Top Five Week Two Hundred Five.
- Project Report
YouTube, Pulitzer Center run citizen media contest- Wired Wikiwatch
Wins Batten Award after building on WikiScanner- Archive bites United
Stock sinks after ‘02 story resurfaces on Bloomberg- Google ink stains
Newspaper archive search shares revenues with papers- Sorority Forever
LonelyGirl15 actress scores role in MySpace serialWhere do you get U.S. election news online?.
With the U.S. election season hitting its final stages, political junkies are inundated with information online. But where do you go to find the news you can trust? Do you go to political blogs, partisan ones, newspaper blogs, video sites, magazine sites? Lately, I’ve been enjoying Politifact and its “Truth-O-Meter” that gauge all the allegations made by both sides in the presidential race. What sites do you visit regularly and why? How has your online media diet changed this election cycle vs. in 2004? Share your thoughts in the comments below or by video on Seesmic.
Legal Drama::Court Rules Print-on-Demand Service Not Liable for Defamation.
Book publishers can be sued if they publish a book full of libelous statements because, the reasoning goes, a publisher should know what it prints. The publisher reviews the manuscript, edits and proofreads it, and distributes the finished book to retailers. It is involved in every part of the process.
But the Internet has given rise to a new breed of printing company, a hands-off model that doesn’t get involved with the writing process at all. Online print-on-demand companies specialize in printing books exactly as they appear on submission, without any changes. If print-on-demand services don’t exercise any oversight over their books, are they still liable when those books are found to contain defamatory statements?
That was the question in a motion recently decided in Sandler v. Calcagni, a defamation action filed in the federal district court in Maine over a book that was printed and distributed by BookSurge, a print-on-demand service that’s owned by Amazon.com.
Print-on-demand services appear at first blush to be the same as traditional vanity publishers, printing houses where authors can pay to have their work printed. However, the web-based interface of print-on-demand reduces the time and expense involved in getting a book to print and also helps to get the book placed with online retailers. Another key difference is that, while many vanity publishers may insist on an author paying for a set number of copies, many print-on-demand services will only print up as many copies of a book as have been ordered.
Traditionally, book publishers could be held liable for defamatory statements in their books under the theory that they exercised some form of control over the books’ contents. But online print-on-demand companies typically provide printing and distribution services only, and do not perform the traditional editing, fact-checking and marketing functions associated with other publishers. Sandler v. Calcagni appears to be the first case in which someone has argued that a print-on-demand company should face traditional “publisher” liability.
Don’t Save the Cheerleader
The case started with a dispute between two high school cheerleaders over (what else?) a boy. According to the court’s opinion, one of the cheerleaders, Calcagni, and some of her friends harassed Sandler with religious epithets. Eventually, Calcagni was convicted of a hate crime for allegedly spray-painting a swastika near Sandler’s home.
Calcagni’s parents decided to tell their side of the story with a tell-all book about the incident. They printed the book through BookSurge, and purchased several hundred copies, which they distributed to friends, family and local bookstores. Several other parties also purchased copies of the book online.
Not surprisingly, Sandler sued Calcagni, her parents, the freelancer and BookSurge. BookSurge made a motion to dismiss the claims against it, arguing that it should not be held liable as a publisher for purposes of defamation law.
What Makes a Publisher?
So far, I’ve carefully avoided referring to BookSurge as the publisher of the book in question. That’s because “publisher” is a word of art in the law, a term that has a specific legal definition. There are specific legal consequences attached to the categorization of publisher — consequences that BookSurge hoped to avoid. As the court itself noted, confusion can arise in defamation cases because “publisher” has a common business as well as a legal meaning.
Under the common law, whether a participant is deemed to be a publisher for purposes of imposing defamation liability depends on the “extent to which he participates with an author…of the defamatory statement in its publication,” according to the court’s ruling in this case. Actors who are “more actively involved” in the process may be held liable “because they have the opportunity to know the content of the material being published.”
The court effectively viewed the BookSurge service as a giant online copy machine, noting that it had “negligible involvement” with the authors of the book. BookSurge never fact-checked or reviewed the manuscript, and it had no editorial control over the work. Accordingly, the court found that the service did not know, or have reason to know, that the book might be defamatory and thus could not be held liable.
We’ll never know whether the ruling would have survived an appeal. On September 4, the remaining parties filed a notice of settlement with the court, ending the case. So the court’s ruling on BookSurge’s liability will stand for now as persuasive authority for other courts faced with that same issue.
Consequences
Print-on-demand services are an example of how the Internet enables writers to circumvent the gatekeepers of traditional communications channels. By dramatically lowering the cost and greatly increasing the ease of communication, writers who would previously have been blocked from the market can find an easy way to get their works out to the public. Authors no longer have to send copies of their great American novel to hundreds of publishers, praying for an editor to view it favorably. In fact, in this case, the parents first sought to have their book published by traditional publishing houses, which uniformly rejected the manuscript.
The question prior to Sandler v. Calcagni was whether the law would saddle these kinds of services with potential liability that would force them to vet their authors’ works in the same manner as traditional publishers. If print-on-demand services were found not to be liable, they would have less incentive to weed out books that could give rise to legal action, almost certainly allowing more content to make its way into the stream of public discourse — for good or ill, as this case arguably demonstrates.
Of course, there’s an upside and a downside to all things. Freeing print-on-demand services from liability places the entire legal responsibility for content on authors, to the detriment of plaintiffs and defendants alike. Plaintiffs could not hope to recover much without a publisher’s deep pockets, while authors would lose the protection of the publisher’s attorneys and liability carrier. Such liability could bankrupt some authors, and the threat of legal action could cause authors to self-edit.
Outstanding Issues
Will courts in other states follow the Maine court’s decision in Sandler v. Calcagni? That remains to be seen. Defamation liability is controlled by state law, with an overlay of federal law in the form of the First Amendment. Although the broad general principles of defamation law are fairly uniform throughout the U.S., another jurisdiction might take a different view of the liability of print-on-demand services.
Overseas is another matter. It isn’t at all given that courts in foreign countries, where defamation law is often quite different, will follow the same reasoning. The U.S. is unique in that it has the First Amendment as a free speech backstop that encourages the dissemination of information. Even in such familiar common law jurisdictions as the UK, the law is much more favorable to plaintiffs, a fact reflected in the rise of libel tourism. Libel tourism refers to non-UK libel plaintiffs who bring their actions in UK courts in hopes of taking advantage of the favorable legal climate.
One final unresolved question remains: can print-on-demand services claim protection under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act? Section 230 immunizes an “interactive service provider” from liability for content submitted by third parties; it’s the law that protects a website owner from liability for defamatory statements by users. That defense was addressed in briefs filed by both BookSurge and the plaintiff but was not addressed in the court’s ruling so that question survives for another day.
Jeffrey D. Neuburger is a partner in the New York office of Proskauer Rose LLP, and co-chair of the Technology, Media and Communications Practice Group. His practice focuses on technology and media-related business transactions and counseling of clients in the utilization of new media. He is an adjunct professor at Fordham University School of Law teaching E-Commerce Law and the co-author of two books, “Doing Business on the Internet” and “Emerging Technologies and the Law.” He also co-writes the New Media & Technology Law Blog.
Embedded in Bowling Green::Does 'Web First' Strategy Make Sense for Small Newspapers?.
The Bowling Green Daily News doesn’t have a “web first” strategy in the way we run our newspaper. That means that we don’t post articles to our website before they appear in print. Apart from some breaking local news, most major stories don’t appear on the Internet until after the press is running.
Right now, our readers aren’t particularly Internet savvy. Many still use dial-up for Internet access. They generally only check their email a couple times a week. They don’t know much about what’s available online. They still depend heavily on the printed paper for their news.
But that’s not going to stay the case for long. When our readers discover the Internet, and the myriad websites that have local information, they will start migrating from print to online. If readers are going to trust a newspaper, it has to be first with news more often than any competitor. So if we are going to keep readers in an online world, they have to know that when an important story breaks, they can quickly find coverage on our website.
Our Situation
The Daily News is a small afternoon paper — we serve a county readership of about 100,000. Our biggest competitor is the local television station, which reports news at 5:00, 6:00, and 10:00 pm.
In a community our size, most local news occurs in the evening. Government agencies meet late afternoon or early morning, but apart from the odd cantankerous session or controversial issue, rarely produce anything unexpected. Press conferences are usually held in mid-morning; most agencies notify us ahead of time so that we can have a story prepared to publish the same day that any public announcement is made.
The big hard news items for us are fatal traffic accidents, fires, particularly heinous assaults, high-interest trials and severe weather conditions. The TV station often mentions these events on their newscasts, but they rarely have video footage — unless it happens early enough in the day they can get a person to the scene and back before 8 p.m. They hardly ever do live shots for a breaking news story.
The competing television station will play the footage at 5:00, 6:00 or 10:00 p.m., or sometimes, if it’s a big story, on all three broadcasts. But our newspaper won’t have the story in readers’ hands until 5 p.m. (at the latest) the next day.
If we adopted a “web first” plan, we could beat the television station by hours and beat the print newspaper by many, many hours. We would “own the Internet” in Bowling Green.
Should We Do Web First?
Our Managing Editor Mike Alexieff, has repeatedly said that he has only one concern about adopting a “web first” strategy: killing the print edition.
“I don’t want to give our readers any more reasons to drop their subscription,” he said. “Our print edition pays the bills…our website only brings in 5% of our revenue and that is flat…what would happen to the newsroom if our print product goes away?”
Alexieff points out that there is no threat online that can compete with the Daily News. He sees no threat on the horizon because of the capital investment required to launch a site and get a staff in place. He cites the cost and lack of potential revenue as a reason to stick with print instead of adopting a “web first” strategy.
