Citizen Media Watch

Going through old posts on Beta Alfa’s blog, I found a post about YouTube’s new Citizen Media channel, Citizen News. They’ve appointed a News Manager and aim to collect news from citizen sources in one place, as a citizen news and interviews channel.

News Manager Olivia M calls out:

So here’s where I turn to you guys for help! If you see examples of fellow YouTubers doing great work in journalism and reporting, please let me know. If you’re a citizen journalist yourself, tell me how YouTube could better serve you. I want to hear how you guys envision news on YouTube and what you’d like to see. My ultimate mission is to make the site a go-to destination for news on the web.

A good ambition, for sure. But after 18 text replies, Olivia hasn’t yet got back to the users commenting her post. And with comments as this one, dated May 26, I feel it’s urgent that she should, if she wants this effort to be taken seriously:

We are very concerned about YouTube’s implementation of geolocational censorship in Thailand and elsewhere. How do you intend to distribute real news to its intended audience without being compromised by YouTube’s secret agreement with Thai government? Freedom Against Censorship Thailand (FACT)

Wishing Olivia and the YouTube the best of luck with the initiative, and hoping to see a bit more interaction with the users.

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.

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.

Tjuvlyssnat.se is a Swedish version of the popular US blog ”Overheard in New York”. In a short period of time it has gained a great success, being the most read blog on Bloggportalen.se, and last summer the blog landed a book deal. The book is also very successful.

Last week Damon Rasti, one of the people behind the site, talked a bit about Tjuvlyssnat on Stockholm Media Week.
Tjuvlyssnat started out as a hobby project between Damon and his friend. They started publishing conversation they had overheard, and the site got a lot of attention. More and more people started contributing.
- It’s everyday conversation, but here they are collected in one place, said Rasti. It reminds you of gossip, but it is more innocent.
The people in the conversations are usually anonymous everyday people.
- It’s never been our intention to expose celebrities.

Tjuvlyssnat.se is ad financed, and it’s going very well.
- When you can influence and contribute content you are much more okay with ads. You understand they are necessary to keep the site going.

Rasti said he has many new projects coming up, one of them with a major media company. But as the papers were not yet signed, that was all he wanted to reveal. Also he’s working on a mashup and two new sites for young girls.

Anyone who can make it to Stockholm on June 12-13 should check out PodCamp Europe. I’m quite excited to hear about what is most likely Sweden’s first unconference. The concept is that the knowledge stems from the audience, so everyone is a potential speaker. And yeah, the event is free!
I’ve registered and really hope to make it.

What is PodCamp Europe? It’s an UnConference of podcasters, bloggers, and new media professionals & amateurs for two days to share, explore, challenge, and grow our abilities in new media. Learn about audio and video podcasting, blogging, photography, Second Life, Twitter, and all kinds of other new and social media tools. Whether you’re a veteran or interested in getting started, PodCamp is for YOU.

(via Media Culpa)

A lot of Twitter mashups have popped up lately. The latest that I’ve tried out is Twittervision, a live world view where twits show in real time. It’s rather addictive watching people’s actions described all over the globe. I’m still pretty hooked on Twitter, and I like that they keep developing the service. Though the increase in numbers of users have caused them some server problems. At times today it’s been impossible to reach the site. Hopefully they’ll fix it soon.

Twittervision is in beta, and is a service from David Troy, who’s also behind Twittermap, which is also pretty cool. You can type in your location and see what others in your area are twittering about. I found myself in Stockholm, though since I haven’t given an exact address it’s not actually where I was at the time of twittering.

When Twitter adds gps data, this will be really interesting. Now the locations are often pinned wrong, twits from people travelling show up in their home town.

Troy is also behind Twittersearch, a search engine for Twitter.

There are also a large number of Twitter widgets to use on blogs or other sites. Twitter has added to their own widgets, or badges as they call them, letting users display the latest twits from their added contacts. Here’s an example on my personal blog.

