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:

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 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.

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.

Ari and Thorsten agree in their diagnosis of the attitudes in Finnish and German professional media: they have embraced participatory journalism after an initial phase of ignorance and reluctance, but they don’t have a plan. They somehow feel the urge to be inside the phenomenon of Web 2.0 and citizen journalism, but they don’t know what to do with it and they don’t want it to change their routines.

Ari argues that blogs are relevant as a symptom that media are not alone anymore as publishers of information. Thorsten is skeptical about this: there are many bloggers, but their readerships are not comparable to professional news websites and they actually tend to comment on news produced by the media rather than contributing original content. Also, journalists are more necessary than ever to filter and select what is relevant and trustworthy in the blogosphere. The agenda setting and long-tail effects (that many small publishers can have as large impact as few bigger ones) of blogs are theories that have not been proven yet.

In the second session, Neil Thurman (City U) and Steve Paulussen (Ghent U) discuss the trends in the UK and Flanders. British online newspapers have developed many participatory journalism initiatives in the last two years. Blogs have exploded: only 3 online newspapers had them in 2005; 18 months later, twelve of fourteen online newspapers had blogs (more than a hundred in total). Most of them had fully moderation of comments, some after exploring more open options. Online editors acknowledge that the reasons for exploring these options are mainly competition (not being left behind of the trends) and the risk of losing their audiences (keeping the newspaper role of the space for public debate).

The practical experience with audience participation in UK online newspapers is bittersweet: Online editors said that there was always people abusing the opportunity of contributing content. Legal concerns (the responsibility of the web publishers when they publish libelous user contributions) were another worry for editors. They were committed to have their audiences read quality content, therefore actively filter and select their users’ contributions. Obviously this is very time-consuming for the newsroom, and that is why many online news sites are creating specific teams to manage user-generated content and developing software to manage content. Editors feel that creating an active community will be good on the long term, to have a more loyal audience.

Neil notes that individual journalists’ attitudes towards audience participation are very diverse, from fearing it, neglecting it, to engaging in active debates with their readers. No clear pattern yet. Also, he points out that there seems to be a ceiling to active participants in the media: The Guardian, for example, one of the most successful ones in audience participation, has never gone beyond 10,000 active participants even if the traffic of their blogs and message boards keeps growing.

Steve Paulussen is involved in serveral research projects in Flanders that try to bridge the gap between traditional journalism and citizen media, exploring pro-am options (examples: Het Belang Van Limburg, HasseltLokaal.be). Professional and citizen journalism have very different production processes. Again, Steve argues that the media do not have a clear strategy when they explore participatory journalism, they don’t have a clear goal. He adds another factor to the slow development of participatory journalism: organizational constraints. Newsrooms need to adopt new routines, new roles, to integrate pro-am journalism, and they tend to resist change.

Reasons for pro-am collaboration: cutting costs (not desirable, nor efficient), reengaging the community (but you also need to engage the journalists), improve journalism (requires investment, training). In the case of Hasselt Lokaal there was a clear intention (generate community publishing, reconnect with their community), but no clear plan, and therefore the journalists of the company ended up being not involved at all in the project. You need to know why and how you want to develop participatory journalism… But that is just the beginning: you will need to convince the newsroom to embrace the idea, there is always resistance.

In a specific case (CoCoMedia project at Concentra), the organizational structure is clearly a factor preventing innovation: online and print journalists do not collaborate even if they are in the same newsroom; the IT department develops new tools without taking care about the needs of journalists, training is scarce; there is conflict among the different departments; journalists are too busy to handle user-generated content, they prefer to rely on the official, traditional sources. Keys to be successful: training, new tools, motivation.

