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The World Association of Newspapers and IFRA, the leading international associations for print and digital news publishing, have merged into a new organisation, the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers (WAN-IFRA). The combined new organisation will represent more than 18,000 publications, 15,000 online sites and over 3000 companies in more than 120 countries. WAN-IFRA is dedicated "to be the indispensable partner of newspapers and the entire news publishing industry worldwide, particularly our members, in the defense and promotion of press freedom, quality journalism and editorial integrity, and the development of prosperous businesses and technology."

The Washington Times is hosting a two-day symposium in New York today and tomorrow to discuss the topic of the 'individuated newspaper.' Peter Vandevanter, vice president of the Denver-based Media News Group, coined the term after researching ways that newspapers can resist the threats of the ailing industry.

"There are two kinds of content now. You choose it, or it's chosen for you. The idea here is self-selection of the news, delivered to any platform, at any time," Peter Vandevanter was quoted saying in The Washington Times today.

Following the Iranian election on 12 June, which both sides claim to have won, Iranians and the rest of the world wants to know the truth about the results, as well as wanting to follow protests and other developments. But this has proved more difficult than anticipated given the restrictions on reporting, both by Iranians and foreigners, and the occasion proved to be an opportunity for citizen journalism to show its value.

Reporting restrictions

Mainstream media has been suffering from severe restrictions in Iran, even tougher than during last year's Zimbabwean elections, foreign editor for Channel 4 News Ben de Pear told the Guardian. Foreign journalists first had to get special press cards and were closely monitored, then on the Tuesday following the election, foreign journalists were banned from reporting on the streets. The BBC's correspondent has been asked to leave the country after the broadcaster was accused of supporting rioters. And it is not just foreign reporters who are suffering: now even reporters of Iranian nationality are being confined to their offices. According to Reporters without Borders (RSF), 26 Iranian journalists, editors and bloggers have been imprisoned since June 14.

Citizen video becomes a symbol

In the absence of an abundance of professional reporters, amateurs have stepped up. One of the most watched and discussed videos to come out of the tragedy, and one which is emblamatic of the role of citizen journalism in reporting from Iran, is that of the death of Neda Agha-Soltan, a young Iranian woman who was walking near the scene of clashes between pro-government militias and demonstrators when she was shot. The video has prompted international outcry and the girl's death has since come to represent the tragedy of the conflict, a "symbol of the anti-government movement," according to the New York Times. It was taken, not by a reporter with a camera, but by a bystander on a mobile phone, and posted on Facebook and YouTube after the man sent the 40-second clip to a friend who then forwarded to friends and news sites in Europe and the US.

A Twitter revolution?

Talk of a Twitter revolution swiftly spread as Iranians and others in the country used the social network Twitter to get their news out to the world, and it has been used extensively by the media. Twitter is particularly effective as a method of spreading news as it is harder to censor, given that it can be accessed via various different applications on computers or mobile phones, as well as via the website. #IranElection has been the top trending topic on Twitter for days, with thousands of updates an hour using the hash tag to get included in the feed and direct interested observers to text, image or video content. Following a request from US President Obama, Twitter decided to delay maintenance to the site in light of the important role it was playing in keeping people informed, carrying it out during Tehran's night rather than daylight hours.

Twitter is clearly not immune to censorship, however. The following message has been passed around Facebook over the last few days amongst Anglo-Saxon users:

"FREEDOM OF SPEECH: If anyone is on twitter, set your location to Tehran and your time zone to GMT +3.30. Security forces are hunting for bloggers using location/timezone searches. The more people at this location, the more of a logjam it creates for forces trying to shut Iranians' access to the internet down. Cut & paste & pass it on."

Amateur issues

Clearly, there are problems with relying on information generated by amateurs. Benoit Hervieu of RSF told Editor & Publisher that one of the main problems is that because many people want to remain anonymous, it is harder to verify information. And indeed, it seems that much false information has been circulating. After Twitter was hailed as the voice of the revolution, a backlash quickly emerged asserting its unreliability. There is always the possibility, after all, that interested parties might deliberately try to misinform, or might be so personally involved in the debate that they cannot maintain impartiality. And one of the disadvantages of a campaign such as that mentioned above, encouraging international Twitter users to set their locations to Iran, could end up misleading journalists searching for information on the network.

So how are citizen journalism agencies dealing with these risks and challenges?

Checking for reliability is a top priority for those trying to sell their content to traditional media companies. Citizen journalism agency Demotix has obtained many images from freelancers and amateurs portraying events in Iran, including two pictures which have appeared on the front page of the New York Times. Demotix COO Jonathan Tepper emphasised that Demotix understands the importance of reliability of sources and "believes that serious citizen journalism needs to take all the ethics of traditional reporting and build on them, such as verifiability and protection of sources." All submissions go through a vetting procedure which includes looking at the metadata in photos.

