Center for Citizen Media

BostonNOW, a new free weekly set to launch April 17^th, expects to fill out its content with excerpts from local bloggers. A small staff will cover local events, and some wire service stories will be included

But the use of the fresh voices of citizens on both its web site and print editions is designed to differentiate Boston NOW from the other free publications and attract younger readers. Beyond offering the citizen-generated content, Editor-in-Chief John Wilpers and Web Content Manager Regina O’Brien also plan to live webcast their editorial meetings, soliciting reader feedback and giving citizens a voice in the paper’s coverage.

According to the Weekly Dig, the short blurbs from the blogs will be included in the paper with complete entries posted on the Boston Now website, with “no editing and no censorship, so long as the copy’s clean and legal.” However, Boston Herald business writer Jesse Noyes notes on the Herald’s blog that NOW’s top executive, Russell Pergament, has had run-ins with bloggers and free-speech issues in the past. But Wilpers replies that the bloggers will be given free reign in this new venture. Right now the bloggers and other citizen contributors (photographers and videographers) are not compensated for their exposure, but possible compensation could be arranged in the future.

Is Boston NOW the future of the newspaper or an experiment in citizen media that will serve as a model of what not to do? I’ll keep an eye on this intriguing experiment.

(Editor’s Note: Welcome to Debbie Block-Schwenk, who will be posting regularly on the Center for Citizen Media blog. She was one of the main contributors to the recent “Principles of Citizen Journalism” project.)

UPDATED

The New York Times, in “A Call for Manners in the World of Nasty Blogs,” asks:

Is it too late to bring civility to the Web?

The conversational free-for-all on the Internet known as the blogosphere can be a prickly and unpleasant place. Now, a few high-profile figures in high-tech are proposing a blogger code of conduct to clean up the quality of online discourse.

Last week, Tim O’Reilly, a conference promoter and book publisher who is credited with coining the term Web 2.0, began working with Jimmy Wales, creator of the communal online encyclopedia Wikipedia, to create a set of guidelines to shape online discussion and debate.

Chief among the recommendations is that bloggers consider banning anonymous comments left by visitors to their pages and be able to delete threatening or libelous comments without facing cries of censorship.

Disclosures first: Tim O’Reilly published my book and is a valued friend. Jimmy Wales, also a valued friend, is an advisor to this center and I’m an investor in his company.

Big issue: They’re creating a bit of a monster, as they discuss asking people to put logos on their work defining various categories of behavior. Who’d be the judge of it? The government? Libel lawyers? Uh, oh.

(They are pushing on a string. I know, having tried a while back to do the same thing with a notion several of us called “Honor Tags” — a short-lived attempt to persuade online creators to label what they were doing to serve as disclosure and, yes, honorable behavior. Of course, they have the ability to get the attention of the New York Times, and I didn’t at the time, so maybe this effort will get more traction.)

I don’t believe there’s a need for a “code of conduct” for bloggers and commenters beyond the simple notion at the top of the NYT story: Be civil. That includes other concepts, such as Disclose your biases. And stand behind your own words. It’s about honor, nothing more.

Note that there is a big difference between the average blogger who attracts lots of comments and the commenters. The blogger almost always identifies himself or herself. That alone tends to lead to better behavior on the blogger’s part. Not always, but usually.

Some of this goes to the recent “Principles of Citizen Journalism” that we posted; if people followed those notions we’d have fewer of these problems, but that doesn’t go to the issue of rancid comments on other people’s sites.

It’s essential for bloggers to be clear what their own rules are about their own sites when it comes to comment policies; that’s why the BlogHer community guidelines are so useful in this context. And then they should be even clearer that the rules will be enforced. If I invite someone into my living room, that’s not permission to spit (or worse) on my carpet. I will invite anyone who does that to leave.

The law is clear on all of this: We are not responsible for what others post on our sites if we’re simply providing a forum. But that does not mean that we have to put up with incivility. We can — and should — remove it.

Readers also have to take some responsibility, too. Namely, be extremely skeptical of anonymous speech.

I wrote in a recent posting that people who don’t stand behind their words deserve, in almost every case, no respect for what they say. The exceptions come when someone risks life or freedom or livelihood by being a whistle-blower or truth-teller. When the purpose is to take down other people, anonymity is most often a hiding place for the dishonorable.

We readers (in the broadest sense) are far too prone to accepting what we see and hear. We need to readjust our internal BS meters in a media-saturated age.

We should start with this principle:

An anonymous or pseudonymous attack on someone else should be presumed false, unless proved true.

