Gitta Wilén and Lotta Holmström. Photo: Pelle Sten

This will be the last post at Citizen Media Watch. As you might have noticed, we haven’t posted in ages. Our focus has been elsewhere, and continue to be so, so with some regret we are making it official that this blog is now simply an archive of our previous posts. We’ll keep it a “landmark only”.

We have met a lot of interesting people and had great conversations along the way. We hope our old posts will shed some light on an era that came and went quite quickly, but changed journalism in many ways.

Over the years we’ve addressed countless issues, for instance we wrote about Wikileaks before it got public. Here are some of our other favorites.

First and last blog post
• Citizen media: A definition. The very first blog post.

• Thinkpublic – designing with people. The last post, with many thanks to Brit Stakston for the video interview with Ella Britton at Think Public.

Gitta: I think that think public, both on land and online, will grow as a phenomenon and become a way to create a more open and smarter communication.

A global perspective
We had an ambition to cover not only citizen media in the western world, but to some extent have a global perspective. We’ve written about projects and events in China, Sri Lanka, Belarus, India, Korea, Thailand, Brazil, Iraq, Singapore, Tunisia and Lebanon.

Lotta: Citizen journalism’s strength is most shown in countries where freedom of speech is limited. The Tunisia prison map is one great example, there are many others. With internet access ordinary people can report first hand on troubling events.

The newsroom of Folha onLine, São Paulo, Brazil.
Photo: Gitta Wilén

• Brazil’s no. 1 online newspaper Fohla OnLine – and its bloggers. Gitta’s first guest post at CMW, before she became a regular blogger here. It got numerous hits from Brazilian readers: a visit at the editorial desk at Folha OnLine, in São Paulo, Brasil.

• A warm welcome to Gitta Wilén

Lotta: It was a natural development of this blog for me to invite Gitta to be a 50/50 collaborator after her having contributed three great guest posts. We make a good team!

Gitta: It has been totally awesome all the way working with Lotta and CMW. We are both storytellers, work-o-holics and Internet addicts.

Hyperlocal and geotagging
Over the years we spent writing at CMW, hyperlocal news went from the next hot thing to failing because hyperlocal markets weren’t ready, to now again being quite interesting since geotagging and geolocation through smartphones is really taking off.

• Here’s one of many posts on this topic: Geotagging makes YouTube videos local at iCommunity.TV.

Lotta: Just look at Gowalla, FourSquare and now also Facebook’s recent integration with Places. We tell stories based on where we are, to a select number of people or to the world. Collaborative maps pinpointing events certainly have their place on major news sites too.

Gitta: It has taken far more time to get there than I thought i would. I seriously thought that geotagging would be implemented and a part of our navigation tools, much earlier. But, let’s handle it wisely and with care.

Teaching and talking
We got opportunities to lecture from our experiences at CMW. For instance Gitta was invited by Jonas Söderström (Inuse), to teach web journalism at Fojo.

Gitta: I managed a one week web journalism seminar at Fojo, with a group of independent Belarus journalists and held some lectures for Belarus journalist students, from the Istitute of Journalism, Zjurfak, at the Belarus State University, BGU. Being the teacher I learned a lot about their situation. Freedom of expression is not to be taken for granted.

Thanks to Fredrik Wackå, Lotta got invited to the university in Karlstad to speak about the role of journalists in future media.

Lotta: I was asked who else they should invite, and thus got the opportunity to suggest Robin Hamman of (then) the BBC and to meet him and discuss the Manchester blogging project I had been following since 2006.

Guestblogging at Mindpark
• Will there be a dark period for journalism? Some thoughts after listening to the journalism debate at SIME 2008. Also published in Swedish at Mindpark. Joakim Jardenberg is a keen Creative Commons advocate, and he also blogged about our SIME interview with Joi Ito.

Gitta: I has been an honour to collaborate with Joakim Jardenberg as a member of the Mindpark blogging team. Both Lotta and I admire his will to unrelentingly guard the soul of the web.

We had a talk with Joi Ito about hyperlocal citizen media and Creative Commons, among other things.
Photo: Lotta Holmström

• Joi Ito: Don’t sign bad licenses. Our meeting with Joi Ito, and a discussion about hyperlocal citizen media.

Gitta: Our meeting with Joi Ito was one the memorable experiences from my time with CMW. Creative Commons is one of the most interesting movement on the Internet.

The future of journalism
The shift from megaphone to discussion partner was a major one, and is probably the one topic we’ve covered the most. Here are some of our posts on the matter.

• Personal transparency, the eleventh change for journalism and Personal journalism, the future of online reporting. Some thoughts on the role of future journalists.

• Sandra Jakob at HD.se – It’s not laziness, it is fear. One of many geek girls with great ideas in a series of video interviews.

• The Lebanese ambulance attack and trust in citizen – and established – media. On trustable sources, bias, traditional media and the blogosphere.

• Swedish news sites narrowing the gap to the blogosphere and The Twingly effect. When Swedish news sites first connected to the blogosphere.

Lotta: I was working at Aftonbladet in February 2006 when they started Läsarbladet, The Readers’ Daily, and I became Readers’ Editor. It was an attempt to engage the readers to contribute with journalistic material to the site, and to create an alternative starting point with the most read and liked stuff in focus, as opposed to the editors’ choices.

It soon became obvious that as an online tabloid it was easy to get readers to send us great photos of their cats and creative gingerbread houses, but enormously difficult to get initiated articles from readers on today’s topics. Later Newsmill proved it could be done, though in the form of opinion material, and also showed the need for asking the right questions.

Gitta and Lotta with Ruiwen Chua and Sriram Krishnan from NUS.
Photo: Brendalene Tan

Students of Singapore conferences and the social media bubble on Jaiku
• Hej! 2007 live updates. Live blogging from Hej! 2007 and meeting all the great people there, who soon conversed on microblogging service Jaiku.
• Why Jaiku outshines Twitter. Fond memories from the Jaiku era.

