Media Re:public

The Knight Foundation has announced the winners of the 2008 Knight News Challenge for “innovative ideas using digital experiments to transform community news.” The list of 16 winning projects includes Media Re:public Forum attendees David Cohn (go Dave!), whose spot.us project will help crowdfund quality reporting and Martin Moore, whose Media Standards Trust is partnering with Tim Berners-Lee to identify quality news.

Lots of other interesting looking projects - Drupal for radio, Sochi residents commenting on the approach of the Olympics, one video and one radio project in India, news via telephone. As we had heard previously, lots of international winners. Wish I were in Vegas to toast them all, looking forward to following their progress.

May 15th is Blog for Palestine Day. 20,000 protesters in Nazareth were met with tear gas a couple days ago. If you missed these stories, or if you’d just like to broaden your perspective on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, this is a good time to check out a partnership highlighting Middle East news between three terrific non-profits: Global Voices, LinkTV, and NewsTrust.net. (Full disclosure, I have friends in all three organizations.) The first two focus on highlighting new sources of news of the world, NewsTrust helps discover high-quality journalism on all topics. If you have only four and a half minutes to spare, start with Jamal Dajani’s Mosiac Intelligencer Report: Your Independence is our Nakba. But it’s worth diving in to the materials on all three sites, and encouraging any journalists you know covering the story to do the same.

Tags: Palestine, Israel, Middle East, Global Voices, LinkTV, NewsTrust.net, nonprofit journalism

Compelling, well-researched, human, making a serious and complicated issue accessible without dumbing it down - that’s the kind of journalism we’re concerned with, right? This week’s episode of This American Life is all of those and more. It’s a collaboration with NPR news that actually makes it possible to understand how the subprime mortgage crisis happened, and its implications for the economy here and abroad. At the same time, you meet, understand and may even feel sympathy for some of the people whose mistakes made it happen, and whose lives were thrown into turmoil.

If you don’t already, subscribe now to the This American Life podcast and check it out. Or if you can’t make time for an hour of radio (your loss), listen online to the 12-minute All Things Considered version which aired Friday.

Great work, radio people!

Now if we could get them to:
put additional materials (photos? videos? reporter’s notes? glossary?) and links to outside resources on both websites;
allow listener comments; and
localize all of the above on each local affiliate’s site,

we’d really have something!

Tags: radio, public radio, NPR, This American Life

Burn The Money,
originally uploaded by Bradshaw.i.

Or at least, the Boston Phoenix does, until it fixes its website! I went to Classified/Real Estate/Boston/Sublets (and remember this is a Boston-based paper).  Look closely at the first results I got. They’re ALL for apartments in the beautiful state of Arizona (Conspiracy theorists will ask if the McCain campaign might be behind this?). And they all have the same New Jersey phone number, which appeared in dozens more ads, including some describing apartments in Cambridge and Boston.  It was too late in the day for me to stomach calling it to see what they would try to sell me.

I know the classifieds are free, but so is Craigslist, and they’ve figured out how to keep the spam down (note that the Phoenix’s “report this ad” link doesn’t actually let you do that, it takes you back in to the classifieds).

Tags: advertising, spam

Sad photos of the post-cyclone devastation in Myanmar, (warning: including dead children), are on this Burmese blog  (my browser doesn’t even display the fonts, have no idea what it’s called) which I found thanks to Ivan Sigal’s thoughtful Burning Bridge Blog. Also fascinating that the author ends the series with a cartoon which I was able to identify as  Singapore cartoonist Heng Kim Song (translation or publication info welcome). Meanwhile, Global Voices provides fascinating insight into what Burmese themselves are saying about the slow arrival of relief for the survivors. One blog says an anonymous government official believes the death toll might be as high as 600,00. Another hopes the government will find a way to accept foreign aid so as not to lose the trust of the people.

Tags:  burma, blogs, globalvoices

Michael Melillo and Len Witt have launched a session at NewsTools2008 on creating a federation of community journalists or platforms. [warning live blogging, errors ahead]

Len is describing his “representative journalism” project, gets spontaneous applause when he explains how he got funded: Ruth Ann Harnisch saw his blog about the idea and sent him an email offering him funding.

