Cit Media

Jon Garfunkel has done prodigious work in analyzing the impact of the now-abandoned pay model at the New York Times. The eight parts of “The TimesSelect Reader,” his report, are all worth reading.

Key finding: Despite complaints from bloggers (including this one), the pay site did not begin to remove the Times columnists from the national conversation. If the columnists didn’t show up in Google searches, he says, that’s because of a Google policy.

Moreover, he writes in an email:

There is a solution for newspapers to charge money to readers who want to pay money for a premium service of news. I don’t know if it’s a viable market, but I have discussed in some more depth in this series and feel it should considered as well.

Also, tying in a point that I made in a previous series: while people fretted about the $10 million made by the NYT in what was clearly a willful contract, no one in the mediasphere has commented on the fact that the Fox News Channel, after renegotiating their carriage fees a year ago, was now pulling down $850 million from American cable viewers. I think the economics of this bears further consideration by people who care about the future of news.

The The International Center for Media and the Public Agenda has released a fascinating and valuable study of transparency at 25 major journalism organizations with global or otherwise widespread audiences:

A majority of the public believes the media can’t be trusted. Which global news sites are most transparent about their operations? Not necessarily the ones you would think….

The Guardian ranked at the top of the 16 sites surveyed, with the New York Times next. Rupert Murdoch’s Sky News ranked last, below Time magazine.

It seems to me that the survey has a flaw, however. Consider that the Economist and Fox News rank relatively low. But because I already know their world views, which they do not disguise (even though Fox News continues to offer its patently false slogan of “fair and balanced”), I put that world view into the lens through which I see their reports.

By having a world view and being biased toward it, they are somewhat transparent in a helpful way. The survey doesn’t take that into account.

The next time the researchers do this study, they should consider adding this variable. The results might change.

Some academic folks I can vouch for are doing a survey of blogs and blog readers about policy topics, specifically politics. To participate, click here.

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

We’ve just posted “Frontiers of Innovation in Community Engagement” — a report that looks at how traditional media organizations are starting to involve their audiences in the journalism process.

Lisa Williams of Placeblogger and H2otown fame did the heavy lifting for this report, which will evolve as we learn more.

Here’s the executive summary:

As traditional journalism organizations move onto the Web, they are learning to do more than re-publish the work they’ve printed or broadcast. The first forays into conversational journalism were blogs written by staff members, a genre now so widespread that it’s getting difficult to find a news organization without staff blogs.

Less common, but becoming more so, is giving the audience an opportunity to comment on the journalism on the organization’s own website. Newspapers, magazines and broadcasters using this technique have done so gingerly, for the most part, because they’ve worried that comments could (and some have) turn into a free-for-all that annoys readers instead of generating useful conversations.

A very few have tried experiments such as wikis, web pages that anyone can edit. (In one famous debacle, the Los Angeles Times abandoned a wiki editorial that collapsed largely due to the newspaper’s mismanagement of the experiment.)

This report looks at the first generation of traditional-media innovators in the arena of community engagement: bringing the community into the journalism itself, beyond blogs and comments.

What They’re Doing

There appear to be four primary approaches to opening the newsgathering process to “The People Formerly Known as the Audience.”1

* “User generated content” (UGC): People are encouraged to post their own material, such as stories, photos and event listings.
* Blog hub: Participants are able to submit stories, photos, and event listings, but they get their own weblog with a unique Web address on the news organization’s site.
* Community hub: Often incorporating the elements above, these sites also offer social networking — connecting participants to each other.
* Newsroom transparency: The news organization opens a window into its news-production process, helping the audience to understand — and weigh in on — what the editorial staff is doing.

Why They’re Doing It

News organizations have many motives for these moves. Some are mostly financial. But there are valid journalistic reasons as well.

* As traditional news organizations lose audience and advertising, growing an online audience is essential, and audience participation is essential.
* News organizations believe they can save money through user-generated content. (We consider this more wishful thinking than anything else.)
* Bringing the audience — the community — into the process has enormous value for the journalism itself. In particular, the community will be better informed, and the news organization’s ties to the community will be reinforced.

What Works

* Success is not highly correlated with large technology expenditures or major shifts in staffing. It takes patience, follow-through, and iterative experimentation
* Sites that blend the contributions of professionals and community members were more successful than those that didn’t, in part because having new content, consistently and from day one, was so important.
* Formal and informal social networking – through profiles, comments, and unique pages featuring the contributions of a single user – helped communities thrive by rewarding peer-to-peer interaction and enabling users to develop a track record of contributions visible to staffers and other community members.

Recommendations

* Experiment and take risks. Make risk-taking part of the newsroom and business cultures of the organization.
* Make technological flexibility a priority. Favor experimentation and iteration over roadmaps and grand strategy.
* Approach community building with confidence, teamwork, and appropriate expectations.

Rebecca MacKinnon has compiled a thorough and fascinating study of foreign correspondents’ views in China of the blog scene there — “Blogs and China correspondence.” Most interestingly, she says in an email:

people generally found the question comparing “reliability” of blogs vs. msm to be completely beside the point.

As noted in an earlier posting, the Sunlight Foundation has awarded us one of its “Transparency Grants” for a test in California. As the foundation noted, we intend to

develop an Election Year Demonstration Project for citizen journalism in one Congressional district. CCM will oversee the creation of a website that will seek to cover everything that can possibly be reported on a Congressional election, with an emphasis on drawing on the talents and ideas of local citizen reporters. The site will include in-depth biographical and political information on candidates, audio and video archives, campaign finance profiles, first-person reports, links to articles, etc. This project is designed to serve as a model for possible nationwide implementation in hundreds of districts in 2008.

