Center for Citizen Media

News organizations are beginning to fight back against the absurd and arrogant demands of sports leagues and entertainment conglomerates (often the same entities, in my view). As the Honolulu Star Bulletin notes today, it’s not publishing pictures from the pro golfing tournament being held in its backyard.

“The organization wants control over all stories and photographs that come out of its events,” the paper explains.

I recently spoke on a panel held by the American Bar Association on this topic, and offered some advice — largely unheeded, but then I was representing journalists and others who aren’t impressed with the sports industry’s controlling desires.

I hope the Hawaii newspaper encourages golf fans attending the event to take their own pictures and post them, say, on Flickr, and then points to the pictures from its website. Even better, the paper should simply refuse to cover the event at all.

Meanwhile, taking a stand is exactly the right thing to do.

Austin-based RSS comany Pluck has just released a demo of a new product called BlogBurst. Essentially a blog wire service, BlogBurst will syndicate content from “pre-approved” blogs to newspaper publishers who pay to opt in. A few forward-thinking newspapers including the Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, Houston Chronicle and San Antonia Express-News have already signed up.

If successful, this intiative will demonstrate that newspapers are finally acknowledging the substantive, high-quality work being done by bloggers who don’t work for them and have decided that it is in their best interest to incorporate good blog content into their offerings. This is undoubtedly one of the most ambitious attempts thus far to facilitate cross-over and collaboration between traditional media organizations and the rapidly-expanding blogosphere. Their tag line: “Got a great blog? Get big-time exposure.”

Pluck may be aiming to become a kind of gatekeeper for the blogosphere, which raises a wide array of questions:

• To what extent will having one’s blog content selected by newspapers for syndication be considered a status marker, and how much value will bloggers place on being “validated” by mainstream media?
• How will newspaper editors choose and present the blog content they publish, and will this add value to newspapers’ financial models?
• Could this initiative be a major step in breaking down the walls between traditional journalism and the emerging sphere of citizen media?

BlogBurst has an open call for bloggers who want to add their blog to the BlogBurst network, enabling newspapers to browse and publish their content. They will also be sending invitations to blogs they hope will join.
We will be watching the progress of this experiment closely and with great interest . . .

Softbank, the Japanese investment company, has invested $11 million in OhmyNews, the pathbreaking Korean online newspaper. The goal, according to the companies: “spreading citizen participatory journalism on the global stage.”

This means, for practical purposes in the near term, pursuing the English-language OhmyNews International edition, which has been around for a while but hasn’t gained a lot of traction. The big questions are a) whether the OhmyNews system can be replicated in the U.S. (I have my doubts); and b) what new innovations Mr. Oh and his team will come up with for the new market(s) they intend to serve.

Whatever happens, it’s safe to say one thing. This is an important turning point in the development of citizen journalism.

(Note: Oh Yeon Ho, founder of OhmyNews, is a member of the Center for Citizen Media’s Board of Advisors.)

Adam Green: Forming a memetracker community. What I’d like to propose is the creation of a group blog on which Gabe, Kevin, and a few other memetracker creators could discuss their philosophy of what a site of this type should do. There wouldn’t be any discussion of algorithms and “secret sauce,” but surely issues like whether a thread should be removed after 24 hours is worthy of discussion. (Gabe says yes on this, Kevin says no.) There is no right answer, but it would be great to see the motivations of these authors. The posts could be at any frequency, and hopefully the colloborative effort would alleviate the defensiveness Gabe sometimes demonstrates and the combativeness Kevin seems prone to. Comments would be turned on for this site, which would be where the rest of the blogosphere would have their say.

Hope this gets traction…

The American Press Institute’s Media Center Blog “Morph” has posted a few interesting examples that suggest mainstream media organizations might be open to trying new things. If these experiments are any indication of a developing trend, it looks like traditional newspapers might finally start to use new technology, multimedia, and the myriad of cool web tools to enhance the quality of their journalism.

This Morph posting suggests that it’s high time professional journalists stop seeing citizen media, blogging, and other forms of participatory media as threats, but instead, view them as exciting new opportunities for improving the work that they do.

I’ll be on the look out for other examples of how traditional media is actively exploring the possibilities of interactivity and participation from the group-formerly-known-as-the-audience. So, if you come across something you find interesting, please send it my way.

This week The Washington Post is running a series on “The Great Firewall of China.” Reporter Phil Pan wrote an excellent piece describing the history of Chinese Wikipedia and the saga of it being blocked three times over the last two years. (It’s still blocked as of this writing.)

