Ethan Zuckerman is about to show a video of Alisa Miller, the head of Public Radio International, talking about the distorted picture the news media give when covering global news. E.g., the death of Anna Nichol Smith basically drove out the coverage of any place else in the world except Iraq. (Ethan points to the carograms at WorldMapper.)

[Tags: media journalism alisa_miller globalvoices ]

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Lisa Williams, who was great in the previous session on the world of media in 103 (which I didn’t blog because I’m so damn tired) is moderating a panel on “viable models.” [I’m live blogging, missing stuff, getting it wrong. I’m posting this before I’ve proofread it because I have to get to the next session. Reader beware.]

Mark Ranalli from Helium gives a quick talk about Helium, a site where people compete to create the highest-rated content on a topic. They share the money they make with the writers. Only peers can evaluate. They do head to head evaluations of two articles and use that to rank what may be dozens of articles on a topic. Helium also flogs its content to publishers in their “freelance marketplace.” And it integrates content into mainstream media. E.g., Boston Now invites readers to write articles and sends them to Helium. A PBS show uses Helium to run a weekly essay contest. [Ah PBS and its essay contests!]

John Sawyer from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting reports from tough areas. They create content and place it all over, from MSM to YouTube. All the reporters blog.

Doc Searls is talking about “a new business model for free media” (= VRM). Marketers have a split in their heads, he says, that allows them to talk about “targeting” consumers even though they themselves are members of markets too. We no longer have to be put into silos, as if we were owned by businesses. We need Vendor Relationship Management. “With VRM I can inquite and relate to markets on the fly.” Express global preferences without having to give all the same info. He’s willing to pay money to reach a human in under 60 seconds. We should be able to manage our own health care data.VRM’s first use case is paying for public media. VRM is introducing the “relbutton” which you can put anywhere you want; press it and you can remember the site and relate to the site in the way you want. It has four visible states: Intention to relate, an existing relationship, an existing relationship, or an intention to sell.

Q: Why isn’t this the same as a PayPal button?
Doc: Because that’s take it or leave it.
Q: Sites have lots of ways of interacting with viewers. What’s different here?
Doc: There’s no one way to interact with them. And they’re not under you’re control. Public radio’s tip system takes too long to pay.
Q: This is not a micropayment system…
Joe Andrieu: It’s an invitation to relate in any number of ways. It’s a generalized approach.
Q: is this supposed to replace the pledge system?
Doc: It’s not intended to replace them. But 90% don’t pledge, and everyone hates the pledge drives.
Q: So how does the RelButton generate money?
Doc: It’s uniform and efficient.

Q: Can you give an example of something that’s approached solving a problem in this way? Letting people take control of a transaction?
Doc: For transactions, no. It’s like an old-fashioned marketplace.
Joe: An example are the old proprietary email systems.

Q: Could you explain how Helium makes money?
A: 1. We have about 700,000 articles, attracting 3M visitors/month. Ad revenue, which we share with the writers. 2. We take part of the fees publishers pay our writers. And, no, we’re not profitable yet but we hope to be soon.

Why do people write for you?
Mark: Individuals building a portfolio. Non-profits have been sending people to us. I’ve stopped trying to guess why people write.

Lisa: You’ve all presented transactional models. That’s where many people are going, but they require huge volumes to work. How do you get to the volume you need?
Mark: Advertisers and publishers.
Doc: We’re not burdened by a business model…
Lisa: You still have to get users…
Doc: You make it available. A Firefox download, etc.
Q: Any partners integrating the button yet?
Doc: It’s a barn raising. A few dozen are highly active on a list. [Tags: media mediarepublic lisa_williams doc_searls helium pulitzer_crisis ]

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Richard Sambrook, Director of Global News at the BBC World Service and a great blogger, is giving the opening talk at a small conference hosted by the USC Annenberg School for Communication and the Berkman Center. The aim of the conference is to talk about how we can begin to assess how the media are changing and what’s going on with participatory journalism. One of the focuses will be on what research we need done (where “we” = our democracy) and how we can get it done. [I’m posting this without re-reading so I can go to the reception, frankly. As always, I’m typing quickly, not keeping up with Richard’s fast pace, getting things wrong, misspelling, etc. etc. If that’s not ok, then read no further. Also, when in doubt I’m reporting what Richard is saying, not inserting my own comments.]

