MediaShift Idea Lab

Freedom Fone Comes to Dar es Salaam

2009-11-26T10:27:13Z

Amanda and I have just returned from Dar es Salaam. We were on the road with "Freedom Fone":http://www.freedomfone.org/. Last Tuesday it was 9 degrees at 9am in orderly Johannesburg and 28 degrees with sweat inducing humidity at 7pm in chaotic Dar. After negotiating the jam-packed arrivals hall we smiled in relief when we discovered John holding up a torn piece of cardboard with Freedom Fone scribbled on it. We couldn't speak Swahili and he couldn't speak English but we made our greetings and jumped into his car for the ride of our life to a lodge off the Old Bagamoyo Road in Michokeni B. Dar was thrillingly alive, jumping with activity of all kinds. Flashing past us . . . Two guys on a bicycle. One of them had a goat draped over his knees. A beggar with buckled legs dragged himself through an intersection, craning his neck to ask for money from people in cars. He wore slip slops on his hands. The storm water drains on the sides of the roads were full of water breeding malaria and other diseases. Little boys' trawled homemade fishing lines through the muddy ditch water hoping for a catch. We saw a young man fill a water bottle from the litter-strewn canal, and we hoped that he wasn't going to drink it. The next day we met up with Bart, Margaret and Lilian the "Farm Radio International":http://www.farmradio.org/ (FRI) crew who we'd come to train to use the Freedom Fone software. FRI is a Canadian-based, not-for-profit organization working with about 300 radio broadcasters in 39 African countries to fight poverty and food insecurity. FRI has partnered with Freedom Fone to engage our software in the support of small scale farmers in Tanzania. FRI have established 5 listening communities attached to 5 community radio stations in varied locations in Tanzania. These community radio stations broadcast programmes that assist farmers in achieving better yields as well as helping answer questions related to the various agricultural challenges they might be experiencing. FRI is currently exploring the "use of information communication technologies (ICTs)":http://ictupdate.cta.int/en/Feature-Articles/Talking-back-to-radio to complement and extend the usefulness of radio broadcast programmes. They selected "Radio Maria":http://radiotime.com/station/s_6424/Radio_Maria_Tanzania_891.aspx, a Christian radio station based in Dar es Salaam, to deploy Freedom Fone. Three main reasons influenced their decision to do this: - Radio Maria is a well-resourced radio station both in terms of human resources with high technical skills and experience, and equipment/infrastructure. - Radio Maria broadcasts some of FRI's agricultural programmes. - Radio Maria has very wide coverage in Tanzania. FRI's listening groups with Radio Maria have expressed a particular desire for information about raising chickens. Local chickens are an excellent income source for small-scale farmers, as they have low input costs and high demand and a ready market. However, many farmers experience high chicken loss due to poor management: not keeping the chickens safely, feeding them properly or looking after their hygiene sufficiently. Better information helps farmers lose fewer chickens, and thus make more money out of them. FRI's Freedom Fone deployment will draw on this desire for more information about chicken management, and their broadcast programme called, Heka Heka Vijijini (Busy Busy in the Village), will be adapted into short segment audio programmes using Freedom Fone software. FRI also intends to use Freedom Fone in Ghana . . . stay tuned! Lilian, the presenter of Heka Heka Vijijini (Busy Busy in the Village)

The New Journalist in the Age of Social Media

2009-11-24T19:13:50Z

The New Journalist in the Age of Social Media

View more documents from JD Lasica.

I'm at Day 2 of a remarkable two-day conference that is bringing nonprofits, citizen journalism and social media together in ways I've never seen before. I'm jazzed, hopeful and intrigued by the challenges ahead. The passion in the room is palpable. The 40 people who convened at the Visioning Summit yesterday in San Francisco, and the 30 participants who are steering the program today, consist of some of the most talented and forward-thinking innovators — nonprofit execs, strategists, journalists — that I've come across in recent years. Above is the presentation I gave at this gathering, organized by a group of nonprofits in a project called the New Media Lab (there's no public presence yet, just a private wiki). And while its focus is squarely on the role that journalist/media producers will play in our project, I've taken the liberty of extrapolating it to the new roles that journalists should be expected to take up in an age of social media if you work for a startup, whether it's for-profit or nonprofit. Called Doing Good 2.0: The next-generation's impact on communication, media, mobile & civic engagement [fixed link], it looks at the forces driving Web 2.0 and the next-generation Internet, the role of mobile, the new cultural norms that social media is ushering in, and the role of the New Journalist: how we need to still tell compelling stories about people and causes but how we also need to expand our repertoire in this new arena by wearing multiple hats: • entrepreneur • conversation facilitator • social marketer • futurist • metrics & research nerd • journalist/storyteller Here are some of the questions we've just begun to tackle: Should nonprofits create their own media? What should be the business model for social cause organizations in the future? How can the media producers funded by this project work with nonprofits to build a sustainable business venture that connects to their core constituencies? How do you turn passive audiences into engaged communities? What happens when you bust the silos that keep us from working together across sectors? I've signed on as a paid advisor to the yearlong project, which will happen largely virtually. The idea is that the alternative, progressive nonprofits — the National Wildlife Federation, National Civic League, Freespeech.tv, Mother Jones and Asian Americans/Pacific Islanders in Philanthropy — will assign point people to work with producers selected by San Francisco State's Renaissance Journalism Center. Leveraging free and open source tools Some of the ingredients that will be sprinkled into the project's secret sauce: use of mobile; an emphasis on social media; use of high-quality video across multiple platforms (Web, cable and broadcast TV); and business plans from Manas Consulting to make it all self-sustaining. The goal, in a phrase, is to "help non-profit partners find innovative ways to get their members to engage in conversation, volunteer, subscribe, donate and advocate." The role of the "New Journalist" — which we're calling media producers — in this project is paramount: The producers (who hail from SF Gate, the Miami Herald, an Emmy-winning documentarian and others) will be sitting down this afternoon to map out how to weave a tapestry out of all these moving parts. "This is a project for those who like to play around, who are comfortable with things shifting fast and often," Jon Funabiki, founder of Renaissance Journalism Center, told the producers. During my talk I showed off this heart-tugging video from aglimmerofhope.org as a compelling example of storytelling for a cause and showed off a suite of free open source and social media tools and platforms. I also pointed to a few ahead-of-the-curve ideas for partnerships: Among those in attendance: Funabiki; fellow IdeaLab contributor David Cohn, founder of Spot.us; Jed Alpert, co-founder of MobileCommons; Arthur Charity, author of "Doing Public Journalism"; management consultant Richard Landry; social entrepreneur Ron Williams, and many other smart folks. Jon Schwartz, who runs a string of progressive nonprofits, is funding the project, and Halcyon Liew organized the proceedings. With a little bit of luck, we'll figure this out. I'll report back on our progress in the months to come.

Journalism, Technology Starting to Add Up

2009-11-24T13:56:19Z

Back in early 2008, as I headed off to a conference at Georgia Tech, I wrote a post for Idealab headlined "Computation + Technology = ?"

Two recent developments suggest that we're starting to find answers to that question -- and more importantly, that there's a growing number of people trying to find these answers. Duke University has released an interesting report, and a group of journalists and technologists has begun meeting in Silicon Valley to address challenges that journalists and technologists might tackle together.

The February 2008 conference at Georgia Tech, entitled "Journalism 3G: The Future of Technology in the Field," introduced many of its 200+ attendees to the idea of computational journalism -- applying computer programming to the challenges facing journalism, journalists and a society that needs original reporting to provide information for citizens in a democracy. Two of the other attendees were the first Knight News Challenge "programmer-journalist" scholarship winners: computer programmers "enrolled in the master's program":http://www.medill.northwestern.edu/admissions/programmers.html at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University.

When the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation awarded the scholarship grant to Medill in 2007, the idea of teaching journalism to technology professionals seemed odd to many people -- both journalists and technologists. But now there seem to be a lot of initiatives aimed at addressing the same set of issues.

