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Making sense of the intersection between media, society and technology

June 1, 2009 • 8:24 am 5

Orato.com turns its back on citizen journalism

Vancouver-based Orato.com used to describe itself as the “only news site in the world dedicated to First Person, citizen-authored journalism”.

Orato.com logoThe citizen journalism site is perhaps best known for assigning two former sex trade workers to cover the trial of Robert Pickton, convicted in December 2007 on six counts of second-degree murder in the deaths of six women whose remains were found on his farm.

The concept behind Orato was to allow people’s voices to emerge, with as little editorial interference as possible.

But it has now turned its back on the notion of a site filled with content from “citizen journalists”.  As part of a major editorial and design overhaul, Orato recognised that:

For the first 3 years of Orato’s existence, the previous management intentionally encouraged first-person stories rooted in an intimate and authentic perspective and deliberately offered very few editorial guidelines or oversight when it came to journalistic standards and Web 2.0 approaches to search.

Instead the focus is on “concrete and trustworthy information that is objective and under-reported”. The owner and founder of Orato, Sam Yehia, said the changes were made to “further professionalize the site, focus its newsworthy content, create and enforce a viable business model and keep pace with Web 2.0 standards”.

New editor-in-chief Joy Joy Gugeler has positioned the site as an outlet for freelance journalists seeking an additional source of income:

We will grow content and traffic to reward correspondents with both pay and profile. They post video, audio, photos and articles live; our editors review the material in 24 hours; readers learn at a glance, and our writers earn from the first ad click. We hope those in search of a value-added training will consider us a vital new client in the freelance marketplace.

This is a significant shift away from Orato’s origins as a citizen journalism website to the extent that it can no longer be considered as one.

And it does raise questions about the very viability of the phenomenon of “citizen journalism”. Similar sites have experienced problems with quality control.

There is no doubt that having more voices in the news can provide a rounder picture of the world. The problem may lie in the term “citizen journalism”.

As CEO of the participatory news network NowPublic.com, Len Brody, likes to say, “telling someone they’re going to be a citizen journalist is like telling people they’re going to be a citizen dentist.”

Filed under: citizen journalism, journalism, new media, online , ,

April 15, 2009 • 3:41 pm 2

Video: Journalism fund-raising experiment pays off

The Vancouver-based Tyee online publication has raised almost $15,000 in donations since it asked readers to give money to pay for provincial election coverage.

The experiment has exceeded the expectations of Tyee editor David Beers, who expects contributions to hit $15,000.  That amounts to double its monthly reporting budget.

The appeal comes as Canwest, the owner of the two Vancouver daily newspapers (the Vancouver Sun and Province) is cutting costs and negotiating with creditors on a CDN$3.7 billion debt.

The Tyee also asked its donors to tell it what matters most to them. After the initial few days, corruption topped the list of issues, followed closely by environment, housing/homelessness/poverty, and education.

In this interview, Beers talks about the reasons behind the appeal and whether this is a potential new funding model for journalism.

Filed under: journalism, new media, social media , , , , ,

April 1, 2009 • 4:20 pm 0

Online journalists positive about future of news

It should come as no surprise that online journalists are more optimistic about the future of news than their counterparts in traditional media outlets.

But this optimism is tempered with a healthy dose of concerns about where journalism is going, according to the survey (PDF) of select members of the Online News Association (ONA) produced by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism.

The online professionals believe that the Internet is changing the fundamental values of journalism, but more often than not for the worse. Still, they are confident that online news will find a way of making money.

Amy Mitchell of the Project for Excellence in Journalism presented the results at the NVision 2009 conference.

Filed under: internet, journalism, new media, video , , ,

March 15, 2009 • 10:50 pm 6

State of the Media report for 2009 is ‘bleakest’ ever

The comprehensive look at the media in the US by the Project for Excellence in Journalism has just been published.

The State of the News Media 2009 report paints a sombre picture:

Journalism, deluded by its profitability and fearful of technology, let others outside the industry steal chance after chance online. By 2008, the industry had finally begun to get serious. Now the global recession has made that harder.

