Center for Citizen Media

ASAP

Originally uploaded by lisa.williams.

Derrick Lang, author of The Slug, part of ASAP, an AP initiative to experiment and multimedia and appeal to younger readers:

“This banner up here, I made that in Photoshop; these graphics on the side, I taught myself how to do that in TypePad; I had to teach myself how to do it…we have a lot of excellent audio and video people to help us, but there is no ‘blogging department.’

The story about the the television show Survivor dividing teams by race was broken on Derrik’s blog:

“I heard that maybe they were dividing teams by race, and I thought ‘That’s crazy, there’s no way they’re going to do that. But I called around, and sure enough, they were going to do it.”

During the Q&A afterward, Derrick Currie reveals that the pop culture blog adheres to the AP stylebook, and it is reviewed before it goes out. Sounds heavy. According to Technorati, the blog has 177 people linking to it as I write this; it started in May.
— Heard at the Sharon Johnson Memorial Workshop at the Pennsylvania News Association.

Tom Evslin’s graceful retraction of something he wrote recently helps us understand the changing media scene. Let’s unpack what happened.
In a posting entitled “Networked Citizen Journalists at Work” (including himself), he discussed the way folks peered into a small telecom company’s apparent business model. What prompted them? An item in David Pogue’s New York Times tech blog, which left some unanswered questions. Tom writes:

What’s interesting is that the business model left unexposed in David Pogue’s post was successively peeled back by bloggers with subject matter expertise AND THEIR READERS. And all three bogs ended up linked together through their comments so those who were interested could learn or contribute to the story.

What Tom wrote next was where he erred. He said:

But note that this isn’t all you should expect from journalism. There’s a strong circumstantial case for how the company makes money (which is not a crime although somewhat deceptive). But none of us, professional or amateur, has pressed the company itself for a reply.

Not so, as David Pogue noted in the comments in the original post I made about this, and to Tom himself.

I have a lot of trust in both of these gentlemen. Today I have even more.

At an Internet conference in Hungary during the past (too brief) several days, I met several people who would be standouts in any culture. Their intelligence and curiosity about the world reminded me of something my brother, Wiley, and I have talked about from time to time: Call it the Hungarian Greatness Quotient, perhaps.

Here’s a short list we drew up, for starters, of accomplished native Hungarians from the past century:

Music:
Béla Bartók
Zoltán Kodály
Georg Solti
George Szell
Antal Dorati
Christian Dohnanyi
Eugene Ormandy

Science & Math:
John von Neumann
Theodore von Kármán
Edward Teller
Leó Szilárd
Eugene Wigner
Paul Erdös
John Kemeny
George de Hevesy
Business:
Andy Grove
George Soros

Other:
Erno Rubik
Arthur Koestler
Elie Wiese

I sent a note to Andy Grove, one of the most prominent members of the list. He suggested adding Albert Szentgyorgyi, inventor of Vitamin C, and noted that there’s a book about all this by a Budapest professor, George Marx.

The “Men from Mars” title of this post comes from semi-humorous speculation that the Manhattan Project Hungarians must have come from another planet — they were so brilliant, the theory went, that this was as good an explanation as any for such a small nation producing so much talent. You can learn more in this essay by Marx, derived, I believe, from his book.

What does all this have to do with citizen media? Not much, I grant, but consider the Hungary Page and its giant list of famous Hungarians. If you know of any, you can submit their names, too.

The site is one of those publications that could not have existed before the Web. Now, we can make lists of anything, and everything.

UPDATED

Tom Evslin discusses the operations of some “Networked Citizen Journalists at Work” (including himself) as they peered into a small telecom company’s apparent business model. What prompted them? An item in David Pogue’s New York Times tech blog, which left some obvious unanswered questions. Tom writes:

What’s interesting is that the business model left unexposed in David Pogue’s post was successively peeled back by bloggers with subject matter expertise AND THEIR READERS. And all three bogs ended up linked together through their comments so those who were interested could learn or contribute to the story.

Crucially, he adds:

But note that this isn’t all you should expect from journalism. There’s a strong circumstantial case for how the company makes money (which is not a crime although somewhat deceptive). But none of us, professional or amateur, has pressed the company itself for a reply.

Update: David Pogue, in the comments, says he did press the company for an explanation.

Over at the MozillaWiki, they’re asking users for ideas about what features to put in upcoming versions:

We are currently in the early development stage for Firefox 3, and would like to collect all the ideas for feature enhancements in a single place. Our goal is to create a single index that lists what sorts of things we’re thinking of doing, with links to more detailed ideas about implementation specifics or concerns, and targets for inclusion in the project.

This is a smart approach, and one that more enterprises should emulate.

MAPLight.org “brings together information on campaign contributions and votes in the California legislature.”

We’ve heard from a couple of people in the past month or so about comments they wrote that didn’t make it onto the site. Apologies for this. Here’s how the comments work here, and what probably happened.

