Write, shoot and edit a movie in a day

Wired News: Could you write, cast, shoot, score and edit an entire movie in a day? The 24 teams that competed in New York City Midnight Moviemaking Madness think they can. By Xeni Jardin and Choire Sicha from Wired magazine.

'Involvement journalism'

From Jeff Jarvis yesterday via Lost Remote: AOL sends out a press release touting what it calls "involvement journalism." But, so far at least, there's little evidence of it on AOL.

A recipe for homegrown news

In OJR last week, Adam Clayton Powell III reported on the MIT Media Lab teaming up with senior centers and schools around the world to teach would-be journalists how to write and publish community news online. The program gives participants simple publishing tools -- and a few key lessons in how to be reporters and editors.

I reported on Jack Driscoll and his work with Silver Stringers back in 1999 in my final column for the American Journalism Review, Citizens as budding reporters and editors.

3D journalism

Norbert Specker relays word of Bill Fisher's interactive 3D-rendering of the September 11 attack on the twin towers. It's an interesting example of a game developer moving into the arena of three-dimensional digital journalism by dint of its re-creation of historical facts.

Smoking Gun: Journalism unfiltered

Here's more on the Smoking Gun website, which MSNBC gossip columnist Jeannette Walls calls "journalism at its best," reports the Boston Globe's Mark Jurkowitz.

The audience as editor

HyperGene Media Blog makes a spot-on observation today about participatory journalism and the need for news sites like ESPN.com to give readers a way to alert editors to mistakes they come across.

Mike Davidson of ESPN.com responds in the Comments field that a link at the bottom of each page titled "Report a bug" is supposed to address this error. Sorry, but I don't buy it. Strikes me that "Report a bug" would undoubtedly go to a techie, not someone in editorial.

A conference on journalism and blogs

John Conway, assistant dean at the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, passes along word of a conference on journalism and weblogs next month. The Jan. 26-27 program is presented by the UNC School of Journalism and Mass Communication. The first day is a hands-on, skills workshop targeted at journalists who want to create their first blogs. Presenters will compare services offered by free and fee-based blogging sites. The second day is a seminar exploring weblogs' role in journalism, the rise of participatory journalism, and legal issues involved with personal web publishing. You can choose to attend part or all of the program. For more information, head .

Citizen reporter catches cops in the act

From Steve Outing in today's E-Media Tidbits:

Here's a great "citizen reporter" anecdote from last week (via Picturephoning.com). An act of alleged racism by Portland (Oregon) police was caught by a witness with a photo phone. In the late hours last Tuesday, police officers parked their car -- decorated with a large stuffed gorilla strapped to the hood -- in front of a E-Media Tidbitsrestaurant where a mostly black crowd had gathered for a hip-hop show. The gorilla was considered by many attending the event to be a racist taunt. One witness took photos of the car with his camera phone, and the images were published in the Portland Tribune and shown on local TV news reports.

As I've been noting in my frequent coverage of photo phones here, the devices -- because of their coming ubiquity -- make extraordinary witness tools. While this sort of thing has happened for years with traditional cameras and video-cams, few people typically happened to be carrying those devices just when something newsworthy like this happened. With a photo phone in many pockets, the odds of a witness capturing an important breaking news event increase exponentially. And as in this case, witness shots from photo phones often can be taken on the sly; the Portland police officers didn't know they'd been photographed. Portland news photographers didn't need to be there -- though that would have been nice -- a citizen reporter was.

Steve's absolutely dead on here. I hope to keep tabs on many more such examples of participatory journalism in the years ahead.

A collective news site about Iran

iranFilter is a new collective news website -- written by registered members -- that focuses on Iran. Thanks to BoingBoing for the pointer.

iBrattleboro: A citizen journalism site

Christopher Grotke of MuseArts spotted my series on participatory journalism and pointed me to a site that's been up since March: iBrattleboro.com, a community blog centered around doings in Brattleboro, Vermont. The site says:

Welcome to Brattleboro's "citizen journalism" site, where you become the reporter. Announce Brattleboro events, report local news, offer your opinion, or use just the search engine to find old stories and add comments.

Grotke says the site is doing quite well. Great to hear, and I hope we see hundreds of these citizen-journalism sites blossom in the coming years.

P2P journalism and citizen reporting

Howard Rheingold considers p2p journalism, and points to this long feature in USC's Japan Media Review on OhMyNews, the pioneering South Korean news site that posts hundreds of stories every day -- most written by housewives, schoolkids, professors and other "citizen journalists." Founder Oh Yeon-Ho says his site is changing the definition of journalism -- and who can be a journalist.

A business model for citizen journalism?

Steve Outing writes in E-Media Tidbits today:

The concept of "citizen journalism" is getting a lot of people excited. Proponents of it, such as Advance.net's Jeff Jarvis, have suggested that citizen journalism is a huge business poised to take off. One of the first companies to try to make a buck from this is GetLocalNews.com, which has established a network of news websites for communities large, medium, and small across the U.S. The company has developed a web publishing infrastructure that can be used by interested local-news entrepreneurs. As GetLocalNews founders Ari Soglin and Ed Schlenker explain it, "People expressing interest in becoming GetLocalNews.com community publishers have ranged from the local gadflies who want to offer their take on city hall to trained journalists interested in running an online version of the local paper." ...

It's certainly possible that there may be a central hub through which local communities get their news, and that there may be a profitable business in this. But I suspect that ultimately the vast majority of citizen journalism will remain independent and take place at the grassroots level. When I go to GetLocalNews's site for my community, for instance, all I get are summaries and links to papers that I already get, such as the Pleasanton Weekly or San Francisco Chron. Where's the value add in that?

Participatory broadcasting

Terry L. Heaton has an essay about TV News in a Postmodern World -- The Live Coverage Revolution. (I prefer the term participatory broadcasting.) Heaton concludes: "In the end, we'll see that the whole top-down media culture, whereby information is trickled down to the masses through institutional channels, is replaced by one that is much more user-centric and connected."

A collaborative events site

Wednesday's NY Times carried an item about Upcoming.com. Here's the scoop from Weblogsinc.:

A new site, Upcoming.org, calls itself a collaborative event calendar because its listings are created by users rather than by newspapers or venues. Once you register - a brief, free process - you can enter the events you plan to attend. The site then sorts the events by metropolitan area and shows which users have expressed an interest in them.

And speaking of Weblogsinc., their Social Software section has a couple of interesting items today.

Rheingold on 'we journalism'

Howard Rheingold in In These Times: It has taken 10 years of talk about “new media” for a critical mass to understand that every computer desktop, and now every pocket, is a worldwide printing press, broadcasting station, place of assembly, and organizing tool--and to learn how to use that infrastructure to [e]ffect change.

Money sentence:

For “we journalism” to have long-term credibility and lasting impact, progressives must fund, staff and promote media literacy--teaching users to create and consume this new journalism.

The ideal gadget for citizen-reporters

I had missed this the other day over at Jeff Jarvis's Buzz Machine: The all-in-one, super-duper, deluxe everything citizens' reporting machine. In which Jeff muses on the ideal gadget for citizen-reporters.

The comments were also interesting, such as this from the Spokane Spokesman-Review's Ken Sands:

"I'm working up a plan to engage citizen bloggers in the news here in Spokane. I think the first step will be to link to some select community bloggers, then open a contest to get more people involved. Soon, reporters and editors will be combing community blogs daily to find good story ideas."

And this from Mary Hodder:

There is one more necessary part for moblogging: metadata. How do you tell all those photos and video feeds apart with key words? A sophisticated metadata at time of capture system is what needs to be put into every phone. Garage Cinema, a research group at Berkeley is working with Nokia on that, but it's a ways off."

Three approaches to journalism

Doc Searls recounts the Bill O'Reilly vs. Terri Gross contretemps of last week, says he has changed his mind about what went down, and concludes with this thought-provoking passage:

Looking back on the event, I find myself thinking there are three approaches to journalism represented here. One is the "cool" approach of traditional journalism, including network broadcasting (in which NPR is no exception). One is the "hot" approach of talk radio, which has since expanded to TV sports networks and now Fox TV. The third is the engaged approach of weblogging. What we're doing here may be partisan in many cases, but it is also inconclusive. Blogging is about making and changing minds. It's less about scoring points against perceived enemies (with certain exceptions, of course) than about scaffolding new and better understandings of one subject or another.

BBC's experiment in citizen activism

Dan G. is in London interviewing people at the interactive arm of the BBC about a fascinating new project that tonight went into a semi-public pilot phase. Writes Dan: If the project succeeds, it'll be a big deal in the world of journalism. The basic idea is to arm citizens with information and tools so they can become political activists. BBC journalists will closely observe what citizens say and so, and adjust their reporting to some degree to reflect what's happening."

Biketoberfest on DaytonaBeach-live.com

Raven captured some cool video of last weekend's Biketoberfest action in Daytona Beach, Fla. -- a large, festive gathering of Harley-Davidson aficionados -- on DaytonaBeach-live.com. Click on your stream speed on the left side of the page.

I wrote about Raven and DaytonaBeach-live.com on OJR.

The blogger as citizen journalist

Blogger Lisa Williams: The blogger as citizen journalist. In which a blogger in the Boston area bemoans the lack of coverage given to local news topics by a chain of corporate dailiies, and offers suggestions on how local residents can take up the tools of community publishing.

Among the topics covered:

• What is a citizen journalist?

• Local News Anorexia: Why Citizen Journalists are Neccessary

• What happens when a town has no functioning newspaper?

• Citizen Journalism's biggest impact: Doing what the big guys can't or won't

• Citizen Journalists, Blogging, Money, and Professionalism

• Tools a Citizen Journalist Needs

• Limits of citizen journalism.

Great essay. Thanks to Steve Outing for the pointer.

News sites ready for citizen blogs?

In his latest E&P column, Steve Outing encourages news sites to set up "citizen blogs."

Combine participatory journalism and blogging and what have you got? Why, citizen bloggers, of course. An experiment in citizen blogging is underway at Advance.net, the online division of Advance Publications Inc., publisher of newspapers, magazines and Web sites (including MassLive.com and NJ.com). If the concept pans out, it may be expanded to other Advance sites and could mark a new trend for online journalism.

10 radical things about the weblog form in journalism

In Jay Rosen's PressThink today: 10 radical things about the weblog form in journalism. Brilliant excerpt:

10.) Journalism traditionally assumes that democracy is what we have, information is what we seek. Whereas in the weblog world, information is what we have--it’s all around us--and democracy is what we seek.

Jay is becoming a daily must-read.

The blog transformation of journalism

Chris Lydon interviews Jay Rosen on the Blog Transformation of Journalism (caution, audio only).

