Citizen Paine | Citizen Journalism

Bayosphere pledge whips up blogosphere

For a basic meat-and-potatoes vow, the new Citizen Journalist Pledge on Dan Gillmor's Bayosphere is creating lots of hand-wringing.

I tend to agree with Laurence Haughton who wrote in the comments area of Jeff Jarvis' critical post at BuzzMachine:

The big question for any organization (or individual) is how specific, measurable and accountable are your pledges, mission statements, codes of conduct? Where's the bar? How can you tell when you've fallen short? Who is going to tell you, "You need to pick up your game."

The Bayosphere pledge -- to be accurate, complete, fair and transparent -- is a reasonable place to set the bar. It would be better if accompanied by tools that enabled the readers to score submissions on how well they meet those standards.

What others are saying:

Joi Ito

I think this is a reasonable pledge. One real difference between a citizen journalist and someone who isn't is whether they make such a pledge or at least agree to adhere to principles like this.

Sandhill Trek

Dan Gillmor has a right to ethically challenge the ethically challenged and any others who might want to sign on to his Bayosphere as armed and badged "community journalists." ...  I agree with Jeff (Jarvis) that a pledge is superfluous.

Pegasus News

I like Jarvis' two worder: Be honest.
But I think I prefer: Be responsible for your own actions.
How to enforce that and encourage lots of participation? That's the rub.

Keep in mind that Gillmor posted the pledge with the caveat that he wants suggestions on how to make it better. "This is not the end of the conversation about our pledge, but the beginning," he says.

Jarvis suggested that the pledge be discussed in a wiki, which Sean Bonner did. And to Gillmor's credit, he expressed no objection and says he's watching "with interest."

Aside from the basic concept of a pledge, most criticism seems to be directed at the line that reads, "I work in the community interest." That's different from the measurable benchmarks of fairness, thoroughness, accuracy and transparency.

The "community interest" issue reminds me of a discussion this week on a Benicia, Calif., schools bulletin board about whether it is in the community's interest to debate certain aspects of the local public school system's fiscal crisis. Some participants called for a hiatus from the debate in the interest of unifying behind fund-raising efforts, others (myself included) argued that debate can be a constructive mechanism of creating an informed populace and building toward consensus.

What one side believed to be in the "community interest," the other did not. That criteria may be far too subjective to include in a pledge, especially if the oath ever is coupled with a rating system.

Side note: Ironically, a school board member correctly noted Wednesday that the debate about the merits of debate was misplaced. It belonged not on a bulletin board intended for dissemination about school district information, but on one of several other local forums.

UPDATE: I'm adding a link to Adam Glenn's post on the new I, Reporter site in which he discusses the concept of citizen journalists being independent, rather than objective:

If you don't come at an issue with an open mind, and don't leave the topic thinking there might still be more ways to come at it than are being pushed by one advocate or another, you're just not trying hard enough.

Amy Gahran, I, Reporter's co-editor, elablorates in the comments section with words about transparancy.

Typepad offers text ads for bloggers

Typepad has announced that users of its Pro level of service now can display text ads to generate revenues from their blogs.

Details here.

Steve Outing writes about the new feature at Poynter Online's E-Media Tidbits:

Since a growing number of news organizations' websites now host "citizen bloggers," this might be an idea worth copying. I've been thinking lately about how to pay volunteer bloggers. Here's a way to provide them some financial incentive to keep writing without any cost to the publishing organization.

I agree with Outing that giving citizen journalists a way to make money from their work, even a small amount, is going to be a key element to the future of the grassroots media concept. Tying those payments to hits and possibly even user ratings would be a way to reward quality.

Typepad's Pro level costs $14.95 a month or $149.50 a year. So, for people using Typepad's less-expensive options (I use the Plus level), you'd have to weigh the additional features of the Pro level and your potential earnings from the ads. The latter would be a guess, as Typepad gives no indication of how much ad revenue a blogger could expect.

A related development (via J.D. Lasica's post at NewMediaMusings.com) was the announcement of Current TV's video submission policy. Current pays $250 to $1,000 for videos submitted to its web site that it then selects to air on its television program. (BTW, ya gotta check out Mark Rinehart's BASE jumping video now featured in the first slot on the Current TV home page.)

