Results matching “citizens journa”

PBS.org blogger Dan Schultz published an article on the ways to distinguish online journalists from online citizens and the roles that each one plays in a media system such as a newspaper site.

According to the article, the system should:

-Recognize quantity
-Recognize accuracy
-Recognize quality
-Recognize wisdom
-Recognize roles

Active and responsive users with clear judgement and insightful and valid contributions may be further categorized as corresponding to journalists or citizens, depending on what role the system associate him or her with.

"There are a few risks you need to keep in mind: make sure the system isn't overcomplicated, make sure the rewards don't get in the way of journalistic ideals, and make sure users can't ever get unfairly powerful," Schultz said.

Schultz pointed out that even if a site may not care about classification, weighing a user's history could make the site "more intelligent" "more responsive" and "more rewarding".

Newspaper sites could use these tips to help understand what users' participation benefits them and possibly study the ways in which interaction may be improved.  

Source: PBS.org

See also:

US: The Hartford Courant's thoughtful citizen journalism venture

The blogosphere's interactive, communal spirit is shaking the foundations of print journalism, but traditional journalists should embrace the change, says Roy Greenslade. News, he says, is no longer "one-way traffic".

"We [print journalists] conceived it [news]. We gathered it. We published it and broadcast it," he writes. "Blogging turns that model on its head. It allows people to question the information we provide. It allows them to produce their own information. It offers them a space to air their own views."

Greenslade says he is no longer certain that his own model of the future newsroom - a core of "professional journalists" overseeing a fringe group of bloggers - is viable. The news organization, he says, is vulnerable.

"...More fundamentally, I wonder whether a news organization is as perfect a model as we might think...It is entirely conceivable that the digital revolution may, in the fullness of time, sweep the media mogul aside," he writes.

Not that this is anything to be afraid of. Greenslade is ebullient when talking about the liberating potential of the blogosphere.

"The joy of the digital revolution is that it is bloodless, and democracy is at its heart," Greenslade writes. "It is the lack of unity that makes blogging so vibrant, so critical and also so self-critical."

For traditionalists who still cling to the old model - journalists as providers, citizens as recipients - and fear relinquishing this power to bloggers, Greenslade has some advice: let go.

"There is no us and them," he writes.

Click here for more on the converging media.

Source: The Guardian (Greenslade) through Journerdism

Leonard Tow, 80, philanthropist and former newspaper executive (CEO of Citizens Communications and Century Communications), donated five million dollars to the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and three million to the City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate School of Journalism for research and development (R &D) and "innovation efforts" to study the future of print and online newspapers, PaidContent.org reports.

CUNY's Tow Center for Journalistic Innovation will be the "R & D center for business models and developing new ventures", PaidContent.org wrote. "The center would bring in venture capitalists s to fund the best ideas", according to Stephen Shepard, reported PaidContent.org via New York Times. Meanwhile, Columbia will be focused "on training journalism students in digital media", according to PaidContent.org.

Source: PaidContent.org

Werner Eggert, Editor in Chief of Tide in Germany, spoke about the advantages of citizen journalism and how to train the 'untrainables' at the 15th World Editors Forum.


 Eggert said that there are many benefits that come with citizen journalism.

• It is mostly free
• Citizen journalists see trends that professional reporters don't see
• Producers/contributors are amateurs and love their topic
  
• It is a way to reach a new audience

But of course there are also disadvantages of citizen journalism.

• They are not professional and not trained
  
• They go on holiday and don't tell you when they will come back or if they come back, which makes it very difficult to plan a program.
• They are obsessed with their area of interest and have problems with producing balanced stories.
• They overestimate their capacity
• It's not really journalism

Eggert and Tides solution is to train the citizens in how to handle professional equipment, how to manage their products, maintain ethical standards, deadlines etc. One problem is that producers often don't want to be trained and often think the content is more important than the quality. Tide therefore decided to set up their own academy for citizen journalists with extremely short courses (mostly they are only four hours). The courses are very basic and focus on practical examples. At the Tide academy they always use professional equipment, Eggert believs that this way the citizen journalists will perform more professional. His impression is that after the course professional quality matters more for the participants.

The courses costs 45 euro or 100 euro depending on the length. From January to May 2008 Tide produced 33 courses with 194 participants and the citizens are now producing 1,5 hours of new video programs per day. According to Eggert citizen journalism is little investment with huge returns.

Two magazines, published by 8020 Publishing and based on an experimental user-generated model, are drawing the attention of traditional newspaper editors.

Everywhere, a travel magazine, and JPG, a photo journal, rely on citizens to create their content, greatly reducing the price of production, while managing to maintain a standard of high quality.

The magazines receive thousands of submissions online, which are then voted on by readers for publication. A small editorial team makes the final decision.