This afternoon, a bunch of us sat in the Annenberg’s atrium, in front of four large panels showing mainstream news channels. We were just trying to do our email and talk with one another, but it was hard as CNN looped for 45 minutes about the discrimination against “short, obese” people and then for an hour about a murdered women. Wow. Great scene-setting for this conference. (Doc may also be blogging about the multi-screen atrium experience.)

Richard is giving the opening “provocation” (as John Palfrey puts it in introducing him). Richard points to Jay Rosen’s saying “Blogging vs. journalism is over” (showing the power of agood sound byte, Richard says) at a conference 3 yrs ago. Much has changed since then, says Richard. Consolidation has happened. Social networking has taken off. Video and conversation have become more dominant. There are still issues of trust and transparency. He mentions someone who said that journalists ought to answer questions and bloggers ought to ask questions, which he thinks is an interesting way of thinking about it. He points to how much blogging and podcasting the msm are doing. “But these aren’t really about participation,” he says, because there are very few links going out and very little interaction.

New research shows (he says) that news sites are now way-stations, not final destinations. He points to memeorandum, “and algorithm replacing a newsroom.” Google is the fourth most trusted news brand in the world, but doesn’t create any content.

The big payers talk about user generated content. It’s a marketing tool. “You have to be seen to be talking about citizen journalism.” But it’s narrowly defined. Four categories: 1. Eyewitness news. MSM have always done that. 2. Sharing of opinion. MSM have not done a good job taking this in. 3. Sharing of discovery. 4. Sharing of expertise (or networked journalism). This is the most valuable and richest example of what citizen journalism holds out, but is the most difficult to deliver. But it’s a minority of the audience that engages in this.

He gives an example. Last year, the BBC chartered a boat and took it up the Bangladesh River to chart the course of climate change. Flickr, Twitter, Google Maps. They had 50,000 followers on Flickr but only 26 on Twitter. Several million listened on shortwave radio.

It’s not about technology, Richard says. What’s the social purpose of social networking, he asks. Have we found one?

Corporate media still has a huge grip on the Internet, he says. The top 5% of sites reach a billion people. With that type of corporate grip on access, will anything change, he asks. Richard says big changes are indeed happening. In the recording industry, what used to be a simple process (get radio play, get on MTV, distribute the disk) has become complex. Same thing is happening to the newspaper industry.

He talks about The Guardian’s leap of faith, trying to become a digital platform. Meanwhile, the NY Times is saying that “Demand has never been greater…” He meant that there are 17M unique visitors to NYTimes.com, half from search and half direct. NYT.com makes money but not enough to fund the Times’ operations. Online advertising is slowing, especially on journalism sites, Richard says. The economic basis of journalism is in qusetion.

He talks about networked journalism. E.g., iPM from the BBC. Highly participatory and transparent. Newsnight on BBC invites people to come to the daily meeting about what stories to cover. He says CBS closed its own experiment on open journalism because “they said they couldn’t find a business model” for it. “As if you have to find a business model for accountability.”

He points to how much live video is now around, from seesmic to vpod.tv. “We need to take the cameras out of the backyard to where things are actually happening.” The video community can be very self-referential, he says. This is early stage of a powerful new technology, so it’s bound to be in a bit of a bubble, he says but he’d like to see us grasp the opportunity more fully. This is about the move from mass to community-based communication.

Technology is bringing in “the new creatives,” he says. Many are very good. Nextnewnetworks.com. TheNerve.tv. Vidshadow.com. The cost base is a quarter of commercial TV and if they can gather a community they can make a business out of it.

He shows a dummy [?] page from the BBC. “My Democracy Now: Create your own political dashboard.” Aggregate what you want. What’s happening in your area. Right now the plan is to only aggregate BBC content, but Richard says that that’s just a first step.

He talks about the shift to the importance of the DJ in music. “What’s the equivalent of that in the information ecology?” Last.fm news? News scrobbling? Personalization is about to work, at last. Tagging, Calais, Twine all add metadata. It’s all about to happen and will take us up to the next level.

He ends with questions, but I can’t keep up. Great talk.