UPDATE

Back when I was working on the Bayosphere project, dealing with forum and comment postings was one of the more time-consuming parts of the operation. We posted these guidelines, which we compiled from our own notions of how things should work, plus liberal cribbing from several other well-run sites:

• In short, we aim here for civility and mutual respect. Beyond that, we encourage robust discussions and debate.
• Members may be blocked from the site for vandalism, making personal attacks on other members, publishing others’ copyrighted material or for violating the guidelines and comments policy.
• Violators may be blocked from entry for 24 hours, for longer periods for repeat transgressors, or permanently, depending on the severity of the infraction.
• Using anonymous proxies to vandalize the site or otherwise causing disturbance will not be permitted. Moderators will block the IP of anonymous proxies indefinitely.
• Offensive, inflammatory or otherwise inappropriate screen names are not permitted, and the use of these will be prevented through blocking of accounts. Members blocked for having an inappropriate name will be permitted to rejoin Bayosphere under a new name.
• Remember, we need your help
• This is a community. If you see material that violates our site rules and guidelines, please contact us.
• Please also make suggestions, on our forums or via e-mail, on how we might improve these terms and guidelines.

Chris Eder, a combat correspondent with the U.S. Air Force, has been pondering citizen media and its application to the military. In “Broadcast This: Leveraging Citizen Journalism in the Air Force,” he dives deep into the topic. (Note: I spent some time with him on the phone and in an email exchange as he was developing his ideas.)

You may or may not agree with his political/policy/etc. views. But what he has to say — not just to his military colleagues but civilians, too — is well worth the investment of your time.

The University of Maryland’s J-Lab has announced:

Ten new ideas for amplifying community news will receive $12,000 New Voices grants to launch news sites for under-covered communities, embed TV reporters in neighborhoods, network regional radio programs, and map the local impact of climate change.

Here are the funded projects. Congrats to all.

* Vermont Climate Witness. To create a map-based interactive experience to track how residents see climate change affecting the state’s economy, from fall foliage and maple syrup to skiing. Tamarack Productions, a nonprofit environmental awareness organization, will work with the Vermont Natural Resources Council to develop user content and create Google Map mash-ups to help users visualize weather data and real-time weather indicators.

* Northwest Community Radio Network Collaborative Newscast. To launch an hour-long, weekly newscast culled from the best public affairs programming produced by more than 40, often-isolated community, college and independent radio stations throughout the Pacific Northwest. Seattle-based Reclaim the Media will use the newscast to anchor a new content-sharing network that will expand the pool of regional news and programming for local audiences.

* Saint Paul City Newsdesk. To create and pay for a network of citizen journalists to cover neighborhood and municipal news for use by media outlets throughout the Twin Cities. Network stories, videos and radio pieces will be published on the St. Paul Neighborhood Network cable-access television web site and on the Twin Cities Daily Planet site.

* New Castle News Forum. To create a weekly cyber newspaper built from citizen-generated content for the Chappaqua area in Westchester County, N.Y., which has lost its local newspaper. The project is spearheaded by local volunteers under the auspices of the Friends of the Chappaqua Library.

* Neighbor to Neighbor. Cambridge Community Television will embed citizen journalists in each of the five neighborhoods of Cambridge, Mass., to report on local issues and events, feature local viewpoints, and facilitate participation in local issues. Five neighborhood segments will be produced and edited into a monthly 30-minute program to air four times each week, streamed live on CCTV’s web site and archived. Segments will be incorporated in the Cambridge Media Map.

* Bilingual Interactive Environmental Journalism. To develop bilingual news and interactive narratives for OurTahoe.org to help the Spanish-speaking residents of the Lake Tahoe Basin understand environmental threats to the area. The Reynolds School of Journalism at the University of Nevada-Reno will spearhead content creation and solicitation through its Graduate Program in Interactive Environmental Journalism, aided by local newspaper partners.

* Neo-News Network. To build a news and information hotline for Gary, Ind., accessed via web, phone, mobile text messaging and listservs to supplement available media. Content will be generated by students and young professionals and coordinated by the Central District Organization, a group led by young professionals who have returned to Gary to live.

* Fulton Hill Interactive Portal. To train local citizen journalists and build a news and information portal for Fulton Hill, a low-income neighborhood in Richmond, Va. Virginia Commonwealth University’s School of Mass Communications will work with the Fulton Hill Neighborhood Resource Center to help local residents produce stories, photos, audio, video and a Fulton Hill wiki.

