Jeff Jarvis

• A range of words heard today:
• Resistance
• Concern
• Curiosity
• Enthusiasm
• "Journalism is broken"
• Who agrees?
• Are citizens the fix?
• A recurring theme: control
• Journalists as the gatekeepers of information
• Journalists as verifiers
• Blurred lines
• What value do journalists add to news?
• Another theme: teaching
• Journalists
• students
• audience
• Technology needs to be easy to use
• Community: It's all about bringing it back to the level of people
  
• Respect/listening/disrespect
• Do journalists respect their public?
• Does the public respect journalists?
  
• Business
• Touched upon only slightly in the discussions
• "I'm a visitor, and I'm grateful that you had me over."

Jay Rosen

• When I got involved in public journalism, it started with an observation of mine that was shared by a number of others: it's summed up with the word "disconnect" -- there's a perception of disconnect between the press and the public
• Many causes for the disconnect, many symptoms, caused concern
• We tried to operate on the sense of duty and conscience -- "experimenting as many peopl ein the movement were doing" -- an "attempt to reform the official press"
• Talk to people more; use a citizen's agenda
• All an effort to get professional journalists to reach across the divide
• During that time, I always thought it was about journalists and getting them to change. It dawned upon me to change citizens to change and move toward the press.
• Blames himself for lacking the imagination to come to that citizen-focused approach, but also says that they also didn't offer grants for citizen-focused efforts
• Now it's citizen focused: they're talking to each other, talking to the press, starting their own papers/web sites/radio stations/TV channels
• It's no longer "Are you going to reach out?" but "What are you going to do under the current conditions?"
  
• The spread of not only technology, but ideas, has led us to this point in public journalism
• It's one more chapter in a very long -- 300 to 400 years -- history of the enfranchisement of people: to speak freely, to own property, to worship freely, to move freely. "That's what self-publishing is: it's enfranchisement of people in the media."
• The point is not that everyone will do so, it's that everyone has the opportunity to do so, if they want.
• The idea is that people can handle the world themselves. "They are competent to understand the world. "
• Invoked Whitman and Jefferson
• Lew Friedman is our resident researcher: a social scientist that asks questions that journalists normally wouldn't, and knows how to apply tests that they wouldn't

Lew Friedman

• "I am a sociologist, and I play one on TV."
• It's how I see the world
• We're in a world that consists of networks and institutions
• The world that Jeff and Jay have described is a world of networks. Anyone that can connect can join, and it's a fluid world.
• Institutions are different: they're filters of knowledge, talent and power. A set of people, rules and professional routines. The press is an institution. It has become systematically disconnected from the public.
  
• The problem: networks may be extremely open, but they may also be extremely fragmented. People can connect, but there can be ways that they can connect that make little difference.
• Power Laws: those that have more, get more.
• The world of web sites mirrors the network world and the world of publishing. There's a concentration of power. Jeff said that it wasn't true in the blogpshere: he's right and he's wrong:
• Right: A blogger doesn't have to have all the readers -- just enough to support what s/he is doing. New knowledge can be formed where ideas keep ideas and people out.
• Wrong: The blogosphere -- populated largely by people like myself: the symbolic analyst class -- people who produce and analyse symbols and interpret them for other people. We work at jobs more privileged than other people. We need the institution of the press to make sense of the world, to distill it. Not everyone knows about blogs.
• Journalism: "a conversation of democracy"
• A sphere in which many people talk amongst themselves, and in a smaller degree, to the world at large
• My hope: to find the relationship between the two spheres.

Every time I hear talk of spheres, I am remind of Gideon Strauss, who talks often of spheres and "sphere sovereignty".

