AEJMC Members Forum

From a CCJIG post of 30 April 2009:

Pew’s State of the News Media 2009 survey examines, among other things, “363 journalism sites in 46 markets (145 citizen journalism sites and 218 tied to commercial media).”

Led by professors Margaret Duffy, Esther Thorson, Stephen Lacy and Daniel Riffe the study compares citizen news blogs, citizen news sites, and sites tied to legacy media.

It finds

[C]lear differences between citizen blogs that primarily offer commentary (along with links to already reported information) and a new array of citizen news sites that also do original reporting. The broader citizen news sites were more interactive, more transparent and more likely to use citizen content. Blogs, while easy to create and set up, were much more limited and less open. Even legacy media now surpass blogs in many of the characteristics that citizen media were once supposed to represent.

Among the findings:

• Blogs were the least the likely to allow citizens to contribute — even to post comments or e-mail the site. The leaders in such interactivity were citizen news sites.
• Legacy media excelled in creating innovative ways for people to download or receive content.
• Legacy sites were also the most transparent about their policies and expectations for users.
• One area where legacy media trailed both citizen blogs and news sites was in providing links within their news stories to outside material. Legacy sites were more than twice as likely as citizen sites to offer no links to outside material.
• On the other hand, the citizen sites linked to legacy news sites twice as often as legacy sites linked to citizen sites, with the citizen sites using the legacy sites as their “news” source.

The nature of the content on the three types of sites varied fairly sharply. Legacy sites provided the greatest percent of news (89%), close to double that of citizen news sites (56%), and three times that of blog content (27%).

More here.

Also see: “I’ll believe in the triumph of citizen journalism when I see it”

From a CCJIG post of 20 April 2009:

The Pulitzer Prizes announced today honored the usual suspects (such as the New York Times) and some unusual ones (the Detroit Free Press).

This year’s prizes hailed not only the best American writing but also the medium of the Internet by allowing, for the first time, “online-only publications primarily devoted to original news reporting” to compete in all 14 prize categories.

In Sig Gissler’s words, that made the prizes a “living organism.”

Lisa Respers France writes for CNN:

Robert M. Steele, the Eugene S. Pulliam Distinguished Visiting Professor of Journalism at DePauw University in Indiana, said . . . . opening the Pulitzer Prizes to online publications “gives further weight to the role that digital journalism plays in this era.”

“In some ways, it’s increased legitimacy for new forms of delivering journalism,” Steele said. “It also heightens the discussion about the distinction between basic information and substantive journalism. Just because somebody throws something online doesn’t mean it is journalism.”

Surprisingly, despite the 65 entries accepted from 37 online-only outlets, not a single online-only publication won a Pulitzer.

Not one online-only publication was even a finalist.

Why not? Whoa, before we engage in fallacious generalization about mediocrity or about the role of citizen reporters, let’s consider a possibility.

The best online outlets (think Talking Points Memo, Salon, Slate) simply did not apply for a Pulitzer.

That could well be the reason none won.

As Ms. France reports:

David Plotz, editor of Slate, said his site did not apply for the Pulitzers despite what he believes was his publication’s exceptional political, technology and business coverage.”We are not a hard-news site, and we don’t do the kinds of stories and projects that have traditionally been awarded,” Plotz said.

Plotz said the recognition for online journalism is more than warranted.

“It’s an overdue acknowledgement that some of the best journalism in the world and in America is being created not for print publication but for places that live entirely on the Web,” he said.

So there.

Only last December, Arizona State professor Dan Gillmor had offered the Pulitzer Prize Board three annotated tips to identify the best Internet journalism.

In retrospect, it seems Mr. Gillmor’s effort may have been moot.

Also see: Journalism comes full circle with civic/citizen movement
And: Is the Web a poor medium of local news?
And: “The Internet weakens the press’ authority”
And: “It’s all about the content. It’s not about the medium”
And: Scholars call for tax credit for buying newspapers
Finally: Should the newspaper industry get a bailout?

From a CCJIG post of 31 March 2009:

Ryan Tate critiques the hot air coefficient of TheFoxNation.com, launched only a few hours ago as a conservative counter to the Huffington Post:

Paucity of original content: Check. . . . The top five stories listed on Fox Nation right now are produced by KTAR TV, ABC News, Politico, the Porterville Recorder and the New York Post. . . .

Hysterical headlines: Check. E.g.: “Scary! Obama nominee wants one world order;” “Bill Maher smears U.S. troops;” and “GOP vows WWII over Stuart Smalley” . . .

Brilliantly insane comments section: Check. Particularly fun was the populist story “GM CEO drives off with $22 million” . . .

More here.

From a CCJIG post of 30 March 2009:

On August 4 at one o’clock in Boston, AEJMC’s Civic & Citizen Journalism Interest Group will bring together some top scholars to discuss the citizen journalism which unraveled the terrorist attack on one of my favorite cities, Mumbai, November 27-29 of 2008.

In yesterday’s New York Times, foreign editor Susan Chira answers an “interesting question” from a reader in Mumbai, India.

