Center for Citizen Media

Dan Gillmor will be joining a discussion on Future of Newspapers next Thursday, March 30, in San Jose. It’s a Commonwealth Club event, and it’s in the evening at the public library. Details here.

Am I the only one who’s bemused that the easiest way to find Georgie Anne Geyer’s commentary, “Without Newspapers, Americans Can’t Understand the World,” is on the Yahoo News site?

The University of Hong Kong’s Journalism & Media Studies Centre, the first higher-ed program to have students do blogs, is looking for someone to run the New Media program. Here’s the official posting of the position.

Each year since 1999 (except last year), I’ve taught in the new-media program part-time. HKU is a terrific school, and Hong Kong is an exciting place to spend time.

Andrew Lih, who’d had the post, just moved to Beijing to work on a book and other new projects. To give you an idea of the creativity he’s brought to the program, take a look at Curbside, a project he and his students ran last year, in a partnership with a local newspaper, to cover the WTO meetings in Hong Kong.

Arianna Huffington: Lesson Learned. At the beginning of the week, I was so focused on making it crystal clear that we did indeed have permission to run the Clooney blog that I was blinded to another extremely important issue: that a blog, where the source of the material is not clear, diminishes the amazing work of bloggers who day in and day out put their hearts and souls into writing their blogs.

I missed this weird escapade while traveling. Huffington’s early insistence that there was nothing wrong with what she did is finally inoperative, as politicians might say. Better late than never.

The L.A. Times picked up on an interesting thread from the State of the News Media 2006 report, released last week.

L.A. Times:

A “new paradox of journalism” has emerged in which the number of news outlets continues to grow, yet the number of stories covered and the depth of many reports is decreasing, according to an annual review of the news business being released today by a watchdog group.

Many television, radio and newspaper newsrooms are cutting their staffs as advertising revenue stagnates, but blogs and other online ventures lack the size or inclination to generate information, reports the Project for Excellence in Journalism, a research institute affiliated with the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

The study depicts the media in an interregnum — with the reach of print, radio and television reduced, but the promise of an egalitarian online “citizen journalism” unfulfilled.”

“The worry is not the wondrous addition of citizen media,” the report says, “but the decline of full-time professional monitoring of powerful institutions.”

So, isn’t the obvious question then: how can professional media institutions reap the benefits of the “wondrous addition of citizen media”?

How about using citizens to brainstorm story ideas, help research, and provide feedback for articles, like Minnesota Public Radio is doing with its “public insight journalism” initiative, Your Voice? Or collecting individual accounts from the community around a specific event to create a richer and more compelling narrative, like the New York Times did during the New York City transportation strike? And what about inviting audiences to ask questions of editors and reporters about how they do their jobs, like CBS has done with Public Eye, its project to promote the transparency of CBS News’ editorial operations?

Sadly, there are only a few examples of this type of collaboration as of yet – but the possibilities for utilizing community knowledge and the power of collective intelligence to enhance the quality of journalism are there and look quite exciting. What we need now are ambitious media organizations willing to experiment.

Over at my blog on Bayosphere, I propose that Yahoo could help save the San Jose Mercury News.

Bryan Alexander: Web 2.0: A New Wave of Innovation for Teaching and Learning?

Slate’s Jack Shafer shreds “Judith Miller’s New Excuse” for her well-deserved comeuppance, in which she blames bloggers for (in her view) unfairly tarring her shabby (my word) journalism in the run-up to the Iraq war.

Note: Miller’s former boss, Bill Keller, all but calls her a liar in the Esquire piece Shafer cites. And Shafer observes, “(This isn’t the only recent ‘he said, she said’ story in which Miller comes out the loser. See this sidebar.) Nasty stuff…

In Part One of this post, I highlighted a few initiatives launched by newspapers that are incorporating more video content into their offerings. However, consumers’ increasing enthusiasm for watching video online presents a much more immediate and direct challenge to the broadcast industry. Slowly, but surely, the networks are catching on. In the last few months, many of the major networks have made their most popular shows available on iTunes – and now several are taking the next steps. Here I want to draw attention to a few of the more creative projects recently announced by the major television networks, which show their (welcomed) willingness to experiment.

• NBC: When the Saturday Night Live sketch “Lazy Sunday” was viewed over 5 million times on YouTube.com, NBC took note. First, it told YouTube to remove the video from the site. Then, it announced it would begin offering the clip and others like it on NBC.com. Just like most newspapers give readers the option to e-mail a story link, NBC is also allowing visitors to send their favorite video clips to friends.
• NBC: NBC’s much-hyped show “Heist” launches next week, and NBC has partnered with MSN Video to offer the first two episodes of the brand-new series in full the week after each episode airs, respectively.
• ABC: Rafat Ali reported that at the Disney Shareholder’s meeting last week, Bob Iger, Disney’s CEO, announced that ABC would start offering its TV shows for free on their website. A small selection of ABC shows are currently available (commercial-free) on iTunes for $1.99 per episode. On ABC.com, users will be able to download the shows (with commercials) for free.
• CBS: CBS is seling “condensed” versions of the NCAA “March Madness” basketball games on-demand for $1.99 on iTunes the day after they air live on CBS. The Final Four and Championship games will be available in their entirety, and serious fans can buy a “season-pass” for $19.99, which includes all 63 games of the NCAA Tournament.
• USA: Using a different approach, USA (now owned by NBC Universal) has announced the launch of ShowUsYourCharacter.com, an online social network intended to create and foster virtual “fan communities” by allowing viewers to create profiles and exchange commentary and content relating to their favorite USA Network shows.

While the grassroots networks of citizen-generated and citizen-submitted video content are growing, there’s no question that many people still want to watch prime-time programming. The Survivor-lover in each of us coupled with the increasing number of hours we spend online suggest that the major networks really ought to reconceptualize the meaning of “television.” It’s time to divorce our notion of video from the single-purpose box known as a TV and start to see the Internet as as good a platform as any. The technology is finally there, so it should be utilized.

Of course, the key is figuring out the appropriate business model, but if the wild success of iTunes video store is any indication, it looks hopeful. So are there any draw-backs? Perhaps not. More people will watch more of the networks’ programming and happily do it when it’s most convenient for them. Plus, these may very well be the people the networks were missing from their audiences before. If the broadcast industry can take the lead on this front, it should see the move toward online, on-demand video content as a positive one, not to mention inevitable.

NY Times: TV Stations Fined Over CBS Show Deemed to Be Indecent. The Federal Communications Commission leveled a record $3.6 million fine yesterday against 111 television stations that broadcast an episode of “Without a Trace” in December 2004, with the agency saying the CBS show suggested that its teenage characters were participating in a sexual orgy.

The FCC’s censorship moves are a danger to everyone’s freedom of expression, not just the hapless broadcasters. Cable and satellite are next on the hit list of the blue noses of all political and social stripes. Never mind the First Amendment, folks.