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 producing journalism at a time when the practice of what we called “journalism” tries to retain its structure and integrity, its rules and roles, its organizations and its traditions.

Here are the slides from the talk.

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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 people are finding Patch sites through Facebook.

The Patch president likened Facebook to having a newspaper box on the street corner.

Talking about the future of journalism, Webster compared it to being in the head car of a fast speeding train, but not knowing where it’s heading.

He located Patch within what people are interested in, arguing that people are interested in what is within 10 miles or 10,000 miles, rather in within 100 miles.

“Patch wants to sit squarely in that 10 mile space,” said Webster.

He argued that Patch is journalism. ”We were the largest hirer of journalists in 2010. And that is something I am really proud of,” he said.

In terms of salary, Webster said it pays local editors more or the same that they would earn at a local weekly, with benefits.

Patch has one full-time employee per site, with, on average, 12 freelancers contributing to it.

He talked about the sites as platforms for neighbourhoods, bringing together disparate and disorganised local information together.

The Patch sites aim to bring together local and regional news, a local journalist, local events, local deals free business listings and community engagement.

Webster said that part of Patch’s appeal as a community platform is that it can be personal and local, citing a story about a lost dog who was later found by its owner.

Patch worked to weave itself into the local community, for example, by having its staff volunteer for five days a year.

Webster said Patch is keen to work with journalism schools and has a program called Patch University to foster connections.

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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
• 15 million average video starts
• 1 million mobile app downloads
• 9 million average page views per day on mobile

Artley went on to talk about some of the work under way in CNN in participation, video and mobile.

One such initiative is “Open Story” that pulls together traditional reporting, user-generated content and data. Open Story is a collaborative story-telling interface, such as this one on Japan.

Another project to let users leave a video comment on stories will go live this summer. And potentially, said Artley, the videos could be used on air.

She also previewed a new video interface, with a more cinematic feel and video in HD.  CNN also wants to create a more integrated viewing experience, so that video viewing can pick up from PC screen to iPad.

On mobile, CNN gets 174 million page views a month in February and these are expected to be over 200 million in March due to Japan. On the iPhone and iPad, CNN has had 5 million downloads.

Artley compared CNN’s strategy to Pilates: strengthening the core and stretching into new areas.

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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.

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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. And, said Dugmore, mobile costs too are still comparatively high.

The figures for mobile are staggering. Dugmore said 36m out of 50m people have cellphones and there are more SIM cards than population, as people swap cards to call each other and avoid connectivity fees.

Dugmore showed a map of democracy in Africa and superimposed a map of mobile connectivity. It showed an almost 100% match between connectivity and democracy.

His program, the News is Coming, provides journalism training to people so that they can report the news themselves.

But the big growth is in instant messaging, using systems such as MXit which lower the cost of messaging.

Given these trends, Dugmore’s group has been working on a CMS customised for receiving news via cellphone, called the Nika Digital Newsroom.

Dugmore concluded by emphasising three points:

• embrace user-generated input, providing training, editing and some cash incentives
• shift to mobile and web first, print second
• content out through mobile-friendly platforms

Innovation in Spain

Mario Tascón focused on LaInformacion.com which launched a year ago in Spain. He said media was created by professionals, citizens and by algorithms.

La Informacion uses algorithms to analyse real-time trends and categorise information. But there is a human newsroom too, with 30 journalists who are digital natives, said Tascon.

There is a focus on design, with an editor deciding the make-up of the front page, with an emphasis on strong visual impact.

Tascon said they were also trying to create new narratives, showing an example of a interactive map of the island in the TV series Lost.

He also showed a panoramic images that allow the user to focus on a specific section of the photo. Another example was a collaborative online book, Cadaverex, created by user contributions.

The site is funded to the tune of 23m euros for five years from investors.

Business models in Mexico

The third example was from Mexico – Reporte Indigo, The site has some free content, but offers a premium service based on hard and local news, introduced just three months ago. Three out of its seven sections went behind a pay wall in January.

