Center for Citizen Media

The YouTube Citizen News Channel wants to highlight citizen videos with news value. Olivia Ma, the site’s News Manager, says on the site’s blog:

If you see examples of fellow YouTubers doing great work in journalism and reporting, please let me know. If you’re a citizen journalist yourself, tell me how YouTube could better serve you. I want to hear how you guys envision news on YouTube and what you’d like to see. My ultimate mission is to make the site a go-to destination for news on the web.

So far so good — another worthwhile experiment in citizen media. I’m looking forward to seeing how it works.

But as they monetize this, I hope they’re going to find a way to reward the people who are doing the work. As I’ve said again and again, I’m not a fan of business models that say “You do all the work and we’ll take all the money, thank you very much.”

I also hope YouTube will give people a way to post using Creative Commons licenses, which are all about sharing information, as opposed to the currently restrictive terms of service. This is the main reason I don’t automatically recommend the service — though I do believe it offers great value in a general sense– and why I do recommend Blip.TV, which makes Creative Commons one of the defaults.

The New York Observer reports that the Wall Street Journal’s “Independence Committee unanimously approves” of the naming of Robert Thomson, Wall Street Journal publisher, as the paper’s managing editor position and Dow Jones editor-in-chief.

Gosh, what a surprise. Rupert Murdoch decides, they approve.

Do these folks — Susan Phillips, dean of the business school at George Washington University; Tom Bray, former editorial page editor of the Detroit News; Louis Boccardi, who ran the Associated Press; Jack Fuller, former editorial page editor of the Chicago Tribune; Nicholas Negroponte, the MIT computer guru — realize how their service in this role corrodes their reputations and legacies?

Perhaps their annual pay of $100,000 a year makes it easier to serve as rubber stamps and doormats.

CNET: Announcing the Totally Unofficial Build a Better Twitter Contest:

I have had it with this Twitter situation. I know it’s a free service, and I know that a lot of you are frankly sick of hearing about it, but I cannot keep pretending that Twitter is the savior of the modern Internet, the message-bearing standard of Web 2.0, and the most important thing to happen to online communication since Gopher when the site itself is only slightly more reliable than a late-model Saab. And I’m sorry, but being down all the time is not excused by the fact that people who think they’re cool think Twitter is cool. Therefore, I would like to hereby officially announce the Totally Unofficial Build a Better Twitter Contest.

I’m certain that the Twitter folks know what a problem they have. The question is whether they’re going to make the service reliable soon enough.

The opening for a better Twitter is real. The other question is whether anyone can exploit it.

AP: Routine conduct at risk with MySpace suicide case. Think twice before you sign up for an online service using a fake name or e-mail address. You could be committing a federal crime. Federal prosecutors turned to a novel interpretation of computer hacking law to indict a Missouri mother on charges connected to the suicide of a 13-year-old MySpace user.

What the woman in Missouri did was despicable. She masqueraded as a flirty teenage boy and created emotional havoc with a girl who killed herself. Maybe the dead girl’s family has a civil case.

But if this is a crime, then America is a land of criminals — because this is a practice that anyone with common sense engages in from time to time. Yes, some do it for mischief. But pseudonyms are also about sometimes justified self-protection.

We should stand behind our words. But the best way to handle anonymous and pseudonymous trolls and sleazebags is to ignore them and persuade everyone else that such speech is less than worthless. Sending people to jail for this is an assault on speech itself.

The “Publius Project” — essays and conversations about constitutional moments on the Net collected by the Berkman Center — has launched. I have an essay there, along with the writings of many other folks.

The Knight Foundation has announced the winners of its Knight News Challenge 2008 competition:

Sixteen ideas to fund innovative digital projects around the world were awarded $5.5 million dollars today from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the World Wide Web, accepted one of the awards for a project that will create a technology to give users more information about the origins and sourcing of digital content.

I’m at the Berkman Center’s 10th Anniversary conference — amazing agenda and people.

Being a Berkman Fellow has been one of the joys of my recent years, getting to hang around with — and pick the brains of — a bunch of folks who are much smarter than I am and who possess knowledge and wisdom.

Here’s a page with webcasts of the event.

