Reportage Medialog

Just stumbled on this article from the Observer (via Seansblog) which argues that blogging is not another sign of the degenerating public sphere, in fact it will strengthen journalism and make it more accountable. Interestingly, like the article on citizen media from the NYT that I just blogged about, this article is also from the business section. People are finally realising that blogging is not just a pajama game it is emerging as part of a new suite of practices that will be integral to the future of the business of journalism.

What’s happening is a small but significant change in our media ecology. All journalists worth their salt have always known that out there are readers, listeners or viewers who know more about a story than they do. But until recently, there was no effective way for this erudition or scepticism to find public expression. Letters to the editor rarely attract public attention - or impinge on the consciousness of journalists.

Blogging changes all that. Ignorant, biased or lazy journalism is instantly exposed, dissected and flayed in a medium that has global reach. (If you doubt that, ask Dan Rather and CBS.)

Conversely, good reporting and intelligent commentary is passed from blog to blog and spreads like wildfire beyond the jurisdiction in which it was originally published. This can only be good for journalism in the long run, if only because, as my mother used to say, sunlight is the best disinfectant.

Technorati Tags: blogging and journalism

A mainstream North Carolina newspaper, The News and Record, is jumping feet first into the civic journalism according to the New York Times:

A planned overhaul of The News & Record’s Web site that is to begin next week, is a potent symbol of a transformation taking place across the country, where top-down, voice-of-God journalism is being challenged by what is called participatory journalism, or civic or citizen journalism.

Under this model, readers contribute to the newspaper. And they are doing so in many forms, including blogs, photos, audio, video and podcasts. Whether such efforts can revive revenue for newspaper publishers is an open question. But with gloomy financial forecasts and declines in circulation, some papers are starting to see participatory journalism as their hope for reconnecting with their audiences.

The transformation is a slow one and is predicated on an already active community according to the editor John Robinson who is upfront about his motives.

The paper, with a circulation around 100,000 that has not increased significantly for almost two decades, has been open about its audience-participation plans, discussing them with readers and seeking direction from them along the way.

Greensboro, a city of 229,000 in the gently rolling hills of central North Carolina with seven colleges nearby, was fertile territory for the town square idea. “Greensboro had a pretty strong blogosphere before we came on the scene, and we were trying to understand it and fit in,” said John Robinson, the paper’s 52-year-old editor, who has been the engine behind the transformation here.

“They were commenting on civic affairs and what the city council did and all the dumb things The News & Record did, and that annoyed me because they were misinformed,” he said. “But they were scooping us. They knew things that were going on that we didn’t, in the schools and other places. There was power in what they were doing.”

Interestingly this is a business oriented project as much as a journalism project and the News and Record are grappling with an appropriate business model.

Robin Saul, president and publisher of The News & Record, said the paper was waiting for more marks of success before putting money into the online project and was likely to put it into the sales staff first. “You don’t invest resources until you’re sure there will be a return,” he said. Ann Morris, the managing editor, acknowledged that the business model is “what we lose sleep over.”

“Advertisers are very conservative,” Ms. Morris said. “And the idea that we’re going to be able to bridge this gap from traditional department store retail advertising to all sorts of different ways of generating revenue online - through e-mail, through selling databases, through things we haven’t even thought of yet - that’s a big bridge.”

It is encouraging to see more companies taking the ideas of participatory journalism seriously but Steve Outing from Poynter makes a useful cautionary comment that reminds us that there is still a lot of work to be done before we really understand how to do civic journalism.

“I don’t think we’re anywhere near figuring this citizen journalism/grass-roots media thing out,” he said in an e-mail message. “I do think that if news organizations think that they’re going to have everybody be amateur (nonpaid) ‘journalists,’ they need to think again.”

He said people were generally intimidated by the idea of writing news articles but, as the reaction to the Asian tsunami demonstrated, they were comfortable sharing their experiences, particularly photographs.

“I think when we figure out a better way to entice people, to make it worth their while to contribute, then citizen media will start to show promise,” he said. “And I think we’ll eventually see some business models come out of this that work.”

There have been civic journalism experiments happening for the last decade or more but a combination of factors - critical mass, widespread internet access, internet activism and blogging, dissatisfaction with traditional media, declining newspaper readerships, and visionaries like Dan Gilmour and Jay Rosen who are developing critical comment and theory - mean that we are now entering a time where the movement can take itself to the next level.