First, while we don’t require registration by comment posters, we do ask that you include an email address in your comment (it isn’t published publicly). We manually approve every new person who comments (based on the e-mail address). So if you post a first-time comment here, it goes into a holding area until we’ve looked at it to ensure that it’s an actual comment and not a trolling exercise or an outright spam. Once we’ve approved your first comment, you can post comments with no further intervention on our part.

It’s in the latter area — spam — where we have the problem that sometimes causes a legitimate comment to fall into a black hole.

You won’t be surprised to learn that the vast majority of blog comments are spam. To deal with the avalanche of bogus comments, we (and lots of other sites) use a fantastic tool called Akismet, a Web service that relies on wisdom of crowds to block the offending junk from polluting these pages.

Occasionally, a legitimate comment is flagged as spam. We Akismet puts what it has identified as spam into a separate holding area for a short time, and we try to go through all of the comments that have been so identified, and approve any that have been mistakenly considered spam.

Once in a great while, a legit comment gets flushed along with the spams. That’s our fault, not yours. Again, apologies.

So if you’ve posted a comment that didn’t appear, please let us know. We’ll work with you to get it properly posted.

I’m speaking tomorrow and Wednesday at the Internet Hungary conference. Then I’ll be in Spain to do the keynote at I Congreso Internacional de Nuevo Periodismo, a conference on new media. Postings may be somewhat sporadic.

Milverton Wallace, in an essay entitled “The new Corinthians: How the Web is socialising journalism,” says:

So now we’ve come full circle: from 17th /18th century amateurism, to 19th/20th century professionalism and back to amateurism in the 21st century.

Here we use “amateur” in the noble, Corinthian sense – someone or an activity motivated by love. And therein lies the problem. Amateur ethics, motivated by love, crashes against professional ethics, driven by commercial gain. Can they be reconciled?

Yes, he says:

The momentum of change is with the new Corinthians. The open source ethos and method of work/production, which began in the periphery with collaborative software development, is moving to centre stage by way of the blogging revolution and open standards in web services.

Read it all.

Frank Shaw: What Replaces Media? So in this world of citizen journalists, who covers the city council meetings? Who applies the resources to uncover what is really happening in Iraq and how the US government is (or is not) doing the right things? Today, it’s the New York Times and their ilk. Tomorrow, who will it be?

We already know who’s covering the city council meetings today. In contemporary American journalism, in most places, it’s not the NY Times and other major dailies. Most likely, it’s nobody.

Oh, daily newspapers do cover the government, sort of, in the major cities whose names they bear. The San Francisco Chronicle has City Hall reporters — in San Francisco. Ditto the Seattle Times — in Seattle. And so on.

But urban newspapers cover few if any of the other local governments where they circulate. Metropolitan areas contain dozens of cities and governmental units, not to mention school boards and a host of other important but (generally) dull groups that tax us, spend our money and otherwise determine how we live major parts of our lives.

So when the dominant dailies do cover those places and people and organizations, for the most part, they do so with drive-by journalism for the most part — cherry-picking the hot story of the moment and ignoring the nuts-and-bolts of civic coverage. This is just a fact of economic life: Newspapers simply don’t have the resources to cover everything that matters. They have to pick and choose.

And the local broadcasters? Forget it. They don’t cover anything to speak of, except crime and spot stories. Newspapers have been just about the only organizations with even a prayer of covering things. Now they don’t even make the pretense in most cases.

So who’ll cover the truly local news? Well, there are little weeklies and small dailies. They do some of it, but even they are facing some of the economic pressures that are causing such turmoil in the news business.

Which is why the bloggers and other citizen journalists are going to be so important. They will do the coverage in the future. They won’t do it professionally, not in a traditional sense. But it’s at least arguable that some coverage is better than none.

Who’ll cover Iraq? This is a tougher question. The NY Times spends more than $1 million a year, by its own public accounts, on keeping a bureau open in Baghdad. Ditto other major news organizations. We should be thankful they do.

It would not be good news if the business model eroded entirely for today’s professional journalism. Eventually, we’d sort through the anarchy, but the interim would be even messier than what we already know is coming.

The major news organizations in Iraq hire dozens of people on the ground, who report to them from the neighborhoods and communities where they live. Some of them could be blogging instead of — or in addition to — filing reports to the American professionals, assuming it was safe to do so. The Times coverage would be more complete, not less, with such things, though the Times would have to take the uncharacteristic step of saying it wasn’t absolutely vouching for the postings from its stringers. This would require more media literacy on the part of the audience, and the Times could help by teaching it.

What if the business collapses entirely? Can we sort out the information bloggers and other citizen journalists provide — and give the ones who want to be journalists sufficient training — to replace the (flawed) system we have today?

Some smart people are working on products to help sort through the noise. Will they do a good enough job of it? Billion-dollar businesses will be created by the ones who do.

If we’re lucky, we’ll keep the good part of today’s professional journalism, finding a way to pay for it, and augment it with citizen media. If we get this wrong, it will be ugly.

(Disclosure: I own a small amount of New York Times Co. stock.)