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.

The study, Comments in News, Democracy Booster or Journalistic Nightmare (PDF), analysed comments on newspaper websites in Catalunya in Spain

David Domingo, Universitat Rovira i Virgilli (Tarragona, explained that the analysis was based on Habermas: were comments an expression of a democratic debate, expressing logical and coherent arguments.

Most users only left one comment in a debate. Domingo said this showed us that people were not following the conversation.

“They drop in, leave a comment and never come back,” he said.

Domingo said participants never articulate an argument. Rather they expressed feelings about an issue.

There were, he noted, a diversity of viewpoints. But many users expressed disdain about other comments.

There were very few instances of users saying they valued the contribution of other commenters.

The evidence suggests that comments are not adding to a democratic debate.

Domingo said that the rules for participation set by newspapers set the groundwork for a democratic debate. But the news sites did not set the necessary measures to ensure these principles were followed by users.

Rather comments were motivated by economics – to increase traffic and reader loyalty.

The study found two approaches. Hands-off moderation that allowed users to rant. But there was not a higher level of debate on the sites with strict moderation.

Domingo concluded that newspapers incorporated comments as a business decision, rather than as a way of fostering democratic debate online.

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.

One is the appointment of an Interactive Reporter, Siobhan Courtney. On the BBC Editors blog, Matthew Eltringham, explains her “beat is simply all the content you’ve been sending in to us.”

The appointment is welcomed but it is simply newsgathering by another name. The journalist retains the traditional role of the gate-keeper.

CBC in British Columbia has a similar project, called Go Public, with reporter Kathy Tomlinson investigating story tips sent in by the public.

But the BBC’s other initiative is far more innovative. For the US presidential debates, it has opened channels on video services Qik, 12Seconds and Phreadz.  Some of the videos were subsequently edited and posted on the BBC News website.

The purpose, explains Eltringham, is “to join in conversations wherever they were happening rather than expect people to come to us and host them on the BBC’s platforms.”

This is a major change in the BBC’s approach to user-generated content. It signals a shift away from the idea that the BBC should host the conversation.

Instead it reflects an acknowledgment that the conversation is taking place all over the web and the BBC’s role is as an enabler.

The term participatory journalism is itself rather ill defined. We’ve taken it to mean the technical, editorial, and managerial processes that allow readers’ contributions to be elicited, processed, and published at professional publications. So the term, user-generated content (or UGC) and user-generated content initiatives seems more appropriate in this context.

Neil started the work in 2004 with a study of online editors’ attitudes to participatory journalism and a survey of the UGC initiatives they were running at that time. Back then participatory journalism in the UK was unevenly distributed.

Only one of the national news sites surveyed hosted real blogs—those with comments enabled. And one national newspaper website had no formats for readers to contribute at all. Where readers could contribute, editing or pre-moderation were the norm, applied in 80 percent of cases. In this sense, the media was retaining a traditional gate keeping role, with journalists acting as message filters.

Editors’ attitudes to participatory journalism were mixed, with comments like this from the then editor of Telegraph.co.uk:

This idea with blogs and particularly wikis that you can go in and edit stuff and all join the party. It is a load of fun but it just detracts from what a traditional idea of journalism is. I think we have to be quite careful.

Editors were concerned about the ways non-professionally produced content challenged journalism’s professional norms. They expressed particular concern over its news value; standards of spelling, punctuation, accuracy, and balance; and the influence of blogs on the mainstream media.

There was, however, an understanding of the benefits of UGC, although this was framed by editors within existing journalistic norms and practices. Contributions from the public were seen as a source of stories, and as a way of increasing loyalty as well as the depth and diversity of coverage.

Perhaps unexpectedly there wasn’t any fundamental prejudice towards UGC amongst editors. Instead, our research findings were consistent with the view that innovations in newsrooms unfold in a gradual and ongoing fashion, shaped by combinations of initial conditions and local contingencies’. Specifically we found that time and resources, the legal environment, the management and professional preparedness of journalists, and news sites’ technical infrastructure were the key determining factors in the adoption of user-generated content.

