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.

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.

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 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. 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.)

That's partly why we've launched Izwi Labahlali (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 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.)

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.

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.

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 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!

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:

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.

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, 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.

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.

(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."

<em>Screenshot of video, courtesy Voices of Africa.</em>

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 -- 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.

Citizen Journalism for the Disadvantaged

For Video Volunteers, 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.

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.

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.

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:

1. It should make sense to users who are trying to make quick decisions about categorizing the errors they're reporting.
2. 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!

I'm pretty thrilled to be joining them: I care a lot about software freedom, improving access to information, 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) 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, 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.

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

Mapping the Unmapped

"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

That's obvious enough -- just ask anyone using AT&T in an area densely populated with bandwidth-hogging iPhone users like me.

Or ask any Twitter user.

But with the launch of Twitter Lists in recent days, it's now theoretically easier for users, news organizations, bloggers, and companies to create little tributaries off the main river of news. Bu building these subsets out of the main stream, you can find tweets from a group of users, which means a news organization can create a list of reliable sources.

And in theory, this has value, because the list of users has been hand-picked by journalists.

But what happens when everyone makes lists that look the same, full of the same sources?

I started thinking about this because I now find myself on 179 lists. Of those, the titles of 123 include some form of the words "media" or "journalism." That's 123 lists with a lot of overlap.

The same idea ran me down yesterday as the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Huffington Post, among others, made Twitter lists related to the shootings in Fort Hood, Texas. (And as I write this, they're all doing it again in Orlando.)

The Fort Hood Lists

There are differences between these lists, but there are also a lot of similarities, as you can see here:

(Click on the image to see the large version. Those lists are from the LAT, NYT, and HuffPo, left to right.)

Now, while they're not identical, there's strong overlap in the type of sources in the first two examples. They're all experts. News organizations. Government. The Red Cross. And, inexplicably, Chuck Todd...

Meanwhile, on the far right, is my favorite list -- the Huffington Post's "Fort Hood Locals." It contains the sort of tweets I was spotting in this search yesterday while I was tracking the story and wondering how many primary sources I could find on Twitter.

Personally, I prefer curating individual tweets, rather than pointing a fire hose of information at the reader. But everyone is experimenting at the moment, and there's nothing like breaking news to get people like me excited about their shiny new toys. As we should be. I just worry that we're going to end up tripping over each other instead of working with each other.

Two Other Takes on Fort Hood Twitter List Efforts:

I encourage you to read two other stories about the Fort Hood Twitter Lists. The first is
Fort Hood Shooting Shows How Twitter, Lists Can be Used for Breaking News" at Poynter. Craig Kanalley's round-up of Twitter use on the Fort Hood story covers the Austin American Statesman's choice to launch a one-story Twitter account, as well as the New York Times list efforts.

The other story is "Fort Hood: A First Test for Twitter Lists" at Columbia Journalism Review. Megan Garber takes a look at Twitter List use by the media for the Fort Hood story. She has this take on the overlap in mainstream lists:

"Yes, there was overlap and redundancy in yesterday's coverage -- the "Fort Hood" lists all generally contained the same local news outlets, the same official sources, etc. -- but, then, that's the case whenever different media outlets cover the same events."

I think there's a problem with that. I don't want to see Twitter Lists become a piece of commodity news.

But I do want to keep chasing after shiny toys...

(Bonus link: Andy Carvin of NPR did a similar bit of navel-gazing and list-counting in this post at All Tech Considered.)

When done properly, M&E begins with the grantee setting out clearly the objectives of the grant, the activities necessary to achieve the objectives, and the resources applied to make these activities happen. So, for example, blogging for Idea Lab is an activity. An objective might be to create a thriving community, or to help guide the way for community news in transition.

For our Knight project, the objective is a bit more specific: to create open source tools that make community news and information easy to visualize. Activities include mapping existing tools, surveying users for specific unmet needs, coding, testing, translating, demoing, fixing, etc. Our primary resource will be the Drupal community, which is also one of our project's main beneficiaries. Ideally, we will create a virtuous circle.

