RConversation

Global Voices praised in State of the News Media 2007

The Project for Excellence in Journalism has just released its massive annual report, State of the News Media 2007: An Annual Report on American Journalism. If you are interested in the future of journalism anywhere, this report is a must-read. I'm going to write something longer in the coming days - both on this blog and elsewhere - with my take-aways from that report and some other recent reports that help us get a grips on what journalists and news organizations are and aren't doing to reinvent themselves in the digital age.

But first things first.

I must pay tribute to the amazing group of people who run Global Voices.

As a result of their creativity, energy, and hard work GV was praised by this year's report one of the most "interesting experiments in new journalism" and scored as one of four "High Achievers" in an analysis of a broad range of news sites (broadly defined) including the NYT, Washingtonpost, CNN, Daily Kos, Digg, and many others.

The narrative overview of the entire report begins by stating that "The pace of change has accelerated" in the news business. It goes on to describe this rapid change, the sense of uncertainty at many news organizations. It also affirms that "traditional journalism is not, as some suggest, becoming irrelevant." A statement with which I fully agree. But it points out that professional journalists have been slow to adapt:

...But practicing journalism has become far more difficult and demands new vision. Journalism is becoming a smaller part of people’s information mix. The press is no longer gatekeeper over what the public knows.

Journalists have reacted relatively slowly. They are only now beginning to re-imagine their role. Their companies failed to see “search” as a kind of journalism. Their industry has spent comparatively little on R&D. They have been tentative about pressing for new economic models, and that has left them fearful and defensive. Some of the most interesting experiments in new journalism continue to come from outside the profession — sites such as Global Voices, which mixes approved volunteer “reporters” from around the world with professional editors.

(Emphasis added.)

The report's Digital Journalism section evaluates 38 websites according to the following five criteria: user customization, user participation, use of multimedia, site depth, editorial branding, and revenue streams.   Global Voices came out as one of only four "High Achievers." The report says:

Only a few of the sites studied excelled across more than two of the content areas we studied. They might be called High Achievers, sites that scored in the highest possible tier for at least three of the five content areas.

Only four of the sites qualified, and they had little in common beyond the breadth of what they offered. They were a network TV site (CBS), a newspaper (Washington Post), a British television and radio operation (BBC) and an international citizen media site (Global Voices).

And what did these sites emphasize? All of them scored highly for the originality of their content. All of them also scored highly for the extent to which they allowed users to customize the content, to make the sites their own or make the content mobile. None of them, interestingly, scored particularly well at allowing users to participate. Only two, CBS News and the Washington Post, involved a lot of multimedia components.

(Emphasis added.)

I must point out that the main reason why GV shines, in my view, is that there are so many thousands of bloggers out there around the world with things to say and much to teach us - but who have no other way of being found easily by a broader audience. Global Voices is in many ways a no-brainer, just putting a bit of organized energy and some Web2.0 talent towards amplifying the amazing work that is already being done out there.

Here is the report's full analysis of GV (alphabetically, in between Foxnews.com and Google News):

Global Voices (www.globalvoicesonline.org )

Of all the Web sites we examined, Global Voices was in many ways the least conventional. The end result was that it scored high in several of the areas we measured. It was the only citizen media site that would fit our definition of a high achiever, a site that earned top marks in three of five content areas.

The site is non-profit, with an emphasis on relating information that the staff editors find interesting, not on providing the top news of the hour (or minute or day).

But Global Voices takes a unique four-step approach to identifying what is interesting. First, rather than searching stories from mainstream news outlets, editors cull through a vast number of blogs from around the world. The editors, who themselves are located across the globe, then decide which postings are worth passing on. Next, they add their own comments or background information to put the blog entries in context. Finally, when necessary, entries are translated into English, often by a different “language” editor.

Take, for example, January 10. In the afternoon the lead was “Philippine free press under attack.” The entry featured a lead-in by an editor noting that the Philippine press has been “one of the freest in the world” since Ferdinand Marcos was deposed, but reporting that the current first family “is harassing journalists by filing libel cases” against them. The post then ran blurbs from the Pinoy Press and the site Freedom Watch. The next post used the same approach to look at the Iraqi government’s efforts to register bloggers.

In our inventory, the site scored well, in the top tier, on customization. While its home page could not be modified by users, there were many RSS and podcast options available to users.