Duke University, through its DeWitt Wallace Center for Media and Democracy, built on the ideas generated by the Georgia Tech conference in a couple of ways. First, the center created -- and has now filled -- a faculty position specializing in the field. The new Knight professor of the practice of journalism and public policy is an old friend, Sarah Cohen, previously database editor for The Washington Post, where she contributed to countless enterprise reporting projects, including a Pulitzer-winning investigation of child welfare agencies in the District of Columbia. Besides teaching courses, Cohen is expected to lead the development of open-source reporting tools designed to make it easier for journalists to discover and research stories.

Earlier this month, Duke released "Accountability Through Algorithm: Developing the Field of Computational Journalism," a report based on a workshop held in July. The report is full of interesting ideas for applying technology to journalists' challenges. Here are a few of them.

Information Extraction, Integration and Visualization

A new set of tools would help reporters find patterns in otherwise unstructured or unsearchable information. For instance, the Obama administration posted letters from dozens of interest groups providing advice on issues, but the letters were not searchable. A text-extraction tool would allow reporters to feed PDF documents into a Web service and return a version that could be indexed and searched. The software might also make it easy to tag documents with metadata such as people's names, places and dates. Another idea is to improve automatic transcription software for audio and video files, often available (but not transcribed) for government meetings and many court hearings.

The report also suggests developing "lightweight" templates that enable journalists to create data visualizations based on XML or spreadsheet files, and tools that help them organize their findings in a timeline. As the report points out, reporters working on in-depth projects often create chronologies in lengthy spreadsheets or text documents. A better tool would let journalists "zoom in, tag events for publication, turn on and off players or events and otherwise use them effectively," the report says.

The Journalist's Dashboard

Here the Duke report suggests that journalists need "a tool with which to spot what's new and what's important in the flow of daily information." A dashboard could include:

A news alert system similar to Google News that scanned only the sources specified by a beat reporter,identifying the originating publisher and the number of other sites that linked to the item;
A tool helping journalists keep track of their sources, including news items about that person and citations from the reporter's own archived stories mentioning him or her;
A "trends and outliers" tool that might generate an alert any time a data source reveals a significant change in a piece of data -- say, a surge in monthly expenditures by a government agency, or a flurry of crime reports in a short period of time.
A timeline generator that would display incidents related to a particular story as well as coverage on blogs and news sites.
An annotator that would allow a reporter to see past stories, images and contextual information while writing -- for instance, by displaying background information about the person being written about. (This idea bears some similarity to the EasyWriter tool developed this spring by students in a Northwestern University journalism/technology class.)

Reader-Reporter Interaction

Philip Bennett, formerly managing editor of the Washington Post and now a professor at Duke, is quoted in the report describing a new approach to investigative projects that engages and taps into reader interest. Instead of seeing long-term investigative projects ending with publication of a package of stories, the initial investigation could serve as just the midpoint in the reporting process. Stories could be presented in ways that enabled each reader to explore the story in layers, giving each a "differentiated news experience depending on her interests." Bennett suggests that a series like the Post's Pulitzer-winning investigation of Walter Reed Army Medical Center could have become a focal point for readers interested in veterans' issues. "If the paper could nurture a community of interest around the story, readers might use the site as a discussion place for the action that follows from the investigation," the report says.

Applying 'Sensemaking' Approaches From Other Fields

The Duke report points out that academic researchers are wrestling with many of the same challenges that journalists face and suggests that their solutions could be helpful. For instance, Georgia Tech researchers have built a tool called Jigsaw that creates visualizations to display connections between individuals and entities mentioned in different documents -- something every investigative reporter would lust for. And the Muninn Project, an interdisciplinary research project focusing on World War I records, is seeking to convert images of handwritten forms into machine-readable databases -- a problem faced by journalists in many states that allow political candidates to file handwritten campaign contribution reports..

Another new development worth taking note of: a new "Hacks and Hackers" Meetup group formed in Silicon Valley by former Associated Press foreign correspondent Burt Herman, who is on leave from the AP and recently completed a Knight fellowship at Stanford University. The group -- billed as being "for hackers exploring technologies to filter and visualize information, and for journalists who use technology to find and tell stories" -- held its first meeting Nov. 19.

The first gathering attracted about 30 people, including people from Google and Google News, Yahoo, sfgate.com, the San Francisco Chronicle, Current TV, PARC (Palo Alto Research Center), and Topix.com, Herman reported. "It felt like the seeds of a movement, and the many lively conversations showed that everyone was able to find common ground," he wrote in an email to me.

Herman said his Knight fellowship -- during which he focused on innovation and entrepreneurship -- taught him that innovation requires bringing people from different disciplines together.

"I started the Hacks and Hackers meetup group to open a broader dialogue between technologists and journalists, so we can move past the endless hand-wringing about the future of news and get down to work building it," Herman said. "Technology and media come together here in Silicon Valley like nowhere else in the world, and there was no group yet focused on this. I'm hoping it will lead to better understanding and perhaps even spawn new ventures."

As some readers of this blog will remember, "Hacks and Hackers" is also the name that "Aron Pilhofer":http://www.aronpilhofer.com and I came up with to describe a new organization and Web site for people working at the intersection of technology and journalism. At the Future of News and Civic Media Conference in June, Aron and I won a $2,000 prize to create an online community for people with these interests.

The Web community idea is still in the early stages of development, but Aron and I would welcome your ideas about how best to make it work. The original concept was to create a place where members can seek help solving problems and provide assistance to their peers by, for instance, sharing a tutorial for a project using Django or Ruby on Rails or Drupal. We know there are people -- in journalism and technology, in industry and academia, scattered through organizations such as the Online News Association, Investigative Reporters and Editors and the Society for News Design -- who can use each other's help and support. We like the idea of having some kind of reputation management system -- say, like Stack Overflow -- that would reward members based on the quality and quantity of their contributions to the community.

If you have ideas for the Hacks and Hackers site, please post them in the comments below or email me at richgor - at - northwestern.edu.

SochiReporter Launches with Time Machine, Wiki Guidebook

2009-11-20T18:20:47Z

I'm glad to say that "SochiReporter":http://www.sochireporter.ru/, my Knight-funded project, launched on October 27. This was a very important day for me, and for our team. We tested SochiReporter for about two months before the public launch, inviting both web experts and users to comment on various aspects of the site. In the days before the launch, I didn't sleep a wink. But this is natural. I was very excited about the launch, and did my best to convey how cool and innovative SochiReporter is to the journalists and students that gathered on launch day in the hall of one of the best schools in Sochi. h2. Generating Content We have been working on this project for almost a year, but we started generating content a few months back. At the end of July, we organized a seminar about the web and new media for students in Sochi. We also announced a contest that would give prizes for the best photos, text and video. So between August and October, students were generating content for the site. We provided the students with some nice gadgets to help with their reporting, as well as some basic knowledge about blogging and other skills. This meant we were able to launch with lots of original content. h2. Site Design and Structure For me, design is really important. As my designer friend who works for a lifestyle magazine told me, "folks are subconsciously attracted by good design." We had a great time working with four designers from Cetis, which is one of the leading design studios in Russia. I call our design "adrenaline." It's really colorful and bright, and each section has a personal touch. Please "take a look":http://www.sochireporter.ru/ and let us know what you think. You can also view a video about the creation of the site: In terms of the structure of the site, I believe we were innovators. As I understand it, innovation is a process that aims to combine existing tools to create a new product. We created a section on the site called "Time Machine":http://www.sochireporter.ru/en/tm. It enables a user to go back in time to any day (starting from October 2009) and see which material was uploaded. This is basically a way of archiving and storing information, and it's very useful when it comes to sites like ours. Other innovative sections include the Guidebook, which is a wiki-based virtual guidebook of Sochi. (I wrote the first Russian guidebook of Norway when I was 21, so this section is important to me). I believe that the Guidebook creates a sense of community, and it's a great element for any community-oriented website. In order to create the Guidebook, I made agreements with the publisher of the best travel guidebook for Sochi to provide us with basic travel information. So we're starting with information provided by professional travel writers. Then, as the city changes, users will be able to edit and add to the Guidebook. We already have some local students writing about Sochi's museums. h2. Marketing We launched with a major presentation of SochiReporter at the 2009 Russian Internet Week. This is a big web industry exhibition organized in a huge venue in Moscow. It was great to be a part of this expo, and many people were interested in our project. We had a small but comfy stand with walls that were covered with samples from the site. In Sochi, all of the local television channels covered the launch, as did the online media and some of the local papers. I realized how much the publicity helps when, days after the launch, I was recognized by a waiter in a café. He had seen me on television. Thanks to our seminars back in July, most of the local journalists had already heard about SochiReporter. This helped create a sense of anticipation for our launch -- and helped make it a success so far. The number of registered users is gradually growing and new stories come up on SochiReporter.

