I was meaning to write about Placeblogger earlier but have been a bit busy with moving from one side of the earth to the other... perhaps I should start a support group for Placelessbloggers...
Launched on January 1st, Placeblogger is a site dedicated to helping you find local blogs from everywhere. (See Jay Rosen's post about it here.) Founder Lisa Williams got the idea from her experience founding and running a placeblog called H20Town in Watertown, Massachusetts. She previewed the site a couple months ago at the Berkman Center. You can watch the video here and listen to the podcast here. Here is how LIsa defines "placeblog:"
A placeblog is an act of sustained attention to a particular place over time
It can be done by one person, a defined group of people, or in a way that’s open to community contribution
It’s not a newspaper, though it may contain random acts of journalism
It’s about the lived experience of a place
I'm delighted to see that a local Hong Kong placeblog, Lamma.com.hk, and its founder "Lamma-Gung" is featured on the front page of Placeblogger this week. Amongst his plans, L-G says he hopes to seed more place blogs in other parts of Hong Kong. Sounds like a great thing, perhaps, for some of my future students to get involved with... or for them to do themselves.
While the site is heralded as a new addition to the "citizen journalism" universe, Lisa makes it clear however that placeblogs should not be confused with "local news:"
Placeblogs, however, are about something broader than news alone. They're about the lived experience of a place. That experience may be news, or it may simply be about that part of our lives that isn't news but creates the texture of our daily lives: our commute, where we eat, conversations with our neighbors, the irritations and delights of living in a particular place among particular people. However, when news happens in a community, placeblogs often cover those events in unique and nontraditional ways, and provide a community watercooler to discuss those events.
This is why I like to use the term "citizen media" instead of "citizen journalism" when talking about the blogging phenomenon, and about the non-Western blogospheres that my friends and I are trying to aggregate and curate with Global Voices Online. Many blogs do perform journalistic functions but that's not what they do all the time - and it's not all they do.
Lisa makes it clear that she doesn't think blogs should replace newspapers and nor do I, for the same reasons. That said, there are a lot of very good reasons why budding journalists - or seasoned journalists looking to get involved with this new medium - should get involved with placeblogging. As Northeastern journalism professor Dan Kennedy wrote on his blog:
Last semester she spoke to my Journalism of the Web students, and talked about placeblogging as an entrepreneurial opportunity for young journalists. Why not? When I was a recent J-school graduate, friends and I talked about several ideas for launching community papers. We didn't do so mainly because it was too expensive.
By contrast, you can launch a placeblog virtually for free, with the hope that, eventually, you can sell enough advertising to make a living. I would think that an aggressive young journalist who knows how to write, and can post photos, video and sound, could give her chain-owned community weekly fits. And there's no need to settle for just "random acts of journalism," either.
In Hong Kong, there is plenty of low-hanging fruit waiting for assertive young journalists to grab and make a reputation for themselves. The local media fails to cover many things, not because they'll go to jail for the most part but for commercial reasons and because corporate bosses don't want to be too controversial. The news media here self-censors to a certain degree, and tends to operate with what many local journalists here describe to me as a massive "herd mentality:" everybody chasing the same stories in packs and few journalists daring to branch off to do truly original stuff that nobody else is doing - and few editors brave enough to devote the resources to let reporters to split away from covering the same stuff everybody else is covering.
Thus it seems to me that students here in Hong Kong have a great opportunity to pursue truly original reporting that can really make a difference to the community. And thanks to technology, it doesn't have to be expensive. Plus they could even help lead the way with media innovation if journalism programs encourage and facilitate it.
Last November I did a brainstorm at the Berkman Center about some of the opportunities the Internet brings for journalism students, and how journalism education might explore these things more creatively. You can watch the video of the talk here, or listen to the audio here. For some reason I was feeling shy or busy or something and didn't post the links at the time. I haven't gone back and watched or listened to it so I have no idea if it's coherent (it probably isn't), but I welcome feedback, suggestions, and ideas from anybody out there. Especially people in Hong Kong who might have specific suggestions. I'd love to hear from anybody who might be interested in working with JMSC students on potentially innovative projects - particularly those related to "hyper-local" or "niche" journalism as well as the creation of what I like to call "communities of conversation" around that journalism.
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