Gitta Wilén and Lotta Holmström. Photo: Pelle Sten

This will be the last post at Citizen Media Watch. As you might have noticed, we haven’t posted in ages. Our focus has been elsewhere, and continue to be so, so with some regret we are making it official that this blog is now simply an archive of our previous posts. We’ll keep it a “landmark only”.

We have met a lot of interesting people and had great conversations along the way. We hope our old posts will shed some light on an era that came and went quite quickly, but changed journalism in many ways.

Over the years we’ve addressed countless issues, for instance we wrote about Wikileaks before it got public. Here are some of our other favorites.

First and last blog post
• Citizen media: A definition. The very first blog post.

• Thinkpublic – designing with people. The last post, with many thanks to Brit Stakston for the video interview with Ella Britton at Think Public.

Gitta: I think that think public, both on land and online, will grow as a phenomenon and become a way to create a more open and smarter communication.

A global perspective
We had an ambition to cover not only citizen media in the western world, but to some extent have a global perspective. We’ve written about projects and events in China, Sri Lanka, Belarus, India, Korea, Thailand, Brazil, Iraq, Singapore, Tunisia and Lebanon.

Lotta: Citizen journalism’s strength is most shown in countries where freedom of speech is limited. The Tunisia prison map is one great example, there are many others. With internet access ordinary people can report first hand on troubling events.

The newsroom of Folha onLine, São Paulo, Brazil.
Photo: Gitta Wilén

• Brazil’s no. 1 online newspaper Fohla OnLine – and its bloggers. Gitta’s first guest post at CMW, before she became a regular blogger here. It got numerous hits from Brazilian readers: a visit at the editorial desk at Folha OnLine, in São Paulo, Brasil.

• A warm welcome to Gitta Wilén

Lotta: It was a natural development of this blog for me to invite Gitta to be a 50/50 collaborator after her having contributed three great guest posts. We make a good team!

Gitta: It has been totally awesome all the way working with Lotta and CMW. We are both storytellers, work-o-holics and Internet addicts.

Hyperlocal and geotagging
Over the years we spent writing at CMW, hyperlocal news went from the next hot thing to failing because hyperlocal markets weren’t ready, to now again being quite interesting since geotagging and geolocation through smartphones is really taking off.

• Here’s one of many posts on this topic: Geotagging makes YouTube videos local at iCommunity.TV.

Lotta: Just look at Gowalla, FourSquare and now also Facebook’s recent integration with Places. We tell stories based on where we are, to a select number of people or to the world. Collaborative maps pinpointing events certainly have their place on major news sites too.

Gitta: It has taken far more time to get there than I thought i would. I seriously thought that geotagging would be implemented and a part of our navigation tools, much earlier. But, let’s handle it wisely and with care.

Teaching and talking
We got opportunities to lecture from our experiences at CMW. For instance Gitta was invited by Jonas Söderström (Inuse), to teach web journalism at Fojo.

Gitta: I managed a one week web journalism seminar at Fojo, with a group of independent Belarus journalists and held some lectures for Belarus journalist students, from the Istitute of Journalism, Zjurfak, at the Belarus State University, BGU. Being the teacher I learned a lot about their situation. Freedom of expression is not to be taken for granted.

Thanks to Fredrik Wackå, Lotta got invited to the university in Karlstad to speak about the role of journalists in future media.

Lotta: I was asked who else they should invite, and thus got the opportunity to suggest Robin Hamman of (then) the BBC and to meet him and discuss the Manchester blogging project I had been following since 2006.

Guestblogging at Mindpark
• Will there be a dark period for journalism? Some thoughts after listening to the journalism debate at SIME 2008. Also published in Swedish at Mindpark. Joakim Jardenberg is a keen Creative Commons advocate, and he also blogged about our SIME interview with Joi Ito.

Gitta: I has been an honour to collaborate with Joakim Jardenberg as a member of the Mindpark blogging team. Both Lotta and I admire his will to unrelentingly guard the soul of the web.

We had a talk with Joi Ito about hyperlocal citizen media and Creative Commons, among other things.
Photo: Lotta Holmström

• Joi Ito: Don’t sign bad licenses. Our meeting with Joi Ito, and a discussion about hyperlocal citizen media.

Gitta: Our meeting with Joi Ito was one the memorable experiences from my time with CMW. Creative Commons is one of the most interesting movement on the Internet.

The future of journalism
The shift from megaphone to discussion partner was a major one, and is probably the one topic we’ve covered the most. Here are some of our posts on the matter.

• Personal transparency, the eleventh change for journalism and Personal journalism, the future of online reporting. Some thoughts on the role of future journalists.

• Sandra Jakob at HD.se – It’s not laziness, it is fear. One of many geek girls with great ideas in a series of video interviews.

• The Lebanese ambulance attack and trust in citizen – and established – media. On trustable sources, bias, traditional media and the blogosphere.

• Swedish news sites narrowing the gap to the blogosphere and The Twingly effect. When Swedish news sites first connected to the blogosphere.

Lotta: I was working at Aftonbladet in February 2006 when they started Läsarbladet, The Readers’ Daily, and I became Readers’ Editor. It was an attempt to engage the readers to contribute with journalistic material to the site, and to create an alternative starting point with the most read and liked stuff in focus, as opposed to the editors’ choices.

It soon became obvious that as an online tabloid it was easy to get readers to send us great photos of their cats and creative gingerbread houses, but enormously difficult to get initiated articles from readers on today’s topics. Later Newsmill proved it could be done, though in the form of opinion material, and also showed the need for asking the right questions.

