Citizen Paine | Citizen Journalism

No citizen journalism story about CitJ site

The thorny question of when to allow businesses to post material about themselves on citizen journalism sites is getting some attention (here and here) after The Star Press, a Gannett paper, nixed an article about community web site Muncie Free Press. When I was at GetLocalNews.com, we crafted a policy intended to address such situations.

Here's what it says:

We allow businesses to use Readers Write to inform readers about their businesses if their articles are labeled "PRESS RELEASE" in the headline. The articles also must provide specific information about the business's expansion, relocation, release of a new product, etc. -- in other words providing news, not just promotional content. For instance, a submission about a new business opening would be appropriate if it said specifically when and where the new store or office is opening.

If you submit an article with Readers Write that does not meet these standards, we will remove it. For promotional material that does not meet our press release standards, please consider our advertising options ... .

As ePluribus Media points out, in The Star Press' GetPublished! section, a note from online community editor Phil Beebe includes the following:

We also encourage businesses to post personnel news, information about new product lines and new businesses (but we will not accept material that is promotional in nature).

ePluribus then asks "where the dividing line exists between informational and promotional when it comes to announcing new products and/or businesses." I don't know where it exists for The Star Press. At GetLocalNews, we would delete submissions that didn't have any news -- posts that simply told people to buy a particular product or use a particular service or announced a sale.

Whether we would have allowed a submission by a Muncie Free Press would have depended on whether it contained news about the business. Thing is, with a little effort, it isn't that hard for a business to come up with something newsworthy about itself. We were OK with that at GetLocalNews because we knew that by allowing readers to comment directly on every submission, a business would be held accountable for what it had to say.

Even the good coupons have vaporized

At the Daily Grit, blogger Wes Thorp has some serious things to say about the role citizen journalism could play in Lansing, Michigan's mayoral and city council election campaigns. But some MSM folks probably may chafe most at this comment, a shot at the local paper:

At one time, you could at least get good coupons on Sunday.  We don't even get that now.

Thorp, citing inspiration from Amy Gahran and her I, Reporter project, is talking about holding a meet-up to organize a citizen journalism initiative:

We have troves of motivated citizens in the area who could and maybe would cover the issues of the day, like city council and township board meetings, stuff local media used to cover. ... Is it time to have a Meet-Up in our area to talk about citizen journalism and give it a whirl?

Rich irony in newspaper's warning about blogs

K. Paul Mallasch's take on a Missouri Valley Times editorial titled Reader beware of the truthfulness in blogs exposes the irony of the newspaper's critique of blogs. It's too bad the editorial resorts to broad generalities because its core message -- don't trust everything you read, consider the source -- is a worthwhile one.

The editorial says (emphasis mine):

[Mainstream media] maintain policies designed to minimize errors and to guard against the perpetration of libel or slander. Bloggers and their fans never worry about those constraints. There is a glorious freedom in their ability to simply "publish" whatever they please with no regard for accuracy or whether their diatribes cause pain and suffering. We of the mainstream media do not have that luxury.

While we work within the First Amendment rights to a free press, our feet are held to the fire by libel laws and the lawyers who rightly apply them to our work. Bloggers-so far-seem to be unfettered by such considerations.

Blogs, unlike the MV Times article, usually let readers make comments directly on their posts, holding them accountable.

WP on 'Your Mom': 'Do-It-Yourself Journalism Spreads'

Your Mom, the teen citizen journalist web site of the Quad-City Times, is the focus today of a Washington Post article.

The site has tried to balance the irreverence that's part of being a teen-ager with a bit of decorum, allowing articles about any topic the teen contributors want to tackle but keeping profanity off the site, the article says:

Many of (editor Hillary Rhodes') contributors say the thing they value most about Your Mom is its rawness, which they say makes it more relevant than a more restrictive school newspaper. More than a few adults, on the other hand, say they could do without so much honesty.

The QC Times launched Your Mom a year ago.

Blogger: London-CJ coverage misses the mark

Dana Blankenhorn writes that coverage of the London bombings-citizen journalism angle (see here and here) mischaracterizes citj:

The major media aren't paying for this stuff. ... (T)he key to success is a business model that includes the citizen-journalist, one that does not just take advantage of him. Papers that use free editorial help are making a devilish deal. They're assuming that the citizens are honest, and looking for work based on their honesty. ... You need some way to assure the readers that the game isn't rigged on the one hand, and some way to give contributors a stake in the game on the other hand.

He also notes that the quantity of citizen contributions can overwhelm readers, putting a premium on filters that point to the best stuff:

... (A)s camera phones proliferate, the volume of such pictures available is just going to become overwhelming. Making sense of what's out there, and getting rights to the good stuff, are going to be keys to success.