"Even in this Twittering digital age in which tens of millions of self-publishers have created their own blogs, there is still enough of a thrill in being published in a bound print publication," reported the San Francisco Chronicle.

"After doing this for a bit, I'm still not seeing what professional travel writers do that our people aren't doing better," Everywhere Editor in Chief Todd Lappin says.

"Think about it. There's only one of them going to a place and there's potentially hundreds of our people already there."

Some editors have expressed reluctance to embrace a model dependent upon citizens - such a system would seem to cheapen the value of professional journalists. Sree Sreenivasan, in charge of new media program at Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism, recognizes the value of user-generated content, but also warns against community-based 'editorial' choices:

"'Create-your-own news sites' lose some of the serendipity of journalism. You're losing the stories that you might not see if there wasn't an editor looking out for them," Sreenivasan says.

The publishers of Everywhere and JPG are considering similar magazines for car fans and food connoisseurs.

It remains to be seen whether this user-generated model can be successfully and viably applied to news and newspapers. Initiatives at the Hartford Courant, or CNN's iReport platform, which now draws 10,000 user submissions per month, point in the right direction.

Source: San Francisco Chronicle through I Want Media

The US Society of Professional Journalists - "an old-media organization" in the words of the Chicago Tribune - has chosen embrace the trend towards citizen journalism by organizing workshops to teach citizens about ethical and responsible journalism.

Until now, "Some major initiatives in this country have failed on both business and news-gathering levels," commented the Tribune.

Others, such as Talking Points Memo and the Huffington Post, have strived.

In any case, the trend towards "citizen journalism" is here to stay and the SPJ has decided to conduct seminars around the country to teach the basics of journalism to "those who are, perhaps, more citizen than journalist," reported the Tribune.

For the first session, about a week ago, there were relatively few respondents. About 25 people signed up, at $25 a day for seminars on ethics, and about two thirds of them showed up.

"There are quite a few bloggers, particularly in larger cities, who do work on a par with any journalist," said Clint Brewer, the SPJ's president and editor of Nashville's alternative City Paper. "We're trying to sort of hang our shingle out in their world with this first step and let them know we welcome them as well."

For Geoff Dougherty, who left the Tribune two years ago and founded the Chi-Town Daily News (see their own news process involving citizens) and taught the reporting seminar Saturday, the SPJ's involvement is a positive sign for the industry.

"It's great that they're interested in kind of extending the professional standards that have been in effect for newspaper journalists to a completely new population," he said.

Source: Chicago Tribune - Technolo-j

A labor union of the Agence France Presse organized a protest May 21 outside the AFP's Paris office, calling for participation from "all members of other media organizations and all other citizens who support freedom on the press."

The protest comes in reponse to government attacks on AFP's neutrality in early May, which then provoked accusations of governmental pressure intended to shape AFP's coverage (see a full description of the controversy).

Source: NouvelObs (in French) through IFRA Executive News Service

The "local focus" mantra that has spread to so many U.S. and U.K. newspapers is also alive and well at Latin American newspapers, albeit with a different game plan for success.

In the view of Editor & Publisher's Mark Fitzgerald, who attended a recent seminar for senior editors of leading Latin American dailies, the reasons for going hyperlocal are essentially the same across the board: to combat the pressures of the internet.

In the U.S., local news is seen as "the one franchise that differentiates newspapers from any other media pretenders." In this conception, in order to survive the digital era, newspapers can create multi-media hyperlocal ventures, tying together a social networking model with what they do best, print, to encourage "constant refreshment of the web site."    

The American local model, however, does not whole-heartedly encourage a two-way dialogue between residents and newspaper. Dialogue is important, yes, but not in the same way as in Latin America. There, it is the foundation of what makes local news successful; newspapers view "their local efforts as ways to imitate the Web's interactivity and its encouragement of self-expression."

"People want to narrate their stories," El Tiempo Editor in Chief Ernesto Cortes Fierro said. "People want to resolve their own problems. It is two-way content, and in a way it is a mutual rediscovery of the newspaper and the citizens."

Readers are an integral part of the Latin American local news model; efforts have ranged from including neighbor hood residents on the board (El Tiempo) to equipping citizen journalists with cameras to get footage during protests against President Hugo Chavez (Venezuelan daily El Nacional).

Source: Editor & Publisher 

A FAITHful voice blog details "The 11 Layers of Citizen Journalism, a step-by-step approach in dealing with the changing landscape of journalism by integrating the professional with the amateur."

1) Opening up to public comment: This gives the newspaper an interactivity and enhances the news story with things the reporter may have missed or with additional sources. 

2) "Citizens add-on approach:" Citizens can add personal experiences or information to a story. These can be made into a side bar.

3) Open source reporting: Citizens can be part of the reporting process by researching, interviewing, reporting, and writing.

