Following is a Q&A with Jean K. Min, communications director of OhmyNews International, the trail-blazing citizen journalism publication in Seoul, South Korea. The exchange — with questions put to him by myself and Matthew Lee of the Center for Citizen Media — took place in January 2007.

The OhmyNews newsroom in Seoul, July 2006. (Photo by J.D. Lasica)

Please tell us about OhmyNews. How did the site get started, and what are its goals?

As a former journalist of a minority liberal magazine named Mahl since 1988, Oh Yeon-ho, the founder and CEO of OhmyNews, had faced repeated rejections while trying to access major news sources. Doors were shut and questions were unanswered.

As a taxpayer, he felt it was his natural right to demand government agencies to grant access to the vast reserve of public information. That was when the idea that “every citizen is a reporter” came up to him. The idea stayed with him for several years until he began his journalism study at Regent University in the United States.
During his graduate study at Regent University, one of his professors asked the class to draft a paper plan on an imaginary new media start-up. He drafted a detailed launching plan of an online news media, building its business model upon his long-dreamed idea that “every citizen is a reporter.”

After coming back to Korea in 1997, he began to persuade some angel investors with his business plan and eventually quit his job at Mahl. With the initial funds raised from these investors and an additional sum from his own personal coffers, he launched OhmyNews in February 2000. The rest of story is now history.

What sets OhmyNews apart from traditional media outlets such as the South China Morning Post?

In his memoir recently published in Korea, Oh has written of his original vision that he “wanted to start a tradition free of newspaper company elitism where news was evaluated based on quality, regardless of whether it came from a major newspaper, a local reporter, an educated journalist or a neighborhood housewife. … So I decided to make the plunge into the sea of the Internet, even though I feared that which was different from what I was accustomed.”

The Internet allows people to have two way communications and Oh wanted to make the most out of this new medium. Oh explains the difference of OhmyNews model as opposed to that of traditional media as such:

“Every citizen can be a reporter. Journalists aren’t some exotic species, they’re everyone who seeks to take new developments, put them into writing, and share them with others.”

And due to unique nature of participants, “OhmyNews does not regard straight news articles as the standard. Articles including both facts and opinions are acceptable when they are good.”

(Click to enlarge.)

OMN has been called the first citizen journalism site. True?

It is not sure if we are the largest CJ media but we are the first citizen journalism site that made a significant dent in the mainstream media’s lock on the national agenda setting. Since no CJ site in the world relies on original stories contributed by over 47,000 citizen reporters, we might be the largest CJ site in terms of number of contributors. Digg, Slashdot and other meta news sites do not require their users to submit original stories.

How has citizen journalism matured and gained mainstream acceptance since OMN launched?

Initially considered just an interesting phenomenon among young Netizens, the citizen journalism OhmyNews pioneered seven years ago has finally obtained mainstream recognition during the 2002 presidential election in Korea. Since then many features of citizen participation OhmyNews introduced have been widely adopted by other mainstream media. For example, Chosun Ilbo, one of the leading conservative dailies, allows its readers to leave comments at the bottom of every article. Daum, the 2nd largest portal in Korea, is encouraging its “Blogger Reporters” to submit their “news” to its dedicated news site names “Media Daum.” SBS, a top three Korean TV broadcaster, receives video news from “U-porters.”

Please explain how the editorial process at OMN works. How can citizen journalists post articles on OhmyNews? Does your editorial staff work with citizen reporters in the field who pitch story ideas and then get paid if they are accepted?

Typical citizen reporters write a story or two per week. After submitting a story, they can track their status. Stories remain as “Saengnamu” articles before being accepted by OhmyNews copy editors. Once accepted, citizen reporters can follow the status of their words in real time, observing the number of readers’ clicks into each of the stories, the number of comments, or the money collected in the “tip jar.”

What happens on OhmyNews is an intensely interactive online conversation. Citizen reporters have to persuade OhmyNews’ front-line copy editors to have their stories accepted in the first place. As much as 30 percent of daily submissions are rejected for various reasons such as poor sentence construction, factual errors, or its lack of news value. After stories are accepted and edited, then placed in a more prominent space, usually within minutes they draw feedback from scores of readers. When the story is controversial, the number of readers’ comments can shoot up to hundreds and even thousands.

How does your newsroom ensure and maintain a high degree of fairness, balance and accuracy from your citizen reporters?

