Center for Citizen Media

Editor & Publisher: Incoming Pulitzer Chair Steiger Wants More Web In Awards. Paul Steiger, the incoming chair of the Pulitzer Prize Board, wants the prestigious awards to delve even more in to Web-based journalism, calling it “the biggest priority for us.”

This is just common sense, but how they’ll do it will be interesting because the distinctions among media forms are disappearing as news organizations move toward the Web platform.

The Pulitzer prizes at issue are designed to recognize newspaper journalism. But newspapers are using a variety of media online including video, audio, mashups and more.

Meanwhile, TV networks and local stations are writing text stories and posting them online. Why won’t they — and bloggers and CNET and other Web-only operations — be eligible? Should newspapers be eligible for broadcasting’s top award, the Peabody?

If the Pulitzer board moves the way Steiger is suggesting — still thinking of the Web component as a supporting piece of what appears in print — one thing is certain. Some of the better online news organizations, such as CNET, will certainly create “newspaper” products that circulate, in print, once a week or so. Then they’ll enter the competition, and one of these years might just win.

Someone, somewhere, is going to create an award for the top journalism, period, in whatever form. It’ll ignore these increasingly artificial distinctions.

Two cheers for Steiger, meanwhile, for seeing that the future is approaching, if not already upon us.

Addendum: In the E&P story linked to above, Steiger claims he doesn’t remember if he ever leaked the name of a Pulitzer finalist before the actual announcement. Seems to me that this is the kind of thing a journalist would remember quite well.

Chris Lydon: An Emersonian transformation under way. The Sage of Concord said: Forsake the authorities and follow the gleam of light flashing across your own mind from within! And now: Blog it! It is a great Emersonian transformation and liberation that’s under way in the public conversation. Or so it seems to one recovering child of the Old School of Boston media.

I’ll be visiting the Thursday Meetings session of the Berkman Bloggers group. That’s tomorrow at 7 p.m. at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School. (Directions)

The Washington Post’s Richard Cohen wrote a column saying (incorrectly, I believe) Stephen Colbert wasn’t funny in his lampooning of the president at the ridiculous White House Correspondents Dinner. Cohen got inundated with emails, a significant number of which apparently came from utter jerks.

In a follow-up column, he wrote how the rank hatred from the idiots would likely poison the Democrats’ chances of regaining power. Possibly true.

But he lashed out at the attackers with some fairly striking language of his own:

It seemed that most of my correspondents had been egged on to write me by various blogs. In response, they smartly assembled into a digital lynch mob and went roaring after me.

Does Cohen really want to compare some digital bits with the murders of the innocent men and women? It’s just as wrong as what he fairly criticizes.

If you have tried to post a comment here for the first time in the past several days, it may have been lost in the wave of comment spams from the slime who work so hard to ruin every online medium they touch. It appears that WordPress blogs are particularly under attack from these bottom-feeders right now, based on the deluge we’ve seen.

Just a heads-up that we’re in the process of creating a Citizen Media Award program. I’ve been working on this for a while, and have several potential sponsors.

These awards will be quite different from the just-announced cool program over at the Press Gazette in the United Kingdom, where they’ve teamed up with mobile phone giant Nokia to give out recognition to folks who take photos and videos.

More details to come…

Jeff Jarvis proposes the open ad marketplace, “that would allow advertisers to find the best blogs and bloggers to find the best ad deals.”

I will quibble on several details in an upcoming post, but overall this could be an important move toward a democratized media future.

Read it all.

I’m at the spring meeting of American Business Media, the major trade group for media organizations whose journalism is aimed at business audiences, notably the business-to-business crowd. The companies include giants like McGraw Hill, technology maven IDG and many others. This is an executive crowd, by and large, not the editorial folks.

At today’s lunch, I’ll be interviewed by David Klein, publishing and editorial director of the Ad Age Group, which publishes (among other titles) the industry standard Advertising Age weekly. (I’m being compensated for this appearance.) The topic will be, naturally, the advent of citizen media and how it is affecting these folks’ businesses.

This morning’s breakfast, which included a panel discussion, was notable for the fear and loathing of blogging that emerged from at least several audience members and two editors on the panel itself. There was a not-entirely-fascetious remark on how great it would be to block audiences from reading blogs. Oh, please…

But McGraw Hill’s chairman and CEO, Terry McGraw, is making major headway for my case in his keynote talk. He notes that the digital world offers a staggering array of choices for audiences, and an opportunity for trusted brands. Today, he says, we have a “new central function as intelligent moderators,” guides for readers and users.

This is clued-in stuff.

Later: Yahoo’s Scott Moore is showing off his company’s new Tech site. This must be scaring the daylights out of some of the people here. If not, it should. What he’s doing is Yahoo’s latest shot across the bow to traditional media organizations, and not just CNET.

Dave Winer’s new service, Share Your OPML, is going to make big waves in coming months and years.

OPML is a format that describes the RSS feeds you’re currently reading. It’s essentially a reading list, but one that can be used in a variety of ways — and shared from machine to machine.

Dave was instrumental in the takeoff of RSS. It’s going to be fascinating to watch what happens this time.

Query: Does anyone know how to export an OPML file of the blogroll links from WordPress?

How apt. A Financial Times editorial appeared on the last day of the WeMedia conference (“Excuse me while I borrow liberally“) commenting on how the mainstream media should learn from bloggers to show attribution for ideas and provide transparency. While observing the recent cases of high-profile plagiarism, Tim Harford considers something bloggers have done well:

In a world where it is easier than ever to shovel someone else’s ideas into your own work, and where it is also easier than ever to detect when this has been done, readers are becoming more relaxed about whether a work is original and simply ask if it is useful, enjoyable or beautiful. Blogs are so liberally peppered with other people’s work that bloggers have developed a code to acknowledge an intellectual debt: HT, the hat-tip.

We should expect to see more writers grabbing other writers’ ideas, and more honesty about the fact that this is happening. That can only improve the quality of journalism, commentary and even novels. Stealing with acknowledgement is not only polite but economically efficient.

Therefore, HT: Tyler Cowen, Krishna Guha, Malcolm Gladwell, John Kay, Laurence Lessig and Charles Nevin.

This is just one of many example how grassroots bloggers, Wikipedians and citizen journalists have created conventions within the community to increase transparency and to fairly acknowledge original work of others. The MSM should realize that it’s a cultural two way street. Citizens are becoming involved in the practice of journalism by adopting professional media industry norms, but the online cultural norms of netiquette (or perhaps blogiquette) can provide examples of better practices for the traditional media.

(For good reading about a history of traditional media outlets using blog material without attribution, see The Huffington Post, The Raw Story, Majikthise and USC’s Online Journalism Review)

(Cross-posted from Andrew Lih’s blog)