Citizenside, which specializes in citizen photo journalism, has managed to get hold of some good images which have been published by mainstream media outlets, but co-founder Matthieu Stefani said that it has been "really hard" both to establish contacts in Iran and to receive images from these contacts. "The big issue is that most of the contributions we've received were sent through proxies, with most of the time no way to contact our contributors as cellphone networks don't work really well," he explained, and therefore his team is extremely cautious about what they accept. He said that the photos that the agency has been pushing most to its clients were received from known and trusted members in the UK who were sent them by close relatives in Iran.

The Observers, a project run by TV news station France 24 combining citizen journalism with professional editing, has been active in its coverage of Iran. Founder of the initiative Julien Pain told the EW that what makes their coverage particularly useful is the fact that they already had trusted contacts in Iran before the election, and hence they have fewer problems with establishing the reliability of sources of information, particularly when using proxy servers. "We worked with these people before the situation was tense," he explained, "so we know them." He gave the example of a girl who has recorded a video describing how the censorship works, with whom he and his team had already worked. Prior to any major election, Pain added, the Observers tries to enlarge its network of contacts, which in this case proved particularly useful. Even using trusted contacts, Pain said that the Observers still cross-checks information as far as possible.

Amra Tareen, CEO of AllVoices, a project that aggregates professional and amateur news on one site, has a different approach: publish everything and let the reader decide. She said that the site has received more than 1,000 submissions, in English and Farsi, since the election, gathered via proxy servers as the AllVoices site is blocked. She stressed that submissions have tackled both sides of the issue and that this is one of the most crucial aspects of citizen journalism and of her site in particular: that anyone can be heard. "we're neutral and anyone can have their voices heard on our platform--that's key for the credibility of citizen journalism; bias will undermine the concept and keep citizen journalism and citizen journalists from ever being taken as seriously as they ought to be."

Generally it seems that such a situation where media access is severely reduced has provided citizen journalism with a significant opportunity to prove its importance. Tareen commented that "we really want to use this opportunity to show that Cit-J is not only about massive amount of non-qualified content, but also good "pro-am" work that we have been promoting for years now," said Stefani.

Getting pictures on the front page of a major daily is likely to be a huge boost to Demotix in terms of fame and credibility. Tepper was clear that Demotix is trying to supplement mainstream media rather than replace it, but said that "we think our reporting can sometimes be more accurate than the mainstream media" because "most of our users record what is known to them, in their city or country" and therefore "Demotix images provide a more accurate representation of the subject from a local perspective."

For the Observers, the situation has provided an opportunity for collaboration with the TV station on an unprecedented level. Usually, Pain said, he would publish a video on the Observers website and offer it to TV, now he has been working more with programming at France 24 to supply them with videos first before putting them online, to offer a period of exclusivity. "We've really moved a step forward here," he said. "We have learnt how to work together, and it's not going to be the same any more."

Although amateur 'citizen journalists' do not have the knowledge or expertise to analyse developments the way a professional journalist could, they can certainly witness and record events, and when traditional media coverage is limited, this is a valuable service. In terms of providing a true news service, amateur contributions must be verified so that readers can trust them, which is a priority for citizen journalism agencies. As opportunities continue to arise for citizen journalism to prove its value, the mainstream media is likely to incorporate it with increasing frequency and develop new ways of working closer with citizen journalism agencies.

The recently released iPhone 3GS, the third generation of the revolutionary mobile device from Apple, offers many new features that have generated excitement about its potential to greatly expand citizen journalism, a field becoming increasingly important in areas of the world where press freedom is in jeopardy. The prevalence of publicly generated content has risen considerably this year already, with incidents such as the war in Gaza and the election protests in Iran spurring a surge in camera phone video uploads to news sites and YouTube, offering perspectives on events often unobtainable by traditional media outlets.

For the iPhone 3GS, the newly added video recording and editing capabilities as well as direct to YouTube uploading will make capturing that newsworthy event much easier for the layman dabbling in citizen journalism, an aspect of the phone noted by founder and CEO of citizen journalism site GroundReport, Rachel Sterne. Sterne explains that "Helping people report on the ground, wherever they are, will only increase the speed of newsgathering." However there are a few features Apple did not add to the iPhone 3GS and its new OS that could present frustrating limitations to the phone's functionality as a tool for journalists in the field.

Nine projects with a strong focus on crowdsourcing, mobile technology and digital investigative journalism have been named winners of the 2009 Knight News Challenge.