• Hoder: Question to canadian bloggers -- why aren't blogs as popular in Canada as they are in the US and UK?
• David Akin: It's not that -- it's that it isn't a big story among Canadian journalists
• Jim Elve: It's the fact that we have 10% of the population of the US. The market is smaller, so getting x hits here is like getting x times 10 hits in the US
  
  
• Gil: For a long time, a lot of us have been trying to create a vigorous public square -- with a bazaar of info with a lot of vendors that retained a civility. We now see fragmentation of the media where consumers are choosing their vendor based on whether that vendor supports their world view. Isn't blogging a further fragmentation rather than part of a solution to create a public place?
• Jay: Blogging in and of itself does not solve any problems. It's a matter of what happens when you "sow seeds on fertile ground". It's what happens when you empower people. It's the further evolution of the media. 3 million people decided that they wanted a page so that the whole world could see. Fragmentation? Echo chamber? Yeah. I'm tired of it too, and it happens everywhere. The blogosphere is an elite.because its people have the skills to use it.
• Jeff Jarvis: To turn it around, fragmentation is about control. Fragmentation is people getting what they want means that. It's bad news for big media. It's a good thing for consumers.
• Marti Stephenson: Technology has allowed the people to become the press. We have been accused of hogging the spotlight. One thing I learned: we know more together than we know alone. One concern: a danger that blogging become a facility for people to react than come together -- to fall victim to the same problems that befell media. Invoked James Cox from Dayton, Ohio. Are bloggers simply saying "my opinions are right, and I'm going to tell you what they are" or are they conversing and learning? We must keep true to those roots that keeping people talking and learning from each other is what's important.
• Nikhil Moro: There seems to be confusion between our understanding of blogging and participatory journalism. Blogging is a tool of participatory journalism, but blogging is not journalism -- you cannot define a large group of readers...
• Jeff: Not true -- a mass audience is not the point. You can do journalism and serve only 10 people. It's no longer the mass market as a mass of niches.
• David Akin: Isn't journalism a process?
• Jeff Jarvis: If it informs the world, it's journalism.
• David Akin: The root words of journalism is "journal". It's a regualr, repeated process. Why do bloggers want to be called journalists? Readers decide who journalists are.
• Jay Rosen: The title "journalist" gets you access. Oftentimes, information is witheld from the general public and made available to members of the press. I don't try to define blogging as journalism in the abstract, but on a situational basis. It's not so simple as a yes or no question.
• David Akin: We had an interesting discussion. Is Michael Moore a journalist? Is Bill O'Reilly?
• Unknown person: Is a journalist accountable? Is a blogger accountable? Journalists have all kinds of written self-policing mechanisms -- do bloggers?
• Lew Friedman: What was journalism but people writing on broadsheets in coffeehouses. That evolved into the press as we know it today. If people read you, you're a journalist. There is a certain sense that there are institutions that have resources and credentials and are held accountable to certain standards of truth. That, in some sense, is the line separating journalistic institutions from bloggers. Bloggers are not accountable to the same rules even thought they speak in the same public sphere as journalists. This isn't necessarily bad -- it speaks to the public right to free speech. The blogosphere expands the public sphere and therefore citizen's right, which I think is marvelous. The public is that space in which citizens come together and make the rules.
• Jay Rosen: Reputational capital divides the institution of the press from the bloggers. A new blogger starts with zero reputational capital, but a new journalist at the Globe and Mail inherits the reputational capital built up from the Globe's long existence, even though s/he has not yet contributed to that reputation. Bloggers can build up their reputational capital -- but in a way that's different from the way traditional sources get theirs.
• Len Witt: many of us have cast blogs as an "evil empire", a "screaming rabble". It's no more evil than a town hall meeting.
• Marti Stepehenson: Bloggers have the same relationship to their readers that traditional journalists do. You can have the best public service blog in the world, but if it doesn't create conversation, you're in the same boat we were 15 years ago.
  
  
• Jack Rosenberg: Are weblogs about the public sphere, or small groups?
• Jay Rosen: They are about the public sphere when they ask the big questions. They widen the group of participants in the discussion of matters of the nation.
• Lew Friedman: The fragmentation of the public sphere is not the fault of weblogs: the media institutions and parties are not holding people together anymore. Public journalism in "the old days" was about building and sustaining public participation.
  