Andrius Kaulikas wants us to consider the different spectrum of values of journalism; resistance from folks who want to talk about business models and services. His list of qualities of journalism
Public Domain…………..Copyright
Visible……………………….Hidden
Work for Free……………Work for Pay
Activistic……………………Voyeuristic
No Castes…………………..Caste (blurred or clear lines between journalists and non-journalists)
Subjective………………….Objective
Relationships…………… Isolation (journalism that builds relationships or creates isolation)
Universal…………………. Provincial (or local or personal)
Timeless………………….. Dated (themes)

Tom Abate suggests that we can build a federation that includes people who are all along these spectrums. Len Witt says we try to find some people to get together. Harnisch
He describes the folks in Northfield, MN who are doing a weblog and podcast, they want a professional journalist to help, so the representative journalism project provides that person and also provides that journalist with editorial support. Also a discussion of whether the reelchanges model can help fund projects like this in the future.

Michael asks us for the next step: a group that is willing to collaborate on discussions of business models, etc. He explains to a new participant that it would be a Kirk Federation (not a Picard one) [further proof of my complete cultural ignorance that I had to Google the names before I got the Star Trek reference. After months at Harvard, I assumed they were the names of more academic sociologists I hadn’t read!] that will bring together resources and mechanisms to support projects that meet media needs for communities whether geographic communities or communities of interest.

Tags: newstools2008, federation, community journalism, Star Trek

Reaching Low-Income Audiences was the important if frustrating topic of a session. Maurreen Skowran from Raleigh, NC, convened it. Her personal frustration with her paper’s ability to ignore huge swaths of thr population has led her to develop a project to install digital kiosks to expand Internet access to people who don’t have it at home or at work. First location ideas: laundromats, bus stops, churches. In later conversations, I learn she plans to charge reasonable prices for Internet access (think of airport kiosks) and set the kiosks up with portal pointing to local information sources. Starting in a county with only a weekly paper that has no editorial online presence.

We bounced back and forth between two poles:

a) what a terrible job most traditional media does covering/serving underserved audiences (Vikki Porter calls them “communities of difference”). Best quote on that from Benjamin Melancon: “well there’s no way we can do worse than we’re doing now in terms of content.” (Many of us worry he underestimates the depths still left to sink to.) He has a small non-profit called People Who Give A Damn, apologizes he hasn’t updated the site (naturally, as he is a web guy).
b) inspiring experiments like Maureen’s kiosks and Michael Stoll’s Public Press Project

General agreement that mobile is the future but we need other media in the interim (Michael Stoll made a convincing case for a paper publication). Also that content is as or more important as mechanics, that mainstream journalists have lost touch with huge groups of the population. Not just lower-income, but rural, undigital, non-college educated, etc.

Tom Stites joined us for a while, sent this follow-up note:
Friends — I was cheered to see such a engaged NewsTools conversation about journalism for less-than-affluent people. If you have time and interest, you might find some interesting context in this keynote speech on this very topic that I gave at the 2006 Media Giraffe conference in Amherst:

http://citmedia.org/blog/2006/07/03/guest-posting-is-media-performance-democracys-critical-issue/

Let’s keep this conversation going. It’s crucial to the future not only of journalism but of democracy.

tom

Indeed I think it is.

Tags: Newstools2008, poverty, diversity, digital divide,

ReelChanges allows the public to contribute to documentaries (or other forms of journalism) at any stage of production or distribution. Launching today, in honor of May Day. [Warning: live blogging, mistakes ahead]

Hal Plotkin: “Currently, decisions about what gets produced are made by .001% of the public. Maybe they always get it right, but we don’t think so.”

Foundations didn’t want to fund us; they see us as competition. Instead named our new thing “AFM” - “Audience-Funded Media and approached business supporters. Found technology company to fund based on the ability of creating a for-profit side. One for-profit project in the works: a large commercial TV network will offer audience opportunity to fund additional episodes of their favorite TV show.

Plotkin unapologetic about being a gatekeeper for the projects that are allowed on the site. Question from the audience “What about for example Michael Moore, not what I would call journalism but could be called quality polemics?” Plotkin sticking with producers he’s convinced are high-quality, reputable, etc. in order to avoid getting scandals in his first year or two, can’t afford it. The first 100 films can’t get us in trouble. Q: But ok to have a point of view, I work with ACLU, would you take a film produced by us, on say the death penalty? Hal: Yes, I would, if I know it’ll be produced to quality standards. Q: But what about neutrality? Hal: We’re also looking at a group who are making a history of the conservative movement, and even though they’re not my political tribe, we’re happy to do it if it’s journalistically sound.

Discussion about non-traditional journalism styles, i.e., Errol Morris, Michael Moore. Hal: If he’s paying sources, then no. That’s not how we do journalism. We might eventually make exceptions, but not now. All donations are public, on the site and also on all versions of the film. I’m focused on journalistic standards.