* Building Blocks. To launch a news and information site to inform New York City residents about major real estate development projects that affect their neighborhoods. Spearheaded by the Pratt Center for Community Development, the project will initially provide news articles, Q&As, public hearing calendars and discussion forums focusing on the redevelopment of Coney Island in Brooklyn, the reuse of the Kingsbridge Armory in the Bronx, and the expansion of Columbia University onto a 17-block area of Harlem in Manhattan.

* News Desk on Access SF. To train San Francisco nonprofits to produce a monthly community news program with a neighborhood focus for cable access television and video blogs. Five special interest desks will produce stories targeting youth, LGBT issues, arts and culture, age and disabilities, and multi-lingual stories. Each special interest desk will have its own video blog, supported by Access SF, the city’s community television corporation.

Slate’s Jack Shafer writes “In defense of the Anna Nicole Smith feeding frenzy“:

Perhaps the Smith coverage doesn’t advance democracy in quite the same way gavel-to-gavel C-SPAN telecasts do. But the demand for natural disaster, tragedy, crime, murder coverage, and other “sensational” news has always ranked at the top of reader and viewer preferences. Giving the audience what it wants shouldn’t automatically be considered a crime.

I don’t hear anyone calling it a crime. But this saturation coverage was at least a journalistic misdemeanor.

If Shafer’s piece had run on April 1, I’d have gotten the joke.

UPDATED

Google Maps personal version is going to be a huge change in the mapping market. It lets people annotate their own maps in rich ways, using the Web the way it was possible to use the application Google Earth before.

It’s not new in concept. A startup called Platial has been doing this already, and has created a terrific community of users (including my class at Berkeley this spring). What Platial does that Google doesn’t is crucial, however.

First is a “mapkit” that lets you embed a map inside your own site, the way YouTube does with videos and Flickr does with photos. How long will it take Google to do this?

Second is collaboration. Platial is all about collaborating. Again, expect Google to catch up.

Google is already ahead of Platial in several ways, meanwhile, including the ability to draw shapes on the maps. This is more like the geographic information system (GIS) look than Platial and Yahoo, among others, have managed to achieve.

Mapping is about to go super-mainstream, and we are just at the edges of understanding how powerful it will be. The arms race to offer us the best product is under way.

My professional life has been particularly blessed by a small group of people who pushed me to be better. They challenged me to try new things, to adapt and endure.

Neal Shine, who died yesterday, was one of them.

Today’s Detroit Free Press, the paper to which he devoted his working years, calls him “A champion of fairness, children and Detroit.” All true, and so much more.

The words, as always, do insufficient justice to the man — to the empathy he never had to cultivate, but which emanated from his soul; to the wonderful, wicked sense of humor that lit up every conversation and often left me breathless with laughter; to the love of family, friends and place; to all the qualities of a person who, as few can, earned the word “great” next to his name.

Everyone who knew Neal has a story about his generosity of time and spirit. Here’s mine:

In the early 1990s I was working at the Free Press and feeling fairly low about my future in journalism. The paper and I felt like a bit of a mismatch, despite everyone’s tries to find the right combination of position and person. I was ready to bag it entirely and try something else for a living.

I went to Neal, as I and countless others had done over the years, for advice. “Danny,” he said — no one since my childhood had called me Danny, but coming from Neal it seemed right — “we’ll figure it out.” He gently insisted that I could not quit on myself or the craft that was, so obviously to him, meant to be the better part of my life’s work, as it turned out to be.

Rest in peace, Neal.

Crosscut Seattle “seeks to reinvigorate local journalism in the Pacific Northwest.”

NY Times: For Tribune Buyer, a Storm to the West. The Los Angeles Times was nothing but trouble for the Tribune Company, and it may prove even more of a challenge for its new owner, Samuel Zell.

Zell is a smart, smart businessman. He knows zip, he’s made clear, about newspapers and media.

Why should that stop him? He has recognized, as have other financial buyers of newspapers, that these are businesses that churn out cash at prodigious rates.

Will he milk the cow — which has more life in it than the utter pessimists believe — or try to run a longer-term business? There’s absolutely nothing in his record to suggest that he cares about anything except cashing in.

If I worked as a journalist for Tribune Co. today, I’d be even more worried.

“Help us update the Slate message boards,” asks Slate magazine.

Slate’s a terrific magazine, but it hasn’t been very “webby” in ways that other publications have long since achieved. The singular innovation there, however, is the FrayWatch, where Slate goes into the comments to extract the best remarks and new facts, and then puts them in context. (Example here.)