The grantee is expected to have a clear causal logic, setting out how the activities will achieve the objectives, and identifying verifiable measures to assess performance against targets at each level: resources, activities, and objectives. Especially objectives. It is important to do this well, because far too often the project gets underway and the grantee loses sight of the objectives. They end up obsessing about performance as it relates to activities and resources. This is natural because activities are much more easily controlled and measured than the messy causal chain leading to the objectives. The donor, meanwhile, is mostly interested in the objectives. These differing centers of attention are the root of most donor-grantee disputes.

By starting out so early on M&E -- essentially before the grant even begins -- Knight is demonstrating how these tools can be used for partnership and management, not merely bean-counting. Our opportunity as the grantee is to embrace their challenge of partnership.

In part one of this series I looked at the history of media development, the major players in the field, and some of the current obstacles - from regulatory reform to linguistic divides - that stand in the way of a healthy media ecosystem. In part two I examined points of agreement and tension among those directly involved in media development, and the recommendations that they made to a group of donors who gathered in a subsequent meeting. In this third and final post I will attempt to summarize the main themes at the meeting of funders, and look at the field of media development from the funder's perspective.

Has Media Freedom Waned Since the Fall of the Berlin Wall?

Eric Newton, Vice President for Journalism at the Knight Foundation, began the three-day meeting at the Salzburg Global Seminar with a series of maps from Freedom House charting media freedom since 1989 until today. While it is difficult to aggregate imperfect data across entire countries, much less the whole world, these global maps show a slight decline in media freedom over the past twenty years. Why is there an alleged decline in media freedom worldwide when over $600 million has been spent on media development during that time? For Newton, the explanation lies in the fact that "governments and funders have failed to recognize and take advantage of the incredible potential of digital media." He points to the Knight Foundation's own $25 million News Challenge initiative as an attempt to push the innovation and adoption of digital media tools and applications. Newton says that this is the third major meeting of funders involved in the field of media development. "It didn't work in London," he said, "it didn't work in Paris. So now we're trying Salzburg."

Amadou Ba, the co-founder of AllAfrica.com and executive director of the African Media Initiative then took to the podium for his keynote address. He began by quoting Thomas Jefferson: "If I had to choose between government without newspapers, and newspapers without government, I wouldn't hesitate to choose the latter." He also cited Amartya Sen who claims that "no substantial famine has ever occurred in any country with a relatively free press." Ba feels that media is "an essential public good, which informs people of their rights." He recounted a conversation he once had with an unpopular African leader who Ba had hoped would increase federal media investment. "Why would I help feed the monster that wants me out of my seat?" the leader responded. For Ba, the response shows why healthy media is such a crucial ingredient in the recipe of democracy.

But, despite the clear importance of press freedom, he feels that funders have little to show for their millions of dollars of investment. Unlike Newton, Ba doesn't see a lack of engagement with digital media to be the problem, but rather a lack of trust by donors in the local leadership of African media outlets. Unsurprisingly, his answer is to invest more in networks like the African Media Initiative, which brings together owners and operators of major media companies in Africa to increase cooperation, coordinate on relevant research, and advocate for better media regulation.

More Investment or a Better Understanding of What Works?

Troy Etulain, the senior advisor for Independent Media Development at USAID left the first evening's discussions unsatisfied:

"There was talk tonight about 'underinvestment.' That's too vague. What's the logical math? If there had been more investment would there have been more development?

Much of the conversation during the next day remained stuck on this issue of whether or not funding in media development over the years has been effective or not. Marguerite Sullivan of CIMA presented numbers from a study which found that globally $600 million has been spent on media development. Forty four percent went to training and twenty eight percent was direct assistance to support the operational costs of media organizations. Sullivan noted that among US government funders there are almost no experts in the field of media development (four people in USAID and one person in the state department) and that media development at USAID is a sub-sub sector of the Democracy Assistance program. For Stewart Chisolm, the senior program manager of OSI's Media Program, the level of direct investment in the media organizations is still too low.

Mark Koenig, challenging the assertion by Newton and Ba that media development has failed, presented research which showed that media assistance had the highest degree of positive correlation of impact among all of USAID's Civil Society initiatives. Brian Levy, an advisor at the World Bank, also presented research which shows a positive correlation between information access and effective development.

