The Revolution Will Be Televised

Rock the Vote recently held a call out to recruit a number of correspondents to Rock the Trail. As part of the application, I had to write a series of essays and produce a two-to-four minute video package on “Our World: My Country as I see it.”

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My 300 word essay on Sustaining young voter participation beyond 2008 is after the break… (more…)

         

Meet the Players:

Dan Gillmor - founding director of the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship: Seees himself as the outlier in the panel. He doesn’t work for a news publication (though he did work at the San Jose Mercury News for quite some time, and probably went off on his own at the perfect time).

Chris Rauber of SF Business Times: Mission is to break business news on a daily basis online and weekly in print. Started 25-30 years ago, and succeeded by exploiting the daily papers deficit in business coverage. Still around, making money, and doing pretty well despite the “harsh economic times.”

Troy May of ON Magainze: provide stories of the diverse lives of the LGBT community, and to give people outside the LGBT community a reason to read the magazine. His personal contribution consists of filtering through a massive influx of info in order to find the gems that he feels will connect with the audience. His workflow involves working very closely with his freelancers to cover the stories in the best way possible. Works to engage the reader.

Andrew Fitzgerald - Manager of the Collective Journalism department at Current.com: developed VC(Squared) because the first two letters in UGC start like “ugly” - Starting from the premise that we should be in more platforms as opposed to a single platform. — The station invites its viewers to take part in making content.

Kourosh Karimkhany - Vice president of development for CondeNet - His job is to figure out how to make money from the online side of the business. Has experience with the acquisition of Wired.com and feels it has been going well thus far.

Dan sees this to be an incredible time for young journalists despite the fact that the career paths he followed as a journalist are greatly diminished. The reasons include the fact that the barrier to entry to trying something is essentially nothing beyond time and a good idea (though I’d contend that essentially nothing is still out of reach for much of the working class). He points out that most projects will fail, but that the small percentage that succeed is still a pretty big number. Dan’s excited about the enormous number of experiments, and points out that failing is a learning opportunity and that people will eventually get it right.

When asked by Tom about time being a valuable commodity and when people must resort to getting their money from Starbucks. All Dan’s efforts are focused on people who want to take risks, it’s not easy to do this if you are 48 with two college kids and a mortgage. He hopes that people who are still employed, will think about some niche product that good journalism can find an audience for. “There’s never enough people to do good journalism at the niches.”

Troy was working for a business publication before buying OutNow Magazine. It was dying at the time, but through surveys, focus groups, and a redesign he’s managed to turn it around and double his distribution. He points out that there is a market for niche journalist, but there is an inherent risk involved.

Kourosh is talking about the marketability of niches and how Nick Denton launched a series of niche blogs with Gawker and it’s been remarkably successful in that regards. Similarly when Conde Nest reaquired wired.com, they’ve followed a similar approach creating and ditching blogs

Andrew states that from a revenue standpoint, their money is coming from Cable fees. “Once you reach a certain threshold, more of the money comes from advertising. Current is trying to get away from the perspective that citizen journalism is bad journalism. The Vanguard journalism department has won many awards and critical acclaim, and they are also developing collective journalism endeavors. Current is inviting people around the world to be sources while the “work of journalism” is being done internally. In other words, the video itself is being produced within the company relying on leads and ideas from the audience.

Hal from reelchanges.org is proposing to the panel that if you ask the audience what they want, they will be more inclined to help pay for what they are looking for.

Andrew points out that they cover a wide range of topics, and says they are similar to a big newspaper with a niche of “young adults.” If they were driven by clicks exclusivelly, they’d be perezhilton.com. He feels that the audience is interested in a wide range of topics, but there are elements the audience doesn’t realize they are interested in.

What Kourosh is looking for are areas where they are making a lot of money: fashion, tech, beauty, etc. he then takes these segments that are highly profitable to underwrite journalism that may be expensive and not profitable but are in need of coverage. “It’s either the MBA’s or the English majors that are running the show.” In response, Kourosh studied the business side to get a more comprehensive perspective of the business.