The speakers:

Amy Gahran, Poynter Institute
Jan Schaffer, J-Lab / KCNN.org
Steve Outing, Enthusiast Group (videoconference)
Georgia Popplewell, Global Voices Online
Javier Moya, ElPais.com
Pau Llop, Bottup.com
Marta Torres and Laura Rahola, BdeBarna.net
Ari Heinonen, University of Tampere
Thorsten Quandt, Free University Berlin
Neil Thurman, City University London
Steve Paulussen, University of Ghent
David Domingo, University of Iowa

It is the 5th edition of the International Online Journalism Seminar, and we would love to see people from all over the world joining the conversation by the Mediterranean sea… or from your computers if you can’t make it. I’ll be live-blogging during the event, come back to tell your 5 cents!

To attend the event, register through this form or sending an email to info@periodistesdigitals.org

In mid-September I attended in a superb conference in the Cardiff School of Journalism (in the photo) on the “Future of Newspapers“. The rise of tabloids and free newspapers was one of the big topics. The other one was audience participation (the “Tampere group” presented our first set of empirical data). Listening to research results and comments from British online journalism professionals reassured me in my skeptical perspective on how this trend is developing. The summary:

• Online news sites offer participatory features “because everybody else is doing it” and because the business side of the company feels it may be a way to build/keep an audience. There are not many public journalism rationales behind what is being developed. Why?
• Online journalists do not trust their audiences. They fear that the quality of what they will send in will be dubious and a burden to the daily routines of the reporters.
• That’s why more and more online media are dealing with audience content management (including comments) by having a specific person in the newsroom devoted to that (so that it does not interfere with the work of the rest of the journalists) or even outsource it to non-journalistic “web 2.0″ companies.
• Our own results on the participatory features on 16 European and US online newspapers show that most of them restrict the users to the role of audience reacting to professionally produced news and offer more participation opportunities in the soft news sections than on the hard news.

How can anybody expect citizen journalism arise from this context? What is the point of having audience participation if it does not “affect” the work of the journalists? My feeling is that we should drop the concept of participatory journalism when we refer to mainstream online media and talk more about collaborative journalism. That is where there can be some actual changes happening, when journalists and citizens engage in a common news project. The concept of crowdsourcing connects with this, but the experience of Assignment Zero shows that there is a lot to refine in terms of how to make such collaboration work smoothly.

Obviously, active citizens are finding other venues to publish their reporting. There is a lot of research to be done within and beyond mainstream online media in order to assess if all this participation can, at some point, redefine journalism and the public sphere:

• Theorising the potentials of online tools and new working routines, such as wikis (as did the brilliant presentation by Paul Bradshaw in Cardiff).
• Assessing the quality (in comparison to professional news) of what is being submitted and published;
• Understanding the motivations of those who participate and of those who manage the process inside and outside professional media;
• Exploring professionals’ attitudes both at the editorial and the business sides of the companies;
• Including a political economy perspective to assess the role of business decisions in the development of participatory features;
• Developing experiments with media companies, such as CoCoMedia, the Flemish case presented in Cardiff (PPT about the project), involving the development of software for the journalists to better integrate citizen-generated content into their workflow, but also training to change the professional reluctancy to collaborate with their audiences.

Criteria. In the 2006 edition, 1,650 applications where received and only 25 were selected, the grants ranging between $15.000 and $5 million. Gary Kebbel, one of the persons directly involved in the selection process, explained to Tidbits editor Amy Grahran that they were looking for projects which:

• Involved innovative uses of digital media
• Would help to build, bind or create a sense of community
• Focused on a specific geographic area
• Would make the results of their work available to all: free, open source, with open standards.
• Offered the broadest appeal and greatest replicability, and projects that will continue to grow and take on a life of their own.

Update 7/17: hear more from Kebbel along with 2006 grantee Nora Paul (IMNS) at NPR’s Future Tense (MP3).

Profiles. Most of the winners of the first edition are veteran activists and researchers in online media, but there is also a 20-year-old Information Systems graduate student. Even though profiles are hybrid in many cases, academics and activists are the ones involved in most of the winning projects:
9 were led by universities
7 by citizen media activists
3 by professional journalists
3 by software developers
2 by consultants
Only one mainstream media company (MTV) was awarded last year. For the 2007 edition, Kebbel suggested they wanted more “young people and more international applications”.