The winners (see below for details) will each win a share of a $2 million investment fund that is part of a 5-year $25 million global initiative set up by the Knight Foundation. The organisation is offering financial assistance to enterprising groups and individuals committed to developing and delivering "bold community news and social media experiments."

A lobbying campaign in the UK has called for the government to up the penalties for online filesharing, a practice in which over 7million UK residents regularly partake. The campaign, echoing that of the French government, takes an economical outlook, claiming that illegal filesharing is costing thousands of jobs in the UK and is denting the Kingdom's already slumping GDP. Is this a similar phenomenon to that which is causing UK and Western newspapers to shed staff at an unprecedented rate? Can newspapers, whose bottom line many consider to be suffering from digital content, learn from the plight of the music and entertainment industries affected by filesharing?

Yes and no. 

In a move to bulk up its digital offerings and earn some digital revenues, USA Today will launch a paid-for e-Edition in August. Editor-in-Chief, John Hillkirk, at a breakfast introducing the paper's new Publisher David Hunke, spoke of how they were "not absolutely convinced that [paid online content] works," but how USA Today would be "extraordinarily bullish" when it comes to mobile apps and devices.

The August launch of the e-Edition, which will cost $10 per month, could be just a first step in positioning the paper for a what Hunke predicted an "explosion" in the market for portable reading devices.

The Apple iPhone 3GS, premiered yesterday at Apple Inc's Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco, boasts an array of important new features for the newspaper industry and journalism at large. Perhaps most pertinent is the development that content can now be purchased from within iPhone applications. This new functionality presents newspapers with the opportunity to employ subscription and micro-payment structures to monetize the delivery of their content to their mobile phone readership.

Given the recent developments in the newspaper industry, such as the 'secret' meeting held in Chicago organised by the Newspaper Association of America to discuss how to monetise online content, it seems the question is no longer whether papers will begin charging online, but when, and how. And with regards to the iPhone 3GS, will they allow readers to continue to access their content for free, maybe making it harder to shift them to a pay structure in the future, or will newspapers seize this opportunity and begin charging readers as soon as the new OS is released?

Whilst newspapers worry about falling circulation and cable news network viewers are dropping like flies, National Public Radio (NPR) is doing just fine. NPR's has retained its dazzling ratings and has not seen its 'listenership' decrease. In fact, NPR has been able to keep the number of listeners on the rise every year for the past nine years. This past March, NPR revealed that it had an astounding 23.6 million listeners tuning in every week by the end of 2008.

So, what is so special about NPR that makes it seemingly immune to the financial crisis that has caused some newspapers to file for bankruptcy or disappear all together? In an article written by Josh Catone for Mashable.com, a social media website guide, Catone says NPR has "a three-pronged strategy that is helping them not only grow now, but also prepare for the future media landscape."

According to Mark S. Luckie of 10000words.net, a website dedicated to advising journalists and web aficionados on how to use multimedia efficiently, the answer is yes. Luckie points to five iPhone applications that revolutionize mobile journalism as such apps "elevate journalism beyond just reading stories [by] interacting with them in new and different ways."

1. Kindle for iPhone

The success of Kindle for iPhone has demonstrated that readers are not only willing to read extensive text on a hand-held digital device, but that they are also willing to pay for that content. This gives media outlets room to speculate that readers will similarly be willing to pay for in-depth news coverage that goes beyond the encapsulated resume of a story, whether in the form of a subscription plan or in micro payments for individual stories.

Alan Mutter has confirmed that he was one of three people who made a presentation at the 'secret' newspaper executives' meeting in Chicago last week. The product he was discussing, which he has developed in conjunction with tech entrepreneur Ridgely Evers is ViewPass: a single, industry-owned brand that would enable consumers to access paid content on websites and mobile platforms from all participating publishers.

Mutter compared ViewPass to a Visa card, and clarified that it would consist of a "simple, one-time registration system that would remember users as they moved among participating websites." It would support micropayments, subscriptions and bundles of content, similar to Journalism Online. "To address the concern that many consumers may rebel against pay walls," reads the document given to publishers at the meeting, obtained by NiemanLab, ViewPass also gives publishers the option of letting users "pay" for content with time or information rather than just cash.

News Corp chief digital officer Jonathan Miller has said  the company is looking into bundling its online content when it adopts a new pay model, according to the Hollywood Reporter. He also expressed his belief that paid online news is the future and indicated that the media conglomerate is willing to lead a push for change.  