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

Use of G8 protest pics stirs fair-use debate

J.D. Lasica points out a heated debate over whether a new KRON-TV blog overstepped the rules on fair use with its publication of photos of G8 protests in San Francisco, images that originated on Indymedia sites.

SF Indymedia and Indybay published the photos in several posts, including here and here. KRON's Brian Shields, doing real-time blogging during the anarchists' protests, posted some of those images on KRON's The Bay Area is Talking blog. Indymedia folks complained that the use of the photos on KRON's site violated copyright law.

Shields, in the post's comments section, defended his use of the photos under "the fair use exception to the copyright laws for breaking news coverage."

Terry Heaton, a blogger and consultant who helped launch the site, didn't address the legal issues but suggested that Shields and KRON were helping the Indymedia citizen journalists reach a mainstream audience with their message. "If, in fact, you are giving voice to those who wouldn't normally have a voice, why would you wish to limit that voice to a closed network?" he wrote in a comment on the KRON blog.

Lasica said he believes Shields' legal argument is "well-founded," and he chastised the Indymedia folks, saying, "But why in the world would Indy Media want to restrict the widespread online distribution of such a newsworthy set of photos? What rank hypocrisy."

Meanwhile, comments from posters indentified as "janky" and "k" took KRON to task for using the images without permission. Janky said:

I would ask that you take them all down and link to the individual articles where they were published. The copyright law for the SF Bay Area Indymedia site clearly states the obvious use limitations of content that is published on the site.

All the photos on this site were taken by people within the community and were posted on indybay.org for a reason. If you do not respect that, then at least leave comments for each individual to contact you for permission for use.

You cant just take photos willy nilly and repost them on a site that is for-profit without expressed permission. Either that, or I get to start making HD copies of Kron4 broadcasts and posting them everywhere on the net due to "fair use" laws.

You folks have paid reporters who make a living from this.

UPDATE: Discussion about fair use has continued in a separate thread on The Bay Area is Talking. Read the comment posted Sunday by Jackson West of sfist.com. He has the most thoughtful, well-reasoned approach so far of all the comments I've read in this thread and the one that started the debate.

More reaction to the London CJ angle

The citizen journalism angle continues to get significant coverage in the wake of the London bombings.

Washington Post: Witnesses to History

The London attacks moved the trend to a new level. Web sites from the BBC's to the Guardian's provided eyewitness accounts, some showing up as little as an hour or two after the first bomb went off. ... The tsunami prompted bloggers to post thousands of video entries and journal-style stories that circulated the Internet in a huge swarm of unedited data. London, (Dan Gillmor) said, showed how that data could be edited like traditional news and fill the gaps that the news could not.

Poynter Online: E-Media Tidbits: Mass Audience for London News by the Masses

One of the first eyewitness pictures was sent by Adam Stacey via his camera phone to Alfie Dennen, the owner of Alfie's Discotastic Moblog and was from there quickly picked up by TV channel Sky, which credited it as "a passenger's camera photo." It was also picked up by the BBC, which added the careful caveat, "This photo by Adam Stacey is available on the Internet and claims to show people trapped on the underground system."

LA Times: Cellphones Change the View of Disaster

Shortly after bombs ripped through London's transportation system Thursday morning, U.S. and British television networks began airing the first footage of the aftermath — dim images of shaken commuters streaming through a smoky underground tunnel. ... "It's a harbinger of what's to come in terms of citizen journalism," said Jon Klein, president of CNN/U.S. "These days, you just have to be in the wrong place at the right time, and you too can cover the news." ... But the increasing availability of the footage will also raise the need for stringent standards about what gets on the air, news executives noted. In London, video technicians studied the footage to ensure it was authentic, according to Justine Bower, a spokeswoman for Sky News.

New York Times: Witnesses Post Instant Photos on the Web

Online photo-sharing sites and Web blogs began chronicling the attacks soon after they occurred, posting material often gathered before professional news organizations arrived on the scenes. ... Tim Bradshaw, who posted photos from around London on flickr.com, said in an e-mail message he was not sure at first whether he would post them. "It seemed kind of wrong," Mr. Bradshaw wrote. "The BBC and other news Web sites were so overwhelmed it was almost like an alternative source of news. "I think it's really interesting how many camera-phone pictures made it onto the national news."

Where do you start? Where do you end?

Today, as events unfold in London, I'm drawn to the eyewitness accounts, such as these comments on the BBC and Guardian web sites and this BBC collection of reader-submitted photos. Yet, in this age of self-publishing, that's a miniscule fraction of what's being published. Thousands of citizen journalist posts and images are showing up on Technorati, Flickr and other aggregators. Finding the best is a challenge.

