Center for Citizen Media

Over at TechCrunch, Mike Arrington has compiled a list of real-time news aggregators. There’s plainly some amazing work going on in this area.

This story in Editor & Publisher, about American media’s unwillingness to print or broadcast the cartoons that have so dramatically inflamed many in the Muslim world, speaks volumes about the industry’s lowest-common-denominator approach to its audience. From the article:

Doug Clifton, editor of The Plain Dealer in Cleveland, agreed that the offensive nature precluded running the cartoons. “It has become a part of great angst and I don’t see any reason to run it, you can just describe it,” he said of the cartoon images. “I don’t see a need to insert ourselves in that fight.”

…

But Clifton said his paper will likely place a link to the images from another site when it runs an editorial on the issue Saturday or Sunday. “They will have the option to see it if they choose,” he said about the Web readers. “The [print] newspaper reaches a much, much broader audience.”

So it’s okay to link to the offending pictures but not to print them? I can understand the logic, but it’s a bit tortured. The cartoons, after all, are the heart of the controversy: If you don’t show it to readers, is describing it sufficient to explain why it’s offending some others?

The cartoons are all over the Web, trivially easy to find with any search engine. The protests against the pictures have had the perhaps unintended effect of making them much more available, and giving people a much greater incentive to check them out to see what the fuss is all about.

Note: I’m not talking here about the core issues surrounding the cartoons — the Danish magazine’s odd (in my opinion) decision to publish them; European newspapers’ decisions to reprint it; Muslim denunciations (and their explicit insistence, demonstrating their own misunderstanding of democratic cultures, that Western governments “punish” media for exercising free speech, however tastless); hypocrisy; etc.

Maybe this is a case where American news organizations’ timidity serves a higher purpose. But in a world where the World Wide Web is a reality, it’s a stretch to claim that pointing to what offends people is all that different from just showing them in the first place.

The Nation: The End of the Internet? The nation’s largest telephone and cable companies are crafting an alarming set of strategies that would transform the free, open and nondiscriminatory Internet of today to a privately run and branded service that would charge a fee for virtually everything we do online.

The modest hyperbole in this commentary should not distract you from its essential truth: The cable and phone companies are truly out to turn the Net into their own collection of walled gardens. They have purchased a compliant Congress, and the more centralized the Net becomes, the easier it will be for the Bush administration’s domestic spies and other controlling types to keep tabs on everything we do.

The technology industry, which should be fighting this tooth and nail, is divided. Cisco is on the side of the cable and phone companies with the products it sells, but Google and other companies recognize the threat. Unfortunately, the tech companies are basically incompetent at the lobbying game the telecoms play so well.

Why is this an issue for citizen media? Here’s just one reason: If the small fry — you and me — in the media sphere are relegated to a distant second place in delivery of content, we are essentially frozen out. In an era where digital video is at least as important a medium as text, this is crucial to recognize.

The mass media have almost totally failed to cover this issue at all, and no wonder. (The Washington Post has been doing the best work lately, but it, too, was late in understanding what was at stake.)

The future is being written by lobbyists and CEOs who believe the Internet is theirs, not ours. If they get away with this, we are in deep, deep trouble.

(Note: I am on the U.S. advisory board of FON, a collaborative Wi-Fi hotspot company.)

I’ll be traveling much of the next 24 hours on my way home, so postings will be sporadic at best.

I’m coming to take for granted the accomplishments of modern technologists, but this week has brought home the progress we’ve made in communications in recent times. Twice, actually.

The first example was a panel discussion on Tuesday evening in the United Kingdom, which I joined remotely via video from a hotel in Doha, Qatar. To have done something like this not very long ago, I’d have had to go to a TV studio with a satellite uplink and sit in front of a video camera and blue screen. It would have been inconvenient for me, and unaffordable for the university sponsoring the discussion.

This time, in my hotel room equipped with semi-fast broadband Internet access, I simply fired up my iSight video camera. No, the video quality wasn’t nearly as good as it would have been in the studio, but it was quite good enough for what we were doing.

