Cit Media

UPDATED

If you’ve sent me email at my citmedia.org address in the past 36 hours or so, I haven’t seen it due to a server malfunction. We’re working on it. (I don’t think I’ve lost any mail…fingers crossed.)

UPDATE: Mail is back up. Let me know if you sent me something in the past day and I didn’t reply.

We changed servers and ISP locations but have lost some posts that I’ll put back on line. Some comments may also have been lost in the process.

If you’re trying to reach me via my citmedia.org email address, we are having major problems. I don’t have an ETA for when email will be working again, so please be patient.

I’m at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society today for the first fellows meeting of the academic year. As before, it’s an honor to be part of this group.

This fall and winter I plan to hold some workshop/unconferences on citizen media, looking at several key issues in the arena including trust and techniques. I’ll have more to say on these soon.

New commenters here must have one comment approved before they can routinely post without moderation. A recent comment contained a Nazi reference, calling a public figure a Nazi (he isn’t one). I deleted it without letting it go through.

In our basic civility-rules stance, comparing people to Nazis is not acceptable. The only exception is if the person being discussed is or was an actual Nazi.

I emailed the person who tried posting the comment, inviting a re-submission with the reference taken out.

The center has received new financial support from charitable organizations affiliated with two of America’s great journalism companies. They are:

• The Philip L. Graham Fund, founded in 1963 and named after late Washington Post publisher and president of the Washington Post Company. The funds will go, in part, toward citizen media workshops and lectures, as well as general activities.
• The McClatchy Company Foundation, the philanthropic arm of the newspaper company. (McClatchy bought my former employer Knight Ridder last year, and I’m a shareholder as a result.) The funds are for general activities.

I’m delighted, and honored.

In the past 24 hours this blog has received more than 1,600 comment spams — fake comments with links to the usual sleazy Web operations that pollute the online world. The  spam-control system I use, Akismet, has trapped almost all of the spams, so you won’t be burdened with them.

Unfortunately, it’s also possible that you posted a genuine comment that got inappropriately identified as spam. If so, it may have been deleted in a bulk-delete operation that I do once a day or so. I don’t have the time to go through the comments identified as spam one at a time to un-mark them, because of the horrible volume of this crap.

If you’ve tried to post a legitimate comment that didn’t make it through, let me know. If I haven’t run the bulk-delete before you tell me, I’ll be able to retrieve your posting and make it public. If not, I apologize.

But the spammers — such slime they are — have left me little choice.

At the Kölner Journalistenschule today in Cologne, Germany, I’ve received a polite but not entirely warm reception in discussing the citizen media shift and its value to the business and economic journalists who are attending this one-day conference. This is not a shock. Germany remains perhaps the most traditional media market in western Europe, and this group is the most traditional of all.

My talk was more structured than some I’ve done lately. I suggested five points of departure:

• The shift from top-down media to an ecosystem that includes edge-in contributions
• Who is a journalist, and what do we call journalism in this new era?
• New economic competition and emerging business models
• How traditional journalists should join the conversation
• Issues or trust and reliability.

The last of those was, as usual in gatherings where I participate, the focus of significant debate. Traditional journalists tend to assume they are uniquely qualified to be the arbiters of truth and trust. We disagree on this.

But we don’t disagree on the need to preserve the best of what these folks do. I can’t solve the business-model issues that don’t seem to be getting any less worrisome. But we can work together to help people get the information they need.

Increasingly I believe that one of traditional journalism’s vital roles will be to help society become more media literate. This will rebound to the benefit, perhaps, of professional journalists, but that’s not a good enough reason by itself to do it. Society needs the help.

This morning we’re happy to announce a new project, “Principles of Citizen Journalism” — a look at the key principles that we believe are at the basis of journalistic work for professionals and non-professionals alike.

The project was supported by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. The principles also appear as part of the foundation’s Citizen News Network, which Knight intends to turn into a major hub of this activity and which, in turn, is being hosted at Jan Schaffer’s excellent J-Lab site at the University of Maryland.

Here’s the J-Lab press release.

Many thanks to JD Lasica, who spearheaded this project for the center, and the rest of the team that worked on it during the last few months. And very special thanks to all the folks who agreed to be interviewed; as the saying goes, we couldn’t have done it without them.

UPDATED

You may have noticed that our home page was going to a blog deep inside the site, as opposed to the regular page.

UPDATE: We’ve got part of that fixed, but are still having other difficulties…

Also, if you posted a comment in the past day it may have been lost due to another glitch. Checking into that, too.

Apologies, and now back to your regularly scheduled programs…