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.

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.

“For the second year in a row we have documented a crisis in American journalism that is far more serious than the industry’s business challenges – or maybe a consequence of them,” said Andrew Nachison, co-founder of iFOCOS. “Americans recognize the value of journalism for their communities, and they are unsatisfied with what they see. While the U.S. news industry sheds expenses and frets about its future, Americans are dismayed by its present. Meanwhile, we see clearly the generational shift of digital natives from traditional to online news – so the challenge for traditional news companies is complex. They need to invest in new products and services – and they have. But they’ve also got to invest in quality, influence and impact. They need to invest in journalism that makes a difference in people’s lives. That’s a moral and leadership challenge – and a business opportunity for whoever can meet it.”

Two years ago, Japanese authorities arrested a man for carrying out a series of virtual muggings in another popular game, Lineage II, by using software to beat up and rob characters in the game and then sell the virtual loot for real money.

The key question is whether for instance rape, child abuse, mugging and killing online should be compared to these acts in the real world. And if so, which country’s laws should the crimes fall under.

Philip Rosedale, the founder and chief executive of Linden Labs, said in an interview that Second Life activities should be governed by real-life laws for the time being. He recounted, for example, that his company has called in the FBI several times, most recently this spring to ensure that Second Life’s virtual casinos complied with U.S. law. Federal investigators created their own avatars and toured the site, he said.

In coming months, his company plans to disperse tens of thousands of computer servers from California and Texas to countries around the world in order to improve the site’s performance. Also, he said, this will make activities on those servers subject to laws of the host countries.

I don’t mean reporters who may be covering the conference. No, I’m talking about “database journalists” who use technology to help tell stories better. They should be here because some of the technology being shown here could easily be the basis for some extraordinary community information — if journalists have the common sense to use it.

Mapping and data that can be geo-coded — put into databases that can populate or link to maps — are an enormously powerful tool. It’s mind-boggling to me that more news organizations aren’t taking advantage of the possibilities, or, in most cases, even bothering to learn what’s possible.

Geotagging is opening up great possibilities for journalists. But we need to use these possibilities, learn more about them. Others will.
Wishing I could have gone to Where2.0.

Also wish I could have gone to Reboot. Seems like it was a great success.

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

In this new era of “conversational marketing”, the measure for engagement in a community isn’t the number of people logging on. Rather, it’s how actively people participate in the community

The study measured frequency of contributions, number of contributions per member and lurker rate among 26 539 members of 66 private online communities.
Private, facilitated communities of around 300-500 members got the most active members, with a lurking percentage of only 14 percent.

In contrast, on public social networking websites, blogs, and message boards, this ratio is typically reversed, i.e., the vast majority of site visitors do not contribute. In fact, in a typical online forum (e.g., wiki, community, message board or blog), one percent of site visitors contribute and the other 99 percent lurk.

The results also indicate the importance of transparency, showing higher activity in branded sites where it is clearly stated who’s behind the community. Communities for parents are the most active among those studied, and communities based on a geographic location got high levels of participation too.
These results are not surprising – the more “social glue”, the more engaging a community is. What was a little interesting to see though, was that same-sex communities get more participation than mixed-sex ones.

The white paper will soon be available in its entirety at http://www.communispace.com/3_news/perspectives.asp

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.

Urban Lindstedt writes about Borders book club, and community building at the book store chain. They collaborate with gather.com, a topics based community service where participants rate others’ contributions and earn points from writing popular posts or inviting more people.
Like Lindstedt writes, the content of the book club is rather limited. So far it has 129 members, which is even less than I have on my slumbering mailing list on creative writing in Swedish, but I guess it’s at an early stage.

What I like about it is that Borders set out to facilitate discussions around the books they sell, and you can reserve the upcoming book club books online and get 20 percent off at your local Borders book store. Each month four new books are presented, and at the Gather book club community the author of each book writes a piece about it, which the members can comment on and discuss with him or her. There are also reading guides available for the books.

