Center for Citizen Media

Daylife‘s mission to:

“gather stories of all shapes and sizes from countless perspectives around the world, and then present them in a rich browseable landscape, helping you make connections you never knew existed. stories of all shapes and sizes from countless perspectives around the world, and then present them in a rich browseable landscape, helping you make connections you never knew existed.”

It’s a very promising start to a useful service. If they get it right, they’ll be Google News done the right way. (Unfortunately, like Google News, they don’t tell you which publications they’re including in their database — bad policy.)

Reuters: User-generated content good for old media-report. Traditional media companies are ideally placed to benefit from the explosion of user-generated content and should see it as an opportunity and not a threat even though the potential revenue is limited, a report says.

Clearly true. But one big question is whether the media organizations will see this is a cheap way to get “free” content or help create an ecosystem that rewards people who are contributing the information.

If the former, they’re creating an unsustainable system. If the latter, the media ecosystem will grow more diverse.

It’s from Steve Outing and is in Editor & Publisher: Some Words of Advice for Small Newspapers. Example:

1. Copy and build from the industry leaders

Some of the most innovative new-media work in the newspaper industry in the last decade has come from small or medium-small newspapers. To get ideas, you don’t have to look too far or too hard. Look at what newspaper Web sites by the Bakersfield Californian, Lawrence Journal-World, Bonita Daily News and Spokane Spokesman-Review, for instance, have done in recent years. Keep close tabs on their Web sites, because they often introduce new features that are worth emulating. (True, those aren’t all “small” papers, but some of the things those papers do online could be accomplished by smaller publishers.)

It’s a terrific list, and will be ignored by most newspaper folks who are too preoccupied with putting out fiscal fires. Too bad.

(Disclosure: I’m an investor in Steve’s new company.)

Great news. Lisa Williams has launched Placeblogger, covering hyperlocal news sites around the nation.

What’s a placeblog? Lisa explains:

Placeblogs are sometimes called “hyperlocal sites” because some of them focus on news events and items that cover a particular neighborhood in great detail — and in particular, places that might be too physically small or sparsely populated to attract much traditional media coverage. Because of this, many people have associated them with the term “citizen journalism,” or journalism done by non-journalists.

Placeblogs, however, are about something broader than news alone. They’re about the lived experience of a place. That experience may be news, or it may simply be about that part of our lives that isn’t news but creates the texture of our daily lives: our commute, where we eat, conversations with our neighbors, the irritations and delights of living in a particular place among particular people. However, when news happens in a community, placeblogs often cover those events in unique and nontraditional ways…

Jay Rosen’s PressThink and the Center for Citizen Media are proud “co-presenters” of Placeblogger. The Drupal specialists at Bryght are handling the technology. Jay and I, with Yahoo’s Susan Mernit, are advisors.

But you should think of the site as Lisa’s, who’s the driving spirit — and yours, in a sense, because it will need the help of many folks as it proceeds.

Lisa is the founder and operator of H2otown, the other Placeblogger presenter and the excellent site that covers Watertown, Massachusetts, with a keen eye and ear. She’s a natural at this stuff, and when she decided to give Placeblogger a try — long before the name came to anyone — she was the obviously best person to do it.

The site contains a fantastic directory of some 750 placeblogs, arranged by geography and mostly (so far) inside the United States. It will grow.

One of the first postings is a list of Lisa’s top-ten U.S. placeblogs. I expect the list will engender some comment and, no doubt, dispute. But that’s a good sign, and no doubt the list will change over time. Here’s it is, anyway:

1. Baristanet, Montclair, NJ
2. Edhat, Santa Barbara, CA
3. Fresno Famous, Fresno, CA
4. Westport Now, Westport, CT
5. ChiTown Daily News, Chicago, IL
6. New Haven Independent, New Haven, CT
7. Gotham Gazette, New York, NY
8. Philly Future, Philadelphia, PA
9. MNSpeak, Minneapolis/St. Paul, MN
10. Duke City Fix, Albuquerque, NM

Are you a placeblogger, or do you know about one? Please visit the site, and help Lisa broaden and deepen the knowledge she’s collecting.

It’s New Year’s Day in Japan, where I am today. Happy 2007 to all.

(Photo by mjzitek; published under a Creative Commons license)

Tom Stites, a former newspaper editor and a deep thinker about the journalism craft, gave a speech last summer that won plenty of well-deserved attention. In that talk — which we guest-posted here, entitled “Is media performance democracy’s critical issue?” — he posed a key question about our future.

