Jan 15th, 2008 | Citizen Media, Media 2.0 | No Comments
Dave “DigiDave” Cohn, the one-man editing and assignment desk behind several NewAssignment.net projects — including Off The Bus (a joint venture in “crowdsourced” political reporting with The Huffington Post) and Assignment Zero (a joint effort with Jeff Howe of Wired magazine) — has a great overview of all the different projects that Jay Rosen’s brainchild is or has been involved in, including:
BeatBlogging.org: Reporters with thirteen news organizations have agreed to try using the Internet — including tools such as blogs and wikis — to build a network of sources that can help them become smarter about their beat.
OffTheBus.Net: In which motivated individuals agree to keep tabs on an election campaign and file reports to The Huffington Post and NewAssignment.
ReadableLaws.com: A lab experiment aimed at using a wiki to turn legal jargon into plain English.
Assignment Zero: The project with Wired looked at the phenomenon of “crowdsourcing” through interviews and feature stories, and while it wasn’t a big success it was a learning experience according to Dave and Jay.
Polling Place Photo Project: A lab experiment that saw people from all over the U.S. track what their polling place looked like on Super Tuesday, and this year was copied by the New York Times.
Some great ideas from Jay and Dave and the rest of the NewAssignment team — and plenty to look forward to in 2008.
Feb 20th, 2007 | Citizen Media | No Comments
From a site called Springwise comes news of a new “open-source media” effort in Denmark. A free paper called Nyhedsavisen has given bloggers and other “citizen journalists” the ability to make it onto the front page of the paper’s website at Avisen.dk, where their stories appear beside articles written by the newspaper’s regular staff.
As the Springwise story puts it, “pros and amateurs compete for top positions in the most read and most debated sections.” If they want to become “Læserskribenter” (which translates as “reader-writers”), users create a profile and set up a blog, then write about whatever they choose. The pieces that make it to the front page are chosen on the basis of popularity.
So far no plans to compensate any of the “citizen journalists” for their efforts, according to Springwise — which points to a list at Trendspotting of the open-source media projects that do compensate their contributors, including several that specialize in photos (such as Scoopt.com), as well as the South African Reporter site, run by one of the country’s largest media conglomerates, which is a wholly user-produced site that pays “reporters” whose stories make it to the front page.
Feb 12th, 2007 | Citizen Media | 4 Comments
It would be nice if the proprietors of KFTY-TV in Santa Rosa, California — a tiny pimple on the giant media corpus that is Clear Channel Communications — had decided that “citizen journalism” or “crowdsourcing” or “open source journalism” or whatever we’re calling it these days was a truly valuable thing to have, a worthy goal in and of itself for a media entity.
Unfortunately, that’s not what happened. What happened is that Clear Channel wanted to cut costs, so it fired all the news reporters at what appears to be a marginal TV station. And now the management are trying citizen journalism as a fallback position. And the guy in charge of the station, whose name is Steve Spendlove (I am not making this up), says that he prefers to think of what he’s doing as “local content harvesting.” Seriously.
This, of course, is very close to what Seth Finkelstein likes to call it, which is “digital sharecropping.” Although the San Francisco Chronicle article says that Spendlove is considering paying contributors, it’s not clear how — or how much. Presumably they will operate on the popular “if you don’t ask, you don’t get” model. And Mr. Spendlove admits that, in order to maintain a certain level of quality control, the station may have to hire more editors.
The Poynter Institute’s site has more, and Dan Kennedy at MediaNation points out that citizen journalism is often a euphemism for getting content for nothing, to boost a content producer’s bottom line. But Dan makes a good point: since the technology is cheap and plentiful, what exactly does a citizen journalist gain by giving their content to a TV station for free, when they can just upload it to YouTube? In the long run, TV stations like KFTY may be sowing the seeds of their own irrelevance.
Not surprisingly, many people think this is a dumb idea squared, including the TV critic from the Miami Herald (not surprising perhaps), as well as this guy and this guy. I think citizen journalism is an interesting idea — but this is not citizen journalism, it’s just financial desperation. Not a great motivator.
Feb 9th, 2007 | Media 2.0 | 3 Comments
Some pretty big developments at Vancouver-based NowPublic, the “citizen journalism” or “participatory media” site, or whatever your preferred term is. One of them is that PaidContent says the company, whose site just underwent a redesign and relaunch, has signed a partnership arrangement with the Associated Press newswire. The two are going to collaborate on news coverage, although there aren’t really a whole lot of details — either in the PaidContent item or in the news release from the wire service.
AP vice-president Jim Kennedy says AP “has a long tradition of pursuing citizen contributions in breaking news events worldwide” and “this relationship will make that connection even stronger and result in more news and images from people who are in the right place at the right time.” Interestingly enough, NowPublic’s “Actual News Guy” Mark Schneider says in a comment on the PaidContent story that the company is looking for a correspondent in Second Life.
The other development came yesterday, and it is that MSNBC founder and former editor-in-chief Merrill Brown has joined NowPublic as chairman of the board. The release says that he “was on the front lines at MSNBC when the Internet transitioned into the number one place to consume news and content,” and that he will “help us to continue building the next-generation wire service.”
Big moves for NowPublic — it will be interesting to see how it develops.
Dec 15th, 2006 | Media 2.0, Social Media | 2 Comments
The Fresno Bee, a newspaper owned by McClatchy — which also owns the Sacramento Bee and the Modesto Bee — has just acquired two community-media sites, FresnoFamous.com and ModestoFamous.com, for an undisclosed sum (hat tip to J.D. Lasica). The sites were founded by Jarah Euston, a former bond analyst who writes about the acquistion here. She and a small team built the websites up over the past two years to have 2,000 members and about 150,000 page views a month. The newspaper writes about the purchase here.
