An impression roster of speakers tackled the question of participatory journalism at International Symposium on Online Journalism.
The session was introduced by Dan Gillmor, professor and director, Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship, Arizona State University, with an overview of the read-write web, from consumers to creators to collaborators.
The question, said Gillmor, isn’t who is a journalist, but rather what is journalism.
There is plenty of supply, but the challenge is demand, he argued, as there is so much to filter and sort.
Gillmor outlined his principles for the active media user, saying media users need to be sceptical, but also not be equally sceptical of everything.
Transparency is the single most important principle for journalists, said Gillmor, as he outlined a list of principles for professionals. But he added that not enough transparency was taking place.
Trends in participatory journalism
Jan Schaffer, executive director, J-Lab: The Institute for Interactive Journalism went over trends in participatory journalism.
She outlined the new ecosystem with new players, from creative technologists to fact entrepreneurs to citizen media.
Instead of talking about journalism, she talked about “new work”. This could be sharing information, facilitating conversations, crowdsourcing stories or collaborating on stories.
Since 2005, J-Lab has had more than 1,500 applications for its New Voices local news start-ups projects.
After five years, about half have lasted beyond the two-year J-Lab grant. Of 46 New Voices grant recipients, 25 still going strong 5 years later, said Schaffer.
Part of the challenges was changes in the leadership of projects, or relying too much on training citizens to provide the content.
The most successful projects derived from passion and knowledge of the community, with people who have time on their hands, who may in the past have been in the PTA, said Schaffer.
She described this as civic volunteerism, rather than citizen journalism.
Now, professional journalists are entering the local space, launching news start-ups. But Schaffer said many did not have entrepreneurial knowledge for a start-up.
Another trend she noted are metro news sites in the US, with small, professional news sites. There are also more high-level niche sites, such as Politico and GlobalPost.
Another relatively new player is the fact entrepreneur, quoting Daily Kos and Daily Dish, said Schaffer
Schaffer said J-Lab was increasingly asked to fund community news sites run by universities and staffed by students. But she won’t fund them unless the site is a year-round operation, rather than just live during the school year.
One new initiative by J-Lab is on networked journalism, citing its report on the media landscape in Philadelphia.
Participatory funding of journalism
For his talk, David Cohn founder and director, Spot.us, focused on what we mean by participation.
Participation is the general idea of distributing the workload of journalism, said Cohn, and this lends itself to certain kinds of reporting.
But there are certain kinds of story that need to be led by a professional. With Spot.us, people participate by providing the funding for the story.
This provides a level of transparency, said Cohn, but also allows the audience to aim to set the agenda. He compared it to letting the public control a publication’s freelance budget.
“Freelancing is an horrible antiquated system,” said Cohn. Pitching to editors is very opaque and happens behind a wall, whereas on Spot.us, freelancers are pitching to the world.
Cohn gave an insight into a new experiment where people can support the journalism.
Users would earn credits by clicking on an ad-sponsored link and engaging with the brand. People can earn a credit of $5 and decide what story to allocate it to.
Participatory journalism worldwide
A different perspective came from Ethan Zuckerman, co-founder and board chair, Global Voices Online and fellow, Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University.
Zuckerman described Global Voices as a news wire for unreported international stories. The content comes from reading thousands of blogs, Twitter and Youtube. Blog entries are translated and add context to make a story accessible to a wider audience.
It is interesting to hear that Global Voices does a lot of translation. When it started in 2005, people tended to write in English, but now they are increasingly writing in local languages for local audiences.
As a result, there is now a vast tier of volunteer translators, in addition to volunteer contributors and a small team of paid editors.
A new initiative is Rising Voices, a project designed to support citizen media across the world by providing funding and training.
Zuckerman’s concern is the systemic bias in how the world is covered, with little reporting from areas such as sub-Saharan Africa.
One of the aims of Global Voices was to change this bias, by offering free content to established media. But what has happened is that media tend to reprint content on stories that they already consider important.
An example is the Haiti earthquake, where news organisations used material from Global Voices. But did not, in contrast, use material from the coup in Fiji.
“In terms of media shaping, we have had extremely poor luck,” said Zuckerman.
The problem is a radical disconnect between the supply side of news from around the world but the demand from mainstream media.
He went on to stress that we radically over-value the power of citizen media. For example, he said talk of a Twitter revolution in Iran or Moldova was “bullshit”.
Twitter built up excitement and spread information. But, added Zuckerman, it is the worst tool for a revolution as the government reads it.
PDF