Great story about dinner with friends where he describes project to them and wife says “that is the stupidest project ever, we can’t get people to pay for good journalism that does exist, who would pay for journalism that doesn’t even exist yet? He asks her, is there no topic in the world that you would 10 dollars to see covered in the media, that they don’t cover well enough or at all? And she immediately says that given that she is an obsessive scrapbooker but can’t afford to go to the scrapbooking conventions, she says I would pay ten dollars if someone would make a video of the convention, with a few interviews and coverage of the exhibits. Hell, I would pay $50 for that. We researched it, and found that this scrapbook thing is huge: there might be 30-70,ooo people willing to pay for that video. So multiple 50,000 times $10. You could cover a couple of conventions for 500 thousand bucks. Question from me: Are you going to do the flip side - where people can suggest the topic they want covered?

Examples brought up: Brave New Films, Chris Allbritton’s Back to Iraq where he successfully gathered donations to support his work in Iraq. Does he work with for example the MediaRights site? Heard of them, will take a look.

Final story (thank goodness, the smell of lunch out in the lobby is about to overwhelm me): Experiment I did in school - give people an obviously biased piece of journalism, ask them if it’s biased, great majority (95%) of them say of course it’s biased and I wouldn’t believe it. Then ask them if they think other people would believe it and 70% say oh yeah I think other people would. We need more respect for everyone else’s intelligence. Changing that mindset could help newsrooms and it’s the philosophy of my project.

Do one thing for us, says Hal: spread the word, tell journalists and producers to apply! I’m doing my part.

Tags: ReelChanges, newstools2008, documentary

Newstools2008 started last night, it’s a real unconference, and already [warning: live blogging, no guarantee of anything] I’m sold. Yesterday evening I came without my laptop and didn’t feel frustrated because they succeeded in getting us to talk to people we didn’t know (our MC: now is the time when if you’re sitting next to someone you already know, you need to move to a different table) about real issues. We didn’t really talk very specifically about the materials and questions they fed us but that didn’t matter, the idea that we were supposed to be talking about something ensured that we talked about related to the overall topic of the conference, and the conversations were good. Now people are posting topics for sessions I want to attend them all.

So I’m becoming convinced that getting the right people together for a sufficient amount of time is the most important thing you can do to have a good conference. The next question is: how to get this group of folks who come to the same conferences to frame projects or questions that lead to action, so that we don’t start all the conversations over again each time?

The butterfly is part of the unconference lingo. Don’t you want to be one?

Should we want Apple (or any other large corporation) to be our conduit for paying for non-commercial media? What about for charitable giving generally?

Two completely separate references to the possibility of using Itunes for non-profit donating caught my eye in the last few days. The ever creative and effective Jake Shapiro blogged recently about how it might work if ITunesU allowed folks to make voluntary donations/contributions to support the makers of free content, whether public media, individuals, nonprofits, universities or whatever.

And then in today’s inbox, the folks organizing the Hollywood Hill’s conference the New Hi-Tech Robin Hoods broadened the question: “In a world where millions pay 99¢ to download media from iTunes, why can’t we do the same to end poverty or stop global warming?”

It sounds so tempting that I feel sure there is a catch, but I’m not sure what it is. We might think we’d like our noncommercial media providers to remain pure and free, unconnected to any large commercial corporations, but how many of us make a point of making our charitable donations by check to avoid having upwards of 2% of our contribution go to the credit card companies? American Express’ Giving Express program doesn’t even feel the need to pretend that its service results in more of the money donated going to the organization: “A 2.25% transaction fee is deducted from donations to cover processing costs. This expense is similar to the cost your organization would incur for processing direct credit card donations.”

Curious to hear reactions from the VRM folks, who’ve been thinking for a long time about these problems, especially about a better way to fund public service media. In my understanding, they want commerce (and non-commerce, i.e., nonprofits) to be customer-centric, and customers rather than vendors to own their data and control their relationships, but it’s hard to imagine there won’t still be a role for intermediary corporations to facilitate those relationships.

I’m guessing that Doc will say that we instead need a free and open system that everyone can use as they wish. So organizations like universities and public broadcasters, who are already set up to take donations could have it on their own sites as well as make it available through the ITunes store and other distributors. Individual artists or small non-commercial media makers would have a non-profit clearinghouse (hello, PRX? in your copious spare time?) for donations that would collect money and send them a check. Then this powerful coalition would launch a lobbying effort to force credit card companies at least slash their rates to non-profits down to a half a percent or so, if not zero them out entirely. And what a beautiful world it will be.