This is the sixth edition of our annual report on the State of the News Media in the United States.

It is also the bleakest.

The report points to two factors that have come together to create a perfect storm for legacy media.

First, the number of people going online for news accelerated substantially in 2008. But although many of these visited traditional news destinations, “the financial impact of that was a negative one”.

Second, the collapsing economy has hit the news industry hard: “the recession hammered advertising and diverted attention away from innovating new revenue sources”.

The combined impact is that legacy media is struggling at a time when there is a growing online audience for news and a need to invest in digital platforms, but it has less time and fewer resources to make the transition:

The problem facing American journalism is not fundamentally an audience problem or a credibility problem. It is a revenue problem—the decoupling, as we have described it before, of advertising from news.

That makes the situation better than it might have been. But audiences now consume news in new ways. They hunt and gather what they want when they want it, use search to comb among destinations and share what they find through a growing network of social media.

However, the report points out that “the death of newspapers is not imminent, despite news of bankruptcies and even some closures”.

The problem is that the time the news industry has to “underwrite the gathering of news online, while using the declining revenue of the old platforms to finance the transition” has effectively shortened.

Filed under: journalism, media, new media, newspapers , ,

February 12, 2009 • 1:56 pm 8

Why new media is a generational term

Over at Journalism 2.0, Mark Briggs poses a question that has been bugging me for weeks – what do we call this new form of journalism and media?

As Mark points out:

The news industry calls it “new media” or “interactive media,” but that’s just differentiating it from legacy forms of publishing. Pretty much everything online is “interactive” and it’s not really “new” anymore.

Much as I don’t like the term, “new media”, it is a shorthand way to refer to a whole raft of trends, from online journalism to participatory media.

It is a bit like trying to define news – every journalist knows what you mean by it, but often struggles to come up with a good definition.

I teach a journalism course in a new first-year undergraduate concentration at the University of British Columbia called New Media and Society.

But my fellow instructors in English and Sociology who also teach in this stream have been debating is whether we should even use the term “new media”.

In class, I tell the students it’s a generic term for digital communication made possible through the use of computer technology, which is almost so general to be meaningless.

The word “new” is also a loaded term, as it has connotations of social progress through technology.

The problem with new media is that it a generational definition. New media is “new” to my generation and beyond. The Internet didn’t exist when I went to university 20 years ago. We barely had computers.

But to the 18-year-olds in my class, new media is not new. To them, it is just media.

The term “new media” reflects the difference between digital natives and digital immigrants.  To the immigrants, this is a new land, full of strange and confusing wonders.

To the natives, it is simply the world they know.

Perhaps when the newsrooms are full of digital natives, we will no longer need to use the term “new media”.

Filed under: Web 2.0, internet, journalism, new media , ,

January 26, 2009 • 4:16 pm 1

How to help students make sense of new media

For my latest post for PBS Mediashift, I’ve written about a new undergraduate course I am teaching at UBC:

The young men and women entering university today are digital natives who have grown up in a world of Microsoft, Google and Apple. They have lived through a time when the Internet went from being a highly specialized system used by scientists to a ubiquitous utility that defines how they engage with the world.

But while today’s students may blog and Twitter their way through class, many are unaware of how that same technology is fundamentally changing the way they live, play and learn.

This is the rationale for a new undergraduate foundation concentration at the University of British Columbia in New Media and Society, bringing together professors from Sociology, English and Journalism. It aims to equip students with the critical skills to engage in the emergent digital media landscape and understand what it means to be literate in an interconnected planet

I am teaching the journalism component of the course. Over the course of two semesters, first-year students are introduced to the development and impact of new media in a challenging and enriching learning environment. It is part of UBC’s Co-ordinated Arts Program that offers several thematic streams for new students with broad interests in the social sciences and humanities.

Read the rest of this entry »

Filed under: Web 2.0, academics, internet, journalism, new media , , ,

November 24, 2008 • 10:27 am 4

The globalisation of the digital revolution in five minutes

The exponential growth of the information age globally raises more questions than answers.

