Center for Citizen Media

Jack Shafer, in “When bad financial news for newspapers is good news for journalism,” thinks the implosion in stock value of newspaper companies — and newspaper sales for well below what they’d have brought only a few years ago — is

potentially good news for journalism. It pops the bubble that had carried newspaper valuation beyond the Van Allen Belt. And by doing so, it presents publishers—and Wall Street—with more rational expectations about what sort of profits the newspaper industry can make without destroying itself.

I’m skeptical. Investors won’t change their fundamental ways. They’ll continue to demand even bigger cuts.

Hard to see a way out of the implosion anytime soon.

I’m at the Beyond Broadcast conference in Cambridge, Mass., where MIT professor Henry Jenkins, author of the important recent book Convergence Culture, was keynote speaker. I’ll be co-heading a workshop latger about the future of public-access television — the channels on local cable systems that carry locally generated programming, generally by non-professionals. Jason Crow, access coordinator at Cambridge Community Television, is co-leader of the workshop. More on that here.

Blog highlights from Doc Searls.

Reuters: Egyptian blogger jailed for insulting Islam.

An Alexandria court sentenced an Egyptian blogger to four years in jail on Thursday for insulting both Islam and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. Abdel Karim Suleiman, a 22-year-old former law student who has been in custody since November, was the first blogger to stand trial in Egypt for his Internet writings. He was convicted in connection with eight articles he wrote since 2004.

The case is a travesty, but in unfree nations such things are all too common.

Keep in mind that Egypt’s repressive regime has imprisoned others for speaking out. The fact that they’ve done it to a blogger is troubling in its own way, but not precedent-setting.

Big, big news in journalism today:

First, read this press release from Reuters about the launch of its Reuters Africa site. The mission:

to cover Africa in detail and from all angles, to give a wider sense of the issues and their contexts, and to explore the individual countries and cultures. Reuters Africa will target both those living on the continent, and anyone globally who follows African development, investment and news.

As Rebecca MacKinnon explains, the venerable news agency has “taken an important and trend-setting step” with this move, in part because

it demonstrates Reuters’ commitment to covering Africa not only as a general news story but also as a global business story – to an extent that I have not seen in other global English-language media…

It also

extends the news agency’s commitment to build synergies between the work of Reuters reporters and the work of bloggers from around Africa, who paint a much more diverse and vibrant picture of the continent than mainstream news reporting tends to do.

Global Voices Online is part of that commitment (and Reuters is a funder). A smart partnership is under way here, and the result are likely to be spectacular.

(Note: Rebecca MacKinnon is on this Center’s advisory board, and I’m on the Global Voices advisory board.)

(This posting first appeared as a guest column in PR Week.)

The university where I’m co-teaching a course this semester is one of several in the nation currently engaged in a ritual that comes around to all such institutions from time to time: finding and hiring a new journalism dean. These searches will, I hope, engender some even broader discussions.

The Digital Era has upended business models for traditional media and has created vast new opportunities for creating better journalism. But it hasn’t, so far, sparked enough of something we also need: a broad rethinking of journalism education itself.

I’m not attacking traditional methods. They served reasonably well in a time when professional journalists delivered “the news” via a somewhat limited number of outlets in any given place or about a given topic.

In an age of media saturation – when we are all becoming creators of media, using technologies that, in turn, help us become digital collaborators on work of various kinds – the traditional methods no longer suffice. Many J-schools fully recognize this; few have fully adapted to it.

The same issues apply to PR and advertising education, which are often housed in schools of journalism and communications. But those industries have been considerably more innovative, as pros, than journalism in recent years. I have little doubt those fields’ leaders are making their needs clear to educators.

Lots of journalism programs still teach courses like “Beginning Newswriting” or some such thing as part of the core curriculum. How vital is that, especially when personal audio and video are becoming at least as much a part of the storyteller’s toolkit as text? I’m not certain.

In some online educational mini-courses for would-be citizen journalists that I’m helping prepare for a journalism-oriented foundation, we’re not focusing on the how-to. We’re looking at core principles: accuracy, thoroughness, fairness, independence, and transparency. Exploring those, it seemed to me, was the most important first step.

Those principles and related skills are among the ones people will need to be media literate in a media-saturated world. I’d like to see every student take a basic media course at every level of education – not just college, but also grade, middle, and high school.

What would it include? Skepticism, for starters: Children need to learn to be independent thinkers and not take for granted that what they see, hear, or read is necessarily true or real. (Of course, in today’s timid and authoritarian society, teachers who try to help students think for themselves may be pilloried as radicals; this doesn’t help.)

