Posts about newsinnovation

Citizen historians

July 5, 2007 by Jeff Jarvis
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Ken Burns is urging “the YouTube generation” to take up their video cameras and interview veterans of World War II to feed an archive of personal histories at the Library of Congress. Citizen historians. He says in USA Weekend:

Thanks to a cooperative effort involving PBS and the Library of Congress’ Veterans History Project, anyone can get a camera and conduct his or her own interviews of a loved one who lived through the war. All submissions will be cataloged by the library to become part of the permanent Veterans History Project collection. This is a great opportunity: When I made my Civil War documentary, participants were obviously long dead. But World War II remains very much alive in the memories of millions of Americans.

Get ‘em while they’re still warm.

NewTeeVee points out the sad irony that Burns and the LoC are not having the YouTube generation use, uh, YouTube to share these videos. That makes this a rather closed, controlled effort: old media, old style, last generation. Imagine what could be loosed if they’d just use the tools of the age.

Of course, this isn’t the first effort to capture large orgal histories. Steven Spielberg’s Shoah Foundation has been collecting the testimony of Holocaust survivors. In New York StoryCorps has been urging people to interview someone and some sometimes great radio comes out of this.

I frankly fear what Burns will do with this material. I know it’s heresy, but I find him and his work dull and dutiful: as predictable as the Ken Burns effect in iMovie.

But I do give him credit for thinking openly and publicly and inviting in more filmmakers to make more film: big pat on the back.

Indeed, think of all the journalism and history that could be gathered if we just dispatched people to take the cameras and ask people questions: Ask teachers about teaching, doctors about doctoring, children about technology. Let’s turn the cameras on our friends and family and see what learning comes out of it.

Entrepreneurial jocks

July 3, 2007 by Jeff Jarvis
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UK football writer Rick Waghorn, who lost his newspaper job in a cutback and started his own web service, has now upgraded impressively at Norwich City’s MyFootballWriter.com. Rick has been joined by fellow sportswriters and has a neat way to charge for content and get paid via SMS:

From August we’ll have a brand-new subscription service which will give you full access to the site for just £1.50 a month. The new subscription adds additional content to last season’s service and it’s an absolute doddle to use. You sign up by a text which is charged to your mobile phone bill. By return you get an exclusive code which you use to register on the site, and that’s it, you’re in. Simple. The new subscription service features:-
* Access to Ferret, TheWife, The Expert, Stanley, Animal, Gadget, Eyes and co.
* Brand-new myfootballwriter.com podcast.
* Join our columnists with your own comments.

Waghorn hopes to franchise it.

One-man bands

July 3, 2007 by Jeff Jarvis
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Roy Greenslade writes about a newspaper put out by one journalist. I’d say that’s nothing new. In my first job in the business back in 1972 (I was a mere nipper, in diapers understand), I was the only guy behind the Addison Herald-Register. Now it’s a bit different because there was some content shared with the other local papers and, of course, I couldn’t produce the thing myself; there were no computers (gawd, I feel old). But still, community weeklies have long been put out on the barest of staff. That is why they depended on citizen content of a sort: they retyped a bunch of press releases and ran really long letters.

Today, if they’d take advantage of the public’s ability to publish and eagerness to share a la Bakersfield’s Northwest Voice, they’d have more and better and more local content for less effort.

When worlds don’t collide

June 29, 2007 by Jeff Jarvis

I had a fascinating day yesterday thanks to being with my son and trying to see the day through his eyes. It started with a most enjoyable few hours with Fred Wilson, Brad Burnham, and their new friends at Union Square Ventures about Facebook and much more. Then I dragged Jake to a meeting at a newspaper about blogs.

What hit me is that he was seeing a world that values innovation most. And then he saw a world that valued tradition most. (And I’m saying that with the slightest disparagement. Those traditions were what drew me to the business; I wanted to be part of such an institution and tradition.) So now the two need to meet. At least the traditional is trying to find innovation. And some argue that the innovative need to bring forward the appropriate traditions. This is where I live

It’s not hard to guess which looked more fun.

A meeting on networked journalism

June 26, 2007 by Jeff Jarvis
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I am delighted to tell you that I’ve received a MacArthur Foundation grant at the City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism to start the News Innovation Project. Its first work will be to hold a meeting this fall to gather practitioners and best practices in networked journalism — cooperative, pro-am efforts to gather and share news.

So I would be grateful if you would leave comments here with examples of what you think is working in networked journalism: cooperative efforts by local newspapers and TV stations, new ventures that enable the community to gather news, people who do this well, and tools that are working. I’m working with David Cohn, who covered this topic in the blog at Jay Rosen’s NewAssignment.net. Thanks to him, we have a pretty good list of what’s happening. But, of course, there’s more going on than, we know, so please pass the word and clue us in.

When I first applied for this grant, my goal was to evangelize the idea of networked journalism (nee citizen journalism). But in the meantime, we’ve seen such a blossoming of these efforts that we now believe the best contribution we can make is to share and extend best practices.

Before everyone gets here for the meeting, David will have written up reports on what these practitioners have done. That, of course, will be on the web for all to read and add to. This way, we can dig right in during the meeting and quiz some of these practitioners — each representing different sorts of efforts — on what works and what doesn’t and what they need to do what they do better (including what others in the room can offer them). At the end of the day, I hope to lock folks in rooms — bloggers with newspaper people, newspaper people with new ventures — and not let them out without returning with new things to do together, ways to push toward new experiments. And then David will followup and report on those efforts after everyone leaves and gets to work.