Employee blogs silenced at Tampa Tribune

CyberJournalist.net reports on three more personal weblogs that have been silenced after apparent clashes with the old media mindset that continues to reign supreme in newsrooms. The latest casualties took place at the Tampa Tribune. Excerpt:

Tom Mangan reports on his Weblog that three Tampa Tribune Webloggers have ceased blogging -- one after pressure from his bosses, and the other two on their own initiative afterward.

Dave Simanoff writes on his Web site, "The people who sign my paychecks have informed me that they're not pleased with the Daily Dave. One of the complaints is that some of my posts on the Daily Dave compromise my objectivity and the newspaper's credibility. Since it's never been my objective to discredit myself or my employer, and because I don't know if any of my previous posts might be used to penalize me, I have decided to take down the Daily Dave, in its present form, in its entirety... It would be a stretch to call this censorship, but it amounts to my voice being silenced nonetheless. If you'd like to blame someone for killing off the Daily Dave, you can blame me: I have made a conscious decision to take down the site because I'm not willing to sacrifice my career for my blog....I will take down all of the Daily Dave content by the end of the weekend. Please enjoy one last look around before the wrecking ball comes through."

CyberJournalist.net also summarizes some of the articles by 18 journalists on the subject of journalism and weblogging that appear in the Fall 2003 Nieman Reports magazine. Here's my contribution, which was informed by the earlier New Directions for News report on participatory media (Shayne Bowman and Chris Willis were the authors).

One of the most misguided entries among the 18 was the one by Brian Toolan, the editor of the Hartford Courant, who forced travel editor Denis Horgan to shut down his personal weblog. CyberJournalist reproduces portions of the Nieman chapter here. Excerpt:

In the article, Toolan says his decision was easy. "Behaving in a manner that safeguards the integrity of a news institution and avoids real or perceived conflicts of interest is central to the compact between a journalist and his employer. Journalists should operate in ways that don't display bias or predisposition. These are ethical considerations, not legal ones, but they are central to the conduct of journalism and must be zealously maintained."

I wrote about this sorry episode of big media arrogance back in May at CyberJournalist.net in a piece titled "Let journalists blog!"

Weblogs and journalism intersect

The Fall 2003 issue of Harvard University's Nieman Reports magazine has just come out (for those not in the know, the Nieman Fellowship is probably the most prestigious fellowship in all of journalism), and it contains what just may be the most comprehensive look at journalism and weblogs that has been published anywhere.

Today I just uploaded my article: Blogs and Journalism Need Each Other. The subject matter ranges from blogging as a form of participatory journalism, to audience participation in the new media ecosystem, to a future of cross-pollination between amateurs & bloggers and those in professional journalism circles. (Nieman also has posted the entire issue, a 4-page table of contents with links to articles, and my article here in PDF format; when I call it up, however, I get a blank screen.)

Jeff Jarvis raised a bit of a ruckus about the editing of his piece (which he ultimately withdrew) a few weeks back, but the lineup is very strong. Sheila Lennon, who wrote one of the pieces, pulled together this list of the Nieman package's article entries and authors along with their blogs. Only a couple of people I don't know here; the rest are leading lights in the blogging world.

Weblogs and Journalism

• Weblogs and Journalism: Do They Connect? BY REBECCA BLOOD

• Is Blogging Journalism? BY PAUL ANDREWS

• Weblogs: A Road Back to Basics BY BILL MITCHELL

• Weblogs Threaten and Inform Traditional Journalism BY TOM REGAN

• Blogs and Journalism Need Each Other BY J.D. LASICA

• Weblogs Bring Journalists Into a Larger Community BY PAUL GRABOWICZ

• Blogging Journalists Invite Outsiders’ Reporting In BY SHEILA LENNON

• Moving Toward Participatory Journalism BY DAN GILLMOR

• Weblogs and Journalism: Back to the Future? BY GLENN HARLAN REYNOLDS

• Blogging From Iraq BY CHRISTOPHER ALLBRITTON

• Determining the Value of Blogs BY ERIC ALTERMAN

• The Infectious Desire to Be Linked in the Blogosphere BY MARK GLASER

• Readers Glimpse an Editorial Board’s Thinking BY KEVEN ANN WILLEY

• A Reporter Is Fired for Writing a Weblog BY STEVE OLAFSON

• An Editor Acts to Limit a Staffer’s Weblog BY BRIAN TOOLAN (Editor, Hartford Courant, no blog)*

• Blogging Connects a Columnist to New Story Ideas BY MIKE WENDLAND

• Bloggers and Their First Amendment Protection BY JANE E. KIRTLEY

• A Weblog Sharpens Journalism Students’ Skills BY LARRY PRYOR

* Toolan is the troglodyte (my description) who shut down staffer Denis Horgan's personal blog; that decision is being contested by Horgan.

Pointing to this well-done series are, among others, Jim Romensko, Doc Searls, David Weinberger, Rebecca Blood and Sheila.

'We Media' in html

Shayne Bowman over at Hypergene Media has formatted an HTML version of the New Directions for News report "We Media: How audiences are shaping the future of news and information." Previously it was available just in PDF form.

Glocal journalism

"Glocal Journalism" in the United States: an interview with Doug McGill and Raman Narayanan on Wisconsin Public Radio (an audio version is also available). I've never liked the term glocal journalism -- why make up terms when you don't have to? -- but the moderator explains it here:

A growing movement in American journalism is trying to do just that, to illuminate the connections between our local community and the international world. It's called glocalizing the news and its being practiced by dozens or more small- and mid-sized newspapers.

Blogging vs. journalism: Another casualty

Dan Gillmor reports that Chinese blogger Chi-Chu Tschang says he was fired by the Bloomberg news agency because of his blog. I don't see anything remotely objectionable in his weblog, so we'll have to wait for more details.

OhmyNews enlists citizens as reporters

Another look at South Korea's OhmyNews, this time from the Japan Media Review, a sister publication of OJR.

'We Media' report finished

New Directions for News earlier this week posted the final chapters in our seven-part report called We Media: How audiences are shaping the future of news and information. It's the most thorough analysis I've seen of the trends, often discussed on this list, relating to participatory journalism. Writers Shayne Bowman and Chris Willis did a terrific job in surveying the field and pulling together disparate bits of information to build a case for a new relationship between media companies and their audiences. (Disclaimer: I served as editor.)

The final chapter (pdf) explores ways for media companies to integrate participatory journalism into their existing operations. Some key points, which the report probes in depth:

• Make your newsroom responsive to change

• Give your staff some level of autonomy

• Embrace the audience as a valued partner

• Embrace customers as innovators

• Don't own the story. Share the story.

Send Dave to Israel

Here's an interesting new site -- SendDavetoIsrael.com -- and another intriguing example of participatory journalism. Dave says by email:

I really enjoyed your series on participatory journalism. I have been interested in the subject since 1996 when I tried to predict the consequences of the internet for China in a dissertation. I did not realize at the time that great change was in store for the west as well. Your series really helped me to clarify some thoughts I have had on technology, empowerment, economics, and society. I have finally (it has been six years since my dissertation) taken the plunge first hand to see if technology really can enable people to do new and exciting things.

The goal of his site is to raise money to "embed" Dave in Israel for a few weeks. He says, "It's time that someone besides government officials and 'professional' journalists interpret what is happening in Israel and walk the roads that make up the Road Map." Dave explains the genesis of his proposed trip here.

It's a hefty sum, but I wish him luck.

Blogworld: The new amateur journalism

Good piece on blogging's contribution to the media ecosystem by Matt Welch in the Columbia Journaiism Review: Blogworld: The New Amateur Journalists Weigh In. What have bloggers contributed to journalism? (Thanks to IWantMedia for the pointer.) Excerpt:

No one knows how many active blogs there are worldwide, but Blogcount (yes, a blog that counts blogs) guesses between 2.4 million and 2.9 million. Freedom of the press belongs to nearly 3 million people.

So what have these people contributed to journalism? Four things: personality, eyewitness testimony, editorial filtering, and uncounted gigabytes of new knowledge.

"Why are Weblogs popular?" asks Jarvis, whose company has launched four dozen of them, ranging from beachcams on the Jersey shore to a temporary blog during the latest Iraq war. "I think it's because they have something to say. In a media world that's otherwise leached of opinions and life, there's so much life in them." ...

Outsiders with vivid writing styles and unique viewpoints have risen to the top of the blog heap and begun vaulting into mainstream media. Less than two years ago, Elizabeth Spiers was a tech-stock analyst for a hedge fund who at night wrote sharp-tongued observations about Manhattan life on her personal blog; now she's the It Girl of New York media, lancing her colleagues at Gawker.com, while doing free-lance work for the Times, the New York Post, Radar, and other publications. Salam Pax, a pseudonymous young gay Iraqi architect who made hearts flutter with his idiosyncratic personal descriptions of Baghdad before and after the war, now writes columns for The Guardian and in July signed a book deal with Grove/Atlantic. Steven Den Beste, a middle-aged unemployed software engineer in San Diego, has been spinning out thousands of words of international analysis most every day for the last two years; recently he has been seen in the online edition of The Wall Street Journal. ...

Besides introducing valuable new sources of information to readers, these sites are also forcing their proprietors to act like journalists: choosing stories, judging the credibility of sources, writing headlines, taking pictures, developing prose styles, dealing with readers, building audience, weighing libel considerations, and occasionally conducting informed investigations on their own. Thousands of amateurs are learning how we do our work, becoming in the process more sophisticated readers and sharper critics. For lazy columnists and defensive gatekeepers, it can seem as if the hounds from a mediocre hell have been unleashed. But for curious professionals, it is a marvelous opportunity and entertaining spectacle; they discover what the audience finds important and encounter specialists who can rip apart the work of many a generalist. More than just A.J. Liebling-style press criticism, journalists finally have something approaching real peer review, in all its brutality. If they truly value the scientific method, they should rejoice. Blogs can bring a collective intelligence to bear on a question. ...

Great, great stuff here, Matt.

CJR has also published a far-too-abbreviated list of journalism bloggers: The Media Go Blogging.

Jesse Ventura's talk show canned?

Mitch Ratcliffe says his colleague at Correspondences.org has the scoop that Jesse Ventura's talk show is being scrapped before it ever launches. Mitch cites this as yet another example of participatory journalism. Pretty good, if it holds up. One quibble, though: Is this the MSNBC-TV show that Jesse was set to host? The item doesn't say.

BBC posts reader photos sent by MMS

Emily Turrettini of Picturephoning.com sends word that BBC offered a two-way MMS service (Multimedia Messaging System, the successor to SMS) at the Notting Hill carnival -- one of Europe's largest events -- this weekend in the United Kingdom and posted a slideshow of the best shots from participants' mobile phones.