Q. Glad to see you answering our questions this time. I am a resident of Mumbai, India, and during the horrific terror attacks in November last year, social media tools, like blogging and Twitter, came to the forefront, in terms of information avenues. Even though these tools display the power of citizen journalism, why is it that credibility is such an issue with blogger and tweeters and not with mainstream media? Especially when in dire situations, the on-the-go Twitter user provides more updates than a regular news channel. … Is there a credibility gap or is mainstream media refusing to accept that blogs and tweets are the new face of journalism?

— Rehab G. Chougle, Mumbai

A. Dear Mr. Chougle: . . . Like many tools of the Web, Twitter, blogs and citizen journalists can be an important resource, but also present signficant challenges. Obviously, I’m biased because I’m a product of the mainstream media. But journalists in the mainstream media are expected to meet well-established criteria and standards. They go through training, sometimes in professional schools and sometimes on the job, which helps them make decisions about the reliability of information that are far more complicated than I think many citizen journalists, bloggers or Twitterers may realize. How do you weigh when a source is telling the truth? How do you identify people’s ideological agendas, and how that may color the information or opinions or analysis they pass on? When are you satisified you have independently confirmed information or facts you are told to consider as a given? While of course we at the Times may stumble,and make mistakes, anyone hired here or sent abroad as a foreign correspondent has proven, again and again, that he or she understands those standards and can meet them. And The Times is an institution that can be held accountable for its errors. . . .

More here.

Plus see: Some thoughts on citizen journalism and Mumbai
Also: A sustainable model emerges
And: CCJIG’s program for the 2009 Boston convention
And: 3G technology promises more power to citizen journalists
And: A sustainable model emerges

Source: Technology Review

By Erica Naone

Despite all our best efforts, most of us are still drowning in e-mail, and much of it is sent by machines rather than real people. OtherInbox, a Web service launched this weekend at the South by Southwest Interactive (SXSW) conference, in Austin, TX, promises to rescue e-mail-swamped users from this problem.

The messages that the new service handles usually aren’t spam. Instead, they’re legitimate communications from trusted companies that sometimes contain useful information: alerts, special offers, and service updates. But the steady influx of these automated messages is a familiar problem for most users.

The basic idea, explains OtherInbox CEO Josh Baer, is to categorize e-mails based on their source. For example, all e-mails from Amazon are automatically placed in one folder, and all e-mails from Facebook go into another. Baer says that he built the service after realizing that automated e-mails make up a huge percentage of all the messages that many users have to deal with–often as much as 50 percent… READ FULL ARTICLE

From a CCJIG post of 23 February 2009:

A few amateur reporters using Twitter, Flickr and GroundReport became stars during the Mumbai terrorist attacks of Thanksgiving 2008 with riveting, even insightful, coverage.

Vinukumar Ranganathan, a software engineer, was one such star. In an interview with Kavitha Iyer of Mumbai’s Indian Express today, Mr. Ranganathan offers a prediction for the future of newsgathering.

News, perhaps collected by unskilled folk, will be a huge source of raw material for mainstream media agencies to tap into. Once 3G comes in, it will actually be affordable to send live photographs and even videos from cellphones to people across the world.

See the Wikipedia entry for 3G here
Also read, “Some thoughts on citizen journalism and Mumbai“

Source: http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/02/18/facebook.reversal/index.html

(CNN) — Under fire from tens of thousands of users, the social networking site Facebook said early Wednesday it is reverting to its old policy on user information — for now.

Backlash against Facebook began after a consumer advocate site flagged Facebook’s policy change.

The site posted a brief message on users’ home pages that said it was returning to its previous “Terms of Use” policy “while we resolve the issues that people have raised.”

The “Terms of Use” is the legalese tacked on to the bottom of most Web sites that details what the site’s owners can do with the information that users provide.

Facebook, the Web’s most popular social networking site, has been caught in a content-rights battle after revealing earlier this month that it was granting itself permanent rights to users’ photos, wall posts and other information even after a user closed an account. (more…)

From a CCJIG post of 7 February 2009:

Bleak as the layoffs scene may be, there is always a silver lining which keeps the future aglitter.

I am pleased to report that Leonard Witt will receive a gift of — no kidding — $1.5 million to start a Center for Sustainable Journalism in suburban Atlanta.

The gift, one of the largest ever offered to a citizen journalism scholar, is pledged by the Harnisch Foundation to the Kennesaw State University Foundation. It will help Witt “seek new business models so that high quality, ethically sound journalism continues to have a role in our democratic society.”

The Foundation, established by Ruth Ann Harnisch in New York in 1998 with the motto, “If people knew better, they’d do better,” is already invested in Witt’s idea of representative journalism. Late last year it gave Witt a quarter million dollars for “creating leading-edge experiments in new journalism for the digital age at a time of upheaval in traditional media.”

One of Witt’s community-supported journalism crucibles may be found here. A quick profile of Ruth Ann Harnisch is available by scrolling down here (pdf 820k). (more…)