@DNA2008: CNN releases beta of new iReport UGC site

Posted by Martin Stabe on 4 March 2008 at 08:53
Tags: CNN, Citizen journalism, citizenjournalism

CNN has released a beta version of iReport.com, the second phase of its user-generated content submission tool, iReport.

Unlike the iReport user-submission tool that the international news channel launched 18 months ago, the new site is largely community-modernated.

A full launch of the service is due later this month, CNN business development director Chris Press told the Digital News Affairs conference in Brussels.

In its first 18 months, CNN’s existing iReport tool has received 100,000 reports, including video from the Virginia Tech shootings, the Burmese uprising and the Minneapolis bridge collapse, Press said.

But because all the content is vetted before being published on CNN.com or on CNN television, Press said, only about 10 per cent of iReport submissions are actually used on CNN.

“Nine out of 10 people were disappointed”, he said. The new site, however, will primarily be is designed to resolve that by creating a site linked to but clearly distinct from CNN’s editorial content.

Media critics look at online Virginia Tech coverage

Posted by Martin Stabe on 18 April 2007 at 08:49
Tags: ABC, Blogs, CNN, Citizen journalism, Ethics, Journalism, Livejournal, Mobile Phones, NBC, New Media, Photography, blogging, onlinejournalism, usa, video

For a second day, there is much analysis from bloggers and media commentators about the online coverage of the Virginia Tech massacre.

Canadian journalism educator Mark Hamilton says it would be wrong to describe the Virginia Tech story as just another “victory” for the development of citizen journalism. We’re well beyond that stage, he suggests.

“What yesterday showed me was the new mediascape in action, a potent mix of journalists, witnesses and aggregators telling the story better than any of them could alone,” writes Hamilton in an excellent roundup an analysis.

Despite isolated examples of terrible journalism and terrible blogging, Hamilton concludes that both the professionals and the blogosphere’s irregulars did sterling journalism.

One particular item from the new mediascape that has attracted a lot of attention is student Jamal Albaughouti’s mobile phone video of the shootings, which was uploaded to CNN’s citizen journalism portal and has been viewed more than 2 million times. Jeff Jarvis criticises CNN’s apparent exclusivity deal with Albaughouti. Jarvis notes that the video is already available on YouTube.

“The value of an exclusive today lasts about 30 seconds,” Jarvis concludes.

NewAssignment.net’s Steve Fox, meanwhile, argues that the video “had no inherent news value and told no story.”

The London bombing showed us how anyone with a cell phone can capture images. But, that was after a news event had occurred. Our heralded citizen journalist captured sounds of people being killed, injured and maimed yesterday as it occurred.

Is this really the type of behavior to applaud, to train citizen journalists to take part in? More importantly, what’s the news here?

Finally, step back for a second. Play the video. And, imagine you have a son or daughter attending Virginia Tech, you can’t get ahold of them and you turn on CNN to find out some information and instead you come across that video.

Much attention is also focused on journalists’ use of students’ MySpace and Facebook pages to to make contact with and request interviews with victims and witnesses.

National Journal blogger Emily Goodin, for example, spots journalists from ABC and NBC television requesting interviews in this way.

Her commenters are very unimpressed. “maggots. feasting off the misery and horror of the families and friends of the victims,” writes Linda.

Journalist and Livejournal user Adam Tinworth, meanwhile, describes it the practice as “digital doorstopping“, and just a new form of journalism’s “long and dishonourable tradition” of treating victims of tragedies in this way.

Livejournal’s community architecture, Tinworth argues, makes it likely to seem like a semi-private place to its regular users, making outsiders’ overtures seem particularly intrusive.

“Barging into that community and asking for comment feels not unlike barging into a pub and asking somebody for comments,” Tinworth writes.

But in Slate magazine, media critic Jack Shafer praises journalists who have coldly pursued the story among the victims. It would be even worse if they didn’t pursue the story, he argues. In fact, he suggests, “viewers would riot”.

Update: Dan Gillmor of the Center for Citizen Media has an essay on his blog which will be published today as an op-ed piece in the Washington Examiner. His eloquent conclusion is worth noting:

We used to say that journalists write the first draft of history. Not so, not any longer. The people on the ground at these events write the first draft. This is not a worrisome change, not if we are appropriately skeptical and to find sources we trust. We will need to retool media literacy for the new age, too.

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All the news that’s fit to Twit

Posted by Martin Stabe on 21 March 2007 at 13:54
Tags: BBC, British Press Awards, CNET, CNET News.com, CNN, Guardian Unlimited, Journalism, Mashups, New York Times, Press Association, Wired, twitter

Just in time for its first anniversary last week, the Twitter has gained a huge surge in attention to go with accelerating growth in its user base.

The service, which combines social networking and blogging, allow users to send 140-character updates detailing what they are doing at the moment. Users can chose to have their friends’ messages delivered directly to an instant massager account or mobile phone via text message.

Helped by a flurry of adoption among the digerati at TED and SXSW conferences, Twitter has become the current darling among the usual early-adopter crowd — and has frustrated some by slowing down tremendously as a consequence.

