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
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
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