J-schools will need especially to incorporate the conversational-media shift into their work. I hope they’ll become leaders in training would-be professionals on how to engage the audience in journalism, to help communities (of geography and interest) have broad and deep conversations about their futures.

New journalists will have to be entrepreneurs in coming decades. Can the J-schools teach product development in a Web world – and not lose sight of the journalistic principles and practices so vital to a self-governing society? Is there an alternative?

The Sunlight Foundation’s Congressional Web Site Investigation Project is under way:

Though no law requires them to do so, members of Congress maintain official Web sites at taxpayer expense to provide their constituents and the general public with relevant information about their work in Washington on our behalf.

Do these Web sites cut through the bewildering array of information available online about the Legislative Branch, making it easier for you to find relevant information about a member’s official acts and publicly required disclosures? Do they contribute to government transparency?

The Sunlight Foundation asks you to exercise citizen oversight and find out if we are getting our money’s worth from these congressional Web sites.

Consider helping out.

(Note: The foundation is funding one of our projects.)

(On Saturday, Feb. 24, at the Beyond Broadcast conference in Cambridge, Mass., I’m helping to put together a workshop about the future of public-access television — the channels on local cable systems that carry locally generated programming, generally by non-professionals. Jason Crow, access coordinator at Cambridge Community Television, is co-leader of the workshop.

I think it’s time to phase out public-access TV and replace it with something more attuned to the Internet Age, and I wrote a blog posting to that effect. Jason has his doubts about this, to put it mildly, and has interjected some comments in my posting.

See it below (and on the Beyond Broadcast site). We hope it will help spark a much broader conversation this weekend.)

DAN GILLMOR
Day and night across America, cable television systems devote one of their channels to programming known as “Public Access” — shows created by people in the communities the cable companies serve.

The programs range from interesting and useful to dull and dreadful. That’s what you’d expect from material created by people who aren’t media professionals. (Which is not to say that the pros create only great things themselves, of course.)

Good to bad to ugly, public access cable TV has given voice to people who had something to say. Using the cable companies’ production facilities and distribution, these folks have been able to make themselves heard by anyone who cared to watch and listen. Public access, by almost any standard, has been a valuable addition to the local media scene.

Valuable, but outdated: It’s time to phase out public access — but in a way that brings us even better publicly created news and entertainment.

The cable companies don’t like it. They have to spend money to provide it, dollars they’re much rather send to their bottom lines and shareholders. It costs bandwidth they’d rather use for other programming.

JASON CROW
The telephone companies trying to enter the business like it even less. They have been working in Washington — lobbying for legislation and revised FCC regulations — and in state capitals for permission to abandon many of their public interest obligations.

DAN GILLMOR
When cable systems were essentially the only game in town for video news and entertainment, their desires carried less weight against the public-interest value of public access. But in the age the Internet and more competitive media, the balance has shifted.

I’m not suggesting that we let the cable companies simply walk away from their community obligations. But there’s a fine way to give them relief from the burden of public access while increasing the number of public voices on matters of community interest.

Let’s make a deal with them, as follows:

1. In five years, cable systems will be free to abandon public access programming in every way. They won’t have to provide production facilities or channels.

JASON CROW
Wow, what you’re suggesting is a big giveaway to the cable and telephone companies. Remember, cable companies pay rent for use of public rights of way. At its core, public access TV is a result of a return on the use of public land. According to the National Cable and Telecom Association, cable companies pay 2.8 billion per year in franchise fees – rent for use of public land. These franchises pay the rent for hundreds of public access media center buildings, grant money for equipment, require universal buildout and provide analog channel and digital spectrum allocation.

Should we really give back those facilities and anywhere from 1-9 channels in over 1,000 communities across the United States? In addition there are dozens of institutional networks already operating, many interconnected, many with dark fiber we could harness as bandwidth. You are suggesting giving back the one of the largest public interest networks in the world, built on the ideals of free speech and civic participation.

DAN GILLMOR
2. In the meantime, they will use those production facilities and public-access personnel — who’ll need some retraining — to help members of the community learn modern media production techniques. Those techniques will focus on a Web model of content, not a broadcast model.

JASON CROW
I propose a “United Stations” movement that includes networking all of the stations into one solid network. There are many implications to this:
a. The largest cable network in the world;
b. Sharing of resources – curriculum, best practices;
c. Single marketing entity – dissolve the negative stereotypes;
d. Share programming (there is tons of good stuff out there).