Troy Warren, the paper’s circulation director, sees it in a different light.
“The news has always been free,” he said. “Advertising has paid for the news. Circulation rates cover the cost of delivering the newspaper, so people have been paying us for delivery, not for the news. I’m not freaked by a ‘web first’ strategy; I think it’s inevitable. Someday my job may change and I would become an electronic delivery person instead of a print delivery person.”
He says he isn’t threatened by the changes that the newspaper is going through. He believes that eventually there will come a tipping point when newspapers will have to choose between investing resources in print or online; he isn’t sure how the Daily News will adapt when that time comes, but he is sure that time is fast approaching.
The Amplifier Already Does Web First
The site’s online director Chris Houchens reminded me that we already have a publication that takes a “web first” strategy: The Amplifier,, a monthly arts and entertainment tabloid that the newspaper brought under its wing about a year ago. That experiment has not been especially successful.
“We put stuff on the web first all the time with The Amplifier but if it’s not in the printed edition, we hear about it — even though the story may have been online for a month,” Houchens said. “We constantly push content to the tabloid’s MySpace page and tease in the print edition to find stories upcoming on the web. You would think this market of readers would be prime for web first.”
Traffic to The Amplifier website has stagnated, while advertising in the print edition continues to grow every month.
Houchens says that newspapers have to realize that the online newspaper does not serve the same function as a printed edition. A printed newspaper has to appeal to a wide general audience, while on the Internet, where users can go anywhere and read anything, websites that appeal to niche audiences are more successful. (Houchens wrote more about this idea on his blog recently.)
Online, we face another potential challenge from a nearby college newspaper.
“Our bigger threat (than the local television station) is the College Heights Herald,” Houchens said, mentioning the twice weekly newspaper for Western Kentucky University. “These students don’t have the newspaper mindset. They distribute the news like they consume it.”
The College Heights Herald has been quick to adapt to an Internet world, even sending out email alerts of story updates. Every time that Houchens has gone to post a breaking story for bgdailynews.com, he says he finds an email in his in-box from the College Heights Herald already addressing the same story. He says this is especially true with stories involving Western Kentucky University.
h2: What’s the Harm In Not Doing Web First?
The big harm in not having a web-first strategy is that we may fall deeper into complacency — and not be prepared for the day when our readers find that they don’t need us anymore. Once our readers discover RSS or even email alerts, there is a risk that they will find replacements for the printed newspaper. They will become their own editors, compiling a list of websites where they can search to get their own news.
If a certain reader is only interested in national and state news, sports, and obituaries, for example, it would be easy for him to find all that information online without ever visiting bgdailynews.com. In a future online world, we will have to find ways to keep our readers.
If an entrepreneur sees a crack in our dominance of covering the news, a wedge could be driven in and cause readers to abandon our print edition and our online edition. Currently, we are using the print content and revenue to subsidize our online edition. It’s our R&D for the future, when the day comes that our newspaper has to make that choice between print and web.
Mark Van Patten isn’t as smart as he thinks he is. He has compensated by surrounding himself with smart people. As a result, he in his 38th year of working at small newspapers, starting on the street as an ad sales rep and working his way up to publisher. Currently, Van Patten is general manager of the Daily News in Bowling Green, Kentucky. He blogs, Twitters, Flickrs, Diggs, Stumbles, Tumblrs, and Woopras his way through the web and is Linked-in. He blogs at MarkVanPatten.com for business and GoingLikeSixty.com for fun.
Report from Beirut::Arab Bloggers Meet to Discuss Free Speech, Reject 'Journalist' Label.
BEIRUT — A quick look at the Regions sidebar on DigiActive, a nine-month old blog that catalogs how activists use digital tools, reveals something unexpected. The site details case studies of online activists from around the world, but by far the largest number of stories involve bloggers from the Middle East and North Africa — 39 — compared with 30 for both Americas, 19 for Sub-Saharan Africa, 18 for all of Asia, and 11 for Europe.
There’s certainly nothing scientific about the numbers. Nevertheless, it reinforces a trend that emerged as I listened to Arab bloggers talk about their experiences at the recent closed First Arab Bloggers Meeting in Beirut: Despite the fact that they live under repressive regimes — or perhaps because of it — these individuals may be the next iconic defenders of free speech, not just in the Arab world but around the globe. Their ideas may land them in prison, but the lessons they teach have no borders thanks to the fluidity of the Web. Through websites like Digiactive and Global Voices, they can still inspire people around the world.
Sponsored by the German Heinrich Boll Foundation, the weekend conference brought together about 30 men and women in their 20s and 30s — most of whom also consider themselves to be free speech and human rights activists — from Bahrain, Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Morocco, Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Tunisia. Participants shared fascinating country reports: Morocco has 30,000 bloggers; Facebook is blocked in Tunisia; photojournalists help Egyptian bloggers by passing along outtakes. The sessions covered a variety of tools, like tagging and map mash-ups, as well as tactics for avoiding filtering and censorship.
Building Solidarity
The main theme cutting across all the conference panels, however, was the question of how Arab bloggers, who span 22 countries but share a common written language, can develop a sense of solidarity — beyond hosting websites like Free Kareem in Egypt and Free Tariq for imprisoned colleagues. And how can they connect with other important actors, such as non-government organizations and journalists?
No matter the approach, the question always seemed to rest at a crossroads between the responsiveness of human rights organizations when bloggers are detained (which is typically slower than when journalists are detained) and bloggers’ need to push the boundaries of free speech and to support their compatriots.
In short, some human rights organizations tend to think that if bloggers behaved more like journalists they would be easier to protect. Bloggers on the other hand don’t want to be victims or prisoners any longer than they have to be and emphasize that it shouldn’t matter what they say, only that they be allowed to say it. The bloggers expressed a general distaste for any imposed system of media ethics or regulations that may compromise the blogosphere’s ” nonconforming, independent character and particular spirit,” said Dina Fakoussa, the conference organizer.
They even largely rejected the idea of adopting a code of ethics instituted to combat hate speech, as some bloggers and journalists have joined forces to do in Bahrain.
Being Activists Instead of Journalists
Another reason bloggers reject the journalist label, while still acting as journalists in some ways, is because they often see themselves as taking a more active role in the news than simply reporting it. They are often instigators of change in the first place. A female blogger from Egypt, the name of whose blog translates to One Egyptian Woman, pointed out that larger role for bloggers.
“Most of the Egyptian bloggers are political activists and most of the bloggers use the common language of the streets, citizen media,” she said. “For example, when they say we want to have an initiative for organizing a demonstration, they were actually behind the launching of these initiatives, which is why their role is bigger, more responsive. When you see people saying ‘we’re here because we heard about this,’ it was because it was actually published in a blog.”
Several recent stories from the Arab media further illustrate her point:
In Egypt, where it is illegal for more than five people to assemble, legislation has been proposed that would give the president total control over all media in the country, including the Internet. The measure was put forward after some innovative activists used Facebook to organize protests against rising food prices in April.
In Tunisia, online video sites YouTube and Daily Motion have been blocked, after so-called cyber-activists used them to besiege the Tunisian presidential palace by linking video testimony of former political prisoners and human rights activists to the Carthage Presidential Palace on Google Maps. Just last week, Facebook was also added to the prohibited list.
This week in Morocco, blogger Mohammed Erraji was arrested, convicted and sentenced to two years in prison for allegedly “criticizing the king’s policy of free gifts to citizens,” according to a Facebook group set up to advocate for his release. Erraji is currently on provisional release.
King Abdullah of Jordan seems to favor keeping online media open, but his stance is still not entirely clear. He recently posted comments online to clarify remarks made during an interview. He encouraged people to post their comments, and their names, without fear “so long as they are not personally offending others, attempting character assassination or undermining the nation’s interest.” He also recently blocked a government motion, opposed by the Jordanian press corps, to incorporate online media into the state’s Press and Publication department.
These activists are blazing the way not only for blogging in their countries but also for increased press freedoms. Many balk at adopting the same centralized codes and standards that traditional journalists follow, believing that such codes would strip them of the main advantages of blogging — being able to advocate, exploit inefficiencies in bloated bureaucratic systems (whose officials often don’t know how to use the media they are trying to control), and use anonymous sources.
No matter what they’re called or what code they follow, they keep blogging. The more they write, challenge, and get around the official clampdown on using blogs and other social media tools, the more sites like DigiActive can document and distribute their acts of speaking truth to power.
Jessica Dheere is a freelance journalist and media consultant in Beirut. She directs the Social Media Exchange, which provides training to civil society actors in the strategic use of social media for social change, and also teaches workshops in online and citizen journalism in the Journalism Training Program at the American University of Beirut.
Video Report from ONA::Journalism Grads Need Basic Skills Plus Openness, Flexibility.
At journalism schools, professors like myself are trying to figure out what we should be teaching students so they can succeed in the newsrooms of today and tomorrow.
At the recent Online News Association annual conference in Washington DC, I posed that question to some of the brightest minds in the media, from editors to professors to entrepreneurs.
The advice for graduates was that they need journalism plus a new set of skills. The basics of journalism — curiosity, passion, accuracy, serving the public interest — were still important. But journalist students also need to learn about how the digital revolution has changed, and continues to change, the media.