Vanessa Mazal of the Bill & Melinda Gates Global Development Program felt that media development has traditionally been too focused on training reporters, and that more resources should be invested in the business and management aspects of journalism in order to make the organizations sustainable. Nazeer Ladhani of the Aga Khan Development Network stressed that funders should help establish locally managed institutions like the Aga Khan Universities in Pakistan and Nairobi to foster indigenous leadership and implement sustainable training programs in partnership with local companies.

Metrics for Success

How do funders know if their investments have an impact not just on the media landscape, but also in terms of better governance and more effective development? None of the funders seemed content with the current metrics for evaluating media worldwide. Some felt that IREX's Media Sustainability Index was outdated, to which Mark Whitehouse, director of Media Development Programs at IREX, responded that, rather than criticizing metrics, the conversation should focus on how to improve them. Pia Hallonsten of the Swedish International Development Agency would like to see more longterm longitudinal studies which look at the impact of media development programs over many years.

Peter Goldstein, the director of online communications at InterMedia, presented the initial findings from AudienceScapes, a new media analysis initiative funded by Gates Foundation and set to launch in January 2010. AudienceScapes aggregates data about media from a variety of sources and supplements it with their own questionnaires. Among the topics in their surveys: demographic information, access to ICTs, usage patterns, mobile phone use, internet use, personal finance, health, and agriculture. Goldstein says that AudienceScapes' data will be available to the public without a subscription, but that they are looking into a business model which would make special information and reports available to paying customers. A sample of AudienceScapes' policy research with focus on Ghana was presented.

Pippa Noris of Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government presented the some of the research and conclusions from her latest book Public Sentinel: News Media and the Governance Agenda, which she has summarized in a post on her blog. Norris stressed that data about the impact of media, and about governance in general, is far from perfect, but suggested that the media development community should collaborate more closely with academic researchers from the International Communication Association, which focuses on the impact of media on society.

Good Media for Good Governance

Much of the conversation over the first two days treated media development as a goal in itself, or as part of a strategy to further other development objectives (like health and agriculture). James Deane of the BBC World Service Trust said he would like to shift the conversation to focus on good governance first, and media as a part of that. Most of the speakers on the panel represented multilateral development agencies like the World Bank, the UNDP, and the Asian Development Bank whose clients are national governments. Deane feels that good media is a requirement for good governance; that quality media outlets serves as irreplaceable public watchdogs. He also notes that good media can help spur economic development by battling government and corporate corruption. (BBC World Service Trust published a 40-page report on "Governance and the Media" in April, 2009.)

Pray the Devil Back to Hell, which documents how Liberian women blockaded the Presidential Palace until a peace agreement was signed, was one anecdote cited as an example of how media can lead to improved governance. But there were also murmuring whispers of the role of radio stations during the Rwandan genocide, and how media can also lead to chaos and brutality.) Both Brian Levy from the World Bank and Bjorn Forde from UNDP alluded to internal distrust at their organizations toward media. They insisted that they weren't involved in outright media development, but that they value the role of transparent information in making development more effective. Both David Hoffman of Internews and Eric Netwon of Knight Foundation felt that large development agencies should cooperate more closely with media development initiatives to further the goals of both.

Final Thoughts

As a mostly silent observer, it seemed to me that the representatives from funding organizations were more concerned with convincing one another that they were making an impact than in thinking of ways to more effectively support the work of their grantees and promote cooperation to engage all aspects of a dynamic media ecosystem for the 21st century.

During the first meeting of media development practitioners there was general agreement that most funders were not sufficiently aware of the needs of the organizations implementing projects, and that funders are not up to date on the latest innovations taking place in the media field. One idea was to organize an online one-week fair so that media development organizations and funders can each learn more about the needs of each other. Unfortunately, when this idea was presented at the meeting of funders, there was apparently little interest.

I have personally witnessed several worthwhile media development projects die out because there was no clear pathway from initial seed funding (often won through some sort of competition like Changemakers or Ideablob) to "mezzanine funding" in order to scale up and then sustainability funding to support basic operating costs. If there was more open dialog between practitioners and funders - and among funders - then there wouldn't be such a high turnover rate and so little expertise in the field.