I, Reporter

links for 2006-10-18

• cmj.com | new music first
  This summer, SPIN.com has covered four high-profile festivals with teams of college correspondents. Now they're looking to build a team of college journalists, photojournalists and radio DJs for CMJ Music Marathon 2006."
  (tags: music citizen+journalism student+journalism events tidbits+fodder)

ONA CitJ Highlights

I'm at the National Newspaper Association annual meeting in Oklahoma City, where I'm scoping out citizen media interest among community newspapers around the country. Before I post about that, though, I had some highlights from the Online News Association annual gathering in DC last week, where much of the citizen media discussion came at the “Developing New Voices” panel I organized.

Here are a bunch of items worth noting:

At Home with Placeblogs

One of the more dynamic presentations of the morning was that of Lisa Williams from H20Town, who focused on what she termed “placeblogs,” sites that she said are about the “lived experience of a place” as opposed to the “news” of the place. Williams argues that although their growth is little recognized, placeblogs are exploding – 648 at last count. As a matter of fact, she showed the group a mockup of a new directory of placeblog sites called Placeblogger.com, which will include headlines from each.

A Question of Training

Two founders of hyperlocal start-ups, in their talks in the first session at the Citizens Media Summit, both emphasized the importance and need for training of citizen journalists.

The Challenge of Scale

One of the issues I hope to see addressed at today’s summit (and which we explicitly organized the ONA Developing New Voices panel to tackle) is the question of how citizen media works at different geographic scales – national, regional, local and hyperlocal.

Onsite at the J-Lab/ONA Citizens Media Summit II

J-Lab’s great citizen journalism summit is soon to be underway here in Washington, D.C., and I’ll be in attendance and helping moderate through the day. I’m glad to say that this year’s program has the support of the Online News Association ...

links for 2006-10-05

• We have new source of expertise: You | IndyStar.com
  On crowd sourcing: "Doug was concerned that if we received information, we may be inclined to think we had to do something with it. There was something of a witch-hunt aspect to the whole idea, he added."
  (tags: tidbits+fodder distributed+journalism journalism media mainstream+media media+evolution)
• For news desk, new tutors in cyberspace - India News
  "UNESCO has collaborated with the Thomson Foundation, the Britain-based media training and consultancy group, and the Commonwealth Broadcasting Association to produce a handbook for journalists from developing countries on the use of Internet for media."
  (tags: journalism citizen+journalism world learning nonprofits)

links for 2006-10-04

• Media Guerrilla: Bloggers: How To Approach Companies
  "Bloggers have developed an unrealistic sense of entitlement and have ceased asking and are now often demanding the same level of access and information from companies that has long been the exclusive privilege of mainstream journalists."
  (tags: media citizen+journalism blogs media+evolution info+access relationship+building influence+ecology PR+marketing mainstream+media journalism)