Center for Citizen Media

National Post (Toronto): Midnight blogger exposes a scandal. For a July, 2006, post that questioned the photo identification method that Mr. Nifong used, for example, Prof. Johnson says he contacted every district attorney in North Carolina, as well as 10 police departments. He questioned them about lineup policies and procedures, and concluded the process used in the Duke case was wildly atypical.

The blogger is a history professor. But what he did in this case was, purely and simply, journalism.

And as far as I can tell he did it better than any of the professional journalists who were covering the story. This case shames the journalism profession, but it’s not as unusual as it should be.

Doug Kaye has started PodCorps, “an all-volunteer team of audio/video producers who record and publish important spoken-word events anywhere in the world.”

The horrific events at Virginia Tech this morning — the killing of “at least 21” (update: at least 31) are the top of everyone’s news in the U.S. The reporting, if you will, was enhanced by mobile-phone camera images that CNN is showing (available via the link above).

More and more major news stories will be amplified in this way. Spot news will be, in part, a citizen-captured phenomenon, and there’s no going back.

Also: Note the way the Roanoke Times is covering the news: blog-style. It’s the right format for this kind of event.

Flickr feed here.

Wired’s Threat Level has comprehensive links.

In Helsinki last Friday morning, I had a meeting-room accident just before a talk to some folks at Nokia, the mobile-phone company. The result was a non-functioning computer requiring the replacement of the machine’s internal hard disk. This occurred just hours before I had to give a talk at a large gathering of journalists.

To put it mildly, this was distressing. But it could have been worse, much worse.

It wasn’t so bad, because I’d backed up my data, something I do as a matter of routine.

Before departing on Wednesday, I did a total backup of my hard disk to a portable disk drive that I carry with me when I travel. This wasn’t just a backup, but what’s called a clone, using a Mac product with a kind of silly name — SuperDuper — but a non-silly function. This software creates an essentially identical copy of the original disk, and with a Mac and a Firewire connection on the disk drive, you can boot from the cloned drive.

So after the repair shop installed a new disk drive in my Mac, I started the computer from the cloned drive, re-cloned that data to the new internal disk and started again from there. What was missing? Well, just a couple of tweaks I’d made to my presentation the night before. (This all was an overnight process; to give my journalism-conference presentation that day we rented a Mac and I copied my presentation from the cloned drive to that machine. By the second day of the journalism conference, when I gave another talk, I was back on my own computer.)

I was also missing the panic I’d have felt without this backup solution. You can’t buy peace of mind for such things; you have to create it ahead of time.

Three notes: First, I was able to make my Nokia presentation because I’d created a PDF of the slides — albeit minus the cool videos and audios — and showed that on one of the Nokia folks’ computers. Second, what I should have done, and will do in the future, is keep the full presentation in two extra places: a thumb drive using flash memory, and online where I could retrieve it if necessary. Third, I keep another backup drive at home. (Someday, we’ll keep all of our important data backed up, and encrypted, in the Internet “cloud” where we can get to it whenever and wherever we need it.)

Am I cautious bordering on paranoid? You bet, and I’ve never been so happy to be this way.

Mark Glaser, in “Netflix Return::What We Lose (and Gain) Without Video Stores,” ponders the pluses and minuses of the demise of local video stores. Quote:

In general, I’d say that the loss of the physical store feels like a loss for the neighborhood, and a loss of the human touch. And the advantage of Netflix is that I’ll get to see more movies for my money and I’ll have more movies and TV shows to choose from.

This maps to all traditional media distribution methods, in one way or another.

We recently canceled the movie channels on our satellite TV system, figuring that Netflix was the better choice. It saves money and has more selection.

Sooner or later Netflix, too, will be supplanted by digital distribution and access. We aren’t going back, no matter how nostalgic we may be for what was. The gains are outweighing the losses for digital media.

KQED, the public TV station in San Franscisco, posted its QUEST documentary Earth Day Special: Where We’ve Been, Where We’re Headed, on the Web ahead of the scheduled broadcast next week. Good move. A sign of things to come?

Two new reports about citizen media have been released recently, both with a focus on local sites. Citizen Media: Fad or the Future of News? The rise and prospects of hyperlocal journalism was released by J-Lab. The report by Jan Schaffer consolidates and analyzes responses from 191 people involved with or familiar with online citizen media, including 31 operators of citizen media sites.

Also enabled by J-Lab and the Knight Foundation via their New Voices program is a new “cook book” sharing the experiences of the first year of community site Hartsville Today. The site was started by Douglas J. Fisher, a journalism instructor at the University of South Carolina and Graham Osteen, Publisher of The Hartsville Messenger. The report, entitled Hartsville Today: The first year of a small-town citizen journalism site, documents in detail the steps they took, from deciding on a web site domain name to training staff. This will be an excellent guide to any group interested in setting up a citizen media site or encouraging citizen participation in an existing site.

(Disclosure: the Knight Foundation, which works with and funds several J-Lab projects, including the Knight Citizen News Network, also provided funding for our Principles of Citizen Journalism project).

On my way to Helsinki for the Mediapäivä international Media Fair, where I’m giving two talks and appearing on a panel. More (much) later…

Caution: If you click through to that site, be aware that it’ll start an audio-video presentation that makes noise. Turn down your speakers if that will disturb anyone nearby.

Tim O’Reilly, instrumental in the recent brouhaha over blogging codes of conduct, offers some valuable “Lessons Learned So Far,” which include:

* The poor choice of the “badges” I proposed, together with a reiteration of why I thought badges might be useful.
* The need for a more modular code of conduct, a set of axioms rather than a single monolithic “code of conduct” or “terms of service.”
* A suggestion of some moderation mechanisms that might be more effective than a code of conduct.
* A more discussion of constructive anonymity vs. “drive-by anonymity”.
* An acknowledgement that a “code of conduct” should be reviewed by lawyers lest bloggers incur additional liability for commenters.
* Why I think civility matters, despite all the nay-sayers.

I remain somewhat skeptical, not at all about the goal but more about the specifics of how it might be achieved.

But this continues an important conversation.

In the wake of bad online behavior and proposals to add more organized weight to online community policing, Jon Garfunkel offers “Comment Management Responsibility (CommResp)” — and it takes time to read and understand. Give it a look.