Miller, speaking at the Hollywood Reporter's Digital Power event in New York, explained that "we want to see a model established" for charging online, adding that  "what works for consumers, I think - and this has to be tested - are bundles." He suggested that News Corp's various papers or various New York media outlets could be bundled. It is an idea which has proved successful for cable TV channels and which many believe could also work for news, as an alternative to individual subscriptions to general news sites, which largely failed. It is one of the options proposed by start-up company Journalism Online.

In 2005, the Guardian prepared itself for what was heralded as a revolution in newspaper journalism by switching from traditional broadsheet to the Berliner format. (See the first issue of the Berliner Guardian, right, printed 12 September 2005.) For the first time since its makeover, the Guardian explains in detail why it decided to make the move and how it went about doing it.

Four years ago, when news first got out that the Guardian was getting geared up for a reinvention, journalistic tongues were soon wagging, such was the interest generated among its rivals.

In what the Financial Times describes as "a first step towards charging for its content on smartphones", Thomson Reuters has launched overhauled its mobile applications. The new apps contain video and market data, as well as headlines. Whilst remaining free for the moment, Alisa Bowen, head of consumer publishing at the company added "It would be a logical conclusion that there would be a paid element in time... The ability to launch premium services is our ultimate goal."

Similarly, the Wall Street Journal's iPhone and Blackberry applications remain free - despite content being charged for on the publication's website. However, Rupert Murdoch recently revealed that users of the paper's iPhone application would soon be required to "pay handsomely". Journal editor Robert Thomson also revealed that it will launch "a sophisticated micropayments service" for the main website this autumn.

Last week, Monty Cook - who took over as editor of the Baltimore Sun in January - led a press and public policy seminar at John Hopkins University. During the seminar, entitled "News and Content First: Protecting what matters most," Cook took the opportunity to tell the audience that his newspaper is "not in decline," before adding "it's in transition."

According to the Baltimore Brew, Cook began the seminar by going over the demise of the newspaper industry, mentioning some of the dead or soon-to-be-dead titles, but did not include his own paper among the list.

The Associated Press' recent announcement of its intention to crack down on misappropriation of its content online and to create new search "landing pages" has been met with much commentary and criticism, with many interpreting it as a direct attack on search engines, Google in particular. The not-for-profit cooperative, whose ownership base is US daily newspapers and which has recently been faced with warnings from members that want to drop the service, also announced rate cuts at its annual meeting in San Diego but these did not attract nearly as much interest. The Editors Weblog spoke to the AP's director of strategic planning Jim Kennedy to find out more clearly what the AP's plans entail and what their implications are.

Search landing pages: creating a map that will direct readers to local sources

There are two main aspects to the AP's current new strategy. One is to start creating pages of aggregated content based around news stories and topics, which would allow readers to find the most authoritative local sources for the news they are searching for. The pages will contain some content and links to other stories from both the AP and its member newspapers, and although it will not actually be a 'wiki,' (a source of information that can be updated by users), Kennedy explained that Wikipedia's design is a "rough model for it," with pages driven by topics or keywords. Such a page will be a "map for the user to access other links," commented Kennedy.

He emphasised that the plan is all about giving the user "an improved news experience," as the AP believes that currently, the mechanisms provided to consumers for news searching are inadequate. Kennedy asserted that "people are using search as a remote control for news and it's not working," as it is like a device with only "a couple of buttons; it's a remote with directional arrows and no channels." If a user does not find the information they want on their first search, they usually reach a dead end and just go back to the search homepage and try again. Also, he asserted, search engines "point people indiscriminately" towards sources, rather than towards the news' local paper which should have the most authoritative article. The AP hopes instead to offer more of a guide to a topic, with sources that are more intelligently chosen.

Pages will be largely automatically produced, a necessary tactic as the organisation plans to have hundreds, even thousands of them, but there will be a certain degree of human editing for big stories. They will have URLs so that they can be 'tweeted' or linked to on social networking sites but they will not be a destination in themselves: "This is a distribution strategy, not a destination strategy," Kennedy confirmed.

Tracking content to stop misappropriation

The second aspect is the AP's mission to "keep up the fight to protect content from misappropriation and protecting it from those who don't pay." He clarified that the he was not talking about "small time bloggers who post a link to a story," rather "people and entities who come along and scrape content systematically and have no intention of licensing it." He claimed that the AP has already been fighting this successfully for many years, and this new strategy is a continuation of that in conjunction with its members. The new mechanisms that the AP plans to put in place include new formats for news content which would carry rights information, and tracking services that follow each piece of content. "Ultimately," Kennedy explained, "we'll get better and better at tracking where the content goes, and that will help us enforce the terms and conditions of its use."

So how will this affect its relationship with Google and other aggregators?

