Center for Citizen Media

The Chicago Tribune’s Phil Rosenthal notes the rise in private (i.e. non-public shareholding) ownership of newspapers and warns, “Be careful what you wish for.” He says the Citizen Kanes of a new era will not be the saviors some people believe.

OK, but so what? (And why does he use a fictional character to illustrate a point that could easily have been done with a real historical figure?)

Yes, we will see plenty of predations and bad acts by local owners. Witness the sad act in Santa Barbara, where the wealthy owner is systematically wrecking her property. This will make a great made-for-TV movie someday. Perhaps this sort of behavior will be more the rule than the exception in most communities where some rich person takes over the paper, but somehow I doubt it.

But it’s difficult for me to imagine a local owner being more cruel and greedy than the new corporate owners of the Akron Beacon Journal, who claimed they had no plans for big personnel changes when they bought the paper and then laid off a quarter of the staff. I’m not saying the layoffs were necessarily out of line with economic reality (I don’t know the situation well enough). I am saying that it’s probably harder to lie so baldly when you’re looking a person in the eye; a local owner has to do that from time to time.

The Boston Herald has done the smart thing: It’s moving its stock listings to the Web where they belong, saving tons of paper in the process and downsizing in a sensible manner. When will everyone else in the newspaper business wake up to this obvious move?

AP: Some CBS Affiliates Worry over 9/11 Show. Broadcasters say the hesitancy of some CBS affiliates to air a powerful Sept. 11 documentary next week proves there’s been a chilling effect on the First Amendment since federal regulators boosted penalties for television obscenities after Janet Jackson’s breast was exposed at a Super Bowl halftime show.

“This is example No. 1,” said Martin Franks, executive vice president of CBS Corp., of the decision by two dozen CBS affiliates to replace or delay “9/11” – which has already aired twice without controversy – over concerns about some of the language used by the firefighters in it.

This is truly crazy. Should networks dumb down everything they do in order to please a few people who can’t stand actual truth on the airwaves?

Of course, this is just driving serious programming, including journalism such as this documentary, onto the cable networks and the Internet. Watch, though, because the bluenoses will follow it there and find a way to whack the First Amendment in the new media, too.
There’s a chill in the air, and it’s not because autumn is coming.

Matt Marshall, a former colleague at the San Jose Mercury News, is now on his own with a blog about the technology financial scene. It’s called VentureBeat, and it looks great.

Matt is one of the most talented journalists in his field. This is a project to watch.

AP: Freelancer jailed over video released. Freelance journalist Josh Wolf was released on bail today from a federal prison where he had been held since Aug. 1 after challenging a grand jury subpoena that demanded outtakes of videos he shot at a San Francisco protest.

Wolf’s advocates, who included national journalist organizations, saw the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals order as a sign that the court is prepared to reconsider the question of reporters’ right to protect confidential sources and unpublished material from compelled disclosure in federal court.

This is excellent news. But the government’s actions have been, and continue to be, a direct assault on free speech and freedom of the press, not to mention California’s state laws.

A lot is at stake in this case, as I noted in a previous posting.

Rebecca MacKinnon praises a new site called Interlocals.net, a “multilingual platform for citizen dialogue.” It’s impressive, and has great potential.

Jack Shafer at Slate reminds us that people who don’t know history are, well, uninformed. Read “Who won the Great Press War of 1897? Hearst or Ochs?” to see why.

It’s here — and purports to be what people on the political right see when they read the New York Times. Extremely clever.

What if citizen journalism is just a mirage?

Let’s look into the abyss for a minute — just as a thought experiment.

As many critics have noted, it’s easy to point your browser at a placeblog, or a pol-blog that sometimes does news, look at it for fifteen seconds, and say, “What a crappy newspaper!,” and hit the Back button.

But to do that obscures almost everything we could learn about placeblogs and pol-blogs, both of which – pol-blogs especially – are having a major impact. (Kossacks raised $56M for these twelve candidates alone).

Question: Are we only interested in placeblogs and pol-blogs to the extent that they mirror traditional journalism? Are we interested in “citizen journalism” in the abstract only to be disappointed when confronted with actual weblogs?

Continue reading →

Doug Fisher has created a 75 page manual/journal of the effort to wrap a citizen journalism layer around a traditional paper:

When we started it with funding from J-lab, we promised a “cook book” that would give other smaller papers considering such projects a road map of what to expect and how to handle some of the challenges.

The report is done and now available. Feel free to download it. It’s a 1 Mb PDF that covers everything from the multitude of early decisions about design and content to the rigors of getting people involved, sales and the technical aspect.

In addition to covering all the aspects, we think it is the first major extended study of such a site, the postings and their contributors. There is an extensive section that tracks five months of postings and proposes a codebook that may be of use to future researchers.

I’ve got it pumping out of my printer right now, and I’m really looking forward to reading it. In my current research collecting “placeblogs,” I’ve focused mainly on independent citizen journalism sites, but the more I see, the more I feel there’s promise for local weeklies and dailies to combine their existing efforts with online initiatives that connect citizens to each other. There’s no evidence that such initiatives “work,” if by “work” we mean increase circulation or halt declining circulation. But I think they’re very promising experiments to recreate the feeling of “our newspaper” that’s missing in so many towns and cities.