Thirty-six people turned out for the citizens media strategy session on May 14, 2005, beginning at the Rob Hill campground in the Presidio before we retreated to the warmth of the Internet Archive offices in San Francisco.

Attending were:

JD Lasica, co-founder, Ourmedia.org, author, “Darknet: Hollywood’s War Against the Digital Generation,” who convened the summit

Dan Gillmor, Grassroots Media Inc., author, “We the Media”

Mary Hodder, entrepreneur, creator of Napsterization.org, head of Ourmedia open standards tagging effort

Scott Rosenberg, managing editor, Salon.com (on leave, writing a book)

Brewster Kahle, founder, Internet Archive

Howard Rheingold, author of “Smart Mobs”

Robin Sloan, Current.tv (San Francisco-based citizens television network)

Mary Lou Fulton, head of new product development, Bakersfield Californian’s Northwest Voice

Francis Pisani, freelance journalist for Le Monde and El Pais

Holmes Wilson, director, Downhillbattle.org, participatoryculture.org

Wendy Seltzer, attorney, Electronic Frontier Foundation

Chris Tolles, VP of Sales and Marketing, Topix.net and co-founder, Open Directory Project

Denise Atchley, director, Digital Storytelling Festival

Mark Potts, founder, Backfence (new grassroots media network)

Susan DeFife, CEO, Backfence

Edgar Canon, publisher, GetLocalNews.com

Ari Soglin, editor, GetLocalNews.com

Zack Rosen, CivicSpace

Bruce Koon, Executive News Editor, Knight Ridder Digital

Jonathan Weber, Founder and Editor in Chief, New West Networks

Amanda Michel, fellow, Berkman Center for Internet & Society, former Internet coordinator for the Dean and Kerry campaigns

Fabrice Florin, videojournalist, founder, NewsTrust Project (a “news feed of news you can trust”)

Kaliya Hamlin, program director, PlanetWork, Identity Commons

Michael Tippett, founder, NowPublic (Vancouver)

Gary Lerhaupt, Stanford student and founder of Prodigem/torrentocracy

Ron Cooper, E.D. Access Sacramento and Chair of the Alliance for Community Media West

Joan Walsh, editor, Salon.com

Mike Orren, Pegasus News – Journalism 2.0

David Bank, co-founder, Emerging Agenda, a Bottom-up Think Tank for the 21st Century

Peter Leyden, co-founder, Emerging Agenda

Andrew Haeg, Minnesota Public Radio

Alan Mutter, Managing Partner, Tapit Partners, San Francisco

Eleanor Kruszewski, blogger looking to get involved with a distributed content aggregation effort

Lawrence Axil Comras, President & CEO, Green Home, Inc.

Mitra Ardron, Australian blogger

Craig Newmark, founder, Craigslist.org

Discussion at the Archive began around 2:30 pm:

Chris Tolles: If you create something of interest and collect an audience, you’ll make money. The question has been raised: Why would someone participate in a citizens media effort? What’s the motivation? Social good is one answer. Harness that again.

Look to sites that have succeeded: LiveJournal, wikipedia, Daily Kos, open directory. Emulate the principles that got people to participate.

Fabrice Florin: One of our challenges is: how can you produce quality content? How do you make sure you create content that’s valuable and get people to connect to that?

Howard Rheingold: The means of creation and distribution are now widespread. The means of doing it well are not widespread. Suggests efforts to accelerate that.

Mary Hodder warns against hosting a conference at a Journalism School because of lack of innovative thinking. Suggested information science departments, or perhaps law school or business school.

Participants agreed to look at various school as possible hosts for a fall conference. NYU, Berkeley, Stanford and Harvard were among the names mentioned.

Fabrice steered the conversation back to trust. How do we enable people to create meaningful content that adds to the culture?

Holmes Wilson: How does political and cultural value come out of citizens media?

One suggestion: create a set of learning tools.

Susan DeFife: Trust the community. Give people the tools to create and the community will decide whom to trust. We take a very hands-off view. We have a “report misconduct” link on every post. We don’t do editing of any content on site but encourage members to please be accurate and truthful.

Dan Gillmor: The second you try to be responsible, you put yourself at risk.

Jonathan Weber: That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t filter out egregious violations. At New West, we edit after the fact. We’ll take down copyright violations and libelous and slanderous statements. We should not be so worried about those issues.