Global Voices was also one of only three sites studied to score in the top tier for depth. It did well because of the large number of stories it grouped together in packages and the archive it included.

The site also earned top marks for the degree to which it was offering a unique brand in which its own editorial process and judgment was emphasized. With thestories chosen by paid editors and with content that came from wholly staff, even when citing other sources, it exercised significant editorial quality control. The banner across the top of the page pays tribute to its many authors. The page’s logo and name sit next to the headshots of four bloggers, each one linking a short bio and a compilation of that blogger’s work. Each post then has the link to the original blog as well as a tag-line of the Global Voices editor. And running down a side column is the list of blog authors and the number of posts each has contributed to date.

The site also scored well, in the second tier, for user participation. It did not offer live discussion and interactive polls, two of the more controversial elements of web participation. But it contained a good deal of opportunity for users interact. In addition to the editorial choices, user content — through a user-based blog — is a big part of this site. At the end of each piece users are invited to “Start the conversation” by posting comments, which are moderated by site editors.

The one content area where this remarkably well rounded site did not stand out is for multimedia. This site is about words, 95% of the content available from the home page was narrative.

The site’s score for revenue streams placed it in the bottom tier as well – perhaps not surprising since it is a non-profit.

The strongest impression one has when visiting this site, however, is its international feel. The largest box of text is a list of countries from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe. Next to that is a thinner blue box with a list of topics ranging from Arts & Culture to Governance to History to Youth. Under that is a slim one-line search box that runs the width of the page.

Global Voices is not a site to visit to get the latest headlines or find out what the media are talking about. But it shines a bright light on issues the big media often pass by.

User participation and multimedia are two things the GV team is working to improve. We are putting the finishing touches on a major site redesign which we hope will be unveiled in the coming weeks.

Finally, I cannot end this post without a hats off to Boris Anthony, GV's information architect, whose genius with RSS feeds, blogging software, and Web2.0 in general is the reason we got such high marks for customization and depth. He is assisted by the young and sharp Jeremy Clarke and several others who help them from time to time. All of them could be making a lot more money working on for-profit ventures. But fortunately for everybody, they place high value on the opportunity to innovate and to be part of media history.

Reuters Africa: breaking new ground

Reuters has taken an important and trend-setting step with Reuters Africa.

It is important in several ways. First, it demonstrates Reuters' commitment to covering Africa not only as a general news story but also as a global business story -  to an extent that I have not seen in other global English-language media.

As Reuters Africa editor John Chiahemen told The Guardian: "We want to show that Africa can be covered as a business story, not just a disaster story. While it is true that African information is available from other sources, there is no single media I know that has the breadth of content Reuters has available."

A press release elaborates further:

Reuters Africa features an interactive map to access local Reuters news across the continent, organized by country. Reuters Africa also provides extensive economic, business and financial news and data, including stock and currency market data and company information, from around the continent. Reflecting the importance of commodities to many African economies, the site features exclusive online content on metals and mining, energy and oil, and agricultural commodities.

This is important. My friend and colleague Ethan Zuckerman has written a great deal about how the global English-language media (and entertainment industry) needs to start treating Africa like a place and an opportunity - not just a crisis. In his work on global media attention, he shows how Africa gets the least amount of media attention than anywhere  else (nobody is too surprised at this), but more interestingly he also argues (original pdf article here) that there is a connection between this lack of global media attention and the inability of businesses and policymakers in Western developed nations to take African countries seriously as destinations for investment and business.

Is China's growing business influence in Africa now an added incentive for Western news organizations to take Africa seriously as a business story? At any rate, Reuters deserves kudos for taking the lead.

Second, Reuters Africa extends the news agency's commitment to build synergies between the work of Reuters reporters and the work of bloggers from around Africa, who paint a much more diverse and vibrant picture of the continent than mainstream news reporting tends to do. Global Voices Managing Editor Rachel Rawlins, who used to work as a correspondent in Africa for the BBC writes:

It’s frequently depressing reading accounts of Africa in the mainstream media. Doubly so, in fact. Firstly because what is defined as worthy of reporting is, well, depressing. And secondly because it so seldom engages with the complex and vibrant reality of the continent in all its massive diversity, preferring instead to deal in simplistic stereotypes.