This involves understanding how people are consuming media and how content flows online, as well as being aware of the importance of community and the conversation taking place online. Teaching journalism has become “journalism…plus” as Robert Scoble says below.Here is what folks at the ONA had to say in a series of video interviews I made with my Nokia N95 cell phone:
Jim Brady, executive editor of WashingtonPost.com:
Peter Horrocks, head of the BBC’s multimedia newsroom:
Geneva Overholser, director of the School of Journalism at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication:
Rosental Alves, director of the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas at the University of Texas in Austin:
Len Brody, CEO and co-founder of NowPublic.com:
Robert Scoble, prominent blogger and managing director of Fast Company TV, a business video network:
What do you think? What skills do you think are important for journalism graduates to have? How much of their skills should be with new media as well as old? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
Alfred Hermida is an online news pioneer and journalism educator. He is an assistant professor at the Graduate School of Journalism, the University of British Columbia, where he leads the integrated journalism program. He was a founding news editor of the BBC News website. He blogs at Reportr.net.
World View::Activists Face Obstacles Online in Winning Women's Rights in Iran.
Women in Iran have learned to unleash the Internet’s potential to promote freedom. In the country that has, according to the OpenNet Initiative, experienced the most explosive online growth in the Middle East, the Internet has become a battleground between a repressive regime and the increasingly active feminists demanding the end of legal discrimination against women.
Women activists, who in the 1990s relied on public demonstrations, in-person contacts and door-to-door advocacy, have now taken their initiatives to cyberspace. The feminist Campaign for Equality launched an online petition called One Million Signatures Demanding Changes to Discriminatory Laws in August 2006; it has already garnered more than 10,000 signatures. Radio podcasts dealing with women’s issues are accessible on the activists’ websites, and women also circulate information through expanding email lists.
For the first time, the women’s movement is not restricted to a certain elite, but includes women of all ages and backgrounds, from big cities to small villages. All these women are united in support of this cause — women who now share the same dream of no longer being second-class citizens.
After a wave of repression in the ’80s, Iranian mothers were reticent to let their daughters contest the new order. In contrast, today many support their daughters fighting for equal rights and some older women even get involved themselves. The power of the Internet, accessible to everyone, has removed the class barrier, allowing all woman to receive and exchange information. The movement has no centralized leadership: The Campaign for Equality is spearheaded by acting or former journalists or novelists barred from writing about their aspirations in the government-monitored mainstream media.
Background on Women’s Rights in Iran
The Iranian legal system is based on the Sharia, the Islamic law, and denies women many rights, including the rights to file for divorce or to claim custody of their children. Women are treated as second-class citizens in other ways, too:
> A woman’s court testimony is afforded less value than that of a man.
> In cases of wrongful injury or death, a woman’s punitive damages are limited to half those of a man.
> In cases of adultery, both partners can be sentenced to stoning, but a woman is stoned while buried up to her neck while a man’s arms are left free.
> The legal age of judicial responsibility is 15 for boys, but only 9 for girls — meaning that girls as young as 9 can be executed as adults.
The repressive Iranian regime does not tolerate criticism. It fears the women’s movement not only because it could elevate the status of women but also for its potential to fuel a broader trend demanding democratic reform in the country.
The government dismisses any accusations that it discriminates against women, but, according to Amnesty International, “women in Iran face far-reaching discrimination under the law.” Even so, Amnesty found that “with the increase of women’s literacy in the last 30 years, women are increasingly empowered to challenge discrimination.”
Activists Are Jailed
Several activists have been imprisoned for speaking out. Two “cyber-feminists” were held for more than a month at the infamous Evin prison in December after writing articles calling for equal rights with men. Jail was the one place they reported receiving equal treatment with men: Both men and women are made to endure very bad prison conditions and multiple interrogation sessions. When journalist Jila Baniyaghoob was released, she spoke of being locked away in a filthy cell, awakened several times each night and led, blindfolded, to yet another interrogation. She spent over a week in the notorious section 209, a detention center where Iranian secret services can hold political prisoners in solitary confinement and conduct torture with complete impunity.
Jila runs an association of Iranian women who have been active in spreading the word about women’s untold ordeals. She has published on her website stories ignored by the mainstream media for lack of interest or fear of official retribution. One such story was that of medical student Dr. Zahra Bani Yaghoob, who was arrested while walking with her fiance in a park in Hamedan province. The two were unable to show a legal marriage certificate when confronted by the local militia. Later that day, the police called her family to pick her up.
But when relatives arrived, they were told Yaghoob had committed suicide, a story disputed by her family and friends. Jila and others helped publicize the case, especially after a local judge acquitted the men suspected of killing Yaghoob. Thanks to pressure brought by these feminists, the case has now been moved to Tehran.
Speaking out is still dangerous for women in Iran. Jila has received many death threats because of her involvement in the Yaghoob case. In March 2007, 33 female journalists and activists were arrested while demonstrating for their rights. Four received prison sentences ranging from six months to a year.
Several days ago, cyber-feminists Parvin Ardalan, Jelveh Javaheri, Maryam Hosseinkhah, and Nahid Keshavarz, were sentenced to six months in prison after writing about women’s rights for online newspapers like Zanestan. They are still free pending the outcome of their appeals, but a sword of Damocles clearly hangs over their heads. Their sentences were intended to send a strong warning to force other female activists into self-censorship.
These four cyber-feminists, however, can count on domestic and international support: Ardalan was awarded Sweden’s Olof Palme Prize this year. Famous Nobel Prize recipient, women’s rights activist and lawyer Shirin Ebadi has agreed to represent all four. She told Reporters Without Borders earlier this month: “These four journalists have been convicted just for writing articles and criticizing laws that are unfair to Iranian women.”
Internet No Longer a Safe Haven
The Internet is no longer a safe heaven for free expression in Iran. A draft law passed by Parliament on first reading last July would extend the death penalty to crimes committed online, including bloggers and website editors who “promote corruption, prostitution or apostasy.” Shirin Ebadi told Reporters Without Borders that she was “worried because I see the situation getting worse. If Parliament ratifies the new law increasing sentences for crimes against society’s moral security, bloggers could get prison sentences.”
The backlash is not limited to judicial persecution. Authorities have also used technology to stop the activists. Iran is on Reporters Without Borders’ list of Internet enemies and has one of the world’s most extensive and sophisticated systems for censoring and filtering Internet content.
In recent years. women’s rights have become one of the top subjects targeted by government web censors, along with sites advocating political reform or hosting pornography. The online newspaper Tagir Bary Barbary (“Change for Equality”) was forced to change its URL after it was blocked several times. To get around official censorship, several “One Million Signatures” campaign websites are now hosted in various Iranian cities as well as in other countries, including the United States, Germany and Kuwait.
With the “One Million Signatures” campaign, the women’s movement in Iran has reached a new dimension beyond gender-only issues. The Men’s Committee of the One Million Signatures Campaign has also been collecting signatures. One of it members, Amir Yaghoub Ali, was arrested in July 2007 and spent 29 days in the Evin Prison. In an interview, he told Mahboubeh Hosseinzadeh that men’s involvement proves that “unequal laws do not only affect women, but harm all of society —- as they affect family and human relations more broadly.” But there are still many conservative forces within the Islamic republic who disapprove of the campaign.
Now the question is: What will happen once the one million signatures have been collected?
Activists believe the government will not be able to ignore them once they have collected such a huge number of signatures. The movement has become stronger than ever. Earlier this month, it scored a real success. The Parliament was debating a government-sponsored “protection of the family” bill that included two articles that would have allowed a man to take a second wife without his first wife’s permission and submitted the women’s dowry to taxes respectively. Lawmakers removed the articles after women activists threatened to hold peaceful demonstrations in front of the Parliament.
The authorities should think twice before rejecting the women’s demands or the One Million Signatures campaign could very well become a “One Million Person Demonstration.”
Lucie Morillon is the Washington, DC, director of Reporters Without Borders, an international press freedom organization. She covers press freedom issues in the U.S. and abroad and is a spokesperson for the group. She also handles advocacy work with Congress and has appeared on CNN, ABC and has been quoted in the New York Times, Washington Post, and other publications. Reporters Without Borders strives to obtain the release of jailed journalists and cyber-dissidents and supports an independent media and the free flow of information online. Morillon is the free-speech correspondent for MediaShift.
YouTube Activism::How Greenwald's Brave New Films Spreads Its Political Message Online.
Last month, Politico’s Mike Allen asked presidential hopeful John McCain the seemingly innocent question of how many houses he owned. McCain’s response — “I’ll have my staff get to you” — became a major focus for both the media and Obama’s campaign, who repeated it in just about every speech to illustrate that the Republican candidate was “out of touch” with the millions of Americans affected by the housing crisis.
But months before Allen asked that loaded question, liberal activist and filmmaker Robert Greenwald, founder of Brave New Films, had come across a news item mentioning McCain’s multiple homes.
“This was maybe six or eight months ago,” Greenwald told me. “And I said, ‘nobody knows about that. This is really interesting.’ And I wondered if we could get video of the homes.”
So, in an editorial meeting with his staff, they came up with a three-pronged approach to the story. First, they would collect video footage of all of the candidate’s houses. Then they began combing through news reports and video to find quotes from McCain about the housing crisis (“Because it was not just to show he had the homes, it was to show that his policy was reflective of him having those homes,” Greenwald explained). Finally, they sat down and interviewed Americans who had lost their properties to foreclosure.
“At which point the editors took over,” he recalled. “I worked with them for three weeks. We went up and back, making 12, 13, 14 versions, getting the timing right, getting the balance right between the three stories.”
The resulting video, “McCain’s Mansions,” launched on YouTube several days before Allen approached McCain with the question about his houses. It has now amassed over 400,000 views.
From Documentaries to YouTube
Greenwald doesn’t take complete credit for the media blow-up that ensued, but he said that it certainly helped in driving the issue into the national spotlight. Though most of his career has been spent working in traditional film — he’s helped make over 50 television movies and feature films and then transferred over to documentaries — for more than a year now he has focused intensely on short online political videos produced and distributed by Brave New Films.
