The talk was based on findings in my co-authored book, Participatory Journalism: Guarding Open Gates at Online Newspapers, into how journalists are thinking about their relationship with the people formerly known as the audience.

Comments on stories have become a familiar feature on news websites. But the idea of leaving a space for readers to “have their say” is hundreds of years old.

Early newspapers in eighteenth-century England left blank spaces where readers could add their observations, complete with spelling mistakes, erroneous facts and inane comments, before passing it on to friends or family.

These early experiments in audience contributions were phased out, as newspapers became professional products authored by journalists. Participation became more formal and rigid through channels such as letters to the editor.

Hundreds of years later, spaces for readers to add their thoughts have re-emerged on news websites as one of a myriad of ways for the audience to participate and interact with the news.

For our book, we wanted to find out how far journalists were opening up the news process to the public at a time when digital technologies are creating opportunities for new forms of media participation, production and distribution on an unprecedented scale.

In our journey through newsrooms at more than a dozen newspapers in 10 Western liberal democracies, we found mixed feelings. There was apprehension, confusion, fear and hope, among journalists who are experiencing facing a rapid and radical shift in their traditional power to oversee the flow of information.

Our research found that three approaches in the newsroom. Some took what we call a conventional stance, seeing journalism as a practice to be defended. The priority for these “conventional journalists” was to preserve traditional boundaries between professionals and readers. An American editor insisted that “what we have to offer as our brand is a newspaper and a site that can be trusted.”

On the other side of the spectrum were journalists who were more open to a dialogue with readers. These “dialogical journalists” shared a belief that the newsroom had to be more open to working with the audience. For one American editor, a more open and collaborative form of journalism was a way “to repair the relationship, to regain people’s trust.”

Mostly, journalists didn’t neatly fall into the camp of traditionalists or evangelists. Instead, they expressed reservations about users as participants in the news, while at the same time acknowledging the potential value of a more active audience. It is hardly surprising most people in the newsroom are “ambivalent journalists”, trying to figure out their role at a time of rapid change to long-held rules, norms and values.

Journalists are used to owning the news, in the most basic sense that they decide what and how to report. Yet at the same time, journalism has always been expected to provide a way for voices from outside the media to be heard.

These tensions are being played out every day in newsrooms across the world. Journalists are torn encouraging readers to be more active in the media, while simultaneously defending the core of the news production process.

While participatory journalism is often celebrated for its potential for a more open media, the reality is more humbling dramatic. The audience has few opportunities to influence what makes the news and how it is reported. Instead readers are involved at the start of the news process by sending in tips, photos or videos, and once a story is published by offering their take on the news.

Journalists see the audience as “active recipients” of the news. Citizens are expected to act when news happens, by taking a photo or emailing in a news tip, and then react by commenting. The crucial and central processes of deciding what news is and how to cover and present it remains almost entirely under the journalist’s control.

The way newsrooms have adopted participatory journalism continues to change and evolve as they try to meld a culture of openness and collaboration with an editorial model of hierarchy and control.

For the most part, so far, journalists have sought to find ways to maintain their professional status, rather than redefine what it means to be a journalist.

As one editor in Canada expressed it, “journalism remains journalism, and it’s not going to change its fundamentals.”

Participatory Journalism: Guarding Open Gates at Online Newspapers by Jane B. Singer, Alfred Hermida, David Domingo, Ari Heinonen, Steve Paulussen, Thorsten Quandt, Zvi Reich, Marina Vujnovic, is published by Wiley-Blackwell.

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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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But I wanted to share the slides and text of my paper presentation for those who weren’t about to make the conference. The paper is also available as PDF.

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First up was Espen Egil Hansen, editor-in-chief of VG Multimedia, Norway. He started by stating that he tells his journalists to spend a minimum of 10% of time interacting and engaging with readers.

Three-quarters of Norwegians visited the site in February, with 87% coming to the homepage, compared to only 4% from Google.

VG’s approach has been to figure out how we can help the readers help each other.

Hansen highlighted how last year during the travel disruption caused by the Icelandic volcano, a developer created a quick and dirty site to help people help each other get home.

In return, readers sent in stories and pictures about their journey home.

VG also has a tool that lets a select group of readers correct typos.  5,000 readers applied to correct typos and 400 were selected to fix typos on the site. 17,000 typos were reported last year, said Hansen.

Another example cited by Hansen was the paper’s response to the disaster in Japan.  VG set up a paper with a live feed of Japanese TV, but also updates from journalists and from readers.

He also showed how during the swine flu, VG created a wiki site inviting users to let others know where they could get a flu shoot.

Hansen said the paper had progressed from a monologue to dialogue. But today, there is another viral layer which taps into social media.

He said VG wanted to be something in the middle between traditional journalism and social media.

Washington Post’s approach to Twitter

Amanda Zamora, social media and engagement editor, The Washington Post, described her job as taking the “earmuff off this sleeping giant.”

She talked about how reporters are using social platforms such as Twitter as a newsgathering tool.

“We’ve learnt a lot from Twitter,” she said, for example by using the hashtag to actively frame the conversation.

She outlined the approach as call, response, reward.

The sign of success is if you issue a call, you get a response, said Zamora, not the number of followers. People who take part are rewarded by bring that content back into the Washpost site.

The paper uses Google forms as a way for people to send in what they know on specific stories, for example on power outages in DC.

One of the ways the Post is experimenting is using Intersect, which can blend accounts from both journalists and readers. This is how, Zamora said, the paper is aiming to transform the social conversations we collect into a narrative.

New York Times and social media

Jennifer Preston spoke of her experience as the former social media editor from The New York Times.

She sees value in Twitter as a tool for reporting, but also for real-time publishing and curating.