         

10 ideas…

David Cohn: Aggregation is creation - newstrust.net — aggregates the best journalism and also allows users to rate the journalism they encounter. Looking to improve best practices so that we can have a better solution.

David Mathison and Jim Moore: Social, civic news, and gaming networks. Journalism as a game - what makes a game effective? Story, excitement glamour. Looking to make journalism glamourous and fun.

Mary Hodder and Bill Allison - Bringing information from multiple data sets is how stories are made. His company is working to create a search engine to save time to digging though multiple data sets.

Personalization, localization, geocoding, geotracking - Paul Lamb: “News is not just local, local is the news” he describes himself as an immigrant

Dan Gillmor on — RSS, Twitter, and Friend Feed. The viral effect is what is important though not completely understood but he knows that it is going to be fundamental in the future.

Steve Enders is talking about Kevin Sites’ project for Yahoo News where he visited every war zone in the world.

Kaliya Hamlin is talking about standardized login accounts so that people can have one username and password for all sites.

Eduardo Hauser is talking about how papers can now be printed on-demand. More specifically having users print their own papers…

Tom Stites is talking about disruption versus the eruption of new ideas regarding how we form identities that present news on the web. The most important point is that the quality of businesses is grounded in the relationship with end users more so that…

7:50PM: Mary Hodder just spoke about her work with Dabble. Now Bill Gannon is speaking about how important meta-data is towards monetization, and why Mary Hodder is an excellent resource for that information.

Gannon: “How many of you have been part of a failed start-up?” Almost every hand is raised… “Aggregation is creation”

Gannon is suggesting that this is the golden age of innovation in online journalism, but I’m unsure how much gold there is out there. Dan Gillmor points out that it’s “really cheap to try,” and that’s true, but the monetization is not quite there yet.

Dan Gillmor points out that if you don’t point to others who are doing important work, you are doing yourself and your audience a disservice.

8:07PM: Bill Gannon concludes their trio presentation by suggesting that the folks in the room try buying internet ads to get a better sense of what it’s all about…

         

Hey everyone, I’m at the News Tools 2008 conference and figured I’d do a little live-blogging:

4:47PM: From the looks of things there are about 100 people in the room; the first MC went through a little stand-up, sit-down exercise to identify what kinds of people who are here. The bulk of the room are on Twitter (I wasn’t surprised but he was). The dramatic moment for me was when he asked those who’ve ever worked in print media to stand up, then he asked everyone who’s not currently in print to sit and most people seemed to drop to their chairs — just one more example of how newspapers, or at least those working for them is waning.

4:50PM: An interesting skit is taking place on the stage right now that takes a humorous look at the conflict between old and new media. It’s somewhat reminiscent to the Mac and Mr. PC advertisements. Old media man has his map out in an effort to find out where “journalism is living these days.” New media man says that he is looking for the same thing and upon realizing they’re both lost and looking for the same thing they embrace around their similarities.

4:57PM: A graphical illustration between old and new media is being used to compare and explore the two respective ecologies.

5:06PM: We’re in small groups now trying to answer the question “What has changed between the traditional newsroom and the emerging news ecology that creates new and interesting opportunities? In the group are Dave Wind, Wayne Lown, Carol Broulet, Tom Murphy, Mary Hodder, and Tracy Van Slick.

Wayne Lown - “It boils down to one word: editors… now it’s just a free-for-all”

Tom - “The number one thing that’s changed is interactivity” “the first mass media controlled by the end-user”

Mary Hodder - If the user wants to put a story out they can, and be on equal footing.

Carol - What’s the difference between Americans and Russians? The Russian’s realize when they are hearing the party line, and Americans do not. But that’s changing. The corporate media gives creedence to a “criminal government” without saying that it is a “criminal government” EG Chavez in Venezuela.

Wayne - We’re the super consumers here…

Tracy - Over 60% get their info from the local news. Barriers to access have broken down as well.

5:24PM: One participant: We live in an age where instead of having conflicts solved on a governmental level — most of these can be solved at a citizen level - people2people and media can make that happen.

Another participant is talking about how they hit a roadblock talking about who’s going to train and provide a blueprint for how the new dynamic is going to work. It seems that there’s a lot of understanding that everything has changed and there’s a lot of opportunity, but how do I do it? What do I actually do? Retraining people and providing that support.