Gitta: I worked and lived in Singapore, year 2000–2001, starting up the Icon Medialab office. When the NUS guys invited us, parts of what later should be named as ”Bubblan” on Jaiku, to their KTH projects, I felt like home. I would like to send all my love to: Sriram, Ruiwen, Ramkumar and Mahesh.

Lotta: Hej!2007 and the following Stockholm NUS events showed us Swedes what unconferencing was all about, and led the way to great (un)conferences like SSWC and Annika Lidne’s Disruptive Media conference series with integrated Twitter feeds on display. I really enjoyed going to Singapore with Gitta and meeting up with the NUS guys again in 2008.

The blogosphere

Blogging is of course a great tool for citizen media, and it’s gone from a marginal activity to becoming mainstream.
• How many Swedish blogs are there? An attempt to sum up the Swedish blogosphere in 2007 which got some attention.

CMW <3 geek girls
We were invited on a bloggers pass at Sime 2008, thank you Andie och Mahesh. Since we are two proud GeekGirls we took the opportunity to talk to YouTube phenomenon Mia Rose about her music and techie geekiness. The interview put on Youtube has reached over 17 000 fans, so far.

• Mia Rose: Portray yourself with your true colours. An interview that attracted a large and quite different readership than we were used to.

Things we wish we had devoted more time to
Where’s the money? A lot of citizen journalism projects met an early end due to lack of resources. Backfence is one of many examples.

• Backfence’s Mark Potts: We’re re-evaluating our strategy. Email interview with the Backfence co-founder after I posted Trouble at Backfence?

Being successful using the web to collaborate and ask for material for making hardcover books sounds kind of awkward in the era of the ebook, but it works really well for Fredrik and Teo Hären. There are lots of more examples and yes we should have written all about them.

• Teo Härén about their series of Idea books: Invite, collaborate and share – the money

Gitta: I would liked to been able to write more about business opportunities made wisely, on the web and via communication social media.

Lotta: Starting out we were examining a fairly new territory. My focus was on understanding it and its future implications. I think now that perhaps we should have moved on sooner to looking at the revenue aspect, even though we did address it some. I guess the main reason I didn’t focus much on it is that it’s not what makes me tick. I’m a sucker for creative ideas not too limited by the harsh reality of economics.

From now om Citizen Media Watch is a landmark only, but this is not a goodbye, this is a HELLO!

Lotta: lottaholmstrom.se (sw/en), skriva.net (sw) & Saychee.se (en, photo blog)

Gitta: Digitalstorytelling.se (in Swedish only).

Lotta Holmström & Gitta Wilén

Thinkpublic are an agency focused on using design to improve service experiences in the public sector. Their methods include social anthropological research, design, film and workshops.
Ella Britton presented their work at the Geek Girl Meetup #2 in Stockholm, Sweden, 24–25 October 2009.

Ella Britton talked about social innovation through user involvement in the public sector.
The process of involving the service users and the service providers is as important as the actual result. A simple solution can solve a big problem. It is great to be listened to. To be able to share and learn.
– We are using a process of discovering and diagnosing the problem, and then co designing the solution. That co designing methodology is Thinkpublic leaders in, Ella says.

Brit Stakston at JMW Kommunikation did an interview for Citizen Media Watch. Watch Ella Briton talk about their method, the process and their key success factors:

Citizen Media Watch wants to thank Brit Stakston for grabbing the opportunity to have a conversation with Ella Britton, even though we ended up on the pavement and all the noise from the street.

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Brit Stakston at the Geek Girl Meetup #2. Film and photo: Gitta Wilén.

I am at the Really Realtime Disruptive Media conference, which is also streamed live at http://livestream.com/disruptivemedia. I’ve just listened to Stowe Boyd and would like to share some of it, though liveblogging is becoming more and more tricky when everyone’s got access to the event in real time. I think this development is good, since you have to contribute your own thoughts and ideas and not just echo back what is being said.

Anyway, Stowe did a good job summing up the shift from the web of pages to the web of flow. I’d like to focus on the journalistic aspects of what he said.
The basis is that we rely more on our network of peers than on traditional media, traditional search, traditional anything.
- It’s the hollowing out of established mass media as people move away from mass belonging, says Stowe Boyd. They start to reject the editorial voice of newspapers.
He brought up the live twittering of the plane crash in the Hudson river and the tweets from the Iranian demonstrations while CNN was broadcasting re-runs as two examples.

So how can media companies matter in this time/space? They need to take the step out there, to be where their (former) readers are. Stowe Boyd talks about web pages and even blogs as the “dusty library shelves” of today. You go there but it’s not where you have your conversations. So journalists need to go to the streams where their writing is in fact discussed, they need to participate, to analyze what’s being said, and do what they’re good at – summarize, bring up the interesting stuff, and make it easier for people to find it themselves by linking to relevant hash tags etc.

By building credibility and making connections on Twitter and the better tools that will replace it you have direct access to people who can make your reporting better. The main thing is as always to listen.

“Guardian Local is a small-scale experimental approach to local newsgathering. We are focusing on three politically engaged cities and we expect to launch in early 2010,” said Emily Bell, the director of digital development at Guardian News & Media. Sarah Hartley, the Guardian local launch editor said: “While researching developments at the grassroots of community journalism, I’ve been impressed by the range and depth of coverage from local websites and blogs. This experimental project reflects both the shifting nature of journalism and the reality on the ground.”

The focus is on local political decision making, and Bunz draws a parallell to the public subsidy NPR has received in the States, pondering if this might be a model for the UK too. Another option is funding from organizations like the Knight Foundation.

In Sweden we’ve seen several local newspapers/sites collaborating with bloggers for local and hyperlocal news (one recent example is Smålandsposten’s Mitt Lammhult), but the national papers seem less prone to. The largest daily Aftonbladet still has its locally contracted bloggers on the larger cities’ pages on Bloggportalen – for instance Norrköpingsbloggen on the Norrköping page – but with the loss of the local sections on Aftonbladet.se I doubt they get much public or journalistic attention. A lot of them are no longer active.
At the same time there are cities and even whole regions who lack journalists covering them, reports Swedish journalists’ union’s paper Journalisten (unfortunately I can’t find the article available online).
It’s not a problem in itself if national media skip local coverage as long as there are local initiatives – by journalistic sites of bloggers with an interest in these issues. Where they’re lacking, though, there’s a danger that corruption spreads.