Book club visitors are also encouraged to start their own book clubs – either on Gather for online discussions, or in real life – where they can discuss books of their own choosing.

Most citizen media ventures are shoestring labors of love, funded out of the founders’ own pockets, and staffed by volunteer content contributors. While they’d like more readers and revenues, site founders nevertheless professed a solid resolve to continue: 51% said they didn’t need to make money to keep going; 82% said they planned to continue “indefinitely.” Nearly all would welcome reinforcements and the ability to make even token payments to writers.

“While not all individual sites will continue to operate, we project that the phenomenon of citizen media will be sustainable, with new sites coming online in serial fashion to replace those that collapse as their founders burn out,” Schaffer said.

73 percent of 500 citizens who participated in the survey think of their sites as a success. Shaffer in the quote above is Jan Schaffer, J-Lab’s Executive Director.

Read more:
The full report at Knight Citizen News Network

(via Center for Citizen Media)

A post by Media Culpa’s Hans Kullin makes it perfectly clear that bloggers are not journalists: Swedish bloggers can be bought for a lottery ticket

The story is that a site selling underwear has asked a number of Swedish bloggers to link to it, in return for a Triss lottery ticket (worth around 3 dollars). Lo and behold, many of them did. Hans Kullin ponders:

I can see that bloggers might be tempted to earn a quick buck by simply posting a link on their blog and as long as they are candid about the circumstances, there’s no real problem, right? A little surprising is when people who are in an official position, like being a member of the local council, allow their blog to become a marketing channel for underwear. But that’s their choice. What is more difficult to digest is when the payback part of the deal is not disclosed or when bloggers simply lie about the whole arrangement.

No, bloggers are not journalists. They would never be bought… that cheap. ;-)

In the States, though, it’s not about lottery tickets. No, the blogger ethics issue is on a whole new level. I guess it’s been hard to miss the debate around Microsoft/Edelman sending out brand new state of the art Acer “Ferrari” laptops, with Microsoft Vista installed, to bloggers, “no strings attached”. The US blogosphere is divided on this issue. While some think it’s great that bloggers finally get some recognition for their hard work, others say the can no longer trust the bloggers who received these laptops. In the end, it looks like the whole thing turned for Microsoft. Lots of bad pr.

The key issue for bloggers is disclosure. The lesson learnt is this: if you receive something for free because you are a blogger, write about it straight away in your blog.
And, I’d like to add, consider the possibility of returning the gift if you have a gut feeling it’s not right and that it might cloud your judgement or that the suspicion might arise that your judgement has been clouded.
Just a piece of friendly advice.

As Readers’ Editor, I try to participate as much as I can in Aftonbladet’s forums, but I often lack time, which I strongly regret. Instead, most often my contact with the forum users are via email when something’s gone wrong.
Sigge Eklund, Aftonbladet’s blog manager, works closely with the bloggers and uses his blog Bloggvärldsbloggen to keep them updated with news both about our blogging tool and things happening in the Aftonbladet blogging community and in the blogosphere in general.

Following the reported problems with the reader comments at AZ Starnet and at the Sun-Sentinel, and also Yahoo shutting down its Yahoo News message boards because they got dominated by “a small number of vocal users”, I was happy to find a US blog host who is doing exactly what I asked for in my post about AZ Starnet.

Jason Sperber is community manager for the citizen blogs at Bakersfield.com. In a recent post on his blog there he is very clear about what’s okay and what’s not in blog posts and comments at the Bakersfield citizen blogs, and why.

I’ve got some stuff to say that some of you aren’t going to like very much.

First off, let’s stop with the namecalling. No more calling each other “idiot” or “stupid,” or worse, in lieu of an argument. No more twisting folks’ names or blog handles into vulgar parodies. If you can’t make your point or defend your argument without resorting to base namecalling, then there are plenty of places for you to play, but this isn’t one of them. You detract from any point you’re trying to make when you go there, and we’re tired of it.

