JTM on YouTube: The Friday Morning Panel Discussion

Jump ahead: Here's my portion of the panel discussion Bill Densmore led us in on June 6 at the Minnesota Public Radio studios (same room where they record Saint Paul Sunday Morning! Very cool!)



Below you can see the other segments that have been posted to YouTube. You can also see the hourlong program in its entirety here.

Michelle Ferrier:


Griff Wigley, Northfield, Minnesota:


Julia Opoti:


Lynn Chakoian:


Patrick Phillips:


Melissa Cornick:


Peggy Holman:


Tim Erickson:

6/5: Briefing on Citizen Journalism

Some semi-random notes from our large-group morning session:

CommunityBlogs.us: Hey! That's the outfit sponsoring the web side of the South Dakota Horizons project! South Dakota's 21 sites in the project are among 150+ such "visioning projects" in the upper Plains. Our speaker says the project is having "mixed success."

One fun characterization of what community websites do: "Random Acts of Journalism."

Visualizing the news is a big deal.

• Bakersfield.com offers a pothole map where readers can mark potholes. Visual and interactive!
• Charticles: combine text, photos, and graphics. Print media love 'em; we can turbocharge them online.
• J-Lab launched a "Fix Your Commute" project in Everett, Washington, that gave commuters a clickable map to give their input on traffic problems.
  

News games: combine fantasy football with your state legislature, let people bet on and trade bills before your House and Senate.

Food chain metaphor: perhaps citizen journalism is the plankton to the big media whales. I'd really rather not be the green gunk in anyone's baleen, but the metaphor does suggest a healthier metaphor, more of an ecosystemic partnership. The whales don't just eat us; they need us to thrive and be everywhere. An ocean with nothing but whales is a dead ocean.

Parajournalism: The Fort Myers News-Press (another Gannett paper with the same online template as the Sioux Fall Argus Leader) is trying out citizen writers. They called for applications, got 100, accepted 20, did a little training, and now have these volunteers going about getting stories for the online edition. We can see similar efforts at YourHub.com (Colorado) and TribLocal.com (Chicago suburbs). Such efforts are "high-touch" (that term again!), requiring very active mentoring, editing, and support.

Former journalists are getting in the act, too: see the New Haven Independent and MinnPost.com.

Community Journalism Characteristics: Whoever's doing it, here are some characteristics you'll recognize among the citizen journalists:

• Passion for community and strong sense of place.
• Paying attention to their community.
• Feel their community is underserved by other media.
• Had journalism "done to them" at some point.
• High ethics.

Citizen journalism and democracy: what a pair! We are good for democracy. The Knight Foundation attributes increased voter turnout to the efforts of The Forum in Deerfield, New Hampshire. One of their big features (which turned into a print edition) was a municipal election feature. The Forum founder Maureen Mann was also asked by her neighbors to run for legislature! (Mann won the special election last January. Wow -- public school teacher and online journalist in public office... could be a dangerous combo!)

Note also the abovementioned Everett commuter map project: 2500 people gave their input. You just can't get input like that at the typical public meeting. No one is saying get rid of public meetings, but online journalism and even government-sponsored outreach efforts offer more channels for gathering information on which citizens and officials can base their decisions.

6/4 Evening: Making Money

Matt Thompson: "payment may not always be monetary."

Definitely not what most folks in the room wanted to hear! But as Arnie commented to me, it's like health care: outcomes are measured in much more than money. You don't go to the doctor based on how much money his prescription or treatment will help you make; you go for your health. We don't blog just to make a million bucks (though don't let me stop you from making a donation!). We blog to contribute a valuable service to our communities: telling stories, building social capital, weaving a thicker social tapestry.

Blogging for profit may cause us to fall victim to the GDP Fallacy: making money doesn't mean we're succeeding. Think of your community blog like Cheers. Remember Sam? He didn't value that bar for the money he was making. He valued it for the people, the community. Of course, he wasn't running the bar as a charity; he had to pay the rent. But when Sam closed the show saying, "I'm the luckiest [s.o.b.] in the world," he wasn't thinking of his bank balance.

We do need to pay the bills, and a number of folks at JTM convened sessions on business models, insurance, and other pocketbook issues. Alas, I can't tell you much about them. I told myself I was going to this conference to learn how others have found ways to turn their online efforts into financially sustainable enterprises, but every time I saw such a discussion posted, I saw another session on Democracy 2.0 or government transparency, and I forgot all about business. Silly me—always putting the commonwealth ahead of financial wealth. ;-)

Paying the bills is nice. We can only do so much for free or for love. But even if we start breaking even or better, we always need to build social capital, not just the capital in our bank accounts.

6/4/ Circle: Notes Big and Small

In this big circle session, we did the usual introductions, plus an experiment in which we had to come up with a brief headline -- a "Twitter" -- to desccribe what we hoped to get from the conference. My headline: "Madville Times raids best minds in country, takes brilliant ideas home to make South Dakota smarter, freer, funner." Bit long for a headline, but maybe I can use that last part for my next (first!) book.

