Archive for category Social News

Date: June 16th, 2010
Cate: Journalism Practice, Open Source and Community, Social News, Web/Tech
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Meet the 2010 Knight News Challenge Winners

Mark Glaser at PBS Idea Lab has the FULL scoop.

As a past winner I try to help out at the PBS Idea Lab blog when I can, so I interviewed a few of the winners. The video is below.

It should also be noted that one of the winners PRX is going to work with the Spot.Us code! I included a video of Jake Shapiro explaining what exactly they are going to do.

Winner: Brad Flora from Windy Citizen. For details on his project check out the PBS Idea Lab post.

My friends at USC Tom Grasty and Nonny de la Peña and their creation Stroome!

The folks from Davis Wiki are launching Local Wiki

From Arizona’s School of journalism: City Seed

The folks from Front Porch Forum

Jake Shapiro explaining PRX’s StoryMarket

Date: June 10th, 2009
Cate: Crowdsourcing, Journalism Practice, Social News, Web/Tech
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Citizen Journalism Networks Stepping Up Editorial Standards

A post I did for MediaShift’s IdeaLabl blog.

I tend to avoid the “professional vs. amateur journalism” debate, saying “I have constructive criticisms for both sides.” As we’ve hit a flash point for traditional news organizations, the evolution of citizen journalism networks like NowPublic, AllVoices and others may shed light on how the media space will resolve. Perhaps the two “opposites” will meet somewhere in the middle or, as I suspect, find out that they are more alike than they ever thought.

Recent news in the space has included Orato and Ground Report making shifts to require higher editorial standards in the submissions they accept and publish.

Alfred Hermida wrote a post on Reportr.net titled “Orato turns its back on citizen journalism,” in which he notes that the site used to focus on first person narratives of events but….

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

When I met up with longtime friend Rachel Sterne, founder of Ground Report, at the Beyond Broadcast conference she explained that her network was making a similar change. While I’m one example shy of a trend, I think these two shifts warrant
some thought.

Rachel Sterne explains the changes happening at Ground Report:

What is the shift on Ground Report?

From what I gathered, there are four main shifts in Ground Report’s editorial policy.

Content from new users goes through a longer vetting period. Ground Report is trading speed for accountability.
Content from a trusted user or source skips this vetting period — but only because the contributor has proven themselves.
Expanding the powers of volunteer editors, who can now edit anything on the site. Again, these are trusted contributors.
A part-time managing editor who is in the process of writing editorial guidelines. This is a tough line to walk because they want to preserve the uniqueness of the writers’ voice but also make sure they are up to the higher editorial standards.

The reasoning

Sterne explained the logic behind the new system: “It is something that in the commercial world has just started to enter the dialogue while it seems obvious in an academic world.” There are several reasons why the policy change makes sense to me:

Trading speed and accountability seems like a no brainer to me. Twitter has come on the scene to dominate the speed world, which means citizen journalism networks can offer an added value of accountability.
Ground Report, Now Public, All Voices and others are looking to syndicate their content to larger distributors. To do that, they must provide a sense of trustworthiness.
iReport, YouTube and other large user-generated sites have begun highlighting well produced work from dedicated contributors while making the larger mass of content they host harder to find.

Even more interesting, according to Sterne, contributions on Ground Report have dropped 50 percent in the month since the site began implementing the changes, but traffic has increased 10 percent. That seems to be a trade off that most publishers would take — giving them a more streamlined workflow and process along with higher traffic.

Some things to note

According to the Wikipedia page on Citizen Journalism:

Allvoices was also the first citizen journalism site to measure the credibility of contributed reports and their authors, providing readers with a gauge launched in March 2009 for assessing the accuracy of news accounts.

I am friends with several of the folk at AllVoices and hope to follow up with them next time we speak.

Most people don’t know, but I am the editor in chief of citizen journalism network Broowaha. We have had similar conversations with our own members and internal team. Not surprisingly, some of the most dedicated contributors have voiced a preference towards structure, guidelines and policy.

Where are we left?