Spurious speculations about posters’ private lives are not welcome. Insults based on assumptions about individuals’ identities or parts of their private lives are not welcome. Again, argue your point, use sarcasm and humor and satire to underscore your argument and undercut that of your opponents, but don’t attack the person you’re arguing with. And if you’re on the receiving end of such an attack, that is not license to fight fire with fire.

By now, some of you have already assumed that I’m talking about or to you. Know this—if this doesn’t apply to you, then it doesn’t apply to you, and you don’t need to get defensive. But if it does, no matter what your political or ideological or religious beliefs, no matter how you identify yourself, I am talking to you. “He started it,” “I’m just defending myself”—these excuses don’t wash. Be the better person, walk away, ignore, and report. Don’t lower yourself.

Do read all of the post, and the user comments. It sets a good example.

Admittedly, being host for a blogging community is not exactly the same as being host for a forum. In my experience, bloggers often take more care to be civilized since they have the reputation of their own blog to think about, and also they are often volunteering more personal information than forum users.

Me: I’m really curious about your business model. Is there enough money in the local market to support the sites just by ads, or do you have other ways to make money? I’d like to hear some of the success stories when it comes to local advertising.

Mark Potts: Backfence is entirely advertiser supported, and we believe in that model. We’ve sold ads to more than 500 advertisers in just a few months.

Me: Has the public response when it comes to participating on the sites met your hopes and aspirations?

Mark Potts: The participation varies by site and by post; that’s to be expected.
It depends on what’s going on in the community and what people want to talk about. We’ve had posts with dozens of responses and
fascinating dialogues by the community about what’s important to them.

Me: What was the reason behind the layoffs and what are you doing to turn this around?

Mark Potts: Can’t really comment on that, except that we’re reevaluating our strategy and planning several changes to our product to make Backfence scale into many more communities and become an even more valuable local resource.

Me: Where do you see Backfence in a year from now?

Mark Potts: Hopefully in many more communities and very successful!

Backfence is still operational; our sites are up and running and serving their communities and advertisers. We’re still very excited about the opportunities for ad-supported hyperlocal citizens’ media sites, and we’ve got some great success stories in both content and advertising to point to at Backfence. And the Backfence managers and employees that I’m leading are really pumped about our plans to expand the company more broadly and to add many exciting new features.

Michael Wood-Lewis at Front Porch Forum, another local media site that seems to focus on neighbourhoods rather than towns, has this analysis:

Perhaps BackFence isn’t aiming at the right target. Stories that appeal to an audience across a 50,000 to 100,000 population, i.e., BackFence’s target (e.g., “city council enacts smoking ban in restaurants”) may best be reported by professional journalist, as has been the case for generations. Stories that appeal to residents of one neighborhood, supposedly the cornerstone of BackFence (e.g., “utility work closes Maple St. and Birch Ct. to through traffic this week”) are not of interest to the other 49,000 people in town.

So, a BackFence model runs the risk of combining (A) stories with broad appeal that may not meet professional journalistic standards with (B) lots of micro-stories that are each only interesting to a very small slice of their readership.

The blog I, reporter has a good point about interaction being a key issue.

In my experience, community-based online media thrives when there’s strong participation and collaboration. It’s not enough just to read the news there, or even to publish your own stories there.

Sadly, Backfence never really got the participation/engagement part down well, as far as I could tell. Matthew Ingram’s recent scathing headline nailed the experience of most Backfence community sites, I think: A back fence around a ghost town.

As I’m not a very economical person – that’s something I leave to people who are good at it – it is hard for me to figure out how a startup in a small local market, starting from scratch, could be expected to make enough money to break even in such a short period of time. But surely they must have a plan? Though without enough people (citizens) participating, it seems like a daunting task.

So far all I have to go on is speculations. So far, Dan Gillmor who sold his Bayosphere to Backfence in April 2006, hasn’t commented on the current situation in his Backfence blog.