5:32PM: When you look at the emerging map, what roles would you add? How do they fit? And what are the implications for creaning an economically viable news news ecology that meets its mission of serving democracy?

Tracy - The Emerging news ecology outlined on its own is not economically viable…

5:40PM: Just did an interview for the Ustream feed… Now we’re talking about economic sustainability… marketwatch is highly successful. Wayne thinks that if the whole industry went to a subscription model - he points out how Lexis-Nexis makes millions of dollars on a subscription model.

5:52PM: The groups have joined the whole:

Tom Abate says “New value must be around interaction,” and points out how people must act as matchmakers within the ecology. People post comments on SFGate for ego gratification. The interactions and the value come out of the information in there which led [him] to say we need behavioral marketing to sell stuff. 4 pieces of information - age, gender, zip code, e-mail address.

One group redrew the entire map as a sort of donut with the user as the hole in the center. The sensemaker, advertisers, and the information architect who each have an equal share of the donut. Information passes through the center of the donut through filters. “Every user has their own donut”

Amy Gahrain - “We were talking about the business thing and I think it gets simpler than interaction. The business model is relevance. Interaction could just be noise… the news business grew up in a time that there was a scarcity economy,” but that’s no longer the case. She is suggesting a community liason who filters what the audience wants up to the reporters. The reporter is the role of the sense-maker.

Jonathon from Reclaim the media in Seattle - Talking about the importance of having some input in the system for journalistic values. The values that make journalism useful for promoting democracy. Journalistic standards — no one wants a single entity to decide what those values are. These values will come from mulitple places: different forms of education, trade associations, etc. Think about community and public funding for journalism - broadband may be an opportunity to create a news source of public funding.

Linda Jue - New Voices of independent journalism: Need Duelas (???) - Transition people

6:04PM And that’s a wrap on the intro session… with a final note about “special messages from our sponsors”

         

For More LIVE Video visit Olympic Torch SF

Olympic Torch SF is an innovative experiment in creating an interactive news venue online and can be found at http://olympictorchsf.com. This year, the Olympic games will be held in China; the only North American stop on the Olympic torch relay will take place in San Francisco on April 9. The games have generated controversy surrounding China’s human rights record, and protests have already ignited along the torch’s journey to Beijing.

We are dedicated to reporting on the events and controversies leading up to and beyond the SF relay. The site will feature live video streams from the run, the protests and will also feature photos and text updates from the community. Additionally, on April 9, at 1:30pm, a special live one-hour presentation of D7TV’s internet news program, Story Today(www.storytoday.com), will feature background stories, streaming footage from the streets, along with Skype call-ins from the route and from those at home.

On Wednesday, Olympic Torch SF will be operating at least 2 live feeds from Noon on, and a very special episode of Story Today will premiere at 1:30PM.

For ongoing text-based coverage, please follow the SFTorch twitter account. You can subscribe to SMS updates by sending a text message to 40404 with the message “follow sftorch.” Alternatively, you can also follow the SFTorch feed by visiting http://twitter.com/sftorch - If you have any updates on the Olympic Torch or the related protests please feel free to send us the information by typing “@sftorch ” followed by your message using either SMS or the twitter web interface.

         

“You’ll be the first one cited and released,” the officer reassured me as I protested my unlawful detention. While I was the first to be led away in handcuffs, this wasn’t the “catch and release” operation the cop had suggested it was. I actually wouldn’t be released until six that evening. It was 10:30AM, and I was just about to take a break from filming and grab something for breakfast. I knew I should’ve eaten before I left, but had wanted to begin filming as early as possible.

I attended the protests as a journalist, and had been actively working to stay out of the officers’ way as I filmed the various actions commemorating the five-year anniversary of the war. I don’t pretend to be neutral; I marched down the streets in a state of rage and sadness the day the bombs first dropped, but I was clearly acting as a news gatherer at the time of my arrest. The police didn’t care, and throughout the day several other journalists would find themselves imprisoned for reporting on the day’s dissent. (more…)