Jul 30th, 2007 | Citizen Media, Media 2.0 | No Comments
Scott Karp of Publishing 2.0 writes about the NowPublic financing and takes issue with the terms “citizen journalism” (which I admit is a terrible term) and “crowdsourcing” (which I actually kind of like). He says that what is going on at NowPublic is just journalism, period — or perhaps “networked journalism,” which Jeff Jarvis suggested as an alternative here.
Update:
My mesh friend Jeff Howe — who coined the term “crowdsourcing” — has a post in response to Scott’s, in which he effectively agrees that it’s really just journalism, extended to new sources.
Jul 30th, 2007 | Citizen Media, Media 2.0 | 3 Comments
I wanted to take a more in-depth look at some of the things that NowPublic.com CEO Leonard Brody said about the local “citizen journalism” model during our interview about NowPublic’s financing and the failure of Backfence, which I posted about here. He said some similar things to Liz Gannes, who also spoke to him about the NowPublic deal for GigaOm.
In talking about Backfence and its “hyper-local” model, Brody said that as far as he is concerned hyper-local doesn’t work as an online model for younger readers:
“For people 35 and under, hyper-local doesn’t mean anything any more,” he said. “Local weather, news and that kind of thing is a commodity, and there’s lots of places you can get it.
We’ve moved from that to hyper-personal news… younger users check their Facebook feed way more times a day than they check CNN.”
Is that why Backfence didn’t work? And why do sites like Baristanet.com continue to prosper? Co-founder Mark Potts takes a look at the failure of Backfence and the lessons that can be learned here. And check the comments at PaidContent for some other thoughts, from Joe Duck and K. Paul Mallasch among others (K. Paul has his own local site, MuncieFreePress.com)
Brody did say during our interview, however, that hyper-local might make sense for print publications as a business model. And Howard Owens looks more at that side of the equation, and says that hyper-local isn’t really about weather or politics — it’s about people. Whether local newspapers can execute a strategy based on that remains to be seen.
One way to do that is to buy hyper-local citizen journalism efforts, which is what McClatchy did when it bought FresnoFamous, and what Fisher Communications recently did with Pegasus News. And for a great in-depth look at Gannett Newspapers’ makeover and its experiments with hyper-local and citizen journalism, check out Jeff “Crowdsourcing” Howe’s recent piece in Wired.
Update:
When it comes to local journalism, Jeff Jarvis says that he agrees with Rafat Ali of PaidContent, who argues that what Brody means by local doesn’t work is that “local is hard as hell.”
Jul 16th, 2007 | Citizen Media, Social Media | No Comments
Through some bizarre confluence of events, we have not one but two restrospectives on two separate citizen journalism or “crowdsourced” media projects today — Backfence, which recently announced it was shutting down, and Assignment Zero, which was the joint venture between Jay Rosen’s NewAssignment.net and Wired magazine, run by my mesh friend Jeff Howe — as well as an overview of the whole citizen journalism concept by Dan Gillmor of the Center for Citizen Media, whose own local journalism project, Bayosphere, failed and was absorbed by Backfence.
Dan’s overview, in a nutshell, is that citizen journalism has come a long way but has much further to go:
“There’s a growing recognition and appreciation of why citizen journalism matters. Investments, from media organizations and others, are fueling experiments of various kinds. Revenue models are taking early shape. And, most important, there’s a flood of great ideas.
But we have a long, long way to go. We need much more experimentation in journalism and community information projects. The business models are, at best, uncertain — and some notable failures are discouraging.”
After much talk about the failure of Backfence, former CEO Mark Potts finally takes a long look at what happened and tries to draw some lessons, including the need to:
“Engage the community. This may be the single most critical element. It’s not about technology, it’s not about journalism, it’s not about whizbang Web 2.0 features. It’s about bringing community members together.”
Potts also talks about the need to trust the community, and to treat the entire affair like a conversation, instead of trying to impose external controls on it. And Jeff Howe has both a Wired piece and his own blog post on the end of Assignment Zero, which he describes as “a highly satisfying failure.”
“Although Assignment Zero produced a strong body of work, consisting of seven original essays and some 80 Q&As, the real value of the exercise was discovery. We learned a lot about how crowds come together, and what’s required to organize them well. But many of the lessons came too late to help Assignment Zero.
In the 12 weeks the project was open to the public, it suffered from haphazard planning, technological glitches and a general sense of confusion among participants. Crucial staff members were either forced out or resigned in mid-stream, and its ambitious goal… had to be dramatically curtailed.”
Well worth reading, all of them. If failure is educational, then we are all learning a lot. And as Eric mentions in the comments, the Washington Post has also just launched a new “hyper-local” journalism experiment called LoudounExtra.com.
Update:
For more on Assignment Zero and the lessons learned, be sure to check out this post from Tish Grier, who acted as the project’s deputy director of participation and has some worthwhile thoughts. David Cohn, who was a key participant, also has a post on the project.