Gitta and Lotta with Ruiwen Chua and Sriram Krishnan from NUS.
Photo: Brendalene Tan

Students of Singapore conferences and the social media bubble on Jaiku
• Hej! 2007 live updates. Live blogging from Hej! 2007 and meeting all the great people there, who soon conversed on microblogging service Jaiku.
• Why Jaiku outshines Twitter. Fond memories from the Jaiku era.

Gitta: I worked and lived in Singapore, year 2000–2001, starting up the Icon Medialab office. When the NUS guys invited us, parts of what later should be named as ”Bubblan” on Jaiku, to their KTH projects, I felt like home. I would like to send all my love to: Sriram, Ruiwen, Ramkumar and Mahesh.

Lotta: Hej!2007 and the following Stockholm NUS events showed us Swedes what unconferencing was all about, and led the way to great (un)conferences like SSWC and Annika Lidne’s Disruptive Media conference series with integrated Twitter feeds on display. I really enjoyed going to Singapore with Gitta and meeting up with the NUS guys again in 2008.

The blogosphere

Blogging is of course a great tool for citizen media, and it’s gone from a marginal activity to becoming mainstream.
• How many Swedish blogs are there? An attempt to sum up the Swedish blogosphere in 2007 which got some attention.

CMW <3 geek girls
We were invited on a bloggers pass at Sime 2008, thank you Andie och Mahesh. Since we are two proud GeekGirls we took the opportunity to talk to YouTube phenomenon Mia Rose about her music and techie geekiness. The interview put on Youtube has reached over 17 000 fans, so far.

• Mia Rose: Portray yourself with your true colours. An interview that attracted a large and quite different readership than we were used to.

Things we wish we had devoted more time to
Where’s the money? A lot of citizen journalism projects met an early end due to lack of resources. Backfence is one of many examples.

• Backfence’s Mark Potts: We’re re-evaluating our strategy. Email interview with the Backfence co-founder after I posted Trouble at Backfence?

Being successful using the web to collaborate and ask for material for making hardcover books sounds kind of awkward in the era of the ebook, but it works really well for Fredrik and Teo Hären. There are lots of more examples and yes we should have written all about them.

• Teo Härén about their series of Idea books: Invite, collaborate and share – the money

Gitta: I would liked to been able to write more about business opportunities made wisely, on the web and via communication social media.

Lotta: Starting out we were examining a fairly new territory. My focus was on understanding it and its future implications. I think now that perhaps we should have moved on sooner to looking at the revenue aspect, even though we did address it some. I guess the main reason I didn’t focus much on it is that it’s not what makes me tick. I’m a sucker for creative ideas not too limited by the harsh reality of economics.

From now om Citizen Media Watch is a landmark only, but this is not a goodbye, this is a HELLO!

Lotta: lottaholmstrom.se (sw/en), skriva.net (sw) & Saychee.se (en, photo blog)

Gitta: Digitalstorytelling.se (in Swedish only).

Lotta Holmström & Gitta Wilén

Several journalists said they wonder if their news organizations are still too dependent on their old business models to create innovative journalism. Chris Peck, editor of The Commercial Appeal in Memphis, Tenn., responded that if they feel that way, they should strike out on their own.

In a time when layoffs are plentyful – atleast in the States, but the economic crisis might mean we’ll have our share here in Sweden too – maybe this is the way to go for some of the people that find themselves outside of traditional media. The big media companies here in Sweden seem to be preparing for a model with fewer employees and more temporary hired workers, if Aftonbladet/Minimedia’s new temp agency is anything to go by. We’ve seen independent journalists starting blogs that has become successful enough to relaunch their careers, such as Niklas Svensson’s (et al) Politikerbloggen, now part of TV4. And of course blogging is also an entry point into journalism for people without academic training but with a passion for their subject and the talent of writing interesting stuff.

One of my great sources of inspiration about citizen media and the future of journalism, Dan Gillmor, is now running the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship, another sign that independent journalistic innovators are needed in the future media landscape.
I’m certainly hoping recently laid off journalists can find the enthusiasm and inspiration to take this step. We need more journalists involved in the innovation online.

Well, back to Angelotti and the Journalism That Matters conference. She points to a set of interviews made by Jackie Hai, a student at the University of Massachusetts. She’s asked a number of the participants what they think is the role of the journalist in this new network of information and community of readers. It’s well worth checking out.

Also read Jackie’s blog post “Journalists: It’s time to be the phoenix”. Good stuff.

“One of the most important things that we need to think about and do is teach journalism to the next generation and to the new leaders within journalism,” said the BBC’s Kevin Marsh, at the DNA 2009 conferenceT in Brussels.

Every aspect of online training that is currently available to 7,500 BBC journalists will be open to the public.

I’ve read a number of posts lately about the education of the public into citizen journalists and educated readers. What do you think, is this the right way to go?

The need for dedicated citizen journalism agencies is declining as citizens become more knowledgeable on how to reach out and get their stuff to mainstream media – and get the earnings from it. The rise of social media has to a large extent meant that they have played out their part.
Even Scoopt’s founder Kyle MacRae now think the concept is doomed.
- A smarter model is sucking in hot images from wherever they happen to be posted and shared, whether that’s Flickr or TwitPic or anywhere else, he says to BJP.

(via journalism.co.uk)

Read Write Web writes:

”While the Knight Foundation’s endowment has been hurt by the current economic climate, the Foundation is still committed to granting a total of $24 million to local media projects over the next five years.

As the newspaper industry still continues on its downward spiral, with more and more local papers facing bankruptcy, these citizen media projects will be able to fill the need for better local news in quite a few communities around the country. In Connecticut, for example, a new local news site will be staffed with a mix of professional and citizen journalists, after the town had lost both its newspaper and local radio station in the last decade.”