International section editor Juan Anonio Zertouche described what the online magazine does as “brain media”. It combines professional journalists with interns.  The site has a strong visual and multimedia emphasis.

The site has about 1.2m users.  But it is now waiting to see if its users are willing to pay for national and local news.

Zertouche said paying for content online was not common in Mexico. But he said they did not have figures yet to see if the premium strategy was working.

This is the big question, and Zertouche joked that the symposium could invite him back next year to report whether users were willing to pay for content.

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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 they might not otherwise obtain. The most obvious examples are footage of breaking news stories. Recent high profile examples include the post election riots in Iran and the terrorist attacks in Mumbai.

But the guidelines also seek to broaden the way journalists think about UGC, and suggests that it is a way of promoting greater media democracy:

While encouraging ‘better quality’ UGC (however that may be defined) might appear a worthwhile aim, pursuing this goal alone could serve only to further amplify the voices of the better resourced members of the audience and further marginalise the poor and disempowered. The aim of these guidelines, therefore, is to provide guidance on how to encourage a greater diversity of material from a wider range of voices: material that serves both the public and commercial needs of broadcasters and the viewing and democratic needs of the widest possible audience.

The advice focuses not just on how to handle UGC, but also on the issue of media and information literacy. It argues that news organisations would benefit from promoting greater media literacy, by strengthening relationships with audiences and countering claims that UGC is just a way of getting free content.

This is an important part of the equation that is often ignored in the discussion of UGC. The people formerly known as the audience have the tools to report on events around them, but the media can play a part in helping people understand how to “seek, use and create media content”.

UNESCO defines media literacy as the ability to “interpret and make informed judgments as users of information and media, as well as to become skilful creators and producers of information and media messages in their own right”.

Journalism is considered as vital to a functioning democracy, by providing citizens with the news and information they need to make informed decisions. In a participatory media ecosystem, part of this role is providing citizens with the skills and competences to evaluate and create media.

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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 of private news outlets.

In Europe, there would also be efforts to establish institutions supporting diversity and pluralism in the media.

Additionally media development would involve training of media professionals, together with reforms of media law and investment in media infrastructure, such as TV transmitters.

Peters went on to outline come of the challenges facing media development in a climate of declining sales and advertising, continued concentration of media ownership and falling investment in journalism.

Her question is, do we need new media development, such as training citizen journalists. Her answer is yes.

As an example, she talks about how citizens are providing much of the information about what is happening in Sri Lanka, rather than the established media.

Secondly, she says media development should also look at new funding ideas and sources. Perhaps, she suggests, we will need to consider hybrid models or private-public funding.

One aspect that remains consistent is legal reform, says Peters. There are still issues over freedom of information and internet censorship in many developing countries.

Through the GFMD, Peters is mapping media development globally and aiming act as a hub for people to come together and share their experiences.

She concludes by appealing for greater exchanges between the developed and developing world, arguing that media professionals in the North can learn from their colleagues in the South.

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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, Tippett said:

This is great news for the company, our readers and all of our contributors. Some of you may know Examiner.com but if you don’t already you’ll be seeing more of them soon. Like NowPublic, they are re-writing the rules about how news gets made. They’ve got thousands of Examiners in cities across the US writing and reporting on everything from nightlife, sports and business to technology news and education issues. This means that there will be some great opportunities for all NowPublicans to get news out to an even larger audience.

The Clarity Media Group runs the Washington D.C. Examiner, The San Francisco Examiner and the Independent newspapers, and owns a US network of local sites at Examiner.com.

According to Rick Blair, CEO of Examiner.com:

Examiner.com is rapidly becoming the solution to the hyperlocal puzzle. In the last year we have created the depth of content consumers and advertisers expect. With the acquisition of NowPublic, we have the technology to further engage our community of over 17 million unique visitors per month and distribute our stories in new and innovative ways.

The sale has been described as a good combo, coming at a time of increased interest in citizen journalism.

