Center for Citizen Media

Over at PBS MediaShift, Mark Glaser offers Your Guide to Citizen Journalism, including a very kind mention of our work here.

I spoke yesterday at the inaugural Picnic gathering in Amsterdam, a look at the future of media. Bruno Giussani, who moderated my talk and subsequent panel with Marc Canter and Craig Newmark, is writing about the conference here.

Marc has been working on a project that I need to learn a lot more about. He calls it PeopleAggregator, essentially a social network in a box. He thinks the days of the massive networks are coming to an end, that we’ll create a massive collection of small ones. Intriguing, to say the least.

LegiStorm:

Who is employed by Congress, and how much they are paid, is often a source of fascination for the politically aware. Prior to this site’s creation, members of the public needed to visit the document rooms of the House and the Senate in Washington, DC to discover who was being paid what. Now, all this information is available on the web – for residents of Alaska or Zanzibar – at the click of a mouse.

Doc Searls offers sage advice to the owner of the Santa Barbara News-Press, which has been in a full meltdown in recent weeks: Fire the editor.

Will Bunch has posted an essay worth reading by anyone who cares about the state of Washington journalism: “Why I’m mad: An open letter to David Broder from a fellow journalist.”

Participants in the online tech community site Slashdot are interviewing Pressthink blogger and NYU professor Jay Rosen on the future of citizen journalism. No doubt Jay’s new project — NewAssignment.Net — will be a factor in the conversation.

Slashdot’s been around long enough that it qualifies for greybeard status on the basis of its longevity; their name has spawned the nelogism “slashdotted,” shorthand for a site that’s down or slow from the hammering it’s getting from being linked to on Slashdot’s front page. Slashdot was one of the first widely known sites in the US to use a reputation system to influence which stories appeared on the front page, and which comments in comment threads were considered particularly insightful or funny.

Although I hadn’t thought about it until this moment, Slashdot and NewAssignment face many of the same challenges in creating a self-sustaining and productive community. Unlike Digg or Reddit, Slashdot’s front page is created by a mix of user and editorial input, and back when I was reading it, there was plenty of healthy (read: flamewar) discussion on the role of site founders and superusers like CmdrTaco (Rob Malda). The balance between the “rights” of users to control what stories got prominent play — and how they played out — and the power of Slashdot’s editors — was a frequent topic of debate back when I was a regular reader in 2000 and 2001, and may still be today.

[UPDATE: Seth Finkelstein makes a good point in comments below: it’s Slashdot’s comments, not the front page, that uses the reputation/ranking system. He also mentions the venerable Kuro5in, another site of the same or earlier vintage using user moderation as a core element of the site.]

That’s the title of Henry Jenkins‘ new book. It’s one of the most important volumes in this space in a long time. Don’t miss it.

Terry Heaton reports:

Michael Rosenblum is launching a futuristic video news project with Verizon that ought to give the “trusted brand” crowd a shudder or three. He’s assembling news gathering units (what he terms “nodes”) in various cities that will make their content available via cellphone, web and cable, and he’s knee-deep in recruiting for the first node in Washington, D.C.

As the cable and phone industries move closer to creating a broadband duopoly in America, the idea that they may be going into the news business is both great and scary. Great, because they’ll have resources beyond most other competitors, and could do some excellent work. Rosenblum’s record is sterling for innovation, and he’ll be making waves for sure with this project.

Why scary? Because the phone and cable companies are demanding the right to determine what content travels on their systems, at what speed and in what order. If media consolidation has been worrisome before, it may get vastly more problematic. Do we want two companies pushing their own versions of news out ahead of everything else? It could happen.

The Big Media have been fairly quiet on network neutrality. Maybe this will spark some conversation.

We’re glad to have Matt Vree joining us for our political transparency project in California’s 11th Congressional District. Matt will be working in the district to pull together a variety of data and information, with a focus on citizen contributions.

Matt recently completed his master’s degree from the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. This past summer, he worked as a fellow in the Carnegie-Knight Initiative for the Future of
Journalism Education, helping to create a large multimedia project that explored the lives and
responsibilities of the U.S. Military abroad. He reported specifically on the transformation of U.S.
presence in South Korea and how the Korean public was reacting to it.

Before graduate school, Matt worked for a number of years as an editor at the Marin Independent Journal. He has also written freelance stories for publications including the San Francisco Chronicle, Oakland Tribune and California magazine.

The Poynter Institute’s Bob Steele, in an essay entitled “HP’s Glass-Housed Critics,” writes:

Journalists are not above using some forms of deception to get stories. We’ve long used our own form of sting operations. We’ve played private detective in ways that aren’t always so kosher. Sometimes we pretend to be someone other than a journalist. Sometimes we are just less than forthright as we gather and glean information.

True enough, and some of the things journalists have been doing lately — NBC News’ Internet stings come to mind — come to mind as especially rancid.

But let’s keep in mind what HP was doing. It was obtaining people’s private data, including phone records. In at least several cases it obtained and used social security numbers to further its spying.

This doesn’t excuse unethical behavior by anyone. But HP’s transgressions exceed most of the ones we’ve heard about by journalists.