Wendy Seltzer educated the group about publisher responsibilities. Online editors have it better than print publications: Internet service providers and any site posting or reposting user content is not liable for the content of a posting. Under the Communications Decency Act (CDA) of1996, section 230, you can edit content and posts and you still don’t assume liability as a publisher.

Dan Gillmor: He was named a nonresident fellow at Stanford Law School and just a got grant to pull together a conference in early 2006 to propose model legislation on he subject. Who should be on that group how does the First amendment work for average folks?

Dan also mentioned Bayosphere, a new project that will be a space for people to do things together. We’re going to ask people to behave under, not a code or set of rules, but my role will be to serve as host. It will be based on geography and a community of interest. It’s on the Drupal platform.

Someone raised the issue of training. Most people have no idea of what goes into a citizens media effort. How to help them learn?

Howard: Would be optimal to get a snowball model where you teach certain practices to people and they teach others and it begins to grow that way.

Ron Cooper: Dance and art are storytelling too. He tells students from inner-city high schools that they have the chance to tell their stories in a variety of ways. History has been written by old white men, you have opportunity to write history from your own perspective.

Amanda Michel: She organized 25,000 volunteers for Dean and 50,000 people for the Kerry campaign. Created tools to show them: What is an effective letter to the editor? How to make contact and set up a meetup, how to profile examples of what others have done to make their work more accessible. Better ways to do it than putting up a training manual.

What community are you trying to build? Who’s your audience? What’s their level of involvement and commitment? When you grow a community, it’s important not to lose momentum, it takes tremendous commitment.

Robin Sloan: Look to the National Writers Workshop, where you get bullet points of what you can do differently. It’s like revival camp – participants get fired up by hearing all this practical stuff. It’s been pretty powerful

Chris Tolles tried to summarize the consensus so far. We’d like to see a toolkit of examples of how to build a citizens community; we’d like to hold a conference to educate regular people and students about citizens media and to bring the movement into the public consciousness. One idea is to give speakers at the conference ownership over what they’re putting together, so they are responsible for creating materials and building a product around a topic. You have a problem, a statement and the beginning of an answer, here are some tools and resources to solve this.

One big accomplishment would be to hold a conference that leads to a lasting online toolkit and learning center.

Someone suggested that an important part of the center would be to display examples of best practices – great examples of citizen journalism – as well as a list of available tools and resources.

Denise Atchley: As a point of reference, participants might want to look t the early efforts of the storytelling workshops, where people created sets of tools, resources and information. The Digital Storytelling Association is willing to share its knowledge, learnings and resources. People have been relying on it to take it back to their own places to expand on it; educators take it back to their schools to engage their schools and students.

Brewster Kahle: We haven’t cracked through the consciousness of much of the creative community yet. Ourmedia is really bottom up, but we’re still missing the activists, the documentary folks, they’re not putting their stuff online, why? It’s a puzzle. We’re seeing a lot of Lego moves, but not yet the Robin Williams and Spielbergs and art video crowd.

Mike Orren: Some of us create content. But most of us are about taking content and storing it and bringing it to the audience. It’s less about training people and really more about getting it to the audience that’s the challenge.

Scott Rosenberg: It’s hard to contribute if you’ve got a blank slate. At Flickr, either spontaneously or via ringleaders, these tags emerged, so you’re not giving them a blank page. He warned that teaching is too top-down and users often resist that kind of control.

Mary Hodder wanted to highlight examples of user generated citizen media, examples akin to the Kryptonite lock story or the CBS Memogate blogger story.

Ron Cooper: Internet delivery doesn’t address how you create content. There is a process for delivering exciting tools that encourage creativity. There needs to be a foldback to encourage that.

Fabrice: We should create a site that lets people contribute examples of good citizen journalism. The conference can discuss how it works, why it’s good, start a database, give examples of why it adds value to the culture.

Dan G. will be speaking at the Investigative Reporters and Editors conference to talk about these issues. That would be a good outcome, if a site showcased the best stuff of what we see with an invitation to others and a mechanism to say how they did it.

Bruce Koon: Citizens now have the ability to help tell the truth, in addition to what traditional media offer. Let’s see if there’s an opportunity to begin to highlight and provide the tools to help organize that conversation. Citizens are going out and doing storytelling and bringing information out that before they had no audience for. If there’s a common theme, it’s about the impact of this phenomenon on our culture — at the end of the day there’s more truth out there coming from citizens. It’s not about big media vs. small media, it’s about giving people an opportunity to be part of the conversation, no matter the medium.