We also established a taxonomy of user-generated content initiatives in an attempt to start to make sense of the wide variety of forms, and the even greater variety of names they went under. This generic taxonomy of formats has developed over the course of our surveys.

About 18 months after the first survey, we did a follow up study which revealed a significant increase in UGCIs by late-2006. The number of blogs had jumped from seven to 118 and there had been considerable adoption of ‘Comments on stories’ and what we called ‘Have your says’.

At this time our taxonomy expanded to include a new format—‘Reader blogs’—introduced at the website of The Sun. This format can be seen as the most radical departure from the traditional publishing model, as it seeks to present ‘news’, and comment on current events from the point of view of the audience.

While news organisations were providing more opportunities for participation, we also found evidence that they were retaining a traditional gate-keeping role. Moderation and or registration remained the norm as editors’ concerns over reputation, trust, and legal liabilities persisted.

This said, we did record a greater openness among editors. One described user media as a “phenomenon you can’t ignore”, another said they “firmly believed in the great conversation”, and one editor explained he was “very interested in unlocking” information from his “very knowledgeable” readers.

But there were hidden agendas in news sites’ decisions to open up to readers. Self-interest emerged as a strong motivator. Some editors were fearful of being “left behind” and there was also worry that, if they didn’t give their staff a “piece of property on the internet”, journalists might develop a community of readers by blogging elsewhere.

This follow-up study confirmed: publications’ desire to get the “right user-generated content” that fitted their brand’s values and the considerable resource implications of moderation. It also questioned the extent to which readers wanted to contribute—and whether that mattered.

Our most recent, unpublished, survey again takes us 18 months forward—to May of this year—and shows a continuing adoption of UGCIs and, perhaps surprisingly, evidence of a more relaxed attitude to moderation. Despite ongoing concerns, the websites of three national newspapers all currently publish readers’ comments without registration or pre-moderation.

The shift away from moderation might well be a result of the increase in opportunities readers have to participate. With more choice, news websites may be finding that readers are less likely to participate if barriers to participation (like registration) exist, or if they don’t get the immediate, positive feedback instant publication gives. This is clearly an area that could benefit from further research.

Although there has been a continual increase in opportunities for readers to contribute over the three years of our work in this area, textual contributions are, in the main, still limited to short ‘comments’ on subjects or stories determined by professional editors. There is little in the way of longer-form contributions or opportunities for readers to set the agenda. We could suggest then that the media is creating an architecture of publication for material from the audience, rather than an architecture of participation.

Where opportunities for readers to set the agenda do exist (for example in readers’ blogs; or at message boards) they often seem to be part of what some have described as a “closed-off annex where readers can talk and discuss, as long as the media companies don’t have to be involved”.

Attempts to create genuinely open spaces where readers can set the agenda are few and far between. The Times’ ‘Your World’ travel site is one, but after initial external investment to get it running (it was sponsored by BMW) the site has atrophied without ongoing support and management. The most recent posts are 4 months old.

A similar feature at The Guardian—‘Been there’—is a much more successful example of the mainstream media allowing readers to set the agenda. Unlike at The Times there are no restrictions on length and users can edit and update other submissions. What’s more readers can aggregate other readers’ tips to create travel guides, hence performing a real editorial role for the 1st time.

Here user-generated content goes beyond simply publishing material from users and instead emphasises the sharing and remixing of content. However we mustn’t forget that this feature is outside what most journalists would consider to be ‘news’, in the softer area of lifestyle, and so, perhaps, a more ‘acceptable’ area for publications to cede control to.

The emergence of online tools that allow for broad participation in the creation and dissemination of content has repercussions for the role of journalists as conveyors of news and information. Our research looked at participatory journalism from the perspective of the professional journalist and hope we’ve offered some insights into the adoption of this emerging trend.

This post is part of May’s Carnival of Journalism, hosted by Ryan Sholin.

It has post several job ads on its blog. NowPublic is looking for:

• Regional Editors – US, Australia, China, India, South Africa and the UK

• A sports editor
• A community relations and content specialist

Applications are due by February 1, so please pass this on to anyone who might be interested.

(I am a contributor to the site and know its founders)

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