  
• Len Witt: This conversation was all possible because of a weblog.
• Jay Rosen: Thos eof you with weblogs had better write about this conference, otherwise you're not doing your job!
  

Hossain "Hoder" Derakhshan

• Weblogs show the world the real Iran, the Iran that we don't see in mainstream news
• They promote freedom in speech in a closed society
• Hoder points out that Iran is not as closed as Saudi Arabia
• Blogs have helped foment political activism:
• Challenged president of Iran re: censorship of the Internet -- bloggers asked, using journalists at Davos as their proxies, what he was going to do about it
• Helped bring news of the situation in Iran to the outside world
• Blogs are building social bridges -- bridges between:
  
• Generations
• The sexes
• Politicians and their constituents -- one of the six or seven VPs of Iran has a photoblog and even moblogs cabinet meetings!
• Politicians and young people -- a poltician took a letter from bloggers directly to the president, got a direct answer and blogged it
• MacKinnon: Hoder, you downplayed your role in bringing blogs to Iraq.

Melinda Robins

• Taught civic journalism in Ethiopia
• What does it mean to teach journalism in a country at the bottom of the economic ladder, where editors can be  harrassed and harmed by the government?
• Civic journalism, in a small way, can help -- the news is not what the president said today. It's "why are there thousands of families livign on the streets?" Why are the journalists not talking to these people?
• Lack of Internet access in Ethiopia -- maybe 50,000 people out of the 70 million population. Not a viable place for blogging
• BlogAfrica -- which Ethan Zuckerman is involved with -- more focused on more economically developed countries (South Africa, Namibia, etc) and the "African diaspora"

Nikhil Moro

• We know who coined the phrase "electronic commons" -- Lawrence Lessig -- and we also know who refuse to participiate in it
• "How many people in the world today really have not enough on their plates already, in terms of problems, to make the internet a part of their lives?"
• Basic issues: it's tricky to talk philosophy with people who are still dealing with issues of survival
• (India doesn't fully count: in many ways, it's a major high-tech player)
• How many people have access?
• 80% of America
• 6% of India
• Lack of access is caused by:
• Censorship
• Refusal to build infrastructure
• Culture -- not everyone holds the same values dear. Freedom of expression -- Moro references Emerson -- is not a core value for everyone.
• He tells a story about the Human Affluence Index -- measured by a quiz, one of whose questions is "Do you have a dining table and do you use it?" In India, the tradition, rich or poor, is not to have a dining table, but to eat on the floor.
  
• The internet has the potential to flatten the differences in freedom of expression
• Should it promote simple freedom of to say what one wants, or should it be specifically used to promote social good?
• Postmodern belief is that there cannot possibly be freedom of speech, as it's a product of what you were taught (he expresses doubt that the postmodern thinkers will ever produce a solution)

Terry Thielen

• Works in places that are "undergoing democratic transition"
• Many of these places lack the infrastructure -- even roads are hard to come by
• Lack of education
• We may take civic participation for granted here -- the concept is foreign to places coming out from under dictatorship. Town hall meetings are new to them.
• The internet can be useful for mobilizing people there, but you'll reach only the elite groups. You need other means, which in her experience is radio.
• Was pleasantly surprised to find that Jamaica has a sophisticated media environment and a number of strong civic journalism programs, an exception in the developing world (they're in a much better league than Haiti or Bosnia)
• Example: Jamaica has a CrimeStoppers program just like ours
• Two national dailies publish study guides and other educational materials every week -- good business (creates the next generation of readers) and good citizenship
• Roots FM: brings potential employers on the air to talk about opportunities, potential employees to promote themselves

Chris Waddel

• Asked by an old boss from Columbia why he's teaching globalism to a class in community journalism in Anniston, Alabama. Such a question was expected from a New Yorker: "New York, is after all, an island."
• The heartland is the starting point for a lot of big-city journalists and where a lot of American news is made
• The Iraq war affects the heartland: the soldiers overseas would normally be their firefighters, police and other members of the workforce. What happens across the globe has effects in the heartland. Globalism affects middle America.
  
