Cit Media

In 2006, Wired called us a “spiraling vortex of ruin.” [Link.] But television is still a $65B business, said Mark Lucasiewicz, VP of Digital Media for NBC said at Editor & Publisher Interactive today in Miami. My reaction: Welcome to the high-tech industry — the Land of the Premature Obituary. How many obituaries have I read for Apple Computer alone? To me, constant claims that the news industry, newspapers, television, books are dead is simply a sign that those are becoming high tech professions in high tech industries, where we declare various companies, products, and movements dead on a biweekly basis, and then ignore the fact that, like the not-yet-dead plague victim in the Monty Python skit who hollers, “I was just going out for a walk!,” they’re not dead. Mainframes, TV, Apple, the newspaper — they’re all still there.

One thing I’m struck by whenever I go to these gatherings is just how much time is spent discussing the Internet, YouTube, blogs, and MySpace — followed by various statements of reassurance. This is interesting, but it’s not about the net: it’s about news people’s concerns about the future of their own industry, their own careers. You can’t really learn anything about the net at these presentations, really, because they’re not about the net.

“This is big,” Lucasiewicz says, talking about video on the web, “it’s here to stay, it’s core to our business, it’s not an add-on anymore…but as I talk about the opportunities, I should also talk about the pitfalls, particularly in journalism…I think there’s a great deal of confusion: a computer is not a conscience…he talks about a news site with a blogger and says that the person is described as a “blogger who performs acts of journalism.”

The audience laughs at this.

User generated content and citizen journalism is also something we have to think about. Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s great, but having a videocamera in your hand no more makes you a journalist than having one makes you a feature filmmaker. He shows a still from the Zapruder film of President Kennedy’s assassination. “Today, we’d call him a citizen journalist; back then, we called him what he was: an eyewitness. Today, we have Jamal Albarghouti, who captured images outside a building at Virginia Tech where he heard sound. A great eyewitness, but not a journalist. A journalist pulls a story together from different sources, and that’s important.”

It’s funny how they get to have it both ways: often “citizen journalism” is criticized because “only journalists are actually on the scene.” Then when nonjournalists with cameras are on the scene, journalism is seasoned analysis and multiple sources. Shrug.

He calls the 5th estate — blogs, videoblogs, etc, the “crapacopia,” quoting Ze Frank. “I’m convinced that people still want to see quality. Steven Spielberg still has a place in the marketplace.” This seems like a straw man argument to me. “I think when you talk about citizen journalism on the web, video that shows up on the web, there are plenty of stories that do speak for themselves…There’s no YouTube reporter tracking down Wal-Mart, there’s no Baghdad bureau of Google.”

Dave Winer says in “What is Web 3.0?” that traditional media organizations will make it through their currently tough times by embracing bloggers and other kinds of new media, “without interpretation by professional reporters.”

I’m cautious about that last bit. Why? Because, slowly but surely, traditional media folks are embracing the audience in ways that would have been unthinkable not very long ago. (We discussed some of those ways in Lisa Williams’ terrific report earlier this year.)

This doesn’t mean that newspapers and broadcasters should try to control everything that they take part in, though lawyers get very hinky when such questions arise. If the choice is between, say, no coverage of a local school board and pointing to bloggers who are covering it in their own ways — including the possibility, or probability, that a local school-board blogger has a stake in the outcome, which can be handled by transparency — then the choice should be some coverage as opposed to none. The news organization can and should help people understand the principles of journalism, meanwhile.

The collaborative potential is what gets me going. We can create new models if we all do this right.

The Citizen Media Law Project, jointly affiliated with Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society and this Center, is launching this week, with the help of a $250,000 grant from the Knight Foundation.

Our central aim is to provide practical knowledge and tools for citizen journalists. In the coming months we will be adding many resources to this site, including a legal guide that will cover everything from how to form a business to how to use freedom of information and open meetings laws to get access to information, meetings, and governmental records, as well as other legal subjects such as risks associated with online publication.

David Ardia is director of the project. He brings incredible experience to the table, including a stint in the general counsel’s office at the Washington Post. We have a great group of advisors, too.

The project is one of many being funded by the Knight Foundation’s 21st Century News Challenge. MIT got a mega-grant to create a center for innovative civic media, and journalist-programmer Adrian Holovaty got a pile of money to create what sounds like a great hyper-local set of sites.

Other funded projects of note:

Global Voices Online, also affiliated with the Berkman Center (I’m on the advisory board), got a significant grant to pursue its great work.

Lisa Williams’ Placeblogger.com, which we helped incubate, is also being funded.

My UC-Berkeley colleague, Paul Grabowicz, will pursue his terrific Oakland music project.

…and many, many more…

Congrats to all, and to the Knight Foundation for having the vision to do this.

Viagra reduces jet lag in hamsters.

UPDATED

The California First Amendment Coalition has won a crucial lower-court ruling that Santa Clara County must provide — at cost — its geographic “base map” of real estate boundaries in the county. The county had been saying it would charge tens of thousands of dollars for information collected on behalf of residents, using taxpayer money.

Maps are turning into an essential element of citizen media, via a variety of techniques including mashups. Traditional geographic information systems (GIS) like the Santa Clara County data are being combined with other data to produce new kinds of information.

Here’s a link to the judge’s ruling (1.4MB pdf).

(Note: I’m on the coalition’s board of directors.)

The University of Tennessee is conducting a survey “to examine the uses and users of blogs.” If you want to participate, click here.