Looking through the finalists for the 2008 Gerald Loeb Award, several things stand out. Despite the excellence of the work being cited, the list of finalists should raise a note of caution about at least one key metric for the ability of American business journalists to look at major problems before negative trends turn to economic calamity.

Several of the finalists, for work done in 2007, were honored for covering the American credit meltdown, in particular the deflation of the housing bubble. The work of these journalists is indeed excellent. But it’s grossly late. The time this coverage should have appeared was several years ago, when the occasional uh-oh story about the blatantly obvious bubble disappeared in the mass of cheerleading that passed for journalism.

Another conspicuous — and related — issue is the shutout of serious online-only journalists, even in the commentary category where in the finalist list is in the new online category, dominated by Big Media online operations. Again, the work cited is for the most part superb. But some of the best economic journalism, especially in commentary, is being done by new-media folks. Perhaps they didn’t know they were eligible for the Loeb awards, but the total absence of their work is noteworthy nonetheless.

If the Loeb team really wanted to spur on great economic reporting, it could add a category: a foresight award for people who were way ahead of their peers in spotting issues that only later — usually too late — are understood by the herd. The Pulitzers could use something like this, too.

In the case of the credit bubble, there would be ample reason to look at some online work, especially among bloggers who saw the bubble early and talked about it incessantly, backing up their work with detailed analysis and data-based evidence. They were too early, however, for a journalistic establishment that rarely acknowledges a crisis until it’s causing or about to cause massive pain. Consider, just in recent history, the savings-and-loan sleaze in the 1980s and the tech/stock bubble of the ’90s, among other missed stories. In each case, there were lonely warnings, generally ignored.

Of course, as Jack Shafer has noted in Slate, journalism awards are generally noteworthy only to journalists themselves. But as long as we do have them, why not honor people who got it right when it wasn’t too late to do something about it.

NY Observer: The Dolans March in, But Please, No Press! But when the time finally came for the officially sanctioned interview of Chairman James Dolan, it appeared not in Newsday but on the Cablevision-owned News 12 channel. “Dolan did a 10-, 15-minute interview with News 12, which is what we had to use in the story, and that’s a slap in the face,” said one reporter. “They could have made him available!”

It’s nothing new for newspaper owners (of the old family style) to want to tell their publications’ minions how to behave, and particularly how they (the owners and their interests) will be covered, if at all. Only the corporate ownership of recent times has been somewhat less authoritarian, and only some of those corporate owners; journalistic interference is hardly unknown in the modern era. But generally, poor treatment by corporate owners has been more related to shrinking resources and bottom-line demands than antipathy for the journalistic species.

Newsday’s new bosses, however, are making it pretty clear that they consider journalists a low form of life indeed. This will make their tenure at a once-great newspaper, um, interesting.

Cablevision was a more logical owner for Newsday than the competitors — combining media strengths and possibly creating a multi-media journalistic powerhouse in the New York City area. You have to wonder if it’ll work, at an organization where the owners seem to hold real journalism in contempt.

San Jose Mercury News: Wanted: Los Gatos bloggers. We’re looking for community bloggers in Los Gatos who can write about such things as events in town, school fundraisers, the score of the latest football game. We need someone who would love a forum for reflecting on the latest buzz story in town, or even write things to do for runners, kids, moms, retirees or other groups in town.

This could be a fairly big deal, especially if it means the paper will do more than just highlight what the bloggers do (i.e. pay them for what they do).

But the very fact that the paper has recognized what has been obvious for years — that the bloggers and others running websites in a community are able to supplement, and in some cases replace, what the newspaper has been doing, or failing to do.

Every newspaper should be a portal to the bloggers, Flickr and YouTube posters and others who are creating media about the towns and neighborhoods in the circulation area. That so few understand this is testament to the industry’s continuing cluelessness.

The Merc is owned by a company that has, from all available evidence, vastly more concern for profit than journalism — a company that appears not to see the value of excellence as a business proposition. So if this move is essentially to get more “content” for less money, it’s a loser.

But to the extent that the Mercury News is recognizing and helping to promote a wider and more diverse media ecosystem, this is a potentially noteworthy move.