Digital Utopia

Lately I am more an more convinced that in the phenomenon of participatory journalism in mainstream news sites we tend to take the exception for the rule. Burma’s coverage by the BBC, the Minnesota bridge collapse i-Reports at CNN and beyond… They are singular cases where citizen journalism adds a lot as journalists are not there to report themselves.

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.

Starting today, and until October 15, media innovators have a second chance to submit their projects to the Knight Foundation up-to-5-million-dollar News Challenge grants. “Before you apply, study last year’s winners“, the organizers recommend. A good resource is the fantastic series of interviews by E-Media Tidbits. But I found difficult to get the big picture, so here are the facts in a nutshell:

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.

The Las Vegas Sun will relaunch their website this summer under the new leadership of Dave Toplikar, who visited U Iowa in March. They want to push the envelope of multimedia storytelling and explore how to tell news creatively with the help of digital tools.

Toplikar sent me the profiles they are looking for, a good guide to understand how the online media industry is evolving. A combination of technical skills and reporting experience is the bottom line:

- Flash Designer: We are looking for someone who is good at building flash
graphics and 3D motion graphics to go with analytical news stories written
by our reporters. This position would also work with photographers on
enhancing their flash graphic skills. And this person would work with our
artist and cartoonist on animating their work.
- Videographer: We are looking for someone who has skills at shooting,
editing and processing video news stories for the Web. I was hoping to find
someone who has shot and produced TV-station quality video who could help
us also help the Sun create a new video identity online.
- Web Content Editor: This person would work with reporters and editors at
building deep, evergreen content sites that would contain granular content
about specific Las Vegas area topics. This person would need to be a good
writer and also have multimedia Web skills.
- Web Technician: This person would have all the skills of a multimedia
reporter, but would mostly do processing work at a desk. The person would
process video, audio and provide other assistance for the multimedia for
our daily updates and for our deep content sites. Skills in editing video
and audio clips, helping to create podcasts and vodcast will be essential.

As discussed by Mindy McAdams some months ago, few Journalism graduates would easily fit these profiles. In my Online Journalism course I’m trying to give the students the basic bricks for a job like these offered by Las Vegas Sun: awareness of the technological options, ability to learn to use new tools and critical thinking to decide when and how to use any storytelling strategy. This might not be enough, but Dave Toplikar told me he really wants to get journalists not just technical staff. And a journalist with the right attitude will quickly learn how to put together the puzzle of multimedia storytelling.

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.