Citizen Media Law Project Gives Free Legal Help to Online Publishers

2009-11-19T15:55:59Z

I am delighted to announce the public launch of the Berkman Center's Online Media Legal Network (OMLN), a new pro bono initiative that connects lawyers and law school clinics from across the country with online journalists and digital media creators who need legal help. Lawyers participating in OMLN will provide qualifying online publishers with pro bono and reduced fee legal assistance on a broad range of legal issues, including business formation and governance, copyright licensing and fair use, employment and freelancer agreements, access to government information, pre-publication review of content, and representation in litigation.

The idea for the network came out of CMLP's work over the last 3 years helping online journalists understand their legal rights and responsibilities. During this time period, we've published and updated our legal guide and legal threats database, blogged on topics of interest to online publishers, partnered with like-minded organizations on a variety of educational projects, and filed amicus briefs in cases with significant implications for online speech. While we are proud of the impact we've had and the success of the CMLP website, we also recognize that many online journalists and bloggers need more than generally applicable legal information--they need their own lawyers to tackle their own individualized legal issues.

The new Online Media Legal Network aims to fill this need by making it as easy as possible for online publishers to find legal help. If you know of anyone that could use our help, please direct them to the OMLN website. Conversely, if you are a lawyer and you want to help, please sign up!

More info on the launch is available here.

4th Programmer-Journalist Scholarship Winner Learns to 'Think Like a Journalist'

2009-11-18T22:20:08Z

Manya Gupta, a software engineer for telecommunications companies in her native India, is the fourth winner of a Knight News Challenge "programmer-journalist" scholarship. She's now in her second quarter studying journalism at the Medill School at Northwestern University. She blogs occasionally at http://manya-myvoice.blogspot.com/.

Learn some more about Manya from the following edited Q&A.

Tell us about your background.

I am from India. I received a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from JSS Academy of Technical Education in Noida, Uttar Pradesh.. While working on projects I realized my passion for programming and decided to make it a career.

So, I moved to Bangalore, the Silicon Valley of India, to work as a software engineer for Infosys Technologies and worked in the telecommunications domain. Three years later I decided to move to Ordyn Technologies, a small company, to gain some startup experience. My stint at Ordyn as a senior design engineer was very fruitful, and among many things I learned Python.

But I am not a complete geek. I am a traveler, a big sports buff, a trained dancer and an avid reader. I love playing football, tennis and volleyball and won a best player award for football in a tournament in Infosys.

How did you get interested in journalism?

Four years ago I participated in a national level anti-reservation protest. [Editor's note: Here's a BBC article about the protests and the policy change that spurred them.] It was then that I realized the power of journalism to effect change. I experienced, for the first time, the positive impact journalism can make in creating a better society. What started as a small protest by a group of students in the national capital soon turned into a youth movement and it was because of effective, strong and powerful journalism. The reach to the youth through different media was amazing. There were traditional sources like the television and newspapers, but there was Twitter and Orkut and Web images and blogs. So, there was this curious mix of new and old and everyone, with whatever means he could, was participating in the movement.

That experience stirred me. It made me want to take the plunge into journalism and explore the new avenues that appeal to today's youth -- because the whole idea is to get the message to them, and adapting to their tools is important.

What have you learned by studying journalism so far? How has the experience changed your outlook?

So far I have thoroughly enjoyed the Medill experience. First and most important, I have learned to report, write and think like a journalist. I look for a story in everything around me! But it is not just old-style writing that I have learned. Medill is a place where the old meets the young -- because with every print story I also created a multimedia piece and that is how I learned the importance of storytelling in the most effective manner.

Beyond that, I have met amazing people, participated in some very intriguing discussions and learned from people with tremendous amount of experience. What I have liked most is that everyone is so willing to share what they have learned.

Moreover, it has given me the opportunity to explore; by interacting with people from different walks of life, by understanding their problems, issues and lives, and by telling stories through creative media.

The experience has enriched me. It has given me the power to bring people's day-to-day issues to light. At the same time, I have learned not to tie my emotions to one side and be balanced and fair by listening to other points of view. In short, I have learned to walk the tightrope.

Why it Matters that Pierre Omidyar is Launching a News Startup

2009-11-18T19:45:21Z

Pierre Omidyar, founder of eBay, is launching a for-profit news startup in Hawaii, where he and his family live. This is important news, and not just because he's involved.

A few months ago Pierre and Randy Ching founded Peer News. Their first project was a Twitter-related experiment called Ginx, which didn't get critical mass and is being closed.

Now they've announced Peer News' more important move -- a project aimed at creating the kind of local journalism that brings accountability and value to a community.

Pierre, in a note on the company blog, says he and his team are launching -- they aim for early 2010 -- based on deep research: "talking to a lot of people in the industry about journalism and how we might be able to have an impact, listening and learning as much as we can."

I'm one of the people Pierre has talked with, but I'm not privy to the details of the new venture. In a conversation last evening, he did say this will be service combining professional journalists and citizen journalists in "a commercial model that hasn't been tried yet."

Tantalizing, no? Let's focus for a second on the word "commercial," because Pierre and team are going for something that seems to have fallen somewhat out of favor for local news startups, the notion that they can and should be profitable. Not-for-profits are springing up in various places, and while Pierre is happy to see them he also believes it's essential to find solid for-profit models for sustainable media.

One message is for the local newspapers: Watch out. Pierre has analyzed the Hawaii media market and sees enough advertising money is going toward journalism in Honolulu "to fund a high quality operation" -- but clearly not the kind that dominates the revenue stream today, namely the local newspapers.

Peer News will operate in the leanest possible way compatible with doing solid journalism and community information. It will involve social media in a big way as well. (The Omidyar Network, the investing and charitable arm of Pierre and his wife, Pam, has been deep into socially valuable media for a long time. Count on them bringing what they've learned into Peer News.)

Plainly, the Hawaii launch is a test bed, in part. If it works, expect more local versions in other places.

Peer News is looking for a founding editor. My advice has been to find someone local, if at all possible, but especially to find someone excellent. If you're interested, here's where you can find out more.

One of the people who'll be talking to editorial candidates is Howard Weaver, a former vice president of news at McClatchy. Howard has been consulting with Peer News and offers some perspective on his own blog, including this:

I'm interested for a lot of reasons, but I'd sum it up this way: the new venture intends to demonstrate that a digitally native, technologically fluent web organization can profitably serve targeted readers who want sophisticated journalism focused on local civic affairs.

Maybe Pierre and his team have cracked part of the code for sustainable digital journalism. Maybe not. But the fact that they're going to try, with some serious resources behind the effort, is great news.

So I'm looking forward to following the progress of Peer News. So should anyone who's interested in the future of journalism.

(Note: The Omidyar Network was a seed funder of my long-ago Grassroots Media (Bayosphere) project. It lost money. Cross-posted from Mediactive.)