Content. The official categories for the News Challenge projects are Ideas, Pilot projects, Leadership projects, and Commercial products. Regardless of this, I feel that 2006 grant winners can be organized into five different kinds of projects: framework projects (6) aiming to be incubators of actual citizen media projects; software development projects (7), mainly in the areas of information mapping and content management; reporting projects (5), focused in citizen journalists’ training; games-as-news projects (3), exploring playful ways for storytelling; and other projects (4) ranging from citizen-media law databases to exploring new newsroom models. Here is a list of the projects based on these categories (I will be adding links to the projects websites as they become available):

• Framework projects: This projects are meant to foster new developments in citizen media software and strategies. Many seek to make journalism and programming students meet to create new applications.
  • MIT’s Center for Future Civic Media. $5 million, 4 years.
  • Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University journalism scholarships for programmers. $ 639,000, 3 years.
  • Arizona State University’s Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship, at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication. $ 552,000, 3 years.
  • Innovation Incubators Project, by seven US academic institutions, led by Park School of Communication at Ithaca College. $ 230,000, 2 years.
  • Global Voices’ program to foster activist bloggers in developing countries. $ 244,000, 2 years.
  • Steven Clift‘s Ideas Factory. $15,000, 1 year.
• Software development: The first four projects are related to mapping information to make it more easy to access by citizens, relating it to specific locations.
  
  • Adrian Holovaty‘s Every Block, a public databases visualization tool inspired in his previous project ChicagoCrime.org. $ 1.1 million, 2 years.
  • Placeblogger, proposing an universal geotagging standard. $ 222,000, 2 years.
  • Dan Schultz, works on a GPS-based news management system. $15,000, 1 year.
  • Paul Lamb and Leslie Rule develop a GPS tracking system to tailor information for mobile users. $15,000, 1 year.The rest of the projects in this category are focused in content management tools for citizen media.
  • Village Soup will create an open-source version of their citizen media sites content management system. $ 885,000, 2 years.
  • Benjamin Melançon is developing a Drupal module called Related items. $15,000, 1 year.
  • JD Lasica’s blog Social Media will follow and analyze innovations in community media software. $15,000, 1 year.
• Reporting projects: These are mainly devoted to develop training for citizen journalists.
  
  • MTV will fund youngsters to cover the US presidential campaign. $ 700,000, 2 years.
  • The Chicago citizen news site Chi-Town Daily News will train 75 neighborhood reporters. $ 340,000, 2 years.
  • The Media Mobilizing Project by Indymedia Philadephia will train 40 immigrants to do video reports. $ 150,000, 2 years.
  • Boulder Carbon Tax Tracker, a weblog fostering the debate between experts, public officers and citizens on this local issue. $ 90,000, 2 years.
  • Jay Rosen will be blogging about how beat reporters can work with social networks to improve their reporting. $15,000, 1 year.
• Games as news: These projects explore gaming as a new way to explain news.
  
  • The Gotham Gazette, a citizen news site in New York, will produce “news games” to engage their readers and help them understand local policy decision-making. $ 250,000, 2 years.
  • The Institute for New Media Studies at the University of Minnesota will create prototypes that will let journalists develop game-like scenarios for community issues. $ 250,000, 2 years.
  • Paul Grabowicz, at the University of California, will create a video game recreating the Oakland jazz and blues club era. $ 60,000, 2 years.
• Other projects:
  • Citizen Media Law Project, at Harvard University, provides legal information and advice to citizen journalists. $ 250,000, 2 years.
  • The Duke Chronicle, student run newspaper at Duke University, will explore new newsroom configurations for a digital converged environment. $ 50,000, 2 years.
  • Dori Maynard will blog about creating and maintaining diversity in digital media.
  • G. Patton Hughes will blog about making his hyperlocal web site, Paulding.com, a financial success. $15,000, 1 year.