At CyberJournalist, though, Mark Potts, the first co-founder who quit Backfence and who’s now come back to run it while the site recovers, has this to say:

“We’re very excited about what we’re going to be able to do and how the hyperlocal space is exploding,” he said. “We’re up and running and moving forward, and very excited about where we’re going, with an excellent team and very supportive investors and board.”

Update 2007-01-11 with Mark Potts comments in the first part of this post.

This summer, the newspaper began allowing readers to post unchecked comments beneath each article on its website. Almost immediately, the hatemongers stormed the gates, and they haven’t let up since.

The comments are reaction-moderated, so it takes a user to alert the moderators when racist comments occur. Though Sun-Sentinel editor Earl Maucker writes that the messageboards are constantly monitored, Bob Norman thinks otherwise. The Sentinel’s internet partner Topix.net runs similar services for a large number of sites, and are apparently not monitoring the Sentinel all that closely.
One reader said he alerted the paper to a racist comment 50 times without anything happening.

“We’re very disturbed when we see insensitive, racist and offensive messages that some feel compelled to post”, wrote Earl Maucker in his “Ask the Editor column. He blames the anonymity of the internet, among other things.

Bob Norman things that the Sentinel should either follow the Miami Herald’s example of allowing comments to only a few stories, or put a lot more effort into monitoring the messageboard he’s got.

It’s hard to handle a good initiative gone bad, as the recent AZ starnet example shows, and perhaps it would be better for the Sentinel to start over with a fresh system, but above all to take part of what the readers are writing and to be active.

Thanks to investor Bruce Sherman’s meddling in the newspaper business, suddenly America’s newsrooms are acutely aware that the world has changed, and there’s a broad debate about what it all means.

One of the recurring themes: What will be the economic foundation that will support serious professional journalism in the future?

What if that’s the wrong question?

What if the right question is: What does an open journalism company look like? How does it work? Because if traditional journalism is a closed system, it’s going to be clobbered by an “OK” open system. How can we make that open system “good enough?”

Check out the full story for the reference for “OK open systems”.

The initiative is an attempt to provide an empirical basis for cataloguing and understanding what a wide swath of media offer the American public at a time of growing debate about the press’ influence, standards and economic foundation.

What about the bloggers, then? Well, they’re a part of a “series of secondary indices”, and collected in a Blogger Index. Other things meassured in this series are “People in the News” and “a Talk Show Index from cable and radio programming”.
Bringing together the different results – and pairing them with the Pew Research Center’s News Interest Index, an index showing how closely people are following certain news stories, based on questionaires with respondents – will let the researchers find out more about the public’s response to news stories.

These twin indices of what the media are covering, and how the public is responding will offer an unprecedented pair of tools to understand the degree to which journalists and citizens are in sync—or in disagreement—over what constitutes important news.

PEJ researchers hope to discover whether there are gaps between what ‘mainstream media consider news and what the public thinks is important and what they want to talk about. Over time, that will start to show up,’ PEJ associate director Mark Jurkowitz says to USA Today.

Very interesting indeed, if that can be the result. But what I didn’t get was how the Blogger Index will be used if the public’s response will be taken from the News Interest Index. It does say that the NII will be new and expanded, but not exactly how.
USA Today writes: “Blogs will be launched later, analyzed separately from the main index but compiled in a way that comparisons can be drawn.”

Even more interesting to see is how mainstream media will react if it turns out there are indeed great differences between what they are reporting and the interests of the public. Will they stick their head in the sand, or actually change?

This raises further questions. When using the Blogger Index in comparison studies, what conclusions could be drawn? Is the number of people in the blogosphere responding to a piece of news a measurement of how interested the public is?

How much should mainstream media change, based on these results? A story about Britney Spears not wearing underwear of course creates more buzz than reportage of a war in a far-away country. Does that mean that the public wants the first and not the other? Or is there a mission for established media beyond the creation of buzz? (Yep, these are extremes, but does not responding always mean you’re not interested in a subject? Could it not also be that you simply don’t have enough knowledge about it yourself to be able to contribute, or value the reporting?)

