tail of the Internet Power Law. Our nose-picking may be blogged, but it will probably get buried amongst the much more interesting activities of Janet Jackson, Camilo Mejia, Dave Chappelle, Michael Jackson and Brad Pitt.

While picking our noses may be less than enthralling, with so many cameras taking millions of pictures every day, practically everything is being recorded. Which is making it harder and harder for those prepared to take the law into their own hands.

Blogger: Bayosphere plans to ask authors to declare their roles

Bayosphere.com, which last week stirred up the blogosphere with its citizen journalist pledge, now is planning to ask contributors to describe themselves with something called "honor tags," according to a post by BL Ochman of whatsnextblog.com.

Ochman says the honor tags were outlined in an email Bayosphere's Dan Gillmor sent to Media Bloggers Association members. The soon-to-be-launched honortags.com, according to Ochman's post, will ask contributors to describe themselves either as Journalist-news, Journalist-POV, Pro-Marketing, Pro-Employee, Advocate/Enthusiast/Fan, Personal, or Fiction. Or if they choose not to declare, they can select UnTag.

As with the CJ pledge, bloggers probably will debate the merits of this system. But what really matters is not what the blogosphere thinks, but how Bayosphere (a) solicits user feedback to help improve the honor tags system (one blogger built a wiki for the Bayosphere pledge, but it hasn't evolved much from the original) and (b) gives readers a tool to dispute or vouch for an author's honor tag.

'Reporters are everywhere'

If we turn into a society where, as Earl Mardle says at A Networked World, 80 percent of the population has a blog, will we wind up with a Big Brother culture where we can't pick our nose in our car for fear of being humiliated on someone's weblog? Or will the positive aspects of a more transparent society outweigh the Big Brother negatives?

As the privacy backlash grows -- as it surely will in a society where those who don't have blogs still will have camera phones and friends with blogs -- what sort of new standards of law or etiquette will arise?

Lots of questions. Not many answers yet.

A thought drawn on my own experience living in a town, Benicia, Calif., where GetLocalNews.com, my employer, has operated a community news web site for five years:

My knowledge that BeniciaNews.com enables anyone to post comments (which has been possible almost since our launch) or articles (for more than two years) has affected my behavior at least in small ways.

Having seen comments on the message board about people's driving habits, I am more cautious when I'm behind the wheel. The possibility of being ticketed, getting in an accident or injuring myself or others already were deterrents to speeding or rolling through the new stop signs that seem sprout weekly. Living in Benicia, the possibility that someone might rate my driving in a message board is yet one more reason to drive carefully. At least til I get out of town, where citizen journalists are few and far between (for now). Just kidding. Really, officer.

Mardle's post ties together Judith Miller, shield laws, the Downing Street Memo and the future of citizen media:

I've been watching the growth of Citizen Media for a year now and it seems to me that it is just hitting its straps and if it keeps up this way, there will be no great need to protect journalists because, when 80% of the population has a blog as a matter of course, and just naturally wants to talk about things they do and see and, dammit, gets the idea that they can ask questions and publish the answers, that bright line between "the public" and "the professional" will fade quickly away.

When every miscreant and/or politician realises that "reporters" are everywhere, listening to, recording, and distributing everything they say, and taking photos of it as well, their ability to corner, embargo, tie down, leak and generally manipulate the media will go away fast. Read the rest

Where's the transparency - squared?

The Boston Globe raises concerns in "For a fee, some blogs boost firms" about businesses paying bloggers to tout their products without either party disclosing the relationship.

Blogger transparency is It's a valid issue, but the Globe's piece on Boston.com doesn't offer the ability for readers to post comments, one of the best mechanisms for making journalism transparent. So, unless you go hunting, you won't see that some of the bloggers are responding on their own sites to the Globe's story:

Susan Kaup, a blogger who has some complaints about the story, says on her own weblog, "At least we have our blogs to set the record straight." Whether or not Kaup has legitimate gripes with the story, why not let her respond directly with a post that Globe readers would see?

Jeff Cutler, another blogger featured in the story, also responds on his own site. His blog has the same shortcoming as Boston.com, no ability for anyone else to comment.

More critical comments about the article here at pc4media.

So, the blogosphere is buzzing with discussion about the Globe's article. But none of that discussion is happening on the Globe's site, costing Boston.com some potential traffic. More importantly, should the Globe wish to respond to the criticisms of its article, it doesn't have a visible vehicle for doing so.

The story is not new -- here's an AP story published in January and a post at Micro Persuasion following Country Music Television's deal to hire a blogger recently  -- but it's an important one.

The Globe story quotes Ed Shull, the CEO of USWeb, saying, "'In our opinion, paying bloggers is no different than Tiger Woods getting money to wear the Nike logo."

The difference, of course, is that the public is well-aware of the endorsement deals that athletes have. Most people know that when Tiger Woods wears a Nike cap, he's being compensated to do so. I don't think that most people would assume that a blogger who mentions a florist is being paid for the reference.

It's all about disclosure: that the payment is being made and what, if any, control the business has over what the blogger may say.

UPDATE: Just ran across this Ad Age column via IWantMedia.com. It's worth a few laughs.