A photo blog of the blackout

Before you can blink, a moblogger at Textamerica has put up a photo blog of today's great blackout.

Talk about participatory journalism!

Thanks to Ryan for the pointer.

Citizen publishing: A reality tour

This lifted verbatim from a Tuesday posting on Sheila's blog (the perma-link wasn't working, but it is now):

Citizen publishing: A reality tour. jobforjohn.com, created by John Andrew of Northfield, Minn., takes job-hunting to new heights. Here's how it starts,

Hello, thanks for visiting my site, JobforJohn.com. Last Thursday, July 24th I was "downsized" from my job of 3 years at a software company.

Later the same day I heard that President Bush's economic team would be doing a bus tour through Wisconsin and Minnesota this week touting Bush's tax cut and its prosperous economic effects.

"What a bunch of BS. I'd like to give their PR tour a dose of reality," is what I thought. So I packed up the minivan and decided to follow their bus around the countryside and talk to whoever would listen about the real facts -- that this economy stinks, and Bush's tax cuts are making it worse.

And off he goes. At one point, he finds himself in the drive-through at a fast-food restaurant Wausau, Wis., as Treasury Secretary John Snow walks by, and he gets his attention:

"What's your story?" Snow says.

I tell him I was laid off last week & saw that he was coming & I thought it was important to come here and let him see the reality of what's going on in today's economy.

"What industry were you in?"

"Most recently the software industry."

"That's a particularly vulnerable part of the economy."

"Yes, well, I need a new job & it doesn't look good."

"Just wait," he said. "The first tax cuts haven't really taken effect. So just wait... the second tax cut... well, it' won't hit the economy for several months, but I'm sure you'll get a job." ...

John then writes, "Snow later recounted his version of our conversation to reporters," linking to an AP story about the tour:

One resourceful demonstrator decided to get into his car and use the restaurant's drive-through window, which remained open, to order a frozen custard while also making his views known.

Snow, who happened to be walking by, responded to the man's comments about the inadequacies of the Bush economic program.

"He said, `Your tax cut hasn't done anything for me,'" Snow told reporters later. Snow said the man told him he was upset because he had been laid off about a month ago from a computer job.

"I know what it is like to not have a job and to want one," said Snow, recounting his early years before he became a wealthy railroad executive.

John blogs the trip, adds photos from the road, photos of his kids. It's a personal, irresistible report from the heartland. His site is a fine example of the citizen journalism.

An interview on citizen journalism

Michel Dumais, technology columnist for Le Devoir, a newspaper in Quebec, interviewed me by e-mail over the weekend on the subject of what he calls citizen journalism and what I call participatory journalism.

He writes a journalism blog in conjunction with his newspaper column, and posted part one of our interview here, in French Canadian. And here is Dumais's column in Le Devoir. I recognize some familiar names in this graf:

Trois journalistes amcains, Dan Gillmor chroniqueur rite au SanJose Mercury News, Doc Searls, journaliste et co-auteur du Cluetrain Manifesto et JD Lasica, rcteur au Online Journalism Review, constatent eux aussi que cette crise est bien palpable et, selon Gillmor, celle-ci ira en s'amplifiant.

The interview covered online ethics, credibility, personal reporting and whether open-source journalism and traditional journalism can co-exist. I'll post it in full below ... in English.

Do you think there's a credibility crisis with the institutional media vs. Mr. Joe Public?

There's a growing credibility gap between what the news media report and what the public believes. The explosion in the number of media sources over recent years has alerted people to the fact that what they read in the newspaper or see on television does not always reflect reality as they know it. The rise of what I call 'personal media' -- weblogs, independent niche news sites, and other forms of amateur journalism -- gives people the ability to ferret out the truth for themselves. New technologies allow ordinary people to become creators and producers of news instead of couch potatoes who passively absorb whatever institutional media funnel our way.

Do you think weblogs are a new form of journalism?

Few bloggers fancy themselves journalists, but many acknowledge that their blogs take on some of the trappings of journalism: They take part in the editorial function of selecting newsworthy and interesting topics, they add analysis, insight and commentary, and occasionally they provide a first-person report about an event, a trend, a subject. Over time, bloggers build up a publishing track record, much as any news publication does when it starts out.

Not all weblogs engage in journalism. But some clearly do. However, it is a journalism of a different sort, one not tightly confined by the profession's traditions and values.

If yes, what do you think it will bring to our profession? To the public?

Blogs bring fresh voices and alternative points of view to the public discourse. By making the news process more open, transparent and democratic, blogging also has a positive effect on the craft of journalism, although newsrooms still have a long, long way to go.

Have you published stories on your blog that you haven't check before? Why?

I've published a few stories on my blog that I haven't been able to verify, but always with a caveat saying that I don't know whether this is true. As a journalist, you get a sense of whether something passes 'the smell test.' Because I don't receive any income from my weblog, I don't have the means to make long-distance phone calls and spend hours tracking down the accuracy of a report. Instead, I rely on my audience to serve that authentication function.

For instance, after Sept. 11, I received an unmarked e-mail that contained an amazing story about the hospitality of a town in Newfoundland that served as a waystation for airliners diverted from the United States because of the terrorist attacks. I posted the story on my weblog because it read like a true first-person account by the co-pilot of one of the diverted planes. I asked my readers whether anyone could verify the account. Within days, several readers pointed to corroborating evidence. Several journalists also contacted me, asking for additional information. And one Canadian journalist finally tracked down the author of the piece and informed me that his name was misspelled but otherwise the account was accurate.

In Gander, the hospitality of perfect strangers

A blog is sometimes a 'raw unedited feed.' Do you think there is a danger for the 'editor' of a blog to publish a story without validating it first?

I believe all bloggers have a responsibility to state whether they know if a story they publish is true or is just an unverified report. But the main responsibility lies with the reader. I'm always amazed at the credulity of people who tend to believe something just because they read it on the Internet. We need to fine-tune our bullshit meters by expressing skepticism each time we come across a far-out story from an unverified source.

Almost every week a relative or friend sends me an e-mail saying they had 'heard this on the Internet' and wondered if it was true. I finally put up a Web page to steer people to sites that debunk Internet rumors. We should trust blogs and other Internet sources only to the extent that they have earned our trust.

Do you think traditional media will have to rely more and more on weblogs as a source of information? How will you judge the credibility of a story published on a blog?

Many bloggers have staked out a legitimate claim as experts in subjects as diverse as wireless networking, copyright infringement, sonnet poetry and much more. Their blogs are written with a high degree of insight and sophistication. I know of many readers who now turn to gifted amateurs or impassioned experts with a deep understanding of niche subjects, rather than to journalists who are generalists and cover topics a mile wide but an inch deep.

Can traditional journalism and this new 'citizen journalism' co-exist? Do you think weblogs can offer something different to journalism?

Blogging will not replace traditional media or drive news organizations out of business. But citizen journalism will provide a valuable supplement to traditional media. When a major news event unfolds, most readers will continue to turn to institutional media for their news fix. But the story doesn't stop there. On almost any major story, the weblog community adds depth, analysis, alternative perspectives, foreign views, and occasionally first-person accounts that contravene reports in the mainstream press.

Journalists should not see blogs as a threat. For readers, it's not a binary, either-or choice. Instead of looking at blogging and traditional journalism as rivals, we should recognize that they complement each other, intersect with each other, play off one another.

Weblogs do offer new opportunities to journalists. Journalists who blog are doing things that they can't do in their traditional roles. On their blogs they ask readers for expert input, post the complete text of interviews alongside the published story, expose the raw material of their stories-in-progress, and write follow-up stories based on readers' tips and suggestions. Giving readers a voice in the editorial process -- by letting them provide meaningful feedback or suggesting story leads -- increases loyalty and understanding.

Do you think that a lot of journalists react negatively to blogs, comments from their readers and new technology because they don't want to accept the facts that sometimes readers know more than you?

I think journalists are often slow to adapt to change. We have been trained to think of ourselves as a special elite who report, filter and interpret the news for lay people. And it's hard to accept the notion that ordinary folks can use the tools of our trade to engage in journalism.

But I find that as journalists learn more about blogging, they accept this as an interesting new form of information and a good alternative source of expertise.

Where do you think we're going with 'citizen journalism' or 'open source journalism'?

We're heading to a more open and democratic media ecosystem where people at all rungs of society get to participate in a dialogue about news. Take three examples from recent months:

* During the peace demonstrations in February, Lisa Rein took to the streets of San Francisco and Oakland, camcorder in hand, and taped video footage of the marchers and speakers, such as congresswoman Barbara Lee, actor Harry Belafonte and antiwar activist Ron Kovic. She posted the video on her weblog, complete with color commentary, providing much deeper coverage of the events than a viewer would get by watching the local news.

* At technology and media conferences, such as PopTech, South by Southwest and Digital Hollywood, bloggers in the audience have reported conference events in real time, posting photographs, speaker transcripts, and summaries and analysis of key points a full day before readers could see comparable stories in the daily newspaper.

* On July 16, 2003, blogger Andy Baio reported on the tragedy in which an elderly driver plowed through the Santa Monica Farmers Market just outside Baio's office window. He had been walking down that street 20 minutes before. Baio described "the dead and dying" lying in the street and relayed first-hand reports from office co-workers who were eyewitnesses. He also posted a map of the accident scene, laid out a detailed chronology of events, and pointed to media coverage and photographs of the bloody scene.

What do you think of this statement: Weblogs will replace those big analyst houses that normally you consult when you need a source of niche expertise?

Blogs won't completely replace the traditional analysts found in journalists' Rolodexes. But blogs will become an increasingly important supplemental source of expert analysis. That's a welcome development. As media become more diverse, so will our sources of expert advice and commentary.

Do you think webloggers have less integrity than journalists?

No. Bloggers write chiefly out of passion. They want to share their views with others -- they're not in it for a paycheck. There are far more bloggers than journalists -- at last count, there are more than 700,000 active blogs -- and yet it's the journalism profession that produces scandals about fabricated stories, conflicts of interest, and other unethical behavior. Not all bloggers are honest, but those who betray their readers' trust are quickly found out by the blogosphere's fact-checking machinery.

What can journalists (and traditional media) learn from 'amateur journalists'?

They can learn that personal voice -- an important hallmark of blogs -- still attracts a wide following. Institutional journalism too often drains the blood from colorful writing.

They can learn that there are alternative perspectives outside the sometimes narrow purview allowed by traditional media.

And they can discover the value of transparency. Letting readers know that journalists are talented, creative individuals who hold opinions on a variety of subjects can only help to repersonalize journalism and make journalists more human in their readers' eyes.