Ari: How do we motivate people to contribute content and use the tools? I don’t have the answer. A lot of people will not want to go to journalism training programs. Motivation is a key piece of it. How do we motivate people?

Alan Mutter suggested supporting a network of citizen editors.

Amanda: We need to do more than just create a bank of examples. Need to foster training skills. The shared vision should be part of the motivating factor. When she met Jimmy Wales and asked why people participated, he said, people know we’re trying to build the world’s largest encyclopedia and it’s that simple.

Mary Lou Fulton: We’re dealing with something new, people are beginning to understand that their stuff will be up online forever. Need a structure behind the efforts. What’s the context? Is it geography? Political mission? Get into the specifics. Then address the inspiration. What will inspire people to participate? Ours is oriented around geographic community, they want to share positive experiences from their community.

Bruce: mary lou was describing a citizen lawyer in a way newspapers don’t. this is already happening, and getting training session going is worthwhile, but as a loose group , what’s interesting is it’s already happening i. It makes sense to me in some ways …

Andrew Haeg: Some of his journalist colleagues interpret “my audience knows more than I do” as threat, but eventually they see that it helps journalists connect the dots for readers, and that this approach empowers you to do more.

Holmes: One of our goals should be as facilitiatros of community journalism.

Scott Rosenberg: To the extent that editors are perceived as gatekeepers, there will be resistance to the editing function.

Pete Leyden: The kind of communal editing that goes on with wikis is powerful. There is training and filtering through osmosis.

Michael Tippet: We might be missing the boat by engineering a process that doesn’t map to what’s happening in the real world. The process is more about quirky, entertaining stuff that is sent out virally, not by a tightly controlled or filtered process.

Mary: We want tools that support all kinds of editing or non editing. We taught law students blogging and they weren’t comfortable without me editing their work. We’re looking for tools ranging from anonymous users to people interested in other part of process. We can brainstorm out those tools.

Fabrice: Editor function should be less about excercizing control than about serving as a filter to find the quality stuff in the rising sea of content.

JD Lasica: Best to stay away from editors, though moderators and guides that point to the good stuff are valuable. Ourmedia offers content through an editor of the week, with user-generated tags and user-generated ratings coming soon, and those will probably be more valuable than what an editor points to.

What users like are choices – a number of different options. We should be focusing on tools that empower users to create their own media but also to annotate and remix and serve up new versions of existing media.

Scott R.: The Internet is an alternative to big media. We shouldn’t step in to find the 22 minute version of the net. We all have our distributed network of people for recommendations. I don’t see that as problem.

Chris Tolles: What’s the problem, then?

Scott R: It’s not a problem, it’s an opportunity to say there is a moment in history when this old structure is collapsing. There are some things we want to carry over from the old world, such as integrity and teaching people how to go out and do the hard work and some of the traditional practices and personal relationships.

JD: Our bottom-line goal should be to enable citizens to create their own media, whether through tools or infrastructure or learnings and best practices. He sees it chiefly as a way to enhance personal creative expression. David Banks asked of citizens media: to what end? My answer is: to advance participatory culture and personal creativity.

Pete Leyden: Huge opportunity lies before us with the next wave — video and podcasting – as moving images, television, film, video, audio all migrate from traditional media to the online medium.

Dan G: However much we enjoy the free for all, what comes out of it besides the noise? I’m a big fan of the noise, but there’s a lot of signal buried in it. How do we find it? Video and audio are very linear mediums as opposed to the scan and browse of text. How do we develop something where people have some trust?

Andrew Haeg called attention to the different points of emphasis between those who are out primarily for truth telling – a process that generally needs a curator of editor – vs. those who are primarily interested in enabling creative expression.

Fabrice: Quality of the content matters because if the content is polluted, democracy suffers. It’s my view thatthere needs to be more rigor applied to publishing citizens media, the journalists have a role to make sure that the information is clean and accurate.

Also pointed out the echo chamber problem. We’re immersed in friends who feed us back what we want to hear. An important role of journalists is to expose viewpoints you don’t necessarily agree on or want to hear.

Amanda Michel: There is room for both the truth-telling and personal expression models.