(via Jeff Jarvis)

Disclaimer: I am a former employee of Aftonbladet.se.

At one of the opening sessions, sydsvenskan.se gatered a group of journalists, bloggers and others to discuss the future of journalism. Starting out, they said “let’s not discuss the economics, but rather how to make great journalism online”. Needless to say, the two are related, so the discussion drifted in that direction towards the end. Morris Packer, The Bonnier Group/mobilab.se, objected to the term “good journalism”, and got the suggestion it be called “costly journalism” instead: The stuff that traditional journalists do and which costs a lot of money.

- When we don’t have monopoly on information, how can we make use of the numerous resources out there?, asked Gustav Svensson of Sydsvenskan.
Leo Wallentin, a freelance journalist, replied: You have to brand your content, to have interconnecting links so people can find it, and to be present where your content is present.
I think that’s a neat summary for all media companies who are struggling to understand how making your content widely available around the web can be good for you. If you communicate around your content you will still be the source where people turn to for related issues.

Other topics in this session were the use of real time statistics when deciding what makes the top of the front page online, what should and could be called journalism, if honesty isn’t more important than absolute truth and whether a great journalistic handicraft still can sell.

Here’s the schedule for today’s sessions at SSWC:

So for the sake of argument, let’s reverse the question: is there something to be gained by the end of newspapers as we know them in this historical moment?

The two rivalling tabloids joining forces is interesting in itself, though it’s not the first time it’s happened. Campaigns in the past has made them join forces.
What’s really exciting is how this exchange took place, and where – on Twitter, where anyone could and did see and comment on the initiative. A lot of retweets tonight. Having two social/citizen media friendly editors in chief at the two main tabloids promises an interesting time ahead. Looking forward to seeing where this development will lead.

Jan Helin on Twitter
Thomas Mattsson on Twitter

Update: More collaboration across publishing house borders, through Twitter – read this post from Publishing 2.0: Networked link journalism: A revolution quitely begins in Washington State

Several journalists said they wonder if their news organizations are still too dependent on their old business models to create innovative journalism. Chris Peck, editor of The Commercial Appeal in Memphis, Tenn., responded that if they feel that way, they should strike out on their own.

In a time when layoffs are plentyful – atleast in the States, but the economic crisis might mean we’ll have our share here in Sweden too – maybe this is the way to go for some of the people that find themselves outside of traditional media. The big media companies here in Sweden seem to be preparing for a model with fewer employees and more temporary hired workers, if Aftonbladet/Minimedia’s new temp agency is anything to go by. We’ve seen independent journalists starting blogs that has become successful enough to relaunch their careers, such as Niklas Svensson’s (et al) Politikerbloggen, now part of TV4. And of course blogging is also an entry point into journalism for people without academic training but with a passion for their subject and the talent of writing interesting stuff.

One of my great sources of inspiration about citizen media and the future of journalism, Dan Gillmor, is now running the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship, another sign that independent journalistic innovators are needed in the future media landscape.
I’m certainly hoping recently laid off journalists can find the enthusiasm and inspiration to take this step. We need more journalists involved in the innovation online.

Well, back to Angelotti and the Journalism That Matters conference. She points to a set of interviews made by Jackie Hai, a student at the University of Massachusetts. She’s asked a number of the participants what they think is the role of the journalist in this new network of information and community of readers. It’s well worth checking out.

Also read Jackie’s blog post “Journalists: It’s time to be the phoenix”. Good stuff.

“One of the most important things that we need to think about and do is teach journalism to the next generation and to the new leaders within journalism,” said the BBC’s Kevin Marsh, at the DNA 2009 conferenceT in Brussels.

Every aspect of online training that is currently available to 7,500 BBC journalists will be open to the public.

I’ve read a number of posts lately about the education of the public into citizen journalists and educated readers. What do you think, is this the right way to go?

The need for dedicated citizen journalism agencies is declining as citizens become more knowledgeable on how to reach out and get their stuff to mainstream media – and get the earnings from it. The rise of social media has to a large extent meant that they have played out their part.
Even Scoopt’s founder Kyle MacRae now think the concept is doomed.
- A smarter model is sucking in hot images from wherever they happen to be posted and shared, whether that’s Flickr or TwitPic or anywhere else, he says to BJP.

(via journalism.co.uk)

Yesterday evening, as we talked about in our bambusing from the event, the Great Blog Award (“Stora Bloggpriset”) gala was held at Nalen in Stockholm. It’s a new award instituted by Aftonbladet and Bloggportalen (owned by Aftonbladet, so basically it’s an Aftonbladet award).

Talking about the FRA blog quake last summer and how bloggers had a better coverage than mainstream media, aftonbladet.se’s editor-in-chief Kalle Jungkvist explains his thoughts about the blogosphere and why it’s interesting from a mainstream media perspective.
- Historically, journalists have acted as a megaphone. Now we’re facing a new challenge, where we meet active citizens who challenge us, critisize us, comment on us and often, in many issues, know more than we do. That’s a good reason to institute an award for the best of the best of them.
- We are in a phase of learning, Aftonbladet’s editor-in-chief Jan Helin says. We’ll still be in the business of telling the many what few know, but in the future that’s only the start of the discussion. Reporters need to keep working on a story, together with the readers, and they are to a large extent the blogosphere.

The award was given in seven different categories, and a panel of 100 bloggers helped nominate five candidates in each category. Working closely with bloggers ensured that the award was well received in the blogosphere, though I found out that the organizers had been a little nervous about that. The Aftonbladet.se crew at Nalen, where the ceremony took place, were very happy with the outcome though. The room was crowded, and though not everyone agreed the best blogs had won, everyone seemed to think the whole arrangement was a good idea.

Here’s the full list of winners. For all nominations, check out Stora Bloggpriset’s blog.

