Cit Media

Jay Rosen offers “What I Learned from Assignment Zero.”

A great deal, it turns out…

The news that MSNBC has bought Newsvine is a very big deal in the new media world. MSNBC.com has done a lot of excellent online journalism over the years, and pulling Newsvine under its wing make perfect sense.

Now we need to see the experiment taken to a more logical conclusion, because Newsvine and its competitors are getting only part of this right — and a company with deep pockets could take it further.

Along with Digg and Reddit and others, Newsvine is one of the sites that has led the way in the voting-on-news arena. But popularity is an extremely crude tool when it comes to understanding quality, better than nothing but not much better.

They and the host of competitors out there need to add reputation to the mix. Whoever gets this right will win, big, and so will the rest of us as we move toward seriously useful community vetting of news and information. We’re not even close yet.

I have an op-ed piece in today’s San Francisco Chronicle urging the nation’s community foundations — which are holding a conference this week in San Francisco — to play a growing role in keeping local journalism vibrant. It starts:

As America wakes up to the crumbling of basic infrastructure, with Minnesota’s bridge collapse the most recent example, a more subtle but also alarming breakdown is hitting our cities and towns. In community after community, newspapers are shedding editorial staff at a rate that spells trouble for a well-informed citizenry, a foundation of a free society.

Unlike the job of building and maintaining roads and bridges, however, ensuring a vibrant press is a questionable role for government, when a key role of journalism is to question power and hold it to account. Nor, as we are seeing, can it be the sole responsibility of the private sector, not when an eroding business model for community journalism leads private owners to favor the bottom line above all other values.

As the nation’s community foundations gather in San Francisco for their annual meeting this week, I’d like to suggest that they put the survival of quality local journalism squarely on their own agendas. They, perhaps more than any other entities, could play a vital role in ensuring that communities emerge from an inevitably messy media transition with the kind of local information sources we all need.

El Tiempo, Colombia’s national daily paper, has been moving at a fairly good speed to incorporate conversational media into its corporate and journalistic DNA. It’s clearly among the leaders in Latin America, if not the leader.

Guillermo Franco, the paper’s online editor, and several of his colleagues gave me a virtual tour of the site’s Participacion area yesterday. It’s impressive.

In addition to about 10 staff blogs, the paper has signed up about 200 citizens in a blog network covering a wide variety of topics. Comments are enabled on stories, and the forums are well-attended. All this attracts a fierce online debate, I’m told, including some angry postings that probably wouldn’t pass muster in most American papers. The politics of Colombia are beyond fierce; they are often literally deadly, and El Tiempo is in the middle of the debate.

The paper has an interesting approach to comment registration and display. A commenter needs only to provide a valid email address to post, but El Tiempo has created a superset of commenters who agree to give more detailed information — including a phone call from the paper — confirming their identity. Comments from the people in the latter group are highlighted on the site under a tab called “Comentarios destacados,” with the others under a tab called “Otros comentarios” — and Franco tells me the quality of the comments from the “destacados” group is high.

El Tiempo has a number of other sites, including several devoted to e-commerce. I’m intrigued with the just-launched vive.in, a site aimed at cultural activities (around Bogota in its first incarnation) with a major social networking component. With little publicity, Franco says, the beta site has already attracted some 5,000 signups.

Keep an eye on what these folks are doing.

UPDATED

Please read “Annals of Reporting” from today’s Talking Points Memo, in which Josh Marshall describes what looks like a classic example of journalistic malpractice.

Here’s the gist. Michael Skube, a former newspaper editor and Pulitzer Prize winner who’s now a journalism professor, wrote an opinion piece for the LA Times in which he flays bloggers for alleged violations of journalistic principles. In this case, Skube writes, bloggers show little willingness to do serious reporting: devoting “time, thorough fact-checking and verification and, most of all, perseverance” to the topic.

But the piece cites Marshall, whose work is among the best journalism — by any standard — that you can find on the Web in any form, in a passing reference, as if he’s one of the offenders.

Marshall takes this with careful calm, but then he reveals a stunning fact about Skube’s “reporting” style. An editor inserted the mention of Marshall, and Skube — who admitted to Marshall that he hasn’t “spent any time on your site” — let that run in the op-ed column. Marshall writes:

Actually, if you look at what he says, it seems Skube’s editor at the Times oped page didn’t think he had enough specific examples in his article decrying our culture of free-wheeling assertion bereft of factual backing. Or perhaps any examples. So the editor came up with a few blogs to mention and Skube signed off. And Skube was happy to sign off on the addition even though he didn’t know anything about them.

More amazing facts: Paul Jones, who teaches journalism and information science at the University of North Carolina (and writes an excellent blog), points me to this 2005 posting by Ed Cone, who cited an earlier Skube anti-blog rant and then asked Skube some questions:

Given his statement that blogs don’t do real journalism, I asked him what he thought about Josh Marshall’s Talking Points Memo. He remembered Marshall as a magazine writer, but was unfamiliar with his blog, or its new investigative-reporting plan.

I asked him to compare the original reporting model promised by Pajamas Media with the commentary-oriented approach of the Huffington Post. He told me he didn’t know either site.

So, apparently Skube — a journalism professor who has a loathing of blogs — was pointed to TPM almost two years ago, but never bothered to check it out.

Marshall writes, with fairness:

I grant you that the blogosphere needs better bloggers. But, as usual, the need for better critics seems even more acute.