Howard R.: Reputational systems don’t always serve the function of quality control. Slashdot is very involved with redesigning system due to very deep understanding of how you can get the bad stuff out of your face, but that doesn’t amount to raising the quality of the discussion. Kuroshin lately has had a lot of discussion around: how do we get out of this bad loop? There is value in promoting excellence. There’s a need for it online.

Susan DeFife: I’m struck by the amount of emphasis being placed on trust and editing. Jayson Blair and other scandals occurred on the watch of traditional media where they had these systems in place. This is what got a lot of people into citizens media. It’s a mistake to bring those systems into this new space.

Joanathan Weber: An individual can create a following and a brand through reputation, but that’s rare. There’s a huge distinction between how the Internet filters up a story like the Dan Rather story vs. how a citizens media site can operate. You need to establish trust and credibility in what floats to the top and what to present to the readers. My view is that brand will be quite important.

Mike Orren: While we want to enable quality content, we should just be happy that the content is there and available for filtering.

Scott R. raised the prospect of a site like Flickr being used to ask members in 100 communities to look at corruption in the local real estate industry. Instead of just islands of local coverage, you might find hat there are problems in 95 out of 100 communities, and then you get a profound network effect.

Jonathan Weber: The bar for that kind of difficult reporting is still high. We talk with the assumption that people will cover city council meeting but their ability and willingness to do that in a broad scale are doubtful. Covering a local council meeting is work.

Chris Tolles: The people who will cover those meetings and comment are those with an axe to grind. … You have to harvest people’s real motivations. One motivation is: If you put stuff up you’ll get famous …

Susan: Even if it’s users wanting to talk about their kid’s soccer game, that’s OK, it’s a way for them to participate when they had no such outlet before.

Michael T: Flickr is fun stuff but for real journalistic legwork it will probably be sponsored by interest groups and people who have power now.

Edgar Canon: At Getlocalnews, the people who already have power ignored us. … In peer review situation, when people jump in then collaborative journalism emerges.
In hyperlocal communities, enough people know what the truth is so that it is eventually teased out.

Brewster Kahle: We’ve got 13,000 videos on the Archive and getting 50 a day. We’re seeing music videos that crash through the line of entertainment and news — commentary that’s not as rigorous as journalism. Supports giving people the tools to help them remix and edit works while crediting the original sources.

Edgar Canon: We haven’t talked about drm. Branding will be next big key on the Net. You have an idea about the range and level of trust you have. But payment systems and rights management and syndication all require standards [or common platforms], otherwise it all has to be built on ad hoc basis.

Brewster: We’re seeing a thundering herd of independent minds who want to be involved in video content distribution systems. Companies coming to us saying, I’m in biz dev and I need content.

Chris T: Reuters is about to put its content out there.

Fabrice: Annotation of existing video content is an exciting prospect.

Dan G. cited the experiment by the BBC to put its archives online.

JD mentioned the effort by Ourmedia, Jon Udell and Doug Kaye to create a multimedia clipping service so that users could jump to 15 minutes, 48 seconds into a video or a podcast if that the only section of interest to them. That will be a powerful feature. We still need to build it.

Dan . suggested that the permission of the video creator is required before a video could be annotated.

JD doubted that. No one asks the author of a text document to grant permission before a user can jump to page 164.

Holmes: The best experience for the user is always downloading rather than streaming. That enables deep linking. Download the video, then the rights management gets weird if you have it on your hard drive.

He described participatoryculture.org’s open set-top platform, which lets you download video off the Net. It’s a Tivo in your computer that gets stuff from the Interent. Companies that offer content [like Akimbo] are afraid of getting sued if they allow people to use content retrieved from the Internet in ways they want.

Wendy S,: It’s not the law so much as the competitive situation – in many cases they’re owned by big media conglomerates that already owns the content.

Holmes: We’ve making a desktop software app hat lets you watch TV on the Web. It’s all open source and allows people to download videos thru RSS feeds. It will play almost every video format.

Someone publishing video on the Net has a way to create relationships with people. It doesn’t matter how much money you have — you can publish video to hundreds of thousands of people without any cost.

JD: That’s huge. And it’s not proprietary, so anyone around this table can use their code.

Gary L: Isn’t the end goal to get your video on TV? How do we create open source journalism? The average person needs to see citizens journalism on TV.

Wendy S.: this is why we fought so hard about the broadcast flag, We want to enable boxes that let you do this. No one will buy a box if it shows only Internet content without broadcast content.

