Center for Citizen Media

AFP: ‘Citizen journalism’ battles the Chinese censors. In the strictly controlled media world of China, “citizen journalism” is beating a way through censorship, breaking taboos and offering a pressure valve for social tensions. In one striking example this month, the Internet was largely responsible for breaking open a slave scandal in two Chinese provinces that some local authorities had been complicit in.

Heading to Seoul for OhmyNews Citizen Reporters’ Forum, the annual citizen journalism gathering. It’s a great opportunity to catch up with some of what’s going on in this rapidly changing sphere. Look for several reports.

Laura Fries: Street Brawl in DC: A Case for Citizen Journalism. People talk about citizen journalism, and they talk mostly of the elites – white soccer moms contributing play by plays of their children, pictures and videos galore; lawyers posting nuanced descriptions of the latest city council development.

But this – sweat, fear, alleged police brutality, raw emotion, a neighborhood terrorized by gunshots and intermittent police presence that now was as frightening as the drive-bys murdering 13 year olds – this is the stuff that “citizen journalism” should be made of, not yuppies posting restaurant reviews.

My keynote this morning at the Print, Internet and Community conference in Tel Aviv had three main points, at least several of which are no surprise to regular visitors to this site.

First, we have moved into a democratized media culture, where the tools of production and access are widely available. On a read-write Web, consumers evolve into creators, and creators into collaborators.

Second, this understanding can lead to better books. My own experience, in which I asked my blog readers to help me report and write We the Media, was a case in point.

Third, that conversation extends past the publication date, with author blogs (now common), podcasts and other tools helping turn books into mini-ecosystems. This gives books longer life spans, and gives authors more visibility for their ideas.

I’ll be expanding on these points in an upcoming posting.

Dave Winer: It’s one thing to let Microsoft buy space on your site (it’s called advertising) and quite another to accept Microsoft money for words coming out of your mouth. Next month when we read something positive on these sites about Microsoft, how are we supposed to know if it’s an opinion, or just another example of being paid to say something supportive of Microsoft.

Jeff Jarvis: So ultimately, this is a cautionary tale for all bloggers who take ads: You must set your own boundaries and not let them be pushed. When you do — whatever those boundaries are — that is the very definition of selling out.

It’s still not clear what led to the death of my former San Jose Mercury News colleague, Rich Ramirez. But he was an unfailingly professional and kind man, and his passing at a young age is tragic.

Rest in peace.

UPDATED

A long Q&A: Life in Iraq on the New York Times website shows the Baghdad bureau in more human terms, and gives readers an even better idea of what life is like in that nation. At one point John F. Burns, the newspaper’s outstanding bureau chief, writes of the Iraqi nationals who do an enormous amount of the actual reporting:

Our Iraqi reporters — who do double duty as interpreters when they accompany New York-based correspondents and photographers on assignments — are the bedrock of our enterprise.

This is not to confirm what some of the more scathing critics of the American media’s performance in Iraq have alleged, which is that American reporters in Baghdad practice a form of “hotel journalism” — meaning that for most of what we write we rely on the reporting of Iraqi staff members who venture beyond our well-guarded compounds, and rarely do so ourselves. There is hardly ever a day when one or more of our American reporters is not out in the city, or on embeds in Baghdad and beyond with American and Iraqi troops, and the results can be measured, on any day, by the authenticity of the reports that appear in the paper.

But it would be foolish to deny that there are occasions when a sensible calibration of risk deters us from going out on assignment ourselves. Often, those judgments apply in equal measure to our Iraqi reporters, too. But there are other times when an Iraqi, blending into the environment in ways that no foreigner can, feels safe in taking on an assignment that we judge to be too hazardous to undertake ourselves. Our principle is that any Iraqi leaving our compound on assignment — whether reporter, driver or guard — does so only as a “willing partner”, and after a thorough security review of the assignment beforehand.

Since our Iraqi staff are in a much better position to assess risk than we are, knowing their country as they do, this is not only a matter of principle, it is a practical precaution that we believe enhances our security.

Sensible, but it raises an issue. This suggests that the Times isn’t going far enough to give these reporters the credit they deserve in the pages of the newspaper (virtually as well as on paper). Shouldn’t they be getting more bylines? And why not let some of them create blogs on the Times’ website (as McClatchy is doing with its Iraqi staffers)?

What we’re seeing, in initiatives like the Times Q&A, is increasing transparency in how the news gets reported. We need more, and more often.

UPDATE: The AP reported on a report by the Project for Excellence in Journalism showing that the pro-Bush network is covering the Iraq war much less than competitors, who speculate that the story line is going so wrong that Fox doesn’t want to call attention to it.

(Note: I hold a small amount of New York Times Co. stock, and McClatchy’s charitable arm has contributed to this center’s work.)

I’m heading to Tel Aviv for the annual conference on “Print, Internet and Community” — will update when I can.

Check out Newspapers 2.0: OPML file for British newspaper RSS feeds at Martin Belam’s CurryBetDotNet for a fantastic way to aggregate and search news. As the BBC’s Robin Hamman explains:

Want to know what every major UK newspaper website and blogger had to say about the Taliban’s renewed efforts to attack Kabul? Simply keyword search the feeds for Kabul and you’ll find every single mention from every single UK newspaper website or blog – instantly and right there inside your RSS reader.

Let’s hope someone copies this idea, pronto, for U.S. media. Meanwhile, major kudos to Belam.

Jack Shafer (Slate): Apple suck-up watch: Watching the press froth over a new cell phone. No drop of milk oozes from the Apple teat without a crowd of journalists gathering to swallowing it up.