Gearing up Citizen Journalism in Grahamstown, South Africa

2009-11-16T14:01:21Z

Low literacy environments, and multi-lingual areas, like Grahamstown, South Africa, face particular challenges when it comes to encouraging citizen journalism. More than 80 percent of the population speaks English as a second language. While most people are able to speak and understand English, writing is not always a comfortable experience (and some are unable to read or write). That's partly why we've launched "Izwi Labahlali":http://www.grocotts.co.za/content/izwi-labahlali-episode-1 (The Voice Of The Citizens), Grahamstown's first radio show with content that's largely produced and presented by citizen journalists and transmitted mainly in iziXhosa, the dominant local language. The show, which airs on Radio Grahamstown on 102.1 FM, gives citizen journalists who have completed a six-week course in the Grocott's Mail "Citizen Journalism Newsroom":http://www.grocotts.co.za/content/grocotts-mail-citizen-journalism-newsroom an extra platform to report what's going on in their communities. (Their contributions also appear online and in Grocott's print edition.) The show is being aired on a trial-run basis every Wednesday in November between 5 p.m. and 5:30 p.m. It will become a permanent show in early 2010, possibly with a longer time slot. For the trial run, Khaya Thonjeni is hosting the show. Khaya is the schools outreach officer for our Knight News Challenge-funded project, Iindaba Ziyafika ("The News is coming"). Khaya is joined by different young citizen journalists each week. (You can listen to the shows online "here":http://www.grocotts.co.za/content/izwi-labahlali-voice-citizens.) The radio show is intended to play a significant role in realizing our project's aim of making news something that is increasingly consumed -- and produced -- by all citizens of Grahamstown. The idea is that it will get people talking about issues that matter to them, thereby giving them more of a sense of belonging in their community. At this stage, we have given two six-week courses in citizen journalism. Thanks to the content our students are producing in print and our new radio experience, we are learning a great deal about what works and doesn't work in this multi-lingual, low literacy area. h2. Providing Guidance to Citizen Journalists We give our trainees the latitude to write about anything they want, but we are also discovering it helps to focus their energy around specific themes. Some of the current group of 40 adults taking the training will soon be working on issues of waste management. We have myriad of waste issues in Grahamstown, from uncollected garbage on the streets to landfill usage. Others will be put into groups to look at issues such as local democracy. Just as it takes a professional journalist a long time to work out the dynamics of a beat, the same is true for a citizen journalist. It takes time, energy and dedication to build up an understanding -- and contacts -- related to a specific topic. We realize we need to create more opportunities for these specializations to grow, and we need to seed and suggest these opportunities to our citizen journalists. h2. Dealing With Power Issues We are also encountering issues of power and respect. Many government officials often won't speak to full-time journalists, so why would they take a call from someone describing themselves as a citizen journalists? We issue graduates of our CJ course a citizen journalist press card that identifies them and gives our contact number at Grocott's Mail. This is so that any prospective interviewee can check out if a person is who they say they are. These uneven power relations are particularly acute for our younger reporters. They often want to write about conditions in their schools, but fear the power of their teachers. This is part of the reason why we are now focusing their energy towards other social challenges in their areas, and away from their schools. Poorly functioning schools are not keen on being exposed by their own pupils, and we hope that some of our brave adult CJ reporters can tackle this issue. In order to tackle controversial issues, we realize we need to spend more time talking about being how they can stand up in the face of power, and learn to push their sources. We find some people just persevere more than others. For example, "this is a well put together piece of reporting":http://www.grocotts.co.za/content/residents-cry-over-unexpected-water-outages that one of our current course participants researched and wrote. It's really worth reading, just to get a sense of what is possible. It even includes a quote from a municipal official! h2. Different People, Different Reasons for Trying Reporting The above article is written by Andile Ecalpar Nayika, a 21 year-old student from Joza Location. This is some of what he wrote about his motivation to get into our oversubscribed CJ course: bq. I survive in Phumlani Location in the eastern part of Grahamstown, Joza Location. I am 21 years of age and I am a student at East Cape Midlands College... I have been a prominent member of my high school newspaper, Edu Buzz of EduCollege. Then a year later, I went on to become one of six Founders of East Cape Modlands College's of the very first Newspaper, 'The Midlands Voice'. At the moment I am a newsreader at Radio Grahamstown 102.1 FM. I have a lot of intent on scribing and telling more stories about my life experience and the surrounding I am in because it is what makes me. It is clear why Andile wants to do the CJ course. Some people simply want to get the news out about their church's activities. Others take the course to see if this is something that might interest them. And then there are those who feel compelled to try this in the hope of finding work -- adult unemployment rates are above 50 percent in Grahamstown. We're thinking through what these multiple motivations might mean for our courses, and whether we can (and should) screen harder for those candidates who want to "change the world," "make a difference," or "speak truth to power," for example. (Currently, prospective candidates have to provide a written account of their motivations, and some are interviewed.) In this vein, we're also having to think much more broadly about what "building social capital" (one of our project's overarching goals) means, and how that intersects, or not, with our other overarching aim: enlarging the public sphere in Grahamstown, and deepening democracy. h2. Preparing for the World Cup It's been an exciting few weeks as more and more elements of the overall Iindaba Ziyafika project get off the ground. It is early days (even though we've been at it for a year), and 2010 will be a big year for testing how our citizen journalism newsroom, our CJ training courses, the multiple input and output methods we are creating (and, in some cases, pioneering), all come together. Next year is especially important because South Africa will host the World Cup in June 2010, and the second "World Journalism Education Congress":http://wjec.ou.edu/congress.php, titled "Journalism Education in an Age of Radical Change," will convene July 2010 in Grahamstown. We are excited by what we're achieving -- and we're confident we'll have more and more stories to tell about the Citizen journalism that is happening in Grahamstown, and what we're learning from it.

Changes in Media Over the Past 550 Years

2009-11-14T19:50:25Z

Sergii Danylenko and Anna Prymakova asked me to speak about "changes in media over the past five years" at MediaCamp Kyiv last week. It's a pretty standard topic of discussion for me, but I felt that it would be more interesting and more useful to look at changes in media over the past 550 years. What follows is a hyperlinked version of my talk.