Q: (Ethan Zuckerman) Almost all the examples you gave were of you inviting people into your universe. But often people didn’t show up. Are there ways citizen participation can shape what the story will be?
A: I agree. Inviting people to your party is a very old media attitude. We’re starting to shift. We’re now allowing people to embed our video on their site. We’re starting to understand that. And we do respond to how people define the news, etc. Most of the comments are people shouting. We’re happy to have them there, but they’re not defining the news agenda. We haven’t found the right way to enable that.
John Palfrey: Ethan, be a consultant. You have something in mind…
Ethan: Bloggers have become commentators and error-checkers. That’s not changing the agenda. The question is whether citizens can change what stories show up on the BBC site…
A: We try to do that. We use GlobalVoices. There are examples…

Q: (susan mernit) In hyperlocal journalism you see events that have happened or things that need to be changed. Traditionally, organizing and journalism are separate. BBC lowering the barrier to entry so that local people can reflect local issues?
A: We had ICAN [?], a site to provide people the tools to discover what’s going on and link them up with people with shared interests. Community issues. And we gave them the tools for civic engagement. It was reasonably successful for a while, but it wasn’t getting enough interest.

Q: What gets in the way?
A: The BBC has a huge audience and is growing. There are managerial problems nurturing deep innovation; generally it has to come in from the outside. It’s not that there’s huge resistance to it. We know we have to change. But pushing it through and getting it to work is a big and complicated project. [Tags: media journalism bbc richard_sambrook citizen_journalism everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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CNN actually had a reporter listen to the entire tape of Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s sermon, instead of just the sound bytes. Wow! What a revolutionary idea! And it turns out that in context, Wright’s words are — get this! — more understandable and less inflammatory. Isn’t it crazy how context will do that? Furthermore, it turns out that the when Wright suggested that our chickens were coming home to roost, he was quotingciting Edward Peck, former U.S. Ambassador to Iraq and deputy director of President Reagan’s terrorism task force.

How many days did it take for the professional news media to get around to this?

[Tags: media journalism obama jeremiah_wright cnn ]

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Tonight, a 8:50pm, this is CNN’s list of “latest news”:

Sigh.

[Tags: news cnn journalism media ]

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From a NY Times article whether the press has been unfair to Hillary Clinton:

“Part of it is her campaign’s fault,” Andrea Mitchell, the longtime NBC political correspondent, said backstage at the MSNBC debate in Cleveland in Tuesday. “They started with this notion of inevitability. And they were very arrogant.”

So, the press will give crappy coverage to a candidate the reporters think is arrogant? Isn’t that exactly what our media are supposed to not be doing, by their own standards? [Tags: media hillary_clinton journalism ]

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Brad Sucks came to Harvard this week and gave a performance-conversation and addressed the class I’m co-teaching with John Palfrey (blogged here and here). There were a few surprises.

What was not surprising was that Brad’s totally delightful, frank, and just a good guy.

First, he pronounces his last name (Turcotte) as Tur-COTT, not Tur-COAT. I stand corrected. Also, he likes his name written as “Brad Sucks,” not “BradSucks.” Sorry twice, Brad!

Second, especially during the class, I was struck by how different copyright looks to Brad than it looks to, well, lots of others. It’s not just that copyright protection looks to Brad like a limitation on how widely his music spreads and his musical career builds. Rather, it was how foreign copyright looks to him. From what he said, it seems like an imposition of an artificial construct place on top of the work.

Here’s what I think is happening, although I can’t say that this is what Brad is thinking. To people who think of music as a work, copyright looks like the natural boundary of their work, the ethical edge of their work itself. Others (Brad, maybe?) think of music not so much as a work as a shared experience, as a connection with listeners. For them, listening is co-creation. The work feels more like a performance to them. The concept of copyright doesn’t fit easily over such a view.

Third, Brad surprised both the class and the attendees at the performance-conversation with his claim that he is a “horrible capitalist” who gives his songs away for intensely practical reasons, not because he’s an anti-copyright activist.

Thanks for coming, Brad. And thanks for being so BradSucksy. [Tags: brad_sucks bradsucks copyright copyleft music harvard ]

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Terry Heaton writes about CNN’s firing his friend, Chez Pazienza, a producer at American Morning, for what he was writing in his blog:

According to Chez, he was terminated for violating network policy by not running what he was writing through their vetting system. So he was fired not for blogging but for the content of his blog. “It’s not that I’ve been writing,” he wrote in an email. “It’s WHAT I’ve been writing.” That may be the official decision, but the truth is he was fired because he had the balls to write about the industry without telling CNN. I would add that there is no mention of his connection to the network on his site, and as a producer, it’s hard to justify the notion that he’s in any way a public figure or publicly connected with the company.