Since he began working in this new medium, the company’s YouTube videos have received more than 26 million views. And later this month, Brave New Films will be distributing what it claims to be the first full-length feature movie made by a major filmmaker to be released for free online: Michael Moore’s documentary “Slacker Uprising.”
Greenwald first migrated to online video almost two years ago, after directing a wave of successful documentaries, including “Outfoxed,” a film about the alleged conservative bias of Fox News, and “Iraq for Sale,” a movie that later led to him testifying before a congressional committee about war profiteering.
“Right at the time that we were most successful, we went counterintuitive in our vision that we were going to work on political video for this new thing that we were starting to hear about called YouTube,” he said. “Because it’s just a few years old and there was no evidence at the time to support the fact that people would watch anything other than cats playing the piano or naked women falling down in showers. But we analyzed it carefully here, and we felt it was a really strong opportunity and no one was doing it.”
The group started with a series called “Fox Attacks,” pointing out instances when the news outlet unfairly attacked Obama or other political figures. It produced videos that harshly criticized Rudy Giuliani, using interviews with the families of 9/11 victims to argue that he shouldn’t be running for president based on how he handled the tragedy. And then after McCain announced his presidential ambitions, Brave New Films started what would become one of its most popular series, “The Real McCain.” One of the videos in this series, “McCain’s YouTube Problem Just Became a Nightmare,” has received more than 4 million views.
Brave New Films has a staff of about 40 people both producing and promoting the videos. Even so, Greenwald refuses to take a back seat in the actual directing of the pieces.
“Once a director, always a director,” he replied. “We die with our boots on…I still play the classic director role, which means driving the editors crazy, going through many versions helping drive the story. I always ask, even on a three minute piece, what’s the story? What’s the beginning? What’s the middle? What’s the end?”
Building Buzz and Criticism
Greenwald doesn’t take a salary, but his entire staff is paid. Since most of Brave New Films’ work is released for free, it raises much of its money through donations and fundraising. Greenald said that he has over 9,000 donors, ranging from those who give $5 a month to others who donate thousands of dollars at a time.
Though Brave New Films’ YouTube channel has nearly 20,000 subscribers, its staff still heavily promotes its videos. Greenwald said they will typically approach bloggers first to create early buzz before reaching out to contacts in the mainstream media. His YouTube videos have been widely linked on left-of-center sites like Daily Kos, Crooks and Liars, and Huffington Post, and they’ve also made front page on social news site Digg.
Predictably, Greenwald has been the recipient of ire from the conservative blogosphere, most notably Hot Air, one of the most popular sites on the right. The publication has labeled the filmmaker a “feeble leftist propagandist” and accused Greenwald of taking a McCain quote about staying in Iraq for 100 years wildly out of context.
“I dare say, this almost constitutes fearmongering, doesn’t it?” Allahpundit asked rhetorically. “Exit question: Can a halfwit who thinks poetry slams are an effective tool for anti-war messaging ever really ‘lighten up and get a life’?”
Most of the criticism of Greenwald on Hot Air comes directly from Allahpundit, who has taken the time to mock his videos on multiple occasions. “Are they going after McCain because they know he’s the likely nominee and want to start beating up on him early?” he asked of Brave New Films. “Or because they suspect he’s a closet liberal who betrayed the cause? Or both?”
A Pass-Around Documentary
On September 23, Brave New Films will be releasing its biggest project to date: Michael Moore’s “Slacker Uprising,” a documentary of his speaking tour to swing state universities to rally young people to the voting booths in November. Those who wish to watch the film must sign up at the Slacker Uprising website to download it for free.
“I’ve known Michael for a long time; we actually marched together at the RNC,” Greenwald said. “He called me out of the blue a couple months ago saying, ‘I’ve got this film, and I’ve got this crazy idea to make it free for people. And after seeing how you guys are working online, I was wondering if you’re interested.’ I said it’s a brilliant idea, and we’d love to use our expertise to help get it out there and reach as many people as possible. And we were off to the races.”
But this isn’t the first time Moore toyed with the idea of free online distribution. After the release of his 2004 documentary “Fahrenheit 9/11,” he famously said, “I don’t agree with copyright laws and I don’t have a problem with people downloading the movie and sharing it…as long as they’re not trying to make a profit off my labor.” Predictably, the film’s distributor, Lions Gate Films, did not endorse this move.
Greenwald said that he has had no editorial input in Moore’s film; Brave New Films is merely acting as a distributor. But does he care if downloaders pass the film around? And should people only download it from the movie’s official website?
“We want everyone in the world to email it,” he replied. “We want everyone in the world to copy it. We want everyone in the world to see it. We will be making every effort to get it out there. The website will be the home base, if you will, and then from there we want it to spread and spread and spread.”
I asked him to compare working in online media to his background in more traditional filmmaking.
“There’s a great line about democracy not being a spectator’s sport,” Greenwald said. “If you believe that then the opportunity to take one’s storytelling skills and use them around critical issues is quite extraordinary. I love working in film, TV, video, digital and telling stories. Now, telling those stories potentially has an impact on people’s lives and issues.
“When I worked for the studio, I felt responsibility to the studio or network because they gave you X millions of dollars for a film or a mini series, and I felt responsible to do a good job. But when you’re dealing with Fox News, or you’re dealing with people who lost loved ones in Iraq, or you’re dealing with economic disparity in this country — man, the stakes are high. But it’s exciting, and I consider it a plus that you’re using your craft, your skill set to reach and talk to people about the most important issues of the day.”
Simon Owens is an associate blogger for MediaShift. He also writes the Bloggasm blog, launched in late 2005 and focusing on the intersection of new and old media. It often includes in-depth feature articles on a variety of media subjects.
- Palin email hack
Anon group uses Wikileaks to reveal Yahoo mail- Napster sold
Best Buy pays less than annual revenues- Hack the Debate
Current TV will run Twitter posts during debate- Sticky-note slinkys
Coke/Mentos duo goes Post-It crazy (with sponsors)- OJR reborn
Media site back as blog on Knight Digital CenterDigging Deeper::NYU Professor Stifles Blogging, Twittering by Journalism Student.
After New York University journalism student Alana Taylor wrote her first embed report for MediaShift on September 5, it didn’t take long for her scathing criticism of NYU to spread around the web and stir conversations. Taylor thought that her professor, Mary Quigley, was not up to speed on social media and podcasting — even though the class she was teaching was called “Reporting Gen Y.” And Taylor felt that NYU was not offering her enough classes about new media; she cited the requirement that students bring print editions of the New York Times to class as one example of their outdated mindset.
Not surprisingly, Quigley was not happy with the story and was upset that Taylor had not sought permission to write her first-person report about the class, and told Taylor it was an invasion of privacy to other students in the class. By Taylor’s account, Quigley had a one-on-one meeting with Taylor to discuss the article, and Quigley made it clear that Taylor was not to blog, Twitter or write about the class again. That was upsetting to Taylor, who had been planning a follow-up report for MediaShift that would include Quigley’s viewpoint and interviews with faculty.
Taylor described to me what happened when Quigley brought up the article in class later.
“She told the class to read the article,” Taylor said. “Then she asked, ‘You all read Alana’s article, what did you think about it?’ There was silence for a good 30 or 45 seconds, and it was awkward and weird. And she said, ‘OK, we can all agree that there will be no more blogging or Twittering about the class.’ It was weird. It seemed like the students were scared to say anything.”
Later, some students in the class asked Taylor outside of class what she did wrong. She explained that according to Quigley, it would be an invasion of the students’ privacy if she wrote about the class. Another student told her, “I didn’t want to say anything in class but I really loved the piece and totally agreed with everything you said.” (The other students in the class did not want to be identified in this story.)
Because Taylor felt that writing a follow-up for MediaShift was not a good idea in light of her professor’s admonition, I decided to take on the task of finding out why a journalism student at NYU would not be allowed to report on what was going on in her classroom. First, I wondered what NYU’s policy was on blogging in or about a class. It ends up that there is no policy.
“We don’t have a policy,” said Brooke Kroeger, director of the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at NYU (the journalism school was recently renamed). “Truthfully it’s never come up before. It’s not the sort of thing that we would control. Professors make their own choices about grading, about deadlines, about standards, about classroom participation — it’s not something we legislate. They’re decided by the instructors generally.”
Kroeger would not talk specifically about Taylor’s piece for MediaShift because she said legally she is not allowed to talk about a student’s performance in public. She defended Quigley’s decision to restrict live-blogging and Twittering because it would be a distraction in a classroom, and said professors could choose their own appropriate policy restricing or allowing students to report afterward on what went on in class.
“Given the new means of communication and how instantaneous they are, it might be a good subject for a forum,” Kroeger said. “If you follow the Chronicle of Higher Education, you’ll see people come on and talk about IM’ing in class and texting in classes, and it’s distracting. People aren’t excited about that in any circumstance. But on the other hand, we’re providing a total WiFi environment with computers in your face.”
Permission Before Blogging
When I approached Quigley to have her explain her ban on blogging, Twittering and writing about what goes on in her class, she at first directed my query to Kroeger. Later, she wrote back to me by email:
I will confirm that I asked the class not to text, email or make cell phone calls during class. It’s distracting to both me and other students, especially in a small class seated around a conference table. This has always been my policy, and I would hazard a guess that it’s the policy of many professors no matter the discipline.
However, I did say after the class session they were free to text, Twitter, blog, email, post on Facebook or whatever outlet they wanted about the course, my teaching, the content, etc. And, because much of the subject matter of this course relates to them and their Gen Y experiences I would not be surprised if they did. At this point, as a course requirement, they all have blogs. [Emphasis added by her.]