She predicted, This fight will go on to Congress.

Brewster Kahle: Mentioned the moribund Storymixer project by Ronna Tannenbaum. 15 years ago it was big deal that with a single click you could go to a website located on another part of the world. Now perhaps we’re ready for video to take that next step.

You piece it together on the fly so you have a video browser with a number of different video feeds. Then, if you click on one of them, you see that movie as your whole context. You see a news clip but what if you want to click back to see the prior video for the full context? You can pull all the train clips you’d ever want to see, all the Casey Jones covers by the Grateful Dead, you can make something on top of the Net….

The second idea I’ll throw out is this:

Libraries have a legal exemption that lets you record off the air any audiovisual news. We can loan a limited number for noncommercial purposes. What does loaning mean? Some experts at Berkeley suggest it means streaming, We hate streaming too. But we’re allowed to loan television news. We’ve been recording DVD-quality 20 channels from around the world 24 hours a day for the past 4 years. So we can go and put that up with a streaming interface that can be deep linked into. We have a technology gap. We’re trying to bring television news to life. You can get away with anything on TV news because it’s here and gone you can’t link back to it. That’s a problem, and perhaps that should change.

Video browser, we’d love it if someone took up our idea for a video browser and ran with it. Television news rebroadcasts – as long s it was one in a noncommercial, academic way.We’re allowed to loan a unlimited number of audio visual news.

Chris T: Let us do that and we’ll put it out to our 3 million users tomorrow. Is it online now?

Brewster: No, it’s mostly in mpeg2 and stored on offline hard drives. It has to be done well or it’ll cause people to blow gaskets.

Dan G: Would like to endorse that. But how important is it if it doesn’t persist? Persistence makes users refer back to it.

JD: The streams can persist, so users can reference that.

Fabrice: The Fox newscasts should be first, and then we can start forming a record of commentators and reporters.

Dan G: So when the announcer comes on, you can have a red X across his face, or a thumbs up or thumbs down.

Holmes: The fact that it hasn’t been tested shows it needs to be done.

Brewster: We did it for 10 days or so after Sept. 11. Perhaps we should do it around the mid-term elections.

Chris T: As long as you do it in conjunction with driving people to the news site, they’d be more reluctant to send in the lawyers.

Dan G.: What if you got 100,000 people to assert fair use?

JD cited fair use as a gray zone on Ourmedia and in cyberspace. Ourmedia constantly takes down infringing material because most people have no idea what the copyright laws say. On the other hand, we allow certain kinds of transformative, creative uses as long as it’s done for educational or creative purposes with no financial gain. We have a law firm in San Francisco devising a set of fair use guidelines for us right now.

Edgar Canon: Any movement to whittle down the protections online publishers enjoy under the CDA?

Wendy: None that I see. You can edit user-contributed materials and filter and still not bear liability for your content. In addition, you have the DMCA safe harbors, so you can wait for a copyright holder to come to you and ask you to take it down.

Ari: When will we see the citizen journalist get sued for infringement or libel?

JD: Might want to check out Media Bloggers Association at mediabloggers.org, which is currently trying to find a blanket protection policy for bloggers.

Dan G: Except that it’ll cost $1 million.

Francis Pisani: Let’s not overlook the aspects that show people how the outside world sees us. It would be a failure if we are only concentrating on our own communities without any knowledge about Iraqis telling what’s happening in their country or the South Asian tsunami. We need a space for that.

Michael T: Hyperlocal content s about granular subject matter, not about restricting your site to geographically local content.

Craig Newmark mentioned that he, and possibly craigslist at some point, is interested in observing the citizens media space and possibly getting involved, but it was too early to say exactly what form such an effort would take.

JD invited members of the open source community to become more involved in producing open source media. Hug a coder today – and send him or her our way.

The session closed with JD highlighting several key points and inviting members to coalesce around several of the efforts raised during the day:

- educational conference: JD, Mary Hodder, others

- training, clearinghouse and learning center for best practices: Amanda Michel, Michael Tippett, others

- online showcase for examples of excellent work: Fabrice Florin

- Legal concerns: Wendy Seltzer, others.

Also, collaborate with the folks attending the media reform gathering in St. Louis this weekend.

Adjourn at 6 pm.

