Cit Media

A startup in the U.K. called Yoosk has created a space for regular folks to ask public figures questions. Tim Hood, co-founder, says in an email:

Yoosk users will submit and then vote on the best questions which will be ranked according to their popularity. We will take the most popular questions and send them to the public figures being asked and request an answer on behalf of our members. The answers we receive will be posted on the site in a similar format to an online tabloid magazine and then members will be able to rate these answers according to whether they actually answer the question and whether or not they think the answer is truthful and sincere.

This is starting to become a trend, and it’s a good one. Another noteworthy effort is PrezConference on YouTube, where several presidential candidates have already answered citizens’ questions.

Yoosk is taking a page from Digg and Newsvine (and other such sites) in its approach, ranking by popularity the questions being asked. This will surely be gamed (see the previous posting), but it’s a good start.

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Annalee Newitz: “I Bought Votes on Digg. Despite their doubts, Diggers kept digging my blog. There’s a perverse incentive here: Diggers who vote early on stories that become wildly popular become more “reputable” in the Digg system. If you’re trying to move up the Digg ranks, it’s in your best interest to vote on anything that looks like it’s gaining popularity. And my blog, with its flurry of paid votes, fit the pattern.

This reveals a flaw in the current system, not necessarily a flaw in the overall concept. But until we can combine reputation — in all its permutations — with popularity, sites like Digg and Newsvine will be missing the mark.

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Ourmedia, a site where citizen-media types — especially podcasters and video producers — can upload and discuss their work, has launched a 2.0 version of the site. The page is much clearer in its aims than before, with a clean design and many tools for citizen media creators.

Ourmedia is an alternative to YouTube, Blip.tv and other sites offering similar uploading and display capability, with a key difference. The default copyright license is a Creative Commons license, which reserves some but not all control for the copyright holder. This encourages spreading of good work in ways that honor copyright but don’t abuse it.

(Note: JD Lasica, director and co-founder of Ourmedia, is an advisor to this center and was project leader on our Principles of Citizen Journalism project. I’m also on the Ourmedia board of advisors.)

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If you missed the live program, as I did, you can watch “Bill Moyers Journal: Buying the War” — a brilliant documentary that everyone who cares about the future of American journalism should see. The report

examines the press coverage in the lead-up to the war as evidence of a paradigm shift in the role of journalists in democracy and asks, four years after the invasion, what’s changed?

A great deal, I believe, though the Washington press corps still tends toward stenography of powerful people’s utterances and, too often, lies rather than the serious, deep reporting we need. At least people are asking the right questions now more than they did before, but it’s taken way, way too long.

Note: Moyers devotes considerable time in this report to the exemplary — and therefore rare at the time — work by journalists in what was the Knight Ridder Washington bureau, which is now part of the McClatchy newspaper company. The KR reporters asked those questions when almost everyone else — with exceptions like several AP reporters and one from the Washington Post — was parroting the administration’s spin and outright lies.

I was employed at Knight Ridder in those days (and still own some McClatchy stock that came with the buyout of KR), and the people in the Washington bureau made me — and all journalists — proud.

Please watch the Moyers program. It is essential viewing.

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The news of Jack Valenti’s death reminds me of a column I wrote about him a few years ago. I wished, I said, that he’d been on our side in the copyright wars — that is, the side of those who wanted a fairer balance of interests. Valenti worked for the Hollywood cartel, however, and a balanced position was not in the cards.

But he was, plain and simple, a gentleman of the old school. He and I had some powerful disagreements, but he was always generous in his time and manner.

Once, after a pair of columns in which I first laid out — as faithfully as I could — what he’d told me in a long interview, followed by a piece in which I explained why I differed, he sent me a handwritten note of thanks. He wasn’t thanking me for my views, with which he took strong issue, but for fairly reflecting his.

He offered civility in an uncivil world. I will miss him.

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I’m in New Orleans, or more precisely on a plane heading that way, with my class from the University of California, Berkeley, Graduate School of Journalism. There, along with my co-instructor, Bill Gannon, and Dartmouth College researcher Quintus Jett, we’re planning to visit a neighborhood called Gentilly.

Our purpose is to work on a project with two aims. First, we’re hoping to help a community tell its own story. Second, we hope to do this via a demonstration project of tomorrow’s citizen media.