Among the technologies that NowPublic has to offer is its real-time mechanism for scanning online conversation called Scan. The tool aggregates, geo-locates, and analyze content from social networks such as Flickr, Youtube and Twitter.

Tris Hussey of M2O Productions in Vancouver described the news as “bittersweet”:

It’s fantastic for the folks at NowPublic. They’ve created something amazing, something tremendously powerful, something new, and something that is helping to reshape how we think about news. They must be proud beyond measure. Of course on the other side of the coin, NP was scooped up by an American company. I hope that given NP and Examiner.com are going to still run independently that NP maintains its base in Vancouver and (I think) a very international/Canadian feel to it.

NowPublic’s Michael Tippett has sought to reassure these concerns by saying the company plans to stay in Vancouver and grow the local office.

(Repost from Newslab.ca)

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The proposal to take money from the BBC licence fee to partly ITV regional news services was one of the headlines of theUK government’s Digital Britain report.

According to the proposal, a small part of the expected £200m digital switchover surplus would fund three ITV regional news pilots in Scotland, Wales and one English region from now until 2013.

The pilots are a response to ITV’s decision to pull out of regional news which it sees as a financial burden. It is a far cry from when regional news was a money-spinner for ITV, with its early evening bulletins often attracting more more viewers than the BBC’s bulletins.

The idea to take about £130m a year from the licence fee to fund a series of independent consortia of local providers in place of ITV’s current regional news service seems a dated approach to the provision of local news.

At a time when audiences are getting their news by mixing and matching old and new technologies, a focus on TV bulletins is ill-advised.

The Digital Britain proposal is an attempt to prop up a system of local and regional news that suited a 20th century audience.

Instead of throwing money at a handful of expensive TV news pilots, the UK government could instead set up a fund to support hundreds of low-cost, hyperlocal news sites.

Hyperlocal sites would address one of the weaknesses of regional TV news – the fact that often the coverage is not local enough.

These hyperlocal sites could pilot emerging pro-am models of journalism, seeking to involve local communties in covering issues of importance to them.

Using BBC money to kickstart a new wave of hyperlocal news sites would be an innovative and creative response to the challenges facing local news, and be more in keeping with the aim of fostering a truly digital Britain.

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The citizen journalism site is perhaps best known for assigning two former sex trade workers to cover the trial of Robert Pickton, convicted in December 2007 on six counts of second-degree murder in the deaths of six women whose remains were found on his farm.

The concept behind Orato was to allow people’s voices to emerge, with as little editorial interference as possible.

But it has now turned its back on the notion of a site filled with content from “citizen journalists”.  As part of a major editorial and design overhaul, Orato recognised that:

For the first 3 years of Orato’s existence, the previous management intentionally encouraged first-person stories rooted in an intimate and authentic perspective and deliberately offered very few editorial guidelines or oversight when it came to journalistic standards and Web 2.0 approaches to search.

Instead the focus is on “concrete and trustworthy information that is objective and under-reported”. The owner and founder of Orato, Sam Yehia, said the changes were made to “further professionalize the site, focus its newsworthy content, create and enforce a viable business model and keep pace with Web 2.0 standards”.

New editor-in-chief Joy Joy Gugeler has positioned the site as an outlet for freelance journalists seeking an additional source of income:

We will grow content and traffic to reward correspondents with both pay and profile. They post video, audio, photos and articles live; our editors review the material in 24 hours; readers learn at a glance, and our writers earn from the first ad click. We hope those in search of a value-added training will consider us a vital new client in the freelance marketplace.

This is a significant shift away from Orato’s origins as a citizen journalism website to the extent that it can no longer be considered as one.

And it does raise questions about the very viability of the phenomenon of “citizen journalism”. Similar sites have experienced problems with quality control.

There is no doubt that having more voices in the news can provide a rounder picture of the world. The problem may lie in the term “citizen journalism”.

As CEO of the participatory news network NowPublic.com, Len Brody, likes to say, “telling someone they’re going to be a citizen journalist is like telling people they’re going to be a citizen dentist.”

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