Entertainment & Culture: Bokhora
Politics & Society: Opassande
Lifestyle: Husmusen
Gadgets & Technology: Moderskeppet
Everyday life: Tonårsmorsa
Sports & Leisure: Marcus Birro
Fashion: Style by Kling

Bokhora, Husmusen and two editors in chief.

Apart from the categories, a special honorary award for great journalistic achievements was presented. The winner, chosen by the editors-in-chief, was StoppaFRAlagen.nu, a site which had the function as the hub for the anti-FRA law initiatives last summer as well as for articles in general about the proposed law.
- It’s a very complex law, it’s hard to get an overview. A mix of competences is needed, and the blogosphere has a unique position to provide them, said Mikael Nilsson, who started the site together with Anna Peterson.

Anna Peterson and Mikael Nilsson from StoppaFRAlagen.nu, the honorary award winners.

Our Stora Bloggpriset set on Flickr. 62 photos from the event.

In Sweden Jaiku has to a large extent been the microblog of choice. But with frequent downtimes, no new features for a long time and Google’s recent announcement that they’re turning it into an open source project, people were ready for an alternative.
In steps Jonas Lejon, an entrepreneur who’s behind several blog-related services in Sweden, who puts together Bloggy, a microblogging service in Swedish. He gets enthusiastic cheers, good feedback, and he responds. More than that, he responds quickly, adds new features, tweaks them, and does in a few months what Jaiku with all its Google backup hasn’t done in years.

When he announced a function for importing all your Jaiku contacts into Bloggy, there was no holding back the migration anymore. Over the weekend my mailbox has been flooded with friends requests from Bloggy users who have imported their contacts.
While it’s a bit sad to let Jaiku go, Bloggy is clearly where the action’s at for the Swedish microblogosphere at the moment. One of the great features is that you can easily follow and update both Jaiku and Twitter from within Bloggy, so you’re not really missing much, even if Bloggy still lacks support for channels. It has adopted many of Jaiku’s features, but it is a bit more like a community than a pure microblogging service.
I asked Jonas Lejon what made him develop the service.
- I was using Pownce, Twitter and Jaiku and I was tired of em all. I was thinking: Can I do this better? So i started developing Bloggy 8 months ago and implemented all the functions I liked from the other microblogging platforms, he says.
How come you decided to do Bloggy in Swedish?
- I think that the English language still feels uncomfortable for many Swedes and that providing a service in Swedish makes it more friendly. “By Swedes for Swedes”.

So far, we haven’t seen how it performs under heavy load. Monday provided one challenge with Thomas Mattsson at Expressen writing about it and giving it lots of space on their front page.

Also Bloggy was mentioned in Dagens Nyheter the other day.
There were a couple of downtimes Monday, but Jonas Lejon assures those problems are now taken care of.
- I’m working very close to our datacenters and they are helping me out with upgrading the server all the time when I reach the limits and I’m fixing performance bugs all the time and now it seems that all problems are gone.
You deserve praise for the way you handle feedback quickly and keep on improving the features. You seem to be online on Bloggy 24/7. Do you ever sleep? : )
- Thanks! I’ve been working a lot the last few days but I’m trying to take some offline time now and then and relax.

Team Eric Wahlforss (co-founder Sound Cloud), Henric Berggren (Sound Cloud), and David Kjelkerud, student at KTH, worked on an application they call listentoblogs.com.

Henrik Berggren was truly enthusiastic yesterday when he told CMW about the way it works:

– It is a really simple site where bloggers come and blogreaders come, not to read their favourite blogs, but to listen to them.

The idea is that you should be able to read, record and upload your or any blog at listentoblogs.com, and subscribe to it as a podcast straight to your mp3 player.

– We are supporting all big open formats. This is possible because we have built it on top of an awesome platform called Sound Cloud and App Engine. It is a glue between this kind of cloud-based services.

The listentoblogs.com team: Berggren, Kjelkerud, Wahlforss.

24hbc took place at Hasseludden Yasuragi, about 20 min drive from Stockholm.

The guy behind 24hbc is Ted Valentin, a Swedish entrepreneur, who has created stuff like: sushikartan (The Sushi Map), Wifikartan (The Wifi Map), Minkarta (My Map) and… Sites that maps different kinds of services and/or places.

- 24hbc is the place to try things out. The focus is to get things done. Not to be afraid to fail, Ted says.

The atmosphere at 24hbc is a mix of hard work, playing around and hanging out.

Erik Starck, one of the participants, said:

– It is like the punk movment all over.

The Swedish TV channel TV4 reported from the event early this morning. On Nyhetsmorgon (only in Swedish).

When we last summer started to see the microblogging-hype we felt that a search dedicated to microblogs would be a quite natural development for us. We like Twitter Search and been using it a lot, especially at conferences and when news like Mumbai were having the best news source at Twitter. But because we used Jaiku ourselves it wasn’t what we needed in many cases.

Microblogging services covered by Twingly’s search engine are: Twitter, Jaiku, Identi.ca, Pownce (which is dead, but a six month archive remains searchable), Swedish Bloggy.se and the German Bleeper.de.
They will keep adding new services, and aim to cover all microblogging services out there.

Read Write Web writes:

”While the Knight Foundation’s endowment has been hurt by the current economic climate, the Foundation is still committed to granting a total of $24 million to local media projects over the next five years.

As the newspaper industry still continues on its downward spiral, with more and more local papers facing bankruptcy, these citizen media projects will be able to fill the need for better local news in quite a few communities around the country. In Connecticut, for example, a new local news site will be staffed with a mix of professional and citizen journalists, after the town had lost both its newspaper and local radio station in the last decade.”

CMW has been writing about Swedish hyperlocal blogging. Maybe this is the way to go? A good mix of citizen contributors and professional journalists. The local content is best found local and it is worth the money.

The Knight Foundation believes it is about democracy:

At Knight Foundation, we firmly believe that you cannot effectively manage the affairs of a community in a democracy without the free flow of information.

That’s why we believe that information is a core community need, as critical as any to a healthy community,” said Alberto Ibargüen, Knight Foundation’s president and CEO.