(Disclosure: Reuters is the main funder for Global Voices which I co-founded so there is a reason I'm paying a great deal of attention to its site and its significance - but I'd like to believe that I'd find it significant even if I wasn't connected to GV, and that many people who aren't will.  If you think I'm completely full of it please hit the comments section and let me know - nobody has ever hesitated in the past!)

As  you'll see from the screenshot that Rachel took from the Uganda page of Reuters Africa, each country page not only includes news headlines but also the Global Voices Uganda feed, pointing to blog posts coming from Uganda, selected by people like our amazing Africa editor Ndesanjo Macha.

   

Mark Glaser at MediaShift has a great post titled Reuters Looks to Africa and a Decentralized Future for Media in which he interviews Reuters president Chris Ahearn on why his company has begun to take blogs seriously. My favorite quote: "last I checked, the business we’re in is to inform people."

Yup, and the bloggers we link to on Global Voices are as serious about doing that as journalists are.

Two more key quotes:

...as we start to arm the quote-unquote mainstream with the same tools as journalists, editors and reporters have, there’s an interesting asymmetry here. I talk to a lot of people who say, ‘How come blogging software seems to be a richer news-telling experience than some of the tools we put into journalists’ hands?’ Interesting dynamic, that.

and:

The cost of newsgathering has plummeted. How do we take that and deploy more resources into newsgathering and news presentation? Why is it that right now, at a time when the world is getting more difficult to understand based on everything that’s happening are news organizations pulling out of so many places around the world? Why?

It's worth reading the whole post to get a further glimpse into Chris' vision of where the industry is going, and why news organizations should recognize that we are entering a "golden age" for journalism - not leaving one.

In the same post Mark also interviewed Ethan, who pointed out there's a lot more potential synergy between Reuters journalism and Global Voices' global community of bloggers that so far has not been explored:

There’s a rising tone of anxiety and despair in the Zimbabwean blogosphere, for instance, but it won’t ‘break’ as a story unless the civil service strike goes off tomorrow and sparks a violent government response,” Zuckerman said via email. “In a perfect world, I think we’d find a way to help our friends at Reuters anticipate stories that might break based on our coverage — that hasn’t happened as much as I’d like.

Perhaps that will be next.  But as Rachel points out in her post on Global Voices, the blogosphere  has a long way to go as well:

This is a great step forward, but there’s still a long way to go. There are large and exciting blogging communities in several countries, such as Nigeria and Kenya but there are other areas where coverage is very sparse and still others, such as Ethiopia and Zimbabwe, where online expression is severely curtailed by the government.

We hope that the involvement of bloggers in projects such as this not only gives a platform to those whose voices have long been left unheard but also encourages others to join the conversation and brings pressure to bear on behalf of those who want to speak but cannot.

Amen sister.

Joi visits my class

My Friday morning New Media Workshop class got a real treat this week when my friend Joi Ito came and spoke. As I mentioned in class, Joi was one of the people I met when I was working in Tokyo who influenced me to move away from my "mainstream" journalism career and to start taking the web's new opportunities serioiusly.

A lot of media innovation on the web has been coming from people like him, and not from news companies. Why is that? Watch and listen.

A few of the sites that he showed were: his blog, his company Neoteny, and Creative Commons. He showed several specific blog posts, including this one about a nuclear power whistleblower and this one about Chinese-Japanese dialogue.

Naturally Joi has posted a camphone photo from the class to Flickr. It's also worth noting that today Joi has a post speaking out against rampant racism in Japan, going where many Japanese journalists dare not tread.

Thanks to Du Ting for shooting the video!

Asia leads the world in blog readership

Edelman the P.R. company has come out with a fascinating study of global blog readership titled A Corporate Guide to the Global Blogosphere (published in that annoying new NXT format, unfortunately.) While the report's primary audience is meant to be companies, there is plenty for non-corporate people who study the blogosphere to chew on.

Their key finding is not surprising: blogs are much more influential in Japan, South Korea, and China than they are in the West.   Here's the chart (click to enlarge):

One thing to keep in mind about global blog counts is that they are very very inexact and unreliable. The Edelman survey, done in conjunction with Technorati, finds that the English language blogosphere remains the world's largest (with 39%) of blogs, followed by the Japanese blogosphere (33%) and then the Chinese (10%). [SEE UPDATE BELOW THROWING THESE NUMBERS INTO FURTHER QUESTION] However, my former Berkman Center colleague Ethan Zuckerman and I both think that Technorati is seriously undercounting Chinese blogs. There are a number of technical reasons for this, which Ethan discusses here and here. More discussion about the undercounting from China here and here. A major reason, in a nutshell, is that many Chinese blog-hosting platforms (and many other non-English blog hosting platforms for that matter) don't bother to configure themselves in a way that their blogs can be easily found by Technorati. Japanese blog hosts seem to do a much better job, thanks in part to  a lot of hard work done by the Technorati Japan office.

