Center for Citizen Media

TV Technology: Corporations Co-opt Citizen Journalism. Aided by the Internet and low-cost digital media acquisition tools, there is no doubt that a handful of talented, dedicated independent media creators have and continue to innovatively challenge the world’s largest corporate media organizations.However, as with most good things, the big guys eventually tried to co-opt it for their own benefit. The first attempts to use ordinary people as news reporters started with local TV stations and news organizations including CNN and the BBC. They actively sought amateur video of newsworthy events made by their own viewers.

No question that there’s a lot of activity aimed at co-opting the field. This is what traditional media do, after all.

But the possibilities are equally interesting for collaboration and real competition. That’s what we need more than anything.

The PBS Frontline series starts in most places tonight. It looks extraordinary.

Democracy Now has an interview of note: Imprisoned Journalist Josh Wolf Speaks Out From Jail After Over 170 Days Behind Bars.

The Josh Wolf case is a disgrace in all kinds of ways, as we’ve noted before.

Lost Remote: AP jumps into citizen journalism with NowPublic deal. In effect, with AP’s broad distribution, this is the biggest development so far in the short history of citizen journalism, although Reuter’s recent citizen journalism deal with Yahoo’s You Witness News is a close second.

This will be worth watching closely. A key question, plainly, is whether and how the citizen-journalist contributors are rewarded for their work.

(Disclosure: I’m on NowPublic‘s advisory board.)

Over the weekend, I attended a day-long workshop in Santa Barbara, California, where several dozen people got together to discuss what organizers called “Newspaper 2.0” — the next version of a venerable, and valuable, part of the traditional media ecosystem.

The gathering’s subtext was the rapid decline of the main local daily newspaper. That reality lent a sense of urgency, and opportunity, to the session.

Several days before the workshop, the Santa Barbara News-Press all but completed might be termed a self-immolation with a round of firings of the professional journalism staff. These terminations weren’t the first, but the casualties included a sportswriter who’d been at the paper for decades and had a major following around the city.

The firings — and some resignations by staffers who couldn’t abide the actions of the paper’s owner, Wendy McCaw — have been accompanied by behavior that I find bizarre. McCaw’s lawyers have been launching threats and lawsuits at critics and former employees, and even one libel suit at a writer for the American Journalism Review. (The LA Times has a good story about the incredible antics.)

PR professors and their students will be studying McCaw and her operations for decades to come. They’ll have a case study in how to poison opinion — against your own interests.

Now, there’s a long tradition in America of local newspaper owners acting in high-handed ways, or worse. But where they could once do what they pleased and lose no influence in the local journalism scene, that’s no longer necessarily the case.

Even as secular shifts in the advertising business take away classifieds and other once-solid revenue streams, and circulation drops steadily as older readers die and younger people don’t bother to pick up newspapers, new voices are appearing at the edges to fill in the gaps.

The urgency at the Newspaper 2.0 gathering was worry by local people who care about their community and the necessity of quality journalism in a democracy. There were lots of ideas, no firm conclusions, about what do do.

The newspaper’s implosion, I’d argue, presents a phenomenal opportunity in Santa Barbara. The News-Press can no longer be considered even remotely the city’s “paper of record” — a term once reserved for news organizations that covered all of the major news in a community.

What can replace it? In an opening workshop session with JD Lasica, I suggested that the people in the room should consider whether they want to build a single competitor or aggregate all the ideas and products now being created as an alternative. Aggregation is valuable, if it’s done right.

I’m skeptical of a single entity that takes the place of the paper. At least two of Saturday’s meeting participants are creating products that will inevitably compete with each other as they try to carve out a piece of the local media scene. Independent media already exists in the city, meanwhile.

And there are several excellent bloggers keeping track of the goings-on. I’ve been following Craig Smith’s blog, for example. His coverage of this situation — what I told the group I’d been watching with “morbid fascination” from afar these past weeks — has been incisive, witty and thorough.

Keep an eye on Santa Barbara. The future is under way in a city that only looks idyllic.

(Kudos to Doc Searls for organizing the workshop. JD Lasica did several interviews with participants, including this with William MacFadyen, who’s building a citizen media site, and this one with Smith.)

Times of London: Fake bloggers soon to be ‘named and shamed’. Hotels, restaurants and online shops that post glowing reviews about themselves under false identities could face criminal prosecution under new rules that come into force next year. Businesses which write fake blog entries or create whole wesbites purporting to be from customers will fall foul of a European directive banning them from “falsely representing oneself as a consumer”.

