Oct 17th, 2007 | Media 2.0, Social Media | No Comments
(This is my attempt at live-blogging the ONA panel on the future of news at the CBC in Toronto with Leonard Brody of NowPublic, Rahaf Harfoush — who did research for Don Tapscott’s book Wikinomics — and Andrew Keen, author of Cult of the Amateur. Note: I did this on a BlackBerry, so please excuse the typos)
Keen says citizen journalism sounds Orwellian, like a guy in a beret creeping around feeling very virtuous; doesn’t think journalists should necessarily be good citizens;
Brody says it’s a dumb term, like citizen dentist; says it is “the people’s view”; brand promiscuity; most younger readers don’t read just one thing, they search and read an average of 16 links on a story;
Rahaf (who is in her 20s) says she bought a newspaper a week ago — for her dad.
Keen says citizen journalism is part of a fetishization of the authentic, focus on the personal; cultural changes, has very little to do with media; take out your frustrations on something else — doctors or restaurants, don’t ruin media; big media has as much responsibility as anyone else; bowing to reality television and cult of celebrity;
Keen says big media should be less humble, more arrogant, more authoritative; saying we understand, you need a voice is … Recipe for disaster;
If you take that view, Brody says, you will be speaking to an empty room. It’s not good or bad, it just is.
Rahaf says having an arrogant journalist tell me what’s important, not interested in that; interested in a dialogue, and in individual voices.
Public view, human perspective and don’t trust single view — want to triangulate truth on my own Brody says; he says the vast majority of people don’t want to be paid; if they did it would be easier — love and ego are much harder to control;
Keen says when we generate something of value most of us want to be paid; not going to give away my labour for nothing; youtube model or wikipedia model, vessel they put their information into, bad in every way; one of the things that keep journalists honest is that they’re paid
Rahaf says that blogs have to develop a reputation, build up trust over time, effectively self-regulating; social contract
Brody says they want to be arbiters of their own truth;
→ continue reading
Oct 16th, 2007 | Media 2.0, Social Media | No Comments
As expected, the New York Times appears to be seeing a substantial traffic jump now that its columnists and other opinion/editorial content are outside the newspaper’s “pay wall,” which was recently dismantled in favour of the Wild West known as the Interweb. According to traffic measurement firm Compete, the opinion section of the Times websites has seen traffic more than double since the move, and overall traffic to the newspaper’s site is up by 10 per cent.
As Valleywag notes, those extra pageviews are going to help the site’s bottom line, although they are likely still not enough to make up for the lost revenue from the death of TimesSelect. The important thing is that the newspaper’s columnists and other content are now part of the gigantic link-farm known as the Internet — and the growth in readership that they are likely to attract over time will almost certainly make up for the loss of the TimesSelect gravy train.
Oct 16th, 2007 | Citizen Media, Media 2.0 | No Comments
I’ve been meaning to get to this for days now, but I wanted to post about Jay Rosen’s lessons from Assignment Zero, the “crowdsourcing” journalism experiment he put together between his NewAssignment project and Wired magazine, with help from a team of people that included Dave “Digi-Dave” Cohn and Tish Grier. On a related note, Dave has also been working with Jeff Jarvis on the Networked Journalism mini-conference Jeff just finished putting together, and has a list of interviews with people who are involved in what might broadly be called social media in one way or another.
Among other things, Jeff admits that the trend story that Assignment Zero chose to focus its efforts on — the impact of crowdsourcing itself, and other “open source” approaches to media — was a little too “meta” and a little too big and subjective for the first project. And he quotes from Derek Powazek’s advice in his review of Assignment Zero lessons (which is here):
“Start with clear, simple tasks. This isn’t because the crowd can’t handle complicated ones - they can - it’s because they haven’t decided if it’s worth doing them for you yet.
People won’t do what you say because you just told them to. You have to inspire them to want to participate.”
Many of the issues that came up with Assignment Zero (and Wired writer Jeff Howe has his own take on the lessons here and here) didn’t have to do with the idea or even the execution so much as the co-ordination of volunteers and contributors. Finding out what people’s motivations are, how much they can do, what they want to do, and then dividing the work up amongst them is hard, Jay says.
“Dividing up the work into tasks people can and will do is among the trickiest decisions the project will have. Expectations have to be extremely clear or a crowd will generate a limitless number of honest misunderstandings.”
One of the potential solutions Jay talks about is having what the open-source movement calls “super-contributors,” whose job it is to help find and co-ordinate other contributors. While he says Assignment Zero did not “crack this case,” Jay told me that he thinks Off The Bus — the networked journalism project that NewAssignment is working on with The Huffington Post — is closer to a solution.
Assignment Zero and Off The Bus co-ordinator Amanda Michel writes a bit about participation levels here, and gives an example of the work Off The Bus is doing with “citizen journalists” here.
Oct 15th, 2007 | Media 2.0, Social Media | No Comments
The Wall Street Journal got the scoop on Discovery Communications latest move into new media (see, old media can still break stories): the TV network is buying HowStuffWorks for $250-million. According to the Journal story:
“We’re way behind in new media and digital,” says Chief Executive David Zaslav, who has shaken up Discovery since taking over in January. “I don’t think we win just by building vertically.”
Although it was a much smaller deal, Discovery acquired Treehugger — a popular environmental awareness site founded by a Canadian — in August for $10-million. As alarm:clock notes, Discovery was an early leader in using the Web, like a Wikipedia for basic-level science. Discovery is making a smart acquisition, I think.
Oct 13th, 2007 | Media 2.0, Social Media | 3 Comments
Along with several other bloggers, I saw a post at Silicon Alley Insider the other day about the New York Times highlighting reader comments on its front page — in this case, underneath a photo of Al Gore after he won the Nobel Peace Prize. Henry Blodget says the Times should be congratulated for this experiment in social media, while David Spector says that it’s a terrible idea and that the newspaper is “devaluing” itself by doing so.
I thought at first that Henry might have stumbled across either an experiment that went live by mistake, or a glitch in the Times’ comment-posting process, but in a comment on the Silicon Alley post, Heather Green from BusinessWeek says that she noticed the Times featured reader comments on the front page back in August as well, when the bridge collapsed in Minnesota.
What’s interesting to me is how opinion is divided on whether this is a good idea or not. David Spector and some of the commenters on his post and others argue that comments belong on story pages but not on the front page, and that the New York Times should just be providing the facts. Others seem to think the facts are probably well known by the time the NYT gets to a story, and so reader comments are a valid part of the news.
I’m inclined to go with that latter view. If it’s a big story that has already been reported, like Al Gore or the bridge collapse, I think a few carefully selected reader comments would be a useful addition to the story. Why else do reporters interview people for their thoughts and then quote them in news stories? Comments are just a way of letting people who don’t happen to get interviewed have their say.