So was Quigley now softening her stance on students writing about the substance of her class? When I followed up and asked her whether that meant students still needed to get permission before writing about class, she said: “Yes, I would certainly require a student to ask permission to use direct quotes from the class on a blog written after class.”
I wondered if there was a legal basis for NYU requiring students to get permission before live-blogging or even writing about a class afterwards. As a private school, NYU might be able to restrict a student’s reporting on what went on in a classroom — but that would go against everything that journalism schools are teaching students about the First Amendment and freedom of the press.
William Creeley is the director of legal and public advocacy for the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), which helps defend students’ free speech rights. Creeley said that NYU might have legal grounds for restricting what students write about classroom activities, but that it would look hypocritical for a school that touts freedom of the press.
“While it might be technically true [that a private school could restrict speech], it would be evidence of an awfully meager interpretration of the rights of free expression which NYU explicitly guarantees its students in its promotional materials and its student handbook,” said Creeley, who got his undegraduate and law school degrees from NYU. “They could make that claim but I don’t know if that would be consistent with their imagination of themselves as a modern university with those rights guaranteed.”
As for the claim that live-blogging would be an invasion of privacy, Creeley thought it was more of a red herring.
“The idea that live-blogging or Twittering would be an invasion of privacy — from a legal standpoint, that doesn’t hold water,” he said. “There’s no possible expectation on the teacher’s part for privacy about what is taught in the classroom. If that’s the case, then no one could write a teacher feedback form at the end of class. That would go out the window. That’s a far cry from what goes on in one’s own home, or in a telephone coversation or email exchange.”
Floyd Abrams is a veteran media lawyer who has argued First Amendment cases before the Supreme Court, and is a partner at Cahill, Gordon & Reindel. He thought that a rule banning live-blogging or Twittering in class made sense, but restricting coverage outside class was not going to work. Here is part of an email he sent me on the subject:
Students have irritated their professors for years. William F. Buckley’s ‘God and Man at Yale’ was a best-selling early 1950s expose of what Buckley viewed as the teaching to Yale undergraduates of left-wing, collectivist, godless mush. Professors objected to the notion that what they said in class should be publically revealed and claimed that such revelations would be ‘chilling.’ Just a few years ago, Columbia undergraduates who viewed certain pro-Palestinian and anti-Israeli statements of certain professors as being false, misleading and sometimes intimidating went public to newspapers, in films, and the like expressing their dismay. Once again, the professors and others in the faculty believed that such criticism — based on what had been said in class — was inappropriate.
I disagree. My own view is that while student commentary that is critical of ongoing classes can lead to a level of tension in class at the same time it makes extremely difficult a teacher-student relationship…it does not violate the ‘privacy’ of the classroom and should not be banned or punished. Would it be llegal to do so? It certainly wouldn’t be unconstitutional since NYU isn’t a state school and thus subject to First Amendment limitations. Whether it violates NYU rules I have no idea. I would be very surprised, however, if NYU permitted a student to be punished for writing such a critique. Surprised and disappointed.
Consulting the NYU Journalism Handbook
So what kind of applicable rules does NYU have in its Journalism Handbook for Students? The Handbook’s author, NYU assistant professor and tech journalist Adam Penenberg, was quick to point me to a passage that would call into question Taylor’s “undercover” reporting technique:
Before engaging in any undercover work for a class assignment, consult your professor. Carefully consider whether your reporting could violate criminal or civil law. Weigh the potential harm involved. Could relying on subterfuge get you arrested? Could it lead to violence? Does it invade someone’s privacy, especially in a non-public area like a home or an office? Are there laws in your state against recording without a person’s permission, or specifically against using hidden cameras? Might it undermine the validity of your story? These are serious questions to consider.
Penenberg thought that I should have required Taylor to get permission from her professor before writing about the class, even though it would be a moot point to ask permission to go undercover of the person who is the subject of the story. Penenberg explains that there is a difference in classroom discussions when they are private or for public discussion, and that the tenor would change if students and professor knew they were being recorded by a journalist or blogger.
“I have taught classes in which the tenor of conversation could have changed drastically if a student were to announce that she were going to blog about it,” he said. “For example, in a media ethics course we talked about naming the accused in rape cases but not the alleged victim. This, as you can imagine, led to a very contentious debate, because false accusations can ruin a life and career. In a classroom you are safe to express unpopular opinions but you probably wouldn’t do it if you felt it would end up on a blog post somewhere.”
Penenberg said that the school’s policy is that they would require a student to ask permission before live-blogging a class or blogging about it after the fact or writing an article.
“That said, I already allow students to blog about a [grad school] class I teach,” he said. “As part of my syllabus for ‘Guerrilla News,’ I have students blog about their multimedia projects, and that includes, if they so choose, to blog about what transpires inside and outside of class. I invite speakers to come in and students can blog about that, too. Part of the blog focus is to help students research their topic more thoroughly; the other is to be the ‘reality show’ behind the making of their multimedia project. But another professor might feel differently.”
While Penenberg touted the multimedia strengths of NYU’s journalism graduate program, Kroeger defended the undergraduate program by saying that new media was not shunted off into specialized classes but weaved into basic courses. She noted that classes now employed “beat blogs,” a specialty of NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen, who also teaches an undergraduate course on “The Rise of the Web.”
I asked Rosen what he thought would be the right policy about students blogging about their classes.
“Often our policy discussions begin when an incident occurs and we have to think about it…’what’s our policy?’” he said via email. “This story may well have that effect. And the handbook, a faculty document, may well prohibit what Alana did; but to me that is not necessarily the key question because the handbook is ours to write and re-write. It has to adapt. I’m not sure what the ‘right’ policy is, Mark. I know that when a journalist wants to write about [or film] an NYU class we are required to get privacy waivers…It’s not clear to me that NYU would even allow us to have a faculty policy that reporting on a class without privacy waivers is okay, as long as you are embedded and undercover. That’s the kind of thing we have to know before we re-write a handbook or make rules for students.”
Kroeger, meanwhile, defends the decisions of her professors to set rules around blogging and writing about their classes, and thinks a forum on the topic would be a good way to share knowledge with other schools and brainstorm ideas. When I told her that NYU as a private school could legally restrict students from writing about classes, she demurred from that option.
“You could say that, but that’s not the way I would address this,” she said. “I just wouldn’t go there. In the end we have the same issues that any academic institution would have. It’s not quite a pure journalistic experience, it’s a classroom experience also, and there are some values that come into chafing. There’s a little bit of awkwardness there and we want to teach journalism and the highest level of journalism and all that that entails.”
What do you think? Should journalism schools restrict live-blogging or Twittering in class as distractions or use them as teaching tools? Should students be required to get permission before writing about what goes on in their classrooms? Share your thoughts or academic experiences in the comments below.
Blog History 101::Scott Rosenberg Traces the Blogosphere's Origins.
In July of last year, the Wall Street Journal published an article titled “Happy Blogiversary,” claiming that it had officially been 10 years since the blog was born. The writer cited Jorn Barger, owner of a site called Robot Wisdom, as the first blogger. After all, it was Barger who first coined the term weblog in 1997, a word that would be later truncated into the monosyllabic blog.
But Scott Rosenberg wasn’t convinced. A co-founder of Salon.com and former technology editor for that site, Rosenberg knew that several online destinations that preceded Barger’s site still met the technical definition of a blog — a website that publishes updates in reverse chronological order — including Dave Winer’s Scripting News and Ric Ford’s Macintouch. By the time that Journal article was published, Rosenberg had already been kicking around the idea of writing a book on the history of blogs for some time.
“I was on tour for my first book, Dreaming In Code, in 2007,” he told me recently. “I was out in Portland and I was with Matt Haughey, the guy who started Metafilter and an early blogger himself…He’s a smart guy full of interesting ideas and he just offhandedly said that nobody has really written the history of blogging. Having just written one ambitious and difficult book, I said, ‘Yeah, nobody has, and nobody will.’”
Famous last words. And the Wall Street Journal article only stoked the flames; Rosenberg soon became even more convinced that such an historical account was necessary, both for the tech-savvy community and the laymen who only stumble across oblique references to blogs in more mainstream news outlets. He finally approached his agent with the idea in late 2007, half expecting it to be shot down.
“When I started blogging at Salon in 2002, I thought, ‘We’re too late for this blogging thing, we missed the boat.’ I thought that blogging had happened already,” he explained. “For this book, one of my concerns was that it might be difficult to sell because blogging history is ancient history in [Silicon] Valley. And here in the Bay Area, blogging is certainly an important thing, but it has been partially eclipsed by social media. So I was a little worried how this would fly.”
But his agent went for it, and he spent the next several months writing a proposal for the book, fleshing out the direction he wanted to take and how he would conduct research. His agent approached Crown, the publisher of his first book, and a few days before Christmas 2007 the company officially made an offer on the project.
The Evolution of Blogging
Speaking with Rosenberg about his book, I felt like we were discussing evolutionary biology. Rosenberg’s research goes beyond highlighting the earliest blogs, and slowly pieces its way through the primordial ooze of the Internet, tracing a line of websites in the early 1990s that first began taking on blog-like characteristics.
“Most of the people I’ve talked to, I’ve asked who had inspired them,” he said. “Who were you reading when you decided to start blogging? To a certain point that becomes a harder and harder thing the further back you go. For instance, Justin Hall started his site in January 1994, before most of us had heard of the web. I asked him, ‘Well, you’re one of the first bloggers, was there anyone out there who you were getting inspiration from?’ And he pointed me to this other guy named Ranjit Bhatnagar who was keeping a site at moonmilk.com in 1993. And, sure enough, it was a reverse chronological list of stuff he found on the web.”
