Citizen Media Watch

Interesting piece over at TechnoKimchi on the protests against president Lee Myung-Bak in Korea and how it all came about through citizen journalism:

How did it happen so quickly? This is the fun part. Lee is a very conservative guy, who still believes in “control”. What he did was, when numerous protests broke out around the country, he basically ordered the media companies “not to report” to the people about what’s happening. There were police at work, trying to stop the “peace candlelight” protests, or vigils now called; some police went quite violent, but none to be reported by major broadcasters, newspapers, Internet news sites, or magazines.

But we’re living in the age of Web 2.0. Now people are in control. People that were there became citizen journalists - thousands and thousands. And the force of citizen journalism has grown so immense that basically nobody can stop it now.

One site gathered a stunning 1.5 million signatures to an online call for impeachment. Read the full piece here.

A lot of comments have been made to Paul Bradshaw’s (read his blog too) excellent list of changes for journalists in the upcoming ten years in the Press Gazette lately. In short, the list is made up of:

1. From a lecture to a conversation
2. The rise of the amateur
3. Everyone’s a paperboy/girl now
4. Measurability
5. Hyperlocal, international
6. Multimedia
7. Really Simple Syndication
8. Maps
9. Databases
10. Just a click away

I’d like to add an eleventh change/challenge for journalists. One that is closely connected to no. 1, but I think it deserves it’s own mention.

11. Personal transparency

As a consequence of blogs, wikis and citizen media sites becoming more important sources of information for the general public, I think we’ll see a new awareness of the importance of trust, and knowing who your source of information is. Bloggers are often open about what their views are and who they are affiliated with. If they’re not, you bet someone else will find out and make it public.

I am convinced this openness will be demanded of journalists as well. You might not need to reveal details about your private life, but you will need to give your readers/viewers/listeners an idea och what you represent. This is an important distinction, since for instance journalists working with sensitive information, infiltrating or walraffing will need to remain fairly anonymous when it comes to for instance how they look and sometimes even what their names are in order to do their job well. But they can still build up trust. Swedish blogger Beta Alfa is a good example that you do not need to reveal your real name in order to achieve this. Being open about your affiliations, for instance, and anything else that might influence or be suspected to influence your work, is a good start. Also simple things like providing a list of links to what you’ve written before on a subject.
I call this personal transparency.

Living in Sweden, and especially taking an active part in covering and exploring social and citizen media, I take many things for granted. One is the right to take photos in public areas, another to report about what I see and opinions and thoughts I have on any thinkable subject.

In other parts of the world, however, those simple actions can get you into serious trouble. I recently read an article in AsiaMedia about the situation in Sri Lanka. The country is the world’s third most dangerous place for journalists to operate, with only Iraq and Somalia being more deadly. Seven journalists were killed there in 2007.

Pedestrians who use their cellphones to film bomb attacks or even everyday events get questioned by police, and it’s not only authorities that pose a threat to reporters or anyone with a camera. There’s a trend of citizens not turning to the tools of citizen media to improve their situation, but instead turning against anyone trying to do this, or anyone remotely suspected of it.

Anyone with a still or video camera in public is immediately suspected as a “trouble-maker.” This endangers our right to click and shoot for personal or professional purposes.

Despite this, however, there is a movement of citizen journalism, though it’s a lonely and vulnerable job, especially with a decrease in democracy in recent years. New media activist Sanjana Hattotuwa is interviewed, and says:

- In Sri Lanka, the significant deterioration of democracy in 2006-2007 has resulted in a country where anxiety and fear overwhelm a sense of civic duty to bear witness to so much of what is wrong. No amount of mobile phones and PCs is going to magically erase this deep rooted fear of harm for speaking one’s mind out.

The article writer, Nalaka Gunawardene, brings up an example which clearly shows the poor state of democracy and the hardship for bloggers in Sri Lanka.

A fellow blogger recently wrote a moving piece about a 65-year-old woman who sells fruits and vegetables at her local market in Colombo. The story behind the story was how the blogger had been surrounded and questioned by four men and the police, who demanded to know whether she had “permission from the municipality to photograph.”

Luckily, the vegetable sellers came to her rescue. “They… said they asked me to come with the camera to take some photographs of them,” she wrote.

But she posed the question: “Do we have to have a camera license like a gun license of yesteryear?”