Time Magazine’s Richard Schickel, riffing off a New York Times story about literary bloggers that ran several weeks ago, goes berserk in “Not everybody’s a critic,” an LA Times op-ed piece that adds to the amazingly uninformed backlash against citizen media:

Let me put this bluntly, in language even a busy blogger can understand: Criticism — and its humble cousin, reviewing — is not a democratic activity. It is, or should be, an elite enterprise, ideally undertaken by individuals who bring something to the party beyond their hasty, instinctive opinions of a book (or any other cultural object). It is work that requires disciplined taste, historical and theoretical knowledge and a fairly deep sense of the author’s (or filmmaker’s or painter’s) entire body of work, among other qualities.

Ah, cutting to the chase: Writing critically is an “elite enterprise,” plainly not in the scope of the non-accredited who can only be given permission, apparently, by esteemed publications. Such as Time, a magazine that has gone so far down-market as to be laughable in recent years? Good grief.

Schickel cites famous critics such as George Orwell and Edmund Wilson, as if bloggers are actually comparing themselves with such folks (is Schickel?). These were people who

wrote for intelligent readers who emerged from their reviews grateful to know more than they did when they started to read, grateful for their encounter with a serious and, indeed, superior, mind. We do not — maybe I ought to make that “should not” — read to confirm our own prejudices and stupidity.

Prejudice? There you have it, in spades.

Stupidity? Not quite. Lack of serious reporting is more the issue.

The Washington Monthly’s Kevin Drum notes, for example, that the NY Times piece is farthest thing imaginable from blogger triumphalism. In fact, the bloggers aren’t comparing themselves with newspaper reviewers (fewer and fewer of whom are staff employees or, in many cases, even paid beyond getting a free copy of the book). They’re doing something different.

Schickel isn’t wrong about several issues, notably one he raises deep in his screed: the modern debasement of damn near everything he finds culturally significant, and the ascendance of people who merely love books (and movies) into the review-writing heights that he and his chosen brethren have managed to scale. Welcome to Earth, 2007.

Oh, it’s not impossible for a blogger to write a serious review, he says. But before he’ll listen to a word anyone says, he demands credentials. Only the anointed — again, by whom? — are invited, or can be taken seriously.

I’m a fan of Schickel’s movie reviews, even though I don’t agree with many of his conclusions. What seems to bother him most is that he and other well-paid critics are losing their oligopoly on publicly available wisdom. Loving something is not the only credential for being a critic. But it’s a hell of a start.

7iber.com is a new citizen media startup in Jordan. The aim is to create:

an independent web-based citizen-media news outlet from Jordan. 7iber provides original, creative and interesting content, seeking to better inform our audience of untapped Jordanian issues as well as providing local perspectives and first-hand accounts of news, politics, arts and culture. 

The audience, for now, is intended to be “persons of Arab origin living abroad and those interested in alternative coverage of Jordan.” But the ambitions are greater. I’ll be watching this with great interest.

That’s the question being posed on Monday afternoon, May 21, at the Knight Fellowships 2007 Symposium at Stanford University. Recommended.

SF Chronicle: Chronicle to cut 25% of jobs in newsroom “That’s not just trimming fat, that’s an amputation. That’s losing a limb,” said (Tom) Rosenstiel (director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism in Washington), who grew up in the Bay Area.

Amputation sounds about right, and it’s a serious blow to local journalism. But in this case the move was plainly going to happen.

When Hearst bought the Chronicle years ago, it pledged to keep all the employees from the old Chronicle. Then it brought the SF Examiner employees along, and had what can only be called a bloated staff.

But the paper did improve — wow, did it improve.

The city always deserved a vastly better paper than it had. It still deserves a better paper, but the positive change has been incredible since the Hearst buyout.

Yet that didn’t translate to subscribers — circulation kept dropping, in part due to deliberate corporate decisions, and advertising didn’t recover after the burst of the tech bubble and the increasing inroads from classified-ad competitors that work better for buyers and sellers. The newspaper was said to be losing $1 million a week a year ago, an amazing number. I’ve heard that the losses were slowing, but obviously not enough to matter. (For the record, we get the Chronicle — and several other papers — delivered to our door each morning when we’re home.)

The Chronicle’s website has been among the most progressive anywhere, and it reflects the dilemma many publishers face. The site is free, with no registration requirements. There are ads, but not enough revenue to make up for the whacks to the print advertising that are hard to stop. The archives are also free and open — which I have to believe is on balance a revenue booster over the paywalled archives at most other local papers.

The Chronicle’s story about the impending cutbacks makes several glaring errors. Consider this sentence:

While an increasing number of people get news from online aggregators such as Google News and Yahoo, those stories are most often originally reported by print journalists.

In fact, they’re still getting their news from the originators of that print journalism. Google posts only headlines and a portion of the first paragraph of stories, and then sends interested readers to the original news organization’s own website. Yahoo does the same. When Yahoo publishes an entire story in certain cases, it does so under a contract with the publisher where, presumably, money changes hands from Yahoo to the publisher.

Then there’s this howler, albeit attributed to Rosenstiel:

He said the effect, even for people who don’t read the paper, “is that 25 percent of what goes on in the Bay Area won’t be covered. It will happen in the dark. … Our research shows that there is a lot of information that appears in a daily newspaper that doesn’t get covered by TV stations or citizen journalists or bloggers when a newspaper’s staff is cut.”

The premise here is that the Chronicle is actually reporting 100 percent of what goes on in the Bay Area now. I suspect Rosenstiel was either misquoted or was being ironic. He’s too smart and knowledgeable to believe this.

(Photo from New York State Library)