I recently received an email from NowPublic, a popular citizen journalism website in North America, with the subject "Now Hiring." This is a rare thing in the field of journalism these days - citizen or traditional - and so I wanted to see what they are paying for and how they are covering the expenses. It turns out that NowPublic is not paying you to be a journalist - that is, not to publish content, but rather to read it. And, more importantly, to get others to read it. They will pay you for "views, visitors, and ad clicks." And they will pay you to refer others to view content and click on ads. In economic terms we would say they are paying to create a false demand for an overabundant supply. For me, this exemplifies the state of news media: there is now, for the first time in the history of the world, an abundance of content and a scarcity of attention. But how did we get here? To better understand that we need to go back to 1435 in Northern France when Jean Miélot, a French priest and scholar, first began working as a scribe for Philip the Good, the Duke of Burgundy. Since the invention of the papyrus scroll in Egypt over 4,000 years ago, this is how books were always produced: by hand, and one by one. Scribes almost always worked either for the church or for the aristocracy, and so princes and priests decided which books were to be copied, and which were to be banned. In 1435 Jean Miélot was given what was at the time thought to be a very prestigious job, just as prestige was associated with journalism as little as five years ago. But then something happened. Just one year after Jean Miélot was given his job as a scribe for the Duke of Burgundy, a German goldsmith named Johannes Gutenberg began working on a new invention. Taking inspiration from mechanical presses that helped produce olive oil and wine, Gutenberg invented movable type, which allowed for the mass production of books. In retrospect, it is hard to overstate the importance of this invention in Europe and, eventually, throughout the world. Previously it took months just to produce a single copy of a book. Now in a week you could create thousands. Slowly, ever so slowly, books began to spread across Europe. In the 1440's, 50's, and 60's the book was the new media of the day. And just like it has taken the world a long time to understand the power of the internet, it took Europe many decades to understand the social impact of the printed book. There is a great irony that Johannes Gutenberg is best known for printing the Gutenberg Bible in the 1450's. Previously, every bible was hand copied by scribes, and only priests and princes had access to what was considered the great book of wisdom. Other Europeans depended on priests to transmit the contents of the bible during their weekly sermons. I say that there is irony in the Gutenberg Bible because the Gutenberg printing press was eventually responsible for taking power away from the Vatican and the Catholic Church. 70 years after the Gutenberg Bible was published it finally became common for European authors to publish their own books using the printing press. Martin Luther was one author to do that. In 1522 he published a translation of the Bible in German rather than standard Latin. This was a direct challenge to the power of the Catholic church. Instead of relying on the few trained priests and scholars who spoke Latin, the Bible was now accessible to all literate Germans. He then published his 95 Theses which quickly spread all over Europe, led to the Protestant Reformation, and the fall of the Vatican as the center of power in Europe. Without the printing press the Reformation could not have never happened. Nor would have the Scientific Revolution of the 17th century or the Enlightenment of the 18th century. Both movements depended on the rapid and broad dissemination of ideas such as Copernicus' On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, Vesalius' On the fabric of the human body in seven books and Descartes' Discourse on the Method. Perhaps the scientific revolution was actually ready to spread much earlier, but there was no way for the thinkers to publish, share, and build on the ideas of others. And, of course, there would be no journalism were it not for the printing press. This is a copy of the London Gazette, which was the first regularly published newspaper, and began as the Oxford Gazette in 1665. The point that I am trying to make is that some technological innovations are so revolutionary that they change everything. The Gutenberg Press led to the Protestant Reformation, the Scientific Revolution, journalism, the Enlightenment, and, arguably, representative democracy. It created what is today a European continent with near universal literacy. Before movable type, Europeans depended on priests to know what was inside of a book. Now they simply open its cover. That is a revolutionary difference. But what is important to remember is that not everyone benefited from the printing press. Scribes all across Europe protested. There aren't good records of their protests, but I can just imagine their reasoning: that people would be overwhelmed by too much information; that they would become isolated reading at home rather than coming to church; that mediocrity would prevail if publishing was put into the hands of ordinary people. Basically, all of the same criticisms we hear of the Internet today. In the end, the scribes lost and the printing press won. With the benefit of historical perspective, we view the result as inevitable. And we are seeing the same dynamic play out today with traditional journalism and the participatory internet. In the US a major newspaper closes down just about every week. Those that haven't closed down yet are all losing money. There is no single major newspaper in the US right now that isn't losing money. The question isn't if the old model of journalism will die out, but when. Which brings me to the next topic: that the World Wide Web is proving itself to be just as disruptive of a technology today as the Gutenberg Press was in the 15th century. The internet is growing up. There are now more Chinese internet users online than Americans. Pew Internet found that one out of every five internet users in the United States uses a service like Facebook or Twitter to regularly update their status. For Ukrainians it might be LiveJournal and Kontact. Two American researchers, Denis G. Pelli and Charles Bigelow, argue that we are charting a path toward "nearly universal authorship." In their study they charted the rise of book authors per year from 1400 to today and compared that data with the number of blog authors, Facebook authors, and Twitter authors over the past ten years. As you can see in the above chart, it took 600 years to reach one million book authors per year. In contrast, it only took five years to reach a million blog authors, three years to reach a million Facebook authors, and two years to reach a million Twitter authors. What will be next? There are some technological innovations are so revolutionary that they change everything. What is the role of media if everyone is part of the production process? I believe that we will continue to see a rise in what Jessica Clark of the Center for Social Media calls "people centric media," which spreads information, communication, and social capital across networks based on location, issues, and events. But how will media organizations and projects survive in an era where content is so abundant that no one is willing to pay for it? I want to stress that no matter how many conferences are held and white papers are published, there will never be a silver bullet to save the media industry. It is as useless of a task as convening scribes in the 15th century to discuss how they can save their industry. However, several new models and strategies are emerging which offer a glimpse into the future of people centric media. Make the readers the journalists. In August 2008 the New York Times published a beautiful visualization of the final subway stops for every subway line in New York City. To do this they sent out reporters to take pictures, collect audio, and file their reports. A year later, a similar project called Mapping Main Street accepts contributions from anyone. It still requires an editor and designer, but in Mapping Main Street there is no distinction between reader and reporter. Remove unnecessary reporters. Newspapers used to hire reporters to go to the police department, ask for the crime report, and then copy and publish it in the newspaper. Today that information can be published immediately and directly. Everyblock scrapes information from government websites and makes it available for ordinary citizens via web browser and mobile phone. Just as Europeans used to have to rely on priests to understand what was in a book, citizens used to rely on newspapers to understand about their community. Now they can see and engage with the information for themselves. Remove unnecessary editors. Newspapers have a limited amount of space. Editors had to decide what was included in that space and what wasn't. They were the ultimate gatekeepers of the day's news. Today we are not limited by space, but rather time and attention. NewsTrust is a collaborative editorial site open to anyone which seeks to collectively rank the most relevant and trustworthy news. Some reporting will always be expensive. For example, a 13,000 word New York Times article on events at Memorial Medical Center following Hurricane Katrina took two years and $400,000 to produce. With a $35.6 million loss last quarter, the New York Times can't invest $400k in a single story. Fortunately for the Times, a non-profit organization called ProPublica footed most of the bill. ProPublica is funded by billionaire Herb Sandler who founded the Sandler Foundation in October 2006 after he got out of the finance and mortgage industry. (Good timing!) Get your local community to fund local reporting. You can either get a few very wealthy individuals/organizations to fund your work, or you can get many people to donate a small amount of money to pay a journalist to report a story. This is the model of San Fransisco-based Spot.us, which describes itself as "community funded reporting." Any journalist can make a pitch on the site about a story that he or she would like to report on. For example, in early July Lindsey Hoshaw was given an opportunity to board a ship to visit the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and report on it for the New York Times. But apparently, neither she nor the New York Times had the $10,000 to pay for the travel expenses. And so Hoshaw recorded a video of herself explaining why the reporting was important, why people should pitch in to help her cover the story. Ellen Miller, the executive director of the Sunlight Foundation, pitched in $20. Tim O'Reilly, a well-known open source technologist and publisher, pitched in $100. Pierre Omidyar, the founder of eBay, pitched in $100. Craig Newmark, the founder of Craigslist, pitched in $50. Zoe Keating, a well known cellist offered another $20. Jennifer 8. Lee, a reporter for the metro section of the New York Times, donated $30. (Perhaps she felt bad that the New York Times was still able to pay her, but not Hoshaw.) Four months after Hoshaw made her pitch on Spot.us her story was published in the New York Times with an accompanying slideshow. Give some away for free, charge for the rest. This is the business model that is mentioned most often these days as a way to keep news organizations afloat. It is the strategy of GlobalPost, an international news site. You can go there now and read more articles for free than you likely have time for. But if you're a real international news junkie, then you can pay an extra $200 a year for their "Passport" membership, which "offers an entrée into GlobalPost's inner circle." A couple weeks ago GlobalPost founder Phil Balboni claimed that so far they have 500 paying subscribers to Passport. He also claimed that GlobalPost is on pace to generate $1 million in revenue this yaer. (Their annual expenses are $5 million.) At Global Voices the majority of our expenses are covered by private philanthropic foundations. The rest of our funding comes from four other sources: content commissions and underwriting, advertising, consulting, and online donations. As you can see, it is becoming more and more difficult to find funding to support both media organizations and journalistic coverage. Then again, it might prove to be even more difficult to find anyone to pay attention to what you publish. It seems that the scarcity of attention is even more severe than the scarcity of funding.

Reporting with Mobile Phones: The Experience of Voices of Africa

2009-11-13T17:10:03Z

(This story was written by Anne-Ryan Heatwole of MobileActive.org.)