(via Social Media)

I once more welcome Gitta Wilén as a guest contributor here at Citizen Media Watch. This time she has interviewed a hyperlocal blogger, Alf Fransson.

Alf Fransson, 69, is blogging about a small area 1.3 Swedish miles from Askersund in Närke, Sweden. By putting up his own placards at the local petrol station/grocery store, he has managed to engage the people who are living in the area to read and to give response to his blog material.

The Åsbro blog has been up and running since the beginning of this November 2007. Fransson says that he got inspired to start blogging by his stepdaughter. The address for the blog is estabo.blogspot.com. Estabo is the name of the place in Åsbro where Fransson lives.
- I did not want to use the blog address “asbro”, because it is Swedish for something else but Åsbro, he laughs.

There are 1.600 people living in Åsbro and Fransson’s blog is about things which concern the inhabitants: “Do we need efficient street-lighting?”, “Why is there cable worth over a million lying down by the lake ‘Åsasjön’?” and “What is going on at the Åsbro kursgård?”

Fransson has been visiting and writing about the companies in the area. One of the companies is Alfapac, which is Åsbro’s largest industry and employs about 80 people.
- It gives me the chance to satisfy my own curiosity as well as getting material for my blog, he says.

There are some musicians and authors living in Åsbro and Fransson has plans for future blogging:
- I am thinking about interviewing people. I would like to write about personalities in the field of culture, he says.

Fransson also wants to blog about interesting places to visit in the area. Not so well known excursion spots.
- Most of the people do not see the beauty of their own neighbourhood, Fransson says and adds:
- There is an old sacrificial well situated in the forest that I would like to show to you and my readers.

Dan Gillmor has put together a ten point report of the state of citizen media today.
While both a general audience and traditional media now pays attention to citizen media, there have been backlashes and we are still struggling with the business models and trust issues, Gillmor writes. Many start-ups have failed, yet there are a few examples of successful sites. Gillmor mentions Scoop and NowPublic as good examples. And he’s optimistic about the future of journalism, encouraging people to experiment more.

not only don’t you need permission, but you don’t need much money, either

In finding new ways for citizen media to develop, Gillmor has a philosophy. This is his advice:

* Openness: Use open technologies, and be open with others about what you are doing. Now, a truly spectacular idea may be such a hot business project that one should work in stealth mode, but most ideas will find more traction with the help of others who care about what you’re doing.
* Use tools that already exist: Reinventing wheels is rarely a productive use of time in the cheap-experiments arena. Chances are that many if not all of the tools you need are already available.
* Collaboration: Work with anyone and everyone.
* Take risks: This is by far the most important. Silicon Valley, where I’ve lived for more than a decade, has taught me a crucial truth, that a culture of risk-taking is a precondition for wider success. The low cost of trying, and correspondingly low cost of failure, is removing virtually all reasons for not taking chances.

The last point is about trust, and is well worth reading in its entirety.

After Magnus Ljungkvist received Nyhetspriset, a Swedish citizen journalism award presented by Politikerbloggen, criticism has been heard. He received the award for revealing that then minister Borelius had a high income when she claimed she could not afford to pay employment taxes for hiring a nanny. Borelius resigned shortly after this.

The two main critics, Fredrik R Krohnman and Jonathan Leman, claim that it’s not correct to call Ljungkvist’s scoop citizen journalism since Ljungkvist’s employed by a political party (the social democrats, where he works as press speaksperson).
The blog is however not an official social democrat blog, but his private publishing space.

The critique and the discussion that’s followed is interesting because it sheds light on an important question: Who can call himself/herself a citizen journalist? In Krohnman’s and Leman’s argumentation I see the same views as some of the more conservative SJF (Swedish journalists’ union) members gave voice to at a debate I took part of in Stockholm in May. The idea that journalism is defined by who does it. And now Krohnman/Leman uses the same argumentation for citizen journalism.

Citizen journalism is most often not objective. What is important though is transparency, to clearly state what allegiances you have.
This is the one bit of critisism that I can partly agree with. It is not obvious from Ljungkvist’s blog that he works for the social democrats.

But: Doing so does not exclude him from performing acts of citizen journalism. For me, that is exactly how you can define it: If you perform an act of journalism that is journalism. But you also need to be very open about anything that could have influenced your angles when you report a story.