We need to combine efforts for a net-based, many-to-many media with cable, one-to-many playback– more a Current.tv distribution model, with user submissions, voting, feedback, comments and the best get played on the channels.

DAN GILLMOR
Let’s look at the various constituencies of public access, and see who gets what under such a deal.

Cable companies: Over time, they get out of an obligation they meet grudgingly in most cases.

Public access employees: They effectively get a five-year employment guarantee, plus retraining in a field that is in many ways the future of media.

The public (the most important constituency): We get a vast array of new programming of all kinds, from a cadre of newly trained citizen media creators. Maybe cable systems will want to put some of it on their channels, or maybe not. But the Web makes it unimportant whether they do or not.

JASON CROW
What about those people who don’t have access to broadband?

DAN GILLMOR
Keep in mind that at least some public-access operations are already doing such things. For example, Cambridge (Mass.) Community Television offers a variety of classes with a distinctly Web-ish tint in many cases. Consider the session entitled “ZIP DOCS: 021XX” — the purpose of which is to “map the Cambridge community with video” using such tools as Google maps as well as standard video techniques. Cool stuff, and a major part of the future.

JASON CROW
We’ve offered podcasting and videoblogging classes in the past as well. We suggest our community members tag their content “cctvcambridge” in YouTube and Blip for redistribution on our drupal-based web community. I would suggest taking a look at the other progressive institutions around the US. For instance, DeProduction manages Denver Open Media, a public access tv web community that allows user to upload video, rank it, comment on it and get it on the cable channels.

DAN GILLMOR
We need much, much more of this.

Public access television was a good answer for its time. But the era when it was so needed is coming to a close.

Let’s create a legion of citizen media people who do solid, honorable work for the medium of the future: the Net.

JASON CROW
Let’s not abandon 30 years of building infrastructure and creating human connections with municipal leaders. We don’t have to reinvent the system, just adapt it to new technologies. There are great citizen journalists on the web like Lisa Williams who benefit from her Selectmen meeting being broadcast on her Government Access channel. She posts excerpts to her placeblog via YouTube. Let’s follow this example and work together to create a United Stations movement.

Slate’s Jack Shafer tries to unravel “The BALCO mess or travels in the gray areas of confidential source arrangement,” and writes of the San Francisco Chronicle reporters whose source for grand-jury minutes turned out to be a defense attorney:

Having found their leaker, the feds dropped the subpoena against the reporters. But a number of journalists, lawyers, and ethicists in the First Amendment Industrial Complex weren’t happy to learn that Williams and Fainaru-Ward weren’t the free-speech martyrs they imagined them to be.

First, a disclosure: I’m on the board of the California First Amendment Coalition, which has taken a stance defending the reporters. I was never entirely comfortable with this, but the federal government’s efforts were beyond heavy-handed. On balance, I agreed that the threat to journalism was substantial.

Now that we know who the leaker is — and that this soon-to-be-jailed lawyer publicly said the case against his clients should be dropped because the leaks had poisoned the jury pool — the Chronicle’s actions look a whole lot less noble. The paper is getting hammered by readers and critics, and I agree with some of the critics.

The newspaper not only got in bed with someone it knew to have an agenda readers would have found highly relevant — totally undisclosed, of course, by the paper — but it stayed silent when that person used the media to lie through his teeth. There’s no moral ambiguity; what the Chronicle did, by omission, was wrong.

There should be plenty of soul-searching going on inside the Chronicle right now. Sadly, if this story in Editor & Publisher is any indication, nothing of the kind seems to be happening.

I criticized JetBlue yesterday for missing an opportunity in its customer-relations debacle of recent days. The company’s failure to use its website smartly, I said, was a missed opportunity.

Today, JetBlue has posted a video by its CEO, David Neeleman, apologizing again for the mess — and offering a “Customer Bill of Rights” that will go a long way toward restoring trust.

Take a look at jerryrobertsandfriends.org, created in the wake of the bizarre goings-on at the Santa Barbara (Calif.) News-Press, where the owner has been firing people right and left — and suing journalists who write what she claims are unfair stories about her actions:

Amid the ongoing exodus of dozens of professional journalists from the News-Press, the paper’s owner has filed a flurry of legal threats, claims and lawsuits against people who dared to speak out or report about what was happening in the newsroom.

In response, a group of prominent local attorneys formed the Lawyers Alliance for Free Speech Rights, to help level the playing field for journalists who found themselves bludgeoned by legal attacks by Ampersand Publishing, owned by billionaire Wendy McCaw.

The site has a link for donations. Consider one.