Here are some specifics:

The working title of this initiative is “Political transparency by the people, for the people,” and the goals are several-fold.

First: In a competitive congressional district — namely California’s 11th district — we hope to create an online repository of every scrap of information about the candidates, issues and campaign.

Second: We will pick an element of this data collection — the advertising — and add value through further reporting and analysis.

Third, and most important: We will use what we learn to create a template for the 2008 election and beyond.

The Repository

We plan to collect the following (and more):

• Candidate information, including biographies, position papers, financial reports and much more.
• Archive of, and/or links to, all articles and other coverage in local, regional and national media about candidates and their campaigns.
• Archive of radio and television coverage, or links to it.
• Audio and video archive from in-district appearances, collected and contributed by citizen journalists and other interested people, along with citizen reports.
• Copies of all advertising, including radio/TV spots, Web ads, pamphlets and mailers.
• Discussion boards about the candidates and the issues.

Citizen Efforts

We will try to assemble the best-ever collection of audio and video from the candidates. For example, we will encourage citizens to attend public campaign events and videotape what candidates say. We also hope to collect videos of semi-public appearances such as fund-raising events. In addition, we will ask people (starting with the candidates themselves) to record and submit all broadcast/cable advertising. We’ll ask for scans of print ads, including mailers sent to people at home. (Note: It is possible that the campaign staffs may provide us with some of this material. We’ll encourage such cooperation with the project.)

Website

The material we collect will be posted online. The site will be designed, built and initially maintained by the students in an online journalism class (J298) this fall at the Graduate School of Journalism, University of California, Berkeley. Assisting the students will be co-instructors Dan Gillmor, director of the Center for Citizen Media, and Bill Gannon, editorial director at Yahoo!, as well as Scot Hacker, webmaster at the journalism school.

Analysis

We anticipate that media organizations and political activists will find the data valuable for coverage and campaign activities. But we also hope that voters, students and others will make use of it for a variety of other purposes, and that they (and, if possible, the candidates themselves), will participate in the conversations.

The Berkeley students will also look at the advertising in depth. Specifically, we hope to deconstruct it for the voters, grading it for truth and fairness.

Template

After the election, we’ll analyze the project’s accomplishments to date and also its drawbacks. Then we’ll assemble what we hope will be a working model for people to use in upcoming elections.

Staff

We plan to hire an in-district coordinator for approximately two to three months. His or her principal task will be to organize citizen journalists; work with campaign staff and other interested parties to help ensure completeness of the data repository; and, after the election, help debrief the organizers (and public) about what worked and what didn’t.

The in-district coordinator will ideally be a resident of the district. He or she must be independent politically.

Nonpartisan

This project is nonpartisan. It is designed to help voters of all persuasions.

Summary

Keep in mind that this will be a work in progress from the very beginning. It isn’t just likely to change; it’s guaranteed to change as we learn what works and what doesn’t.

We believe this project has terrific potential. We have major advantages — including a great group of students; a budget that allows us to hire an excellent on-the-ground person in the district; and a desire to help improve American politics in a small way this year that could pay big dividends in the future.

As Ellen Miller, president of the Sunlight Foundation, wrote in her blog, “Imagine citizens taking video cameras to fundraising events, or house meetings, or conversations with senior citizens and then posting them all on a single website. Imagine combining that with first-person reports, links to articles, data bases on campaign financing, video archives of past statements, etc. etc.”

We hope you’ll imagine it with us, and suggest ways to make it work better.

LA Times: Lonelygirl15’s revelation: It’s all just part of the show. After amateur sleuths uncovered apparent links between the Creative Artists Agency and the official lonelygirl15 MySpace page, a statement claiming to be from “The Creators” was posted on the lonelygirl15 website late Thursday. It read in part:

“Our intention from the outset has been to tell a story — A story that could only be told using the medium of video blogs and the distribution power of the Internet. A story that is interactive and constantly evolving with the audience.”

The entertainment industry is not known for its ethical behavior. This is just one more example.

It’s also another demonstration of the skepticism we must increasingly bring to the media we encounter. People like the ones behind this stunt make it hard to trust anything we find online, at least until we have some reason to believe its authenticity.

Slate’s Jack Shafer expresses apparent suprise that the Pew survey I mentioned this week shows a distinct minority of bloggers who consider themselves journalists.

Since when was it otherwise?

The Pew Internet & American Life Project has a new report (260k PDF) on blogging. The organization says, “Blogging is bringing new voices to the online world” — and survey data include these highlights:

• 54% of bloggers say that they have never published their writing or media creations anywhere else; 44% say they have published elsewhere;
• 54% of bloggers are under the age of 30;
• Women and men have statistical parity in the blogosphere, with women representing 46% of bloggers and men 54%;
• 76% of bloggers say a reason they blog is to document their personal experiences and share them with others;
• 64% of bloggers say a reason they blog is to share practical knowledge or skills with others.
• When asked to choose one main subject, 37% of bloggers say that the primary topic of their blog is “my life and experiences;”
• Other topics ran distantly behind: 11% of bloggers focus on politics and government; 7% focus on entertainment; 6% focus on sports; 5% focus on general news and current events; 5% focus on business; 4% on technology; 2% on religion, spirituality or faith; and additional smaller groups who focus on a specific hobby, a health problem or illness, or other topics.

Unfortunately, Pew persists in publishing its surveys only as PDF files, as far as I can discover.