CNN may feel a little safer, but do you think the journalists there think this is a good policy? [Tags: blogging journalism media Chez_Pazienza ]

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The NY Times reports that Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences will vote next week on a proposal that would require faculty to deposit a copy of their articles in an open access Harvard repository even as they submit those articles to academic journals.

I like this idea a lot. I only wish it went further. Faculty members will be allowed to opt-out of the requirement pretty much at will (as I understand it), which could vitiate it: If a prestigious journal accepts an article but only if it’s not been made openly available, faculty members may well decide it’s more important for their careers to be published in the journal. I would prefer to see the Harvard proposal paired with some form of official encouragement to tenure committees to look favorably upon faculty members who make their work widely and freely available.

Nothing is without drawbacks. A well-run, reliable, thorough peer-review system costs money. But there’s also an expense to funding peer review by limiting access to the work that makes it through the process. Likewise, while the current publication system directs our attention efficiently, but there’s a price to the very efficiency of such a system: innovation can arise from what looked liked inefficiencies. There’s value in the long tail of research.

If we were today building a system for evaluating scholarly research and for making it maximally available, we would not build anything like the current paper-based system. Well, we are building such a system. The Harvard proposal will, in my opinion, help.

Disclosure: I’m a fellow at the Berkman Center which is part of the Law School, not the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and I’m not a faculty member in any case. Stuart Shieber, one of the sponsors of the proposal, is a director of the Center.) [Tags: open_access peer_review scholarship research publishing media everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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My fellow Fellow, Persephone Miel, wonders why bloggers are not all over a juicy story like NPR’s piece on Fort Drum advising veterans away from benefits (to oversimplify the situation). That story seems to have it all. Yet hardly any bloggers have picked it up.

She writes:

Here is where the “cream will rise to the top” theory crashes and burns. In addition to being well-reported by an award-winning reporter at a reputable news organization, this story has everything: it’s political, it’s potentially useful to vets who might have been denied benefits unfairly, it builds on the Walter Reed story, it’s ideally suited to citizen journalism (someone needs to find the other 10 hospitals visited by the deserves-to-be-infamous Col. Becky Baker and find out what she said there). But except for the Army’s public clarification with regards to Fort Drum, I’m betting it sinks without a trace into the blood-dark sea of election horse-race commentary. I hope someone proves me wrong.

This new media ecology is so complex, and such a rich field for study and research. (Not entirely by coincidence, Persephone is putting together a conference on researching participatory media.) For example, we look to mainstream media to provide coverage. Bloggers generally don’t feel the obligation to report on something just because it deserves to be reported on. The factors influencing what we blog about are shifting, personal, and multidimensional. We may surface a story that we think has gotten insufficient coverage because we think it’s so important or because we think it’s quirky and under-reported. We may provide a viewpoint that we think is interesting (and thus not obviously common) or we may express outrage if we feel we need to weigh in. But we may not blog about a story that meets some of these criteria because we’re tired of writing about outrages, because we wrote about one yesterday, because we have nothing to add to it, because it deserves more work than we’re willing to put into it, because we think it’s being adequately covered by the MSM or mainstream bloggers, or because we have to go to the parent-teachers’ conference. There are as many reasons not to blog about something as there are for not talking about them.

It’s like reading a newspaper at the breakfast table. Which stories cause you to look up and say to your spouse, “Wow, it says here…”? You’re not covering the news. You’re talking about what strikes you as worth talking about…and what’s worth talking about isn’t the same as what’s worth knowing. The “It says here” interruption assumes coverage exists.

So, I agree that the cream doesn’t rise to the top of the blogosphere, where “cream” means “most important for an informed citizenry to know.” Coverage has been a property of institutions. It’s not at all clear that it can be a property of networks, or that a coverage system will emerge from a network of bloggers doing intentional or incidental journalism. [Tags: journalism citizen_journalism participatory_media everything_is_miscellaneous persephone_miel ]

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