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UPDATE (8 hours after original post): On January 9th, David Wolf of Silicon Hutong reported on ChinaTechNews: Edelman Gives Up Tracking Chinese Blogs. Basically, Edelman as of the end of last year recognized that Technorati is unable to track Asian language blogs sufficiently well. He points us to a blog post by Edelman's Steve Rubel on December 29th in which he says:

Work on the Asian language sites - Korean and Chinese - has ceased. In China there are access issues and Korea data quality is less than desirable because most blog platforms don't ping. That's the nature of the culture.

Therefore, Edelman and Technorati reached a decision to de-emphasize Asia and focus on Europe. The partnership was never set to renew.

 

It's strange that Edelman does not note any reservations about the language blogosphere numbers in their report.
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Another extremely interesting finding was that more Chinese blog-readers are more likely to take action as a result of reading a blog than Japanese or Koreans. Here's the chart (click to enlarge):

Tony Tao of Edelman's Shanghai office writes that "engaging the Chinese blogosphere is something that should be done with complete transparency. Perhaps more than elsewhere, bloggers in China can be extremely hostile if they feel they are being maniuplated."

I recently did a small-scale study of the extent to which the international media is influenced by blogs in their coverage of China. (I posted some of the initial results here and will share a more detailed academic paper I've written based on those and other results once it's ready.) I found that Chinese blogs and English-language "bridge blogs" about China have become a staple part of the China correspondent's media diet. Given the extent to which Chinese Internet users are influenced by blogs according to this Edelman study, journalists covering China are increasingly remiss if they don't keep an eye on the Chinese blogosphere.

Reading through the country-by-country writeups, one is struck by how unique every country's blogosphere really is. This confirms my own conclusions from working on the Global Voices project. People in different countries and language groups use blogs in different ways for different purposes. You really can't take generalizations about how the U.S. blogosphere works and apply them to any other country or region's blogosphere. The relationships between blogs, mainstream media, government, companies, etc. etc. are very different from country to country and region to region. To understand any blogosphere you have to construct a unique equation involving a country's culture, economic level, internet penetration, political system, and many other factors.

Global Voices Delhi Summit: People of the Year

As the Global Voices team held our second annual summit in Delhi this weekend, TIME magazine dedicated its "person of the year" to YOU: people around the world who are taking media creation into their own hands. 

(Photo by Jace. Click to enlarge.)

The TIME article praises the individual "for seizing the reins of the global media, for founding and framing the new digital democracy, for working for nothing and beating the pros at their own game," etc. The article concludes: "This is an opportunity to build a new kind of international understanding, not politician to politician, great man to great man, but citizen to citizen, person to person."

That, in a nutshell, is exactly what Global Voices is all about.

The problem is that the "new kind of international understanding" that TIME describes, a world of true "citizen to citizen" communication, remains a still-distant dream.  The reality is that Web2.0 - and the potential for empowerment that it represents - remains largely inaccessible to large numbers of people on the planet, and is not being accessed by many more, for many reasons.

(Photo by Georgia. Click to enlarge.)

How do we help more people become creators of their own media? What kind of outreach can Web 2.0-savvy citizens provide to the still-uninitiated? How do we bridge massive and endless barriers of language and culture? Are the technical tools accessible enough to the next billion Internet users, or are we in need of new solutions better suited to the developing world? And how about people who are being prevented from speaking - or being heard - by governments, corporations, and other powerful entities?  These were exactly the questions we tackled during our public meeting on Saturday.

My key takeaways from the day's discussion:

- Global Voices right now is in English (translating what content it can from blogs in Arabic, Persian, Chinese, Spanish, Portugese, French, and Russian) but it needs to be in many other languages. Right now there is a volunteer-driven effort to translate GV into Chinese. Many people in our community feel strongly that much more translation needs to happen, and it appears that at least for some of the languages there is a great deal of enthusiasm. The challenge now is for people to take the lead in building new translation teams to make this happen.

