Media Re:public

Compelling, well-researched, human, making a serious and complicated issue accessible without dumbing it down – that’s the kind of journalism we’re concerned with, right? This week’s episode of This American Life is all of those and more. It’s a collaboration with NPR news that actually makes it possible to understand how the subprime mortgage crisis happened, and its implications for the economy here and abroad. At the same time, you meet, understand and may even feel sympathy for some of the people whose mistakes made it happen, and whose lives were thrown into turmoil.

If you don’t already, subscribe now to the This American Life podcast and check it out. Or if you can’t make time for an hour of radio (your loss), listen online to the 12-minute All Things Considered version which aired Friday.

Great work, radio people!

Now if we could get them to:
put additional materials (photos? videos? reporter’s notes? glossary?) and links to outside resources on both websites;
allow listener comments; and
localize all of the above on each local affiliate’s site,

we’d really have something!

Tags: radio, public radio, NPR, This American Life

Burn The Money,
originally uploaded by Bradshaw.i.

Michael Melillo and Len Witt have launched a session at NewsTools2008 on creating a federation of community journalists or platforms. [warning live blogging, errors ahead]

Len is describing his “representative journalism” project, gets spontaneous applause when he explains how he got funded: Ruth Ann Harnisch saw his blog about the idea and sent him an email offering him funding.

Andrius Kaulikas wants us to consider the different spectrum of values of journalism; resistance from folks who want to talk about business models and services. His list of qualities of journalism
Public Domain…………..Copyright
Visible……………………….Hidden
Work for Free……………Work for Pay
Activistic……………………Voyeuristic
No Castes…………………..Caste (blurred or clear lines between journalists and non-journalists)
Subjective………………….Objective
Relationships…………… Isolation (journalism that builds relationships or creates isolation)
Universal…………………. Provincial (or local or personal)
Timeless………………….. Dated (themes)

Tom Abate suggests that we can build a federation that includes people who are all along these spectrums. Len Witt says we try to find some people to get together. Harnisch
He describes the folks in Northfield, MN who are doing a weblog and podcast, they want a professional journalist to help, so the representative journalism project provides that person and also provides that journalist with editorial support. Also a discussion of whether the reelchanges model can help fund projects like this in the future.

Michael asks us for the next step: a group that is willing to collaborate on discussions of business models, etc. He explains to a new participant that it would be a Kirk Federation (not a Picard one) [further proof of my complete cultural ignorance that I had to Google the names before I got the Star Trek reference. After months at Harvard, I assumed they were the names of more academic sociologists I hadn’t read!] that will bring together resources and mechanisms to support projects that meet media needs for communities whether geographic communities or communities of interest.

Tags: newstools2008, federation, community journalism, Star Trek

Reaching Low-Income Audiences was the important if frustrating topic of a session. Maurreen Skowran from Raleigh, NC, convened it. Her personal frustration with her paper’s ability to ignore huge swaths of thr population has led her to develop a project to install digital kiosks to expand Internet access to people who don’t have it at home or at work. First location ideas: laundromats, bus stops, churches. In later conversations, I learn she plans to charge reasonable prices for Internet access (think of airport kiosks) and set the kiosks up with portal pointing to local information sources. Starting in a county with only a weekly paper that has no editorial online presence.

We bounced back and forth between two poles:

a) what a terrible job most traditional media does covering/serving underserved audiences (Vikki Porter calls them “communities of difference”). Best quote on that from Benjamin Melancon: “well there’s no way we can do worse than we’re doing now in terms of content.” (Many of us worry he underestimates the depths still left to sink to.) He has a small non-profit called People Who Give A Damn, apologizes he hasn’t updated the site (naturally, as he is a web guy).
b) inspiring experiments like Maureen’s kiosks and Michael Stoll’s Public Press Project

General agreement that mobile is the future but we need other media in the interim (Michael Stoll made a convincing case for a paper publication). Also that content is as or more important as mechanics, that mainstream journalists have lost touch with huge groups of the population. Not just lower-income, but rural, undigital, non-college educated, etc.

