Digital Utopia

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.

The morning starts with two insider views of participatory journalism in mainstream online media: Rosa Jiménez from ElPais.com and Nathalie Malinarich from BBC News. ElPais.com is one of the most daring online newspapers in Europe regarding participatory journalism. But Rosa is not completely satisfied with how they are doing everything. She feels they are still exploring.

She argues that quantity should not be the main criteria to evaluate success of participatory options. She does not feel that forums are useful. They have 3,000 daily users, but comments on news seems to her to be much more useful.

Managing the community of blogs is her main duty. There are 6,000 users and 200-300 daily new posts. They have a metablog that summarizes the takes of the bloggers on current issues, and this is linked in the news stories.

Yo, Periodista is the citizen journalism section of ElPaís.com. Rosa would like more visibility of their section, but they don’t always have good stories to be shown in the main homepage. They stopped giving out monetary prizes to the best articles. They are thinking now about giving out tools for citizen journalism (a mobile phone…) or starting a point-based system so that everyone can have some reward in the end. Their challenge is keeping people interested, motivated.

Citizen media in Spain

In the second session, Pau Llop explained his citizen journalism project, Bottup.com, and Marta Torres and Laura Rahola presented their website mapping stories about Barcelona, Bdebarna.net.

Bottup.com was born January 2007. It is run by professional journalists who write stories and edit those contributed by citizens. They discuss editorial decisions collectively on a forum and have online materials to help citizens train themselves as journalists.

Bdebarna.net is a 7-year-old project. It is an open space for Barcelonians to contribute stories about specific places in the city (photos, narrations). It is like a geotagged collective blog that tries to reveal the subjective city, the voice of the citizens, the microhistory of the everyday life that is not covered by the media. They have a weekly program in a local radio where the stories of the web move to the mainstream media.