- notes by JD Lasica

For this week’s Engadget Inteview, journalist J.D. Lasica spoke with Steve Heiner, the head of Nikon‘s digital single lens reflex systems, about how Nikon is faring in the transition to a digital world, its new line of D70S and D50 cameras, and the hullabaloo about Nikon’s encrypting white balance metadata in RAW image files in some of its cameras. Or at least he tried. Heiner, an accomplished photographer, spoke from Nikon’s headquarters in Melville, NY, with two media representatives listening in.

Let’s start with the big picture. In the age of film, Nikon was always known as the class of camera manufacturers. How has Nikon been faring now that we’re transitioning to the digital age?

Nikon has had a line of SLR cameras for many, many years. Even before we started making SLR cameras, we were making world-class Nikkor optics. Our reputation has been built over the years as much on our lenses as on our camera bodies. We take a great deal of pride in that.

Twenty years ago, when I first joined the company, I got a peek at some of our first digital products. Back then, Nikon was the first to introduce the NP1000, a film transmitter designed for photojournalists at newspapers. You could web process a C41 or a black-and-white negative and scan it using this device, and it had a modem built in so you could transmit the photograph.

In the ’90s we introduced a series of cameras with a moniker E at the beginning, E2S, E3. Those were cameras really designed for industrial purposes. They were large, bulky and very expensive but were very high quality for that time.

In 1999 we introduced the D1 camera and took the market by storm because no one by that date had produced a digital camera that was the same size form factor as our previous 35mm cameras at a price level below $6,000. We introduced that at about $5,500, and most other digital cameras were well over $10,000 at that point.

As the years have progressed, we’ve seen a succession of professional digital models, including a sub-$2,000 camera, which came out in late 2001. It was designed for enthusiast photographers, amateurs and hobbyists.

We introduced the D70 over a year ago, and it’s been a tremendous success. Won 2004 Camera of the Year at Pop Photo and won numerous other awards and was accepted wildly in the marketplace because its price point for the body was just under $1,000. We then paired it with a very high-quality 18-70mm lens.

In the digital age and a new generation of kids who aren’t familiar with the Nikon brand, aren’t the digital camera manufacturers essentially coming off the same starting line?

Essentially. Even though they can’t possibly appreciate the history of a company like Nikon going clear back to 1917 when we started making lenses, what matters most to that customer is the lens. Not to denigrate the importance of the camera body, but the old principle of garbage in, garbage out always applies, especially in photography. The quality of the optics, the clarity of the image, the simplicity of the camera’s operation has got to be a major factor for anyone considering an SLR.

Our goal, from the design side of the company over in Japan, is to make that transition from a digital point-and-shoot camera to an SLR as easy as possible. We try to make these technologies — like our advanced multipattern or metrics metering system and the autofocus operation and all of the processing that takes place in the camera — as fast and as invisible as possible to the end consumer so that they’re focused on getting the best image results.

This may be the year in which a majority of cameras sold will be digital rather than film—

Certainly digital SLRs over film SLRs. The popularity of digital overall has lunged ahead of film sales.

What have been some of the ramifications of that for your industry? Kodak, for instance, has had to reinvent itself.

Well, we’ve been doing digital photography for quite some time. We see, based on sales figures, that the demand out there in the marketplace is definitely for digital. There’s no question that digital is fast replacing film as the camera of choice for most consumers.

Do you have an internal business unit devoted entirely to digital SLR cameras?

The majority of departments within this company are, for the most part, digitally oriented. We still sell quite a number of film SLRs, and there’s still a considerable segment of the market who prefers to shoot film. But most departments in this company have long become digital-centric. …

Our digital SLRs take not only our latest dedicated DX lenses, designed specifically for the sensor we use in our digital cameras, but we also have a full line of regular Nikkor lenses that were designed for our digital cameras as well as our film cameras. So, we all sit in the same building, we all meet together, but there’s no doubt that digital is the way things are going.

Another internal change, of course, is that you now have to write software for your products. How difficult is it for a hardware manufacturer to be producing software?

Actually, it’s not, because Nikon has been real proactive about being in the software business. Even before our first digital cameras, we had digital film scanners that required special software designed by Nikon engineers. Every time we introduce a new camera, the software has to be compatible with all our previous cameras. So we’re doing quite well in the software business.

In the past two years we introduced a new browser and basic editing software called Picture Project. Plus, we have a very capable image browser and thumbnail program called Nikon View and we have Capture software, which is designed to be an integral part of our digital SLR systems.