For blogs, I've been looking at "london"-tagged posts at Technorati and at the UKBlogs Aggregator. For images, try "london"-tagged posts at Flickr. Flickr also has two-relevant photo pools: The London Bomb Blasts Pool and London Explosions Pool.

Something innate compels me to wade through dozens of posts and photos, yet there's just too much here. Neither Technorati nor Flickr call for the user to evaluate content, so we can't help guide one another to the best material.

Over at moblog UK, users to rate photos. But on a breaking story, that's not much help because the highest-rated photos are older ones. There's no mechanism for promoting the best of the most-recent images.

So, we rely on the individual human filters:
Boing Boing, which led me to the Flickr pools.
Project Nothing!
Wikipedia
Tim Worstall
Europhobia
Buzz Machine

NYT's take on Greensboro News-Record

A New York Times piece today on the Greensboro (North Carolina) New-Record's citizen journalism drive -- Why Newspapers Are Betting on Audience Participation (yeah, ya gotta register) -- says the newspaper's evolution is going slower than expected; the paper is considering collaborating on an investigative project with a citizen journalism upstart; some elected officials also are bloggers, making them competitors.

A quote from News-Record Editor John Robinson about Greensboro's active blogging community illustrates the thinking that puts the paper ahead of the curve, even if its changes are coming along slowly:

They were commenting on civic affairs and what the city council did and all the dumb things The News & Record did, and that annoyed me because they were misinformed," he said. "But they were scooping us. They knew things that were going on that we didn't, in the schools and other places. There was power in what they were doing."

The N-R may be getting ready to tap that power in a significant way. An MSM-newbie collaboration may be in the works, according to the article. The paper is considering teaming up with Greensboro101.com on an investigation into water quality.

The Times story gives examples of the competition that the N-R is seeing in the form of sources' blogs. City Council members have beat the News-Record on a couple stories, including once when a reporter called a councilman for a comment on a Wal-Mart deal and the councilman promptly blogged the news. So much for that exclusive. Another council member's blog beat the paper on a city budget story, the Times reports. (RELATED: Reporters: Are YOU 'On The Record'?)

Overall, the Times reports, the N-R's progress has been slower than hoped, partly because of the magnitude of the project, partly because the publisher wants to see some signs of a return before investing more dollars.

The Times says, "The unveiling of the new site was bumped back throughout the spring and is now planned on July 11. The site's participatory aspects will not be available until a few months later." (RELATED: Greensboro N-R redesign will boost reader engagement)

Here's what the Times article had to say about the pace of change at the News-Record:

At this stage, though, enthusiasm in the newsroom for the town square initiative has outstripped the online reality. Charles Stafford, the strategic development manager, said developing the Web site turned out to be a bigger job than the editors had imagined. And management has not yet thrown in more money or staff members.

The unveiling of the new site was bumped back throughout the spring and is now planned on July 11. The site's participatory aspects will not be available until a few months later.

Robin Saul, president and publisher of The News & Record, said the paper was waiting for more marks of success before putting money into the online project and was likely to put it into the sales staff first. "You don't invest resources until you're sure there will be a return," he said.

In response, the article quotes Steve Outing, who writes about citizen journalism for Poynter Online and Editor&Publisher, saying that given how early we are in the citizen journalism game, he "was not troubled by what he called the Greensboro paper's 'unimpressive' start."

While we are early, I wonder whether the N-R's inability to keep up with expectations will have any long-term fallout. For instance, consider the turnaround time for publication of citizen journalism articles. Lex Alexander, the paper's citizen journalism coordinator, noted last month that due to an extended absence he was a couple weeks behind on editing and posting user-submitted articles. Currently, the N-R's Your News page has nothing posted since June 24 (I don't know whether that's due to a lack of submissions or the turnaround time).

Whatever the reasons for the delays -- lack of staff to cover when a key editor is not available, the inherent lag time created by the N-R's policy of editing reader submissions, etc. -- the danger is that contributors will feel slighted. If they do, they may simply turn to a competitor like Greensboro101 to publish. (RELATED: Publish the Site You Can Maintain)

This NYT piece on Greensboro comes less than a week after the paper published an article titled Web Content by and for the Masses.

UPDATE: N-R Editor John Robinson responds to the NYT article:

Yes, we're blogging. podcasting and soliciting citizen submissions to reconnect with readers. But the overriding reason we're barging into the form is to extend the ability to break news, spur civic engagement, to help readers, to be a watchdog. Pretty much what we're trying to do in the newspaper.