4) "Citizen Bloghouse:" Invite "outstanding and prominent bloggers to blog for your news website." Then your news site will not only have quality blogs, but your online traffic will  probably increase. 

5) "Newsroom citizens transparency blog:" An online ombudsmen who will respond faster to you.

6) "The stand-alone citizen-journalism site - Edited Version:" For more localized and specific news, let citizens blog with minimal editing.

7) "The stand-alone citizen-journalism site - Unedited version:" Citizens have complete freedom to blog and moderate themselves

8) "Add a print edition:"  Publish the best stories and photos in different sections, like a newspaper. This may motivate the bloggers to work harder.

9) "The hybrid:" Both professionals and citizen journalists work together on news website content.

10) "Integrating citizen and pro journalism under one roof:" Both professionals and citizen journalists "work alongside each other to complement the content of the paper."

11) "Wiki-journalism": Horizontal structure where everyone is an editor and journalist.

A FAITHful voice concedes that these layers are truly ideal and questions if they will work in reality. A citizen journalist site Scribblesheet had shut down earlier this month because of financial troubles.

Source: A FAITHful voice

The Editors Weblog is running a series of exclusive interviews about the future of journalism with top editors at leading newspapers around the world. Here is the latest installment with Dan Bogler, Managing Editor of the Financial Times in the UK.

Click here to view all interviews in this series. Other titles include The New York Times, the Guardian, Fairfax Media, the Hindustan Times, etc. (full list at the bottom of the interview).


Questions: "News, journalism, newspapers: same past, different futures?"


- How long do you think you will define your company as a newspaper company or a print company?

We see ourselves as a news organization and we're becoming much more agnostic about our distribution channels. We're becoming much more interested in creating relevant information for our readers and much less interested in how it gets to the readers. Pearson, the parent company, clearly is an education company with a print publishing arm and an information division, which includes the FT. At the FT level, we consider ourselves to be a financial news business more than a newspaper. Our mission is to be the gold standard for global business news in print and online - and in any other formats.

- At this year's World Economic Forum in Davos, a panel of futurists claimed that print newspapers wouldn't exist by 2014. To what extent do you agree with this?

Largely but not completely. 10 years from now - 2014 may be slightly too short a time frame - we will still have printed newspapers, because people like reading  things in print. Newspapers, just like the book, are convenient to read in places you can't do with a computer; but my belief is that a lot of what will be printed will be analysis, comment, analysis and opinion. The actual news will be more or less online or in other more timely formats. In a way the FT will split in two, with FT.com for all the news that's breaking and some immediate reactions and  opinion. The more considered analysis will be almost an Economist-type publication. Maybe it wouldn't have to be broadsheet anymore, it could be tabloid or even magazine format. To put it very crudely, you'd have all the news online, and you'd have 12 pages of Martin Wolf the next day in print, and all the editorials, columnists, features and more.

- In journalism's multi-centennial history, do you view the emergence of digital journalism as part of the continuity, or as a complete breakaway with previous forms of journalism?

There's one thing that's old and one thing that's new. What's old and part of the continuum is that traditional companies are going online. Our journalists are now fully integrated and write online and in print. I'm sure that in 2 years time they'll all be carrying video cameras. We've gone from zero videos website to over 100 per month in the last 18 months. That's part of the continuum: it's us doing the same thing in different distribution channels.

What's new is the blogosphere, citizen journalists and the idea that anyone - people who are not qualified journalists, either experts in a narrow field or just interested citizens - can start a blog or website and distribute it. For the FT, you would think it's negative in the sense that there's more news and opinion and more competitors. In fact, that's not really true, it almost enhances the position of leading media brands for several reasons. One is we are trusted, people believe the news they read with us. Secondly, we select and edit, which becomes an increasingly crucial function as there is more information out there. The more 'over-informed' people are, the more likely people who want to know what's actually going on will turn to a few sources that tell them what s actually important. That's what professional newspapers do really well.

- Do you believe in the increasingly active role of the user in the news process, and is it a threat or an opportunity for professional journalists?

I do believe in their increasingly active role of users: very often readers are more informed than us. If you look at an old format like the letters page in the newspaper, the amount of expertise that our readers have, who are often professionals in the City, is just incredible. They know more about it in certain aspects than our journalists. That's why we get CEOs, academics, lawyers, heads of accountancy firms and more writing in to us to say what's actually happening. They can do this online with comments or take part in Q&As, or print their views in the pages of the FT and FT.com. That sort of content is very helpful. We also have a function for any user to comment on the website's stories.

Is it a threat? Sure, to some extent. But as long as it's happening on our site or in the pages of our newspaper, it's been bundled, monitored, checked for quality and therefore is important. We're not going to turn into a place where we just repeat hundreds of readers' letters and have no journalists of our own. It's more of an opportunity for our journalists to become more informed and build contacts among readers. And it's amazing that all these readers are willing to give this information for free.