As with most web innovations, the blogosphere moved forward in fits and starts before exploding across the Net, creating a quick succession of firsts — the first person to get fired because of something written on a blog; the first first blog to receive a major journalism award, etc. Rosenberg sees it as his job to examine the myriad turning points in the medium, exploring how they affected the practice of blogging and led to further innovations in the field.
To do this, he interviewed over 100 bloggers, traveling to blog conferences and other online media meet-ups. Rosenberg uses these first-person accounts to detail how the bloggers pioneered new methodologies of online journalism and how they handled the unforeseen hurdles that often sprouted up like weeds. As blogging became more widespread, practitioners often faced the same ethical and practical scenarios that have plagued mainstream journalists for years.
H2.Recognition as a Legit News Source
While discussing pivotal breakthrough moments in blogging history, our conversation eventually turned to Joshua Marshall, founder of liberal political website TalkingPointsMemo. Marshall recently won a George Polk Award for his reporting on the firing of several U.S. attorneys — he is the first blogger to have won the award. Marshall first reached prominence several years ago after exposing controversial statements made by then-Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott praising Strom Thurmond’s racial segregation platform. Before speaking to Rosenberg, I had assumed — incorrectly — that TalkingPointsMemo first broke that story.
“I should say to begin with that this is one of the valuable things for me to do,” Rosenberg told me. “You go dig into these stories like the Trent Lott story, which I go into great detail in the book. It turns out to be really complicated. Josh is credited, and deservedly so, for playing a very important part in that story. But he didn’t break the story.
“It was more like ABC News had actually reported on the story, but then it just disappeared and dropped off the media map. And then Josh Marshall, with the help of some other bloggers, started beating the drum on it and said, ‘Wait a minute, this really is a story.’ He started digging up tidbits to show that what Lott had said was actually something that he had been saying over and over through the years; it wasn’t this bizarre slip. He put that together, and then five or six days later, the Big Media picks it up again, and it becomes a story.”
This incident highlights the often-contentious relationship that has bubbled up between the mainstream media and the blogosphere, one in which words like “curmudgeons” and “amateurs” are bandied about in haphazard jabs as bloggers clamor for legitimacy in the 24-hour news cycle. Several traditional journalists had mocked Marshall, for instance, when he first began reporting on the U.S. attorney firings, only to later apologize when the controversy ended up being newsworthy.
The Original Pioneers
When it comes to the history of blogging, few are more knowledgeable than Rebecca Blood, the first person to attempt to write a comprehensive article on the subject. Her essay, “Weblogs: a history and perspective,” approaches the issue from the point of view of an insider who has been immersed in the blogosphere since almost the beginning.
Written and published in 2000, the essay begins by listing a number of bloggers who emerged in the late 1990s. This was before the advent of Web 2.0. and the ready availability of free blogging software, meaning that most of these early web writers had to create their sites from scratch.
“I was one of the original bandwagon jumpers,” Blood told me. “People at this point consider me to be one of the original bloggers, but from my perspective I came late to the party. The original blogs started in 1997 and that’s when I became an avid reader. At that time, you could read all of them every day; there were just a handful.”
She described this first group as a close-knit band of web enthusiasts, a herd of filters whose sole focus was to find interesting pages online and then post links to them. It was in this Wild West of the web — when the tech bubble was quickly approaching the popping point — that three main factions emerged, each scrambling to gain legitimacy.
Besides bloggers, “There were two other groups of people at the time who were producing online work,” Blood said. “There were the journalers and the zinesters; both preceded the weblogs, really.”
I pointed out that online journalers were usually considered bloggers, to which she refuted, “They weren’t blogs; they were a completely separate community. They had a different form where they would put one entry on a page and then you’d have to click on a link to go to the next entry. It was as if they had transferred a print journal to the web.”
She explained that it was often the zinesters, who wrote for and published online magazines, called ezines, who looked down upon the early bloggers. Their argument — that they spent hours crafting publishable prose while the bloggers merely linked to the content of others — is still repeated today by mainstream media critics.
“But the bloggers, those who were doing it, really did think what we were doing was important,” Blood said. “We were filtering the web for people. We were pointing to things we thought were interesting. It’s kind of ironic, given that there are so many weblogs now. When we started, we were creating signal to noise — we were trying to pull out the good stuff on the web. But now, of course, there are so many weblogs that they just contribute to the noise. It’s impossible to even read all the good ones in a day much less read all of them.”
Most early bloggers, including Blood, hadn’t expected how widespread this noise would become — or rather, how many millions of blogs would sprout up after free software became widely available. Though Blood predicted that the medium would gain in legitimacy and popularity, she thought these gains would only be reflected in growing readership.
“I stopped making these predictions years ago when all my predictions were wrong,” she told me. “When we were doing it back then, I honestly never envisioned the expanse of the blog universe. I thought that those of us who were blogging would gain larger and larger audiences over time, until we had sort of a mainstream-sized readership. It never occurred to me that everybody would want to blog, that instead of 150 blogs with 10,000-people sized audiences, there would be millions of blogs. That’s completely backwards of what I expected. So as much as I was a pioneer, I was still thinking in old media terms.”
Bloggers Ignorant of Their Past
I asked Rosenberg to compare his book project to Blood’s essay; in what ways would his work expand on hers? He explained that her piece was written from the perspective of someone immersed in the field, what he called “primary source material.”
“On one level, I think her account is very much of its time and place and shaped by her experience up to that point,” he said. “In fact, I interviewed her a few months ago. I sat down and talked to her about all the changes between then and now. A big difference is that my book is an attempt to write for a wide readership, just as ‘Dreaming in Code’ is an attempt to write about software development for people outside the software world…It’s a little bit of a different approach than Rebecca’s post because a lot of it centers around profiles of people whose stories represented some particular aspect of blogging, or some problem that blogging brings up.”
But though the book — tentatively titled “Say Everything” and scheduled to come out next summer — will be written to engage a non-tech savvy audience, Rosenberg hopes that it will have a certain appeal to already-converted web evangelists. These very online media enthusiasts, he has found, are often clueless as to their medium’s origins.
“Because I think that the technology industry and the web community are often a little bit ignorant of their own past,” he said. “I found this writing about software development in ‘Dreaming in Code.’ A lot of programmers are really smart people, but then a lot of them know shockingly little about their own field. It’s a cliche but a line of great merit, the one about ‘if you don’t know the mistakes of the past, you’re doomed to repeat them.’”
Given the almost daily news stories spurring heated debate over blogger ethics — Gawker’s reprinting of Sarah Palin’s hacked emails, for example — such a book could help people put today’s ecosystem of bloggers and journalists (and blogger/journalists) into a better historical context.
Simon Owens is a former newspaper journalist and an associate blogger for MediaShift. He currently works as an online analyst for New Media Strategies. You can read more of his writing at his blog or contact him at simon.bloggasm@gmail.com.
Photo of Rebecca Blood by Sebastian DeLaOsa
Top Five Week Two Hundred Seven.
- Raja Petra Kamarudin
Malaysian blogger sentenced to jail without trial- Palin hack suspect
David Kernell has apartment searched by FBI- T-Mobile G-1
First phone with Google Android unveiled- CBS Eyemobile
Takes on CNN iReport with iPhone app- Comcast throttling
Admits to FCC that it targeted BitTorrentDigging Deeper::Political Fact-Check Sites Proliferate, But Can They Break Through the Muck?.
As the U.S. elections near the finish line, the presidential campaigns are throwing around enough verbal attacks and inflammatory advertising to make the average voter’s head spin. Fortunately, there are now three excellent sources for fact-checking political discourse online: Annenberg Public Policy Center’s FactCheck.org, the St. Petersburg Times and Congressional Quarterly’s PolitiFact and the Washington Post’s Fact Checker blog. And on the local level, there’s a new crowd-funded effort from Spot.us, Newsdesk.org and Public-Press.org to fact-check local political mailers in San Francisco.
While these sites have grown in name recognition and popularity over the past few months, they still lag behind the efforts of partisan groups who fact-check the media themselves at Newsbusters.org (for conservatives) and Media Matters (for liberals). A scan of web traffic, as measured by Compete.com, and links from the blogosphere, as measured by Technorati, shows how far the non-partisan efforts lag behind the partisan ones:
Newsbusters
Compete.com traffic (August ‘08): 472,489 unique visitors
Technorati rank: No. 67
Google News mentions: 79Media Matters
Compete.com traffic (August ‘08): 312,728 unique visitors
Technorati rank: No. 47
Google News mentions: 58FactCheck.org
Compete.com traffic (August ‘08): 277,555 unique visitors (up 1,000% in the past year)
Technorati rank: No. 89
Google News mentions: 1,254 (though this includes syndicated stories by FactCheck)PolitiFact
Compete.com traffic (August ‘08): 87,602 unique visitors
Technorati rank: None (2,560 blog reactions)
Google News mentions: 190Washington Post’s Fact Checker blog
Compete.com traffic: N/A
Technorati rank: None (2,357 blog reactions)
Google News mentions: 171Interestingly, the non-partisan sites receive a greater number of Google News mentions, indicating that more established news sources are citing them. But the non-partisan sites also have to struggle to break through the clutter of so much media banter and political talking heads on TV around the issue of who is lying and who is truthful in political discourse.
Bill Adair is the Washington bureau chief at the St. Petersburg Times and editor of PolitiFact, which just won a Knight-Batten Award for Innovation in Journalism. Adair says that political journalists have been handcuffed by the idea that being fair means reporting what both sides say in a campaign, withoutcalling out politicians for falsehoods.
