We began with excellent session, led by Brendan Greeley, on podcasting. Very informative and good at the conceptual level as well. It seemed to be well received by the media folks. (Q: Why was this session about podcasting accepted so well while text blogging stuff yesterday met hostility?)

Next, Ethan Zuckerman is leading a session about tools. Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia starts off by talking about why it has a neutral point of view (NPOV) policy. Without it, he says, he’d lose tons of contributors.

I ask Jimmy: You have an operational view of neutrality: It’s neutral when we stop arguing about it. But who is the “we”?

Jimmy responded that he’s concerned to make the community that supports Wikipedia as diverse as possible, in part by encouraging a culture of openness and niceness. Once you join the community, you gain some civil rights. E.g., you can’t be banned just for disagreeing with someone politicallly.

I ask about the demographics of the community that does the bulk of the support of the Wikipedia. He says for the English version, it’s definitely white, male, and a slim majority are US citizens. “We’re in over 50 languages by 8 or 9 have over 10,000 articles. There’s a certain kind of diversity that’s hard to achieve just because of where pepole live.” He points out that USB article in the US version is a “fantastic, clear article, but the article about Emily Dickinson is Ok but not fantastic.” He says they’re trying to reach out to people. “I’m very interested in reaching out to the Arabic community. We’re trying to reach out but it’s difficult.”

Jimmy says that the quality of the encyclopedia takes precedence over almost everything else, including being open to anyone to edit.

Jane Singer asks Dan Gillmor what he wants citizen journalists to learn from established journalism. Dan says that, for example, most people don’t know that the Freedom of Information Act applies to them, not just to professionals.

Jonathan Zittrain worries that when Wikipedia gets noticed by the mainstream, its norms will be swamped by its catastropic success. “How do you batten down the hatches against that?” Jimmy says: We try to think of problems ahead of time but not try to solve them until they happen. “The community’s already scaled much larger than I ever imagined.”

Jimmy says that wikipedia does not do original research but wikinews will have some original reporting. It’s going to have to be high-quality, he says, and he has no prediction about how much of wikinews will be original.

Dan points out that the Emily Dickinson article that Jimmy uses as an example of an ok-but-not-great article quotes her poem “Tell all the Truth but tell it slant,” and suggests that that’s a good motto for this conference.

Dan asks how the various constituencies would handle seeing a charge about a government official posted on an anonymous blog.

Jim Kennedy says the AP wouldn’t publish it without checking it out. E.g., the wife of a Navy Seal posted photos on oFoto (maybe) that looked like it was Abu Ghraib-style abuse. The reporter checked it out and ran the photos, and now the family is suing the AP. No matter how it comes to you, you follow the same rules.

Jay Rosen says he wouldn’t run it.

Dave Winer does run items he hasn’t checked out. He asks himself if he thinks it’s true, and asks himself what he’s basing it on. He also tells his readers the degree of confidence he has in it.

Jill Abramson says that in the old journalism craft, verification isn’t enough. Even if you confirmed the story, you’d have to get comments.

John Hinderaker. Powerline doesn’t go with anything that’s anonymous.

Me: This is right where this conference hits the shoals we were warned about. This discussion assumes that blogging is continuous with journalism and ought to be judged by the same criteria. And it isn’t. The change to the institution of journalism will come, I think, not from bloggers who think they’re sort of journalists but from the 99.999999% of us who don’t think we’re journalists at all.

Jane: Bloggers have an ethical obligation to their readers. Saying untrue things cause harm.

Ethan says that I’m being disingenous when I say that my blog is like a talk over the water cooler because it gets read by more than two buddies and it gets indexed. [Yes. It’s not identical to water cooler talk, but it’s more like that than it is like journalism. So, the blogging form of rhetoric has a set of responsibilities that water cooler talk doesn’t. But those responsibilities aren’t the same as journalists…although we can learn a lot from the ethics and practices journalists have developed. E.g., disclosure.]

Jay: I’m trying to increase informational certainty but decrease conceptual certainty.

Jimmy: Free licensing does the media no harm if they’re revenues are based on advertising. Release your work under a license that requires attribution back to you. People say “Gee I wish we had your Google power.” We got that power because people are copying our content.

Jim Kennedy: In concept, it’s kind of neat. I’m worried about what sort of abuses would occur and how the brand might be hijacked by people who thought they had a right to it. And it’s more of a problem for images and video.

Jimmy: Take a look at the spectrum of licenses…Your model doesn’t depend on people coming to your web site so maybe it doesn’t apply to you. But it does to newspapers.

Dave: How do you point to something that disappears after a couple of weeks.

Jim: It’s an archive issue. We sell access to the archive.

Jay: In five years you’ll change.

Dave: How can we judge the credibility of an author if we can check what he’s written?

Jim: I don’t disagree with you. We just don’t have a mechanism for it.

Dan puts in a plug for Creative Commons. “I don’t know if it hurt sales, but I do know it helped bring attention to the topic.”

Dave Sifry: The elephant in the room is about business models. Until we ask how people still make money doing it, we can’t talk well together. (Dave says that every page of Technorati is Creative Commons licensed.)

Jay points to the damage done by locking up the archives. He says journalists don’t recognize the damage because they can always get at the content via Lexis/Nexis. But for the rest of it, the content is simply gone. This is critical to the development of the Web and the future of journalism. the place to watch is Greensboro North Carolina. Jay calls upon journalists to demand this.

Bill Mitchell of Poynter says this discussion is changing his mind. He came in thinking that archives were one of the reliable sources of revs, but now he’s thinking about the social impact of locking up the archives and about alternative business models.

Jay points to an article about The Guardian’s reasons for making the archives permanently available.

Alex Jones of the Shorenstein says that it would bring people to the pages, and they could sell advertising.

Jim (AP): Our management is enlightened. We’re just stuck between models for a while.

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