How can the bloggers will deal with problems related to trust, ethics, accuracy? And the law? Do you think that, when we'll see the first lawsuit against a blogger, the 'chilling effect' will force bloggers to autoregulate themselves?

I think it's readers who have to maintain a skeptical eye when reading anything on the Internet, including blogs.

I don't think the law will have much impact on where blogging is going. The 'gossipy' nature of blogging will always be with us, because informal communication is part of human nature.

With all those tools, (weblogs, moblogs, cellular phones, SMS, photophones, webcam, etc...) that enable anybody to be an editor or.... a victim (ref.: Trent Lott) of those 'new journalists', and now that the medias, the political advisors, the business men, etc., are becoming more aware of their impacts, do you think that we'll see people becoming more and more politically correct, afraid of what they say or do, will be 5 minutes later published on the Web? A plain jane vanilla society?

On the contrary, I see political leaders taking up the weblog form themselves to engage the public directly and to correct misimpressions fostered by traditional media. In mid-July, presidential candidate Howard Dean guest-blogged on Larry Lessig's weblog:

This week, presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich will do the same. Last week, Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle began a weblog.

Yes, weblogs will hold political figures more accountable for their words and actions. That's a positive development.

What do you think of anonymity? Do you think that a weblogger, to have a minimum of credibility, should clearly identify himself? What can we believe? What can we trust?

Yes! I do not read anonymous weblogs, and I don't know why anyone would. The first thing I look for when I trip across an unfamiliar weblog is a link to the person's bio or background. How can we be expected to trust a person's observations or reports if we don't know who he is?

That's not to say that bloggers need professional credentials in order to blog. Anyone should be able to pick up the democratic tools of blogging. But the first rule ought to be, tell us about yourself.

Let's get back to moblogs and photophones. What about obtaining a permission? In some countries, like Canada, you need a permission before publishing a picture. What about reputation?

In Canada you need permission before publishing a photo taken in a public place? Certainly that can't be true of news photojournalists. Moblogging will force a reevaluation of traditional cultural mores and expectations. As the tools of personal media allow us all to become publishers, we'll be taking photos of friends, public speakers, protestors, street scenes and interesting-looking strangers, and e-mailing them to acquaintances and publishing them to photo blogs. That kind of free exchange of information and ideas -- that increase in openness and transparency -- will lead to some diminution of privacy, just as cell phones have increased our connectedness at the expense of our privacy.

Reputations won't be ruined by moblogging. But perhaps carefully cultivated (and misleading) manufactured images will be punctured by the moblog paparazzi.

We've seen recently a new kind of site, RedPaper (www.redpaper.com) , where, as they say, RedPaper is the world's first collaborative Newspaper filled with articles for sale written by people from around the world. RedPaper's goal to is create an alternative to traditional media outlets by providing individuals with the capacity to publish valuable content on every matter of interest. What do you think of that new approach?

I hope they succeed, but I don't know if they can sustain their business model over the long haul. We're surrounded by so much free media today that getting people to pay money for editorial content is a real challenge.

Slashdot on participatory journalism

Yesterday afternoon my OJR series on participatory journalism got Slashdotted. I'm diving in now to post some comments.

Swarm journalism

Over at Reason Hit & Run, blogger Julian Sanchez -- who in May authored an article on what might be called distributed journalism, swarm journalism, or open-source journalism -- points to my three-part package in OJR on what I've been calling participatory journalism, part of a longer ongoing series I've been doing on the subject. This, after Jesse Walker of Reason Online pointed to the series four days ago (with responses here). Thanks, lads.

By the way, in a single graf, Julian nicely picks apart the Stealing the Internet piece up on TomPaine.

Readers weigh in on participatory journalism

The reader forum boards are humming over at OJR in response to my series on participatory journalism.

The articles are here, here and here, and the forums can be found here, here and here. The folks at indymedia have posted a couple of entries.

Uh-Oh. Paparazzi with Phonecams

Smartmobs.com: Uh-Oh: Paparazzi with Phonecams. Adds Steve Outing: "Tabloid editors are now wise to the idea of getting photo phones for their photographers -- all the better to blend in with the regular people and get that perfect candid of J-Lo having dinner."

A series on participatory journalism

A few hours ago the Online Journalism Review posted what I consider to be my most important series of articles this year (not counting the book I'm working on).

The subject is participatory journalism. The three-part package includes:

• Personal Broadcasting Opens Yet Another Front for Journalists

• Participatory Journalism Puts the Reader in the Driver's Seat

• What is Participatory Journalism?

OJR originally didn't package these well, but they've corrected this, so I've temporarily removed the articles from my site. (As I say below, my complaint is really with all online news outlets, which continue to make related material very difficult to find. In any event, that minor quibble about format shouldn't overshadow the thrust of the articles.)

An excerpt from the main article:

By night, Raven -- the name everyone uses for 47-year-old Harold Kionka -- works as a janitor, mopping the floors and cleaning the grease traps in TGIFriday's in Daytona Beach, Fla.

By day, he operates almost single-handedly a 24-hour Internet TV station, serving as owner, station manager, producer and on-air personality. Daytonabeach-live brings live coverage of events in the Florida resort town to as many as 17,000 viewers a day.

Raven and a handful of others are at the vanguard of a new breed of journalism: personal broadcasting. Using equipment that is now relatively inexpensive and simple to use, these video pioneers are claiming a stake in territory that was once the exclusive province of big media.

And the first sidebar:

The New Directions for News report says of this phenomenon: "Everyone on the Internet is a potential expert on some subject -- from Pez dispensers to digital photography techniques to wormholes -- and these participatory forms are great places to find and share not only obscure or rare information, but commentary that might be too controversial for mainstream media."

One of those niche publishers is Sheila Spencer Stover of Bunn, N.C., whose Indian name is Firehair Shining Spirit. She runs the Internet Native News and Issues List, a mailing list with 400 members, mostly native Americans. ...

"Our members talk about prison rights, religious freedom, the selling of spirituality, the repatriation of bones, the stockpiling of native artifacts in museums stolen out of grave sites, building on sacred lands, the reclaiming of languages, elder health, Alaskan natives afflicted by gas-sniffing, suicide on reservations, issues with Indian trust monies, the Pipestone project in Montana, where they want to build a theme park on sacred land -- we exchange news about anything and everything," she says.

Here's the series of articles I've written about new media as a force in empowering readers and citizen-journalists:

---

In this series:

•  Personal video journalism hits the Net

•  Participatory journalism puts the reader in the driver's seat

•  What is participatory journalism?

•  Niches of trust

•  Independents day

•  When webloggers commit journalism

•  Personal storytelling

•  Women's Enews, a news service with an agenda

•  Citizens as budding reporters and editors

---

Follow-ups:

Steve Outing in E-Media Tidbits this morning recounts my complaint about OJR's burying my two sidebars. It wasn't that big a deal to me -- if it was, I would have taken it up with OJR's editors. As it turns out, they've redesigned the page to make the two siders more prominent.

My complaint is really with all online news outlets, which continue to make related material -- even stories that are part of the same package -- very difficult to find. It's one of the major flaws in the online news soup.

Mitch Ratcliffe over at Correspondences.org has kind words for the participatory journalism series, though he prefers the term "civic journalism." He's right -- the label's less important than the concept.

Howard Rheingold liked the package, too. He excerpted the section on programmers Matt Haughey and Rusty Foster's plan to launch a "smart mob-style site" to provide a place for independent reporting about next year's election. LostRemote.com also reported on that bit of news today.

Ernie the Attorney blogs from his temporary new home on TypePad.

Tim Porter weighs in thoughtfully, writing, "Self-publishing and other forms of participatory journalism are both a threat and an opportunity to traditional news media, particularly newspapers. Newspapers certainly don't need another media type with which to compete for reader attention, especially one that invites readers to sit at the keyboard themselves. They could, however, embrace the change and lead the reader instead of following him. Their track record in this area is lousy, though. Participatory journalism is another one of those fields that newspapers should be playing in even if they don't fully understand its implications. The future tends to unveil itself only to those who are there."

In "Moblog the vote," BoingBoing points to the 2nd OJR story by way of the mention in Lost Remote about the upcoming experiment in citizen coverage of the 2004 election.

At Projo, Sheila Lennon went nuts today with a great examination of the issues related to participatory journalism, pointing out specific kinds of reader participation that take place at the Providence Journal.

RedPaper: Another experiment in participatory journalism

Wired News:

A host of court documents in the Kobe Bryant sexual assault case are available online from a collaborative publication created by ordinary citizens.

For $2 a pop, all the public documents filed in the case against the Los Angeles Lakers basketball star can be downloaded from the RedPaper, a 3-week-old collaborative website written by "citizen reporters." ...

The RedPaper is testing the market for specialist information, ordered and paid for over the Web using a micropayment system, which long has been touted as an essential component of online publishing.

"(The RedPaper) is a combination of eBay and The New York Times," said founder and editor Mike Gaynor. "You don't have to have something valuable in your garage. You just have to have something valuable in your head."

Backed by software giant Adobe Systems, the RedPaper is an experimental market for information, allowing anyone to publish and sell their writing, be it recipes for muffins or hard-to-get court documents.

The site has about 600 registered users, who have published several hundred articles on the site, including favorite drink recipes, car maintenance instructions, poetry and short fiction. ...

A first for moblogging news in Japan

OJR: A clip of breaking news video sent in from a camera phone airs on Japan's NHK network. A trucker videotaped a huge pileup on a busy expressway with his cell phone, and he called the clip in to NHK. A few minutes later, he's live on the phone while his grainy video of the deadly accident plays on the air. "Moblogging" is poised to change the dynamics of news coverage forever. OJR reports from the First International Moblogging Conference, held in Tokyo earlier this month.

Blogger journalism

Just tripped across this example of first-person blog journalism from last week. Blogger Andy Baio reported on the elderly driver who careened through a farmers market just outside Baio's office window in Santa Monica, Calif., on July 16. He had been walking down that street 20 minutes before.

Baio described "the dead and dying" lying in the street and relayed first-hand reports from office co-workers who saw the driver. He also posted a map of the accident scene, laid out a detailed chronology of events, and pointed to media coverage and photographs of the bloody scene.

Participatory journalism at Correspondences.org

Correspondences.org has this Mission Statement:

Think of this as a "newspaper out of the box" where everyone can contribute. We're building a portal for reporting of events by participants and commentators covering all aspects of events around the world, locally and internationally: politics, business, economics, technology, medicine, media and culture.

Somehow I hadn't seen this site before. Good stuff here, like Today's Political Rewards, a regular feature. Yesterday Mitch Ratcliffe posted an entry on the day's Department of Defense contracts and the political contributions made by the companies that received them.

It's the sort of thing newspapers used to do.