“Political journalists — myself included — have been too timid about fact-checking in the past because we were afraid we would be criticized for being biased,” Adair said via email. “But facts aren’t biased. Now, we are finally calling the balls and strikes in the campaign the way we should have in the past.”
Can Non-Partisan Sites Break Through?
So how can FactCheck.org, PolitiFact, and Washington Post’s Fact Checker blog get more notice from confused voters? FactCheck.org started in late 2003, is now syndicated on the Newsweek website, and includes a blog called The FactCheck Wire and weekly video reports. PolitiFact is just a year old, but now includes many ways for people to get their “Truth-O-Meter” reports: widgets, RSS feeds, twice-weekly emails and an iPhone application. The Post’s Fact Checker blog includes Pinocchio nose ratings for falsehoods and asks the audience to help in fact-checking.
Reviewing these sites, I wondered whether pointing out factual errors would really lead the candidates to change their ways or stop lying. Adair said it wasn’t up to non-partisan sites to do that.
“Newspapers run our items in their papers,” he said. “So there are plenty of opportunities for people to see our work. If the candidates are still making exaggerations and telling falsehoods, that’s between them and the voters. Our job is not to get politicians to stop lying. Our job is to inform voters. After that, it’s up to the voters.”
Right now, though, it’s the partisan fact-check sites that are getting more traction and are more popular among bloggers who link to them. Adair doesn’t believe that they will win the trust of a broader public, however.
“I think partisan fact-checking sites will always have their biases questioned,” he said. “The best fact-checking comes from non-partisan journalistic sources.”
Adair said that PolitiFact is “completely transparent” and includes sources to back up its stories as well as author archives for people to check. But there is no personal information for the writers that might point to how they’ve voted in the past, or if they’ve volunteered for political campaigns. FactCheck.org states clearly that its publisher accepts “NO funding from business corporations, labor unions, political parties, lobbying organizations or individuals. It is funded primarily by the Annenberg Foundation.”
But does such transparency and dedication to neutrality matter to the public? They are becoming less enthralled with the work of traditional journalists — who they suspect as being biased — and like to go to partisan sites for political news online.
“I think that the fact checkers are useful, in so much as the public actually cares about the facts,” said Shaun Dakin, CEO and founder of the National Political Do Not Contact Registry to stop robo-calls from candidates. “The bottom line is that most of the electorate sees the day-to-day campaigning through their own rose-colored glasses. Most Democrats think McCain is lying. Most GOP voters think Obama is a loser with no experience. Every day they see the election through those frames…Unfortunately, it is an echo chamber — particularly on the Internet.”
Robert Steele, a journalism professor at DePauw University and senior faculty at the Poynter Institute (which also owns the St. Petersburg Times), said that the fact-checking of politicians’ statements goes back to the work of the late Carole Kneeland in the ’80s in Texas. Steele thinks the various non-partisan sites do have a challenge in breaking through the media clutter online.
“It’s hard to keep up with the candidates’ statements and their ads, especially when there’s so much puffery and some outright lying by the candidates,” he said via email. “And then there is the ‘viral’ nature of the Internet (and to some degree talk television and talk radio) that rapidly passes along falsehoods. The key to successful fact-checking efforts is creating a rigorous process for research that can work quickly in this white-hot media environment. I do believe the good fact-checking sites make a difference, especially the ones that have credibility based on their independence and their skilled work.”
Getting Local
While the fact-check sites are focused very closely on the national campaigns, who’s watching the local races? The new Spot.us site is an experiment in “crowdfunding” journalism run by Knight News Challenge winner David Cohn, who writes for MediaShift’s sister site, Idea Lab. Spot.us recently helped raise $2,500 for the sites Newsdesk.org and Public-Press.org to run a non-partisan series of stories fact-checking local political mailers in San Francisco.
Michael Stoll, the project director for the non-commercial Public-Press.org site, told me that Newsdesk.org’s Josh Wilson had a longtime interest in doing election ad fact-checking so it was a good fit for them to work together on it. Stoll hopes the site’s new “San Francisco 2008 Election Truthiness” series will go beyond mailers and include ads in other media.
“Our first trial run we’re focusing on the deluge of paper that stuffs our mailboxes and gets hung from our doorknobs in the weeks preceding the election,” Stoll said via email. “We’ll also try to capture radio, TV and Internet broadcast ads. In addition, we’ve already started picking apart the partisan, paid arguments in the voter-information booklet that the city distributes to every voter. All these ads are fair game.”
Stoll says their reports will be featured on local public radio station KALW and likely in print with the San Francisco Daily Post. Despite this cross-platform outreach, it’s unclear how interested the public will be in such a project. Stoll says that the journalists writing the reports will be vetted for partisanship or any hidden agendas, and will include biographies saying where they’ve worked and whether they have been activists for political causes before.
“I think that while it’s unrealistic to have a large percentage of San Francisco voters reading this online with only viral promotion and no marketing budget, we would hope to get several thousand readers on each story this fall,” he said. “We also want to generate significant buzz in key constituencies, such as the campaigns themselves, because part of the point of fact-checking is to send a signal to advocates on all sides that there are independent watchdogs keeping track of their perhaps exaggerated claims and counterclaims.”
As newspapers and magazines cut back on their own staff of fact-checkers, will these local and national online fact-checking sites help bridge the gap? Barbara Kelley, a journalism instructor at Santa Clara University, said the various sites might help fact-check political statements — but might also be used as a crutch by hamstrung news organizations.
“We shouldn’t NEED outside fact-checking sites,” Kelley told me via email. “I worry that if there is a cadre of these outside sites, it might give reporters and news organizations a get-out-of-jail free card and/or enable lazy reporting, as in: ‘Well, I can just report what so-and-so says on the stump without getting into the validity of what he or she says. After all, if it’s wrong, FactCheck.org will do the digging and correct it.’…It also puts too much of a burden on the ordinary news consumer who doesn’t have the time, energy or savvy to root things out on the Internet all day, as you and I do.”
When the Toronto Star recently interviewed FactCheck.org’s director Brooks Jackson, he said that he would really prefer for news organizations to do the fact-checking we expect from them so he can get on with his life:
It’s definitely ruined my fishing season once again. This is not the way I had planned to spend my semi-obscure retirement years. When’s it all going to end?…What would really be nice is if other news organizations would do what the St. Pete Times and Washington Post are doing, and put us out of business. I’ve been saying for a long time it ought to be an embarrassment to any news organization that we exist. Isn’t this a core First Amendment responsibility? I think so.
As news organizations continue to cut back on fact-checkers, there’s little chance they can be counted on to hold politicians’ feet to the fire. Perhaps non-profit sites like FactCheck.org and crowdfunded efforts like Spot.us will help bridge the gap. But it still remains to be seen if they can work in concert with other political coverage at traditional media sites.
“Can [fact-check sites and mainstream media] work in tandem? I think they absolutely should,” said Kelley. “But that also can bring problems. There was a Boston Globe piece that referenced Obama talking about McCain’s plan to privatize Social Security and how the recent stock market collapse could have affected current retirees. Then the article quoted FactCheck.org saying Obama was wrong because McCain had proposed this plan only for those born in 1950. The article left it at that — without getting into any of the nuances, so Obama’s statement was dismissed as non-factual, but the point of what he was saying was missed.
“Finally, how many fact-check sites will reporters rely upon? You have to wonder where the sites themselves get their info — do they go back to original transcripts? Multiple sources? And also, which ones will become the arbiters of truth? Will it be like relying only upon the New York Times or AP to tell us what’s going on in Washington or Iraq? I guess what I’m saying is that, like soup kitchens, fact-check sites address crucial problems, but the real issue should be why we need them in the first place.”
Further Reading
Campaign Check at the San Francisco Chronicle
CNN Political Ticker’s Fact Check entries
How Fact-Checking Took Center Stage in 2008 Campaign at Editor & Publisher
Fact-checking Web sites are good news in a muddy presidential race at the Columbia Missourian
Fact-Checking FactCheck.Org on Obama and Guns at National Review Online’s Campaign Spot
Fact check at the Anchorage Daily News’ Alaska Politics Blog
My Day with Brooks Jackson of FactCheck.org at the Moderate Voice
Policing the Pols at American Journalism Review
What do you think? Are non-partisan fact-check sites helping you figure out who is telling the truth in political ads? Or do you prefer the partisan sites? How do you think this kind of fact-checking will be handled in the future? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
UPDATE: Just as my story was posted, I noticed a raft of conservative sites and blogs attacking FactCheck.org’s impartiality on a few issues. The National Rifle Association took issue with FactCheck.org’s report debunking the NRA’s attack ads on Obama. The NRA said that FactCheck.org was buying into Obama’s spin and that FactCheck.org’s funders, the Annenberg Foundation, actually has a stake in this issue:
Just last year, FactCheck’s primary funding source, the Annenberg Foundation, also gave $50,000 to the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence for “efforts to reduce gun violence by educating the public and by enacting and enforcing regulations governing the gun industry.” Annenberg made a similar grant for $100,000 in 2005.
While FactCheck.org says it is transparent and non-partisan, I think it is taking the same stance as traditional media by expecting people to believe that on its face. They will need to be much more open about the people who are running the site, their own voting records and whether they have been involved in any political activity before.
But of course fact-check sites are going to be attacked by partisans no matter what findings they have. The same conservative blogs that are knocking FactCheck.org now have also been happy to praise the site’s reports that debunk lies by Obama in his ads.