• Noted that papers have huge budgets to cover the Masters Tournament and the Superbowl
• My favourite part of the New York Times ("We actually get it in the heartland") after the magazine is the travel section. He can fly anywhere ion the world more cheaply from Atlanta than his old boss can from NYC.
• In his paper, the best letters to the editor get highlighted; the best letter writers are invited to a steak dinner with a special guest speaker (this past year: Russian reporter who covered the story about the Forbes editor murdered in Russia)
• Seven Fulbright scholars in the university down the street
• University has an international house with 70 foreign students
• Involvement with the Southern Center for International Studies' television program, The Angry World

Rebecca MacKinnon

• Interest in how weblogs can help people in a country find out and connect with people in an another country
• Before weblogs, you'd either have to have friends in that country or hear news reports. Now, weblogs are a new source of info. Cites the example of the Saudi Arabian blog, The Religious Policeman.
• Jeff Jarvis: The are journos who can't get out of the "green zone". There's coverage in weblogs that could not exist in mainstream journalism and without hte effort of citizen journalists.
• Talk of incorporating blogs and talk radio in 3rd world countries
• David Akin: One of the stories we've been following for the past 3 - 4 years -- how tech companies have been promoting tech in developing countries.
• Terry Thielen: "There's infrastructure and there's infrastructure." In Haiti, which is mountainous country, the cell phone towers help keep the diaspora in touch (they make lots of calls). The real infrastructure problem is roads. Even where you can get tech, who can repair it? With radio: 15% of the budget is for actual radio equipment -- the rest is for inverters, generators and anything to produce the power. Eevn if you can get the telecom infrastructure in place, you need skilled people, and as soon as people get skills, the skip town.
• Jay Rosen: Rebecca, last winter, we talked about a blog called North Korea Zone, a blog with information from insiders from North Korea. Another idea was that you could be a guide to similar sites. How hard has it been to get information? Have returning travellers from North Korea been able to provide info?
  
• As background, she sought out Jay's advice abotu setting up a weblog of info on North Korea. many frustrations with covering it as a traditional journalist.
  
• Less success than she had hoped with getting info from businesspeople and aid workers in Korea -- fear of not being allowed in or criticism
  
• Snags: China started blocking TypePad, South Korea has been blocking TypePad to Blogger. Moved North Korea zone to an indie site running Moveable Type.
• Len Witt: In many places in the world, the internet infrastructure isn't there for us to reach them. "We need to know more about the rest of the world than the rest of the world needs to know about us." We (newspapers) need to bring the world to our readers.
• Terry Thielen: There is a need to train journalists from the developing world here, to train them. It brings the world to us.
• Chris Waddel: The Fullbright brings 500,000 international scholars to the US. Don't know how many of them are j-students. We should also be concerned about the lack of bandwidth here at home. Blogging is one way to solve the problem, but we can't rely on one form of communication: newspapers and other media can also play a role.
  
• Commenter: The state department brings in foreign journalists to meet with media organizations and universities -- great exchange of information
• Melinda Robin: We have immigrants in all our communities, and I feel that journalists have missed them as sources of global information.

"Building social capital...that's what blogging and public journalism are all about."

(Missed the first bits of this session, dealing with getting the luggage -- one bag of clothes, one accordion -- that American Airlines lost last night back into my grubby paws.)

Mary Lou Fulton

• Demonstration of how the Northwest Voice site is put together; demonstration of content-management system
• Trying to keep the site open to all contronutors: interesting quandary when local businesses want to contribute content. They set ground rules, saying that local businesses should write about their area of expertise without turning it into straight advertising
• Akin: We need more disclosure about where the money comes from with blogs. For instance, it's well-known that the advertising branch of the Globe and Mail pays my bills.
  