Kennedy was clear that these moves are not being made as an attack on Google or any other specific aggregator, despite widespread reports to the contrary. He said that the AP will continue to license its content to Google, Yahoo and others, but that it wants to "introduce new ideas into the relationships over time and try to influence their search mechanisms, in particular to help us point to authoritative sources." Essentially, the AP wants to discuss search optimisation in order to know how to ensure that their landing pages appear high up on users' search results, and "may want to talk to them about having some kind of advertising relationship." The organisation has accepted that widespread use of portals and is not hoping to turn the clocks back, he clarified, rather the AP's goal is to "harness the traffic that goes through them and use the portals to move traffic to more in-depth coverage."

Selling content to open portals is old news

American Journalism Review's Paul Farhi recently argued that the AP may well be partly to blame for the industry's current difficulties in finding a way to charge for online content, as by selling its content to portals such as Yahoo, the organisation helped to make news a commodity. Kennedy responded that the decision to sell content to commercial websites was justifiable from a competitive and financial point of view, as the AP was being "outpaced by Reuters in the Internet space" and "we weren't realising any significant new revenue from the web." The board of directors hired the Boston Consulting Group to assess the situation, and it was concluded that licensing some AP content, national and international coverage rather than local, to commercial customers on the web would be an appropriate response to both issues. And indeed, it has "accomplished both goals," Kennedy affirmed: "it has put us in the position of major news wire service on the web and it has brought in hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue over the course of that decade." That has meant that the members have had to pay less to support the cooperative's newsgathering, and that the AP has been able to increase its presence worldwide, "grow our video operation and expand employment around the world."


The future of news: mobile and paid-for premiums?

Currently, Kennedy insists, the AP is not trying to dramatically alter the news landscape. "This doesn't affect the current eco-system at all, it adds to it," he stressed. But he believes that the situation will be different in the future, and that "many different models will evolve," as well as the current ad-supported model which has dominated media across the board for so long. He suggested that in the future, the AP will definitely be looking to charge consumers for some services, but not all, explaining that this is what CEO Tom Curley meant when he said that "Free is not a business model."  Rather than being defeatist about the way that the Internet has changed news, Kennedy insisted that "we believe that there is still a frontier and there is still opportunity to create new models, new experiences and attract new advertising and new spending from the consumer because we can offer them something that they want."

"We are not going to put up pay walls around existing content but we are going to go forward and try to look at opportunities for premium content," he explained. "It's about creating something new:" words that echoed advice given by Wall Street Journal Online executive editor Alan Murray to papers considering charging online. "We are trying to look for new ways to build our revenue base beyond strict licensing," added Kennedy.

He cited the AP's mobile efforts as an example of moves that the organisation has been taking to diversify its revenue streams. The AP created a free application for the iPhone, which aggregates its own and its members' content and organises it by postal code, so Americans have an efficient, accessible source of local news. The iPhone app is ad-supported, with local ads sold by the members and national sold by hired agencies, and a Blackberry application was recently launched, which phone owners must pay to download. "It's really a model for the kind of activity we want to do in the future," he explained, "where as an industry we aggregate our content and put it where the users are, and build a model around it."

Kennedy was clear that the two projects will be pursued "very urgently" and that both efforts will be launching within the next three to four months. With its new search pages, the AP is trying to take a far more active role in a consumer's news reading experience, a big step for a news organisation which, due to its lack of a commercial website, has always been somewhat distanced from its audience. It is proposing a solution which it feels will benefit the reader, and which will evidently benefit the AP and its members, if they have more control over directing traffic and can make extra advertising revenue on these pages. The intellectual property initiative seems to be similarly motivated: becoming more directly involved with where and how readers find AP news, while seeking further income to which the cooperative feels it is entitled, as the producer of such ubiquitous news content. Regardless of motivation, any effort to address the discrepancies in the relationship between content generators and search engines will be closely followed by the rest of the industry in light of recently growing controversy, and any initiative that does indeed improve the news reading experience should be welcomed.

An experienced radio journalist, having worked at Radio France Internationale for 20 years, Anne-Laure Marie decided to launch what she describes as "participatory online investigations" (or enquêtes participatives in French) using citizen contributions to look into technological issues in Africa. RFI, whose target audience is Francophone Africa, is widely respected as an independent source of news, and as well as the radio station, offers an extensive website. Marie has carried out three investigations so far, combining her professional journalistic experience with information from people in Africa who have the capability to offer first hand accounts of the situation. The Editors Weblog spoke to her to find out more about her investigations and how she is making professional-amateur journalism work.