The second example came on Thursday, when the BBC interviewed me for an upcoming radio program about the future of media. Instead of using a phone or studio, I logged into my Skype account and spoke with the reporter that way. Because Skype’s sound quality is considerably higher infidelity than a phone, I sounded almost like I was in the London studio.

What once were tools for professionals are in everyone’s hands. This is a remarkable era, getting more so every day.

Rich Skrenta: News 2.0 is not Journalism. The quality of journalistic output today is, for the most part really really good. In fact it’s too good. The product costs a huge amount to bring to market, and what the Internet enables is a an alternative product built for zero, and providing a different value proposition. Citizen journalism is going to be more Citizens and less Journalism.

I’m at the second Al Jazeera forum in Doha, the base of operations of the Arabic news broadcaster that is about to launch an international network in competition with CNN, BBC and others. Later today, I’m speaking on a panel about blogs and other grassroots media.

My Berkman Center colleague, Ethan Zuckerman, another speaker here, is blogging the conference. He types faster and more accurately than I can manage, so I recommend that you read his blog if you want to get a feel for this gathering. (Like Ethan, I do not agree with some of what I’m hearing from the stage, but the range of views is remarkable and educational nonetheless.)

At several press conference yesterday, Al Jazeera officials put on display — albeit diplomatically — what is obviously a ferocious internal debate over the positioning and independence of the new international operation. It’s clear to me that they haven’t reached a conclusion on how to handle this, which is not surprising.

The conference subtitle, “Defending Freedom, Defining Responsibility,” is a generic one for journalists. I’ve reversed the verbs and subjects in the title for this posting, and have noticed that it would apply well to these discussions, too.

The journalists present here, from around the world (the network covered the cost of this trip), are passionate about their craft. And they are, for the most part, ready and willing to listen to each others’ ideas. (At a side debate, asking if Arab journalists could learn anything from Americans, a significant majority said yes.)

These are first impressions. More to come…

Reuters: Newspapers take aim at Google in copyright dispute. The Paris-based World Association of Newspapers, whose members include dozens of national newspaper trade bodies, said it is exploring ways to “challenge the exploitation of content by search engines without fair compensation to copyright owners.”

At the association’s annual meeting last year in Seoul, one of the keynote speakers was Krishna Bharat, the man who was a principal creator of Google News. (I was the other keynote speaker.) He was treated somewhat roughly by the audience, which was visibly skeptical of his message that Google was more a friend of newspapers than an adversary. Now the other shoe is dropping.

The newspaper people are mistaken. Google does create disintermediation, but it also sends traffic. More fundamentally, it uses the Web as designed.

If the newspapers are serious about this, they should simply tell Google (and use technology to enforce it) to stop linking to their stories, or put them behind pay-walls. These would be dramatically counterproductive moves, to be sure, but at least the lines would be drawn in an appropriate way.

Legal threats against the Web’s design are the wrong way to proceed.

The San Jose Mercury News’ recent series, “Tainted Trials, Stolen Justice,” is a brilliant and powerful demonstration of what Big Media do at the very finest. Rick Tulsky and his colleagues at the Mercury News should be enormously proud of their accomplishment. It should lead to some serious reforms in a criminal justice system that can go so wrong, sometimes ruining the lives of innocent people in a single-minded pursuit of convictions — at the cost of true justice.

Is this project the last of its kind at the Mercury News? The impending sale of Knight Ridder may ensure that such efforts fall victim to investors’ preference for high profits at the cost of genuinely pathbreaking journalism such as this.

We need great journalism, and we especially need the kind of work this series represents.

Mark Glaser, who recently started the “MediaShift” blog for PBS, has posted an interview about this center. Here’s the Q&A portion:

Q: Why did you decide to start the Center?

Gillmor: Given the upheaval in traditional media, I saw an opportunity to create a relatively independent perch to offer some analysis and help, both to the established players and the new ones in what we’re calling citizen media.

It’s important to remember that the upheaval isn’t only about the traditional news organizations’ shareholders and employees. It’s much more about the readers/citizens — when I say “readers” I include listeners and viewers, etc. — and serving their interests will be my overriding goal.