Citizen Media Watch wants to thank Joakim Jardenberg at Mindpark for having a conversation with us about this subject. How will local newspaper be able to make enough money online to be able to survive? And it is like Joakim says: ”Riktigt djävla hårda fakta” – Really … hard facts.

Fredrik och Teo started the idea book project about eight, nine years ago. They wrote the first book by themselves. But the business idea for interesting.org is to invite people outside the organization, to collaborate, be creative and solve problems.

The first book they wrote by inviting people to contribute with material was the Idea book for parents.

– We had ideas that we wanted to be in the book, but we did also invite 10 000 people that we did have e-mail addresses to. And told then that we are going to write a book about how to keep children’s creativity alive as a parent. If you have any ideas that could be in the book please write us, Teo says.

They did also promise to pay the contributors whose material that was chosen to be in book.

– If someone gives us something that we can use, we are also paying them. That is our belief, Teo say.

They did pay 150 euros for each story. It could be a short one, like only one sentence, but they did still pay them 150 euros.

Fredrik and Teo have recently launched a book about creative service and they went about it the same way, but now the network has grown into about 20 000 people.

– We also asked our old customers, clients, their clients and through media. We told them we are writing this book, we have these ideas, but we want everyone else who have ideas about creative service to join us, please send in ideas, Teo say.

Half of the Idea Book for Parents is made up of contributed material, but the interesting.org.

Teo thinks it is a great way to write books.

– Most of our books in the future will definitely be written in this way. It has to be better. It will be better. It can’t be worse, could it? You will ask tens of thousands of people. And of course they will contribute and give ideas that you didn’t think of yourself, Teo says.

Fredrik and Teo are keeping the e-mail addresses to every buyer of their books. Which enables them to contact every buyer of their previous books, who already knows their work, and invite then to contribute with material to their future books.

– We are also thinking about using that concept by asking our existing readers, as authors, and ask them what kind of book they do want us to write. Us, being me and my twin brother and all our readers.

Fredrik and Teo do see them selves as authors with a community of readers.

Watch the rest of the conversation:

This conversation did take place the day after an interesting event at Teo’s place at Älvkarleö Bruk – a TED Talk Weekend. I did manage to catch him right after the breakfast coffee and talk about stuff we care about here at Citizen Media Watch – user generated content.

If you choose to watch the whole conversation, you will hear Teo talk about why they are going to put their e-mail address on every page in the book, why they choose to print their books, their plan about making it the most translated book in the world – by a living author.

He also talks about how it is to work together as brothers. Teo shows a book and one of the different ways you can use it. And finally some stuff about interesting.org and their business model sharing ideas and endorse creativity.

Watch the whole conversation with Teo Härén. [part one + part two]

# Newspapers are experimenting with user generated content. The study found that 58 percent of newspapers allowed for user generated photos, while 18 percent accepted video and 15 percent articles. Overall, 58 percent of newspapers offered some form of user generated content in 2008 compared to 24 percent in 2007.
# Research shows that the number of newspaper websites allowing users to comment on articles has more than doubled in the last year. Seventy five percent of newspapers now accept article comments in some form, compared to 33 percent in 2007.
# Ten percent of newspapers had social networking tools, such as user profiles and the ability to “friend” other users, built into their sites in 2008. This compares to five percent of sites that included this feature in 2007. It is surprising that this number isn’t higher.
# Seventy six percent of newspapers offered a Most Popular view of content in some form (Most Emailed, Most Blogged, Most Commented, etc.). This compares to 51 percent in 2007 and 33 percent in 2006.

It’s good news that things are moving in the right direction. But the question is what the news corporations who are still behind are thinking. It’s 2008. Time to wake up – or you’ll soon be out of business.

The site has received a lot of love in the comments in the sidebar. What I like most about it is the way that any story can be scrutinized paragraph by paragraph by adding questions and answers, thus providing a tool for collaborative fact-checking and discussion about the validity of statements. It is also a social tool, letting me know when my contacts have been active on the site. And it flattens the news hierarchy (though not completely – you cannot add questions or answers to stories posted by users, and those are limited to 250 words). The news can come from traditional news stories or from other members (through letters to the editor), questions can be posed by anyone, replied by anyone (not just the reporter/writer) and anyone can comment.

Joshua Pollock writes at the Crunchberry project blog:

it harnesses the credibility of an established media company, leverages existing online social networks and gives people a constructive way to interact with each other and the news.

Comments, called quips in News Mixer lingo, are limited to 140 characters, making them similar to microblogging posts.

And, last but not least, it’s open source. So Eastern Iowa will be the first site in what will probably be a long number of local and national efforts. Looking forward to see this evolve. I hope to see a Swedish site not too far off in the future.

Sandra Jakob works as an online journalist at hd.se. Helsingborgs Dagblad is a daily newspaper situated in the south of Sweden, in Helsingborg.

CMW: What are you thoughts about the editorial work at HD in the future. Do you think you will have to change the way you work and think differently about the way you are publishing your content?

Sandra thinks that they have to start to think about how to publish the news, based on the type of content, instead of the editorial staff.

– The process of integrating the different channels into each other will be more important. I think that it will somehow be the ultimate test to see which newspaper that will make it out of this big crisis that we are in, that everybody is so afraid of.

– If we are starting to think about how we are going to, all together, work towards a goal of reaching out with our information and news. Then we are going to be successful, Sandra says.

CMW: Why are journalists avoiding to embrace the internet and use it the way it can be used? Is it about fear, laziness or convenience?

Sandra does not think it is laziness and it is not the lack of journalistic confidence. She thinks it is about fear. Not knowing how to use the technical tools and how to communicate on the web.

– You just have to somehow go over the threshold and try it once for yourself and see that you can’t ruin everything. We have backup systems, she says.

Sandra thinks that the biggest challenge of reaching out to a journalist who is not used to working with the internet, is to show them that it is not dangerous. It is not going to make them look stupid. That it is going to help them and that is going to change the way they will go about their work in the future.

– People that are very humble and say that: ”I don’t know this but I’m willing to learn,” that’s an amazing start. If I just get that, I am very happy, she says.