CMW has been writing about Swedish hyperlocal blogging. Maybe this is the way to go? A good mix of citizen contributors and professional journalists. The local content is best found local and it is worth the money.

The Knight Foundation believes it is about democracy:

At Knight Foundation, we firmly believe that you cannot effectively manage the affairs of a community in a democracy without the free flow of information.

That’s why we believe that information is a core community need, as critical as any to a healthy community,” said Alberto Ibargüen, Knight Foundation’s president and CEO.

Citizen Media Watch wants to thank Joakim Jardenberg at Mindpark for having a conversation with us about this subject. How will local newspaper be able to make enough money online to be able to survive? And it is like Joakim says: ”Riktigt djävla hårda fakta” – Really … hard facts.

Sandra Jakob works as an online journalist at hd.se. Helsingborgs Dagblad is a daily newspaper situated in the south of Sweden, in Helsingborg.

CMW: What are you thoughts about the editorial work at HD in the future. Do you think you will have to change the way you work and think differently about the way you are publishing your content?

Sandra thinks that they have to start to think about how to publish the news, based on the type of content, instead of the editorial staff.

– The process of integrating the different channels into each other will be more important. I think that it will somehow be the ultimate test to see which newspaper that will make it out of this big crisis that we are in, that everybody is so afraid of.

– If we are starting to think about how we are going to, all together, work towards a goal of reaching out with our information and news. Then we are going to be successful, Sandra says.

CMW: Why are journalists avoiding to embrace the internet and use it the way it can be used? Is it about fear, laziness or convenience?

Sandra does not think it is laziness and it is not the lack of journalistic confidence. She thinks it is about fear. Not knowing how to use the technical tools and how to communicate on the web.

– You just have to somehow go over the threshold and try it once for yourself and see that you can’t ruin everything. We have backup systems, she says.

Sandra thinks that the biggest challenge of reaching out to a journalist who is not used to working with the internet, is to show them that it is not dangerous. It is not going to make them look stupid. That it is going to help them and that is going to change the way they will go about their work in the future.

– People that are very humble and say that: ”I don’t know this but I’m willing to learn,” that’s an amazing start. If I just get that, I am very happy, she says.

When Sandra teaches her colleagues at hd.se how to use the blog tool, they sit down and walk it through step by step. After trying it out for themselves for a while, they do think it is so much fun and easy. She believes that you should not be afraid of the blogs just because the word blog is misused by a lot of people, it is an information source like everything else.

Sandra did work for Mindpark earlier this year. Mindpark is a web developing agency with the swedish morning newspaper industry as its main clients and beneficiaries.

Sandra Jakob and Joakim Jardenberg had this conversation (in Swedish) on her first day at work.

[Roughly translated]: The conversation, which contained nine parts of laughter and one part of seriousness (before the editing) was about why journalists should blog, why user generated content is a good thing and a little about where Rubbet is heading. [Published at mindpark.se 2008 03 06]

Joakim asked Sandra if she could come up with a more suitable word for the concept user generated content. She promised to think about it.

CMW repeated that question and asked her if she had managed to find a better word for the interchange of content and information:

Sandra has thought about it but she thinks it is hard to find a new word, because it is user generated content. Even though she does not like the word user.

- They are people that we work with, because they send us their pictures and their movies. They call us and give us information, she says.

Sandra believes that user generated content is the best terminology at the moment.

In the Mindpark sofa, Sandra also talked about the need of linking to the blog, as the original source of the news or the conversation.

CMW asked her if she still thinks it is the way to work. Does hd.se link to bloggers and external sites?

– Yes, I still think it is is the only way to go, Sandra says.

Sandra think it is important to pick up subjects that people are talking about and that it is important to give credit to the person that wrote about it on her/his blog. She thinks that if they start a conversation about the subject, it will only benefit the newspaper in the future. Sandra hopes that people will see that the newspaper do respect their work and what they are doing and that they do want to be in contact with them.

Sandra has not yet any example of a local blogger that has been creating any news for hd.se, but she does hope that it will happen soon. But they have been writing about bloggers and the internet.

– Then we are always make sure that we do link back to the person that we are writing about, she says.

CMW: The web is about conversations and expressing personal thoughts. Do you think that journalists should be more open with their personal opinions?

Sandra has an example from hd.se sports blog Sportbloggen. In the beginning they were only linking to funny YouTube clips.

– It did generate a lot of ha ha-comments, but it is nothing that will draw attention in the end, Sandra says.

She advised them to have a personal opinion. If they can have that in a column in the newspaper they can have that on a blog too.

– But, you have to think about it. What am I comfortable with saying? Can I stand for this?, Sandra says.

Sandra believes that you have to be comfortable with what you are saying on the blog. If your are not, maybe you should not do it. They want their journalists to blog, but everybody might not be comfortable doing it.

- If you are open with where you stand and what you think, the audience is going to respect you more, she says.

CMW: How are journalists going to handle transparency? Is there a good transparency level for a journalist?

– There is a bad transparency level, let’s start with that, it is so much easier, Sandra says.

She thinks that a bad transparency is when you tell everybody who gave you that tip. All of their sources are protected by the Swedish law. But a good level of transparency would be to be more open with the process of working as a journalist. It could be as a blog where you write about what kind of seminars and conferences you go to and tell more about how you find information about the subject you are writing about.

– I would love to see somebody who writes about the process and all the frustration there is to be a journalist. It is not always that fun even though we love it. Because there are people hanging up on you, people not liking you. Maybe you get the answers that you would like but it still doesn’t happened. Or you don’t get the result you would like to have, Sandra says.