Mobile phones are the tool of choice for a new group of young reporters in Africa. Voices of Africa Media Foundation, a Netherlands-based non-profit, trains young journalists in Africa to create news videos for the web using mobiles.

The foundation currently has programs in Kenya, Ghana, Cameroon, Tanzania, Mozambique, and South Africa, with plans to expand to more countries in 2010. The training program for the young journalists lasts nine months and teaches the trainees how to create video news reports with cell phones. At the beginning of the program, the small group (there are usually six or fewer participants per program) comes together and is trained for three to four days in the basics of mobile reporting (both how to use the technology and in basic journalism). Then they return to their communities, and for a period of six months, use the phones to make video reports on local stories.

The reporters send in the videos (usually two per week) to the Voices of Africa website (part of Africa News) where they receive feedback on the reports from a Netherlands-based teacher; at the end of the six-months period, the students enter a three-month phase in which they are encouraged to continue in journalism by going after new assignments. After the nine-month process, the students have received a free education on how to tell stories digitally - and are encouraged to continue publishing pieces on the Voices of Africa website as a way to promote themselves.

Cell phones were chosen as the primary reporting tool for several reasons: they are much more portable than full camera equipment, they are less intimidating to potential subjects, and they can easily transmit information. Annelies van Velden, a program manager for Voices of Africa says,

"The use of the mobile phone is a very useful tool for reporting. What we have noted is that people don't feel intimidated when being interviewed by a mobile phone; as opposed to having a complete camera crew that walks into a village. [...] When people are interviewed by someone just carrying a mobile phone it's less intimitating, they're used to phones - everyone is walking around with a phone. Especially when they're interviewed by a person from their own community, speaking their own language, they are able to tell their own stories, and they feel comfortable. So we have really realized that the mobile is a useful tool for bringing out local stories."

The reports captured by the journalists show a variety of subjects, such as the effects of illiteracy in Tanzania or a meeting among the women of the Kibera slum to discuss women's rights. Van Velden stressed that an important component of the program is that the students are free to cover whatever they like, as long as it relates to their community. This freedom allows students to report on everything from music to environmental concerns. This approach also keeps the content on the site engaging and fresh.

Despite its freedoms, the program has faced challenges - especially in adapting technology to the constraints of working in areas where Internet access is often limited or non-existent. The students are given Nokia phones that have camera and editing functions - the model changes depending on the location, year, and level of funding available. Says van Velden,

"We are basically just using the Nokia phones with a camera and an editing function. So, it also depends on the season - we had the N79 that we were using, but we have already changed [to another Nokia] for the new program [...] Things develop fast, so we just change - if we see a cheaper phone that comes out that is also able to do the same work, then we change to that phone [...] For example, in Kenya, we have just started to use mobile broadband. We use the USB - you use the phone to plug it into a computer and you use the Internet and send your videos like that. In other places like Nairobi, people are able to send the video directly from the phone using Internet on the phone. It just depends on what is happening in the market [...] At the moment, in Kenya, it's getting better and better - especially in the bigger towns. One year ago, people were not able to upload the reports in the rural areas; they always had to travel to Nairobi. But now, with the current Internet speed and using mobile broadband, people are able to stay in their own village and upload the reports."

Another challenge faced by the organization is the difficulty of sharing its news coverage with the very populations it covers; since the video reports are distributed online, it is necessary to have Internet access in order to view them - a rarity in many rural areas. For now, the main audience of Voices of Africa videos is concentrated in Europe and North America, and in major African cities.

Voices of Africa is investigating ways to give visibility to their reporters and to increase the distribution range of their videos by linking up with different organizations. Videos are hosted on the Africa News website in order to draw greater attention to them. Voices of Africa also has a partnership with the World Wildlife Fund so that environmental-themed videos are covered on the site. The foundation is looking for creative ways to bring the work back into the communities they cover. Says van Velden, "We have made some videos of local NGOs, and are now looking into giving the videos back to them so they can show the videos on their own laptops or their own TVs, because to watch the videos online is a big challenge in those countries."

Because Voices of Africa provides its training program free of charge to its students, they are dependent on funding from outside sponsors. The current program in Kenya is sponsored by Hivos, a Dutch NGO dedicated to alleviating poverty and creating sustainable economic development in developing countries, while the WWF contributes money for its partnership as well. Van Velden spoke of the limitations of funding on the expansion plans for the organization saying,

"We have high ambitions, it's only that we are limited by funding. So at the moment, we are still taking it step by step, although eventually we'd like to be in so many countries, we first of all have to make sure that things are going right in one country before going to the next. [...] But yes, although we have big ambitions, we also still depend on funding opportunities and partnerships. It's difficult to predict the future, how fast it will go."

The program, which started in 2007 in two countries with only nine trainees, has grown to six countries with 22 participants, and projects to more than double that number of participants next year. Many of the alumni of the program maintain their status on the Voices of Africa page; van Velden specifically mentioned two alumni, Walter Nana Wilson and Wanjohi Peris Wairimu as being notable for their continued progress in journalism.

Voices of Africa alumni have a section of the website in which they can add updates and comments. In Nana Wilson's follow-up describing his experience with Voices of Africa he writes, "Life has never been same for me since I got to be part of this business called www.africanews.com and Voices of Africa. It has been an indelible experience and it will continue to be."

Wairimu echoes this sentiment writing, "I joined the Voices of Africa mobile reporting project in October 2008. Since then my life [has] never been the same again. In the project I have learnt how [to] approach people for interviews, how to make videos and also how to write reports. Through Voices of Africa also I was able to fly to the Netherlands - not for fun but to attend a Global Media Forum in Bonn, Germany. In the forum I got a chance to interact with my colleagues from Ghana, Cameroon and other world wide reporters."

Mobile phones offer a lightweight, non-intrusive means of covering communities that are in need of having their stories told. Voices of Africa meets this need by training local citizen journalists to tell the stories of their neighbors and neighborhoods. Van Velden summed up the foundation's mission saying,

"Basically, what we feel is that we need to bring out more local stories - and the best people to bring out local stories is people who live in communities themselves. They can tell about their own issues, and they are able to bring stories from their own viewpoint. And that is basically what we want to do. This is why we use mobile phones."

Screenshot of video, courtesy Voices of Africa.