Applications. The 2007 applicants must register before filling in the forms with their project data. This year you can make your project idea public in the News Challenge site and have feedback from other registered users to improve the project if you submit it early enough. Users will be able to rate the projects, therefore helping to the final decision of the Knight Foundation. Look forward to the list of public projects in the following weeks. Be inspired and inspiring, check the official FAQ for common doubts and… good luck!

Update 8/17: There are already 20 public projects receiving comments and suggestions. I plan to analyze the proposals soon.

Two weeks ago, in the blooming spring of Tampere, in Finland, I participated in an International Seminar entitled “Towards Participatory Journalism”. The line-up was very exciting, and hopefully a starting point for joint research projects: Jane Singer, currently at U Lancashire, Thorsten Quandt, Ludwig-Maximiliaans U in Munich, Steve Paulussen, U Ghent [the three of them in the picture, discussing in the woods of Pyyniki], Mark Deuze, on a videoconference from U Indiana, and Esa Sirkkunen and Ari Heinonen from U Tampere. You may want to browse the presentations yourself, but let me summarize the rather skeptical perspective that the different presenters shared in very complementary contributions.

Participatory journalism seems theoretically very attractive as a way to improve journalism public service role (or to get back to it, it could be argued), but in practice participatory projects are not easy to develop nor are they guaranteed per se to improve quality of journalism and democracy.

Participatory journalism requires changes in journalists’ attitudes and newsrooms internal organization to be effective, which Steve Paulussen demonstrated to be very challenging; at the same time, it may not foster the participation of the voiceless, it might be restricted to local and worthless stories (at least in terms of democratic collective interest relevance) and media companies may just use it to cut jobs. Real risks that the ideal has when put into practice.

Empirical and anecdotal data suggest that journalists resist to embrace participatory journalism or, at least, to let it change their professional principles. Therefore, participatory projects being developed nowadays may not be effective in achieving the benefits that theoretical approaches to participatory journalism suggest (more responsive and responsible journalists, more civic engagement of citizens, more transparency of the news production process, more power of citizens in defining the news agenda…).

In online journalism, immediacy is the priority and journalists seem have a diminished responsibility on their work (few bylines, mostly editing wires), as Thorsten Quandt pointed out. In citizen media cases, Mark Deuze highlighted that the profile of users is often the wealthy families rooted in their communities, those who are already well served by professional media. Both ends don’t seem to meet in what would be the idealistic intentions of participatory journalism proponents.

Jane Singer defended that journalists need to redefine the grounding for their ethical standards, and I proposed they should have new responsibilities in the new participatory context. They will still be needed, in order to encourage and enhance active audience contributions and reach out for what the audience does not cover, which can actually be the most crucial stories for social debates.

The challenge is detecting what are the factors and strategies that may foster participation that contributes to improve journalism and the overall democratic debate.

Convergence, multimedia storytelling and citizen journalism were obviously the hot topics of the conference. After letting the ideas settle down in my mind, the best-practices cases explained by US national and local news sites as well as European and Latin American online media, and the less-than-optimist studies of some scholars may seem contradictory. Well, I think they are not.

While the US bigger national newspapers presented their efforts in converging online and offline newsrooms and the benefits of this strategy, top European dailies (El País and Le Monde) expressed an overt refusal of convergence. “It is too early to close the web laboratory”, stated Jean-François Fogel. He argued that online journalism is still finding its own model and should not be the victim of the crisis of newspapers. 75% of LeMonde.fr users never read the newspaper and have a younger profile. While the newspaper circulation and advertising has been declining since 2002, the web is growing steadily “because we have been more innovative than the competitors”. LeMonde.fr expects to consolidate this online leadership creating its own self-competitor, a different news website that will be launched this summer.