Macworld carried a story earlier this year saying the world is essentially divided into three kinds of digital cameras: compact point-and-shoot cameras; advanced amateur cameras that are a little bigger and offer more optical zoom power without interchangeable lenses; and professional SLR cameras. Would you agree?

I would, though they’re not divided so much by the camera’s controls or features so much as they are by the lifestyle they appeal to. We have Coolpix cameras that shoot an amazing photograph for their size and weight and price, and the person who buys that camera is just as interested in high quality as a person who buys a higher-level camera. It’s just that their lifestyle dictates that this be an easy, affordable camera they can slip into a coat pocket.

So you have professional cameras, compact cameras and right in the middle are what other companies tend to call prosumer cameras. We tend to shy away from that word, but they’re more advanced, more full-featured than typical compact cameras. And for people who want a digital SLR, we now offer two models under $1,000.

One of those would be the 6.1 megapixel Nikon D70 (pictured at right), which some have billed as a strong competitor to the Canon Rebel.

The D70 is the best-selling SLR camera we’ve had, by far. The goal of keeping a camera at a price point where it can be had by as many people as possible was always in the designer’s mind. Unlike some camera manufacturers, we weren’t interested in stripping down a camera to reach that price point. It was built to retain the most amount of capability.

The D70, unlike the Rebel, affords people the opportunity to grow much more, because there are many more menu settings and manual controls and options that are available to a photographer as their interest in photography grows, where other manufacturers — and I daresay the Rebel specifically — are limiting in their manual control capabilities.

The D70 is powerful and yet simple to operate. A photographer can take advantage not only of aperture and shutter speed but also those more complicated settings like in-camera sharpening and tone compensation and color mode, which are all automatically set.

You released the D70S (pictured at left) just last week. How does it differ?

It has a larger LCD (2 inches). It has a more refined auto-focus system so it can acquire the primary subject a little faster. It has improved focus tracking, so if you’re autofocusing something that’s moving, all of the sensors can concert with one another and track the subject better.

In addition, some of the feedback we got from customers was that the D70 has a small optional ML-L3 infrared remote trigger, a push-button you can use to trigger the camera. Many advanced amateurs and hobbyists had commented that it was difficult to use when shooting close-up photography on a tripod, for example, because the sensor is on the front of the camera. so we included a remote port on the left side of the camera so you can plug in an optional electrical cable release with a locking switch.

It now shoots with a higher-yield battery, which now can shoot as many as 2,500 images on a single charge, which is pretty amazing. The menu design has changed; it offers a different color scheme and a slightly larger font so it’s easier to see, especially in bright light.

And the cost is $899 for the body, and $300 for an 18- to 70-mm lens kit?

Right.

Do only Nikon lenses work with the Nikon SLRs?

Well, there are aftermarket lenses out there, but for someone who’s interested in getting the highest quality photographs you can capture, we highly recommend Nikkor lenses. It’s also worth noting that the digital SLRs will accept the lenses used on Nikon’s F-mount cameras going back to 1959.

The D70 and your SLRs take a compact flash card. But why did Nikon decide to go with SD cards rather than CF cards for your entry-level digital SLRs?

Not only to keep the body smaller and lighter, but also because of the popularity of SD cards. The D50 will take SD as well.

You’re rolling out the D50 (pictured at right) next month for $899, and that’s being targeted as a family camera, right?

The D50 is similar to the D70 but has simplified the process of taking images even more so. There’s a child mode, because we recognize that a good number of users of this camera at this price point will be family users, people who want to capture everything from birthday parties to pictures of the kids playing soccer.

One of my favorite features in the D70 has been expanded even more in the D50, and it’s fairly unique in the industry. We’ve built into many of our cameras a help menu to help the user with a full-featured, easy-to-understand menu. It will show you a description on the menu of exactly the setting you’re about to set, so as you use the camera you can learn as you go.

The lenses that will paired with it will provide the first-time SLR user with a great deal of picture-taking power, frankly. It’s paired with an 18- to 55-mm kit lens and an optional 55- to 200mm lens, so within those two lenses you’ll have coverage from 18 to 200mm.

Why would people want to move up from low- or mid-level digital cameras to a digital SLR?

One of the inherent difficulties with a compact digital camera where you’re really surrendering all of the control to the automated systems in the camera is that it tends to slow down the reaction time. In many situations that’s not necessarily a detriment. But in certain instances, trying to capture that decisive moment, that expression or peak of action, sometimes it’s difficult to do with a compact camera.