Video Volunteers Talks Technology and Non-Profits at TED India

2009-11-12T14:06:04Z

I just returned from TED India, where I was one of the 100 TED Fellows invited to attend the event. My head is spinning with all the new ideas and my pockets are heavy with business cards. This was undoubtedly the best networking event I've been to. The people on stage were only marginally more spectacular than the people I turned to for chit-chat on the police-escorted buses from Bangalore to Mysore, where the conference was being. The chap sitting next to me, for instance, told me as an aside that he had invented a needle that can only physically be used once (see "PointCare":http://www.pointcare.net/ -- its needle retracts inside the case after one use and can't come out). His invention saved millions of lives in the developing world, and caused policy changes In India. We then proceeded to discuss Indian handicrafts. Such is a typical TED conversation. There are a million things one can write about after attending TED. I choose to write about my experience being a TED Fellow from the non-profit sector, what it's like to meet so many technology companies and have the possibility to "pitch" your work to them. h2. Citizen Journalism for the Disadvantaged For "Video Volunteers":http://www.videovolunteers.org/, being at TED was amazing in several ways. My goal was to connect with people who could help us develop the business model of citizen journalism for the disadvantaged. It was therefore fantastic that companies such as Nokia, Google, Cisco, Microsoft, Reuters and various media organizations were in attendance. I had a brief chat with all of them. For my talk on the TED Fellows stage, I explained why I feel that content produced by poor communities could be monetized. I also expressed my hope that citizen journalism might allow the next TED India conference stage to reflect the kind of diversity of voices and economic backgrounds that this one (like all conferences, unfortunately) lacked. Talking about our work with various companies was a real learning experience in how to communicate with corporations. VV's strength has been in engaging the NGO community and doing community-level work. We need to learn to better engage the corporate world if we are ever going to scale. All of the companies I previously mentioned are investing heavily in rural markets. They are likely spurred on by the obvious size of the population at the "base of the pyramid" (and hence its potential), and by the huge success that cell phone providers have seen rural markets. h2. Company Talks at TED India Nokia was at TED to share its experience with Nokia Life Tools. Reuters talked about Reuters Market Light, and Cisco focused on its technology and education programs. The many people from Google.com and Google.org were talking about their translation tools and their local language search. These tools have made an impact on our work. I just returned from three weeks working on our program in Brazil, where Google Translate provided us with instant translations of the scripts and story pitches the Brazil producers made. The ability of Google to search content in various Indian languages has also helped some of our community producers -- who had no concept of or interest in the internet -- to get excited about the online world. It has huge potential for research in rural areas on issues like health, water, and education -- and thus can improve the content produced by community journalism. But a huge problem is that most searches in the regional languages end in frustration for our community producers because there is so little content that is digitized. Local newspapers and local government offices don't put their info online, and key data -- such as World Bank or WHO data on health issues in India -- is not translated. There needs to be as much investment in offline activities as there is in developing software or applications, or else there will be lots of great software for rural markets, but few people able to use them. Another thing I observed in my conversations at TED with different companies is the possibility of corporate partnerships to drive you off-mission. Like me, many of the other TED Fellows running NGOs were eager to connect with these companies. In general, the corporate folks seemed open to having NGOs help them in spreading their technologies to rural markets. NGOs eager for partnerships will be tempted to create technology projects tailored to the companies' needs just for the sake of "getting a foot in the door," but this can drive one off-mission. At the same time, the corporations, who seem to have lofty ideals of creating systemic change at the base of the pyramid, would make more impact by trying to tackle the root problems, rather than focusing on tailoring their technologies to meet a smaller technology need. h2. Culture, Corportations and Activists TED India struck the right chord between culture, corporates and activists. Because it was held on the campus of Infosys, one of the most iconic companies in "shining India," and because of the conference theme ("The Future Beckons") one might have expected it to be all aglow about India's growth and future prospects. But it wasn't, and there were probably as many representatives from "civil society" as there were from corporations. The most popular talk (as far as I could tell) was by Sunitha Krishnan, a young woman who has rescued thousands of women from human trafficking, and whose very pointed talk got a very emotional response, as did Eve Ensler's talk about the "girl gene," which I will remember forever. The TED Fellows program brought people between 20-40 years old into the TED community from a really wide range of interests and backgrounds. There were rockclimbers, a pastry chef, writers, musicians, magazine owners, and many others. Like the Knight Foundation events, there were also a lot of extremely interesting people who ran non-profits (and particularly technology nonprofits) in areas like using cell phones to disseminate information in rural areas. Every time I come to a forum like this I'm struck by how many people are working in the information space for social change, and what a positive development that is. Some TED Fellows wondered at the absence on the stage of some of the most prominent and outspoken activists, people like Medha Pathkar who led the struggle against the Narmada Dam, or the writer Arundhati Roy, and people who worked on issues of Hindu-Muslim tension. These are some of the people who are most critical of India's current, pro-business direction. Did the organizers have to choose between the two opposing points of view? Would either business leaders or the more radical activists have refused to come if the other "camp" was present? Some people said yes, there must have been a compromise. I felt that probably there was not. Such is the power of a space of dialog like TED, that today, at least in relatively peaceful places like India or the US, even the most contrary people would be willing to share a stage. they do so because they know that the audience is open-minded, curious and non-judgmental. This was the beauty of TED India for me, and I wish it could be an annual event. Or better yet, I hope that it spawns lots of TED X events, which are the independently organized TED events where people take it into their own hands to spread ideas and create dialog.

How Do We Categorize All Journalistic Errors?

2009-11-11T15:50:56Z

How many different kinds of errors is it possible for journalists to make? And how would you classify them or organize them into useful categories? These questions are not my attempt to concoct a tactful paraphrase for "How many different ways is it possible to screw journalism up?" Rather, they represent one of the interesting issues we face as we move work on MediaBugs from the project-organizing phase to the "let's build something" stage. There's a wealth of established practice in the software field for the kinds of data you can associate with a bug that a user finds in a program: how important the bug is, where the bug is located, how work on it fits in to the rest of the project, and so on. In software development, the purpose of the bug tracking system is, mostly, to define and organize the work of fixing bugs. As we attempt to apply this model to the world of journalism, we find little in the way of similar established practices in our field. Individual news organizations sometimes track their own errors internally, but, as far as we've been able to determine, there is no common, industry-wide nomenclature for categorizing those errors -- no Library of Congress classification or Dublin Core metadata standard. We're pretty much on our own. So we're doing our best to devise an initial set of categories, knowing that we'll probably need to revise them once we get real data from real users. (We've already drawn much from the invaluable work of my colleague Craig Silverman, in his book Regret the Error.) Here's the list of categories we're playing with right now:

misquotation
mistaken identity
other simple factual error
ethical issue
faulty statistics or math
error of omission
typo, spelling, grammar
other

I'd love to hear what you think of this. Have we left out something obvious? Is this valuable or interesting? Any set of categories will need to meet two goals: # It should make sense to users who are trying to make quick decisions about categorizing the errors they're reporting. # The breakdown of the total universe of errors that the list provides should ultimately be useful as we try to understand why errors happen, and how we can minimize them. We know that there's no bright, shining line one can draw between errors of objective fact and subjective problems with media coverage. Errors don't fall into two distinct buckets labeled "fact" and "opinion"; there's a spectrum between the two. We want MediaBugs to favor the "fact" side of that spectrum, so our choice of categories is weighted in that direction. I believe this is where we'll find the most common ground between journalists and the public, and make the fastest progress in our effort to bring the two together. We'll know a lot more soon!

Staffing Up DocumentCloud

2009-11-11T14:45:54Z

A few months ago (three, to be precise), I quietly announced that I'd be "leaving":http://velociraptor.info/notes/?p=684 Gotham Gazette for parts unknown. I wasn't making that up about "parts unknown," but my announcement did get a few conversations started. The most interesting one turned out to be with "Eric, Aron and Scott":http://www.documentcloud.org/who.php, who persuaded me to join "DocumentCloud":http://www.documentcloud.org as their program director. I'm pretty thrilled to be joining them: I care a lot about "software freedom,":http://www.mayfirst.org/organicinternet "improving access to information,":http://www.pbs.org/idealab/2009/09/improving-access-to-information-is-one-way-to-make-reporting-cheaper245.html and making great software accessible to small organizations. DocumentCloud gives me a great opportunity to approach access to information from a different angle, and to have a hand in developing undeniably excellent tools that will be (some "already are":http://github.com/documentcloud) accessible to large and small news organizations alike. I just started this week, but you'll be hearing more from me as we proceed, about both our challenges and successes. The first challenge was realizing that it was time to bring someone on board to work with our document partners and help "Jeremy Ashkenas":http://www.pbs.org/idealab/2009/10/documentcloud-going-open-source-every-step-of-the-way302.html, our lead developer, find beta testers to help keep him moving forward. I like to think we handled that one well, and I'm looking forwarded to more challenges to come.

How the Spot.Us Garbage Patch Story Got to the NY Times

2009-11-10T08:47:05Z

Today in the New York Times science section you'll find a piece written by Lindsey Hoshaw about the Pacific garbage patch and an accompanying photo slide show. This piece would not have been possible if Spot.Us and a community of over 100 people hadn't come together to fund her trip. It is a great case study for Spot.Us, and arguably the best of the 40-plus projects we've undertaken in the past year. Despite its ambition, and the mound of publicity it generated, the story went off without a hitch. It involved almost every facet of how I imagined Spot.Us could work, and I'd like to walk through how it came about from start to finish.

