As my colleague Rachel R. notes, there have been some technical problems with the webcast (video only, tsk tsk) and online chat today. The tone of some of the panel discussions has left some bloggers, including my colleague Neha V., feeling a bit frustrated and defensive.
Tomorrow should be more relevant and accessible to the international blogosphere. Rachel and I will be moderating several panels in which we are hoping to reflect the views of people from around the Global Voices community. So I hope you'll follow the webcast and join the live chat via this page as we explore the citizens media revolutions in East and South Asia, Africa and the Middle East. (As my colleague Georgia Popplewell laments, Latin America is most unfortunately not represented. A massive oversight!!) We hope that the perspectives not represented in the room will be voiced online. Rachel and I will do our best to represent these views back into the room.
UPDATE: MY Global Voices co-founder Ethan Zuckerman has a great post, observing the conference from afar. He makes an excellent point:
...while global news organizations seem obsessed with the bloggers/journalists “dichotomy”, local media seems more open to this idea. I gave a lecture at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts a few weeks ago as part of a class taught by Bill Densmore, who has edited several Berkshire County newspapers. Bill observed that local newspaper editors generally understand the value of journalists cooperating with bloggers because local papers don’t get produced without the help of lots of amateurs. That baseball story, town meeting summary or theatre review might have been produced by a seasoned, experienced journalist… and just as likely was produced by an intern, an amateur trying to get some experience, or someone in the community who was passionate that an event get covered.
Maybe these conversations aren’t best yelled held between bloggers and journalists from highly professional, structured, hierarchical news organizations - maybe community papers could help provide an ideological bridge between camps?
Rebecca:
In our "Future of Journalism" class at MCLA, Ethan gave a terrific guided tour of Global Voices Online and ended with a question for our class: "Is this journalism?" That's when we drew the comparison to what you're doing to bring grassroots voices to the attention of the world's mainstream media (and the public). Our observation was that this is what weekly and small daily newspapers used to do -- cajole, beg, schmooze and praise stringers and free-lancers into covering what used to be called "chicken-dinner news." Sure, it was cheap to do it that way rather than pay union-scale reporters. But it connected the papers with the public.
These town correspondents never thought of themselves as "journalists" -- too fancy a word. They were the first cut. But without that (because of media consolidation) the raw material that sugars down to major news is lost. Local online news communities -- and Global Voices Online -- are recreating the functional equivalent of those town correspondents.
This "future of journalism" conversation will be continued at the first Media Giraffe Project roundtable summit, June 28-July 1, 2006 at the University of Massachusetts with Helen Thomas as one of our keynotes. See: http://www.mediagiraffe.org/wiki/
Posted by: Bill Densmore | May 03, 2006 at 11:55 PM
The book "White Male Privilege" could help in regards to understanding perspective. Amazon.co.uk has a synopsis.
Posted by: Mark Rosenkranz | June 05, 2006 at 05:58 PM