What would be interesting to see, are the number of occasions when MSM will have to back on stories because of blog coverage proving them to be inaccurate or have flaws. And how much MSM uses blogs as sources for news.

(via Daylife, a new tool worth checking out, which I found through Joho the Blog)

9. The most important journalism innovation will be:
A. The combination of reputation and popularity in selecting news that matters
B. Sophisticated “Web 2.0″ mashups
C. A major investigation, reported in part by the audience, leading to significant state and/or federal legislation

(answer: all)

“Placeblogger.com’s goal is to serve the community of placebloggers”, said Lisa Williams at a presentation at The Berkman Center at Harvard.
She wants to make it easier for placebloggers to find eachother, among other things by using geotagging. The site also provides OPML readinglists for each country (there are a few placeblogs listed outside the US, but they’re not many), state and city.
Each blog is pinned to a map, has a short description and a few lines of the most recent posts.
There’s a Yahoo Group and mailing list connected to the site.

It’s also a one stop shopping for people who are interested in citizen journalism in the United States. You can actually see, instead of just theorize.

Here’s more of what Lisa Williams had to say about Placeblogger in the video clip from Harvard:

Lots of people talk of citizen journalism and hyperlocal media. This is what I think a placeblog is. A placeblog is about the lived experience of a place. I think that’s a useful definition, because when we talk about these sites as citizen journalism, it’s very easy to go to even the best of these sites, take a look at it for 15 seconds, say “what a crappy newspaper” and hit the Back button.
And that’s because most of us are extremely fortunate. Our lived experience of the place we live in when we walk out the door is not news. And if it is, one of two terrible things have happened to you. 1) you have become a celebrity, which is awful, or 2) you live in warzone.
For most of these places where they live, they are talking about lived experience of the place. And, sure, there’s news in that, random acts of journalism. But they’re also talking about what it’s like to live in this particular place and talk to these particular people, eat somewhere and take the bus somewhere.
I think that the relationship between placeblogs and newspapers is that the newspaper publishes the slice of the lived experience of that place that is newsworthy.

I checked out the five blogs about Boulder, CO. One thing that would have been cool would be a combined rss feed for all of them, showing the different posts sorted by date rather than by blog, which would be the effect if I added them to a Boulder folder in my RSS reader.

Update:
A similar site (?) in the making seems to be K. Paul Mallasch’s Local journalism.net. Not much info there yet: “This is a project I’ve started to keep track of specific examples of local journalism (aka citizen journalism aka grassroots journalism) websites. Stay tuned for more.” Though the tagline seems to imply it’s more of a corporate initiative: “Your Guide to Citizen Journalism Startups”

You can talk all you want about new media, and even hire people with experience in new media, but if the top execs don’t really get it, then change is quite difficult.

This is the second time since StarNet launched in 1995 that the Star’s online forum has forced management to rethink allowing online interaction. The last foray, the Community Front Page, was yanked completely in 2000 after attempts to maintain civility failed.

Kornmiller says they hoped for a “tough but respectful debate”, but got comments that are “just plain coarse”.

AZstarnet has had a hands off policy, letting the reader community be. But that can also be interpreted by visitors as not caring. Allowing too much is as bad as removing too much. It’s basic community maintenance – making people feel at home.
Now it seems like the problem has spiralled for AZstarnet.

While we added the reader comments feature to give readers a place to talk, StarNet is still our house. And our editors and staff simply do not want guests who make vulgar, abusive, obscene, defamatory and hateful comments. If you want to live in that kind of neighborhood, go create your own online forum.