OhmyNews citizen reporters are not allowed to write behind a fake identity. We verify their identities through government-sponsored authentication process before we grant membership. The stories submitted by them are then screened, fact-checked and edited before they are published. As many as 30% of the submissions are rejected for various reasons. Some sensitive stories that contain claims that potentially damage news makers’ reputation get more thorough fact-check and sometimes entail even on-site visits. We also retain the right to revoke membership of any citizen reporter who was found to have violated the agreement and code of ethics they signed on when they joined OhmyNews. See below for more details of the agreement.

What do you consider some of the main principles, or tenets, that form the basis of citizen journalism?

OhmyNews values news that is collected and written through the lens of ordinary citizens. The eye-level perspective of their stories stuffed with a rich array of personal anecdotes is what sets apart the content of OhmyNews from that of other news sites.

OhmyNews also encourages our citizen reporters to select stories they have a good understanding of and tell them in their own voice. We advise them that they don’t necessarily have to follow the logic and formula of professional journalism even though they can be useful sometimes. In short, we tell them to be themselves.

Lastly, OhmyNews puts great importance on the accuracy and credibility of their stories. We have trained internal editors who screen, fact check and edit the stories submitted by citizen reporters before publishing them. That is why we keep reminding them of the “responsible participation.”

To sum up, OhmyNews’ editorial policy is the perfect cooperation and harmony between the professional journalists and citizen reporters. To define the roles of each group and harmonize their diverse contributions in a single, powerful and coherent news package without losing iconoclastic flair requires the most sophisticated level of editorial acumen and gut instinct learned from the many years of journalism practices.

Do you consider independence an important hallmark of citizen journalism? If so, what does independence entail?

Independence from everything including even OhmyNews is the underlying guideline when it comes to the editorial independence of OhmyNews. Political power is not exerting as big an influence on the Korean media as it used to be. An increasingly grave concern among Korean journalists is the pressure from advertisers.

OhmyNews strives to listen to the voice of no one but our readers’ and citizen reporters’. OhmyNews, by design, cannot bend its editorial integrity because of illicit pressure from anybody. Our citizen reporters will submit whatever story they deem newsworthy and worth attention, and OhmyNews cannot reject them without first offering them publicly justifiable reasons. Should anyone find that we are rejecting some critical stories out of pressure from any one, OhmyNews will instantly come under great fire and public scrutiny by our own citizen reporters.

How does OMN maintain its editorial integrity instead of being a vehicle for its founder’s point of view?

Other than the said open structure of our newsroom design, we have an ombudsman committee composed of citizen reporters and other outside watchers. They monitor OhmyNews main page on a daily basis and submit a monthly ombudsman report, which is then published on OhmyNews.

However, millions of watchful eyes of our readers and citizen reporters might be the most effective defense for OhmyNews in preserving its editorial integrity against external force—even from its own founder.

Does transparency play a role in citizen journalism? How does OMN use transparency?

Absolutely. Since we are accepting on average about 70% of submitted stories by our citizen reporters, we have to be very transparent to our citizen reporters about our editorial guidelines and screening process. We have a public forum open to anyone, where people can pose questions and get answers from our editors. Without transparency, citizen journalism would exist only in name.

We are upgrading our editorial transparency to the next level recently by allowing our readers to decide today’s top stories for OhmyNews in the separate news folder. We named it “Netizens’ Edition.”

When it comes to accuracy, what is the track record of OMN citizen reporters?

About five stories reported by citizen reporters have been involved in legal dispute so far, an impressive feat for OhmyNews considering the fact that it has published a couple of hundreds of stories every day for nearly seven years. We believe we were able to maintain our reputation as a credible news source thanks to our unique editorial policy—“responsible participation.” Thanks to the internal screening and editing process, we were able to preserve our credibility as a news media all without alienating ordinary amateur citizen reporters.

Does OhmyNews screen for inaccuracies and fact check the work of its citizen reporters?

Yes, we do.

Are OhmyNews contributors allowed to include subjectivity and point of view in their work, or is “objectivity” the desired focus?

We value individual overtone contained in each story our citizen reporters write for OhmyNews. A degree of subjectivity would be tolerated or even encouraged depending on the nature of story. However, we put an extraordinary editorial effort in maintaining integrity of factual description in each story. Bottom line is: your personal interpretation is welcomed but no factual fallacy will be tolerated.

The OhmyNews Citizen Reporter’s Agreement

1. I recognize the editorial authority of OhmyNews’ in-house editing staff.

2. I will share all information about each of my articles with the OhmyNews editing staff.

3. I will not produce name cards stating that I am a citizen reporter of OhmyNews.

4. When an article I submit has or will be simultaneously submitted in another medium, I will clearly state this fact to the editorial staff.