- Outreach can't be one-size-fits-all and must fit local needs. we had much to learn from some of the Indian attendees who described a number of very successful citizen media outreach projects in India. One in particular was Cybermohalla, in which slum dwellers reported on the demolition of their own community in order to make way for a public works project. There was some discussion about who ought to be doing outreach to whom - and much agreement that we are not talking about putting Western bloggers on planes to teach people in the Third World how to blog. Rather, in most cases it's about bloggers and media activists in the developing world reaching out to their less privileged countrymen.  People agreed that outreach techniques and tactics will vary widely from country to country and community to community - and the more local the teachers, the more likely they will understand the needs of the people being taught. There was also a great deal of discussion about children as the focus of technology and citizen media outreach - the idea being that it is young people who will take most naturally to the idea of using technology for self-expression. (There was of course much interest in the One Laptop prototype that SJ Klein brought to the meeting.)

- Teaching people how to blog or create media isn't enough, as Salam Adil explained in the fourth technology session. People need to be able to speak and be heard without fear of reprisal if their thoughts aren't in line with their government's. They need tools to get around censorship - both in terms of expressing themselves and in accessing the works of others. There is also the issue that many people in many countries aren't aware of what their governments are actually doing to limit speech or access to information on the Internet, and thus even in many democracies, there isn't enough public pressure on governments to be as open as possible. Global Voices is about to launch an advocacy arm, thanks to some funding from the Dutch development organization, Hivos, which will enable members of our community to work directly on these issues.

Be sure to read Nathan Hamm's summary of our introductory Session 1, Ethan Zuckerman's account of Session 3 on translation, and Sameer Padania's summary of Session 4 on tools and technology. A summary of Session 2, focusing on outreach, should be coming soon. There is also a conference blog put together by Ange, one of our community members participating remotely from Dubai.

Sunday's meeting was a closed-door session for Global Voices editors and authors only. We rolled up our sleeves and discussed how Global Voices authors and editors can do an even better job at amplifying citizen voices from around the world. We are working on a major re-design of the site to make it more user-friendly (and less overwhelming); we are also developing a new public aggregator of all the blogs that our editors and authors watch in order to compile their daily links and features. As we realized last year, GV is not just a media site but a conversation community. Many of our authors and editors discussed strategies for community building: specifically, how to support communities in their own countries, regions, and language groupings comprised of people who want to communicate with a broader global community of conversation.

People are taking initiative to carry out ideas that we could never have imagined just a year ago.  We've always known that the individuals who work on GV are talented, passionate, creative, and articulate, but spending two days with this diverse collection of characters was humbling.  As co-founders, Ethan and I were excited to see that authors and editors have taken real ownership for the project, enabling the two of us to step aside when it comes to leading Global Voices and representing it to the public. We are very happily receding into backstage supporting roles: fundraising and doing the legal groundwork to transform Global Voices from a project under Harvard's Berkman Center to an independent non-profit organization.

This weekend's meeting also drove home the importance of face-to-face meetings even for a virtual organization like Global Voices. The Web has helped us find one another and has enabled us to work together in ways that would otherwise be completely impossible. But for the people who are devoting many hours every week to curating the global conversation on Global Voices, there is nothing like sitting down over curry and beers for building trust, camaraderie, commitment, and a feeling of shared ownership of the project.

People who are not very familiar with what we do often make snyde remarks about how strange it is that bloggers find it necessary to meet in physical space - as if the need for face-to-face meeting somehow proves the limitations or inadequacies of what we do. These remarks completely miss the point, of course. Global Voices may be a virtual organization with no physical headquarters (and no plans to create one), but what we do is ultimately about building understanding - and ideally dialogue - between real flesh-and-blood human beings and physical human communities.

We are not just generating chatter amongst avatars and usernames and online personas. We are not creating an alternative universe or online cyber-utopia into which our members escape from the realities of our daily lives and the problems within and between our countries. We are using the Internet's virtual space - and the creation of online citizens' media - as a means to a very physical end. The Web connects the physical human beings at the ends of it who are using it as a channel to express themselves and reach out to one another.  When we as individuals can all create our own media, not only do we find each other and organize more easily around common causes. By taking control of our own narratives, our own stories, we gain greater control over how others perceive and define us. This in turn will make it more difficult (we believe) for outsiders to impose unwelcome, unsuitable, unjust or violent policies upon us - all of which are made much easier when mass media is used to stereotype, pigeonhole, and dehumanize us. 