Below you will find.

•   How did this start?
•   The connection with the Times.
•   What all this represented in a nutshell.
•   The real test: fundraising
•   The unfolding story: Lindsey's live reporting
•   Conclusion/what can be improved.

How Did This Start?

I first met Lindsey Hoshaw after speaking at Stanford's journalism school about Spot.Us. Our first meeting was uneventful. The only impression I was left with was her time in Los Angeles, which gave us something to connect on.

A few months later, however, Lindsey contacted me about the Pacific garbage patch. It was a story I knew of through Manuel Maqueda, who himself has undertaken recent reporting efforts around plastic in the ocean.

Lindsey explained that she had been given a seat on the boat with Captain Moore, the man who first discovered the Pacific garbage patch. After reaching out to the science editor at the New York Times, she found that they were interested in the story. There was, however, one giant hurdle: she needed to pay her own way on the trip, and getting to the middle of the Pacific Ocean wasn't cheap.

The Connection with the Times

This pitch excelled where many others have gone awry, and for that I must give praise to the Times. In most Spot.Us experiences, the larger a news organization, the slower it is to get approval to try something with Spot.Us because of our radically different approach. In past attempts with mainstream organizations, I've sat in countless meetings only to spin wheels. Those experiences are actually the inspiration for this blog post, "News Organizations In a Battle Against Inertia."

My hat is off the Times. They interfaced with Spot.Us as if they were a lean and mean startup. I spent half a day at the Times talking with various decision-makers who agreed to entertain the idea further if we drafted a pitch. Once the pitch was approved, all we had to do was make it live and let them know. I am still in awe of that process. It contrasts with everything I've experienced with other larger media organizations, and it's a testament to why the Times is not just the paper of record but also leading the charge into the digital future.

What All This Represented in a Nutshell

A freelancer and a news organization wanted to work together, but they needed to grease the wheels with some money. This is not uncommon. News organizations have a shrinking staff and budget. They must rely more on freelancers, but also don't want to burn through the entire freelance budget on a single story. This is one reason why we are seeing less original long-form reporting. Spot.Us acted as the grease. I hope we can continue to grease the wheels between freelancers and the public and with other news organizations.

The Real Test: Fundraising

At the time, this pitch had the most ambitious fundraising goal Spot.Us had ever undertaken. I am happy to say that a new project with McSweeney's and the Public Press may surpass it. Fundraising is never easy, but a few things favored this pitch.

1. Lindsey is an ideal Spot.Us reporter. She is passionate and unafraid to show it. Her desire to report on this topic pours out of her in the Spot.Us video pitch. I only wish every Spot.Us reporter could show their interest in a story like her. Perhaps, in the future, the "video pitch" will be required for a Spot.Us pitch. Furthermore, Lindsey was unafraid to reach out to her network of friends, family and social networking sites to ask for support.

2. The Times followed up our initial efforts with a story of their own, "Many Checkbooks One Newspaper." The piece by Clark Hoyt examined the growing role of public support in journalism and highlighted Lindsey's pitch. I would never speak on behalf of the Times, but I like to think this was their way of putting out a test: "if we ask, will you give?" The answer was a big "yes" from a variety of folks for a multitude of reasons. Some donated in support of the Times. Others did because they knew of, and want to know more about, the garbage patch. Perhaps others donated just because of how fresh Spot.Us seemed; and perhaps others did so because they connected with Lindsey as an individual

Regardless, we raised $6,000 on Spot.Us before I could even go in and change the fundraising goal to $10,000 (the amount Lindsey truly needed). We used Facebook Causes to get the remainder.

The Unfolding Story

Once funding was secured, Lindsey didn't rest. She blogged regularly throughout her experience - including using a satellite phone to get online while on the boat. She saved her best photos for the Times upon her return, but she did not ignore the interest of people that supported her trip. She kept them involved and engaged. The best wrap-up of her posts from the ship can be found here.

The best pitches on Spot.Us are those that treat their subject as an unfolding story. KALW's "Crime Courts and Communities" pitch is another great example of this "beat blogging" approach.

Conclusion/What Can be Improved

Spot.Us needs a new design. There, I said it! (We've gotten started).

We need to express our mission clearer, and improve functionality/features of the site (new designs coming soon). We are far from perfect. This is not a post to simply pat us on the back and claim/whine, "if only more reporters were as open as Lindsey, or more news organizations as willing as the Times Spot.Us would be the best thing since the Walter Lippmann." That sentiment would not only be naive -- it would shift the burden of improvement from Spot.Us to the culture of journalism.

Spot.Us does represent a fundamental shift from traditional journalism culture. While that is a hurdle for us, it is something we must overcome by highlighting exemplary projects like this, and figuring out how they can be repeated. With that in mind, this case study would be incomplete without the following section.

We Need

1. Other ways to support reporting. There are other ways to support reporters beyond whipping out a wallet. Distributed reporting can be huge, and Spot.Us should dabble in this. Perhaps we will shift from "community funded reporting" to "community powered reporting" or "community supported reporting."

2. Facebook, Twitter and more. The Times article would not have had a big impact without Twitter.

3. A clearer way to articulate what is going on with every pitch to any visitor that comes to our site.

4. Your ideas!

Finally

A big thank you from Lindsey:

Using Mobile Phones to Map the Slums of Brazil

2009-11-09T14:30:01Z

In the favelas, or slums, of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, unnamed streets meander through the hillsides. There are hospitals, coffee shops and restaurants, none of which appear on a map. Mail carriers struggle to deliver letters to homes without addresses.

A new project by Rede Jovem, a Brazilian non-profit that loosely translates to "Youth Net," seeks to change that. With the help of five young "wiki-reporters" and GPS-equipped mobile phones, the non-profit is building a map of five Brazilian favelas: Complexo do Alemão, Cidade de Deus, Morro do Pavão-Pavãozinho, Morro Santa Marta and Complexo da Maré.

Mapping the Unmapped

By uploading information to the phones, the reporters are mapping the unmapped, one road and cafe at a time.

"The main goal was to mark public interest spots on a map and show places like schools and institutions and hospitals and restaurants," said Natalia Santos, the executive coordinator for Rede Jovem. "We wanted to spread the news about what slums do have, so all the people can get to know that the slum is not just a place for violence and marginality and robbery."

All the reporters are women, according to Santos. Although the project originally intended to have male participants, the men were nervous about being in the favelas with costly mobile phones.

"The boys in the last phase of the selection said they wouldn't have the guts to walk with a cell phone in a slum," said Santos. "Girls can walk with a lot more freedom than boys, and boys get approached by the police."

The reporters are between the ages of 17 and 25, and all are in their final year of high school. The person that maps the most information will receive a scholarship to study communications or journalism at a private university.

The reporters use GPS-equipped Nokia N95s and a mobile application developed by Rede Jovem that uses Google maps. As they move through the favelas, they label corners, streets and bystreets. The reporters can also add photos or video directly from their phones, and label places like restaurants and hospitals. There is both a website, www.wikimapa.org.br, and a mobile site for the resulting maps. Content added to the maps is also automatically added to a Twitter feed.

Expanding to New Platforms

Funding for the project comes from a 150,000 Brazilian reais (U.S. $87,310) grant from Institutional Oi Futuro, which is affiliated with Oi, the largest telephone operator in Brazil. The project is scheduled to conclude when the funding runs out in December. But Rede Jovem is applying for other grants, according to Santos. In the future, the organization hopes to build a mobile application that works on other operating systems. Currently, the mobile application (available for download here) only works on Symbian phones. "We want everyone who has a cell phone with GPS to be a wiki-reporter," said Santos.

As the maps expand, they will provide more and more useful everyday information. On a larger scale, they also give legitimacy to the residents. "I think they are very happy because they're seeing that they exist," said Santos. "And the mailman says that now he can deliver the mail."

Photos courtesy of Rede Jovem