Later: Mitch emails: "I'm hoping that if enough people pick up their own little hobby reporting efforts, so that we dissect the system that exists today, we can create something greater than the newspaper and CNN rolled into one genetically mutated civic journalism."

Blogger-journalist story

Several months ago I read an item about a journalist who raised a few thousand dollars through reader contributions on his weblog to finance his trip to some location. I thought I blogged it, but now I can't find it, and I need it for inclusion in a report I'm editing on participatory journalism. (And no, it's not Andrew Sullivan.)

Can anyone remember the episode and send me a pointer?

Later: Well, I just stumbled upon it myself: Freelance journalist-blogger David Appel appealed to his readers readers to let him to pursue an investigative story.

Still later: Patrick Phillips of IWantMedia and Joseph L. Hall both emailed to jog my memory about Back to Iraq. Christopher Allbritton reported breaking war news from Iraq on his Web site, funded by 320 people who donated $14,334. Business Week Online asks: Are pay-to-read sites the future of journalism? (Steve Levy mentioned it here.)

Roll-your-own Net TV takes off

Wired News: Roll-Your-Own Net TV Takes Off.

Blogs breaking logjam of journalism

Kathleen Parker in the Orlando Sentinel: Blogs breaking logjam of journalism. Excerpt:

I'm not an expert on blogging, but I am a fan. As a regular visitor to a dozen or so news and opinion blogs, I'm riveted by the implications for my profession. Bloggers are making life interesting for reluctant mainstreamers like myself and for the public, whose access to information until now has been relatively controlled by traditional media.

I say "reluctant mainstreamer" because what I once loved about journalism went missing some time ago and seems to have resurfaced as the driving force of the blogosphere: a high-spirited, irreverent, swashbuckling, lances-to-the-ready assault on the status quo. [emphasis added] While mainstream journalists are tucked inside their newsroom cubicles deciphering management's latest "tidy desk" memo, bloggers are building bonfires and handing out virtual leaflets along America's Information Highway.

Only nitpick with the article: Matt Drudge is not a blogger. Isn't now, never has been.

Thanks to Ryan of Dead Parrot fame for the pointer.

Moblogs foreshadow online journalism's future

Howard Rheingold writes in OJR: Moblogs Offer Crystal Ball for Future of Online Journalism.

OJR asked Rheingold to pull together his thoughts on moblogging and how it will change journalism: Does the nascent moblogging movement mean journalism will eventually become more democratized, or is moblogging a fad destined to only ever be chic among a geeky minority?

Stories of participatory journalism

I'm working on an article for the Online Journalism Review about participatory journalism. I'm looking for examples of it. If you, or someone you know, has committed an act of participatory journalsm, drop me a line.

I'm not so much interested in the restaurant review you posted on your weblog. I'm thinking more about things like:

- covering a news event and posting video footage on your weblog or website

- examples of moblogging, perhaps with a camera phone, and publishing updates or coverage of an event, rally or speech on a group site

- community news sites where moms, dads or kids publish coverage of their local soccer team because it doesn't get coverage in the newspaper.

- examples of sending in "amateur" photos to a news site (as dallasnews.com and the BBC have done) or citizen reporting (a la Korea's ohmynews.com).

Citizen journalism in South Korea

Dan Gillmor is just back from South Korea and files this report in today's San Jose Merc: A new brand of journalism is taking root in South Korea. Excerpt:

OhmyNews is transforming the 20th century's journalism-as-lecture model, where organizations tell the audience what the news is and the audience either buys it or doesn't, into something vastly more bottom-up, interactive and democratic.

The influence of OhmyNews is substantial, and expanding. It's credited with having helped elect the nation's current president, Roh Moo Hyun, who ran as a reformer. Roh granted his first post-election interview to the publication, snubbing the three major conservative newspapers that have dominated the print-journalism scene for years.

Even taxi drivers who don't have time for newspapers have heard of OhmyNews. The site draws millions of visitors daily.

Citizen-reporters in South Korea

USA Today has picked up on the story about citizen reporters writing for a South Korean news publication.

Japan's little online daily

New in Japan Media Review, the sister publication of the Online Journalism Review:

JanJan: Japan's Little Online Daily with Big Dreams
Frustrated with the complacent reporting offered up by Japan's daily papers, journalist and former mayor Ken Takeuchi launched Japan's first serious alternative online daily. He hopes to follow in the footsteps of OhmyNews, Korea's wildly successful online publication.

Moblogs: roving personal media outlets

Speaking of ReadMe, a while back Lisa Le Fevre interviewed me on the subject of moblogging. Turns out her piece appeared in ReadMe a couple of weeks back: The Three M's of Moblogs: Mobile Phone Blogging, Real-time Mobility and Mob Media. Whether they serve as personal travellogs, political weapons or media outlets on the go, moblogs take the amateur journalism of weblogs into the field. Excerpt from the article:

Today, moblogging is much more than an urban legend. Involving only a laptop and a wireless card, mobile blogging offers the potential for hybrid forms of media that can be accessed anywhere, anytime. Now, multimedia news can travel faster as users call up information and text images from the street using personal cell phones. What results, is a three-way conference call between wireless technology, real-time mobility, and mobdriven media.

Howard Rheingold is quoted in the article as well. Here's the full Q&A I did with Lisa on the subject of moblogging:

How does mobile access to weblogs affect the writers and the readers?

I suspect we're talking about a niche of a niche. That may not be sexy, but the fact remains that perhaps only 1 or 2 percent of the half million bloggers out there will be using mobile access to update their weblogs. A lot of the professional blogging class already have a laptop, PDA or (soon) a tablet PC to update their blogs when they're on the go.

Most bloggers with mobile phones will use them to communicate with other bloggers or confidants before they post an entry. At the new media conference at UC Berkeley on Saturday, someone sent a text message to a member of the audience, who relayed the question to one of the panels. That's power.

If weblogging could be called a genre similar to diary or journal musings, what happens to it now that people can log on their blog while on the go?

In a few years, when mobile phones with text messaging or keyboard access begin to take off in a serious way, I think we'll see more people jump into the amateur journalism game. The temptation to report, or chronicle, a public event as it's happening will be enormous. It will become second nature for young people to get on their mobiles and tell the world what they're experiencing.

This will really be something when built-in cameras and camcorders become pervasive, so that bloggers can broadcast visuals in real time. Text is cool, but pictures bring immediacy and a richness of detail as no words can.

Lastly, what is your personal opinion? Would you prefer to check on your blog from outside, or wait till you get home? And, which do you think will be used in the future?

Mobile phones will bring convenience and immediacy to the weblog experience. But I think good old desktops will remain the technology of choice for some years to come.

I think moblogging -- where bloggers post photos and impressions from the field -- will grow in importance in the coming years, although I doubt it will ever reach critical mass. The reason? A mobile phone will always be primarly a communication tool rather than a publishing device.

Finally: If you have time, you should contact Joi Ito, who has written extensively about moblogging.

A web antidote for political apathy

Wired News: In October, the BBC will launch a radical experiment in online democracy -- a website for turning ordinary citizens into grassroots political activists

Open source journalism

Dan is writing a book about We Media -- the reconceptualized role of journalism in an age when the former audience becomes participants in the news process.

It's an important work, given the roadblocks this line of thinking still faces in most traditional newsrooms. Dan showed me his first chapter a few months ago, and it's well written and right on the money.

As in any good open-source concept, Dan is inviting his weblog readers to participate in the process. Check it out.

SARS news was spread thru SMS

Dan Gillmor in his eJournal: SARS and SMS: How the News First Spread.

Blogging, journalism and standards of fairness

I'm quoted in an article, Blogging: the new journalism?, that went up today in DotJournalism.co.uk, the British equivalent of the Online Journalism Review. It's instructive, if only for how resistant traditional journalists remain to the blogging phenomenon.

The head of BBCNews.com surprisingly proves himself to be an old-schooler by claiming, "Dissemination of information is great, but how much of it is trustworthy? They (Blogs) are an interesting phenomenon, but I don't think they will be as talked about in a year's time."

Lloyd Shepherd, chief producer for Guardian Unlimited, says that both weblogs and the Drudge Report do not qualify as journalism.

And the author of the article wrongly maintains: "If journalism is by definition the reporting of news in a fair, balanced and accurate way, then blogging is not journalism."

Recently I wrote that weblogs do indeed sometimes serve as journalism, and that we need to move beyond that simplistic debate to discuss how to incorporate the advantages of blogging into mainstream media.

Because I'm often asked by reporters and students for quotes on the subject of blogging, journalism and new media, I'll include the entirety of my exchange with DotJournalism correspondent Jody Raynsford here:

To what extent do people now rely on blogging for breaking news stories or unmediated coverage of events? Do you think this differs depending on where you are based, e.g. US, UK, Iran?

Blogging wont replace traditional news reports, but it will supplement and enhance them. Readers are flocking to online news sites by the millions for the latest news about the war in Iraq. But the story doesnt end there. They are also teeming to weblogs for skeptical analysis, critical commentary, alternative perspectives rarely seen in mainstream media, the views of foreigners, and the occasional first-person account. A handful of reporters in the Gulf region are maintaining weblogs to provide fuller, more personal and colorful reporting of what they are witnessing first-hand.

Certainly, locale plays an important role. But weblogs help to break down those traditional national, regional and institutional barriers. More than 10,000 Iranians and Persian-speaking people now maintain weblogs, a number that is increasing by 200 every day. I wrote about them here.

How can bloggers overcome the arguments regarding journalistic standards of fairness, balance and most importantly accuracy? When does breaking stories first become more important than verifying the truth of these stories before publication on the web?

Journalists arent the only ones who know how to speak the truth. Bloggers are increasingly engaging in random acts of journalism whenever they report on events they witness first-hand or when they offer analysis, background or commentary to a newsworthy topic. Those who publish rumor and present it as fact will be burned fairly quickly. Individuals build up brands and track records just as media organizations do. Not all bloggers go the extra mile, but many are now taking the extra step of trying to verify a report by sending an email, picking up the phone or checking with a hoax site before publishing a report that may or may not be true.

For those who dont bother to check their facts, reputation filters and circles of trust in the blogosphere help weed out the nonsense. We all need to do a better job of fine-tuning our bull meters. But as journalist-blogger Ken Layne once said of the blogging masses, We can fact-check your ass.

What do you think the legal implications may be, in terms of libel and slander, if blogging takes off as a serious news source? For example, what if the allegations made couldn't then be substantiated?

Im hopeful that many more news organizations hop on board the blog bandwagon. Libel and slander laws should apply in cyberspace just as they do in print and broadcast. Some bloggers will learn the hard way that the Internet is no shield to scurrilous accusations. I just dont happen to frequent any weblogs that play that game.