In a digital SLR camera, the response is much quicker, and it prepares for the next shot, and the shot after that, much faster. In addition, you get a wider selection of lenses and speed lights and other attachments. For someone who likes photography a lot will very quickly reach the limit of what a compact camera can do.

Sony’s Cyber-shot is one of the best-selling digital cameras in the world. How did camera manufacturers like Nikon, Canon and Konica Minolta let an outsider like Sony come in and let that happen?

Well, Sony obviously has a great name that’s ubiquitous and omnipresent in so many facets of this electronic life. When Sony makes a camera that appeals to people who buy that brand of product, it will always have some level of penetration. I daresay there are a lot of people who are used to buying home electronics and don’t necessarily recognize Nikon’s name. We want to change that and let people know we’ve been in the photographic business for almost 90 years. We’re not just trying something new here.

Adobe has been trying to get camera manufacturers to adopt the license- and royalty-free DNG or Digital Negative standard. Is Nikon considering that?

Saurabh Wahi, MWW Group (PR representative): Actually, let me jump in real quick. Let’s save that question for another discussion because we just want to talk about digital SLR cameras now. Is that OK with you, JD?

Well, it’s not OK, because if you don’t address some of these issues, our readers are going to rip into you. So it’s for your own good to get in front of these topics that have been swirling around the past two weeks.

Wahi: I understand. But at this point, we have put out an advisory, and we want to forward that advisory over to you, but beyond that we have no further information. So I hope that’s fine.

I don’t know why Steve wouldn’t be able to talk in general terms about these issues.

Wahi: There’s so much information out there right now, we want to make sure we can come back with specific information that can help people, and we are in the process of putting that together.

There was a report in CNET on April 21 about the encryption being broken on the white balance metadata for RAW files in the Nikon Capture application, does Nikon plan to take any action against the programmer who broke your encryption code?

Wahi: Again, whatever information that we have available right now is available in the advisory, and I can make sure I can send that out to you.

Could we just talk about the business decision of Nikon encrypting its white balance metadata in the RAW files?

Wahi: Again, the advisory contains all the information that we have available to give to you, and we’ll send that out to you.

I’d like to know what you would say to your customers who are hopping mad about this.

Wahi: The advisory contains all the information and as soon as we finish this interview I’ll send you that.

Steve, talk to me briefly about FoveOn, a 5-year-old technology coming out of Silicon Valley that sounds like one of the most promising, revolutionary developments in the history of cameras and optics. And yet, virtually nothing has been done in the camera industry. Why is that?

Steve Heiner: From what I understand, it does take a very precise manufacturing process to ensure high quality, and I know this technology has been out there for some time, and FoveOn has offered it to many companies. I can’t speak to our designers’ technical reaction to it or to our business sense of it, but suffice to say our engineers are always looking at new technologies that come down the pike. I can’t really address why that particular type of sensor type hasn’t been widely adopted.

Tell me about the long-range outlook for Nikon and the industry. Will our cameras get smaller, faster, smarter, cheaper?

That’s always the $64,000 question. Everyone wants a more efficient workflow, a more efficient camera, they want it smaller and lighter, but there’s a point of diminishing returns. Many pros recognize that sometimes the smaller camera doesn’t perform as well as one that is more stable in the hand. So our designers are trying to strike the right balance between performance and ergonomic comfort. Building a smaller camera isn’t always the answer.

There’s also a point of diminishing returns with higher resolution. We’ve gotten into the double-digit megapixel range, many photographers can’t imagine needing a whole lot more. What you’re going to see is a refinement of more fundamental elements of camera design, that being image processing, efficiency of operation, speed, improvement in new optical designs, things like that. I don’t think the megapixel wars will necessarily yield the best possible cameras.

Elsewhere, we’re already into our second generation of wi-fi transmission, which is an exciting prospect. We’re able to transmit images directly to a server or computer, and the amount of interest in that has taken off in the pro market.

By newspaper and magazine photographers?

Yeah. We originally expected wire service and newspaper photographers and people on deadline would find it most appealing, and they certainly do. Now we’re finding wedding photographers who use it as part of their service. They have the ability to be shooting in one part of a venue and transmitting images to a computer via 802.11g connected to an LCD projector so that people can see the photographs in nearly real time, which is pretty neat.