She believes that bad transparency is when you tell people exactly who told you what, that is gossip. Good transparency is being open with the process, how you think, how you work, how you relate to your readers – both negatively and positively. And It is important to be honest.

– Because if you’re not honest, in the end it is coming back to bite you, Sandra says.

CMW: Do you still think that the internet is something good and useful for a journalist?

As a curious journalist Sandra does think that internet is an amazing way of possibilities and she loves the conversation that is going on out there, even though you have to be critical as usual against information and disinformation.

Sandra talks about the way the Swedish blogs handled the FRA affair. She thinks that it is a good example of a subject raised by bloggers and that ended up as a discussion in old media.

– I can only see the internet as a very positive thing, she says.

CMW: What do you think the newspaper will look like within five years. Do you think that they are still going to exist in print?

Sandra does still believe in the printed newspaper but not the way it looks like today. But she thinks it should be more of a magazine and not be distributed seven days a week. Maybe three days a week, or just over the weekend. A magazine that is going to be customized. More feature, more background and more thoughts.

– I still believe in print in some other way than we have today. The feeling of using print paper and have it in your hand, is something that we can not replace with a PDA or a mobile phone, she says.

CMW: Where do you see yourself with in five years?

Sandra hopes she will be able to dedicate herself full time working with inspiring colleagues to use the internet in a useful way. Integrating and developing newsrooms for the internet. She hopes to be working, not with in the news rush, but with people that works with news and that are interested in new ways to come out with their information and keep track on what is happening on the internet.

– I love developing stuff for newsrooms and news organizations. I hope I will be able to work with something like that, she says.

Sandra Jakob ends our conversation with a request. Sandra would like to have a conversation about online journalism if you are interested, you are welcome to contact her at sandra.jakob@hd.se.

And of course and as always, you are welcome to post your thoughts about this subject as a comment.

Related post: Will there be a dark period for journalism? Joakim Jardenberg at Mindpark on how Helsingborgs Dagblad can survive as an online paper. A version in Swedish at mindpark.se.

There are good examples of microblogging serving a journalistic purpose, though these initiative do not necessarily come from professional journalists.

• The Twitter Vote Report is one, where Americans across the country made short reports on how the voting in the US election was really going, using hashtags to pinpoint where they were and what their report was about, for instance #machine for problems with the voting machines. They also reported on waiting times. It all ended up on a big map where you could follow the progress in real time.
• Get eye-witness reports and comments. For instance check out this Twitter channel on the bombings in Mumbai. More on the Mumbai coverage here.
• Live reporting from an event. By using an established microblogging site you get comments from site members and you invite them in a natural way.
• Live commentary to tv shows. One example is Drive on Fox.
• Coming up with questions for interviews. By asking people what they want to know from a person you’re to interview you get more interesting questions, and you know you’re asking stuff your audience want to know.
• Local news gathering. Here’s an interesting example from Harrisonburg, VA. Or even as a source for bigger breaking news.
• Cynthia McCune talks about microblogging as a “21st century police scanner”, listing these uses for reporters: keep up with sources, get quick feedback, get referrals, post live updates to sport scores.
• Breaking news. Anders Brenna at digi.no writes: “Twitter is both the perfect journalist tool for being first with breaking news, and the best relief from the tyranny of breaking news.” Super-fast publishing of the latest news without risking that the reader won’t come to your site for the full story. You can even send a message and point to it once it’s out.
• Paul Bradshaw has some advice for anyone wanting to use microblogging to cover a topic. Check out the comments too for a few ideas on good use.
• Another post on how news makers have to change and use micro-blogging tools.

Do you have more good examples? We’ll collect them and update this list (giving you credit, of course).

Also, here’s some advice on what not to do.

• scepticism
• judgement
• research
• independence
• recognize persuasion techniques

In a recent interview at DigitalJournal, Dan Gillmor said:
- We’ve all been consuming news in different ways since the Net came along. We are good at deciding what we trust and what we can’t trust. Everyone needs to learn to be skeptical of absolutely everything. That includes the local or national paper or TV broadcast.
- At same time, people need to go outside what they normally read and look for things that challenge their worldviews. They need to learn media techniques, including how the media is used to persuade the public.

Update: I just remembered that Dan Gillmor actually mentioned his new book project when he spoke to a bunch of people at Aftonbladet in early 2007. Here’s a sound clip. Pardon the bad quality.

At SIME, Joi Ito expressed concerns that professional journalism journalism may perish.
- It would be very difficult for a blogger to get a military unit to fly them into Sudan to cover that in first-hand. It would also be very difficult when you write a scathing article about corruption in Singapore to fight the libel suit you get from Lee Kuan Yew and try to stay out of jail. Legal protection against libel suits and also heavily funded first-person war journalism, that’s going to be a while before amateurs will be able to deal with that, he said, and continued:
- I think that everywhere where we’re losing the revenues of physical distribution or transaction costs, whether that’s the financial markets affording analysts or whether it’s academic journalism affording peer review, all these professionals that used to be hired to deal with quality are being put out of business because the distribution can’t afford to pay those guys anymore, they’re all suffering from the same thing. I think bloggers and all the amateurs will pick up a bunch of that, but there’s still going to be this gap. I think it’s going to be a while before we get organized enough. And I’m afraid that professional journalism may collapse before we pick up, and there may be a kind of a “dark period” when we can’t send people to Sudan or we don’t have the ability to fight against the biggotous people that we ought to be going after.

David Sifry thinks the future of journalism lies within the blogosphere.
- I think we actually have a responsibility, given the fact that we are all disintermediating these big media companies, to make sure that we can find a way to help make sure that journalism survives.

Joi Ito and David Sifry in a panel debate about blogging and journalism during SIME 2008.