Quintus Jett is the brains behind the Gentilly Project, a mapping effort that’s designed to show, block by block and house by house, the condition of reconstruction in the neighborhood. (Update: Friday’s New Orleans Times-Picayune newspaper has a front page story on his project. Very cool…) We’re here to augment and extend the great work he and his team have done.

More on this tomorrow, when we get out into the community.

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UPDATED

Wired News calls Jason Calacanis “cowardly” for refusing to do an interview except by email. Pretty thin-skinned response to Jason’s fuller explanation of why that’s his policy.

Updates: Wired’s Fred Vogelstein posts the entire email exchange he had with Jason on this topic. (Fred didn’t write the item to which I linked above.) Also, it’s worth noting that the world “cowardly” is in the headline, and the rest of the Wired piece essentially makes fun of the situation, and not in a mean-spirited way. But the headline is plain nasty, and what I was referring to as thin-skinned.

I don’t mind doing interviews by phone (or in person) but an email exchange has an advantage for the interviewee: I can post the entire exchange and let people judge for themselves. And, as one of the commenters on Jason’s posting notes, email interviews allow the interviewee to write part of the story. The commenter thinks this is a bad idea. I don’t.

Here is a fact, and I say it with regret after almost 25 years of professional journalism experience. Almost every article gets something wrong, from the source’s perspective. Typically it’s not a remotely crucial point, just a tiny one. I’ve been treated pretty well, I should add. Only once can I remember a reporter (apparently) deliberately misconstruing (or outright making up) what I’d said. There’s no doubt that the overwhelming majority of journalists try very hard to get things right, and for the most part do so. But little mistakes or misinterpretations are common, even when they’re basically harmless.

Every journalist should have the experience of being covered by journalists. Nothing would improve the craft more.

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Dave Winer has created a smart mockup of what he calls MSNBC-of-the-Future. The viewers can use checkboxes to say what they’re interested in seeing covered, and what they’re not interested in seeing covered. (Update: Dave gets lots of responses.)

Audience feedback is a fine idea. Until then I use a different kind of checkbox: the change-channel button.

Incidentally, the too-often putrid nature of American cable-TV news is never more obvious than when I’m traveling outside the U.S.

I’m in Madrid to give a talk later today, and the English-language cable news choices here are BBC, CNN International and CNBC Europe. BBC, of course, is the gold standard — head and shoulders above the others. But CNN International is vastly superior to its American counterpart, offering serious news programming and much less tabloid stupidity. CNBC Europe isn’t a lot better than the boosterish programming at home from the channel, but even this channel, because of its globalized view, is better.

It would be an intriguing test if U.S. cable and satellite companies put these versions of BBC and CNN on their systems. I predict they’d be huge successes. I’m absolutely convinced that there are many, many more Americans who care about quality news programming than the cable-news executives seem to think.

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David Halberstam, who died Monday in a Bay Area car crash, was one of the great journalists of his generation and an inspiration to countless people, including me, who later took up the craft.

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Citmedia friend and contributor J.D. Lasica reported earlier this week from the Web 2.0 Expo . Bill Tancer, general manager of research at HitWise and Dave Sifry, founder and CEO of Technorati paired up for a keynote on the state of the “Participatory Web” or “Live Web.”

There’s no question that blogs and other participatory sites have seen tremendous growth. Sifry’s State of the Live Web blog entry notes 70 million blogs with another added every 1.4 seconds), while Tancer noted a 668% growth for popular participatory websites since April 2005.

But that growth is also deceiving in a way:

Said Tancer: “It’s not the 80-20 rule anymore. It’s 1-9-90.” Spread across the Web, generally 1 percent of visitors are creators and producers, 9 percent are “highly involved participators”,… and 90 percent are consumers or viewers.”

These technologies and approaches to the web are still in their infancy, so hopefully time and the greater public consciousness of these tools will raise the participation rate. But these statistics about Web 2.0 participation have implications for citizen media, too. Are we truly erasing the barriers between citizen and media, or are we just replacing one set of gatekeepers with another?

It’s also possible business leaders are looking at participation in the live web the wrong way. Web 2.0 isn’t just about a handful of “killer apps” that will make their CEOs millionaires and rock gods among the geek crowd. It’s also about the dozens or hundreds of small sites that won’t ever get that much buzz, from the small-town hyperlocal media sites to the private social networks keeping a group of friends or colleagues in touch for decades. It’s about those human connections that go from the web to face-to-face to phone and back again, over and over. It is alive. And that’s a lot harder to fit onto a PowerPoint chart.

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