Center for Citizen Media

An interesting crowd will be gathering next month in Memphis, Tennessee, for the National Conference for Media Reform. I’ll be speaking about citizen media.

Hope to see some of you there.

A student wrote to ask “whether blogs are a valid form of journalism.” I replied:

An equivalent question would be: Is publishing on paper a valid form of
journalism?

Blogging is simply a publishing method — a website.

Some blogs are clearly journalism. Most are not. The bloggers who are doing
journalism are for the most part following standard journalistic principles
such as thoroughness, accuracy, fairness and independence as well as
transparency.

NY Times: No Stock-Class Shift, Times Co. Chief Says. Janet L. Robinson, the chief executive of The New York Times Company, sought to put to rest yesterday any notion that the company might change its dual-class stock structure, a move that could make the company vulnerable to a takeover. “The Ochs-Sulzberger family, which owns approximately 20 percent of the equity of our company — more than any other investor — has no intention of opening our doors to the kind of action that is tearing at the heart of some of the other great journalistic institutions in our country,” Ms. Robinson told analysts.

Glad to hear it. The Times’ quality is partly the result of the family’s decision to have such high standards and pay what it takes to keep them.

Their stance, in theory, is bad for me, if you believe the agitators who want to force the company to move to a one-class stock structure. That’s because I own a small amount of NY Times company stock.

But I’m convinced that it’s worth more in the long run if the management gets to manage for the long run, not the short-term hyperventilations from Wall Street.

Pegasus News — long awaited in the citizen media community — has launched its news site. I’ll be watching with interest.

Over at Slate, Jack Shafer shreds the Wall Street Journal’s self-serving description of its own downsizing. Quote:

It’s the rare amputee who describes himself as better off without his two big toes than with them, but that’s what Wall Street Journal Publisher L. Gordon Crovitz attempts today in a “Letter From the Publisher” on the paper’s op-ed page.

UPDATED

The rise of the citizen journalist is not a new phenomenon. People have been witnessing and taking pictures of notable events for a long, long time. And they’ve been selling them to traditional news organizations just as long.

But professional photojournalists, and more recently videographers, have continued to make good livings at a craft that helps inform the rest of us about the world we live in. That craft has never been more vibrant, or vital. But the ability to make a living at it will crumble soon.

The pros who deal in breaking news have a problem. They can’t possibly compete in the media-sphere of the future. We’re entering a world of ubiquitous media creation and access. When the tools of creation and access are so profoundly democratized, and when updated business models connect the best creators with potential customers, many if not most of the pros will fight a losing battle to save their careers.

Let’s do a little time travel.

This movie camera captured the most famous pictures in the citizen-media genre: the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Texas on November 22, 1963. Abraham Zapruder, the man pointing the camera that day in Dealey Plaza, sold the film to Life Magazine for $150,000 — about half a million dollars in today’s currency.

In Dealey Plaza that day, one man happened to capture a motion picture — somewhat blurred but utterly gruesome nonetheless — of those terrible events. Zapruder’s work, by any standard we can imagine, was an act of citizen journalism.

Now consider what media tools people carry around with them routinely today — or, better yet, consider what they”l have a decade from now. And then take yourself, and those tools, back to 1963.

Dozens or hundreds of people in Dealey Plaza would have been capturing high-definition videos of the assassination, most likely via their camera-equipped mobile phones as well as devices designed to be cameras and little else. They’d have been capturing those images from multiple perspectives. And — this is key — all of those devices would have been attached to digital networks.

If soon-to-be-ubiquitous technology had been in use back in 1963, at least several things are clear. One is that videos of this event would have been posted online almost instantly. Professional news organizations, which would also have had their own videos, would have been competing with a blizzard of other material almost from the start — and given traditional media’s usually appropriate reluctance to broadcast the most gruesome images (e.g. the Nick Berg beheading in Iraq), the online accounts might well be a primary source.

(Less germane to the topic here, we’d also soon have a three-dimensional hologram of the event, given the number of cameras capturing it from various angles. And we’d probably know for sure whether someone was shooting at the president from behind that famous grassy knoll.)

Consider, as well, how we might remember the horror of September 11, 2001 under similar circumstances. Recall that people inside the World Trade Center towers and on the four hijacked airplanes were making mobile-phone calls to loved ones, colleagues and authorities. Suppose they had been sending videos of what was going on inside those buildings and planes to the rest of us? The day’s events would go into history with even grimmer — and even more human — detail.