Yesterday, Joakim Jardenberg of Mindpark wrote a long blog post describing the steps necessary for a paper distribution-dependent local newspaper to make enough money online to be able to survive without the paper edition, should that be necessary. It’s in Swedish, so I’ll take you through his main points.

His solution has three parts: having enough visitors, knowing/keeping track of visitors and using advanced mechanisms to match them with advertisers. Like Jardenberg says, this is no rocket science and behavioural targeting is nothing new. But it hasn’t been evolved enough, and that’s why Jardenberg’s take is interesting. He gives an example with real figures from local paper Helsingborgs Dagblad, and he’s pretty convincing. They need a 40 percent share of the money spent on local advertising in their area to make it.
Though the solution can be explained in a few simple steps, those are not easy steps to take, and Jardenberg is aware of it. He lists these obstacles (my translation):

• Technology isn’t quite mature enough. But with baby steps in the right directions we’ll make it in time.
• Local sites might lose their relevance. Without an audience the revenue model collapses.
• We might not have the stamina. This won’t pay off tomorrow. Count on 5-10 years to reach those 40% in a healthy way.
• Our sales force is immature, we still sell paper ads online. Our main advantage, our local sales people, are also those who need to change the most.

A slide in a presentation by Joakim Jardenberg about the decline in Helsingborg Dagblad’s reach.

Jardenberg goes into more detail, and has interesting ideas about data collection and transparency, so if you’re interested, here’s a rough translation of the text through Google Translate. On the whole, he is optimistic about the future of journalism.

The death of local relevance, as mentioned by Jardenberg above, is one of two threats addressed by Jonathan Kay in a blog post at Canada’s National Post’s Comment section’s blog, Full Comment. Kay talks about saving the print media, but this could well be applied to local journalism on the whole.
Kay writes:

The breakdown of Canadians’ sense of community has also contributed to newspapers’ challenges. Slogging through stories about the people who share your city, your province or your country makes sense only if you feel a sense of emotional investment in your neighbours. But in a globalized age, an increasing share of Canadians don’t feel that way. As office-bound yuppies, they commune with their distant college-era friends using Facebook or email, but don’t know the names of the people they pass on their street.

Kay’s other point is the death of spare time. If people don’t have time to read, journalism is in trouble. Print even more so. The three types of print media that will survive are, according to Kay:

(1) Business-oriented media that cater to older, more affluent readers of the type who can justify the expense of long-form news consumption (in both time and money) as a work activity.

(2) Premium publications that cater to the ideologically involved and intellectually upscale

(3) The hyperlocal.

As Kay is talking about the survival of print, I am a bit surprised about his third point. I think hyperlocal is one of the areas where the web can bring so much more than a print product, as it’s all about communication and round the clock updates.
But then, hyperlocal sites are struggling. When Gitta and I talked to Joi Ito a few days ago, he said hyperlocal is failing because local businesses aren’t mature enough online. I think that’s a valid point, and I believe that once they mature and more and more people expect to find hyperlocal news online, this is a very interesting area.

My own take is that journalism will survive and come out stronger and better through this media shift, though it will take a few years of struggle. And it may not look exactly like it does today at the end of it. Which is probably a good thing.

Update: There’s a Swedish version of this text availble at Mindpark where we were invited to guest blog.

During SIME, the What’s Next duo did several recordings, and Citizen Media Watch filmed this clip from a session last Wednesday. Apart from Tomas and Kristin, the panel consists of Björn Falkevik, Anton Johansson and Fredrik Wass.

For those of you who don’t understand Swedish, you can see this as an example of how you can make a great podcast production with very simple means.

Citizen Media Watch met with blogging veteran, super-entrepreneur and CEO of Creative Commons Joi Ito during the SIME conference in Stockholm. He told us about how he (possibly) made the New York Times change their contract for freelance material, and he sent a message to anyone wanting to make it as a semi-pro or pro journalist or photographer.

Mainstream media is struggling with how to use photos with Creative Commons licensing. The reason is they’re not used to attribution models, but rather to pay the photographer and get the exclusive rights for the photo, says Joi Ito.
But they are starting to learn.
- They’re realising that atleast for certain situations and certain people it’s impossible to get a photograph in time. They’re realising it’s a resource. They’re starting to learn the rules, says Joi Ito, who saw a lot of abuse of the license in the early days.

He reveals that it took him three years of refusing to sign the New York Times’s standard contract after having written an article for them before they gave in – and actually changed it for everyone. At first they simply wanted the exclusive rights, period. Now the contract says they get the exclusives for one month, then you can re-use it in any way you want.
- But they changed. It took me three years of saying no no no. You just have to keep working. Don’t sign bad licenses, advices Joi Ito.

This is part of a longer interview also addressing the need for new business models, why hyperlocal journalism is failing and the two ways for photographers to make money. We’ve made the full-length uncut interview available on our blip.tv account. It is licensed under a creative commons license.

A big thanks to Joakim Jardenberg who pinpointed one of the questions for Mr Ito. And to Björn Falkevik for the filming/camera crash-course.

/Lotta & Gitta

Lindberg writes (my translation):

The blogosphere won the FRA debate because it was right. It was an issue that was pretty much dead everywhere else. It touched a nerve, it made people react. And – although not each individual blogger could get all the technical facts of a very complex issue right – it was possible to discuss it on a fundamental level.

Lindberg expresses criticism against the mass-emailing staged by evening paper Expressen, which urged people to copy a text about the FRA law and send it to all the members of the Swedish Riksdag. She thinks this is a form of spam rather than a good way to communicate people’s opinions to decision makers. There blogs are a better option, and Lindberg stresses their role as opinion media.

