Conclusion: It was a nice pedagogic experience for the students, that learned that CMSs are not always designed to suit their needs. But I had the feeling that there should be something else in the open-source world that would be more user friendly in the backend. That’s why I am intending to use WordPress. It was originally designed to manage weblogs, but the huge improvements of their lastest version and the precedent of some college news projects using it encouraged me to try it out.

Next step: finding a newsy template. There have already been some discussions about open-source CMS options and, specifically, WordPress templates for news portals, but first-hand experience is a must to make a decision. Here is what I have learned after installing and playing around a bit with four WP themes (I could not download Revolution News, as the purchase process gets stuck on Firefox and Safari in my Mac… will add it if I get around this problem):

Gridlock

The theme has not been updated recently, and that may be a problem in the long run. It is very handy that options are integrated into the WP admin panel, but they are very scarce, in the end. You can only hand-pick the three top stories. There are no instructions to customize the template and it does not support widgets (a useful WP feature that lets you drag and drop features to the sidebar). Moreover, the layout is optimized for 800px screen width, a very old-fashioned look right now.

The Morning After

The homepage has some customizable spots, but it is pretty rigid: It allows to highlight a story below the latest (which cannot be chosen). Also, lets you include short text announcements, not very handy for news stories. There is a nice systematic how-to page, but the theme requires extensive use of FTP to take the full advantage of the layout, and uses custom fields that you need to set up in order to insert images in the homepage. Images with captions in posts can be controlled with specific HTML code to paste, which is a bit annoying. It is widget ready. Basically, it is a theme for patient, code-loving journalists, instructions are clear enough to avoid getting lost.

Mimbo

The homepage layout is quite rigid (a lead story, three featured headlines with photo and three section highlights), but very customizable tweaking the category ids in the WP theme editor (that’s messing with the code, but with the last version of WP you can do it within the admin interface, without FTPing pages). Code is well commented, helping customization, and there is a nice set of instructions in the author’s blog, but it is a bit anoying if you want to change things every time you publish. Leads in the homepage can be different from the story pages, using the standard “Excerpt” WP field. Photos in the homepage can be inserted using custom fields and uploaded via FTP, and images in posts can be controlled with specific CSS. Widget management is apparently limited to adding one to the theme sidebar, unless you hand-code.

News

This is the only theme I tested that is not free. It costs just $75 for one site, but may not be worth it, as there is no tutorial for customization and their support forum is not usually visited by their developers to answer the user questions. Code has comments to help with customization, but you feel yourself quite lonely exploring how to get things done. Apparently, you cannot control which is the leading story, that by default is the most recent. Instead, you can decide what categories to feature at the bottom of the homepage (and it will show the newest post). Not a lot of editorial control over the homepage, that’s it. The template neither allows for custom excerpts in the homepage, but with the “more” tag you can control what shows in the homepage. Photos are managed automatically, creating thumbnails for the featured articles, no need of FTP. It has a cute AJAX sidebar for latest news, comments and most popular, but it disappears if you want to add widgets.

Veredict: I will work further with Mimbo, which seems the most promising template. Will let you know if I change my mind.

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.

Data comes to me

Since I started using Google Reader some years ago, I browse the web less and less. Surfing is old fashioned, I’m rather sit comfortably at the porch and let RSS feeds, podcasts and mashed up data come to me. I get what I want, when I want, and only go fishing for more following suggestions from my trusted sources. Yes, Google’s search engine is also there to guide me to the unknown, but that’s anymore my main web activity. Ubiquity, one of the recent experiments at Mozilla Labs, takes this philosophy to the next step, letting users create their own mashups, combine web services wherever you are (webpage, email), to avoid what you need to do now: linking to them, browsing to them.

Apps are the browser

I couldn’t help getting an iPhone 3G. To me, its main contribution to the world is not that it makes surfing the web on a portable device doable for the first time. That’s cool, but there’s something bigger: Most iPhone apps are connected to the web and let you do tasks transparently, without the need of a browser. So, you tap on the Facebook app and do Facebook activities without having to browse to the website in Safari. May seem a small change, but when online access is (almost) everywhere (and more and more people have it) this means that browsing is not relevant anymore, the Internet becomes just a tool to perform tasks that are more powerful connected than disconnected. Mozilla Labs is also developing the concept of generating desktop apps out of websites, in the Prism project.

The browser becomes the OS

This is the most natural step if the other two mature enough. If the web is there, always, and we have intelligent apps that bring to us what we need when we need it, why do we need the OS anymore? We can have all our data online, we can have all our apps online… and load them whenever we need them. The interface then can become much more flexible and playful, touch screens (even Microsoft is working on this!) and natural language (as Ubiquity aims for) be the way to get what you want. The OS will still be there, of course, but it will be an interface manager more than anything else. Mozilla Labs have created Aurora, a prototype of a browser where the browser is “transparent”.

[Update, 16:11] I guess when I started writing this morning with the buzz about Google Chrome in the back of my mind… But did not actually mention the newcomer! Reviews previous to the release of the G-browser argue that it aims to kill Windows by letting (web) apps live a new life inside the browser. Here you have a condensed version of the comic book that Google has used to introduce the browser (it will be available for Windows later today). Reading through the comic it seems promising but just one more step towards the future of the Internet. I have come to learn that change is always slower than we expect.

This is the first step to reactivate the blog. Talking to Alfred Hermida in Montréal about his outstanding blog on digital journalism, I concluded that it is all about discipline: I already have the routine of reading interesting posts of other blogs and news websites through my RSS feeds; I just need to add some time to write every morning about what I have saw or done that is worth sharing. I will keep online journalism as the common ground, hoping that my thoughts can be useful to the community.

A personal note: I am back to Catalonia, resuming my job at URV on September. Keep in touch online… and look forward to catch up with everyone in conferences and seminars all around!

• 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.

In a field where most books tend to deal with the theoretical possibilities of online news, we have tried
to offer a reality-check: researchers contributing to the book have lived with journalists in the online newsrooms to describe their real practices and the constraints they face. We hope that this perspective will be very useful for the teaching of online journalism and for professionals willing to have a deeper understanding of the evolution of their job.

It is, at the same time, an invitation for more ethnographic research, for the rich data it generates. Ethnography entails observing professionals at work until their routines and values are fully understood, but also in-depth interviews and work with on-site documents. It is time-consuming, but the results are worth the effort!

The book has two added attractive features: it has a multi-national dimension, showcasing examples from Argentina to Germany, from the USA to China. And also, it collects research from different moments in the evolution of online journalism, form late 1990s to 2007: it can be read in part as a history of online news.

We have set up a website, makingonlinenews.net to continue the task of the book. Our intention is to keep track of relevant and critical online journalism research. There you will also find info about the book chapters and authors. The book will be in stores on May and you can already pre-order it on Amazon –you will get a 5% discount!

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.