• Problem with journalism is that it's made people feel unimportant and ineffectual. The goal of the Northwest Voice is to change that
• Northwest Voice is built using iupload, made by a company located in Burlington (a satellite town of Accordion City)
• "There's a sense of ownership" with the Northwest Voice -- people see themselves in it.
• The stories may be personal, but accountable: you can write about your kid, but we let the readers know that it's your kid
• "The problem with being a gatekeeper is that you're keeping people out, not letting people in."

Jan Schaffer's rebuttal

• "Jeff and I have a lot of common ground...I've just invited him to be on my board of directors."
  
• Jarvis is plagiarizing from the civic journalism playbook by viewing news as a conversation -- civic journalism has been doing this before blogs.
• Just as town hall meetings are now considered passe, blogging will someday be considered passe
  
• Shouldn't aspire to add links, but add meaning and context. Otherwise, you're just making more noise.

Q&A

• Comment from audience: blogs will find their niche and not replace other forms of journalism, but complement them and find their own place, just as TV did not eliminate radio.
• Rebecca MacKinnon: What about the tools, which lower the barrier of entry to publishing? Blogging tools make it so you don't need to know web design.
• Schaffer: The bar is high, for people with no English skills or no writing or grammar skills. It's a niche for people who can write and who have the confidence. America is increasingly made up of minorities, who will not have the language skills to blog. Plans to teach people how to use Dreamweaver and other tools to create interactive content -- interactive maps, games, web pages and the like
  

(I call bullshit. It's much tougher to create web pages without blogging tools, and interactive maps, media and games take a lot more effort -- I know, I used to be a multimedia developer. As for immigrants, a good number of them speak much better English than the local-born.)

• Artvoice.com audience member: How do we incorporate blogging into what we do (indie TV)?
• Lewis Friedland points:
  
• Remember, public journalism is not about self-expression, but about solving problems.
• Blogs are subject to power laws.
• The structure of the blogosphere as a whole, with some important exceptions, is not all that different from the "he said she said" horse-race mentality of big media
  
• Jarvis: "power laws" are the old way of thinking. You have to be big to survive. The mass market is dead, it's abotu niches now.
  

Neil Heinan

• "I'm the dinosaur...I'm the manual typewriter in this group."
• With We the People/Wisconsin: US's oldest civic journalism project
  
• "I understand the power of the camera-equipped cell phone, but we're still struggling with that in Madison, Wisconsin."
• "Dragging the citizens to the candidates"
  
• Will forego the moderator in the next set of political debates and just have them talk to each other
• Want to have the candidates answer citizen's emailed questions
  
• Want to make the questions posed to candidates "fair": "Fairness...which is as far from the blogosphere as you can get."
• Still trying to get citizens to talk to each other, face to face. "As valuable as computer-to-computer is," the idea of citizens talking to each other and to candidates running for office is something valuable
• Shortcoming: we have traditionally cut out young people from the process. Active attempts at fixing this: inviting middle-school minority students intot he newsroom
• Some input from web-based participatory journalism
• Here as an old-school practitioner, trying to incorporate the online innovations.
  

Jeff Jarvis

• "As Rosen rebutted Kinsella, Jarvis shall now rebut Schaffer"
• It is mainstream media that is useless, narcisstic and niche
• "Forget Gutenberg. The most important media invention is the remote control."
• Blogging is the new remote control
• The readers are now writers
• The people we used to call an audience now have a voice.
• Advice to editors: The first thing you should do is not write the blogs, but read them
• Bloggers do it because they care
• Blogging is complementary:
• "It is news? Yes, I say it is."
• "Is it journalism? Yes, I say it is."
• With the commoditization of news, viewpoint becomes important
• If we stick up our noses at Fox News (or the Guardian, for that matter), we are ignoring the people
• Citizens' media gives the audience authority
• Blogs are essentially social -- this is a community
• Equated "audience" with Doc Searls' interpretation of "consumer": "It implies that we are all tied to our chairs, head back, eating ‘content’ and crapping cash."
• Blogging establishes a culture of transparency
• It's an egalitarian meritocracy. It's about frankness and democracy. Liberte, fraternite, egalite!
• The grammar of information is changed: we search. We link. We no longer wait for the news; it waits for us to come to it.
• Re-designing news: News is not the article or the channel, but the story or the post.
• Johnathan Miller, head of AOL: 60 - 70 percent of AOL's spends their time on reader-created content
• "Don't worry about all the geeky tools" -- new tools will appear that will only make things easier
• Andrew Sullivan: "This happens only once in a lifetime. You don't stumble across a new medium every day." Jarvis: "I say 'amen'."