She writes (again, my translation):

Blogs are first and foremost opinion based media. When competing with tv or papers that have greater resources for investigative journalism, fact checking and the like, they are underdogs, even if they can compensate for this somewhat through networking. But misconceptions and errors can still spread through blogging networks. In such cases you lose credibility.

And she concludes:

The lesson to learn is that the impact of a medium depends on trust. Trust is volatile. You have to nurture it, or you will lose your readers.

(Video clip from the demonstration outside the Riksdag, which to a great extent came to pass because of activism from bloggers)

Today the BBC is collaborating with the site by sponsoring the feature called “the 12second challenge”, a daily question that users reply to. Users get to reply to the question “Economic downturn – how bad can it get? Give some examples.” The replies may then appear on BBC TV.

Further, 12seconds.tv today announced to its users plans to involve them in extensive coverage of the US election day.

In an email to the service’s users, the 12seconds team writes:

Citizen Journalism is pretty important for the health of a democracy. For this reason, we’re going to put a lot of effort into Election Day. Where appropriate (and legal) we’d like 12ers covering reactions, parties, exit polls and emotions on November 4th all over the world. We’re assembling a team of people and will feature their content on Election Day.

How did it happen so quickly? This is the fun part. Lee is a very conservative guy, who still believes in “control”. What he did was, when numerous protests broke out around the country, he basically ordered the media companies “not to report” to the people about what’s happening. There were police at work, trying to stop the “peace candlelight” protests, or vigils now called; some police went quite violent, but none to be reported by major broadcasters, newspapers, Internet news sites, or magazines.

But we’re living in the age of Web 2.0. Now people are in control. People that were there became citizen journalists – thousands and thousands. And the force of citizen journalism has grown so immense that basically nobody can stop it now.

One site gathered a stunning 1.5 million signatures to an online call for impeachment. Read the full piece here.

1. From a lecture to a conversation
2. The rise of the amateur
3. Everyone’s a paperboy/girl now
4. Measurability
5. Hyperlocal, international
6. Multimedia
7. Really Simple Syndication
8. Maps
9. Databases
10. Just a click away

I’d like to add an eleventh change/challenge for journalists. One that is closely connected to no. 1, but I think it deserves it’s own mention.

11. Personal transparency

As a consequence of blogs, wikis and citizen media sites becoming more important sources of information for the general public, I think we’ll see a new awareness of the importance of trust, and knowing who your source of information is. Bloggers are often open about what their views are and who they are affiliated with. If they’re not, you bet someone else will find out and make it public.

I am convinced this openness will be demanded of journalists as well. You might not need to reveal details about your private life, but you will need to give your readers/viewers/listeners an idea och what you represent. This is an important distinction, since for instance journalists working with sensitive information, infiltrating or walraffing will need to remain fairly anonymous when it comes to for instance how they look and sometimes even what their names are in order to do their job well. But they can still build up trust. Swedish blogger Beta Alfa is a good example that you do not need to reveal your real name in order to achieve this. Being open about your affiliations, for instance, and anything else that might influence or be suspected to influence your work, is a good start. Also simple things like providing a list of links to what you’ve written before on a subject.
I call this personal transparency.

In other parts of the world, however, those simple actions can get you into serious trouble. I recently read an article in AsiaMedia about the situation in Sri Lanka. The country is the world’s third most dangerous place for journalists to operate, with only Iraq and Somalia being more deadly. Seven journalists were killed there in 2007.

Pedestrians who use their cellphones to film bomb attacks or even everyday events get questioned by police, and it’s not only authorities that pose a threat to reporters or anyone with a camera. There’s a trend of citizens not turning to the tools of citizen media to improve their situation, but instead turning against anyone trying to do this, or anyone remotely suspected of it.

Anyone with a still or video camera in public is immediately suspected as a “trouble-maker.” This endangers our right to click and shoot for personal or professional purposes.

Despite this, however, there is a movement of citizen journalism, though it’s a lonely and vulnerable job, especially with a decrease in democracy in recent years. New media activist Sanjana Hattotuwa is interviewed, and says:

- In Sri Lanka, the significant deterioration of democracy in 2006-2007 has resulted in a country where anxiety and fear overwhelm a sense of civic duty to bear witness to so much of what is wrong. No amount of mobile phones and PCs is going to magically erase this deep rooted fear of harm for speaking one’s mind out.

The article writer, Nalaka Gunawardene, brings up an example which clearly shows the poor state of democracy and the hardship for bloggers in Sri Lanka.

A fellow blogger recently wrote a moving piece about a 65-year-old woman who sells fruits and vegetables at her local market in Colombo. The story behind the story was how the blogger had been surrounded and questioned by four men and the police, who demanded to know whether she had “permission from the municipality to photograph.”

Luckily, the vegetable sellers came to her rescue. “They… said they asked me to come with the camera to take some photographs of them,” she wrote.

But she posed the question: “Do we have to have a camera license like a gun license of yesteryear?”

(via Social Media)

Alf Fransson, 69, is blogging about a small area 1.3 Swedish miles from Askersund in Närke, Sweden. By putting up his own placards at the local petrol station/grocery store, he has managed to engage the people who are living in the area to read and to give response to his blog material.

The Åsbro blog has been up and running since the beginning of this November 2007. Fransson says that he got inspired to start blogging by his stepdaughter. The address for the blog is estabo.blogspot.com. Estabo is the name of the place in Åsbro where Fransson lives.
- I did not want to use the blog address “asbro”, because it is Swedish for something else but Åsbro, he laughs.