One of the things you have said about blogging is how much you enjoy the interactivity with readers while writing an article. Just being the devil's advocate but is the beauty of journalism not based on the information you provide, but on the writer's individual take on the facts or situation? By heavily involving the readers are you not denying them the opportunity of your individual and fresh take on a subject?

Not at all. Interactivity doesnt take away anything from the writer, it just adds to the richness of the journalism process. A writer, if he or she is to be relevant in cyberspace, cant simply file a story and be done with it forever. Readers want to be involved in a dialogue about the writers findings. They want to probe, question, challenge conclusions, toss out compliments, offer suggestions for missed avenues of exploration. Ive heard from hundreds of writers who say the interaction with readers is the most rewarding part of their jobs. That interaction becomes even richer in the blogosphere.

What do you see as the future for weblogs, particularly those set up by the print media with an online presence?

I believe the opportunities are enormous. The vast majority of media companies have missed the boat so far, and readers are turning to expert amateurs, people with a deep knowledge about a niche subject, and others with a flair for writing or interesting stories to tell hundreds of thousands of bloggers who have become part of the media ecosystem. If the news media choose to ignore it, theyll continue to lose a chance to connect with readers on an intimate daily basis. And theyll become a bit less relevant with each passing day.

Webcast of tonight's journalism & blogging session

I'm told that my appearance at Berkeley tonight with Rusty Foster, founder of Kuro5hin, will be webcast. We'll be discussing why news organizations and journalists should establish weblogs. It's scheduled for 10:30 Eastern, 7:30 pm Pacific time (US).

Technology redefines journalism's role

In Sunday's San Jose Merc: Protesters relying on wireless, Web tools. Excerpt:

Over the past three days, activists created pirate radio broadcasts that streamed live on the Web and were rebroadcast at numerous sites across the world. They uploaded live video of marches to the Internet and sent hundreds of digital images of clashes with police to the Web. And they communicated on those cell phones to keep close track of one another's whereabouts.

In Monday's NY Times: Improved Tools Turn Journalists Into a Quick Strike Force. Excerpt:

Reporters covering the war in Iraq are at one with their technology as never before. Television reporters are toting hand-held video cameras and print journalists have traded the 70-pound satellite phones of the 1991 Gulf War for svelte models that can be held up to their ear. High-speed Internet lines in the desert and more satellites in the sky mean journalists can make a connection almost anywhere. As the conflict unfolds, they are tapping into the global communications grid regularly.

Random acts of the blogosphere

Nice to see my SxSW presentation about random acts of journalism is getting some traction in the blogosphere, including excerpts or mentions in McGroarty's Ink Feed, Weblogs at Harvard, JOHO, News Goat, One Hand Clapping and elsewhere.

Meantime, Tennessee journalist Bill Hobbs has a rejoinder. He concludes, as I do, that blogging is sometimes journalism, and points to examples where bloggers do a better job than the pros do.

Random acts of journalism

Beyond 'Is it or isn't it journalism?': How blogs and journalism need each other

Here are the remarks I prepared for the March 9, 2003, panel discussion on Old vs. New Journalism at the 10th annual South by Southwest conference in Austin, Texas. Other panelists were Dan Gillmor of the San Jose Mercury News, Joshua Benton of the Dallas Morning News, Evan Smith of Texas Monthly and Matt Haughey of Metafilter.

A quick story: On Super Bowl Sunday I was one of the millions of unfortunate souls who tuned in to see Jimmy Kimmel's new show after the game. The best thing about it was a two-song set by Coldplay. I wanted to find out the names of the songs played and, naturally, abc.com, coldplay.com and the usual suspects in the online news business provided not a clue.

But a 10-second search on Google turned up Jessica, a 22-year-old blogger in Los Angeles who braved the freezing cold to attend the outdoor concert, came home and blogged it, writing about her take on the concert and providing the answer to the mystery of the missing song names. Jessica probably didn't know it, but she was committing a random act of journalism.

Those of you in what Dan Gillmor calls the former audience who are blogging this panel live -- if you're dong more than a mere transcription, if you're providing summary, synthesis, analysis or commentary, you're committing a random act of journalism.

We're seeing more random and not-so-random acts of journalism taking place in the blogosphere these days. I'm constantly astounded at the breadth and depth of expert knowledge displayed by bloggers on subjects as diverse as digital media, wireless networking, copyright infringement, Internet video, and much more, all written with a degree of grace and sophistication.

Now, is all blogging journalism? If a weblog does nothing more than show off photos of your pet cat Boca, I'll go out on a limb and say that it probably isn't journalism, unless Boca is one special cat. So not all blogging is journalism, by any stretch of the imagination. But a lot of what you read in the newspaper isn't journalism, either, at least not in the strict sense.

It is becoming clear that millions of people are turning to weblogs for news, information, commentary and entertainment -- just for the pure joy of taking in writing that's vivid, vibrant, telegenic, emotion-laden, and driven by personal experience rather than the formula of detachment that deadens far too much traditional journalism.

What does it take to be an online journalist? You don't need a professional publication with a slick Web site behind you, though it doesn't hurt. All you really need is a computer, Internet connection, and an ability to perform some of the tricks of the trade: report what you observe, analyze events in a meaningful way, but most of all, just be honest and tell the truth.

All of this makes a lot of people in Big Media nervous. I worked in newspaper newsrooms for 19 years, and I think it's fair to say the attitude of most old-school journalists can be summed up in the pithy phrase, What the hell is a weblog? Or, if they have heard of blogs, they airily dismiss it, saying none of this is journalism, or at least not real journalism.

Toward a future of cross-pollination

Now, I don't share the view of some that blogging will drive news organizations out of business. When the bombs start falling in Baghdad, my first media pit stop won't be at our young friend Jessica's weblog. You can bet that millions of us will be tuned in to CNN or checking out the web sites of the major news organizations. But the story doesn't stop there, for the weblog community adds depth, critical analysis, alternative perspectives, foreign views, and first-person accounts, perhaps by Iraqi citizens or friends or family of U.S. military personnel.

So we need to stop looking at this as a binary, either-or choice. We need to move beyond the debate of whether blogging is or isn't journalism and celebrate its place in the media ecosystem. Instead of looking at blogging and traditional journalism as rivals for readers' eyeballs, we should recognize that we're entering an era in which they complement each other, intersect with each other, play off one another. The transparency of blogging has contributed to news organizations becoming a bit more accessible and interactive, although newsrooms still have a long, long way to go. MSNBC and other news sites such as the Providence Journal and Christian Science Monitor have incorporated the form into their missions, with mixed success. In a small way, blogging is helping to repersonalize journalism.

Old Media may have something to offer the young turks, too, in the trust department. Bloggers who dabble in the journalistic process would do well to study the ethics guidelines and conflict of interest policies of news organizations that have formulated a set of standards derived from decades of trial and error.

But more needs to be done to make this coming together a deeper and more meaningful phenomenon. Too many newsrooms are still shrouded in veils of secrecy. If I ruled the media world, I would take a blasting cap to every single newspaper reader forum and replace them with weblogs to make the former audience a central part of the conversation about public policy, news coverage and niche subjects. If I ran a newspaper chain, I'd hire someone plugged deeply into the blogging world, as Harvard University did recently when it lured blog pioneer Dave Winer with a fellowship to start a blog experiment.

The emerging romance between weblogs and traditional journalism will not be an easy love affair. The Washington Post's Leslie Walker recently suggested that readers will never be able to dependably rely on weblogs for news and information because bloggers don't cling to the same "established principles of fairness, accuracy and truth" that traditional journalists do. An old-schooler at the London Guardian wrote dismissively, "Blogging is not journalism. Period."

I think, ultimately, they're wrong. We need to get away from the notion that journalism is a priesthood that's inaccessible to the masses. The No. 1 rule of journalism, really, is simply this: Tell the truth. Report something as accurately and faithfully as possible. Can bloggers tell the truth? I suspect so. Over time, they build up a track record, much as any news publication does when it starts out. Reputation filters and circles of trust in the blogosphere help weed out the nonsense. We all need to fine-tune our bullshit meters. But as one someone once said of the blogging masses, "We can fact-check your ass."

What's ahead? Keep an eye on what I think will be the next big wave: visual blogging, or multimedia personal journalism. Already, blogger Lisa Rein is bypassing the mainstream media by posting video footage of the Feb. 16 peace demonstrations in San Francisco on her weblog, complete with color commentary. She plans to be out there again this Saturday, camcorder in hand, for the next rally. In two to three years, as the tools become more widespread and cheaper, we'll see an explosion of multimedia blogging, with riveting stories of first-person reportage, reviews -- and other media forms no one has yet imagined. And that will be extremely cool.

Note: J.D. Lasica will participate in a panel discussion on whether media sites and journalists should do weblogs at 7:30 p.m. March 24, 2003, at the University of California, Berkeley. The session is designed for mid-career journalists.

Highlights from SXSW

I'm just back from the South by Southwest conference, a bit earlier than I expected. Wanted to stay for the last day to hear presentations by Po Bronson, Cory, Richard Florida ("The Rise of the Creative Class") and others. But had to get back for family affairs. Had planned to blog there but was too caught up bouncing between rooms and chatting up people I had only known online before (Derek Powazek, Phil Kaplan, many others) to do it effectively.

Some quick takeaways, and photos, from my trip:

Our Sunday panel on New vs. Old Journalism -- with Dan Gillmor, Matt Haughey and Josh Benton and moderated by Texas Monthly editor Evan Smith -- went well, I thought. I wanted to make a quick point about the artificial barrier between media experts and members of the "former audience," as Dan skillfully puts it, and so I went into the audience and snapped this photo of Ben and Mena Trott, founders of Movable Type:

I'll be posting the gist of my comments about how we need to move beyond the debate over whether some weblogs are or aren't journalism and recognize their valuable contribution to the media ecosystem by acknowledging the increasing intersection of blogs and traditional journalism. More about that in the coming days.

Meanwhile, here's one blogger's transcript of our panel. Jeez Louise, and he's not even getting paid for this.

The bionic man
Another highlight was the hourlong talk by Kevin Warwick, professor of Cybernetics at the University of Reading in the UK, author of "I, Cyborg" -- and the world's first bionic man. Warwick gave a riveting account of artificial intelligence and the surgical procedures he underwent in pursuit of his craft. Here's a photo (click to enlarge):

Casanova on mpeg4
Frank Casanova, director of QuickTime Product Marketing at Apple, gave an interesting talk about the promise of Mpeg4, which he described as "Mpeg for the Internet." The Mpeg4 codec is is 10 times amller than uncompressed CD quality audio and a third of the size of DVD-quality video. Casanova expressed disappointment that Microsoft has not adopted mpeg4 on the Windows Media Player, while Real has done so. He showed off a nifty film short by BMW Films.