Tom Stites joined us for a while, sent this follow-up note:
Friends — I was cheered to see such a engaged NewsTools conversation about journalism for less-than-affluent people. If you have time and interest, you might find some interesting context in this keynote speech on this very topic that I gave at the 2006 Media Giraffe conference in Amherst:

http://citmedia.org/blog/2006/07/03/guest-posting-is-media-performance-democracys-critical-issue/

Let’s keep this conversation going. It’s crucial to the future not only of journalism but of democracy.

tom

Indeed I think it is.

Tags: Newstools2008, poverty, diversity, digital divide,

ReelChanges allows the public to contribute to documentaries (or other forms of journalism) at any stage of production or distribution. Launching today, in honor of May Day. [Warning: live blogging, mistakes ahead]

Hal Plotkin: “Currently, decisions about what gets produced are made by .001% of the public. Maybe they always get it right, but we don’t think so.”

Foundations didn’t want to fund us; they see us as competition. Instead named our new thing “AFM” – “Audience-Funded Media and approached business supporters. Found technology company to fund based on the ability of creating a for-profit side. One for-profit project in the works: a large commercial TV network will offer audience opportunity to fund additional episodes of their favorite TV show.

Plotkin unapologetic about being a gatekeeper for the projects that are allowed on the site. Question from the audience “What about for example Michael Moore, not what I would call journalism but could be called quality polemics?” Plotkin sticking with producers he’s convinced are high-quality, reputable, etc. in order to avoid getting scandals in his first year or two, can’t afford it. The first 100 films can’t get us in trouble. Q: But ok to have a point of view, I work with ACLU, would you take a film produced by us, on say the death penalty? Hal: Yes, I would, if I know it’ll be produced to quality standards. Q: But what about neutrality? Hal: We’re also looking at a group who are making a history of the conservative movement, and even though they’re not my political tribe, we’re happy to do it if it’s journalistically sound.

Discussion about non-traditional journalism styles, i.e., Errol Morris, Michael Moore. Hal: If he’s paying sources, then no. That’s not how we do journalism. We might eventually make exceptions, but not now. All donations are public, on the site and also on all versions of the film. I’m focused on journalistic standards.

Great story about dinner with friends where he describes project to them and wife says “that is the stupidest project ever, we can’t get people to pay for good journalism that does exist, who would pay for journalism that doesn’t even exist yet? He asks her, is there no topic in the world that you would 10 dollars to see covered in the media, that they don’t cover well enough or at all? And she immediately says that given that she is an obsessive scrapbooker but can’t afford to go to the scrapbooking conventions, she says I would pay ten dollars if someone would make a video of the convention, with a few interviews and coverage of the exhibits. Hell, I would pay $50 for that. We researched it, and found that this scrapbook thing is huge: there might be 30-70,ooo people willing to pay for that video. So multiple 50,000 times $10. You could cover a couple of conventions for 500 thousand bucks. Question from me: Are you going to do the flip side – where people can suggest the topic they want covered?

Examples brought up: Brave New Films, Chris Allbritton’s Back to Iraq where he successfully gathered donations to support his work in Iraq. Does he work with for example the MediaRights site? Heard of them, will take a look.

Final story (thank goodness, the smell of lunch out in the lobby is about to overwhelm me): Experiment I did in school – give people an obviously biased piece of journalism, ask them if it’s biased, great majority (95%) of them say of course it’s biased and I wouldn’t believe it. Then ask them if they think other people would believe it and 70% say oh yeah I think other people would. We need more respect for everyone else’s intelligence. Changing that mindset could help newsrooms and it’s the philosophy of my project.

Do one thing for us, says Hal: spread the word, tell journalists and producers to apply! I’m doing my part.

Tags: ReelChanges, newstools2008, documentary

Newstools2008 started last night, it’s a real unconference, and already [warning: live blogging, no guarantee of anything] I’m sold. Yesterday evening I came without my laptop and didn’t feel frustrated because they succeeded in getting us to talk to people we didn’t know (our MC: now is the time when if you’re sitting next to someone you already know, you need to move to a different table) about real issues. We didn’t really talk very specifically about the materials and questions they fed us but that didn’t matter, the idea that we were supposed to be talking about something ensured that we talked about related to the overall topic of the conference, and the conversations were good. Now people are posting topics for sessions I want to attend them all.