Q: What do you plan to do beyond the blog ? Conferences, training seminars? What’s the role for the universities?

Gillmor: I want to be project-oriented, as opposed to building a big infrastructure. Three main areas:

1) Research, Analysis, Advocacy. People like you know all about this, but the vast majority of folks have no idea what “citizen journalism” means, why it’s important or how it works. So I want to help get out the word and help figure out where it’s all going. I’d like to figure out, for example, if a bunch of citizens blogging together can build up as well as tear down. We’ve seen a lot of the latter, but too little of the former.

We’ll do or commission original research into some of the key questions, including the impact on public knowledge and opinion. What are the obstacles, such as legal and financial, and how can we help people avoid them?

2) Best Practices and Tools. Among my many goals in this category: connect innovators in far-flung places; identify gaps and fill them (everything from attention to financing and teams), identify and propagate the best practices globally to those who don’t have the time or resources for R&D [research and development]. This will include tools as well as practices.

One thing I’m anxious to do is use our site as a test bed (or maybe playground) for cool ideas and tools. Anyone who has ideas, I’d love to hear them.

3. Education, Training, Advice/Consulting. We’re open to everyone here: citizens who want to participate in the process; media professionals who want to use these technologies and want to work with citizens; companies that need to understand what is happening; and anyone else who cares.

We won’t be just telling them what’s what. We want them to join us to help figure it all out. I hope to build teams of folks — via collaborations for the most part — who participate in a variety of ways. If we do it right, we can bridge some of the chasms between the public interest and commerce, management and labor, media and audience.

At the moment, I think I’d rather leave conferences to other folks who are better equipped to do them. As for my university partners, needless to say I’m honored by their support. Both [Berkeley and Harvard] have lots of smart folks who are interested in this phenomenon, and want to help make it happen in a good way. I’ll be working with students and faculty as much as possible, and hope to get some collaboration going between the two universities. I’m working with the Berkeley folks on new-media instruction ideas as well, and will be teaching a (specific subject yet to be determined) course there next fall.

Q: How far along do you see the evolution of citizen media? Are we in the beginning stages or maturing somewhat?

Gillmor: We’re early. I don’t know, using the baseball metaphor, whether we’re in the first or second inning, but I don’t think we’re beyond that.

That said, this is likely to be an accelerating process. The tools are getting fairly robust, and as the major media see their business model unravel (and for the most part fail to adapt, to my amazement), extremely smart people are moving quickly into the field.

Q: What are the biggest challenges for running a citizen media operation, either independently or within a news organization?

Gillmor: This is a long, long topic. My recent posting discusses how one independent site saw it. I still believe big news organizations could thrive in this environment, given their historical and current reach in their communities. For reasons that elude me they’re basically not trying.

The biggest challenge for everyone in this space is keeping our eye on something crucial: This is all about shifting from the lecture toward a conversation — and also remembering what I’ve been calling the first rule of conversations: You have to listen. We all have things to offer, but we all have more to learn.

And, again, we have to stress the bottom line on which everything else rests: It’s about the audience (even if they’re participants). If there’s not enough worthwhile to bring them in, the rest is relatively unimportant.

Q: Do we need a new name for citizen media?

We need many names for it, most likely, because it’s about creating, communicating and collaborating. That covers a lot of ground. I mean, look at the differences among things like wikis, solo blogs, podcasts, discussion groups, mashups and the like. Even within those categories, the variety is enormous.

What they all have in common is the idea of a web that’s read-write, though, where we can publish almost as easily as we can read. Citizen media will live, and I believe thrive, in an ecosystem that includes lots and lots of styles and aims.

Q: What is the end goal of citizen media and how can it eventually transform our society?

Gillmor: People will pick their own goals. That’s the best part of this, in a way.

For me, in the context of journalism, this is about moving toward two things. First, we can’t afford to have an ignorant citizenry; the stakes are too high.

Second, I’m convinced that the process of becoming more engaged with current events can lead people to become more active, and even activists. Self-government, if I’m right, is becoming something we do every day, not something we react to (mostly on Election Day, if we even vote). I think that would be a positive development, maybe even a vital one.