Center for Citizen Media

Pegasus News: Anti-sunshine bill HB 2564 on Governor Perry’s desk Saturday. Under this law, local and state government agencies could track individuals who seek public records and bill them for employee time spent to dig them up. Elected officials, nonprofit corporations, FCC-licensed TV and radio stations and “Newspapers of General Circulation” would be exempt.

Pegasus’ Mike Orren calls this a blatant attempt to prevent activists and others from covering what local officials are doing. This interpretation sounds about right: a terrible bill in a state known for terrible government.

Cory Doctorow explains: How To Keep Hostile Jerks From Taking Over Your Online Community.

Chris Daly has an intriguing idea for Dow Jones and the New York Times Co.: “Readers to the rescue?

The existing subscriber base of both newspapers is a precious asset, one that is not realizing its full potential. The owners of both papers should take a cue from public broadcasting and launch a “pledge drive” the likes of which no one has ever seen. Instead of just sending money, the subscribers could be enlisted to buy stock.

There’s precedent in another field, far afield if you’ll pardon the expression: pro football. The Green Bay Packers franchise is owned by the fans. In this case, the “ownership” is almost entirely symbolic, and it’s unclear what recourse the fans have if management goes insane.

But community ownership has appeal, even though in the case of the Wall Street Journal and New York Times the community is an international audience. Daly’s notion is at least intriguing.

(Note: I’m a shareholder in both Dow Jones and the New York Times Co., and would rather see them put out the best possible journalism than turn over their futures to the whims of Wall Street, even at the cost of lower share values.)

This looks intriguing. YourBroadcaster is not just another photo or video sharing site, although you can use it like that. The goal of the site is to collaboratively create five feature films in five different genres (bollywood, horror, thriller, comedy, drama). Users upload scripts, auditions, settings, etc. Other members vote on which uploaded material will be used in the film.

The site is still in beta, but will be an interesting experiment to watch. I expect shorter works, animations and mash-ups to be the first worked produced by this community. A feature film is on such a larger scale it will be an incredible challenge to produce, especially using material chosen by community vote rather than selected by the filmmakers. Yet ever since sites like YouTube have created internet celebrities, sites like YourBroadcaster will spring up hoping to become the star-making machines of Web 2.0.

In 2006, Wired called us a “spiraling vortex of ruin.” [Link.] But television is still a $65B business, said Mark Lucasiewicz, VP of Digital Media for NBC said at Editor & Publisher Interactive today in Miami. My reaction: Welcome to the high-tech industry — the Land of the Premature Obituary. How many obituaries have I read for Apple Computer alone? To me, constant claims that the news industry, newspapers, television, books are dead is simply a sign that those are becoming high tech professions in high tech industries, where we declare various companies, products, and movements dead on a biweekly basis, and then ignore the fact that, like the not-yet-dead plague victim in the Monty Python skit who hollers, “I was just going out for a walk!,” they’re not dead. Mainframes, TV, Apple, the newspaper — they’re all still there.

One thing I’m struck by whenever I go to these gatherings is just how much time is spent discussing the Internet, YouTube, blogs, and MySpace — followed by various statements of reassurance. This is interesting, but it’s not about the net: it’s about news people’s concerns about the future of their own industry, their own careers. You can’t really learn anything about the net at these presentations, really, because they’re not about the net.

“This is big,” Lucasiewicz says, talking about video on the web, “it’s here to stay, it’s core to our business, it’s not an add-on anymore…but as I talk about the opportunities, I should also talk about the pitfalls, particularly in journalism…I think there’s a great deal of confusion: a computer is not a conscience…he talks about a news site with a blogger and says that the person is described as a “blogger who performs acts of journalism.”

The audience laughs at this.

User generated content and citizen journalism is also something we have to think about. Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s great, but having a videocamera in your hand no more makes you a journalist than having one makes you a feature filmmaker. He shows a still from the Zapruder film of President Kennedy’s assassination. “Today, we’d call him a citizen journalist; back then, we called him what he was: an eyewitness. Today, we have Jamal Albarghouti, who captured images outside a building at Virginia Tech where he heard sound. A great eyewitness, but not a journalist. A journalist pulls a story together from different sources, and that’s important.”

It’s funny how they get to have it both ways: often “citizen journalism” is criticized because “only journalists are actually on the scene.” Then when nonjournalists with cameras are on the scene, journalism is seasoned analysis and multiple sources. Shrug.

He calls the 5th estate — blogs, videoblogs, etc, the “crapacopia,” quoting Ze Frank. “I’m convinced that people still want to see quality. Steven Spielberg still has a place in the marketplace.” This seems like a straw man argument to me. “I think when you talk about citizen journalism on the web, video that shows up on the web, there are plenty of stories that do speak for themselves…There’s no YouTube reporter tracking down Wal-Mart, there’s no Baghdad bureau of Google.”

Dave Winer says in “What is Web 3.0?” that traditional media organizations will make it through their currently tough times by embracing bloggers and other kinds of new media, “without interpretation by professional reporters.”

I’m cautious about that last bit. Why? Because, slowly but surely, traditional media folks are embracing the audience in ways that would have been unthinkable not very long ago. (We discussed some of those ways in Lisa Williams’ terrific report earlier this year.)

This doesn’t mean that newspapers and broadcasters should try to control everything that they take part in, though lawyers get very hinky when such questions arise. If the choice is between, say, no coverage of a local school board and pointing to bloggers who are covering it in their own ways — including the possibility, or probability, that a local school-board blogger has a stake in the outcome, which can be handled by transparency — then the choice should be some coverage as opposed to none. The news organization can and should help people understand the principles of journalism, meanwhile.

The collaborative potential is what gets me going. We can create new models if we all do this right.

The Citizen Media Law Project, jointly affiliated with Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society and this Center, is launching this week, with the help of a $250,000 grant from the Knight Foundation.

Our central aim is to provide practical knowledge and tools for citizen journalists. In the coming months we will be adding many resources to this site, including a legal guide that will cover everything from how to form a business to how to use freedom of information and open meetings laws to get access to information, meetings, and governmental records, as well as other legal subjects such as risks associated with online publication.

David Ardia is director of the project. He brings incredible experience to the table, including a stint in the general counsel’s office at the Washington Post. We have a great group of advisors, too.

The project is one of many being funded by the Knight Foundation’s 21st Century News Challenge. MIT got a mega-grant to create a center for innovative civic media, and journalist-programmer Adrian Holovaty got a pile of money to create what sounds like a great hyper-local set of sites.

Other funded projects of note:

Global Voices Online, also affiliated with the Berkman Center (I’m on the advisory board), got a significant grant to pursue its great work.

Lisa Williams’ Placeblogger.com, which we helped incubate, is also being funded.

My UC-Berkeley colleague, Paul Grabowicz, will pursue his terrific Oakland music project.

…and many, many more…

Congrats to all, and to the Knight Foundation for having the vision to do this.

Viagra reduces jet lag in hamsters.

UPDATED

The California First Amendment Coalition has won a crucial lower-court ruling that Santa Clara County must provide — at cost — its geographic “base map” of real estate boundaries in the county. The county had been saying it would charge tens of thousands of dollars for information collected on behalf of residents, using taxpayer money.

Maps are turning into an essential element of citizen media, via a variety of techniques including mashups. Traditional geographic information systems (GIS) like the Santa Clara County data are being combined with other data to produce new kinds of information.

Here’s a link to the judge’s ruling (1.4MB pdf).

(Note: I’m on the coalition’s board of directors.)

The University of Tennessee is conducting a survey “to examine the uses and users of blogs.” If you want to participate, click here.