How it started

Marie was given the task of working on interactivity of the website, but as most of RFI's audience is based in Africa, she was not sure how effective this would be due to people's difficulties in getting online. This concern itself gradually developed into the topic for her first project: why is the Internet so expensive in Africa? Using the l'Atelier des Médias community, which she described as a space in which people can "not only relate to journalists, but relate to each other," Marie sought contributions from people with first hand experience of this topic, asking questions such as how much people paid for an hour in an Internet café. She also contacted experts and found official figures.  L'Atelier des Médias has an hour and a half long radio show as well as its website, and its host Philippe Couve asks the community what questions they would like to ask guests on the show, and what subjects they would like to hear discussed. Collaboration between the two projects is working well, giving Marie a good base to work from and increasing the size of Couve's original community.

The benefits of participatory journalism

So far, Marie has carried out two further Africa-based projects, on the role of the mobile phone and on computers in classrooms. She is in the process of launching a fourth investigation, the subject of which she is letting her community choose. The advantages of seeking information from a community 'in the field' are numerous. For a start, it allows a journalist such as Marie to obtain contributions from many different countries, such as Benin, Cameroon, Senegal, Madagascar and the Congo: it would have been financially and practically impossible for one reporter to visit all of them in a short space of time. Looking at a range of countries allowed her to draw more general conclusions about the problems, and identify the causes more accurately. And as she said, her point of view would have always been that of a foreigner; "The people who live in the place always have another way of seeing the problem."

Marie explained that one of the most rewarding aspects of the investigations was coming across the unexpected: being prompted to pursue angles she had never considered. For example, one of the contributors to the first investigation accused her of being naïve for not realising that the problem was a north-south divide. Marie was not convinced by his argument, believing it to be too simple, but in following it up she realised that in fact it was largely true. "That is what's most interesting about carrying out this kind of journalism rather than working alone: it makes you think about different questions you wouldn't come across otherwise," she explained. She said that the way she works means that she has to trawl through a lot of material to find what is actually useful, and that it would probably be more efficient to ask people to contribute to specific points, but that then "all the surprise and the unexpected would be lost."

Participants

To participate, people must be a member of the community, and Marie stressed that it is very simple to sign up and takes less than five minutes. They must provide their name, location, job and phone number, so that can be contacted. They can then take part in any debate they want, or even start their own discussion. For the third investigation into the presence of computers in African classrooms, Marie received 244 responses from about 150 people. "There is a regular group who contribute frequently," Marie pointed out, and added that participants to the last investigation had said that they had located others in the community who worked in the same field.

Marie explained that in terms of participation, the projects have been working very well. She asks for documents and details as well as pure reports from her participants, and described how many people send very long contributions: because their time online is often limited, when they get connected they write as much as they can. One issue, however, is that because of people's limited contact with the Internet and even with phones, it is sometimes hard to reach people a second time to follow up on a contribution. From a journalistic point of view, Marie commented on how stimulating communication with the people is, and how much closer she feels to the people she is writing for and about than in previous projects. "It really creates trust between journalists and the people," she added, "and we create stronger bonds of citizenship."

Fact-checking

One of the major issues that arises with participatory or citizen journalism is how to verify that the information provided by the public is true, and this seems particularly pertinent when the participants are on a different continent. Checking every citizen's contribution would be a fairly daunting and possibly fruitless endeavour, and Marie relies instead on comparing information with that from specialists or officials, and with that of other participants. She asks a series of questions until she gets enough corroboration to ascertain that something is true. It is a tactic that works for this kind of in-depth investigative journalism carried out over a longer period (usually two months in this case) but not one which Marie thinks works well for breaking news, as there is just not time to present a full picture using citizen material. She also stressed that the value that citizens provide is their ability to witness, rather than their opinion on what is going on.

Moving into multimedia

Marie records some of the conversations she has with participants so that she can add some audio to the investigations. For the second investigation, on different uses of mobile phones, she started to make maps that showed the location of the participants, so that readers could click on a country, see who participated and listen to sections of interviews. "People liked it a lot," she commented, and added that she is very keen to make a "truly multimedia story with sound, pictures and video." The problems are that it is extremely time consuming, and she has learnt that it is difficult for people in African countries to get good quality pictures.



Funding

Carrying out these projects is extremely time-consuming, Marie explained, adding that she often produces about six articles over a two month period. For now, RFI are willingly funding her to start more investigations, but she does not know how long this will continue, and although she would like to see this sort of journalism grow, she is not sure whether it would be possible could find another media organisation who would be willing to pay journalists to do a similar thing in this economic climate. Investigative reporting is suffering at many traditional news outlets. Another option she mentioned would be to seek funding from NGOs or international organisations and investigate topics about which they wanted to know more.