- Do you consider the Golden Age of investigative journalism is already past, or just beginning?

I don't know. That's a really hard one. I might say it's already past.

There's so much more information out there and it's so much harder for companies to hide information. Take the Northern Rock story, which was broken by BBC journalists, and there was a bank run as a result. It's harder to hide information. The idea that journalists have to do long-term, deep, undercover investigations where they reveal something months later - I don't think it works like that anymore. Journalists still have scoops and still break important stories, but it tends to be in a much shorter time frame. It tends to be a single development that they're breaking rather than a long series of connections.

But frankly, newspapers and media organizations are under pressure. It's hard for us to send a journalist or a group of journalists off three months investigating something - and if nothing works that's a shame but nevermind. We don't have resources to let people go off and do that for such a long time. I think The Golden Age of journalists working undercover, developing sources and breaking big scandals is less likely; but revealing news that people don't want out there, on a short term basis, uncovering a scandal and having it come to light, that's more likely. As soon as a tiny thing breaks now, it gets distributed so quickly that it's hard to see a journalist working undercover for a long time and gradually piecing something together without having it go public much earlier in the process.


Stay tuned for more interviews in our series. Among the other titles that have been asked to participate in these interviews are:

- The New York Times - Jonathan Landman (US)
- Financial Times - Dan Bogler (UK)
- Guardian (UK)
- Washington Post - Jim Brady (US)
- Globe & Mail - Ed Greenspon (Canada)
- The Times (UK)
- The Economist (UK)
- Gazeta Wyborcza - Jaroslaw Kurski (Poland)
- Le Monde (France)
- Die Welt (Germany)
- The Hindustan Times - Pankaj Paul (India)
- Asahi Shimbun (Japan)
- JoongAng Ilbo (South Korea)
- The Age / Fairfax - Mike van Niekerk (Australia)
- The Nation - Pana Janviroj (Thailand)
- Punch (Nigeria)
- El Tiempo (Colombia)
- Clarin (Argentina)
- Gulf News - Abdul Hamid Ahmad (UAE)

Online Journalism Review's Robert Niles writes that "there's no such thing as 'off the record' anymore," with the Internet making it nearly impossible to keep anything private, and with citizen journalism gaining popularity.

Political comments, drunken party pictures, anything can end up on the Internet thanks to Facebook, Myspace, discussion boards, etc. Niles compares the web to "life in a small frontier town, where everyone knows everyone else's business."

Case in point: U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama made comments on "a popular view among many progressives, notably articulated by author Thomas Frank four years ago in his book, "What's the Matter with Kansas?"," according to Niles, which in turn caused rival Hillary Clinton and other right-wing supporters to call him "elitist." Though this gathering supposedly didn't allow journalists, these comments reported for Huffington Post's "Off the Bus."

With citizen journalists and bloggers,  "any professional news reporter who agrees to respect an "off the record" request at a meeting is committing an act of unilateral professional disarmament," writes Niles. 

So why can't a professional journalist be a "citizen" journalist and gain access to events closed to professionals? After all, all journalists are citizens, argues Niles.

Ultimately, there really is no way to enforce an "off the record" request anymore. People may be forbidden from future events, but there are several other potential "citizen journalists" to fill in the shoes.

Do people now have to resort to watching what they say in public and censoring themselves? Niles seems to think so and while the Internet might increase formalities and cautiousness among people, it might "lead us in the opposite direction, where we deal with all this information about each other by ignoring it, in the way many people have learned to ignore public cursing, kissing and other displays that would have offended many more people a generation or two past."

As for journalists, Niles suggests that they keep reporting since the information will end up on the web anyway, and consolidate the information in a "smarter, sharper perspective than anyone else does."

Source: Online Journalism Review

For the second year in a row, the Knight News Challenge asked the public for ideas to transform community news through digital innovation, and 17 projects were chosen for funding. The projects will be announced on May 14, 2008, at the E&P Interactive Media Conference in Las Vegas.

The top finalists are projects that have the potential to "inform, empower and engage citizens and help them participate in the decision-making process of their neighborhoods, their communities and their countries," according to the Knight News.

Some projects are:

"Doing Away with Dewey ~ Unifying Digital and Physical Collections and Knowledge with a new open organization of knowledge (B3OK)" by Bonnie Pierce: By hyperlinking the materials within libraries with an open global digital knowledge network, all physical library collections, informative materials, media, and books, cultural objects, and specific physical locations will be connected.

"Louretta" by Matthew Waite: An open-source, socially networked, host for small-town weeklies and twice-weekles, which would improve and expand small-town journalism online.  People would participate in and contribute to those social networks, and have mechanisms for following their institutions of government, schools and local sports through databases of public records, newspaper-created information or data entered by the users themselves.

"Flash Storytell