5. I will accurately reveal the sources of all quotations of text.

6. Citizen reporters who work in the field of public relations or marketing will disclose this fact to their readers.

7. Legal responsibility for acts of plagiarism or unauthorized use of material lies entirely with the citizen reporter.
8. Legal responsibility for defamation in articles lies entirely with the citizen reporter.

The OhmyNews Reporter’s Code of Ethics

1. The citizen reporter must work in the spirit that “all citizens are reporters,” and plainly identify himself as a citizen reporter while covering stories.

2. The citizen reporter does not spread false information. He does not write articles based on groundless assumptions or predictions.

3. The citizen reporter does not use abusive, vulgar, or otherwise offensive language constituting a personal attack.

4. The citizen reporter does not damage the reputation of others by composing articles that infringe on personal privacy.

5. The citizen reporter uses legitimate methods to gather information, and clearly informs his sources of the intention to cover a story.

6. The citizen reporter does not use his position for unjust gain, or otherwise seek personal profit.

7. The citizen reporter does not exaggerate or distort facts on behalf of him or any organization to which he belongs.

8. The citizen reporter apologizes fully and promptly for coverage that is wrong or otherwise inappropriate.

The post OhmyNews: ‘Every citizen can be a reporter’ appeared first on JD Lasica.

Matt Foremski, pictured below, tells how he did some citizen sleuthing to discover the true identity of YouTube’s Lonelygirl15. She was not a home-schooled 16-year-old girl named Bree but rather an actress named Jessica Rose, who had recently moved from New Zealand to Burbank, Calif. I caught up with Foremski in an AIM chat to learn the details of how he broke one of the biggest Internet stories of 2006.

A: I’m 19 now and do some busy work for my dad’s sites, like Silicon Valley Watcher. I was 18 and was taking off a semester of college to play around on the Internet when all this happened. Now i’m at the santa rosa junior college.

Q: Your father, Tom Foremski, got you interested in blogging and then videoblogging?

A: Yes,  he always likes to talk to me about emerging tech stuff, which i like as well. I got into vlogging from spending time at YouTube.

Q: When did you first begin following the saga of lonelygirl15 on youtube? what intrigued you about her?

A: I caught it at the end of june – i thought she was pretty and spunky. I feel she turned me on to a new area of youtube, that of videoblogging. before, I just went on youtube to watch the funny cats.

Q: Were you caught up in the storyline, or did you suspect she was spinning fiction from the start?

A: I think it took me a few weeks to catch on, as i read some of the comments attached to her videos. it was happenstance that made me dig around: i had a domain, lg15.com, and I kept getting emails asking if she was a fake or what the actor’s name was.

Q: What did you find out? How did you uncover her identity?

A: I had read through an article about the outing of the lonelygirl15 production on the hollywood site tmz.com and found in the article’s comments a link to a myspace page someone believed to be that of the lg15 actress.  whoever it was had closed up shop – made their profile private – which made it seem like a dead end.  i had remembered a little trick about google’s search engine cache, as people have used it for evidence gathering before, so I took a look at the page with that tool.

The cache was from late spring, and it had all the person’s salient details – full name, date of birth, home town and such. I then did another google search around that person’s name and came up with two headshots that were undoubtedly of lonelygirl – once again saved in google’s cache, which i rushed over to my dad, and we ended up publishing that on svw early that morning.
Q: You mean Silicon Valley Watcher’s scoop,  The identity of LonelyGirl15.

A: Right.  initially, just the first two—I added in the latter ones to round it out later that morning.

Q: You also did some digging around about her background in new zealand?

A: Yes, all those details of her background I found on her myspace page. She was an actress from a small city in New Zealand who moved to Burbank to act. The name on the profile was “Jessica Rose.” when i searched her myspace user name,  “jeessss426,” on Yahoo, it turned up a bunch of pictures from her probably forgotten ImageShack account.

Then,  someone else found a whole load of her online photos, which really gave the story some pop. :~)

Q: OK, what happened next?

A: That morning my friend Cody and I put together a video to feature on youtube.

When my dad published the story it got picked up rather quickly and was sourced for a ny times article and a few others that ran later that morning.

Q: They found out the identity of the filmmakers behind the project, right?

A: Yes, I believe they were sitting on a big article that they then decided to publish after our part of the story broke

Q: This sounds like an effort where users acting as citizen journalists in effect teamed with mainstream reporters to contributed to a piece of investigative reporting. What does this episode say about the power of “online wiki-style investigations and manhunts,” as the NY Times put it?

Q: I think there is a lot to be said to that effect. I think the collaborative construct allows for a lot of people to put in little tidbits of info and half thoughts that when combined properly can be the fabric of great stories. :~)

It’s really comes down to how you can put all those varying sources of information together and pull a story out of it.