Now consider another famous picture, the one at the left. It’s the single image that we will most remember from the July 2005 bombings in London. It was taken by Adam Stacey inside the Underground (subway), as he and others escaped from a smoky train immediately after one of bombs exploded.

Again, the production values of the image are hardly professional. But that doesn’t matter. What does matter is the utter authenticity of the image, made so by the fact that the man was there at the right time with the right media-creation gear.

In a world of ubiquitous media tools, which is almost here, someone will be on the spot every time.

And there will be business models and methods to support their work.

Today, YouTube is the site of choice for all kinds of videos, including newsworthy ones such as the recent abuse-by-taser of the student at the University of California, Los Angeles (more than 764,000 viewings as of today), and the racist nightclub rantings of Michael “Kramer” Richards (more than 1.2 million viewings). Both were captured by mobile-phone video cameras.

Others will make their way to sites like the newly announced projects such as YouWitness News (a joint project of Yahoo and Reuters), or operations like Scoopt or NowPublic. They and other companies want to be aggregators of, and in some cases brokers for, citizen-created media. (Disclosures: I am teaching a class with Yahoo’s editorial director, and I’m an advisor to NowPublic.)

If reputable photojournalists face big changes, so do the paparazzi who capture celebrities’ public (and sometimes private) doings. Bild, the trashy German tabloid, asks its Leser-Reporters to send in their own pictures — and pays handsomely. (I’ve been told, but haven’t verified, that some of the professional paparazzi are submitting photos this way, because they can make more money than through traditional dealings with the newspaper.)

The business part of this is important. I’m highly skeptical of business models, typically conceived by Big Media Companies, that tell the rest of us: “You do all the work, and we’ll take all the money we make by exploiting it.” This is not just unethical.. It’s also unsustainable in the long run.

Not every person who captures a newsworthy image or video necessarily wants to be paid. Stacey’s picture was widely distributed, including onto the front pages of many newspapers, in part because he put it out under a Creative Commons license allowing anyone else the right to use it in any way provided they attribute the picture to its creator. There were misunderstandings (including at least one use by a photo agency that apparently claimed at least partial credit for itself), but the licensing terms almost certainly helped spread it far and wide in a very short time.

The problems this trend will create are not trivial. One is that democratized media tools also include easy and cheap ways to fake or alter reality.

The picture at right circulated widely around the Net after Sept. 11. It purportedly shows an airliner about to hit a World Trade Center tower, with an unlucky tourist having his picture taken just before the moment of impact. The photo is fake — a composite created by a not-so-funny prankster. It was quickly debunked (see this Snopes urban-legends page, for example), but not before a lot of people were initially fooled. Some who saw the “photo” are probably still believing it was authentic.

To weed out the phony stuff, we’ll need to combine traditional means of verification with new kinds of reputation systems. It won’t be easy, but the need for such methods is plain enough.

So, back to our friends, the professional photo or video journalists. How can people who cover breaking news for a living begin to compete? They can’t possibly be everywhere at once. They can compete only on the stories where they are physically present — and, in the immediate future, by being relatively trusted sources.

But the fact remains, there are far more newsworthy situations than pro picture takers. In the past, most of those situations never were captured. Not any longer.

Is it so sad that the professionals will have more trouble making a living this way in coming years? To them, it must be — and I have friends in the business, which makes this painful to write in some ways.

To the rest of us, as long as we get the trustworthy news we need, the trend is more positive.

Remember, there was once a fairly healthy community of portrait painters. When photography came along, a lot of them had to find other work; or at least their ranks were not refilled when they retired. Professional portrait photographers, similarly, are less in demand today than a generation ago. But portraits have survived — and thrived.

The photojournalist’s job may be history before long. But photojournalism has never been more important, or more widespread.

UPDATE: The comments are producing some fascinating material. Please take a look.

Some folks are misinterpreting what I’ve written. (Part of this is my fault, for not being crystal clear at the top that I’m talking about spot (breaking) news; I’ve fixed that — and also changed the title of this posting to say “Decline” instead of “Demise” as suggested indirectly by a commenter.)

I’m not saying all professional photojournalism will disappear. Great feature photography is a special skill that amateurs won’t match anytime soon, if ever. There will be many cases, as well, where even the pros get in place to capture the spot-news picture.

But they won’t be able to be everywhere at once. And in an era when news organizations are whacking away at staff as fast as they can, the pressure to use what the community can provide will be irresistible given the money it will save.

I’m not saying this evolution is an entirely positive development (though it will help in some circumstances). I am saying it’s inevitable.