When Sandra teaches her colleagues at hd.se how to use the blog tool, they sit down and walk it through step by step. After trying it out for themselves for a while, they do think it is so much fun and easy. She believes that you should not be afraid of the blogs just because the word blog is misused by a lot of people, it is an information source like everything else.

Sandra did work for Mindpark earlier this year. Mindpark is a web developing agency with the swedish morning newspaper industry as its main clients and beneficiaries.

Sandra Jakob and Joakim Jardenberg had this conversation (in Swedish) on her first day at work.

[Roughly translated]: The conversation, which contained nine parts of laughter and one part of seriousness (before the editing) was about why journalists should blog, why user generated content is a good thing and a little about where Rubbet is heading. [Published at mindpark.se 2008 03 06]

Joakim asked Sandra if she could come up with a more suitable word for the concept user generated content. She promised to think about it.

CMW repeated that question and asked her if she had managed to find a better word for the interchange of content and information:

Sandra has thought about it but she thinks it is hard to find a new word, because it is user generated content. Even though she does not like the word user.

- They are people that we work with, because they send us their pictures and their movies. They call us and give us information, she says.

Sandra believes that user generated content is the best terminology at the moment.

In the Mindpark sofa, Sandra also talked about the need of linking to the blog, as the original source of the news or the conversation.

CMW asked her if she still thinks it is the way to work. Does hd.se link to bloggers and external sites?

– Yes, I still think it is is the only way to go, Sandra says.

Sandra think it is important to pick up subjects that people are talking about and that it is important to give credit to the person that wrote about it on her/his blog. She thinks that if they start a conversation about the subject, it will only benefit the newspaper in the future. Sandra hopes that people will see that the newspaper do respect their work and what they are doing and that they do want to be in contact with them.

Sandra has not yet any example of a local blogger that has been creating any news for hd.se, but she does hope that it will happen soon. But they have been writing about bloggers and the internet.

– Then we are always make sure that we do link back to the person that we are writing about, she says.

CMW: The web is about conversations and expressing personal thoughts. Do you think that journalists should be more open with their personal opinions?

Sandra has an example from hd.se sports blog Sportbloggen. In the beginning they were only linking to funny YouTube clips.

– It did generate a lot of ha ha-comments, but it is nothing that will draw attention in the end, Sandra says.

She advised them to have a personal opinion. If they can have that in a column in the newspaper they can have that on a blog too.

– But, you have to think about it. What am I comfortable with saying? Can I stand for this?, Sandra says.

Sandra believes that you have to be comfortable with what you are saying on the blog. If your are not, maybe you should not do it. They want their journalists to blog, but everybody might not be comfortable doing it.

- If you are open with where you stand and what you think, the audience is going to respect you more, she says.

CMW: How are journalists going to handle transparency? Is there a good transparency level for a journalist?

– There is a bad transparency level, let’s start with that, it is so much easier, Sandra says.

She thinks that a bad transparency is when you tell everybody who gave you that tip. All of their sources are protected by the Swedish law. But a good level of transparency would be to be more open with the process of working as a journalist. It could be as a blog where you write about what kind of seminars and conferences you go to and tell more about how you find information about the subject you are writing about.

– I would love to see somebody who writes about the process and all the frustration there is to be a journalist. It is not always that fun even though we love it. Because there are people hanging up on you, people not liking you. Maybe you get the answers that you would like but it still doesn’t happened. Or you don’t get the result you would like to have, Sandra says.

She believes that bad transparency is when you tell people exactly who told you what, that is gossip. Good transparency is being open with the process, how you think, how you work, how you relate to your readers – both negatively and positively. And It is important to be honest.

– Because if you’re not honest, in the end it is coming back to bite you, Sandra says.

CMW: Do you still think that the internet is something good and useful for a journalist?

As a curious journalist Sandra does think that internet is an amazing way of possibilities and she loves the conversation that is going on out there, even though you have to be critical as usual against information and disinformation.

Sandra talks about the way the Swedish blogs handled the FRA affair. She thinks that it is a good example of a subject raised by bloggers and that ended up as a discussion in old media.

– I can only see the internet as a very positive thing, she says.

CMW: What do you think the newspaper will look like within five years. Do you think that they are still going to exist in print?

Sandra does still believe in the printed newspaper but not the way it looks like today. But she thinks it should be more of a magazine and not be distributed seven days a week. Maybe three days a week, or just over the weekend. A magazine that is going to be customized. More feature, more background and more thoughts.

– I still believe in print in some other way than we have today. The feeling of using print paper and have it in your hand, is something that we can not replace with a PDA or a mobile phone, she says.

CMW: Where do you see yourself with in five years?

Sandra hopes she will be able to dedicate herself full time working with inspiring colleagues to use the internet in a useful way. Integrating and developing newsrooms for the internet. She hopes to be working, not with in the news rush, but with people that works with news and that are interested in new ways to come out with their information and keep track on what is happening on the internet.

– I love developing stuff for newsrooms and news organizations. I hope I will be able to work with something like that, she says.

Sandra Jakob ends our conversation with a request. Sandra would like to have a conversation about online journalism if you are interested, you are welcome to contact her at sandra.jakob@hd.se.

And of course and as always, you are welcome to post your thoughts about this subject as a comment.

Related post: Will there be a dark period for journalism? Joakim Jardenberg at Mindpark on how Helsingborgs Dagblad can survive as an online paper. A version in Swedish at mindpark.se.

Leah Culver writes:

We have some very big news today at Pownce. We will be closing the service and Mike and I, along with the Pownce technology, have joined Six Apart, the company behind such great blogging software as Movable Type, TypePad and Vox. We’re bittersweet about shutting down the service but we believe we’ll come back with something much better in 2009. We love the Pownce community and we will miss you all.

We’re very happy that Six Apart wants to invest in growing the vision that we the founders of Pownce believe so strongly in and we’re very excited to take our vision to all of Six Apart’s products. Mike and I have joined Six Apart as part of their engineering team and we’re looking forward to being a part of the talented group that has created amazing tools for blogging and publishing.