And I say "Amen" too! A well-done, passionate, articulate and fiery rebuttal to the previous speaker.

Jan Schaffer

• "Going to bringing this back to participatory journalism, because this isn't supposed to be about blogger dot com"
• "We were interactive before digital media" -- Not conflict driven, participatory
• New media: speed, delivery, moving parts ("bells and whistles"...."more noise")
• Participatory journalism: on people, connections, conversations...on attachment
• The story we are missing: not about blogs, but about media participation
• Media participation: not just telling the stories, but telling them
• This [US] election is about media participation: MoveOn.org, the "Dean Scream" remixes, Fahrenheit 9/11 and Outfoxed
• Story Making:
• Internal: Consuming stories people make
• External: Making stories people consume
• Internal story making: Individuals as news aggregators: people develop an internal sense of the news based on the input they get
• External story making: blogs, email, citizen media
• Future news: people constructing those stories. Not something you read, something you do
• Early civic journalism: town hall meetings, mock juries
• Confession: "I'm not a fan of blogs."
• Not useful
• Narcissistic
• Niche
• Where they have the most utility:
• Beat reporters use blogs for stories that don't merit inclusion in the paper
• Editorial boards can use blogs so that ed board members can be held accountable for their opinions and can explain them
• Showed online educational games and multimedia sites as a way of making news and other information more accessible to the average person
• Need to build entry points, which means you build attachments/relationships/audiences. Build connections and people respond to that
• "Blogs are the 50-foot view. Participatory journalism is the 5,000-foot view."
  

Spider-man says: Snotty self-important journalist senses...tingling!

Warren Kinsella

• Blogs are "punk rock" media: angry, do-it-yourself
• "Corporate blog" is an oxymoron
• Wag in audience during technical difficulties: "This may be the first time in history that Warren Kinsella has been silenced by technology."
• Daily blog campaign:
• What is the big hairy deal about blogs?
• Who is my target?
• What is my message?
• Why should anyone care?
• What's the big deal with blogs?
• They're free
• Proudly biased
• Really easy to access
• Hegelian dialectic on speed
• They're populist
• Google power
• Specialists are welcome
• Interactions are welcome
• Pithy as heck!
• Rather faddish at the moment, aren't they?
• Are they the digital pet rock?
• Tips on ensuring blogs last past Christmas
• Tell a story. Facts tell, stories sell.
• Be brief: your readers demand it
• Leave no charge unanswered
• Take it seriously: hit back or lose!
• Who is my target audience?
• Nobody does it for themselves: otherwise they'd just write into a locked diary
• Don't try to be all things to all people
• Your target audience isn't the world, but the people you want to get onside
• The Pyramid of power:
• Top: Big bananas -- presidents, prime ministers, etc
• Next: Commentariat -- senior staff, big-shot reporter
  
• Third: Chattering classes -- people who stay informed and involved
  
• Bottom: The rest of us -- little power and interest, but they vote governments in and out! "They are what blogs are for and about"
• "You own personal computers, which means you are suspicious of the government, like me"
• Don't ignore layer 4: they're the ones everyone is afraid of
• The soccer mom vote in 1992 US elections / Canadian equivalent is "new Canadians" -- watch out when they get angry!
• More influential than big bananas, than bureaucrats, lobbyists and politicos put together
• They are us -- reach out and hold onto them
• You (bloggers) are uniquely qualified to do that
• Warren's corporate media tips:
• mainstream media will not be able to absorb blog culture
• Mainstream media wired differently than us; different DNA
• Failure, misery, disaster make their bells go off
• Bloggers answer only to themselves
• Bloggers have the last word
• The media have a different focus. Consider Roger Ailes orchestra pit story: "If you have two guys on stage," he said, "and one of the guys says 'I finally have a solution to the Middle East problem,' and the other guy falls into the orchestra pit, who do you think is going to be on the evening news?"
• Why should anybody care?
• Most of the time, people don't -- not because they're dumb, but because they're busy.
• Make readers care: make it interesting, you'll get read
• Be unique -- deliver a message the opposition can't
• Hebrew National story: competing against Oscar Mayer with "We answer to a higher authority" -- something that Oscar Meyer couldn't say
• Be repetitive: simplicity, repetition, volume
• Don't let them change the channel on you!