I don’t claim to have a crystal ball, but I wouldn’t be surprised if more citizen journalism networks make this shift. I think it is perfectly possible for these networks to be picky about what they publish without being exclusive. This will be a fine line to walk so as not to lose their citizen journalism souls as they try and up their game.

Date: October 3rd, 2008
Cate: Journalism Practice, Links and People, Social News, Straight Geek, Travel

New Things Launching: NewsTrust.net, ReportingOn.Com, JTM and Soon…Spot.Us

I’ve done a semi-crappy job of noting things happening elsewhere in the web. But the link economy is strong and I should be adding to it.

So what’s new?

NewsTrust.Net
Many of you know that before Spot.Us became a reality I was a contributing editor at NewsTrust.net (disclaimer). I’m happy to see that they’ve finished the redesign (which started just as I was leaving). From time-to-time Fabrice and the NewsTrust team would call me in as a fresh pair of eyes, so I know just how much thought and effort was put into this massive overhaul.

The site is aesthetically the same, but has been moved to Ruby on Rails, which means future development will happen quicker. But the site itself also moves faster, feels cleaner and is easier to navigate and use.

I always thought that NewsTrust’s biggest hurdle was that they asked so much of the user. I think this is a step in lowering the bar. I am a big believer that aggregation is creation and that linking is an editorial service. NewsTrust, along with sites like Publish2.com and NewsCred are pushing this practice. Journalisim should find a way to own this space and with the right tools I believe that is possible.

ReportingOn.com Picture_2
I am a HUGE fan of Ryan Sholin‘s. Always have been. Anyone involved in journalism just needs to take a few glances at his personal blog to become a fan as well. His effort at Wired Journalis has been a collosaul success. Ryan has probably done more singlehandedly to evangelize the “get on the web” effort than anyone else.

I was truly excited that Ryan was a Knight News Challenge winner as well – and very happy to see his ReportingOn.com launch. He is the type of colleague whom I’m honored to call my colleague.

Journalism That Matters Zen_classic_logo

Journalism That Matters has a new Drupal based site up which can organize the many tentacles of this organization. If you already know JTM, then you know what a fantastically idealized organization it is. They essentially organize unconferences about media all across the country. When they started planning one in Silicon Valley – I jumped up and did my fair share of the organizing.

The problem as I understand it, was that JTM is trying to be more than a conference facilitator. I believe it’s trying to start its own little movement and create a culture around journalism. If you’ve ever been to a JTM then this would make sense. Again, it comes from the unconference world, so don’t attend thinking all your questions will be answered. In fact, you should be prepared to leave invigorated with three times as many questions as you came in with. Some people find that unsatisfying – I love it.

But to be more than an unconference facilitator JTM needed a single hub where they could collect all their achievements and let participants meet and greet each other online. This Drupal site is the first big step in that direction. That they’ve accomplished so much without a real hub site just goes to show how much force has been behind JTM – the people running this are its life blood.

Spot Us Spotimage

Okay, so here’s the part where I’ll be brief, because if you’ve been following this blog, you know that Spot Us is moving forward and is getting closer and closer to launch.

But here’s an interesting update. As many know I’ve been as open and transparent about this process as possible. I’ve been very lucky that my developers and designers have seen value in this as well. My developers are also entrenched in the Ruby on Rails community – and their openness has attracted some attention from other developers who get a chance to peek into how they do things.

The interesting thing about this project was that the source is freely available on Github for any Joe Bloggs to pour over (link). Not only that, but the client taped his reaction upon seeing the application for the first time: (link).

I had a quick looksee at the application, and what I saw blew me away – how’d they get so much done in such a short space of time?

Here’s some of the stuff I noticed….

That’s it for now.

Next week I’ll be flying over to Jacksonville Florida to, you guessed it, spend some more face-to-face time with the developers.

The goal was to be finished by the end of next week. As things are right now – we might need one more week, but I’d hardly consider that a failure – the amount of work that is involved in building a website is huge, waiting one extra week wouldn’t kill anyone.

Also: Check me out at PSFK as a source in citizen journalism gone awry via the Steve Jobs incident on iReport. Lots can be said about this. I simply don’t have the time to opine.

DigiDaveJournalism is a Process, Not a Product