Digital Utopia

This is going to be an exciting Spring, with some big projects seeing the fruit of months of work. I am specially fond of the research project on audience participation management in online newspapers. We did interviews with news editors and community managers of 24 newsrooms in 10 countries in Europe, North America and Israel. The team included Jane Singer, Alfred Hermida, Ari Heinonen, Thorsten Quandt, Zvi Reich, Marina Vujnovic, and me.

In few weeks, the book summarizing the results of the study will be available: Participatory Journalism: Guarding Open Gates at Online Newspapers. Alfred Hermida presented some of the conclusions at the recent International Symposium on Online Journalism in Austin, Texas, and the reactions on Twitter show that the research is welcomed as much needed. Beyond the hype about audience participation and citizen journalism, we tried to assess how journalists perceive this trends and how they manage user-generated content in practical terms. We found that they try to resist empowering the audience, therefore keeping the gatekeeper role of the journalist and in many cases setting participation opportunities as separate playgrounds for the users, separate from news production.

We have also published several articles in scientific journals in the process of producing this study. Check them out!

Vujnovic, M.; Singer, J.; Paulussen, S; Heinonen, A.; Reich, Z.; Quandt, T.; Hermida, A.; Domingo, D.  (2010).  Exploring the political-economic factors of participatory journalism: a first look into self-reports by online journalists and editors in ten countries. Journalism Practice, 4(3),  285-296. [Abstract, PDF]

Domingo, D., Quandt, T., Heinonen, A., Paulussen, S., Singer, J., Vujnovic, M. (2008) Participatory journalism practices in the media and beyond: an international comparative study of initiatives in online newspapers. Journalism Practice, 2(3), 680-704. [Abstract, PDF]

Paulussen, S., Heinonen, A., Domingo, D. & Quandt, T. (2007). “Doing it together: Citizen participation in the professional news making process”. Observatorio (OBS*) Journal, 1(3):131-154. [PDF]

The Knight Foundation offers for the fourth time grants for local journalism projects that develop open-source software that can be useful for other communities. This News Challenge is a wonderful innovation booster. And I have gathered old and new colleagues to submit a very exciting project!

These are the highlights. Your feedback will be welcome, as we will be refining it in the coming weeks! You may write your comments here or, even better, in the News Challenge application page!

PARTICIPA: Reconnecting journalists and citizens to foster community consensus

PARTICIPA wants to rethink citizen journalism in order to promote a more active citizenry that engages in social debate in search for community consensus, and to help journalism regain its status as a profession that truly serves its community. The core rationale is to take the burden off citizens, defining new roles for more involved journalists and using open-source software to make participation easier and more effective, purposeful and consensus-oriented.

Citizen journalism and web 2.0 initiatives have empowered local communities, but they often lack an effective management, which diminishes their social impact. Professional online media usually treat audience participation as a playground rather than regarding users as citizen. Our project wants to revisit and update the tradition of public journalism to improve the social impact of participation. We will use online software to transform random participation into clear and easy step-by-step phases that, with the aid of journalists, guide citizens into effective collective debate that fosters consensus. This will also rebuild the trust between citizens and journalists, a necessary step in strengthening the democratic role of media.

The project will involve several organizations, mainly:

Journalism Practice has just published the first article with empirical data of the international research group on participatory journalism I am participating since April 2007, informally called the “Tampere group” as it was founded in this Finnish city.

The article summarizes the results of a structural analysis of the features that 16 online newspapers offer for audience participation. It also sets up a theoretical framework to interpret the trend of participatory journalism, which we think can be applied to bigger samples. We have split the analysis of participation features into five production stages (access, selection, processing, distribution, interpretation) and found that each news website has different levels of openness in each of these stages.

The bottom line is that, overall, online newspapers are eager to open interpretation to the audience, as this is coherent with their definition of the audience as audience. Access, distribution and even processing are open to a lesser extent, but selection is completely closed to participation, as this is the core of the journalistic profession.

The issue of Journalism Practice compiles, along with a twin issue of Journalism Studies, work presented in the conference the Future of Newspapers, held in Cardiff on September 2007. There are other relevant articles about participatory journalism in the UK (by Alfred Hermida and Neil Thurman) and in Sweden (by Henrik Örnebring,  and also about citizen journalists’ routines in Israel (by Zvi Reich). Our article was updated in December for the journal.

The ICA conference in Montréal was a very nice opportunity to move on in the debate on the research of participatory journalism. I chaired a panel that outlined the different approaches to date:

• The study of the attitudes and strategies of mainstream online media
• The exploration of the newsmaking routines of citizen reporters in comparison to those of professionals

Alfred Hermida, who participated in the panel, summarizes nicely the findings of two of the studies presented there: British online editors’ attitudes and Israeli citizen reporters’ routines. In the discussion, two research questions were identified as next steps to take:

• What are journalists offering back to the audience that participates?
• Who are the citizens that participate and what are their motivations?

The first question has a normative implication: if participatory journalism is to be relevant at all to improve the role of media as catalyzers of a more engaged citizenry, then journalists should get involved in the participation processes. If business rationales and legal cautions prevent this, “participatory journalism” may need to be renamed into “audience publication architectures”, as proposed by Hermida: spaces where user-generated content is published in a very controlled and limited environment completely separated from professional newsmaking processes and products.

The second question may shed some light into the value of participatory journalism for the other side of the equation, the citizens. Knowing why do they participate will help to see if they have any aspirations of changing mainstream journalism… or just become part of it.

The Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication just published an article (PDF) in which I try to contribute some theoretical and historical context to this debate. I describe “interactivity” as a powerful myth that has just been renovated by the discourses on “participatory journalism”. Online journalists feel compelled to incorporate the myth into their products, but their professional culture and organizational constraints push the actual developments out of the core routines of online newsrooms.