Jay Rosen

• Will cover how his blog, PressThink, decided to cover the convention
• Wanted to try out blogging the DNC because it hadn't been done before
• PressThink tries to operate within a "newsy" way within its own domain
• Story about who got credentialled
• Instead of simplicity, repetition and volume, it's complexity, depth and nuance (the opposite of Warren's approach, BTW)
• Jay's approach: wants to limit the readership -- it's not for everybody, but it's for a specific type of reader
• "The very last thing I would assume about my audience is that they need something drilled into their heads."
• Interesting observation: media says that conventions are less and less relevant, yet they keep sending more people to cover it
• Story about regimes of political convention coverage: see this entry in PressThink.
• Another kind of coverage: inspiration from the past -- Article on how Norman Mailer covered the 1960 convention for Esquire
• "People have subscriptions to newspapers, people have relationships to the blogs they follow."
• Newsday's reporting online had no links "because that's the way they think"
• Including links to the material you're drawing from "is what any responsible journalist should do" -- that's an advantage that weblogs have
  
• "The way you blog an event like this [the DNC] is that you participate in it."
• Story about Obama: Obama said he had a blog and met with the bloggers. He asked for tips. Rosen's reply: "Write it yourself!"
• Thought it was amazing that the DNC had a CEO -- asked to interview him.
• Convention: communication vehicle for party message. People get news from different ways, hence they had different groups: bloggers, TV, talk radio, etc.
• Interview with Thomas Edsall: Bloggers are breaking up the groupthink
• "The most serious journalists are serious about blogging."

Q&A

• Chris Waddell: Does not believe in Kinsella's "pyramid of power" -- 50% of America is disenfranchised. How do we re-enfranchise them, via blogging?
• Kinsella: Blogging -- not sure the world changed with bloggers at the DNC, but I'm sure they changed
• Rosen: Important to ask the questions about employees doing weblogs. What are the consequences of individual authorship? Suggests studying the most popular weblogs: what makes them good or effective? "Start local" -- make it real to people in your area.
• Rosen: The very first weblog that a mainstream journalist that becomes a success will point the way for the others
• Rosen: There is a "phony competition between mainstream journalism and weblogs". Suggests to journalists to learn from webloggers -- "Every skill that a journalist has is tapped by the weblog"
• Kinsella: The "mainstreaming" of blogging may "denude" blogs of their essence, which is to say "up yours!"

Leonard Witt

• Journalism, as we know it, is broken
• 1988 elections were controlled by the "spinmeisters": it was flag factories, Willie Horton and that photo of Dukakis in the tank
• General idea: Move away from the "horse race mentality" ("Who'se ahead? Who's behind?") and bring back discussion into the public sphere
• Because of public journalism, we have a body to critique mainstream journalism
• Gillmor: "If you're not sincere about something, over a period of time, you'll stop"
• Treating the audience as citizens, not consumers
• PJ reporting is not only on the extremes, but the middle gound
• PJ still not reaching out to all communities, especially disenfranchised ones ("judging by the ethnic makeup of the room")