Technorati Tags: citizen media

Reuters.com reports on a new survey which confirms earlier surveys about the move towards online news readership. I suspect the figures for Australia would be reasonably consistent:

Nearly one-fifth of Web users who read newspapers now prefer online to offline editions, according to a new study from Internet audience measurement company Nielsen//NetRatings.

The first-time study from Nielsen//NetRatings found that 21 percent of those Web users now primarily use online versions of newspapers, while 72 percent still read print editions.

The remaining 7 percent split their time between online and offline editions. Comparable historic statistics were not available.

“A significant percentage of newspaper readers have transferred their preference from print to online editions,” said Nielsen//NetRatings senior media analyst Gerry Davidson.

Interestingly it is still the big newspaper sites like NYT and USA Today which top the list of most visited sites. I wonder if this allegiance will drift towards the aggregated sites like Google News over time.

Louise Krasniewicz, an American media anthropologist gave a fascinating keynote at the recent Melbourne University Superheroes conference Titled “True Lies Superhero: Do we really want our icons to come to life?” it rehearsed many of the themes from her great book Why Arnold Matters? She has been studying Schwarzenegger as a cultural icon for over 20 years and has some fascinating insights into his recent emergence as politician. (For more information check out her Arnie hypertext project).

She made the point that even the serious media was obsessed with merging the movie characters Arnold has played, his movie star persona and his emergence as a politician in coverage of his campaign in the Californian recall election. They did this by relying on easy recourse to “Governator” imagery and commentary. This is still the case, as she showed with a recent clip from a California daily on the governor’s falling poll ratings. After 12 months in office this story - which has nothing to do with movie star Arnold - is still illustrated by a Terminator still.

An article in this morning’s Sydney Morning Herald showed this very clearly and even imposes the action man figure into local NSW politics.

What can NSW learn from Arnold Schwarzenegger? When it comes to energy it may be a fair bit. After booting out the Democrat governor Gray Davis for taking California’s energy system to near collapse, The Governator stormed in and has begun the essential rebuilding of the state’s electricity system….With the focus and vigour of his most famous screen character, Schwarzenegger recently made public a 10-point plan for a modern 21st century energy system. Some in the old guard urged him to focus only on supply oriented alternatives for keeping the lights on in the country’s biggest state. However, his plan relies on a combination of new and old, of supply and demand.

The story is actually about the success of sophisticated multiple rate devices which encourage consumers to use cheaper energy during off peak periods but what is fascinating about the piece is the portrayal of governor Schwarzenegger as an action hero: it’s all about his kinesthetic body: he “booted out” Gray Davis then he “stormed in” and started “rebuilding”. The inescapable paradox of this language comes in the next sentence which explicitly references “the focus and vigour of his most famous screen character”. What was the result of this Terminator like vigour: a ten point plan, which is not an action response but a typical bureaucratic response. So while we are treated to an image of the heroic Schwarzenegger doing something new this action sequence masks his actual response which is typically cautious and orderly.

The other fascinating thing is that this op-ed piece is written by someone who has an interesting pedigree herself: “Cathy Zoi is group executive director of Bayard Capital, a private investment group. She was previously chief executive of the NSW Sustainable Energy Development Authority and chief of staff of Environmental Policy in the Clinton White House.” The Bayard group is now running a trial of the metering devices in NSW. So while this is situated as an op-ed piece on policy options from a former government policy advisor it is essentially using the Arnie factor as a celebrity endorsement for a scheme her company hopes to convince the NSW government to take-up.

Both Zoi’s position with the group and Bayard’s involvement in NSW are mentioned in the article and the connection is there to be made by careful readers. But like the contradiction between the imagery of the governator and the reality of his political actions, the blur between Zoi as policy wonk and policy salesperson are also blurred by this kind of journalism

Interesting op-ed piece by Edward Wasserman, Knight professor of journalism ethics at Washington and Lee University in the Miami Herald (free registration required) about the ongoing plagiarism controversies in US journalism. He makes the interesting point that one form of serioous intellectual theft that is often unacknowledged is institutional:

Respect for precedence — acknowledging work that preceded and materially contributed to your own — gives us a handle on the worst form of intellectual theft in journalism, which is practiced not by individuals but by institutions. It’s when whole stories reported by smaller organizations are appropriated, re-reported and published by market-dominant media, which never mention who broke them.

Here, I think the public suffers. How important information comes to light is itself important information. If lesser news outfits ferret out hard-to-get scoops we should know that. We might support smaller media more generously, and the upshot would be stronger, richer and more-diverse information sources.

And just so I can post this with a clear conscience I got the link from the always interesting Daily Briefing on Journalism.org!