I think Ljungkvist’s scoop is qualified to be called an act of citizen journalism. Even though it is not obvious for a new reader of his blog Magnus Tankar who he is, this was not unknown for returning visitors or indeed for most media. Knowing this does not change the value of what he revealed about Borelius, and his doing this before any traditional media company.

I do agree with Krohnman/Leman that traditional media should have done a better job presenting who Ljungkvist is though. I also believe a critical approach to your sources is vital for anyone doing journalism.

Disclaimer: I was a jury member for the Nyhetspriset award

I haven’t had time to write about the SJF panel debate on citizen media the other day, so I was happy to see that Media Culpa and Andreas Aspegren have done the job for me. And a good job too.

On the whole it was an odd situation, being in a debate with my employer’s main competitor suddenly on my side, and the other side consisting of representatives of my own trade union. These are strange times.
It was however a good and necessary debate which high-lighted for me some of the dangers of the conservatism in the press corps.

In December I wrote about the multimedia project in Brighton which is a collaboration between the University of Brighton, Nokia, Ymogen and the BBC.
Today the result was released as Geo-stories, a set of geo-tagged photos and film clips brought together as a kind of multimedia story on this site.
If the goal was to “create engaging stories” as Mark Hardwick put it, I’m sorry to say I am not that impressed.

There are two ways to explore the stories, either by clicking the “play the story” button, in which case you get the full multimedia experience with a satellite image background, music and text, photos and video clips telling a step-by-step story. Unfortunately many of them are over-done, having music with lyrics in the background while you’re supposed to read small and quite blurred text which disappears too quickly. The most engaging story is The bible on the beach, though that one raises a lot of other questions. Nowhere do we get to know if this is a fictional or true story. If it’s true, there are a lot of objections to be made. If not, that should be made clear.
The Guerilla gardening story also works okay.

The other way of exploring the stories is by clicking the dots/signs on each story’s map. That doesn’t work well at all. The navigation leaves a lot to be asked for. It sometimes, for instance on the “Tree Survey”, brings you away from the map of photos/video clips once you click to view one of them. In other places you still get to see the map with the geotagged photos, but if you’ve zoomed in you lose the zoom once you click on a photo and have to re-zoom (and re-zoom you have to, since the standard view of the map is so much zoomed out that the photo dots are on top of eachother). If you use the Next and Previous links there are no indications on the map which dot represent the photo your looking at.

However, it is an interesting experiment, and a first step towards using geotagging in story-telling. The main flaws in the second way of story exploration are actually due to less than perfect site building, not the way the students have carried out the projects.

With some more training, this could mature into something quite interesting. But it is important to remember that a web audience usually wants to be active - clicking the forward arrows in the multimedia needs to work flawlessly. And clicking your way around a map needs to work without the map reloading and zooming when you haven’t asked it to.

As for the “citizen media” aspect, I see no way to contribute to the site, though it says you can comment as a registered user. That doesn’t seem to include the general public, or the link is well hidden. But I guess the citizen journalism part is referring to the students not being trained journalists.

I have a busy week coming up. Thursday I’ll give a presentation at Karlstad University on citizen media and how we work with participatory journalism at aftonbladet.se. Also some important challenges for news sites and some trends I see in the near future. Should be fun.
The other speakers are Fredrik Wackå and Robin Hamman, so I’ll be in good company. I’m really looking forward to Hamman’s presentation of the Manchester blogging project and how the BBC is working with educating people to become bloggers through workshops.

Tomorrow morning I hope to have time to stop by Stockholm Media Week to listen to Damon Rasti talk about web2.0 and a panel on local as “the new black”.

Then on Monday I’ll participate in a debate hosted by the Swedish Journalists’ Union on Citizen journalism - “threat or opportunity”. It’s to take place at Cafe Aguéli, Blecktornsgränd 9, Stockholm, at 19.30. It’s free and open for all. Jonas Morian hoped for more bloggers/citizen media people in the panel as opposed to journalists, and I can see his concern. Let’s hope for a lot of them in the audience.

Next month the ground-breaking South Korean citizen media site OhMyNews will relaunch as “OhMyNews 2.0″. The new site’s aspiration is to attract 100 000 volunteering contributors (today: 43 000) within the next three years, writes Dagens Medier.