Abusive comments, fights and name-calling is something we work with continuously at Aftonbladet. In our Forums, we struggle to keep the debate at a good level – not to censor, but not to be sloppy either, or people will take offense.
One important thing, which I think I am not doing enough, is to be visible in the forums yourself. The old problem with commentary to articles (Aftonbladet’s forums are often linked to individual articles) was that online newspapers simply provided the opportunity to comment, but didn’t very much care what anyone was writing – as long as it wasn’t against their rules.
What I try to do as Readers’ Editor is to highlight great postings, to summarize discussions and to bring the readers writing into the articles and sections pages of the site. To show our readers, who are also writers, that their words have bearing.

I can understand AZ starnet’s dilemma at the current situation. It’s a small organization – I’ve visited them – and building community takes time and effort.
AZ Starnet used to be in the forefront of online news sites. Bob Cauthorn (currently working on the launch of CityTools), when he worked there in the 90s, took the initiative to many ground-breaking reader-centered features. I hope this is not a change in the course set by him.
The post by Kornmiller has more than 100 comments, most of them civilized. So there are people in the Tuscon area who are willing to have a serious online discussion. Hopefully, with some advice, they can continue that conversation.

(via Matthew Ingram)

On her first minishow, which became available yesterday on ABC’s Web site, Ms. Congdon shows up in a taut Steely Dan T-shirt and opens with her trademark girly casualness: “O.K., this is weird.”

Virginia Heffernan who wrote the Times article has an interesting analysis of the Congdon phenomenon, comparing her way of expressing surprise or disbelief straight into the camera with the melodrama of Walter Cronkite.

It’s an interesting career step, and yet one more proof of the shooting stardom that can stem from blogging.

(via Scripting News)

And that is just the start. A new section of the site will be devoted to “My Times”, “where the best minds in journalism helps you edit the web”.

What My Times seems to be is a personalized page where you can collect your favourite bits of the NY Times along with other material from the web via RSS. Here’s what the “First Look blog” says about My Times in its current beta.

My Times Beta is a new service that lets you organize New York Times content, as well as content from around the web, on your very own page. This personalized service makes it easy for you to read all that you like, from one central place. You can further personalize your my Times page by adding up-to-date weather information of your city, movie showtimes in theaters near you, or display your favorite flickr photos.

Though it doesn’t say how much you’ll be able to interact with this material on the site – for instance can you post comments? Articles? Columns?

An interesting development, none the less. The NY Times may be behind, but they seem to finally have got it, and are putting a lot of effort in to catch up.

Another cool thing they’re doing (though not related to citizen media) is the Times Reader, a separate software for an optimal reading of the NY Times, a beta version now available for download. Not sure it’ll be a success, but it’s worth keeping an eye on.

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 10
3:00 – 4:15 p.m. – “Building the Multimedia Newsroom”
• Joe Howry, Bruce McLean, Colleen Casem, Tom Kisken, Ventura County Star

MONDAY, DECEMBER 11
12:30 – 1:30 p.m. – “Smart Mobs”
• Howard Rheingold, “Smart Mobs” author

7:45 – 9:00 p.m. – “Approaches to Multimedia Storytelling”
• Robert Hood, msnbc.com
• Travis Fox, Washington Post

TUESDAY, DECEMBER 12
12:30 – 1:30 p.m. – “Multimedia Storytelling From Start to Finish”
• Seth Gitner, Roanoke Times

7:45 – 9:00 p.m. – “News Site Interfaces and User Experience”
• Seth Familian, UC Berkeley Haas School of Business

WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 13
1:30 – 2:30 – “Online Business Models 2.0″
• Al Bonner, Lawrence.com

It doesn’t say what timezone that is, but Berkeley is in PST, so for Swedes that should be +9 hours, meaning today’s webcast starts at midnight. For those of us who needs to be asleep at night, an on demand version of the webcasts will be available later on.

(via CyberJournalist)

Men are more likely than women to report podcast downloading; 15% of online men say they have downloaded a podcast, compared with just 8% of online women. And those who have used the internet for six or more years are twice as likely as those who have been online three years or less to have downloaded a podcast (13% vs. 6%).