Fighting and blogging for government sunshine -- again

I'm back before the Benicia (Calif.) City Council tonight, where a sunshine law proposal again is on the agenda. I'll be speaking in favor of the law, which would expand on existing state open government laws. I'm also keeping local citizens updated on the discussion at BeniciaNews.com.

UPDATE: The council voted 4-1 to enact the new sunshine law. Good news for citizens, journalists and citizen journalists.

More wikitorial post-mortems

Jeff Jarvis' "three critical mistakes" hits the mark in analyzing where the LA Times went wrong with the wikitorial: (1) collaboration vs. argument, (2) care and feeding, (3) newspaper ego.

The Times' own story today says the LATimes.com may try to resurrect the wikitorial.

New York Times: Postings of Obscene Photos End Free-Form Editorial Experiment

SFGate launches 'Culture Blog' ... no comment(s) ... yet

SFGate and the San Francisco Chronicle on Monday launched the Culture Blog, a collaboration of  web site and newspaper writers. The blog may be a first on SFGate; it doesn't say, but I don't recall another and it's the only one listed in the Blogs section on the home page.

According to the About page, the bloggers will "be posting daily items -- newsy, opinionated, critical or simply silly -- on our various arts, culture, media, and Web-related interests and obsessions."

This blog -- fun and irreverent -- seems to be a nice fit for SFGate.

But, deep breath, where are the comments from readers? The About page explains:

Input from you, our readers, is all important, and very soon you'll be able to post your comments directly to the Culture Blog.

I dunno. Whaddya think? It's a blog. For a hip, craigslist-happy Bay Area audience. Should we launch even though the comments aren't enabled? Sure. Grrr.

Are video and audio critical to a site's success?

In a Forbes.com piece today, Citizens Media Entrepreneurs, columnist Sam Whitmore says  "America's pathetic literacy rate" will doom most citizen journalism sites that don't emphasize audio and video over text.

He writes:

The successful citizens media sites will mimic Ourmedia.org, a portal which offers "free storage and free bandwidth for your videos, audio files, photos, text or software. Forever. No catches." Notice that "text" was listed fourth--behind videos, audio files and photos....

While I agree that citizen journalism sites should go beyond text, I think Whitmore is shortchanging what readers will tolerate. On sites such as BeniciaNews.com, where text submissions are more common than photos and where audio and video uploads are not yet possible, we've seen strong traffic based almost solely on written words. (BeniciaNews is run by GetLocalNews.com, my employer and one of the companies Whitmore mentions in his piece.)

Readers will overlook grammatical and spelling errors if they care about the topic and the author has something interesting to say. (Longwindedness, however, can be deathly.)

Also, consider (a) how much easier it is to post text than video, audio or photos and (b) how equally bad audio or visual media can be.

Whitmore say, "The generations behind us would rather watch and listen than read."

True. But the generations ahead of us would rather participate than "watch and listen" and text is critical to making that happen.

Bottom line: Incorporate all media, but don't underestimate the value of text as a means of making the user part of the conversation.

Side note: Whitmore uses "citizens media" not "citizen journalism."  See discussion here.

Veteran citizen journalists discuss their sites

Lisa Williams of H2Otown and Karl Martino of Philly Future, two of the more-established citizen journalism sites, are among the folks commenting on Friday's Poynter Online E-Media Tidbits item "Grassroots Journalism: Will Independents Succeed First?" It's a discussion worth checking out. Read their comments here.

Thanks also to Steve Outing for pointing in Tidbits to this video that Williams produced about H2Otown and Watertown, Mass. The video clearly describes what Williams is trying to do with the site. As Outing notes, the site is an effort to answer questions like, "What was that explosion we heard last night before the power went out?" Those are kinds of questions you may ask neighbors and friends, questions that MSM usually doesn't answer.

LA Times whacks the wikitorial

The LA Times pulled the curtains on its wikitorial experiment for now because of "inappropriate material." The wiki also seemed unworkable for an opinion piece, at least the way the LA Times set it up, and that may be the real reason it went down so fast.

Here are some thoughts about what went wrong with the wikitorial: Buzz Machine, Long Tail, Many-to-Many, Slashdot.

More on wikis

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.