Also: I’ve corrected Nick Berg’s first name, which I got wrong in the original piece.

And, welcome to Slashdot readers, whose comments are well worth a look, too. Thanks as well to BoingBoing and Romanesko readers who followed links here, and to the many others who linked to this post.

UPDATED

Running the latest version of Firefox is a huge drag — repeated freezes that require a forced shutdown of the application on my MacBook Pro. Growing pains for the Mozilla folks or just sloppy coding?

Update: I should have been clearer, as commenters are noting, that the sloppy coding, if it exists, could easily be the doing of the folks writing the add-on extensions that many Firefox users, including me, have found so helpful. I’ve been testing the application with some of the extensions removed to see if that is the problem and, if so, to try to isolate what add-on(s) might be causing the problem.

New Update: The Mozilla folks have identified a small bug in the software. I installed a slightly updated version of the application, I’ve had no freezes since then. Thanks!

NY Times: Open-Source Spying. For the intelligence agencies to benefit from “social software,” he said, they need to persuade thousands of employees to begin blogging and creating wikis all at once. And that requires a cultural sea change: persuading analysts, who for years have survived by holding their cards tightly to their chests, to begin openly showing their hands online.

…

The premise of spy-blogging is that a million connected amateurs will always be smarter than a few experts collected in an elite star chamber; that Wikipedia will always move more quickly than the Encyclopaedia Britannica; that the country’s thousand-odd political bloggers will always spot news trends more quickly than slow-moving journalists in the mainstream media. Yet one of the most successful new terrorism-busting spy organizations since 9/11 does in fact function like a star chamber. The National Counterterrorism Center was established by Congress in 2004 and charged with spotting the most important terrorism threats as they emerge. The counterterrorism center is made up of representatives from every intelligence agency — C.I.A., F.B.I., N.S.A. and others — who work together under one roof. Each analyst has access to details particular to his or her agency, and they simply share information face to face. The analysts check their personal networks for the most dire daily threats and bring them to the group. In three meetings a day, the officials assess all the intel that has risen to their attention — and they jointly decide what the nation’s most serious threats are. “We call it carbon-based integration,” said William Spalding, the center’s chief information officer.

American Journalism Review: Blogging Between the Lines. The mainstream media have fallen in love with blogs, launching them on everything from politics to life in Las Vegas to bowling. But does the inherent tension between the blogosphere’s anything-goes ethos and the standards of traditional journalism mean this relationship is doomed?

Well, it took only, what, seven years for blogging to catch on in newsrooms. Given the journalism industry’s hidebound ways, that’s not so bad.

But the same questions — relevant ones — keep popping up. This article talks at great length about the legal and ethical questions, which are mostly being asked by lawyers, if my own experience is any guide.

I recall being summoned to a meeting four or five years ago at Knight Ridder headquarters in San Jose. The topic was blogging, something I’d been doing since 1999 and pushing inside the company ever since. I believed passionately that this format was one of the answers to our long-term troubles — and at the very least it was a great additional tool of our trade.

So, as I drove downtown to the meeting, I had visions of senior management folks asking me to lead or help a company-wide blogging explosion, where Knight Ridder would become the unchallenged leader in this form of new media. It wasn’t to be.

Instead, when I walked into the room, I found a conference table around which were two journalists other than me. Everyone else was a lawyer or an executive with a worried look on his/her face.

And the question wasn’t, “How can we make this happen?”

It was, “How exposed are we?”

Exposed, as in exposed to lawsuits.

We spent most of the time talking about finding ways to insulate the company against the problems the lawyers were being paid to anticipate. We spent very little time talking about how blogs might improve our journalism.

Now my old paper has a bunch of blogs. Everyone does. In the slow-moving ways of newspapers, the progress has been rapid. In the world we actually live in today, it’s been dog-slow.

East Bay Express: No reporters, no news?. (A)ll union editorial employees at the San Jose Mercury News have been ordered to not come to work on December 5 between 8 a.m. and 10 a.m. Merc management told the reporters and photogs earlier this week that they should remain at home, waiting by their phones for a call that will tell them whether they’ve lost their jobs.

Having spent many happy years at the Mercury News, the paper’s implosion, which was somewhat slow-motion but is gathering speed, leaves me with a deep sadness.

It was probably inevitable, despite the blatantly misleading comments Dean Singleton, CEO of the new owner, Medianews, made after his company bought the paper. Remember, only a few months ago, when he said his company was “getting the flagship and the crown jewel of Knight Ridder.” The diamond-cutters are in the building.