UPDATE 2: FactCheck.org director Brooks Jackson, who is becoming used to partisan attacks from both sides of the aisle, responded to the NRA broadside in an email to me:
Looking over the NRA’s lame response to our article it’s apparent why they wouldn’t talk to us beforehand and didn’t contact us afterward. They attack us for receiving some funding from the Annenberg Family Foundation, which also has given money to the Brady campaign. That was news to us, so we dug in. Annenberg Foundation also gave $12.25 million to the Ronald Reagan Library, $3.1 million to the George H.W. Bush Library, and $14.6 million to the conservative Hoover Institution. That’s their pattern. [The NRA] likes to ignore evidence that shows them wrong.
We get flayed by zealots and partisans on both sides all the time, when we challenge their theology. You should see the stuff that comes in by email. We read everything. If people are just venting, we don’t respond. A lot of it is anonymous anyway. If somebody shows us that we have made a mistake, we correct it and do so transparently. If somebody we have mentioned in a story just wants to argue, we will consider posting their objection alongside our article, provided that a responsible official signs it and if it is civil and engages on the facts at issue.
Project: Report::Can Pulitzer Contest Boost Serious Journalism on YouTube?.
Whenever news breaks, the first people on the ground, before reporters arrive, are ordinary folks with cameras. Citizen journalists have played an important role in getting us the first glimpses of developing news, from the London transit bombings to the Southeast Asian tsunami to the Virginia Tech massacre. With the advent of YouTube as a hub for video-sharing, there’s finally a venue outside the mainstream media where amateur journalists can distribute their videos to a wide audience.
While professional journalists have used the service to distribute documentaries, the nature of citizen reporting on YouTube still remains very time-and-location specific, more a matter of catching an event, something fleeting and out of context, than of telling the story behind it. Last week, YouTube announced Project: Report, a journalism contest that aims to change that.
Pulitzer Center calls for citizen journalists to cover forgotten stories for Project: ReportIt’s an unmistakable sign that the site is growing up, struggling to become something more than a repository of funny videos of cats falling off of things while still maintaining the community vibe that’s made it so popular. Project: Report aims to motivate people outside the established news media — the ordinary people that make up the bulk of YouTube viewers — to take up reporting. The contest is open only to non-professional journalists; even frequent freelancers are excluded under the rules, although journalism students are encouraged to compete. The idea of using a payment incentive to encourage quality reporting may mean that YouTube soon won’t just have an army of citizen journalists but an army of quality citizen journalists (or semi-pro journalists), interested in telling stories rather than just passing along comic moments.
The Rules
Project: Report is a three-round contest for aspiring journalists to dip into video reporting. For the first round, contestants are asked to create a short video profile of someone in their community. YouTube partnered with the Pulitzer Center, a non-profit that supports international independent journalism and uncovering underreported stories. The Center’s journalists will judge the entries and choose 10 semi-finalists.
In the second round, those 10 will compete to tell local stories with global impact. Five second-round winners will go on to tell the story of an under-represented community — with an added twist. According to the YouTube press release, “Each of the finalists will be provided with two additional Sony videocameras to give to members of the group they are reporting on, so that they can participate in the telling of their own stories. The reporter will then use this footage and integrate it into the telling of the story of five minutes or less.” Rounds two and three won’t be judged by professional journalists, but rather put to a popular vote by the YouTube community.
Winners in each round receive video technology prizes from Sony. First round winners also get to participate in a journalism conference hosted by the Pulitzer Center, while second round winners will get one-on-one mentorships with a professional journalist as they head into round three. Finally, the grand prize winner also gets a $10,000 grant to travel abroad and will get to work the Pulitzer Center on an important global story.
Pulitzer Center executive director Jon Sawyer sees the contest as the first step toward fulfilling YouTube’s potential to showcase “serious” reporting.
“The Pulitzer Center works to raise the quality of American journalism, and part of that is to keep attention on important news stories,” Sawyer told me, “To that end, we created a channel on YouTube, where we now have about 50 or 60 videos up. They’re getting good traffic; we put one video about Iraq on YouTube, an 8-minute serious piece, and it’s got more than 300,000 views. It demonstrates that, even without any advertising, people are interested in serious journalism on YouTube.”
More Than Accidental Reporters
Project: Report is the brainchild of YouTube news & politics manager Olivia Ma and political director Steve Grove, who have long touted the site’s potential for more substantial reporting. Through Project: Report, they hope YouTube can become a home for a form of journalism rarely seen in the online video world: longer form story-telling. Until now, YouTube reporting has largely been confined to the “citizen with cameraphone at the right place at the right time” variety. That’s largely the brand of amateur journalism that traditional media has tried to tap into with its various overtures to the cameraphone set — including CNN’s iReport and Fox News’ U-Report.
YouTube’s earlier journalism projects likewise focused on the accidental journalist. YouTube launched one of its first such projects in 2007 with a video asking Iowans who brought cameras to their state caucuses to send in coverage of the event.
“That wasn’t really a focus project, more of a ‘If you’re out there and happen to be shooting video, then send it to us,’” Grove told me. “This is more robust and focused, something targeting an audience that wants to delve deeper and really tell a story in much more the way that a journalist would.”
YouTube’s Steve Grove and Olivia Ma announce the start of Project: ReportGrove prefers to avoid the term “citizen journalist,” noting that the contest is aimed at people whose interest in reporting news goes beyond just showing up with a camera but extends into telling a compelling story. He prefers to refer to entrants as “aspiring journalists,” noting that the contest targets journalism schools.
Finalists receive support from Pulitzer Center journalists with the goal of creating winning entries that could pass muster both with YouTube viewers and any traditional media outlet — and narrowing the gap between professional and citizen journalists.
Most online journalism contests aimed at non-professionals have generally focused more on content than technique, promoted by advocacy groups asking for works about a certain issue or arguing a particular point of view — like Sunshine Week’s Monthly Essay Awards through Helium. In contrast, Project: Report is more about learning the tools of journalism.
Not the Nine O’Clock News
It isn’t the first time that YouTube has been used for journalism, but it does seem to be the first time that the Internet video site has moved to get into the game itself. It follows similar moves by YouTube’s parent company, Google, to dip toes into journalism with its extensive election coverage page and the addition of comments on Google News stories.
Although YouTube is fostering and encouraging journalism, Grove doesn’t see the site as competing with traditional journalism outlets.
“This isn’t a case of YouTube getting into the journalism business,” he said. “We don’t have editorial control over the content. It’s not like we’re setting up the YouTube news bureau. It’s more about empowering people to use technology. It’s our responsibility to highlight and serve users by connecting them.”
Although Project: Report is an independent endeavor originating from YouTube, Google spokesperson Kate Hurowitz pointed to it as an example of how Google products are becoming a platform for citizen journalism.
“Our focus [at Google] is on organizing information and making it accessible and useful,” she said. “We’ve created a number of easy-to-use tools, including the voter information page and My Maps, that are making it easier for users to find news and information. Rather that thinking of these tools as journalism per se, it might be more accurate to think of them as helpful tools for citizen journalists.”
Others agreed that, while journalism is a booming trade on YouTube, key differences exist between it and traditional news outlets.
“This shows that YouTube can engage in a network-type function, but instead of the old ‘pushing out’ function, it can empower people to create their own programming,” said David Perlmutter, a journalism professor at the University of Kansas.
Perlmutter is encouraging students in his new media and politics class to enter the contest.
“YouTube allows that expression because it contains interactivity,” he said. “TV networks are declining in terms of viewership. When I was a kid, there was just ABC, CBS, PBS and some Japanese monster movies on UHF. Everyone watched the same things, but today it’s fractured. There are only a few shows, like ‘American Idol,’ that everyone sees. People are recognizing that YouTube can be more than a repository of random bits of entertainment.”
But Why a Contest?
Focusing on the cash prize, it’s easy to be skeptical that a contest is the best format to encourage journalism. Mark Hopkins of Mashable predicted an outcome with “one moderately excited winner and a whole bunch of disenfranchised losers.” Hopkins suggested that the prize money could better be spent in seeding various smaller documentary projects. That’s something that Current TV has done well over the past few years.
While YouTube could sponsor more reporting through smaller, individual grants, there’s always the problem of getting people to watch them. Grove pointed out that it’s precisely the contest format that gets entrants more exposure.
“One of definitive things about YouTube and online communities is that the wisdom of crowds is a great signal for content,” he said. “Great videos rise to the top based on what viewers think, not what people behind the screens here at YouTube think. Not having a popular vote wouldn’t be true to the YouTube spirit. The popular vote helps get people inspired to view the videos. It will require journalists to use the web how it’s supposed to be used, using interactivity to promote their work.”
Whether YouTube will hold similar contests in the future depends in part on the response to Project: Report, but Sawyer and Grove are optimistic. So far, over 205,000 people have already viewed the contest’s call-out video posted on the Pulitzer Center’s website.
New Media Bytes blogger Shawn Smith wrote that the real value in Project: Report could be in connecting citizen reporters to their local media outlets. Those outlets, looking for their next star reporter, would do well to check out prospective journalists’ abilities on YouTube. That increased visibility could be a real boon to aspiring journalists in a tough job market.
What do you think about Project: Report? Do you think YouTube can become a home to more polished semi-pro journalism? How might local news outlets work more closely with YouTube to motivate people to produce stories for them as well? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
Mike Rosen-Molina is a Northern California freelance reporter and an associate editor for MediaShift. A graduate of the University of California at Berkeley schools of journalism and law, he has worked as an editor for the Fairfield Daily Republic and as a managing editor for JURIST legal news services.
Top Five Week Two Hundred Eight.
- Royalty settlement?
House passes bill to lower Net radio rates- Debates 2.0
Many ways to follow prez debates online- AP dropped
Spokesman-Review drops pricey AP feeds- Social NPR
Adds social networking features, open APIs- IconDial
Free ad-supported Net calls; will it last?
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