Digital Utopia

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 long-awaited moment has arrived for me! This morning I received the first copies of the book I have co-edited with Chris Paterson: Making Online News: The Ethnography of New Media Production. It is the first compilation of research into the working routines and values of online journalists. Chapters by 15 authors –including Thorsten Quandt, Jane Singer and Mark Deuze– offer for the first time the insight of ethnography
into the 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!

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.

Ari Heinonen (U Tampere) and Thorsten Quandt (Free U Berlin) have started the first session of the International Online Journalism Seminar, in Vilanova i la Geltrú (Catalonia). I will be live blogging during the two days of the event, here and in the official blog of the conference in Catalan.

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.