Center for Citizen Media

In a place with no access other than a much in-demand dialup from a central room (no phones in individual rooms!). More when I can get back online for more than few minutes.

Slate Magazine is celebrating its 10th anniversary, and I say congratulations. The online publication is cleverly headlining some essays by folks who explain, “What I Hate About Slate,” including in one case its “insufferable smugness,” by a writer who is occasionally insufferable himself in print.

Slate, which I read frequently, is many things. Innovative is not among them, not in any way that matters when it comes to the Web. It’s what it calls itself: a magazine, albeit a generally excellent one, and not much more, with a bit of Web technology tossed in.

There’s one area of genuine innovation at Slate, however: the FrayWatch, where human editors create new essays based on reader comments, which are posted in, you guessed it, the Fray. This fairly low-tech idea, more than anything else Slate does, gets the idea that the audience is loaded with smart people who have smart things to say.

I wish more publications did this.

Jon Udell at Infoworld hates the expression “user-generated content,” with excellent reason. In “User-generated content vs. reader-created context,” he writes:

Now that the original vision of a two-way web is finally made real, we can distinguish between amateur storytellers (in the best and highest sense of amateur) and professional storytellers. Thanks to the contributions of the amateurs — who are of course professional practitioners of the disciplines that we “cover” — we can tell deeper, richer, more well-informed stories about the products and services they create, and the work they do. Those stories are valuable, and the business I want to be in is based on that value, not on the “monetization” of “user-generated content”.

His suggestions for replacement language don’t go quite far enough, in part because not everyone is trying to add context when they speak. Some people want their voices to be heard, and that’s it.

…Please try again. I changed servers and lost a few messages in the switchover. Thanks.

Washington Post: A Push Toward Private Control of Newspapers. The recent breakup of the Knight Ridder Inc. newspaper chain has helped spark interest around the country in returning papers to local or private ownership after decades of expansion by corporate media conglomerates.

This is, on balance, a  good thing. Too few publicly owned newspaper companies have shown the kind of grit to stand up to Wall Street’s demands — and in almost every case they’ve been the ones with two-tiered stock ownership that lets the managers focus on great journalism above great profits.

Local owners will have some of the same demands placed on them by the people who finance these go-private deals. But there will be the potential for more flexibility, and especially for more understanding of the community.

The risk, of course, is that the new owners will be the kind who use their papers to push political and business interests above the journalism. (What, like Rupert Murdoch? Imagine!) This will happen.

The difference now, of course, is that these manipulations will be visible more widely. In the old days when the local paper was the local paper, when there was almost no competition, an owner could flog his interests with little public knowledge. Today and tomorrow, bloggers will point out such activities with relish, and more of the community will be in on the game.

The next great experiment in American professional journalism is beginning.

Over at his blog, Jay Rosen writes about — in preparation for a session he’s leading next Friday at BloggerCon — “Users-Know-More-than-We-Do Journalism,” saying:

It’s a “put up or shut up” moment for open source methods in public interest reporting. Can we take good ideas like… distributed knowledge, social networks, collaborative editing, the wisdom of crowds, citizen journalism, pro-am reporting… and put them to work to break news?

The answer is absolutely. Read the posting and comment thread for some good discussion. Here’s what I posted:

Generally speaking, what we’re discussing here are projects that can be broken down into little pieces where lots and lots of people can ask one question, or look at one document, or solve on piece of a big puzzle. Then the results are aggregated, parsed and reassembled into a coherent whole. It’ll almost always require some folks at the center. We used to call them editors.

Reading all the laws is a great project, but I think it’s too big to chew on except as a long-term goal. I’d suggest paring it down to something smaller and much more essential:

The next time Congress gets ready to pass an appropriations bill of any sort, we need an army of lawyers and others who understand legislative language to parse it *before* it’s passed.

This may not be possible, of course, given the leadership’s increasing tendency to force members to vote on bills they haven’t had time to read, and after injecting last-second stuff that no one except a few staffers and lawmakers knows about.

The way to experiment with this is to take it down a level, to the state legislature. Pick a state that’s relatively uncorrupt and do roughly the same thing. The project will be more manageable, though you’ll probably find less, if much at all, of the material that turns into headlines.

Last fall, I proposed that major media organizations bring in the citizens for a project on the Katrina reconstruction. No takers, unfortunately, but I still think it was a good idea. (One organization is still thinking about doing this but hasn’t acted.)

I also, more recently, suggested that the Wall Street Journal expand its brilliant coverage of the stock-options scandal and do a thorough, citizen-driven database of how widely (or not) this sleaze has spread. Stay tuned on this one.

As to the question of whether it’s a good idea to tell your competition what you’re working on, this depends on what you want to accomplish and whether it matters if the thing is done in full view in the first place. Is the goal to do good journalism, to serve the public? Or is it a professional scoop? Wouldn’t someone “stealing” the idea be seen as a thief, if he/she used the material gathered under your wing without credit? And aren’t there many kinds of investigations where it’s just fine to let the targets know they’re being investigated?

I don’t expect Seymour Hersh to tell us ahead of time precisely what he’s working on. But many, many kinds of investigations are better done in the sunlight. Some — like the ones we’re talking about here, where there’s no way to do them without massive help from the community — should be done that way.

Heading back home from Helsinki and the great Aula event.

Ross Mayfield and Bruno Giussani did some solid blogging.

It is genuine and excellent news to see that Om Malik, as he writes in “Its Time To Transition,” is going independent. His blog is required reading in Silicon Valley, and he’s one of the best journalists I’ve encountered, period.

He’s amused to have been scooped by the ValleyWag blog. This reminds me of when I left the San Jose Mercury News and was also scooped on the news by a blog run by my then-colleagues Matt Marshall and Mike Bazeley. (Maybe it’s near the time for them to take the plunge…)

AOL’s blogging boss, Jason Calacanis, has convinced the company to use the Netscape.com brand — still enormously valuable — as a Digg-like site where people vote on which news stories are the most important, interesting, etc.

I’d expected something like this from Yahoo, not AOL. Jason seems to have made the difference, and I hope this works.

unwiki: The Deletion Log is a list of all the pages that have abused Wiki’s democratic remit; it is the last stop on the way to destruction.

Caution: not entirely work-friendly…