Jul 9th, 2007 | Citizen Media, Media 2.0 | No Comments
Wired magazine is running some of the stories that have been produced by Assignment Zero — the first “crowdsourcing” journalism experiment from Jay Rosen’s NewAssignment.net and Wired writer (and mesh panelist) Jeff Howe — and one of the first is a piece by Anna Haynes about just how difficult the entire process has been. As she describes it:
“The results of my efforts were mixed. Some parts were rewarding: I enjoyed digging to uncover lobbyist connections to earmarked appropriations in the Earmarks Project, plus there’s a certain satisfaction in publicly exposing stonewalling, and a different satisfaction in finally getting an answer.
But I contribute to crowdsourced journalism because I want my work to yield a high “social good” return, and by that metric, overall, the experience has been frustrating. With some of these projects I ended up with nothing to show for the time I put in.”
In the end, however, Anna says that she believes it was worth it — and that more of it needs to happen:
I did it, and will continue doing it, for the same reason that you keep going out on dates even though the first six guys didn’t measure up — you know there’s potential to the form, you want that potential to be realized, and you’re pretty sure that, if you keep plugging away and you put the word out, in time that potential will blossom.
Jul 9th, 2007 | Citizen Media, Media 2.0 | No Comments
I wrote about this last week — bloggers covering the attacks on a radical mosque in Pakistan — but wanted to return to the subject in a little more depth:
On some “metro-blogs” such as Torontoist.com or NYCBloggers.com, a big day might be a photo montage of a cultural event or a post about something dumb the mayor has done (always a good topic) — or a public fracas such as the one involving a bicycle courier and a driver that got Torontoist so many page views back in January of last year. At Metroblogging Islamabad, however, they have been “live-blogging” the ongoing incendiary standoff between a group of radical Islamic priests and the Pakistani army in the country’s capital city.
While U.S. cities were taking the day off to celebrate July 4th, Metroblogging Islamabad was posting updates like this one at 2:30 a.m.:
“The 111 Brigade from the RWP Corps has assembled at the Lal Masjid and there is a high probability of an assault. The area is cordoned off completely, and there is a curfew. EVERYONE IS ADVISED TO AVOID THE AREA AS SPECIAL FORCES AND OTHER SECURITY PERSONNEL HAVE BEEN TOLD TO EXERCISE MINIMUM RESTRAINT, ZERO TOLERANCE AND ‘SHOOT ON SIGHT.”
Further updates came at 2:40 and 3:00 a.m., then another at 3:10 saying simply “SHOTS FIRED!” At 5 p.m. came a post that said:
“Activity near the Lal Masjid intensifies as gun shots from automatic rifles are heard. Tracked vehicles can be heard. Gun smoke can be smelt several meters away from the site of action. The loudspeaker has gone mute, that was chanting Allah-o-Akbar. After the willing students left, the ones left inside seem to be ready for death or victory.”
Metroblogging Islamabad is part of the Metroblogging network, which includes more than 50 blogs in U.S. cities such as Los Angeles and Boston, but also foreign centres from Dublin to Manila. The network was started by Sean Bonner and Jason DeFillippo, and began with the Blogging.la website. A competing “metro-blog” network is the series of “-ist” blogs, which started with Gothamist and now includes Torontoist, Chicagoist and Shanghaiist among about fifteen other metro-blogging sites.
As the siege of the mosque in Islamabad continued last week, posts at Metroblogging Islamabad continued to chronicle the attempted escape of one of the ringleaders, disguised as an old woman in a burqa (”So much for Jihadi spirit!” says the post). The following day, the site carried posts about shots being fired in the mosque, heavy gunfire coming from Pakistan Army soldiers and the arrival of AH-1 helicopters — with a helpful link to the Wikipedia entry on military attack helicopters.
The siege has now gone on for six days, and Metroblogging Islamabad continues to pull together eyewitness reports, news reports and rumours on an almost hourly basis. Other Metroblogging sites have done similar things in the past, including the London site during the bombings in 2005 — where people posted eyewitness reports, impressions, news about the missing and so on — and the New Orleans site after the floods during Hurricane Katrina. Metroblogging Montreal also became one of the sites that people went to after the shootings at Dawson College to find out more about the event.
Is this an example of what some are calling “citizen journalism” in action? That’s difficult to say. While many of the reports on Metroblogging Islamabad are journalistic in nature, with facts and attribution (some to mainstream media, some to local reports and eyewitnesses), there are also posts like this one:
“Immense emotion fills me up when I think of the people that have died on the either side of this conflict. While one being in the capacity of delivering pictures to the outside world, I take this time to say a little prayer for Lt. Col. Haroon Islam, a son of Lahore.”
It may or may not be journalism, but whatever it is, I find it fascinating.