So it looks like some microblogging functionality will be integrated into these blogging services. I for one think it’s only natural that we see some microblogging services closing down. There will probably be a concentration to Twitter, Jaiku and a couple others that turn out to be the better ones, or simply where people you know are. Though it’s a piece of cake to automatically update several microblogging sites, there’s little point as long as there are no smart ways to keep track of replies and be a part of the conversation without having to check all the sites manually. If you know of a good service that does that, please let me know.

Other news from Six Apart: they are giving away free pro accounts to laid-off journalists (via CyberJournalist) in the TypePad For Journalists Program.

We want to help independent journalists become more entrepreneurial, and to give you the tools you need to succeed with your own blog.

Cool initiative. For those who are not accepted, there’s always WordPress, of course.

There are good examples of microblogging serving a journalistic purpose, though these initiative do not necessarily come from professional journalists.

• The Twitter Vote Report is one, where Americans across the country made short reports on how the voting in the US election was really going, using hashtags to pinpoint where they were and what their report was about, for instance #machine for problems with the voting machines. They also reported on waiting times. It all ended up on a big map where you could follow the progress in real time.
• Get eye-witness reports and comments. For instance check out this Twitter channel on the bombings in Mumbai. More on the Mumbai coverage here.
• Live reporting from an event. By using an established microblogging site you get comments from site members and you invite them in a natural way.
• Live commentary to tv shows. One example is Drive on Fox.
• Coming up with questions for interviews. By asking people what they want to know from a person you’re to interview you get more interesting questions, and you know you’re asking stuff your audience want to know.
• Local news gathering. Here’s an interesting example from Harrisonburg, VA. Or even as a source for bigger breaking news.
• Cynthia McCune talks about microblogging as a “21st century police scanner”, listing these uses for reporters: keep up with sources, get quick feedback, get referrals, post live updates to sport scores.
• Breaking news. Anders Brenna at digi.no writes: “Twitter is both the perfect journalist tool for being first with breaking news, and the best relief from the tyranny of breaking news.” Super-fast publishing of the latest news without risking that the reader won’t come to your site for the full story. You can even send a message and point to it once it’s out.
• Paul Bradshaw has some advice for anyone wanting to use microblogging to cover a topic. Check out the comments too for a few ideas on good use.
• Another post on how news makers have to change and use micro-blogging tools.

Do you have more good examples? We’ll collect them and update this list (giving you credit, of course).

Also, here’s some advice on what not to do.

But what is the definition of a microblogging service? Does it need to be focused/dedicated to microblogging, or can it be a social media site having a microblogging component? The question arose at SIME, where Andie Nordgren posed a question from the audience: Is Facebook the world’s largest microblogging service?
Net Jacobsson, Director of International Business Development at Facebook, hasn’t thought of status updates as microblogging, and I guess that’s quite understandable as it’s not their focus.

What do you think? Are status updates on sites like Facebook and LinkedIn a form of microblogging? On which services do you actively update your status, and what kind of information do you put there? Give us your comments!

The fear I hear constantly is that investigative journalism will be the first form to die. That would be foolish and news organizations will learn that. In a link-and-search economy, you must create unique content with strong value to get attention and audience. Investigations matter more than ever; they will have greater audience and thus business benefit.

• scepticism
• judgement
• research
• independence
• recognize persuasion techniques

In a recent interview at DigitalJournal, Dan Gillmor said:
- We’ve all been consuming news in different ways since the Net came along. We are good at deciding what we trust and what we can’t trust. Everyone needs to learn to be skeptical of absolutely everything. That includes the local or national paper or TV broadcast.
- At same time, people need to go outside what they normally read and look for things that challenge their worldviews. They need to learn media techniques, including how the media is used to persuade the public.

Update: I just remembered that Dan Gillmor actually mentioned his new book project when he spoke to a bunch of people at Aftonbladet in early 2007. Here’s a sound clip. Pardon the bad quality.

At SIME, Joi Ito expressed concerns that professional journalism journalism may perish.
- It would be very difficult for a blogger to get a military unit to fly them into Sudan to cover that in first-hand. It would also be very difficult when you write a scathing article about corruption in Singapore to fight the libel suit you get from Lee Kuan Yew and try to stay out of jail. Legal protection against libel suits and also heavily funded first-person war journalism, that’s going to be a while before amateurs will be able to deal with that, he said, and continued:
- I think that everywhere where we’re losing the revenues of physical distribution or transaction costs, whether that’s the financial markets affording analysts or whether it’s academic journalism affording peer review, all these professionals that used to be hired to deal with quality are being put out of business because the distribution can’t afford to pay those guys anymore, they’re all suffering from the same thing. I think bloggers and all the amateurs will pick up a bunch of that, but there’s still going to be this gap. I think it’s going to be a while before we get organized enough. And I’m afraid that professional journalism may collapse before we pick up, and there may be a kind of a “dark period” when we can’t send people to Sudan or we don’t have the ability to fight against the biggotous people that we ought to be going after.

David Sifry thinks the future of journalism lies within the blogosphere.
- I think we actually have a responsibility, given the fact that we are all disintermediating these big media companies, to make sure that we can find a way to help make sure that journalism survives.

Joi Ito and David Sifry in a panel debate about blogging and journalism during SIME 2008.

Yesterday, Joakim Jardenberg of Mindpark wrote a long blog post describing the steps necessary for a paper distribution-dependent local newspaper to make enough money online to be able to survive without the paper edition, should that be necessary. It’s in Swedish, so I’ll take you through his main points.

His solution has three parts: having enough visitors, knowing/keeping track of visitors and using advanced mechanisms to match them with advertisers. Like Jardenberg says, this is no rocket science and behavioural targeting is nothing new. But it hasn’t been evolved enough, and that’s why Jardenberg’s take is interesting. He gives an example with real figures from local paper Helsingborgs Dagblad, and he’s pretty convincing. They need a 40 percent share of the money spent on local advertising in their area to make it.
Though the solution can be explained in a few simple steps, those are not easy steps to take, and Jardenberg is aware of it. He lists these obstacles (my translation):

• Technology isn’t quite mature enough. But with baby steps in the right directions we’ll make it in time.
• Local sites might lose their relevance. Without an audience the revenue model collapses.
• We might not have the stamina. This won’t pay off tomorrow. Count on 5-10 years to reach those 40% in a healthy way.
• Our sales force is immature, we still sell paper ads online. Our main advantage, our local sales people, are also those who need to change the most.