Now he’s back with an essay about the need for great journalism.Read it below:

Continue reading →

What will happen in American journalism in 2007? Here, in the multiple-choice format borrowed from (and with grateful apologies to) columnist William Safire, are my own best guesses. Answers are at the bottom. (Note: “All” or “None” are valid choices.)

1. The biggest network-news shock will occur when:
A. A major broadcast network kills its evening news show due to low ratings and the prospect of making more money with a “reality” show
B. CBS replaces Katie Couric with Howard Stern
C. Google launches a highly viewed daily “newscast” featuring editor- and audience-selected YouTube videos, and syndicates the program to independent TV stations

2. CNN will:
A. Hire Ann Coulter to make itself even less distinguishable from Fox News
B. Restore its reputation for respectable journalism by firing Nancy Grace and Glenn Beck
C. Create a system for routinely paying citizen journalists for their videos

3. Local TV news shows will:
A. Start producing actual news reports
B. Create special segments featuring video news releases
C. Attempt to persuade citizen journalists to provide all the content without compensation
D. Collaborate with citizen journalists, and pay them, to produce more comprehensive reports

4. The first major American news organization to ask its audience for reporting help on a major project will be:
A. New York Times
B. Washington Post
C. NBC News
D. Fox News

5. Most newspaper executives will:
A. Continue to downsize their newsrooms without any real plan for the long term
B. Complain incessantly about competition from online advertising competitors
C. Remain suspicious of citizen media except as a possible way to save money
D. Innovate at the edges, not in the core functions

6. The number of top editors at over-100,000 circulation newspapers who will quit or be fired:
A. Fewer than 3
B. 3-7
C. 8-12
D. More than 12

7. Scandals will emerge with the disclosure of:
A. Inflated circulation numbers for magazines
B. Special-coverage deals between news executives and newsmakers
C. Widespread pay-for-play deals involving bloggers

8. Google will:
A. Pull more and more advertising away from other media companies
B. See its stock drop precipitously as unfixed click-fraud drives away advertisers
C. Offer an online marketplace connecting citizen media creators and media organizations
D. Start a print magazine called “Googling”

9. The most important journalism innovation will be:
A. The combination of reputation and popularity in selecting news that matters
B. Sophisticated “Web 2.0” mashups
C. A major investigation, reported in part by the audience, leading to significant state and/or federal legislation

10. A prominent blogger will:
A. Lose his/her house in a libel judgment or settlement
B. Win a Pulitzer prize in journalism
C. Win a MacArthur “genius” grant

Answers: 1-C; 2-none; 3-C; 4-B; 5-all; 6-B; 7-all; 8-a; 9-all; 10-A.

Tom Evslin explains how the alleged “concessions” by AT&T to get approval of its BellSouth buyout are a sham:

• at&t’s IPTV is exempted from the neutrality provision. It is the TV “pipes” that at&t CEO Ed Whitacre thinks are his. Trouble is, there are no separate pipes on an IP network. at&t has left itself full flexibility to favor its own Internet video offers over all challengers or to charge others a premium for equal treatment.
• Very carefully, the ACCESS network is defined as the part of the at&t supplied network between the customer premises and the nearest Internet peering point. But at&t owns huge stretches of Internet BACKBONE (the part of the Internet between peering points); there is absolutely no promise of neutrality here.
• Even this very weak concession sunsets in two years rather than the three and half years at&t has offered for their other “concessions”.

Sadly, people who should know better have been utterly taken in by this bait-and-switch.

The principles that made the Internet the most open and valuable platform — for everyone, not just the people who control networks — have been shredded. CItizen media is going to be hurt badly by this deal.

Star Tribune: Star Tribune’s sale turns several new pages. The Star Tribune’s new chairman is a Wall Street investor who says he’s driven by public service. Chris Harte is also a resident of Texas and Maine and a former newspaper executive who’ll be advising an investment group that has never owned a daily newspaper.

Oh, sure, these investors made the deal in search of ways to contribute to public service. What insulting drivel. They did it to make money, and they bought the paper at a price that may well work out well for them.

Another possible outcome is this: The new owners a) pay themselves gigantic bonuses; b) milk what’s left of the cash cow; and c) unload the thing in a couple of years to someone who’ll slash and burn even more.

Washington Post: Google Set To Expand Newspaper Ad Program. But to hear newspaper executives and analysts tell it, the outlook is more cautious. They said Google has brought in new advertisers, such as small companies outside their distribution areas looking to build more awareness for their products. But Google’s online ad technology is so new that it remains unclear how much it will help newspapers, they said.

Google is in business for Google, and in the long run it’s in direct competition with newspapers. If executives don’t keep that in high focus, they will regret jumping this particular shark in the end.