While podcasting audience is growing, it is still marginal. Mark Glaser at MediaShift has made an intersting observation when it comes to how the survey’s been covered by traditional media and blogs, listing some of the headlines about it. It’s quite a big difference between “34 million ears perked for podcasts” (eMarketer) and “Podcasting falls on deaf ears” (PC Authority).
Yes, how indeed do you interpret the result? The main problem, Glaser writes, is that the survey is too shallow.

OK, millions of people are downloading podcasts, but do they eventually listen to or watch them? How often? And do they listen to podcasts online with streaming audio instead of downloading them? And do they listen to the whole thing or just bits and pieces? It seems like every piece of data we get about podcast usage spawns more questions.

More research in this field is indeed needed. I’d like to see some numbers for Sweden too. My guess is that the numbers are even lower in Sweden, but that’s just a guess.

People like to discover things that they might enjoy reading but they didn’t necessarily know that they would before they were exposed to it.

Yes, that’s what newspapers have been good at for centruries – surprising people. If in the future all we get is news filtered through keywords of our own choice, where’s the surprise? Where’s the fun?
Exactly how Newsvine will work to bring users these surprising news remains to be seen.

Tang also thinks there are certain news stories that should be displayed to everyone, disregarding their filters. This is how they’ve solved that at Newsvine.

We think that bringing you the top news is one of the important things. That’s why we present our site with traditional media content right next to citizen-generated content. We don’t favor one or the other. We think that they are complementary in many ways.

The site’s users are no longer only the early adopers, Tang claims, which is interesting because it shows a readiness for citizen media and web 2.0 news services that means the big shift is just around the corner. He also states that the newspapers who will mix citizen media with traditional journalism will be the winners.

I think that eventually all traditional media companies will have to rely on some form of citizen reporting, partly motivated by financial reasons but also because of access. While the quality of reporting from the average citizen is typically of a lower ‘quality’, in the traditional sense, I think that this is offset by the timeliness and unfiltered nature of accounts offered by citizen media.

So far the site has been all text, but Tang reveals he’s just signed a deal to bring video to Newsvine.

How to transition a significant part of the newspaper business to online and new media — how to make the newspaper online experience compelling enough to attract the modern media consumer — while keeping enough money flowing in during the transition period to fund quality journalism, and prevent newspapers from entering a downward spiral (in terms of audience as well as financially).

His conclusions, then? There are several problems, and the newspapers aren’t taking them seriously enough.

1. Not enough video content, or too little on it on the front page of the site. Outing writes:

It seems to me that to compete more effectively, newspaper sites should be making their homepages a healthy mix of text, still images, video and audio.

2. Better blogging is needed. Outing wants newspapers to use the blog format for breaking news stories – “use the blog format to tell the story in bits and pieces as reporters learn the details”.

3. Bad use of classifieds. Many smaller or medium size newspapers are still just bringing the print classifieds online. Craigslist is taking over the market, and to my opinion rightly so – the newspapers could have taken that initiative.

4. Way too little interaction between journalists and readers. A lot of newspapers still don’t give their readers a chance to comment on news.

Yeah, sure, public discussion is scary and it can get messy. So institute some tight controls, or even moderate (pre-screen) public posts to keep out the crap. But preventing public discussion outright is a sure-fire way to demonstrate that your organization doesn’t understand the current media landscape.

Interestingly enough, Editor & Publisher doesn’t allow comments to Outing’s column. Something he says he regrets.

Outing singles out the Washington Post as a leader and innovator, though he’d like to see more of all of these points even there. And e concludes:

Today’s state of the newspaper website doesn’t leave me terribly optimistic about the industry.

My comments:
I think Outing’s demands of newspaper sites are, though valid, quite modest. A comments function to every article is the very least they could do when it comes to interactivity. But why only let the readers react to the agenda already set by the editors? Invite them in, let them write and create news too. Blogging is a great tool for this.