While the stories in the U.S. have focused on Wikipedia’s weaknesses — the John Seigenthaler case, citation in college student papers, or comparisions with Britannica — I always remind folks that outside of the English-speaking world, Wikipedia’s impact is much more profound. Phil provides a small glimpse of the dynamics among PRC, Taiwan, Hong Kong and “overseas Chinese” in the editing process. He writes:

To many educated in China, these governing principles of Wikipedia — objectivity in content, equality among users, the importance of consensus — were relatively new concepts. Yuan said he consulted the work of philosopher John Rawls and economist Friedrich Hayek to better understand how a free community could organize itself and “produce order from chaos.”

“We had heard of these ideas, but they really didn’t have much to do with our lives,” said Yuan, now a computer programmer. “In school, we were taught an official point of view, not a neutral point of view. And we didn’t learn much about how to cooperate with people who had different opinions.”

It’s important to realize that for most other languages, there is no general knowledge encyclopedia that is freely available, not to mention one that provides the “neutral point of view” that is Wikipedia’s calling card. The implications for Asia are enormous.

After stagnating for two years, the Arabic language Wikipedia recently surged to over 10,000 articles, forming a solid foundation for free educational content for the Middle East. Bangladesh media activist and photojournalist Shahidul Alam said at a recent conference that he finally saw a way for the true history of his country to be told, and it was through Wikipedia. In English language circles, we can debate the merits of Wikipedia’s value against well-established information sources. But for much of the world, it comes just at the right time.

Washington Post Op-Ed columnist Colbert I. King raises a question that more and more people – readers and journalists alike – seem to be asking: who decides what’s newsworthy today?

Interestingly, King came to address this issue thanks to feedback from a Post reader who wrote to the editor after the murder of Marion Fye, a local African-American woman, received no coverage in the press until more than six months after the crime. This reader wanted to know how the Washington Post decided whether “one story is more worthy than another?”

King responds:

The decision to go with one story rather than another turns on what we in this business consider “newsworthy.” It’s an amorphous term, but editors claim to know it when they see it. Unfortunately, in my view, that decision seems to boil down to what those of us in newsrooms, and not readers, care about.

And there’s the problem. What draws the interest of people in the news business (what they like to read and write about) often bears little relationship to what people who live in communities like Marion Fye’s care about.

King deserves recognition for raising important questions. Exactly how are we being fed our news, and is it the news we should be getting? It seems that there is a growing restlessness among readers to engage in both the reporting of the news and choosing what news is important and relevant to them.

My colleagues at the Berkman Center, Rebecca MacKinnon and John Palfrey, have penned an op-ed piece for Newsweek’s international edition called “Censorship Inc.” Takeaway:

If we’re not careful, we may wake up one day to discover that what a person can see and do on the Web will be radically different depending on which country he or she lives in: the Internet will become “The Internets.” And U.S. tech firms won’t have much of value left to sell if the Internet ceases to be the wonderful, world-connecting thing it is today. They must find a way to make their money in China without checking their values at the border. Morality aside, the long-term survival of their industry depends on it.

Daniel Gross (Slate): Twilight of the Blogs – Are they over as a business? As a cultural phenomenon, blogs are in their gangly adolescence. Every day, thousands of people around the world launch their blogs on LiveJournal or the Iranian equivalent. But as businesses, blogs may have peaked. There are troubling signs—akin to the 1999 warnings about the Internet bubble—that suggest blogs have just hit their top.

It’s obvious that there’s been way more hype lately than is healthy. But the entry of Big Media into the blogging space is not a sign of impending doom.

If Time Warner and other big-media companies start a bunch of sucky blogs, they won’t get anywhere. If they buy a bunch of great blogs and turn them into sucky ones, ditto.

But the barrier to entry is sufficiently low — and the number of talented people who want their voices to be part of the conversations continues to grow — that competition will stay pretty fierce for readers. That does suggest, perhaps, a more realistic view of the business possibilities. But blogs and their brethren are far from over. They’re really just getting started in world where the conversation is the thing.

Jay Rosen: Dick Cheney Did Not Make a Mistake By Not Telling the Press He Shot a Guy: He followed procedure— his procedure. As Bill Plante, White House reporter for CBS News said at Public Eye, “No other vice president in the White Houses I’ve covered has had the ability to write his own rules the way this one has. He operates in his own sphere, with the apparent acceptance of the president.”