Value of investigations, goals moving forward

The investigations are filling an important role in identifying and exploring some of the African continents technological obstacles: as Marie commented, she has "information you couldn't get another way." And some of the discoveries she has made have the potential to make a significant impact, if enough attention can be drawn to the subject. The investigations have revealed, for example, the extremely high costs that foreign telecoms providers such as France Telecom charge for Internet access in African countries, and the fact that there were new computers locked away unused in some African classrooms. The press response to the investigations has been positive, with a extract of the third report recently published in French paper Vendredi in its 'best of the Internet' section. NGOs have also been enthusiastic, Marie said, agreeing that the investigations were accurately portraying the situation in the field.

Marie's goal is to find a way to communicate with people who are not connected to the Internet, as evidently, it is a minority who have web access on a regular basis, as well as making the form of the reports more interesting with an increased multimedia focus. It is by no means 'popular' journalism; Marie herself admitted that many people outside the continent "just don't care" about Africa, but it is bringing attention to issues that matter and giving a voice to people who would be unlikely to have had such an opportunity otherwise.

Citzen journalism hub Allvoices has announced that it is making it "even easier" for its citizen participants to contribute, as they can now send in news via an SMS. The Allvoices system will immediately begin to build a report page around the submission, searching both mainstream media and user-generated content, including picture and video. The system will also send a report code back to the contributor so that more content can be provided to the same report using the code.

"Mobile device technology has reached a point in its evolution where text reports and media are of comparable quality to data delivered via a PC or media shot with dedicated cameras," explained Allvoices CEO Amra Tareen. She added that she believes "it's becoming increasingly clear that people want breaking news delivered immediately, and with little editorial bias or interference." In the US, contributors can send an SMS to 'VOICES,' and international participants can find an SMS number on the Allvoices site.

As twenty of the world's leading political figures convened at London's Excel centre something unprecedented was happening in the media world - with coverage going digital in a way never before seen.

What's more was that the key players providing the coverage were not just your usual brigade of journalists but also consisted of the general public who, by using social networking tools such as Twitter, provided an additional news element to this year's summit.

American Journalism Review's Paul Farhi questioned whether the Associated Press' decision to sell its news content to online portals may have had a damaging effect on the daily newspapers that actually own the wire service. Back in the 1990s, millions of subscribers to AOL or other early portals and hubs of the web such as CompuServe would get their daily news from AP's packages. And now, the wire service is the primary news provider for online giants such as Yahoo or MSN, and is used by Google. Hundreds of sites, asserts Farhi, are "in the news business because of the Associated Press."

So this essentially means that the AP, a non-profit news cooperative owned by US newspapers, has been enabling these sites to compete for traffic and ad revenue with the very newspapers that own it. Or as Farhi puts it "for years, newspapers have effectively been handing their online competitors one of their chief weapons in the fight for the news audience, the AP wire."

French citizen journalism portal Citizenside has announced the launch of its iPhone application in English. Version 1.1, in French, was launched at the end of January. Citizenside co-founder Matthieu Stefani explains that the English version of the application should help the company to extend its already global reach, as the "international application market is over 20 times larger than the French one".

The platform, which was launched in 2006, acts as an agent between amateur photographers and publications, as well as helping other publications to set up their own citizen photo sites. Citizenside has also developed technology which allows detailed authentication of the origin of the images it receives, and helps avoid the pitfalls of photos which aren't what their owners say they are.

The International Herald Tribune's website is no more, but is being rebranded as 'The Global Edition' of the New York Times (global.nytimes.com) in a move that is part of a wider attempt to further integrate the publications. The new joint site "combines the international voice of the IHT, the breadth and depth of The New York Times's international journalism and the digital expertise and reach of NYTimes.com," according to the a note from IHT publisher Stephen Dunbar-Johnson, to provide 24-hour coverage "from a truly global perspective." The global home page retains the IHT logo.

IHT.com users will be automatically redirected to the new Global Edition, and buttons on the home pages of both the US and global editions will allow readers to navigate easily between the two. There is also a mobile site: mobile.nytimes.com/global, and readers will be able to sign up for a 'Today's Headlines Global Edition' email service which is delivered twice a day, to coincide with both Asian and European mornings. Plans to combine the websites were announced last summer, along with a redesign of the IHT print edition.

The American Society of Newspaper Editors embraces the technological age by holding a "virtual convention" in place of its cancelled annual convention that was scheduled for April in Chicago. So far ten Webinars have been scheduled to address media issues, such as shifting to the web or cutting back on print editions and staff, in order to help newsroom leaders deal with challenges ahead.

This February ASNE announced the cancellation of April's convention due to the stress of structural changes in their newsrooms, deep recession, and expectation of low attendance. This is only the second time since ASNE was founded in 1922 that the organization has not held a convention; it was also cancelled in 1945 during the last critical days of World War II.