So I’m becoming convinced that getting the right people together for a sufficient amount of time is the most important thing you can do to have a good conference. The next question is: how to get this group of folks who come to the same conferences to frame projects or questions that lead to action, so that we don’t start all the conversations over again each time?

The butterfly is part of the unconference lingo. Don’t you want to be one?

Should we want Apple (or any other large corporation) to be our conduit for paying for non-commercial media? What about for charitable giving generally?

Two completely separate references to the possibility of using Itunes for non-profit donating caught my eye in the last few days. The ever creative and effective Jake Shapiro blogged recently about how it might work if ITunesU allowed folks to make voluntary donations/contributions to support the makers of free content, whether public media, individuals, nonprofits, universities or whatever.

And then in today’s inbox, the folks organizing the Hollywood Hill’s conference the New Hi-Tech Robin Hoods broadened the question: “In a world where millions pay 99¢ to download media from iTunes, why can’t we do the same to end poverty or stop global warming?”

It sounds so tempting that I feel sure there is a catch, but I’m not sure what it is. We might think we’d like our noncommercial media providers to remain pure and free, unconnected to any large commercial corporations, but how many of us make a point of making our charitable donations by check to avoid having upwards of 2% of our contribution go to the credit card companies? American Express’ Giving Express program doesn’t even feel the need to pretend that its service results in more of the money donated going to the organization: “A 2.25% transaction fee is deducted from donations to cover processing costs. This expense is similar to the cost your organization would incur for processing direct credit card donations.”

Curious to hear reactions from the VRM folks, who’ve been thinking for a long time about these problems, especially about a better way to fund public service media. In my understanding, they want commerce (and non-commerce, i.e., nonprofits) to be customer-centric, and customers rather than vendors to own their data and control their relationships, but it’s hard to imagine there won’t still be a role for intermediary corporations to facilitate those relationships.

I’m guessing that Doc will say that we instead need a free and open system that everyone can use as they wish. So organizations like universities and public broadcasters, who are already set up to take donations could have it on their own sites as well as make it available through the ITunes store and other distributors. Individual artists or small non-commercial media makers would have a non-profit clearinghouse (hello, PRX? in your copious spare time?) for donations that would collect money and send them a check. Then this powerful coalition would launch a lobbying effort to force credit card companies at least slash their rates to non-profits down to a half a percent or so, if not zero them out entirely. And what a beautiful world it will be.

The crowd around me is happily singing along with a German video about “the dangers of the Internet.” Who says young people have no common experiences? What they (or at least the ones directly behind me) lack is any sense of their own volume.

I’m gratefully escaping the infamous LOLcats panel while listening to Jason Scott’s presentation called “Before the LOL.” He’s an actual grownup human, with a site called textfiles.com though as he points out he also does documentaries, i.e., “I actually get out of the house.”

Jason seems to be representing mid-generation baby boomer geekdom here at ROFLCon, which means he’s my age or so. Hooray. He’s showing us some history: Martin Cooper, the inventor of the cell phone and then this mysterious slide:

OLL KORRECT (LOLcats of the 1840s) became O.K.
GONE TO TEXAS (peaced out)
OUR FINE MEN (politicians and so on)
NUFF SAID

The fashion of misspelling came before, so is this just historians being happy that we’re not so new? Now we’re on the telegraph and its codes from 1859. 73 = Best regards 30 = no more (end). There’s nothing new under the sun. Ham radio as the original social media. He also shows slow-scan TV, which no one in the room, including me, has heard of – hacking video or at least pictures onto ham radio. The man who did this is Copthorn Macdonald.

Jason Scott is a master of early 21st century ADHD presentation style – 80% entertainment, 20% content. Perhaps standup comedy the only thing that compete with our online lives?

Now we’re transitioning from photocopiers to faxes to the very earliest BBSes. I’m not sure where we’re going here.

“K-RAD is short for ‘OK, Rad.’ Originally making fun of somone’s ”K bye’ signoff, then added “radical.” The efficiency of LOLcat language.

Ah, the overall message! We’re all just part of the great flow of history, YouTube is in fact the descendant of the telegraph. Jason Scott and the Web not-so-difference. I think one could do a similar history focused on the news media.