There are 1.600 people living in Åsbro and Fransson’s blog is about things which concern the inhabitants: “Do we need efficient street-lighting?”, “Why is there cable worth over a million lying down by the lake ‘Åsasjön’?” and “What is going on at the Åsbro kursgård?”

Fransson has been visiting and writing about the companies in the area. One of the companies is Alfapac, which is Åsbro’s largest industry and employs about 80 people.
- It gives me the chance to satisfy my own curiosity as well as getting material for my blog, he says.

There are some musicians and authors living in Åsbro and Fransson has plans for future blogging:
- I am thinking about interviewing people. I would like to write about personalities in the field of culture, he says.

Fransson also wants to blog about interesting places to visit in the area. Not so well known excursion spots.
- Most of the people do not see the beauty of their own neighbourhood, Fransson says and adds:
- There is an old sacrificial well situated in the forest that I would like to show to you and my readers.

not only don’t you need permission, but you don’t need much money, either

In finding new ways for citizen media to develop, Gillmor has a philosophy. This is his advice:

* Openness: Use open technologies, and be open with others about what you are doing. Now, a truly spectacular idea may be such a hot business project that one should work in stealth mode, but most ideas will find more traction with the help of others who care about what you’re doing.
* Use tools that already exist: Reinventing wheels is rarely a productive use of time in the cheap-experiments arena. Chances are that many if not all of the tools you need are already available.
* Collaboration: Work with anyone and everyone.
* Take risks: This is by far the most important. Silicon Valley, where I’ve lived for more than a decade, has taught me a crucial truth, that a culture of risk-taking is a precondition for wider success. The low cost of trying, and correspondingly low cost of failure, is removing virtually all reasons for not taking chances.

The last point is about trust, and is well worth reading in its entirety.

The two main critics, Fredrik R Krohnman and Jonathan Leman, claim that it’s not correct to call Ljungkvist’s scoop citizen journalism since Ljungkvist’s employed by a political party (the social democrats, where he works as press speaksperson).
The blog is however not an official social democrat blog, but his private publishing space.

The critique and the discussion that’s followed is interesting because it sheds light on an important question: Who can call himself/herself a citizen journalist? In Krohnman’s and Leman’s argumentation I see the same views as some of the more conservative SJF (Swedish journalists’ union) members gave voice to at a debate I took part of in Stockholm in May. The idea that journalism is defined by who does it. And now Krohnman/Leman uses the same argumentation for citizen journalism.

Citizen journalism is most often not objective. What is important though is transparency, to clearly state what allegiances you have.
This is the one bit of critisism that I can partly agree with. It is not obvious from Ljungkvist’s blog that he works for the social democrats.

But: Doing so does not exclude him from performing acts of citizen journalism. For me, that is exactly how you can define it: If you perform an act of journalism that is journalism. But you also need to be very open about anything that could have influenced your angles when you report a story.

I think Ljungkvist’s scoop is qualified to be called an act of citizen journalism. Even though it is not obvious for a new reader of his blog Magnus Tankar who he is, this was not unknown for returning visitors or indeed for most media. Knowing this does not change the value of what he revealed about Borelius, and his doing this before any traditional media company.

I do agree with Krohnman/Leman that traditional media should have done a better job presenting who Ljungkvist is though. I also believe a critical approach to your sources is vital for anyone doing journalism.

Disclaimer: I was a jury member for the Nyhetspriset award

On the whole it was an odd situation, being in a debate with my employer’s main competitor suddenly on my side, and the other side consisting of representatives of my own trade union. These are strange times.
It was however a good and necessary debate which high-lighted for me some of the dangers of the conservatism in the press corps.

There are two ways to explore the stories, either by clicking the “play the story” button, in which case you get the full multimedia experience with a satellite image background, music and text, photos and video clips telling a step-by-step story. Unfortunately many of them are over-done, having music with lyrics in the background while you’re supposed to read small and quite blurred text which disappears too quickly. The most engaging story is The bible on the beach, though that one raises a lot of other questions. Nowhere do we get to know if this is a fictional or true story. If it’s true, there are a lot of objections to be made. If not, that should be made clear.
The Guerilla gardening story also works okay.

The other way of exploring the stories is by clicking the dots/signs on each story’s map. That doesn’t work well at all. The navigation leaves a lot to be asked for. It sometimes, for instance on the “Tree Survey”, brings you away from the map of photos/video clips once you click to view one of them. In other places you still get to see the map with the geotagged photos, but if you’ve zoomed in you lose the zoom once you click on a photo and have to re-zoom (and re-zoom you have to, since the standard view of the map is so much zoomed out that the photo dots are on top of eachother). If you use the Next and Previous links there are no indications on the map which dot represent the photo your looking at.

However, it is an interesting experiment, and a first step towards using geotagging in story-telling. The main flaws in the second way of story exploration are actually due to less than perfect site building, not the way the students have carried out the projects.

With some more training, this could mature into something quite interesting. But it is important to remember that a web audience usually wants to be active – clicking the forward arrows in the multimedia needs to work flawlessly. And clicking your way around a map needs to work without the map reloading and zooming when you haven’t asked it to.

As for the “citizen media” aspect, I see no way to contribute to the site, though it says you can comment as a registered user. That doesn’t seem to include the general public, or the link is well hidden. But I guess the citizen journalism part is referring to the students not being trained journalists.

Tomorrow morning I hope to have time to stop by Stockholm Media Week to listen to Damon Rasti talk about web2.0 and a panel on local as “the new black”.