One tidbit I wasn't aware of: CNN, ABC and adult entertainment sites that charge customers for access to their video have to pay a licensing fee for use of mpeg4, but sites that don't charge have the fee waived.

Lessig's speech
The highlight of the conference so far was the stunningly effective hourlong presentation by Larry Lessig, in which he met head-on MPAA chief Jack Valenti's claim to the moral high ground in the file-sharing debate. The Lessig-Valenti duel can't be easily summarized without doing an injustice, so I'll just quote a few snippets from his talk:

"We have never in our history had a time when fewer interests have controlled more of the creative process than now. Never."

"An architecture that forces you to call my lawyer every time you want to clip a picture onto your web site is insane."

"The law is not the engine to seek the reasonable middle here."

"Let me tell you about us (lawyers). We believe in control. We work for clients who come to us and we create structures of control. It makes us feel weve given our clients something. But its not the space in which the broadest range of creativity and innovation can flourish, and you know that. As the lawyers come down to regulate this space to benefit not you generally but a few in particular, as we come do this to you, you need to stand up and push us out of the room. You need to reclaim this space to reclaim for you because we dont belong there."

He also showed a hilarious video (second one down) from an inventive group in Sweden that satirized President Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair to the duet Endless Love -- the kind of innovative use of digital technologies endangered by government and private sector restrictions.

It was an amazing speech. Lessig received a rousing standing ovation -- the only standing ovation at the convention.

Before his speech, I chatted with Larry and last night he sent a few suggested contacts for the book I'm writing on digital rights, intellectual property, file sharing and piracy.

Meantime, looks like Larry is back blogging.

More coverage
Bloggers are doing an excellent job covering SXSW:

Heath Row

David Weinberger

BoingBoing

Aaron Swartz

Adam Greenfield

Post-panel highlight
Spent Saturday evening hanging with my good bloggin' buddy Ernie the Attorney. A dozen folks in the crowd at the reception told us everyone was heading to Guero's, on Congress across the lake. Turned out we were the only ones who made it. But still managed a great time, and found it to be a first-rate Mexican restaurant.

'A new kind of interactive media'

I'm quoted in today's Japanese newspaper the Yomiuri Shimbun in a story about personal journalism and weblogging. The headline says something like: A new kind of interactive media has appeared. It also quotes Dan Gillmor, Rebecca Blood and Joi Ito. Um, it's in Japanese.

Blogging and big-j Journalism

Dave Winer talks with News.com today about early blogs, his move to Harvard for a fellowship there (only 10 blogs at Harvard? that can't include the student body, can it?), and how blogging is supplanting some of the roles traditionally performed by mainstream journalists.

It's a worthwhile read, of course, since Dave is one of the few bloggers who's a big thinker, a doer instead of just a pontificator, and a dang good writer.

Dave and I have had runarounds on the subject of journalism's role in the new media ecosystem, and it's clear that he's felt burned by a lot of press coverage in the past and that colors his perspective. (Just as the fact that I've worked in newsrooms for 20 years colors mine.)

So when Dave says ...

People now get the information from each other and for each other using Web logs. There are still professional journalists writing, but a lot less. Web logs are journalism. Have they had a big impact? Absolutely. When a big story hits, I don't necessarily trust the professional journalists to tell me what's going on. If I can get the Web logs from the people who were actually involved, I'll take that.

... I'll have to disagree ... and agree.

I agree that weblogs have changed the dynamic and balance of power in the media ecosystem. We're no longer passive recipients of fact and entertainment dished out by the establishment media. We're creators, producers, designers, publishers. Most bloggers have something worthwhile to say, and they find a ready audience for their niche or wide-ranging subject matter.

Too many newsrooms still share the caveman mindset that blogging is at best a lower form of journalism or that it's not journalism at all. It's a convenient stance, given the dire state of the news industry, but it's flat-out wrong.

At the same time, I think bloggers can be a little too self-satisfied and dismissive of the mainstream news media. In truth, it's a symbiotic relationship. As I've written about before, weblogs will supplement and complement, but not replace or displace, traditional media. When big news hits -- when war breaks out, a terrorism attack occurs, or even a neighborhood shooting -- you can bet the overwhelming majority of online readers will first turn to news media like CNN.com, MSNBC, nytimes.com, a local news site and other traditional sources -- and then turn to weblogs for discussion, dissection, interpretation, counter-arguments.

Weblogs need the traditional media, if only to play off against. In the years ahead, I think we'll see a richer interaction between the best parts of weblogging and the best parts of traditional news operations. It's been slow in coming, but the evidence is growing by the day that their futures are intertwined.

Despite their warts and all-too-evident shortcomings, newspaper and broadcast journalists still play an essential role in this democracy trying to keep us informed. That's what real journalism aims to do, regardless of the medium or the messenger.

Balanced Subjective Journalism

Don Park on Balanced Subjective Journalism and his proposal to jump-start the dying SF Examiner with peer-to-peer journalism.

Thanks to Dave for the pointer.

Weblogs and participatory journalism

The following weblog entries were written in response to questions from reporters and undergraduate and graduate students on the topic of weblogs, participatory journalism, or both:

How blogs and journalism intersect
Nieman Reports, Fall 2003

An interview on citizen journalism
Aug. 12, 2003

A series on participatory journalism: A good starting point
Aug. 7, 2003

Debunking Internet hoaxes and scams
July 28, 2003

Let journalists blog!
May 1, 2003

Blogs: flavor of moment or publishing revolution?
April 6, 2003

Blogging, journalism and standards of fairness
March 25, 2003

Random Acts of Journalism — Beyond 'Is it or isn't it journalism?' How blogs and journalism need each other
March 12, 2003

How weblogs fit in the media landscape
Jan. 27, 2003

Q&A with Online NewsHour on the Internet and journalism
Dec. 13, 2002

Of speed and quality in online journalism
Sept. 9, 2002

The state of online news ethics
Aug. 27, 2002

What will journalism look like in 2010?
July 6, 2002

Should newspaper bloggers be subjected to the editing filter?
July 1, 2002

On weblogs, journalism and ethics
June 27, 2002

More about blogs and journalism
May 26, 2002

How the Internet is reshaping journalism
June 26, 2001

Thoughts about online media
May 21, 2001

In addition, I wrote a two-part series on Weblogs and journalism for the Online Journallism Review.

— JD Lasica
Senior Editor
Online Journalism Review

Q&A with PBS' Online NewsHour

Longtime readers of this blog may recall that I've done a couple of Q&As with the Media Watch unit of PBS' Online NewsHour on the subject of online journalism, back in 1999 and 2001. (I've archived them on my site.)

A producer there approached me a month ago to do a reality check on the state of online journalism today. Because it's not certain whether they'll be doing a story or posting a report, I thought I'd post the interview here.

Journalism and the Internet have had an uneasy relationship right from the start. What dynamic is in play today?

It's important, I think, to distinguish between the craft of journalism and the business of journalism on the Internet. On the financial side of the ledger, online journalism remains something of a black hole. While a handful of companies, such as the New York Times on the Web, turn a profit, most online news sites continue to thrash about for a sustainable business model. Just today, Business Week laid off six staffers from its online division. Stand-alone news and culture sites like Salon will continue to have a tough go of things until online advertising makes a U-turn. Times are extremely tough for news publications.

But the craft of journalism on the Internet has never been more robust. And by that I mean the type of amateur journalism we're seeing with the explosion of web logs, community news sites and small, independent sites devoted to a niche subject. Internet journalism is alive and well, but it's no longer confined to a select, narrow priesthood of professional reporters and editors.

What have blogs done to the traditional journalism model? Is the definition of journalism changing?

Journalism is undergoing a quiet revolution, whether it knows it or not. Readers will always turn to traditional news sites as trusted, reliable sources of news and information -- that won't change. But the walls have fallen. The scope and mandate of journalism have expanded.

A great number of people on the Net have taken on some of the trappings of journalist. You don't need to write or work for a professional publication with a slick million-dollar Web site to be an online journalist. All you need is a computer, Internet connection, and an eye for the truth. A journalist is anyone who is an eyewitness to or interpreter of important events and who reports it as honestly and accurately as possible. Period.

Much of that is happening through web logs. Blogs, for the uninitiated, are a kind of scrolling personal journal of fact, opinion and personal experience, with frequently updated entries and links to other sites. A handful of professional journalists have taken up the form, such as Dan Gillmor of the San Jose Mercury News, Sheila Lennon of the Providence Journal and Eric Alterman of MSNBC. Understand, most bloggers aren't practicing journalism. But some clearly are. They may engage in the editorial function of selecting newsworthy or interesting topics, report on events first-hand, provide nuanced context and background information on a subject, or offer analysis, commentary and opinion. In the process, they build up a publishing track record and establish a loyal following.

This form of Internet journalism eschews some of the pieties of traditional journalism. "Objectivity" usually goes out the window; the idea behind blogs is that you're part of a network of ideas and won't get a complete, unvarnished encapsulation of a story or idea at any one place. First-person writing is celebrated rather than shunned. Colorful writing and emotion are welcomed rather than filtered out, because the lowest-common-denominator of mass media doesn't apply. A writer's reasoning and reputation count more than one's pedigree, status or the shingle you hang on your door. Participation by and feedback from peers are part of the process, while in mainstream news operations, after you're done with a story you're on to the next thing.

It sounds like the traditional conventions of journalism don't apply to the Net.

Journalism should adapt to the medium, and the Internet celebrates voice, interactivity, independence. But web logs and amateur journalism need to absorb lessons from mainstream journalism as well. For decades journalists have built up a time-honored set of values, standards and ethical rules of the road regarding matters like conflicts of interest, separation of editorial material from business concerns, trying to get all sides of a story. And lone-wolf bloggers will never be able to replace the fact-checking machinery of a daily newsroom. Whether it's done by amateurs or professionals, online or offline, journalism at its core is about getting at the truth.

Where are you seeing the greatest impact of the new forms of journalism?

In several places. Large community news sites like Slashdot and Kuro5hin -- which are both considered group web logs -- bring together thousands of users at any one time who can bring their own expertise to a subject.

When dozens or hundreds of people attend conferences, speeches or trade shows, more than a few bring along laptops with a wireless connection and report live from the event on their web log. I just attended a conference in Camden, Maine, where those doing real-time blogging included a newspaper reporter, a lawyer, an author, a student and a photographer. And they all linked to each other.

Small niche-focused sites bring another form of amateur journalism to particular topics. The Car Place provides straight-shooting auto reviews that place a premium on readers, not advertisers. ThemeParkInsider deputizes its users into serving as consumer watchdogs who are on the lookout for unsafe amusement parks. Some of the earliest eyewitness reports of 9/11 appeared on Metafilter, another grassroots news site. All three sites are operated by a single individual who has built up a reputation for trustworthiness.