Trig.com today opened up for anyone to join. The Sweden-based music community site has got quite a bit of attention since they opened up for beta applications, and it will be interesting to see how the site develops now that it’s fully live. “We’re still in beta mode, adding new features and squishing bugs”, the Trig team announced to its members, but now the user profiles are open for anyone to look at. For an example, check out my test profile (no blog content though).

Now that the site is live and I no longer have to obey the non-disclosure agreement, I guess I can go into detail about the stuff I like on Trig. The Timeline Content Browser is one such cool solution. You can browse Trig content in a timeline, letting you see how it changes over time (most trigged songs, profiles and blogs). Also the Live’n'Direct page which features the latest logged in users, latest uploaded pics and songs, and also a shout box where you can shout stuff to the community (nothing that hasn’t been tried before elsewhere though). Over all, I like the feel of the site, but am not sure how much usage it will get and if it’s a real contender to MySpace. I hope so though. It definitely has a nicer appeal.

Previous posts about trig.com:
A look at trig.com and the possible fall of Lunarstorm

iCommunity.TV is a new mashup service of YouTube and Google maps. As I predicted, geotagging will be big this year, and this is a good example, even if it remains to be seen how widely used the site will be - so far there are about 26 “place channels” which lets you watch video related to a certain city. Each videoclip is pin-pointed on a map. The geotagging and sorting into different news categories is done by the site’s users.

It’s interesting to see that the site has journalistic ambitions.
– We like to think of it as an experiment to further explore the potential of citizen reporting, says Chris Haller of eParticipation.com, the company behind iCommunity.tv.
The focus is said to be local news, but there are also a bunch of entertainment/music clips with local connections. You can subscribe to the channels for different cities or news categories.
From the front page presentation:

We believe that Youtube.com offers more than diet coke+mentos and the beer cannon. This website is dedicated to giving citizen reporting a video platform, by adding location to news footage hosted on Youtube and distributing it through various local news channels.

The Institute for Interactive Journalism, J-Lab, has released a lenthy study on hyperlocal citizen media and its sustainability over time. In a news release, J-Lab writes:

Most citizen media ventures are shoestring labors of love, funded out of the founders’ own pockets, and staffed by volunteer content contributors. While they’d like more readers and revenues, site founders nevertheless professed a solid resolve to continue: 51% said they didn’t need to make money to keep going; 82% said they planned to continue “indefinitely.” Nearly all would welcome reinforcements and the ability to make even token payments to writers.

“While not all individual sites will continue to operate, we project that the phenomenon of citizen media will be sustainable, with new sites coming online in serial fashion to replace those that collapse as their founders burn out,” Schaffer said.

73 percent of 500 citizens who participated in the survey think of their sites as a success. Shaffer in the quote above is Jan Schaffer, J-Lab’s Executive Director.

Read more:
The full report at Knight Citizen News Network

(via Center for Citizen Media)

David Kaplan at paidContent.org writes about a new site by Penguin publishing house: A Million Penguins. The site is a wiki where users can contribute to a novel that is to be written in only six weeks time.
Creative writing students set up the framework for the story, and editors will report on the progress. According to Reuters, Penguin are not planning to publish the finished work in the form of a book.

“This is an experiment. It may end up like reading a bowl of alphabet spaghetti,” Jeremy Ettinghausen, head of digital publishing at Penguin UK said

Ettinghausen also writes about the project in his blog:

Over the next six weeks we want to see whether a community can really get together, put creative differences aside (or sort them out through discussion) and produce a novel. We honestly don’t know how this is going to turn out - it’s an experiment. Some disciplines rely completely on collaboration, while others - the writing of a novel, for example - have traditionally been the work of an individual working in isolation. But with collaboration, crowdsourcing and the ‘wisdom of the crowds’ being buzz words du jour, we thought we might as well see if these new trends can be applied to a less obvious sphere than, say, software development.

A couple of commentors on Kaplan’s post point to similar projects that might be worth checking out - Glypho and Poups (the latter in German).