Then on Monday I’ll participate in a debate hosted by the Swedish Journalists’ Union on Citizen journalism – “threat or opportunity”. It’s to take place at Cafe Aguéli, Blecktornsgränd 9, Stockholm, at 19.30. It’s free and open for all. Jonas Morian hoped for more bloggers/citizen media people in the panel as opposed to journalists, and I can see his concern. Let’s hope for a lot of them in the audience.

there’s a bit of a kerfuffle going on right now in light of revelations that even as she has been producing stories for ABCNews.com, she has also been performing in infomercials for DuPont, one of the largest companies in the world.

Congdon herself mocks or atleast laughs at the whole thing in her blog.

ABC and HBO both approved the DuPont spots. And under the “blogger” title, which is what I am, hello? I am not subject to the “rules” traditional journalists have to follow.

Isn’t that what new media is all about? Breaking the rules? Setting our own? I see nothing wrong with doing commercials, which is what they, quite transparently, are.

I definitely think Terdiman has a point when he sends a bit of advice Congdon’s way:

That attitude is more one of someone intent on being a performer, not a journalist. And while bloggers generally don’t have to answer to anyone except themselves and, to some extent, their readers, Congdon is in a totally unique category: She is a blog-bred personality who has crossed over to the mainstream. If she was video blogging for ABC.com, that would be one thing. But her work appears on the news site, and that makes her part of the news team.

So, while she is a nice person, and seems to have good intentions, I think Congdon may well want to think about whether she wants a future in journalism. If not, then she’s fine. But if she does, she may be burning bridges which she can’t cross again.

More on Amanda Congdon’s career: From Rocketboom to the newsroom

Anyone who’s passionate about the freedom of information and communication should go there and start filling it (the wiki) with information. It’s a site for anyone who wants to be digital today, not tomorrow. Hence “Digital idag”!

Previous post on the same subject:
Oscar Swartz to set up citizen journalism wiki

Gore said Current TV was designed – to democratize the medium of television and open it up to voices, so people can join the global conversation.
Mainstream television, he says, is a one-way conduit, and – a conversation that shuts out individuals begins to get a bit stale.
Gore and his co-founder Joel Hyatt bill Current TV as – television for the Internet generation of tech-savvy 18-to-34 year olds who demand interactivity and, it seems, have short attention spans.

In connection with the launch, Current TV announced a contest where three winners get to have lunch with Al Gore in London. It’s about shooting what Current TV calls a pod – a 3-5 minute ”non-fiction video that tells a story, profiles a character or place, and/or shares an idea” – and uploading it to the current.tv site.

A third of the content on Current TV is made up by pods like this. The content is very segmented – here’s a sample hour:

As you can see, Current TV also partners with Google. And they’ve put extra effort into making people with a background in journalism contribute to the site and tv channel through its Current Journalism program.

”Welcome to UK and Ireland”, writes US current.tv blogger Amanda Zee, who reports that the UK team has been working hard to make the launch.

I’ve only been over here for four days, but the team at Current UK has been working toward this for months, seemingly non-stop. No matter what time I’ve been in the San Francisco office, there’s always someone in the London one available to answer questions — and if you do the time-zone math, you’ll know just how crazy that is. Hopefully now they’ll have a chance to enjoy what they’ve made.

Reporters without borders issued a statement voicing their concern about the law being a threat to free speech.

The sections of this law supposedly dealing with ‘happy slapping’ in fact have a much broader scope, and posting videos online showing violence against people could now be banned, even if it were the police who were carrying out the violence

Happy slapping is when a gang beats up someone, films the event and spreads the film – just for “fun”. This is what the law is meant to prevent, but as it is written, it will effect citizen journalists doing important work.
Reporters without borders goes on to talk about how important ordinary citizens are as “recorders” of the authorities’ activities around the world, naming Egypt as a recent example where bloggers have revealed scandals involving security services. Video recording played an essential part in revealing the widespread use of torture.

In the field of human rights, it is them and not professional journalists who have been responsible for the most reliable reports and information – the information that has most upset the government. Reporters Without Borders thinks it would be shocking if this kind of activity, which constitutes a safeguard against abuses of authority, were to be criminalized in a democratic country.

Odebi, a civil liberties group in France, has collected some of the response to the news.

In Sweden, anyone can actually be a journalist in the sense that there is no required education you have to have in order to call yourself a journalist. You need to work as a journalist to be a member of the journalists union and get a press card though.
I am not sure how this works in France, but I am assuming they have some kind of journalist card to define who’s a professional journalist. If not, it would be interesting to know how they distinguish between citizen and professional journalists. And what about journalists who blog on their free time? If I, for instance, would film a French police officer beating up an innocent person, and I would blog about it here, would that be against the French law? I don’t blog here as a journalist, but as a citizen.

(via Beta Alfa)

With this as background, Pawal writes that SVT sending its email traffic through the UK becomes extra worrying since the focus of the surveillance will be on traffic outside Sweden’s borders.
Also other countries can spy on email traffic if its sent outside of Sweden.
Pawal continues (my translation):

When you explicitly send unencrypted emails via a foreign country you cannot have given personal integrity a thought. It’s easy to draw the conclusion that they ought to encrypt all emails that are the least bit sensitive. We’ve known this for a long time, but so far the there’s been a limited risk of being surveilled within Sweden.

The other day I got interviewed about investigative journalism in blogs, and could come up with few examples of this in Sweden. I’m glad to be given one so soon.
Following Pawal’s post, the Swedish Journalists’ union has urged the parliament to turn down the proposition, blogger Calle Lidström has revealed that a number of Swedish newspapers also send their emails abroad, and Pawal writes in a follow-up post that there’s a rumour about SVT employees not even being allowed to encrypt their email.
There’s a law in Sweden that prohibits the investigation into a journalist’s sources. One wonders how to avoid scanning media emails if this proposition is taken. Especially if those emails are a part of an international data communication.