Tags: ROFLcon2008

Someone from the audience (you go, girl) finally mentions that there are 6 young white guys moderated by one older white guy. The responses include:
“girls have better things to do”
“girls are smarter”
“girls are not allowed to be funny”
“there will soon be lots more girls on the Internet”
“girls are weaned on Barbie, girls are weaned on GI Joe, and encouraged to take computers and go”
“I guess we’ll have to keep talking about this until we don’t have to anymore”

And now the last question from the audience, a young black man “first things first black people do use the Internet”
The Tron guy says something about “young ladies.” The Tron guy mystifies me.

Many of the panelists do seem to sincerely mean that the fact that they got famous is “stupid” and that girls are less stupid. Not a bad point.

tags: ROFLCon2008

More of ROFLcon live blogging. We have moved from David Weinberger’s excellent keynote to a panel of 6 white males of indeterminately young age (one of them just said “I’m just said”). David is moderating, bravely doing his best to get these kids to think outside of their own little projects, which they seem to assume everyone knows well. Of course, I may easily be the only human in the room who hasn’t heard of most of these guys, except so far for Jib Jab and the red paperclip guy, whose best feature is his charming Canuck accent. He’s going to Manitoba to teach government officials to think “oot of the bawx.”

Thanks to the joy of online conference going, I can find out who these kids are while I watch them fidget.

David – “Learning by example is sometimes NOT the best way to learn, sometimes there many examples that fail and only one that works. So did you guys plan your success or was it a fluke?”

Red paperclip guy: “when I started it was pretty granola, it was pretty hack, and then I started saying I was trading it for a house and I got pretty stoked.” I have no idea what he means, but he seems very sincere.

I ask the IRC channel what he means, here’s the conversation:
dear younger
persons, can someone translate red paperclip guy’s comment that “it was granola”?
fonchik: homegrown, summer of love, hippy spirit, natural, etc
josh diaz has paperclips
thanks dantekgeek, further clarification – summer of love, etc has negative or positive connotations?
depends on who you are
😉
Huge applause for David pointing out that Chuck Norris has his head up his ass for suing the Chuck Norris fact guy.

Rocketboom guy very perspicacious, also the only one (or the only one to admit it?) who says he planned his project to make it famous. He refers to the bad old days “only having a few channels” even though he surely was born into the age of 100+ cable channels.

Oops battery dying. Back after lunch/power break.

Tags: ROFLCon2008

David Weinberger’s keynote at ROFLcon. [warning virgin live blogger at work] Fame and greed go well together in the broadcast world of scarcity, he says. You can be famous and shoot someone in the face and no one will ever look into it. [Dick Cheney picture]

Fame as part of a network. Blogging is about taking off the makeup. It’s about exposing yourself as fallible, you don’t have time to send it to rewrite. We pre-emptively forgive bloggers, which creates intimacy. The crowd of people around me, nearly all oung enough to be my children, now hoot appreciatively for a picture of a cartoon character I don’t recognize at all. I’ll ask David.

Famous on the web = looks like it was made by human hands.

But not only. David talks about the “I kiss you” guy. 10 people clap that they remember him. Not I.

He’s a lot like Borat.

He plays ping pong. He lies on the beach in a too small bathing suit. He writes English badly.This is 1999, so his site becomes famous. We made him that way, getting our revenge against broadcast fame.

It’s an “odd sort of conversation” we’re having with ourselves, sharing silly jokes and videos. So now we get to “everyone will be famous to 15 people.”

David shows an entirely unscientific graph of fame on the web and the long tail.

The Obama girl appears, of course. This is the second time in less than 24 hours that someone at MIT has shown the Obama girl video in a presentation. Soon we’ll need a new definition. A subset of those who are famous on the Internet will also be famous to attendees of conferences about the Internet.

David says fame reflects us, thank you that’s the end. The crowd applauds him like a rock star. Not bad. What will I be doing at David’s age (I don’t think he’ll mind my pointing out that he is a few years older than I, though not by nearly as much as I’m older than these kids around me) that will get me this kind of adoration from people in their 20s? What will people in their 20s in the year 2020 laugh and applaud?
Tags: <a href=”http://www.technorati.com/tag/roflcon2008″>ROFLCon2008</a>