Dan Gillmor

• Being blogged immediately teaches journalists a lot about how they're doing
• His publisher is handing out a free copy of his new book, We the Media, to everyone in the room later.
• Showed video he took in Tokyo showing a handheld that scans RFIDs of bottles of drugs -- scanning one, the handheld says "this will conflict with your prescription"; another bottle scanned makes the unit say "this has expired"
• Not only will every person have a story -- every thing will have a story too.
• Image of Lynndie England and leashed prisoner at Abu Ghraib: it's hard to keep secrets now
• Image of Treo running RSS software
• Image of man in surgical mask behind phone display: The news about SARS was spread long before the media did it via SMS
• If journalists are going to be learning blogging, they should be using tools that make it easier
• We the Media is "not just about weblogs, but something bigger than that."
• Image of GPS phone: Maps of Tokyo, a notoriously difficult city to navigate
• Image of Swe-Dish: satellite dish in a briefcase. $100K now, $1M back during Iraq War I
• Image of MoveOn.org: It's possible for anyone with just basic off-the-shelf software and hardware to make their own agitprop
• Self-assembling journalism: aggregator blogs, wikis (image of Wikipedia -- "journalism is just beginning to understand wikis")
• Wikipedia: "First absolutely open-source journalism" project that he's heard of -- brief explanation of wikis.
• Intriguing part of wikis: trolls can wreck the comments section of a blog or discussion board, but when anybody can fix the vandalism, it tends to get fixed.

David Akin

• When he first made the leap from print to broadcast journalism, the best advice he got was to "just be a tourguide"
• Praised Dan Gillmor as being one of the best tour guides to the tech world

Leonard Witt

• Journalism is now in the middle of a transformative period, thanks to new tech
• Everyone has their own printing press
• "How can I use these tools to get my audience involved?"
• Citizens are getting involved in public journalism at lightning speed
• OhMyNews: Korean participatory newspaper -- 30,000 contributors, all citizen-produced -- there's an English version now
• Another example: Back-to-Iraq.com
• "Through blogs, public journalism has new DNA"
• The old way of public journalism: face-to-face meetings, took too much time, episodic, the journalists did all the talking
• The new way: Now we all own presses. It's the citizens who are now influencing things.
• A first: the DNC letting bloggers in -- they got more press than the press themselves
• Quote from Orville Schell (see this NYTimes article), dean of the graduate journalism program at the University of California, Berkeley: "Obviously, the official media don't quite know how to deport themselves in relation to the blogs. If they adopt them, it's like having a spastic arm — they can't control it. But if they don't adopt it, they're missing out on the newest, edgiest trend in the media."
• Newspapers still haven't figured out how to incorporate blogging into how they work
• We Media
• Story about pictures from the war (Abu Ghraib / caskets / behadings): At a conference, journalists kept asked amongst themselves whether they should run these gruesome photos -- they were, in their minds, still the gatekeepers. A journalist called up a site running the beheading video of Nick Berg on his laptop. It no longer mattered whether the mainstream media would show the pictures: other people would. "There are no more gatekeepers."
  

Q&A

• David Akin: This room is an elite talking to itself, talking about issues they find important
• Leonard Witt: We all have to our own affirmative action
• Dan Gillmor: Moore's Law will make technology accessible in terms of affordability. The real hurdle will be intellectual and conceptual accessibility, and this will rely heavily on our educational system.
• Peggy Kohr: How do you find time?
• CTV news writer: Video of the beheading of Nicholas Berg -- "It would be disastrous for journalists to engage in a race to the bottom"
• Marie France: Videos like Nick Berg's pose a challenge to teaching journalistic ethics
  

Sitting here with David Janes to my right (positionally and politically) at the Sheraton Centre at the Exploring the Fusion Power of Public and Participatory Journalism conference. Anne Kothawala, President and CEO of the Canadian Newspaper Association (CNA) has just finished the introduction and is showing a CNA video (mostly a PR-driven montage of Canadian images overlaid with "Aren't Canadian newspapers great?" text with Jesus Jones' Right Here, Right Now playing in the background.

David Akin has just finished introducing himself as the "traffic manager" of the conference and has promised to keep us on schedule.

Leonard Witt is now speaking on the topic of public journalism.

More updates as things happen.