(Via Rob Fields, Heleana Quartey)

Filed under: Web 2.0, education, internet, new media , ,

November 20, 2008 • 11:00 am 0

Setback to Canadian campaign for network neutrality

Supporters of network neutrality have suffered a setback with the CRTC ruling in the case against Bell over Internet throttling.

The communications regulator denied the Canadian Association of Internet Providers’ (CAIP) request that Bell Canada cease the traffic-shaping practices it has adopted for its wholesale services.

However, this is turning out to be just the first round in the battle over network neutrality. The CRTC chairman Konrad von Finckenstein acknowledged that:

The broader issue of Internet traffic management raises a number of questions that affect both end-users and service providers. We have decided to hold a separate proceeding to consider both wholesale and retail issues. Its main purpose will be to address the extent to which Internet service providers can manage the traffic on their networks in accordance with the Telecommunications Act.

As part of this process, the CRTC is holding a public hearing next year to look at how service providers manage traffic on their networks. As Michael Geist notes about today’s CRTC ruling:

The decision is not a total loss for net neutrality supporters as the Commission made a clear commitment to addressing the issue of net neutrality and network management in a formal proceeding in July 2009.  Indeed, it is important not to lose sight of how much has changed in the past year.

The question of network neutrality could become one of the big technology issues of 2009. In the US, president-elect Barack Obama has expressed his support for the idea of the net as a neutral platform.

In Canada, the SaveOurNet coalition has already launched a campaign to lobby the CRTC over its decision.

(Via Newslab.ca)

Filed under: Canada, innovation, internet, new media , , , ,

November 17, 2008 • 12:01 pm 2

Learning from the digital mindset of the Obama campaign

Barack Obama @ Twitter

Image by comicbase via Flickr

This month’s Carnival of Journalism tackles takes its cue from the historic change in the US, asking what can newspapers – or more accurately, the news media – learn from the Obama campaign.

Others have already addressed how Obama’s team used Web 2.0 technologies or have discussed the campaign’s mobile strategy.

The use of the technology shows how this campaign was run by a team at ease with the world of the web, and here lies one of the key lessons for journalism.

For Obama’s campaign, the web wasn’t an add-on. Instead here was a campaign that understood the digital world and was part of it. YouTube wasn’t an after-thought but part of a strategy.

The question is how many journalists who see new media tools as an integral part of their work. This goes beyond just using the technology. After all, anyone can upload a video to YouTube or send a tweet.

This is about having a digital mindset that understands the potential, and limitations, of digital technologies in journalism.

Look at the Obama camp. The president-elect is seemingly addicted to his Blackberry. More startling is that he may be the first president to have a laptop on his desk in the Oval Office. This indicates how technology is just part of his daily routines and the way he does business.

Sometimes the way legacy media adopts new technologies reveals the gulf between journalists and the tools.

This weekend, Vancouver went to the polls to elect a new mayor and city council.

CBC Vancouver ran a TV special on the results in which they highlighted what people were saying on Twitter. So far, so good.

But when CBC ran the tweets on-screen, it failed to name who said this. Instead, Twitter was given as the source for the tweet.

Similarly on the CBC website, people were encouraged to share their thoughts on the election on Twitter. But instead of pulling in the tweets onto the CBC site as an RSS feed, people have to go to Twitter Search.

CBC Vancouver should be commended for trying to tap into the thoughts on Twitter about the civic vote. But the way it did this reveals a lack of understanding about social media tools.

Too often journalists are peering into the social media world, parachuting in to take what they want and then leaving, rather than being part of this world and engaging with it.

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Filed under: Web 2.0, internet, journalism, new media, newspapers , , ,

November 15, 2008 • 11:09 am 0

Video: What Web 10.0 will bring

This short talk by Kevin Kelly, executive editor at Wired magazine, at the Web 2.0 Summit looks at where the web came from and where it is going:

(Thanks to BoingBoing)

Filed under: Web 2.0, internet, new media , , , ,

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Alfred Hermida
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