But it can also involve users in the creative process, helping to engage with community, she said.

Preston shares how it was a very big step for the Times, which has many layers of editing, to put content from journalists and users in real-time.

One example she cited was Nicholas Kristof’s posts to Facebook covering the uprisings in the Middle East.

Preston showed some ways in which the Times was trying out new ways of engaging with readers. One example she showed was A Moment in Time, asking people to take a photo at a specific time and date.

When the Times did this last year, it was inundated with photos. But rather than wait for the paper to publish the photos, readers also shared their photos on Flickr.

Facebook, said Preston, provides an enormous opportunity to seed communities. She showed the Civil War Facebook page from the Times.

Lessons from TBD

Jim Brady rounded off the session by sharing his experiences at TBD.

He said that users need to be involved in journalism, not just allowed to upload pet photos. Engagement has to be a two-way street.

He said TBD used Twitter and Facebook to gather news, not just disseminate news. His staff also used Fourquare to find people in a specific location.

When it came to sending out news links, TBD encouraged staff to have a very conversational tone on Twitter.

By January 2011, TBD had 1.5 million unique visitors. “We were pretty confident the model was working editorially,” said Brady.

He urged people not to see TBD as a failure, saying it was on the right track before the owners abandoned the original vision behind the site.

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The question takes it cue from the Knight Foundation’s 15 recommendations on the news and information needs of communities.

One clear way for journalism schools to contribute is by having students cover the city. Our students at the UBC Graduate School of Journalism already do this, as do many other j-schools.

By doing this, j-schools are filling the gap left by shrinking newsrooms. However, this only addresses part of the issue.

There are more acts of journalism being done by more people than ever before. The problem isn’t necessarily a lack of supply, but, as Clay Shirky puts it, filter failure.

The challenge is not just to increase the number of news sources, but to help communities navigate news and information that is networked and distributed.

Andy Carvin of NPR demonstrated the value in applying a journalistic lens to curating information flows on social media about the protests in Tunisia and Egypt.

Such an approach recognises that journalism has become ambient. As I wrote in a recent paper:

Journalism, which was once difficult and expensive to produce, today surrounds us like the air we breathe. Much of it is, literally, ambient, and being produced by professionals and citizens. The challenge going forward is helping the public negotiate and regulate this flow of awareness information, facilitating the collection, transmission and understanding of news.

There is a role for journalism schools to act as news hubs, to bring together and curate information flows in their around communities.

Additionally, j-schools can develop as centres of innovation and experimentation, tapping into the resources within the university and beyond, to work on new ways to help communities find the news and information they need.

The way forward is recognising that the media has become a space shared by professional journalists and citizens and coming up with ideas that take advantage of our mixed media ecosystem.

(Photo courtesy of Kris Krug)

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Thanks to the wonderful xkcd.com

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OpenFile is based in Toronto

In my latest post for PBS Mediashift, I discuss two recent developments in the Canadian media landscape.

This week was marked by the purchase of the Canwest newspapers and the launch of OpenFile:

Two Canadians took a gamble that local news still matters this week. The two represent the hopes of both old and new media.

One was a $1.1 billion buyout (in Canadian dollars) of Canada’s largest newspaper chain, the Canwest newspapers, led by experienced news executive Paul Godfrey.

The other was the launch of a hyper-local, participatory news start-up called OpenFile.ca, backed by venture capital and led by former CBC, CTV and CNN journalist Wilf Dinnick.

Both are betting on the public appetite for local news, approaching it from two sides of the business spectrum, with each of them hoping to revitalize the media ecology in Canada.

I conclude:

The buyout of the Canwest newspapers and the launch of OpenFile share one thing in common: No one can say whether or how either will dramatically change the face of the media industry in Canada.

Both bring a focus on local news and both stress the importance of digital. A mix of the old and the young, the established and the new, is to be welcomed as journalism tries to figure out its future.

Read the full story on Mediashift.

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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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The ability of anyone to play an active role in the process of collecting, reporting, analyzing and sharing news and information is seen as one of the big shifts in journalism over the past 10 years.

But a growing body of research suggests that the advent of participatory journalism, or user-generated content (UGC), has done little to change the way the media works.

At the recent Future of Journalism conference at Cardiff University, academics presented a series of studies that further illustrated how the mainstream media is trying to tame the phenomenon.

The research paints a global picture of how journalists are seeking to maintain their position of authority and power, rather than create a more open, transparent and accountable journalistic process that seeks to work with readers.

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The study by Claire Wardle, Andrew Williams and Karin Wahl-Jorgensen was presented at the Future of Journalism conference in Cardiff.

They found that the BBC mainly views UGC as part of its newsgathering operations, in essence as a way of obtaining photos and video, eyewitness accounts or story tipoffs. There were isolated examples of BBC journalists viewing participation as a way to collaborate on stories or as a shift towards networked journalism.

The researchers noted that this institutional framework towards UGC was reflected in the BBC course on the topic, entitled “Have they got news for us”.

The BBC has a dedicated UGC hub that has grown from three people in 2005 to 23 now, and it is physically located by newsgathering, at the heart of the corporation’s news operations.

The researchers found that the UGC hub trawl through comments and submissions for news content and for eyewitnesses to pass on to radio and TV as potential interviewees.

The study found that approach focused on sorting the wheat from the chaff, with the wheat defined as eyewitness material, tip-offs and case studies to feature on TV and radio.

The researchers concluded that UGC has become institutionalised at the BBC as a form of newsgathering, consolidating the existing relationship between journalists and the audience.

They did find some examples of BBC journalists experimenting with other forms of audience engagement, but these were largely taking place on the periphery.

At the core of the BBC News operation, UGC has become embedded as a form of gathering the news, rather than as a way to explore new forms of journalism.

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