Could mobile be the future of newspapers? And crucially, can it make them money? Garcia Media recently reported that the number of people getting news via a phone doubled from 10.8 million in January 2008 to 22.4 million in January 2009, according to comScore. As phones get "smarter" and people become accustomed to accessing their email and finding information on the go, it makes sense to offer them a good quality news service. Many major newspapers such as the New York Times, USA Today, and Le Monde have developed iPhone applications that users can download and which are intended to improve the reading experience, while many others have created special mobile versions of their websites.

Why an application?

There are advantages to viewing news via an iPhone application rather than via the mobile website or even on your computer; as Michael Logan, one of the founders and directors of Kanchoo, pointed out: "it's not just a version of the website." Obviously, the stories should be made easier to read on a small screen, and you can do things like scrolling through slideshows with your finger. But also, for example, using GPS technology a newspaper application could give you news stories relevant to your precise location, something otherwise not possible.

However, developing an iPhone is expensive, involving spending up to $20,000, according to Realising that the expenditure was too great for the newspaper he worked for, and that the cost would undoubtedly prevent many other smaller newspapers from creating their own application, Logan decided to take action and start a company that would develop iPhone apps for newspapers at a far smaller expense. Kanchoo launced in a beta version on March 6 offers its a basic service package for a start-up of $88, and a $28 per month charge for bandwidth and hosting: Logan commented that the low start up cost meant that newspapers could test the application's effectiveness rather than having to make a huge commitment upfront. Having someone else operate the app also means that "newspapers can just focus on producing content," and not have to worry about keeping up to date with technological developments, as the service will do that for them.

Small screen: less potential?

So with companies such as Kanchoo, developing iPhone apps should become a possibility even for smaller papers. But there will always be limitations, the most obvious being the size of the screen. The reading experience cannot be comparable to reading a print newspaper, and for some users it will always be a source of frustration. As a result of the small screen, there is also somewhat of a lack of potential for originality and differentiation: Logan described the reading experience as "pretty uniform" aside from basic branding and colour differences. Although perhaps as technology advances, this situation will change.

The development of smart phones as tools on which to read newspapers is definitely something that producers of e-readers, such as Plastic Logic whose device will be released early next year, should be looking at carefully. The more sophisticated newspaper and magazine applications get on phones, the harder it will be to persuade people to buy a new product. Plastic Logic VP of business development Daren Benzi claimed that phones do not offer competition to the experience that the company's e-reader will be able to provide, which he hopes will be as close as possible to actually reading print, and seemingly more suited to in depth reading.

Mobile money: is it a possibility?

The big question for newspaper publishers is: how to monetise its mobile audience? Obviously advertising is one, though the small size of the screen might make this harder possibly some kind of scroll over system makes sense. Logan explained that there are various companies, such as AdMob, which can help newspapers provide ads to their applications. The other possibility is subscriptions: similar to those utilised on e-readers, whereby the reader pays a monthly fee to receive an electronic version of a paper. It is not clear yet how this would work and whether it will even be a reality in the near future, but speculation has been mounting across the industry following Apple's recent announcement that its iPhone 3.0 operating system, due to be released this summer, will allow consumers to make purchases via applications. Currently, the only way to charge users directly is a download fee for the app.

The Revenue 2.0 group which met on March 21 to discuss strategies for funding journalism concluded that while mobile users might not be actually willing to pay for content that they can get free on the web, they seem happy to buy iPhone apps that provide features to "customize content on iPhones" and enhance the experience. They suggested a suite of features such as off-line reading, geo-tagging, archive/export, sophisticated customisation and text-to-speech which could be used when literally on the move.

Newspapers throughout the developed world should now be seriously taking their mobile audience into account: even though it is only a small proportion of people who currently have iPhones or other suitable 'smart' devices, the number is likely to grow as they become the norm. It does seems as if phones will always be more suitable for brief news updates rather than reading long in-depth articles, but there is definitely an increasing public desire to be kept up-do-date, for which mobile news works perfectly. If a way can be found to generate significant revenue, whether by paid applications, ad-ons or via subscriptions, then this market will become ever more appealing to newspapers as they address the financial challenges presented by today's media environment. But, as the Revenue 2.0 team pointed out, it is important to start charging now, rather than allowing readers to start taking free mobile news for granted, as they do with news on the web.

In 2008, the BBC World Service launched the "Your Story" project - taking citizen journalism to another level.  Since its launch in June last year, anyone with access to the internet can upload a story, with the possibility that it may be heard or seen by large audiences if used by the BBC World Service.