Twitter invites users to reply to the question “What are you doing right now?” It then sends the responses — by RSS, IM or, crucially, mobile phone — to all of those friends who have signed up to follow that user’s messages.

Inevitably, this invitation has meant that the service is being used primarily for communicating the most banal aspects of everyday life — and this has led to a Marmite-like devision of opinion among the online commentariat.

Some A-list bloggers are contemplating shifting most of their everyday writing to the service. Weblogs Inc founder Jason Calacanis, for example, announced that “90% of my blogging is now on Twitter”, prompting howls of disapproving comments from some of his regular readers.

While the enthusiasts can’t get enough Twittering, its detractors are equally unflinching.

“Of all the masturbatory ego-fluffers on the Web, nothing chafes me worse than Twitter,” complained Steve Bryant of eWeek. “Not content with blogging — itself a microchunked, short-form version of diary keeping — we’ve taken to journaling the minute-by-minute factlets and factoids of our bite-sized lives.”

Like the blogging naysayers, the Twitter-haters are absolutely right when they complain that 99 per cent of the communication produced with the service is utter rubbish. Even the closest of friends are probably not interested in receiving a text message every time one of their mates farts.

But by focusing on the banality of most Twitter messages, the service’s critics are guilty of the same logical error as those who dismiss blogging because of the stupidity they observe in many bloggers: they confuse medium and message, technology and content.

Twitter may be encouraging its early adopters to use the service in a relatively banal form of content, but technology adoption never works out quite as the developers of new services imagined or even intended.

The technical idea underlying Twitter is interesting: It is a gateway service that lets users easily post and receive between three normally incompatible short-messaging services: web site comments, instant messaging and SMS text messages.

And like many of the Web 2.0 sites, Twitter has been clever about encouraging such unintended uses, by providing an API that makes it easy for skilled users to find innovative uses for the service.

Anil Dash of Six Apart, put it well when he wrote on his blog: “The sign of success in social software is when your community does something you didn’t expect. “

And that is certainly happening. US presidential hopeful John Edwards is using Twitter to keep supporters abreast of his campaign.

One user has created service that automatically provides service updates for the London Underground.

And of course, many people have seen the potential of the service for distributing news alerts. The Press Association announced last week that it would be using Twitter to distribute updates of Gordon Brown’s budget announcement today.

PA’s experiment is not the first attempt to use Twitter as a vehicle for distributing news, but what’s unusual about it is that it is being produced in-house rather than by their enthusiastic readers.

A few months ago, Twitter user Mario Menti created a mashup that ports the latest headlines from CNN and the BBC into Twitter, allowing users to receive headlines and links to breaking news headlines on their mobile phones by joining the publication’s network of Twitter friends.

A similar service have appeared for Google News headlines. Blogger Dave Winer created a Twitter headline service for Wired after a journalist at the magazine suggested it on one of the magazine’s blogs. The New York Times has both an official Twitter account and another one produced by Dave Winer. There is what looks like an official Twitter feed for technology site CNET News.com.

While I was writing this post, my phone chirped with a Twitter message from Guardian blogs editor Kevin Anderson revealing that something Twitter-related is afoot at Graun towers as well.

Of course, we’re not beyond jumping on the Twitter bandwagon ‘round here. Next Monday evening, you’ll be able to get the British Press Awards winners on your mobile phone as they are announced. Just follow the user ‘pressgazette‘ on Twitter.

Update: Even political blogger Guido Fawkes seems to be Twittering.

Update 22/3: The Guardian’s Twitter feeds, created by Ben Hammersley, are ‘guardiannews‘ and ‘commentisfree‘. Simon Dickson notes that Nick Robinson’s frantic budget micro-blogging for the BBC might have been a good use for Twitter (a bit like PA’s experiment, perhaps).

Update 23/3: Jack Lail ponders the journalistic applications of Twitter.

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Citizen journalism guide in Press Gazette

Posted by Martin Stabe on 23 March 2006 at 10:17
Tags: BBC, CNN, Citizen journalism, ITN, Journalism, Mobile Phones, Photography, Sky

If you are interested in “citizen journalism” (or whatever you prefer to call
the many-faceted phenomenon) will enjoy the issue of Press Gazette that is out today.

Our Reporter’s Guide to Citizen Journalism is introduced by Mike Ward of the University of Central Lancashire, who argues that professional news organisations cannot afford to ignore citizen journalism. Julie Tomlin interviewed citizen journalism doyen Dan Gillmor. Graham Holliday explained how journalists can make the best use of the blogosphere. I paid a visit to the dedicated BBC unit that sifts through the deluge of “user-generated content”. Jonathan Munro of ITV, John Ryley of Sky News related their experiences of using content supplied by the cameraphone-wielding public, while Nic Robertson of CNN wrote about using a cameraphone to report from Iraq. Kyle McRae recounts the early days of his citizen journalism picture agency Scoopt, and how it has made few friends on tabloid feature desks.

For the uninitiated, we also have some links to notable citizen journalism projects
and social news aggregators and bookmarking tools.