I described myself as geocentric, thinking geography, then realized the better word for my online efforts (and others) is topocentric, centered on place. All this talk about dispersed online communities is interesting, but it would make Wendell Berry nervous. Place, literal place, matters.

Olivia Ma from YouTube informs us that YouTube has created a new account labelled reporter.

Bob Cox from New York observes that four years ago, no one at the Journalism That Matters gathering was talking about making money. He sees here a sign that the community journalism scene is becoming more stable: we're figuring out what we want to do and now can spend time figuring out how to make a living from it.

Tish Grier of Placeblogger says we are the stewards of the communities we create.

Michelle Ferrier fires off a couple great comments:

• her headline: "the nexus of folklore and the future." Folklore! The stories, the knowledge, the shared language and narrative that make our memory collective!
  
• "social capital is the infrastructure that allows for democracy" -- placeblogging builds social capital! It builds connections along which democratic discourse and collaboration can flow.
  

6/4 Circle Discussion

Don't forget: the circle is the oldest form of human communication! The old hunter gatherers didn't sit in rows all facing the same direction. They spread out in a circle so everyone could look everyone else in the eye.

Some key concepts:

• hi-tech, hi-touch journalism: we can put all these tech tools to work, but we also have to be deeply involved as people, giving our journalism a voice people can recognize and engaging with our fellow participants
• Ready Fire Aim!: Just do it! Put your words out there, in rough-draft/you-draft form, let the story evolve collaboratively. This is conversation, not lecture: we don't go to parties with prepared written statements. We build our most important narratives on the fly.
• media literacy: we've got to prepare kids for all this! Evaluating and engaging in participatory community journalism is very different from being a consumer of mass media.
  • [CAH] Now maybe this isn't as big a challenge as we think. We all grow up getting fairly good practice at reading conversations; maybe we just need a little more heads up now to apply our common-sense community interaction filters to this new media. Maybe it's just a matter of unlearning whatever we've learned about mass media literacy.
• community is now often so big that you have to have technology to get the word out.
  • [CAH] If you're placeblogging someplace like Madison, SD, you'd think this wouldn't be a problem. You tell your neighbors over the fence and at the grocery store, they tell their friends, boom! Message disseminated.
  • But even here, media and community are fragmented. People commute to Sioux Falls and Brookings, work night shifts that keep them out of the loop, tune in different TV and radio, read different websites.
  • Even Madison can use a shared, asynchronous portal to serve as a little bit of community glue.
    
  
  

6/4/ small group: discussion

various comments:

• "Build it and they will come" doesn't work! If you want to build an online community, you have to nurture your users, show appreciation
• implications for DSU research: we can't just adopt some system and say to the organization, "O.K., everybody, start blogging!" We need someone at the tiller, helping to establish the culture of the online community: expectations, rules, boundaries, etc.
  
• Journalism should evoke interaction (again, we are participants, and we want everybody else to participate!)
• Citizen journalism is here to tell the stories the papers don't.
  • This isn't just beating the corporations and power-peddlers; this is telling about the debate team, the visits, the human things that maybe don't make the cut for the paper but which build community, which give different groups a sense of belonging.
  
  

6/4 Opening: Mary Turck, Building Community

Speaker: Mary Turck, editor, Twin Cities Daily Planet
Topic: Citizen journalism, building community

• Agrees with Matt that the challenge is motivate people to create content.
• Citizen journalists are deterred by criticism, negative feedback, catching heck from subjects of articles. [CAH: Think about how nervous kids are about writing reports for class, how sensitive they can be to criticism from profs. For most people, that's the last formal writing experience they had. Now you want them to write out loud, for public consumption? Uff da!]
• Getting people to participate takes work: mentoring, editing, encouragement, writers workshops. [Think of it as gardening!]
• Tech is a challenge: gotta fight spam, keep image files small [folks dump huge photos on community sites, don't think to shrink the file, maybe don't even know what huge resolution their cameras are operating at].
• Financing is a challenge, too!
  

6/4 Opening: Matt Thompson on Citizen Journalism

Speaker: Matt Thomspon, deputy Web editor, Minneapolis Star-Tribune
Topic: Citizen Journalism

• The strength of a citizen journalism site is not its features. Add all the multimedia whizbangery you want, but the real driver of an active, vibrant online community is deeply invested individuals.
  
• Communities coalesce around individuals.
• Citizen journalism usually takes place in a geographical context, but you can find some overlap with how dispersed online communities evolve and function.
• In journalism, perhaps the citizen/professional distinction is less useful than the individual/institutional distinction.
• "How do we motivate consumers?" may be the wrong question. If Margaret is right about our desire to create, and if Matt is right about the importance of deeply invested individuals, then it may be just as important for those of us who would start an online community to ask, "How do we motivate creators?"