Here are the slides from the presentation by Jan-Hinrik Schmidt of the Hans Bedrow Institut at the Neo-journalism conference in Brussels. The research highlights how journalists and the public consider participation. It shows that in many aspects, both share the same views. But there are also some areas of incongruence. Journalists and participatory media from jpub

At the Neo-journalism conference, Manuela Farinosi a post-doc at the Università di Udine presented her research into the motivations behind citizens who gathered and shared news following the 2009 quake in L’Aquila close to Rome. For the study, there were 20 in-depth interviews with the most active citizen contributors. The most common motivation was related to mainstream media coverage in Italy. The citizens said they felt media reporting was incomplete and pro-government.

During my trip to Australia, I was invited to deliver a keynote at the Screen Futures conference in Melbourne. In the talk, I explored the promise and practice of participatory journalism. It draws on the data from my co-authored book, Participatory Journalism: Guarding Open Gates at Online Newspapers. We found that journalists are navigating uncharted waters – figuring out how to bring in the audience into the professional process of

The afternoon keynote at the ISOJ was by Warren Webster, president of Patch Media. Depending on who you listen to, Patch is or isn’t journalism. But it is hiring journalists and has a presence in 800 US towns. It has 50% penetration in these markets and is growing in monthly visits by more than 40%. The percentage of traffic from AOL is fairly small compared to other traffic, said Webster. Rather

The second keynote of the ISOJ was by Meredith Artley, vice president and managing editor, CNN.com She started by stressing the importance of journalism and showed dramatic images of the aftermath of the disaster in Japan. Like for other news organisations, Japan has proved a major draw for CNN. In the 10 days since the Japan quake on March 11, CNN had: 75 million average page views per day on PC

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

The second day of International Symposium on Online Journalism offered a refreshing look at international innovative initiatives. Harry Dugmore, MTN Chair of Media and Mobile Communications, Rhodes University (South Africa) started by providing an update to a project founded by the Knight News Challenge. in South Africa, almost 100% of families have access to cellphones, while broadband access is growing but slowly. While bandwidth is rising, the prices are prohibitive.

The set of guidelines about user-generated content produced by industry body, the Commonwealth Broadcasting Association (CBA), aims to help broadcasters get the most out of working with the audience. The guidelines, available as a PDF, cover familiar ground on concerns about quality of the content and potential legal issues. It acknowledges that: The most apparent benefit for broadcasters of using UGC is that it provides free access to material which

In a keynote at the Future of Journalism conference in Cardiff, Bettina Peters tackles the idea of what we mean by media development. This is pertinent to Peters, who is the director of the Global Forum for Media Development (GFMD), a network of some 500 media assistance organisations from around the globe. Peters explains that in a traditional media US-based model, you would promote media development by encouraging the established

Image via CrunchBase The big news in the citizen journalism space is that Vancouver-based participatory news site NowPublic.com has been sold to the local news network, Examiner.com. The new owners, Philip Anschutz’s Clarity Media Group, are reported to have paid around $25 million. NowPublic was started in 2005 by Canadian entrepreneurs Leonard Brody, Michael Tippett and Michael Meyers, and has raised more than $10m in venture capital. Writing on NowPublic,