UPDATE: As noted in comments, Jay Rosen implores Skube to retire before he embarrasses himself any further. Ed Cone has an arch comment, too.

The remaining big question in this episode: What will the LA Times and Skube himself do about this mini-travesty? At the very least, a major correction is in order. More appropriate would be an outright apology.

City University in London is offering a full-time “Sky News - City University Studentship in Citizen Media / User-Generated Content”

to explore concepts around citizen journalism in the mainstream news media, using a case study approach and participant observation. For the first year of their PhD the appointee will work closely with Sky News on an innovative project to recruit several hundred “citizen journalists” to report on the next UK general election campaign. The project aims to allow contributors to do more than simply give their opinion; instead they will be expected to write stories, take pictures and possibly record video.

A great opportunity for the right person…

Note to media organizations in the U.S.: There are undoubtedly universities (I can think of at least a couple, cough cough) that would welcome such a project at the masters-degree level.

The Knight News Challenge, in which winners get grants ranging from tiny to huge, is in its second year. Here’s the Knight Foundation’s pitch:

It’s time to enter this year’s Knight News Challenge, which awards big money for innovative ideas using digital experiments to transform community news.

The contest is run by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. Last year’s winners won awards ranging from $15K to $5 million.

Winning projects included:

* Open-source software that will let citizens find public information about their neighborhoods.

* Young journalists covering the 2008 presidential election on cell phones, for cell phones.

* Online games to inform and engage players about key issues confronting New York City.

* Digital newscasts for Philadelphia’s immigrant community distributed through a new citywide wireless platform.

Anyone worldwide can apply at http://www.newschallenge.org.

This is for real. If you have a great idea, give it a shot.

(Note: Knight sponsored a project here last year, and the News Challenge winners this time included Placeblogger and the Citizen Media Law Project, which I’m advising.)

Radar: Inside Cryptome, the website the CIA doesn’t want you to see. Young is a mad scientist of secrecy, working with little more than monomaniacal focus and an Internet connection to turn the tables on the spooks and expose what he regards as a worldwide criminal network of intelligence operatives. And the spies don’t like it. After he posted the MI6 list in 1999, the British government reportedly asked his Internet service provider at the time to shut the site down. The company refused, but in May of this year, his hosting service suddenly, without explanation, announced that it would no longer have anything to do with the site. (Young promptly relocated to another service.) He says he has received three visits to his home from the FBI, including one from a pair of agents with the Joint Terrorism Task Force. Young’s enemies have tried to shut the site down with denial-of-service attacks. Officials at the National Security Agency read his site with interest, and everyone wants to know where he gets his information.

Here’s the Cryptome site.

The Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School is seeking a Media Fellow to work on a citizen-media project. Details:

Project: The Berkman Center for Internet & Society is undertaking a project to comprehensively study the new/citizen/social media landscape, including reflection on its reach, implications, impact, and ecosystem, and charting an agenda for research and action moving forward. In the beginning, the potential of citizen media seemed limitless – finally there would be a way to overrule the gatekeepers, re-establish nuanced and in-depth analysis, escape commercially-driven news, and use the power of the network to fundamentally change the production and dissemination of knowledge and information. Citizen media promised democratized news and maybe even democracy itself, giving everyone with a computer and an internet connection access to not only follow – but also shape – the agenda and our understanding thereof. But after years of hard work and substantial investment, has citizen media lived up to that hope? Has power really shifted from the center to the edge? Has the conversation become more informed and inspired? Who is participating and how can we measure the impact of this new form of media? How has the dynamic of the media ecosystem changed with respect to interaction between professionals and amateurs, and is it sustainable? We will perform a critical analysis of where citizen media has fallen short, where it has delivered, and how we as a community can help it to do better.

Responsibilities: Working closely with the principal investigator and others in the Berkman community, the research fellow will develop and implement all elements of the project, including: designing and conducting research on diverse relevant topics; writing articles, case studies, blogposts, and project reports; organizing (with logistical support) workshops and major conferences; coordinating contributions from the Berkman community of faculty, fellows, staff, students and others still; and developing supportive tools and media as appropriate. Other duties/responsibilities include relationship-building, collaboration with others working in this space, content creation and development around the project events, and general promotion of the project through conversation and writing.

Requirements: Expert understanding of, healthy skepticism for, and strong interest in both citizen/social media, mainstream and public media are fundamental. Experience in media field strongly preferred. Must possess a blend of knowledge, curiosity, openness and self-motivation. Strong written and oral communication skills are essential, and an advanced degree in relevant field is required. Familiarity with new media and technology tools and proven ability to coordinate logistics and/or research projects are valuable. Desire to work for dynamic, mission-driven organization is a must. Must be willing to travel.

Organization: The Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School is proud to be celebrating its tenth year as a research program founded to explore cyberspace, share in its study, and help pioneer its development. Founded in 1997, through a generous gift from Jack N. and Lillian R. Berkman, the Center now is home to an ever-growing community of faculty, fellows, staff, and affiliates working on projects that span the intersections among innovation, democracy, learning, law, technology, and policy. More at http://cyber.law.harvard.edu

Pay: $48,000 plus full benefits.

Contact: Catherine Bracy at the Berkman Center. Email cbracy (at) cyber.law.harvard.edu

David Erickson: Minneapolis Bridge Collapse & Citizen Journalism.