Citizen Paine | Citizen Journalism

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.

Citizen journalism labors of love

Ya gotta root for efforts like this one, and ya gotta figure it's a harbinger of what's coming for small communities that just don't have the ad dollars to support a print product: After trying since October to make a go of it with the monthly paper of Winooski, Vermont (6,387 people, according to ePodunk), editor Cathy Resmer announced this week that she's converting The Winooski Eagle to an online-only citizen journalism effort.

Last month, she wrote:

Loyal readers will remember that when I assumed responsibility for the paper last October, I took over for a group of people who were planning to shut it ... I tried everything I could to keep this paper alive, but the bottom line is that it has become a physical and financial drain for me and my family. ... I still believe Winooski needs a local news provider, a place where residents can find out the latest information about the city, the schools, the businesses and the people who make up this unique and exciting community.

In addition to the low publication costs, Resmer cites the frequent updates, site accessibility and searchability, and the citizen journalism component as advantages over the print model.

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

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.

New site aims to harness reader selections

Common Media has launched Common Times, a social bookmarking site that will try to highlight news stories based on reader interest.

The site has sections on International, United States, Business, Technology, Science, Environment, Arts, Entertainment, Sports and Editorial. While it does not have geographic-based sections, it does encourage users to include location names as topics when adding stories.

This page describes how it works.

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."

Making a move

Starting Monday, I will be the editor for online news and citizen media for the Contra Costa Times. It's a new position, and I'm very excited about this opportunity.

It's a return to where I spent the '90s as a reporter, assistant metro editor, county bureau chief and, finally, online editor. The title shows how things have changed since I left Contra Costa in 2000 to help start GetLocalNews.com.

I won't say much more here about the new gig. You'll have to check in periodically at ContraCostaTimes.com to see what we're up to.

For GetLocalNews, I wish only the best. It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to help conceive and build a citizen journalism network before we even knew to call it that.

The future of this blog? Don't know yet.