Month: August 2004

“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!”