A slide in a presentation by Joakim Jardenberg about the decline in Helsingborg Dagblad’s reach.

Jardenberg goes into more detail, and has interesting ideas about data collection and transparency, so if you’re interested, here’s a rough translation of the text through Google Translate. On the whole, he is optimistic about the future of journalism.

The death of local relevance, as mentioned by Jardenberg above, is one of two threats addressed by Jonathan Kay in a blog post at Canada’s National Post’s Comment section’s blog, Full Comment. Kay talks about saving the print media, but this could well be applied to local journalism on the whole.
Kay writes:

The breakdown of Canadians’ sense of community has also contributed to newspapers’ challenges. Slogging through stories about the people who share your city, your province or your country makes sense only if you feel a sense of emotional investment in your neighbours. But in a globalized age, an increasing share of Canadians don’t feel that way. As office-bound yuppies, they commune with their distant college-era friends using Facebook or email, but don’t know the names of the people they pass on their street.

Kay’s other point is the death of spare time. If people don’t have time to read, journalism is in trouble. Print even more so. The three types of print media that will survive are, according to Kay:

(1) Business-oriented media that cater to older, more affluent readers of the type who can justify the expense of long-form news consumption (in both time and money) as a work activity.

(2) Premium publications that cater to the ideologically involved and intellectually upscale

(3) The hyperlocal.

As Kay is talking about the survival of print, I am a bit surprised about his third point. I think hyperlocal is one of the areas where the web can bring so much more than a print product, as it’s all about communication and round the clock updates.
But then, hyperlocal sites are struggling. When Gitta and I talked to Joi Ito a few days ago, he said hyperlocal is failing because local businesses aren’t mature enough online. I think that’s a valid point, and I believe that once they mature and more and more people expect to find hyperlocal news online, this is a very interesting area.

My own take is that journalism will survive and come out stronger and better through this media shift, though it will take a few years of struggle. And it may not look exactly like it does today at the end of it. Which is probably a good thing.

Update: There’s a Swedish version of this text availble at Mindpark where we were invited to guest blog.

During SIME, the What’s Next duo did several recordings, and Citizen Media Watch filmed this clip from a session last Wednesday. Apart from Tomas and Kristin, the panel consists of Björn Falkevik, Anton Johansson and Fredrik Wass.

For those of you who don’t understand Swedish, you can see this as an example of how you can make a great podcast production with very simple means.

Mia Rose is a YouTube-made star, a true child of the new music industry. She’s the most subscribed to and most viewed artist in Great Britain on YouTube, and her story started with a cheap camera and some great talent.

Urged on by her friends, she started to upload video clips of herself. People noticed her, and pretty soon the clips were viewed by hundreds of thousands of people. Today she’s got a record deal and is travelling the world. And she still uses YouTube for reaching out to her supporters.
- It’s so different, so innovative to be able to use your camera to talk to the fans, she tells Citizen Media Watch as we meet her in Stockholm where she’s just performed at SIME.

We thought it would be interesting to hear what advice she has for others wanting to build a career through self-publication in citizen media.
- Be very honest about yourself. Portray yourself with your true colours, so that in a few years time people don’t say “wait a second, in the beginning you were like this, and now you’re like this”. Enjoy what you’re doing. Because if you don’t enjoy it, they won’t enjoy it, she says.
When recording her videos Mia Rose thinks about what she would like her idol to say, if she had one.
- I put myself in the position of the people watching me. If I had an idol, that’s how I’d like her to interact with me.

We asked if house concerts – having fans invite you to their living room and bring other fans over – which is something that for instance Vienna Teng has done quite a bit of, might not be something for Mia Rose. A YouTube star should be close to her audience in real life too. And sure enough, she’s planning something similar.
- I was presented with the Mia Rose strategy, it’s the strategy that I’m gonna adhere to. It’s awesome, you’re in for a lot of really exciting stuff. Inside it we have a plan to do a Mia Rose lounge thing, something more personal, not a lot of fans. They’ll just chill out on pillows and watch. It’s gonna be really cool.
The lounge gigs will also appear on the web, in a new website that Mia’s management is planning. There you’ll find everything related to her in one space.

/Gitta & Lotta

Here’s the full nine minute interview. It also contains bits about her future plans, and – she’s a geek!

Among other things today, we met with YouTube star Mia Rose. Check back for the video clip tomorrow.

Citizen Media Watch met with blogging veteran, super-entrepreneur and CEO of Creative Commons Joi Ito during the SIME conference in Stockholm. He told us about how he (possibly) made the New York Times change their contract for freelance material, and he sent a message to anyone wanting to make it as a semi-pro or pro journalist or photographer.

Mainstream media is struggling with how to use photos with Creative Commons licensing. The reason is they’re not used to attribution models, but rather to pay the photographer and get the exclusive rights for the photo, says Joi Ito.
But they are starting to learn.
- They’re realising that atleast for certain situations and certain people it’s impossible to get a photograph in time. They’re realising it’s a resource. They’re starting to learn the rules, says Joi Ito, who saw a lot of abuse of the license in the early days.

He reveals that it took him three years of refusing to sign the New York Times’s standard contract after having written an article for them before they gave in – and actually changed it for everyone. At first they simply wanted the exclusive rights, period. Now the contract says they get the exclusives for one month, then you can re-use it in any way you want.
- But they changed. It took me three years of saying no no no. You just have to keep working. Don’t sign bad licenses, advices Joi Ito.

This is part of a longer interview also addressing the need for new business models, why hyperlocal journalism is failing and the two ways for photographers to make money. We’ve made the full-length uncut interview available on our blip.tv account. It is licensed under a creative commons license.

A big thanks to Joakim Jardenberg who pinpointed one of the questions for Mr Ito. And to Björn Falkevik for the filming/camera crash-course.

/Lotta & Gitta