What's next?

As broadband becomes more widespread, look for amateur journalism to expand from the text world to the video world. A high school freshman videotaping a faculty strike and uploading clips to the Internet with his commentary on the situation is, for all intents and purposes, an amateur news journalist. A college student who maintains a smart, informed web log about the latest doings in the tennis world is an amateur sports journalist. These "amateurs" have just as meaningful a role in the future of news on the Net as do the professionals.

In three to five years users, as video tools become cheaper and easier to use, we'll see everyday citizens take up their camcorders to publish news and views about their lives, communities, sporting events, and offering cultural commentary about politics, movies, television and more. Look for 30- or 60-second video snippets coming to a computer screen near you.

As for the major news organizations, I hope they'll grasp the potential of the wireless Internet and offer on-the-fly news coverage and mobile services for the wired power users in their audience. That's not likely to happen until late in the decade, however.

This entry originally appeared Dec. 13, 2002, on my Manila blog.

How weblogs fit in the media landscape

Julie Moran Alterio of The Journal News of Westchester County, NY, interviewed me by email in December for a piece on blogging, which appeared Sunday.

The main piece, Web of blogs, is here. For the sidebar, Blogs blur line with journalism, Julie interviews me, Dan Gillmor, Rebecca Blood and Paul Boutin. A second sidebar looks at Financial potential of blogs uncertain.

Because I keep an archived page of Q&As from students and reporters, I'll add this interview to the list and post the complete Q&A here:

Why did Web logs emerge?

Web logs give voice to the amateur, which is to say, all of us. The pundits, the political elite, the media -- all have had their turn in the public spotlight. Now comes a new form of communication and interaction -- more informal, less polished, but often more genuine and full of insights and points of view that often escape the conventional punditocracy.

What are the hallmarks of the earliest Web loggers?

The early bloggers wrote about what they knew best: technology and software. The form has only begun to flower in the past year when web logs moved beyond their original moorings into a broader array of
topics: politics, foreign policy, debates over public affairs.

What exactly were you trying to accomplish?

Why did I begin blogging? Simple: to connect with other people. From the moment I dipped my toe into the Web log waters some 20 months ago, I knew this was something special. It's a daily revelation, a conversation among friends, colleagues and strangers about any topic that's on our mind that day.

How do Web logs fit in with traditional mass media?

Web logs aren't a mass medium. They're a one-to-many medium. But it's wrong to think of blogs, or the Web, as a communication medium, like a souped-up telephone or a newsletter on steroids. I like John Perry Barlow's metaphor: 'The Net is not a channel. It's the ocean. And that's a vastly different thing.'

How big is the readership?

Most web logs are relatively small. I get a few thousand visitors a day. The most popular ones, like Glenn Reynolds' InstaPundit, attract about 30,000 readers daily. But multiply that by the half million blogs out there, and you're talking serious numbers.

Who is being influenced? How is this influence different than that of the NY Times, say, or other mainstream Web media?

The influence is at the edges. You can see sentiments first expressed on Web logs bubble up into the mainstream media several days or a week after they first surface. Now that Andrew Sullivan, Mickey Kaus and other members of the media elite are active bloggers, the political class and major newspaper columnists have begun to take notice.

The audience for any particular weblog is generally small, often in the hundreds of readers rather than the many thousands at some major news publications. But the freedom and instaneity involved -- no filters, few strictures -- make the smaller readership worth it.

Are Web logs journalism? Why or why not?

A small percentage of Web loggers are guilty of performing journalism, whether they know it or not. They

Most Web logs aren't journalism, and most bloggers don't fancy themselves journalists. But many do perform a journalistic role: they take part in the editorial function of selecting newsworthy and interesting topics, they add analysis, insight and commentary, and occasionally they provide a first-person report about an event, a trend, a subject. And over the long haul, they establish their own credibility with their publishing track record. If they're credible and have something valuable to contribute to the public arena, people will return.

A few professional journalists (Dan Gillmor, Sheila Lennon, Eric
Alterman) have begun keeping Web logs. I suspect many lower-profile journalists who keep weblogs don't look upon their blogs as work. It can supplement your work, let you poll your readers, toss a question out into the ether to gain immediate feedback before you harden your position on a particular issue. That's pretty cool, and quite powerful.

Is there commercial potential? If so, would bloggers shun that? Why?

The vast majority of bloggers don't gain a dime from their Web logs. Many do it chiefly to carve out a niche for themselves as experts in a given topic. The most knowledgeable expert on the subject of wireless networking, for example, is someone who writes a blog. That carries a certain cache that can be turned to advantage in their writings or professional career. A few bloggers make a few bucks off the tip jar on their site -- Andrew Sullivan collected almost $10,000 that way. Others, like Meg Hourihan, have Amazon wish lists that readers sometimes contribute to. And Dave Winer, the founder of Userland, claims that his Scripting News Web log has directly led to tens of thousands of dollars in business for his firm.

Is there a blog "community"? If so, does it have a function in our democracy?

There may not be a single blog community, but there are certainly islands of common interest. If you're into politics, you'll run across many of the same names: libertarian Virginia Postrel, conservative Andrew Sullivan, liberal Mickey Kaus. If you like fly fishing, I'm sure there's a fervent group of fly fish ideologues blogging away at this moment.

On a personal note, what does your blog do for you?

Currently I'm writing a book about intellectual property, Internet piracy and file sharing, so the blog gives me a break from writing the manuscript. Mostly it's a way to keep in close contact with a circle of colleagues on the issues of the day. And it has begun to open doors. I've been a guest lecturer at technology conferences, and an active Web log is almost de rigueur these days.

How much time does it take for you to maintain?

An hour a day, sometimes longer. Some days I'm sure it's worth the payoff. Other days, the investment is a little harder to gauge.

As a journalist, do you consider your blog journalism?

Again, sometimes yes, sometimes no. When I'm ranting about my PC, probably not. When I'm blogging live from an industry conference, giving summaries of speeches, taking photos of participants and posting it all to the Web in real time -- yes, that's journalism.

I suspect Web logs will increasingly tear the wrapping off of journalism in the years ahead. They have the potential to serve as community and media watchdogs, fact-checking the professionals and keeping us all more honest.

But Web loggers need to learn that they're not inventing the rules of the road from whole cloth. The conventions of journalism -- accuracy, credibility, trustworthiness and being straight up with your readers -- are guideposts that any good weblogger should engrave on her wall.

This entry originally appeared Jan. 27, 2003, on my Manila blog.

How the Internet is reshaping journalism

Liselotte, a 23-year-old journalism student at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia, wrote to ask questions for a research paper on new approaches to journalism and publishing. Here are her questions and my answers:

To date, what have been the most significant changes in journalism since the arrival of the Internet?

I'll name three:

1) The Net as a research tool. The Internet is the most incredible research tool ever invented, and during the past three years the vast majority of reporters have climbed aboard and been dazzled by its deep and rich treasures. There's an entire branch of journalism devoted to Computer-Assisted Reporting and Research, but really all journalists are becoming digital journalists, whether they're in print, broadcast or online.

2) Accountability. If a journalist makes a significant mistake, or is too lazy to make the extra phone call or conduct the research to get his or her facts straight, you'll hear it from your online readers. Because facts and accounts can now often be verified at the click of a mouse, the whole world is now your fact-checker and proofreader, not just your publication's editors.

3) Speed. The Net is speeding up our instant-gratification culture. That's not a judgment call, just a reality.
I've written often about the dangers of Speeding Net News -- too often the chant is I'd rather be first than right -- and this is a trend that all responsible journalists need to watch closely. For more on the subject, see, for example, this column on some of the perils posed.

What is still missing in online journalism? How can it be changed?

The chief missing ingredient in online journalism today is interactivity. Only a handful of online publications make their reporters and editors available to interact with users in any meaningful way. Many online journalism publications still don't do something as rudimentary as publishing their reporters' e-mail addresses.

The problem is that many online publications still haven't evolved past the we-publish-you-read mindset of the print world. But the Web is a fundamentally different medium. Online should be more of a dialogue than a one-way conversation. It's not a one-to-many mass medium, it's a one-to-one and many-to-many medium.

It has been claimed that everyone's a journalist on the Web. Do you agree? Why/Why not?

Not everyone is a journalist on the Web. People surf, rant, spam, write poetry, keep personal diaries, post photos of their cats, and none of that is journalism.

Having said that, there are a great number of people who have taken on the mantle of journalist. You don't need to write or work for a professional publication with a slick Web site to be an online journalist. All you need is a computer, Internet connection, and an ability to perform some of the tricks of the trade: report what you observe, synthesize and analyze events in a meaningful way, but most of all, just be honest and tell the truth.

A high school freshman videotaping a faculty strike and uploading clips to the Internet with his commentary on the situation is, for all intents and purposes, an amateur news journalist. A college student keeping a Weblog about the latest doings in the tennis world is an amateur sports journalist. And these "amateurs" have just as meaningful a role in the future of news on the Net as do the professionals.

Please see my new 2-part series in OJR on this topic, here and here.

There are a lot of established journalists that now run their own news publications, columns etc. Do you think we will see more of that, or is that phenomenon going to die? Could you make a living from running your own news publication? Will you be able to in the future?

I think we'll see a lot more of this, especially the phenomenon of writers making names for themselves by writing online columns. But I suspect it will be at least a generation before anyone can support himself or herself as a journalist by self-publishing in this way. Perhaps the best-known journalist now doing this is Andrew Sullivan (www.andrewsullivan.com), who recently collected $10,000 from contributors to his Web site, but that's only a small percentage of his yearly income from writing for mainstream publications like the New Republic. Even Matt Drudge wasn't making a dime off of his Web site, and he was drawing hundreds of thousands of hits not long ago.

What does the future hold for self-publishing? Since major news organizations *today* can't seem to fashion a workable business model, I'd have a hard time predicting how independent journalists will be able to do so. But since I'm currently an independent online journalist, I sincerely hope someone makes this work!

What will happen in journalism in the next 5-10 years? What do you hope will happen?

Feel free to quote any of these thoughts that I gave to PBS or that I've published on my Weblog here. We're near the nadir of a terrible downswing in the online journalism business, but this, too, shall pass, and as multimedia and fatter broadband pipes gain a more solid foothold throughout the world, and as an increasing number of amateur journalists ply their craft with honesty and integrity, we'll be seeing exciting new forms of online reporting take shape.

Good luck, Liselotte!

For other responses to students, see this page.

This entry originally appeared June 26, 2001, on my Manila blog.