I, Reporter

Glimpse the Citizen Media of Tomorrow

The Knight Foundation, the funder behind the I, Reporter Boulder Carbon Tax Tracker project, today launched a new web site that provides a fascinating window into the citizen media innovation. The group blog is called MediaShift Idea Lab, and the idea is to allow the folks behind each of the Knight Challenge Grant winners to explore the progress of their innovative Internet projects with each other and in the public eye.

As the blog editor Mark Glaser puts it, "Idea Lab will be a place where you can read about what innovators are doing to help reinvent community news. The dozens of authors at this new group blog -- hosted by PBS.org and funded by the Knight Foundation -- have received grants from Knight in their 21st Century News Challenge, and are going to report first-hand on the status of their projects."

Check out our first entries on Boulder Carbon Tax Tracker-- a blog post about our initial progress with the project, and another about some lessons learned.

Paley Panel Prompts Discussion on Way Forward for CitJ

By Adam Glenn

Last night’s Paley Center panel on citizen journalism was a great give-and-take between panelists ranging from practicing citJers to former network news chiefs, and an audience of well over 100 and full of questions.

For my part, I made the case that media and news organizations, in order to take full advantage of the power of the Internet, must focus attention on the potential for citizen journalism. There’s proof enough of that in the growing number of citizen media sites – I,Reporter has identified more than 500 of them for the KCNN.org citmedia directory, while Placeblogger.com has ID’d more than 2,100 similar placeblog sites – and the fact they’re of such a remarkably wide variety in terms of who contributes to them, what type of content they post and their geographic scales. Panel moderator Merrill Brown put it this way, “Citizen journalism is not an outpost.”

'NewsHour' on New Media

The NewsHour had an interesting segment (mp3) last night on media trends, with some discussion of citizen journalism toward the end of the segment.

Nicholas Lemann, dean of the Columbia J-School, who's been embroiled in debate over the value of citizen media following his New Yorker essay on the topic last summer (see Rebecca McKinnon's blog posting for reaction to his piece), had this to say on the PBS program: "There's nothing wrong with citizen journalism at all and a lot of it is a healthy development. ... However, what I haven't seen citizen journalism do yet is really provide an ongoing, regular report that monitors the activities of government and business and so on. It's a kind wonderful add-on and corrective to flaws in the conversation, but it doesn't conduct the conversation, and that's the value of traditional media."

But just to cite one example, wouldn't the Sunlight Foundation projects on earmarks and congressional family business be exactly the kind of ongoing, regular report he says is missing? And aren't the many hyperlocal citJ sites that are covering what no local or regional news organization is covering an example of conducting the conversation?"

-- A. Adam Glenn

Youth Citizen Journalism and the $100 Laptop

Went to a fascinating talk the other night that put me in mind of how powerful a tool citizen journalism might be if it could be put in the hands the millions of young people around the globe. Unrealistic? Not if the plan for a $100 laptop as part of something called the One Laptop Per Child project is realized over the next few years.

"Norg" + Citizen Journalism = Better News? Maybe...

I just read a fascinating essay by journalist Will Bunch in Attytood, a flagship weblog of the Philadelphia Daily News (a major daily tabloid print newspaper). In "The New Philadelphia Experiment: Saving the Daily News," he argues persuasively for the survival of his news organization by letting go of paper. For instance, he writes:

"We are, and can continue to be, the front-line warriors of information -- serving up the most valuable commodity in a media-driven era. But that means we must be the message, not the medium, and so we must adjust to give consumers news in the high-tech ways that they are asking for, not the old-tech way that we are comfortable with."

Well said...  Although I don't think the attraction for the evolving news audience is "high tech," but rather more convenient, customizeable, updatable, searchable, and (perhaps above all) conversational.

I think there's ample room for citizen journalism in Bunch's vision of the future of news...

On the BackFence

One up-and-running citizen journalism effort is  Backfence, which has launched two sites in suburban Washington, D.C., and has plans to launch more in a national rollout over the next few years. Here's a really interesting interview with the two principals, Mark Potts and Susan DeFife, in the latest American Journalism Review. One intriguing aspect is how these citizen journalist moguls-in-the-making view existing mass media -- will they partner with them or not? ...

Citizen Journalism and the Culture of Sharing

Today's New York Times includes an interesting article by John Markoff: "Web Content by and for the Masses." It's a fairly basic overview of several online tools and trends which some leaders in the online world are calling "the culture of sharing."

Markoff briefly mentions citJ as part of this emerging culture, but doesn't really explore that angle. Still, this piece offers useful context to anyone interested in citJ...

How Creativity Might Save Journalism

It may seem counterintuitive, but Univ. of Missouri journalism professor emeritus Charles Warner recently contended that depleted creativity is the root cause of many of today's news business woes. See his remarks to a recent conference at that school: "Solving the Problem of Journalism Creativity: May the Force be with You"

I think he has a point. Here's a brief excerpt...