@NMK: Dan Gillmor: New genres of journalism online

Posted by Martin Stabe on 13 June 2007 at 14:13
Tags: Blogs, Mashups, NMK

Dan Gillmor asks “who’s a journalist?” in a media space where all sorts of people — like academics, corporations, and NGOs can — publish instantly on the Internet.

“One of my personal clichés”, Gillmor says, is that “journalism is moving from a lecture to a conversation”. But the first rule of conversation is to listen. Journalists tend only to be good at listening to sources, but need also do better at listening to feedback from their audience. While this is happening more and more, it is still “freaking out” many traditional journalists.

Recent developments in online story-telling show that there are plenty of new things that are fundamentally journalism, even if they are not the type of things that conventional reporters might recognise as a typical story.

Database journalism, like that practiced by Adrian Holovaty at WashingtonPost.com, is a new way of telling stories. Journalism.

He points out a mashup, built by an American estate agent to point out properties sold for less than their assessed value (a sign of house-price inflation). Is this journalism? Yes, and why aren’t news organisations doing this instead? Journalism.

Is a map tracking the location of potholes in local streets, generated by reports from people in the community, journalism? Yes. It tells a story about local road maintainance. Journalism.

Is a satirical mashup of Tony Blair singing “should I stay or should I go” a form of journalism? It’s certainly comment of some sort.

Gillmor also raises his concerns about user-submitted photographs. It’s now routine for news organisations to call for readers’ pictures, but this can risk encouraging people to put themselves in harm’s way. The German tabloid Bild has called for people to send in paparazzi-style pictures, which raises serious privacy issues. However, random acts of journalism, like putting up pictures of newsworthy events on Flickr, is now a routine part of the news stream.

Citizen media is not a new phenomenon, he says, pointing out the Zapruder film of the Kennedy assassination. But today there is a new equality and a quantitative difference. If that event had happen today, or at most within a few years, there would be dozens of high-definition cameras, all of them linked to digitial networks along the street in Dallas. But what if the people on the 9/11 airplanes, who were making voice calls on their mobiles, had been sending us real-time footage of what was happening, he wonders.

He quotes Clay Shirky saying that the cost of failure in experimentation in new media is approaching zero, allowing all sorts of people to come up with new projects.

Organisations need to allow people to fail in attempting to innovate, he concludes.

In the question and answer session, he points out that today’s culture of online openess means that in an election within 20 years, a person will stand for President of the United States despite having made online disclosures about him- or herself that would easily disqualify them today.

More: Gillmor gave a similar presentation at the BBC yesterday, which Robin Hamman blogged.

@NMK: Big media and interactivity

Posted by Martin Stabe on 13 June 2007 at 12:22
Tags: BBC, CNET, Channel 4, Guardian Unlimited, Journalism, NMK

This morning’s panel at the New Media Knowledge Forum at St Luke’s on Old Street is looking at “how the MSM (Mainstream Media) facing up to the new wave of interest in social media?”

• Jem Stone: BBC New Media
• Tom Bureau: Managing Director, CNET Networks UK
• Meg Pickard: Head of Editorial development, Guardian Unlimited
• Adam Gee: New Media Commissioner, Factual at Channel 4 Television
• Paul Pod: Co-Founder, TIOTI (Tape It Off The Internet)
• Ashley Norris: Co-founder, Shiny Media
• Nico Macdonald: Spy.co.uk
• Jeff Revoy, VP of Search and Social Media, Yahoo! Europe

Nothing really earth-shattering was said in what should have been an excellent panel. Still, some highlights:

Gee: Traditional are media are well-positioned to do public tasks by providing the architecture for interactive projects. He points to a Channel 4 map of public artwork being created by “a willing public” armed with cameraphones.

Revoy: The development of interactive tools online is being driven by the growth of broadband penetration and the wide availability of applications. It’s not a trend, just evolution of the medium. In a few years’ time, it won’t be considered a trend, but will just be the way people interact with the internet.

Bureau: CNET uses “architecture of participation” to solicit and encourage high-value users’ interaction on its web sites and that their contributions are treated in a similar vein as the contributions from the professional journalists on their sites. What professional journalists create is just the starting point, and a challenge is to change the way they look at the world and relate to their users to reflect that. Silicon.com, for example caters for high-level technology executives. The question has to be who knows more about the subject — a journalist or some members of such a specialst audience. When you have a specialist audience, you’ll inevitably have a proportion — perhaps 10 to 20 per cent — who are greater expects. They may not have the presentation skills to express that knowledge as well as the journalists, though.

Pickard: The Guardian is becoming more “granular” in its thinking about user interactivity. She outlined various classes of user interactivity, starting with casual, passive viewers, followed by interaction (such as leaving comments), curation, and finally content creation. Many big media organiations are still only getting the first chunk. The trick is to find ways to move people from being mere consumers to more creators. This should be a fundimental part of the proposition.

Norris: Lot of journalists despise new media, because they are accustomed to delivering tablets of stone, and this is still something that affects most news organisations. He singles out the Daily Mail and the Sun for frequently picking up stories from blogs, but rarely links out from their sites to acknowledge them. Even the BBC, he says, rarely links to the many blogs in the British blogosphere.

Stone: Responding to Norris, he says this may not be because the journalists don’t respect the bloggers, but just because they aren’t aware of their posts. Norris retorts: “That’s like saying journalists aren’t aware of news stories.”

See also: Kevin Anderson, Jemima Kiss, Robin Hamman.

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