It’s a fine idea to name and shame. People who cheat this way deserve censure.

But criminal prosecution? That’s going way, way too far.

The British are turning so fast toward police state behavior these days — uber-surveillance and more — that something like this should be no surprise. Nonetheless, this over-reaction is worse than the offense.

SF Chronicle: Tonight at 11, news by neighbors / Santa Rosa TV station fires news staff, to ask local folks to provide programming.

Spendlove is loath to dub what’s coming next to Channel 50 as “citizen journalism,” the industry buzz term that is journalism’s equivalent of user-generated content online. Broadly defined, citizen journalism means tapping into the wisdom and creativity of the audience and enabling nonprofessionals to become part of the news-gathering process. Media analysts believe there may be 700 citizen journalism outfits reporting on geographic nooks of the country and countless other bloggers doing various versions of the local news.

No, in this case it sounds more like a way to save money, and not much more.

It’ll still be intriguing to see what happens.

In a story entitled “WiFi Turns Internet Into Hideout for Criminals,” the Washington Post asserts, among other things:

Open wireless signals are akin to leaving your front door wide open all day — and returning home to find that someone has stolen your belongings and left a mess that needs cleaning.

An open WiFi signal is nothing of the sort for people who make routine adjustments for safety of the data in their own computer, such as a firewall on one’s own PC. It’s entirely possible to run an open signal without seriously jeopardizing one’s own data in the way the article suggests through its painfully strained analogy.

The article goes on:

One way to combat it [the need for house-cleaning] is for people to secure their wireless networks by making them password-protected. But, authorities said, businesses and cities that offer free connections need some way to track the users, such as filtering measures that could scan to see who is accessing the network.

Oh, really? A password-protected network using, for example, WEP “security” is little better than an open one. It may be worse, because it can create a false sense of personal safety.

The second quote gets to the real agenda of the story — or at least the agenda of the law-enforcement sources who probably convinced the reporter to do the piece in the first place. They want to stamp out open networks, period. And as they see cities starting to offer WiFi, they want to prevail on governments to force a registration system that will track everyone who uses such municipal systems.

That’s an issue worth discussing. Misinformation doesn’t help.

In today’s LA Times, media columnist Tim Rutten discusses the Anna Nicole Smith frenzy and its somewhat dismal implications for journalism’s more honorable traditions in a digital era. Key quote:

Television ratings or aggregated “hits” on newspaper websites constitute useful marketing information. When they’re transmuted into editorial tools, what you get is a kind of faux-empiricism that can create a false but nearly irresistible authority. It’s that most misleading of commodities, information without context. It is data, but not necessarily information, that you can use because you understand the data. In the case of these accumulations of online hits, it is hard to know what you’re measuring beyond a 24-hour fad or the inclinations of obsessive people with too much time on their hands. Standing on the cusp of this inevitable transformation, it’s a good moment for American newspapers to take a reflective breath to consider just how they want to play this numbers game — or, more important, whether they want to play it at all.

Which prompted Boston media critic and professor Dan Kennedy to observe:

Newspaper editors — the good ones, anyway — have traditionally aspired to something better. Unfortunately, being able to measure reader interest is going to make it harder to resist the urge to pander.

Uncharted waters ahead. Will we get irretrievably lost?

The SF Chronicle catches up with a somewhat old story today with a piece called “Creeps beware: Web gives women revenge / Catcall recipients share their stories — and men’s photos” — an article focusing on the way female bloggers are using the HollaBack sites to “post pictures and videos of guys who harass them in public.”

There’s something both great and creepy about this practice. Great, because it may deter some bad behavior, after all.

But it’s creepy to be imaging that our every move in public places (and, increasingly, semi-private places we once assumed to be free of surveillance from Big or Little Brother) is now under observation and being recorded. Moreover, a video taken out of context can be used to embarrass anyone.
A key quote in the Chronicle story, from a man who worries that flirting could put him in an unfriendly light on the Web, applies to almost everything we find in the media today, but particularly important in this context:

In the Information Age, when even the most trivial missteps by ordinary citizens can be exposed — from bad parking to letting their dogs poop on the sidewalk — people should realize what they read online is just one anonymous person’s opinion…

A video is more than an opinion. But even videos can be distorted to create false impressions. We need to remember context, and we need to remember that not everything we see or hear is a fair reflection of reality.