Ismael Nafría agreed that paper and web should have separate teams. “Internet is a different medium, with its own rules, language, users, pace…”. He defended the idea of coordination of newsrooms rather than integration. At Prisa, the media group that owns El País, they have an online company (Prisacom) that staffs 200 (and growing fast) in charge of all the webs of the group. Each website has its specific team and there is a central online newsroom that manages participation, multimedia and innovation projects. They started to be profitable in 2006 with 30M-euro revenue.

The research I presented at Austin, a preliminary study on convergence trends in Spain (PDF) by a team of 25 researchers led by Ramón Salaverría, tries to understand the phenomenon as a multidimensional and open process. In fact, our survey of 58 media companies suggests that smaller local and regional media are more eager to explore newsroom collaboration and professional multiskilling than bigger media. Even in the very same media groups, national media tend to keep independent newsrooms when they foster collaboration in their regional outlets. Overall, convergence development in Spain is very moderate and does not challenge existing routines and values. Fully-fledged convergence has been idealized as the place where every media should be heading, but the fact is that it may not necessarily have positive outcomes to the quality of news.

Forget citizen journalism

At least that is the suggestion of Jan Schaffer, who is leading the analysis of participatory media trends in the US at KCNN.org. She presented a thorough study of the features, strategies and values of sites that foster active audience involvement. “I would rather use citizen media rather than citizen journalism to refer to them”, she said, arguing that many of the initiatives don’t try to compete with news media, but to be a bridge between citizens and the media. Their objectives are mainly creating community debate and helping to cover those hyperlocal issues that mass media usually neglects. Therefore, they measure success by the quality of participation rather than by revenue. The cases from Fort Myers, Florida (more here), and Bluffton, South Carolina, showed that if journalists care about citizen participation, put the means to gather ideas and use them when reporting, there can be very successful experiences starting from mass media.

As Lisa Stone, of the women blog sindication community BlogHer, put it: “Ask, don’t tell”. That’s the starting point to better serve your community. So, we can forget about citizen journalism, but it seems to me that active audience involvement is something that can add value to online journalism… if only you really believe in it. Alfred Hermida (he also comments on the Symposium at his blog Reportr.net), from the University of British Columbia (Canada), presented a study (PDF) on UK online media strategies on citizen participation, and the main conclusion was that they were developing lots of services but at the same time thinking that they were not a worthy contribution to their products. They were basically following a trend (blogs were the most developed form of participation) to be able to say they were innovative, but their professional culture made them see user-generated content as a gatekeeping problem, rather than as an investment. Ismael Nafría explained that at Prisacom they have already hired 6 people to manage citizen participation besides 6 freelances. He calculates that 10% of their audience is an active contributor to the different options they offer.

Multimedia skills for journalists?

BlogHer is an example of how you can do successful business if you find the adequate niche. A similar example is MediaStorm: they have specialized in compelling multimedia storytelling, where video, audio, text and pictures are combined to explain heart-moving journalistic stories. They make auctions to sell some of the stories to big media, and promoting their work on iTunes, Flickr and MySpace. In a lively round table moderated by Nora Paul (University of Minnesota), Brian Storm defended that what media need now is good journalism and critical thinking, and multimedia tools are just ways to explore new forms of storytelling. He defended that the best way to produce multimedia stories is in teams with people with outstanding skills in each of the elements of the story. He was very radical in saying that journalism schools just need to teach the j-basics, good repoting.

But when NYTimes.com speaker, Andrew DeVigal, said that their better hires lattely have been two Flash developers with no journalistic experience, I somehow prefer to think that the more the students can get at the university, the better. The key: teaching them to learn to learn new tools and skills. The videos linked at the first paragraph of this post are by Lindsay Meeks, a creative local multimedia journalist I met at the conference… She will graduate at UT this summer, and she has a bright future ahead. Lindsay conducts on her own video interviews with two cameras (one on a tripod) and creates Flash containers. A brave online journalist you would like to have in your multimedia storytelling team!