Cit Media

Mark Glaser, at PBS MediaShift, interviews PlaceBlogger founder Lisa Williams: Placeblog Pioneer Sees Geo-Tagging as Key to Local Aggregation.

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Ventura (California) Star: Colleges keep turning out optimistic print journalists despite the newspaper industry crunch. While students focusing on public relations, advertising and broadcasting account for much of the increased journalism enrollment on most campuses, sizeable numbers still want print media careers and are determined to find newspaper jobs despite increasingly bleak employment prospects.

This is strange, to say the least, because the prospects for traditional newspaper jobs are getting slimmer all the time.

I’ve been telling students who wonder about their futures to understand the changes in media, but not to get depressed about them. There’s never been a worse time to jump on the semi-standard career track of the past, where you worked for a succession of papers, each one bigger than the last, and hoped to end up at the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post or other major daily. Maybe one of the students I’ve taught this year — all of whom were immensely talented — will go that route.

But I also tell them the bright side: There’s never been a better time to be a journalistic entrepreneur — to invent your own job, to become part of the generation that figures out how produce and, yes, sell the journalism we desperately need as a society and as citizens of a shrinking planet. The young journalists who are striking out on their own today, experimenting with techniques and business models, will invent what’s coming.

Most experiments will fail. That’s not a bug in the system, but a feature. It’s how we get better.

I can assure students of this. If I am in a position to hire someone, all other things equal, I will absolutely favor someone who’s failed at something interesting — and learned from his or her mistakes — over someone who’s taken the seemingly safe route.

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A professor at UC-Berkeley, where I’ve been teaching part-time, bemoans “The decline of news” in an op-ed piece in today’s SF Chronicle. Needless to say, I think he’s way, way off the mark, and I’m working on a response that’s a lot more optimistic.

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I’m at the Where 2.0 conference in San Jose, California, seeing a bunch of amazing new geographic tools. I find myself wondering whether certain journalists are present.

I don’t mean reporters who may be covering the conference. No, I’m talking about “database journalists” who use technology to help tell stories better. They should be here because some of the technology being shown here could easily be the basis for some extraordinary community information — if journalists have the common sense to use it.

Mapping and data that can be geo-coded — put into databases that can populate or link to maps — are an enormously powerful tool. It’s mind-boggling to me that more news organizations aren’t taking advantage of the possibilities, or, in most cases, even bothering to learn what’s possible.

I’ll be talking more about this in the next day or so. Stay tuned.

(Note: I’m involved with a Web service that’s being demonstrated here, and O’Reilly Media, the company that’s putting this conference together, also published my book, We the Media.)

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It got a bit lost in the overall noise when the Knight Foundation announced the winners of its 21st Century News Challenge, in which the foundation awarded some $12 million in grants for creating new kinds of community journalism, but one of the most intriguing and potentially valuable winners was Rich Gordon at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism.

Rich’s goal is, essentially, to help bring into the journalism universe more people like Adrian Holovaty (also a grantee). Adrian is a terrific programmer with a journalist’s soul.

Rich will use the Knight grant to create:

an academic program blending computer science and journalism, designed to fill a staffing void at many digital news sites. By offering scholarships to Medill’s graduate journalism program to people with education and/or expertise in computer programming, the goal is to turn out students who understand both journalism and technology, connect one to another in ways that build audiences and also enhance and protect the civic functions of journalism in a democratic society.

Now, Northwestern isn’t what you’d call a hotbed of technology superstars. But Medill is a great journalism school — and it’s offering scholarships for qualified applicants.

Rich wants to get this program going in the fall term. That means a short deadline for applying.

If you blog about such things, please link to Rich’s call for applicants on the Medill site. What Adrian has been doing, and what Rich wants to broaden, is essential to the future of journalism.

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One of the invaluable resources in the citizen media community has needs financial help. It’s Open Source Radio, and I encourage everyone to donate. Now.

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Pegasus News: Anti-sunshine bill HB 2564 on Governor Perry’s desk Saturday. Under this law, local and state government agencies could track individuals who seek public records and bill them for employee time spent to dig them up. Elected officials, nonprofit corporations, FCC-licensed TV and radio stations and “Newspapers of General Circulation” would be exempt.

Pegasus’ Mike Orren calls this a blatant attempt to prevent activists and others from covering what local officials are doing. This interpretation sounds about right: a terrible bill in a state known for terrible government.

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Cory Doctorow explains: How To Keep Hostile Jerks From Taking Over Your Online Community.

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Chris Daly has an intriguing idea for Dow Jones and the New York Times Co.: “Readers to the rescue?

The existing subscriber base of both newspapers is a precious asset, one that is not realizing its full potential. The owners of both papers should take a cue from public broadcasting and launch a “pledge drive” the likes of which no one has ever seen. Instead of just sending money, the subscribers could be enlisted to buy stock.

There’s precedent in another field, far afield if you’ll pardon the expression: pro football. The Green Bay Packers franchise is owned by the fans. In this case, the “ownership” is almost entirely symbolic, and it’s unclear what recourse the fans have if management goes insane.

But community ownership has appeal, even though in the case of the Wall Street Journal and New York Times the community is an international audience. Daly’s notion is at least intriguing.

(Note: I’m a shareholder in both Dow Jones and the New York Times Co., and would rather see them put out the best possible journalism than turn over their futures to the whims of Wall Street, even at the cost of lower share values.)

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This looks intriguing. YourBroadcaster is not just another photo or video sharing site, although you can use it like that. The goal of the site is to collaboratively create five feature films in five different genres (bollywood, horror, thriller, comedy, drama). Users upload scripts, auditions, settings, etc. Other members vote on which uploaded material will be used in the film.

The site is still in beta, but will be an interesting experiment to watch. I expect shorter works, animations and mash-ups to be the first worked produced by this community. A feature film is on such a larger scale it will be an incredible challenge to produce, especially using material chosen by community vote rather than selected by the filmmakers. Yet ever since sites like YouTube have created internet celebrities, sites like YourBroadcaster will spring up hoping to become the star-making machines of Web 2.0.

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