Category Archives: Citizen journalism

Benazir Bhutto assassination: the citizen and pro photojournalist takes

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Mindy McAdams has highlighted some interesting pieces of photojournalism documenting the tragic events of last week when Benazir Bhutto was murdered after speaking at an election rally in Rawalpindi.

Two pieces of work of the same event effectively sum up the citizen vs pro debate.

The BBC has footage that it claimed shows the assassin firing shots into the back of Bhutto’s head before blowing himself up (effectively debunking the Pakistani authorities’ line that she broke her neck while trying to take cover and evade the bullets).

As you’d expect it’s grainy, wobbly footage, but that’s not so important as it’s the event rather the quality of the craft that’s makes this compelling.

Compare that with the professional slideshow put together for the New York Times by the Getty photographer John Moore who was covering the event.

He gives a spoken first person account as his pictures show the rally, the brutal attack from further back in the crowd and the shocking fallout.

Look at the video images from the amateur and the powerful stills from the pro, then if you can think of a better more succinct example of how citizen journalism and the work of pro-snappers complement one another, I’d love to hear about it.

God, no? Is it list and predictions time already?

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Yes, it’s that time again, the season of favourites lists, bests of, highlights of 2007, and rough guesses of what may happen in the coming 12 months.

I’ve brought together the few lists I have managed to find in between crazed bouts of gorging my way through East Sussex’s entire supply of mince pies and crapulent afternoons spent selecting the wine for the Christmas party (finally decided on Blue Nun – half bottles).

For what it’s worth, my predictions for the next 12 months are a pocket-sized Second Life for the Asian market, Google car insurance and marriage counselling by April and some kind of Granny app for Facebook so you can check on the vital signs of elderly relatives.

Citizen journalist videos through op-ed pages of NYTimes.com

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Later this week videos created by citizen journalists that look at issues surrounding the upcoming presidential primaries, in the US, will be available alongside professional work through the op-ed pages of NYTimes.com, according to Beet.tv.

Talking to Beet, Cynthina Farrar, producer with Purplestates.tv (and Yale researcher scholar), explained how non-professional reporters working with her new company put together nearly a dozen pieces for the Times.

(Video of her interview in the news section.)

Purplestates.tv is also running the videos through Facebook and will build applications for its videos to run through Open Social, Farrar added.

Innovative journalism/technology development projects in the US and UK

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This post is Journalism.co.uk’s contribution to the Carnival of Journalism, which is being hosted by Scribblesheet.

So much has happened in the last 12-months in the online news area we thought it was about time to focus a little attention on some of the projects and processes looking to drive the next step of innovative ways of getting news to the public.

Quite simply, we just want to draw attention to two development projects – one either side of the Atlantic – which aim to meld journalism and technology and find new and unique ways of engaging an audience.

It’s no surprise that both these projects are being run by – or in conjunction with – forward thinking academic institutions.

The UK project is, appropriately enough, called Meld. It’s being run this week by UCLAN department of journalism, under the watchful eye of fellow contributor to the Carnival Andy Dickinson.

Teams of of journalists, creative technologists/interaction designers volunteered to be brought together for a week of hot-housing ideas which would then be pitched to industry partners – Sky News, Johnston Press (JP) and Haymarket Media.

Each partner set a slightly different brief for the teams:

Sky News wants to ‘grow its unique users and page impressions (especially unique users) by offering a variety of original news related content’.

JP wants to ‘enhance our relationship with our readers and expand the local audience for our range of news and data websites.

While Haymarket wanted a rich media offering to serve a traveling baby boomer audience, something that appealed to a new men’s market or a Web 3.0 offering to blend ‘source and social’.

Based on these briefs, the industry bods provide feedback on the ideas – IP developed at the workshop is owned by the teams, each of which would be expected to negotiate their own terms should any commercial relationship develop with the industry partners.

The project is about pure innovation, trying to develop great ideas that benefit the industry and consumer, not innovation cosseted by the sometimes limiting effect of industry-led development where cost worries often cut innovation and failure of a single idea can be seen as failure of innovation, per se.

This snippet of Matt Marsh (taken from the Meld Blog) sums up the spirit of innovative thinking bursting over at the project.

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FKxGbbGEO7c]

The second project is similar, it’s a project being run as part of the graduate programme at CUNY, this time under the eye of Jeff Jarvis (Jeff has already documented part of the process).

Students on the first wave of the entrepreneurial journalism course spent last week pitching their ideas to a dozen jurors drawn from New York’s stellar media community.

A five minute pitch followed by seven minutes of questions from the jurors offered the chance to walk away with as much as $45,000 seed much for an innovative journalism project.

The course was set up with a $100,000, two-year grant from the McCormick Tribune Foundation.

The students developed projects including a hyper-local site for a Brooklyn neighbourhood, innovative uses of Ning to create specialist social networks, blog search engines using Google’s custom search technology and several project – personal finance for young people, a service to match school athletes with colleges – that questioned weather they could survive just for Facebook (Judge Saul Hansell has posted a fairly full piece about the nature of the individual projects).