The reason for all this is that I firmly believe that networked journalism is one — not the only but one — answer to the question of how journalism can be sustained even as the old business models of news and media shrink and shift. We also believe that technology and networking now allow us to join together as never before to gather more news, cover more parts of our communities, involve more people, even investigate investigate deeper. This isn’t about saving journalism. It’s about growing journalism.

The second effort of the News Innovation Project will be to hold another session on new business models for news. More on that later.

Unfortunately, our space — physical space — will be limited at the school. So I don’t think I’ll be able to open this to all comers. Of course, I wish we could. But we will do everything online: before, during, and after. And we’ll do everything we can to bring in everyone’s wisdom, experience, questions, and help wherever they are.

So please let me know who you think is doing great things in networked, cooperative, pro-am, innovative journalism.

I’ll send you to a web site as soon as we have more details. Thanks. (And thanks to John Bracken and MacArthur.)

Local independent TV

June 21, 2007 by Jeff Jarvis
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Via journalism.co.uk, we come across a local TV anchor and photog who chuck
the fame and fortune, the exposure and paycheck of jobs on the local TV news to create their own local online shows for Madison, WI, at StoryBridge.tv. They want to do stories that “validate” — their word — people doing good things locally.

Based on their beta stories, I wish they also chuck more of their local-TV ways and make shows that are a little rougher, less polished, more authentic. I also hope they put their videos up on YouTube et al and make them embeddable so they can be part of the local conversation. And I hope they’ll also do stories that are useful, not just TV-heartwarming.

Now having given those caveats, I’m enthusiastic about what they’re doing. They will surely avoid the fires and press releases and weather mania that inhabit most local TV nows — because they can’t afford it. And so they will go out and do real stories, showing their old newsroom what’s possible. There’s no reason any individual or team in any town couldn’t do this; the tools and distribution are all there.

They’re also doing innovative things, starting, for example, a nonprofit arm that will allow locals to support series that may not have commercial appeal.

Will they boycott reality?

June 19, 2007 by Jeff Jarvis
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The National Union of Journalists in the UK is planning a Europe-wide day of protest against cuts in journalism.

One wonders whom they’ll picket: the internet? the economy? their readers? reality? Whom can they boycott this time (at least this isn’t Israel’s fault; that was the NUJ’s last grand political act). Protesting is so empty, so unproductive, ultimately so silly.

Media Guardian reports:

The union said the day of protests was a response to the “accelerating threat to journalism and journalists from devastating cuts across the industry, resulting in chronic under-resourcing, downward-spiralling working conditions, job losses and falling editorial standards”.

“This will be a day of huge importance. The time has come for us to stand up as one and send a loud, clear message that our industry is in deep crisis,” said Jeremy Dear, the NUJ general secretary.

But what are they going to do about it? Perhaps instead they should have a national brainstorming day to find and invent new ways to serve the public in all media. Or perhaps a national training day to show all these keyboard addicts how to use and make audio, video, blogs, wikis, search, social networks, and more. Or I’d like to see a national networked journalism day in which the pros share the tricks of their trade with the public to encourage more and better acts of journalism. Or maybe even a national efficiency day, in which the journalists find cuts that can be made instead of reporting. Or maybe a national entrepreneurial day to find ways to create new sustainable journalistic businesses that will not only pay those journalists but give them a piece of the equity.

Media are changing and so are their business realities. Not much — not anything — one can do about that but find new opportunities and change alongside. Protesting and wishing things wouldn’t change might make you feel better. But what does it accomplish?

: Roy Greenslade would disagree.

: The NUJ likes boycotts. This organization of journalists — professional journalists — showed their stripes when they voted to boycott Israeli good.

: Here was the NUJ’s effort to regulate citizen journalists and here was some professional reaction at the Guardian.

: See the discussion on this post at Comment is Free.

Being used

June 14, 2007 by Jeff Jarvis
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Om Malik ends a post about widget mania and measurement with an astounding quote from Fox boss Peter Chernin that I had not seen:

Peter Chernin, the big cheese at News Corp., while speaking at the All Things D conference said: “We won’t allow people to create for profit platforms on our platform…. the Wall Street Journal doesn’t allow people to sell ads on their platform.”

That’s the essence of the old media architecture: ‘I own the platform (read: distribution) and you don’t and I will get all the benefit from it and you won’t nya nya nya.’

The new media architecture: the more you help others benefit — which includes making money — from your platform, the more they will distribute it for you and develop and extend it for you. YouTube. Google. Openads. See Seth Goldstein on whether Facebook will become the social platform; he says it all depends on whether developers can benefit from building on it.

I am reminded of a meeting probably more than two years ago when I introduced Fred Wilson to Upendra Shardanand and Daylife in its very earliest days. Fred asked: “Can others build profitable businesses on top of your platform?” And without a breath or a moment for us to respond, he said: “The right answer is ‘yes.’”

At the Murdoch newspaper confab in Monterey where I ran a panel with Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, I got him to talk about turning your business into an API so people will use it in more than one sense of the verb. I said that we need to turn news organizations into APIs. Nick Denton, also on the panel, disagreed; I may have been alone in the room thinking that. But I’d say that the more people can use news and build on top of it the better off news organizations will be.