A: OK, thanks, Matt, great job.

Q: Sure, thanks!

This post originally appeared as part of the Knight Citizen News Network’s Principles of Citizen Journalism project.

The post Citizen sleuthing: The unmasking of Lonelygirl15 appeared first on JD Lasica.

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

Attendees of the Summit

We were surprised by the robust turnout. People came not just from the Bay Area but from as far away as Boston, Washington, D.C., Minneapolis and Vancouver. 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”

Craig Newmark, founder, Craigslist.org

Joan Walsh, editor, Salon.com

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

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

Notes from the gathering

Discussion at the Archive began around 2:30 pm. Here were a few highlights that I captured.

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 at 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

The post Summary of 2005 Citizens Media Summit appeared first on JD Lasica.

This column — my last for AJR — appeared in the July-August 1999 issue of The American Journalism Review.

Where will online journalism be in five or 10 years? In the hands of more and more regular folks, who may not even think of themselves as journalists.

The Internet has long held out the ideal of Everyman as publisher — ordinary citizens who take back journalism from the professional class. As the Web matures, we’re starting to see a flourishing of community journalism, a phenomenon that has both distant roots and a promising future.

“The news consumer is turning into a news provider,” says Walter Bender, associate director of the MIT Media Lab. “It’s not that these news consumers will compete with the New York Times, but the consumer becomes part of the process of telling stories in a way that enriches the public discourse.”

Through the Net, readers have been interacting with writers and editors. But in the next stage of Web journalism, citizens actually are becoming writers and editors. We’ve already seen the glimmerings of this trend with zines (special-interest electronic magazines) and with individuals’ own Web pages in online communities such as GeoCities or Tripod. Most of these enterprises have been lone wolf affairs.

Here’s a more exciting prospect: Enlisting people with shared interests to connect with each other and the outside world in new and powerful ways. It’s not clear whether this kind of community publishing will take place through online communities like GeoCities, online city guides like AOL’s Digital Cities or online newspapers. But online papers are missing a good bet if they overlook this rich source of community content.

MIT’s Media Lab isn’t waiting around to see who’ll pick up the ball. Its News in the Future program has set up community publishing projects among seniors groups in the United States and Finland, in a high school outside Atlanta and in several villages in Thailand. “We’re getting both youngsters and 60-, 70- and 80-year-olds to publish online newspapers, and the results are absolutely extraordinary,” Bender says. “They’re publishing some of the best stuff on the Web.”

One of the projects, Silver Stringers, began in mid-1996 with 10 volunteers from a seniors center in Melrose, Massachusetts. They agreed to participate in a community-oriented approach to news. MIT supplied three computers, a laptop, a digital camera, a scanner, a color printer and software to produce an online publication. None of the seniors had been on the Net before. “Most of us did not even have a computer when we first started,” recalls Virginia Hanley, 72, a founding editor.

“In the early days, those who couldn’t type were encouraged to write in longhand, and we found volunteers to transcribe those stories onto the computer,” adds Jim Driscoll, 74, an editor. At the outset, MIT advisers helped edit articles and insert photos. In time, the seniors took over those tasks. The result was the Melrose Mirror, a monthly online newspaper that runs features, recipes, essays and news. Today, a handful of editors meets weekly to kick around story ideas and edit copy, while about 20 staffers contribute stories, reviews, photos and poems.

The Web publication draws readers from around the world, but its most loyal readers are current and former residents of Melrose. Says Driscoll, “The most popular articles seem to be stories describing experiences during the Great Depression and World War II” — material that most professional journalists wouldn’t define as news.

“We don’t see this replacing newspapers,” says Kay McCarte, 69, one of the editors. “But it lets us be involved in the creative process. It gives us a voice.”

Jack Driscoll, the Media Lab’s editor in residence (and Jim’s brother), says online news organizations should follow suit and put Web publishing tools in the hands of community groups. “We’re empowering readers to become journalists,” he says. “They’ve got talent, and they’ve got things to say. It’s amazing to watch them develop their own sets of publishing values.”

This is where we’re heading: news not as a commodity dispensed by a professional class, but as a service in which the consumer is engaged as an active participant. In the future, journalism will become a catalyst for creating communities of interest and for building links and relationships between news providers and consumers. That’s a win for everyone.

This, alas, is my last AJR column. A new son and a new job heading the editorial department at BabyCenter, a new media company in San Francisco, have forced me to cut back on outside commitments. During the past 25 months I’ve enjoyed watching the online news industry grapple with the revolutionary changes wrought by the Internet. This wild, wonderful ride has only just started.

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