A few project were awarded grants from the jurors to develop their ideas further, notably a project to get the public angle on what follow up stories reporters should follow.

The overriding importance of this and the Meld project is that it gives the opportunity to develop left-field ideas which get inside the mind of those that would benefit by using it, rather than just owning it.

These ideas aren’t just providing the next cash cows for big media, they are writing a new language for journalism, creating new platforms for the principles of good practice to be carried forward into this new century.

That is both novel and revolutionary.

Video: Blogs in plain English – it’s all about news

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The good folk at online consultancy Commoncraft have created the following neat explanation of blogging as part of their plain English video series:

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NN2I1pWXjXI]

Aside from being a useful explanatory tool for bloggers, the video distils some interesting ideas about how blogging content works as news, as hyper-local, niche publishing platforms.

While the video goes on to emphasise the importance of reader interaction and relationships with other blogs, it continues to compare the platform to news: blog posts are ‘individual news stories like articles in the paper’ and make the news ‘a two-way street’.

Encapsulating the ideal that blogs can democraticise the news, the video says:“As blogs became popular they created millions of news sources that gave everyone an audience for their own version of news. Of course, we’re using the word news loosely, but really isn’t everything news to someone?”

Citizen experts not citizen journalists?

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Yesterday’s news that Topix will now handle the forums and article commenting system for MediaNews Group raises some questions for the future of user-generated content on news sites.

Does the future of so-called citizen journalism and user-generated content on news sites lie in opinion/comment rather than reporting?

MediaNews’ decision seems to suggest so, investing in areas of their sites where users react or debate content rather than submitting their own.

Writing for the Future of News blog, Steve Boriss takes this one step further saying: ‘Citizen journalism is dead. Expert journalism is the future‘. To summarise, Boriss argues that citizens (and to some extent professinal journalists) should not be reporters or newsgatherers for online but act as ‘topic experts’:

The model that will work — that will make news better, not worse — is one that combines the talents of topic experts throughout the web with those who have a knack for aggregating and editing their material to satisfy an audience.

Quality content, whether it’s from citizens or journalists, properly targeted by editors with the ability to ‘energize their audience’. To be avoided: allowing a free-for-all in terms of the quality of user-generated content in a bid to show users that their contributions are desired.

Allowing citizen journalists and users to submit news reports can be invaluable – the first pictures of a fire, a natural disaster, riots in Paris. But, as Steve Outing suggests in his article analysing the failure of his own grassroots citizen journalism project, the way in which news sites publish this content needs changing.

Too often, says Outing, these images and films are segregated in a separate area of the site away from professional coverage of the event. A better idea, says Outing, is to use editors to select the best submissions and mix these with the professional coverage – again supporting Boriss’ model of experts and expert editors.

Outsourcing newspaper interaction – on Topix

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Topix has just struck a deal to run the forums of MediaNews Group in the US, which owns 61 newspapers including the Denver Post and San Jose Mercury News.

If Topix’s claim is genuine (and I have no reason to doubt it) that it gets over 80,000 comments a day – three million people posting more than 18 million comments since it launched its forums little under two years ago – then there seems to be obvious and compelling reasons for the union.

Marry what Topix does best with the local audience/trust that MediaNews papers have and you’re on to a winner surely?

Topix boasts again: IndyStar.com and Sun-Sentinel.com have each surpassed one million forum posts since Topix started running them.

In interview yesterday with Journalism.co.uk Yoosk consulting editor Nick Ryan said that traditional media was failing to shift from the old top-down approach online because it’s not getting involved nearly enough in user-interaction.

So all good with this move? Not all, according to Howard Owens:

“Media News signing a deal to turn over commenting functions to Topix is just dumb beyond belief

“Ironically, Media News owns the Denver Post, which of late has been doing a fantastic job of trying to become the hub of community conversation, both through its main news site and its innovative neighbours site.

“Those efforts are completely incompatible, as I see it, with the Topix business model, which Chris Tolles is quite blunt about: “We’re aiming to be the number one local news site on the web …”

“There can be only one number one, and if it’s Topix, it ain’t your newspaper.com.”

Owens adds that local should be a vertical, in the way fashion and travel are, and that the local paper should ‘own’ that space, dominating it across all platforms in a way other major brands dominate verticals, rather than letting another company get the best out of the paper’s good relationship with its audience.

NUJ to recruit first full-time blogger?

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According to Martin Stabe, the National Union of Journalists’ London Freelance branch will tonight consider the application of Engadget freelance contributor Conrad Quilty-Harper.

Read more about all the hoops Mr Quilty-Harper has already had to jump through on his own blog here.

NUJ general secretary Jeremy Dear has already boasted on his blog that “Membership in new media was up almost 11% over the past year” and asks “Who says we’re not attracting new media workers?”

Who indeed.