We use the Web not to escape our humanity, but to assert it.

Blogging between China and the rest of the world

(photo courtesy Aether Woo) Portnoy Cheng speaks - we listen...

This is a picture from our panel titled "From China to the World, From the World to China."  I introduced the panel by talking about the serious imbalance of global information flows. Multinational media organizations are largely based in the West and for this reason, you have a heavy flow of information going from the West to the rest of the world, countered by a relative trickle going back from the rest of the world to the West. Until recently, if you felt that the global media was misrepresenting your country and your people (or ignoring your country completely), there wasn‘t much to be done unless you had the power to influence a lot of Western journalists and get them to interview you. Now people all around the world are taking matters into their own hands and blogging their own perspectives, in some cases with the express purpose of informing the outside world about their country in ways that the mainstream media fails to do. Global Voices is trying to aggregate many of these blogs. I invited our panelists to talk about the ways in which different projects are trying to improve communication between the Chinese blogosphere and the rest of the world.

Unfortunately I couldnt take detailed notes because I was on stage doing the panel. But here's the basic gist:

Isaac Mao talked about how the international media covers China in a limited way that many Chinese people feel is biased and unfair. Blogs, he believes, are an important way for people to take matters into their own hands and represent themselves. He eloquently explained why it's important for Chinese bloggers to think more globally, and consider their power as media creators to make a difference in the way that the rest of the world understands them.

Frank Dai talked about how the biggest obstacle to communication isnt so much language, it's the difference in perspective. He started blogging in English last year and communicating with people around the world, and he found that they tended to be interested in some of the things he had to say, but not others, which left them still with a skewed picture.

Portnoy, founder of the Global Voices Chinese translation project, talked about why he started translating GV's roundups that summarize and link to blog posts around the world. He said that while Taiwan has a high amount of free speech, speech in Taiwan actually has very low credibility. Taiwan's media reports very little about the outside world. So he decided last year to start translating posts from GV, then it expanded into a group translation project involving bloggers in Taiwan, mainland China and Hong Kong. He welcomes more people to help.

Chow Sze Cheng then introduced the new project, Interlocals.net, a new multilingual blogging platform run out of Hong Kong, with contributors all around the region. He says a major challenge is trying to find ways to make the lives and experiences of individuals in one country relevant to people in other countries - and worth their attention. They are working on different ways to connect conversations about common experiences, like urban renewal and the the social conflicts such policies generate in lots of different countries, to give one example.   

Global Voices' John Kennedy then spoke about how he finds Chinese blogs to translate. It's not an easy job given how many blogs there are in China today. So aside from his Bloglines aggregator, He relies heavily on people sending him interesting links. He also leans heavily on the new，rebel-spirited Chinese blog aggregator www.bullog.cn... which makes a deliberate point of highlighting voices that don't appear on the commercial blog sites like Sina.com, which mainly invite celebrities to blog and then feature those blogs, rather than amplifying interesting new voices from the grassroots.

There wasn't too much time for discussion, but a couple of people raised interesting questions about the ability of any of these projects to be much more objective or balanced about China than the international media currently is. Might they just replace old biases with new kinds of bias? I responded that there is no way that any of these projects will make everybody happy. What has changed is that there is no scacity in terms of media creation. We shouldn't be the only people trying to facilitate communication between the Chinese blogosphere and the rest of the world. The more people are out there trying to create communication bridges between China and the rest of the world, the harder it will be for anybody's bias or perspective to dominate. What has been done so far is really only just a very small start, and much much more needs to be done.

Newspapers get bad grades for innovation

This chart comes from the N2 Newspaper Next report recently issued by the American Press Institute (click to enlarge).

I'm sitting at a conference on the future of news, sponsored by the Shorenstein Center at Harvard, where Scott Anthony, who leads the Newspaper Next project is giving a presentation about the report. (Click here for a live webcast of the conference. I'll be on a panel with this afternoon.)

I agree with many of the things Scott has to say: newspapers are not devoting nearly enough resources to innovation, many are not thinking sufficiently outside the box in order to reinvent themselves in the internet age. The report - and Scott's presentation - contains a great deal of useful analysis about the lack of innovation in the newspaper industry today, with many ideas for how newspapers can innovate, reach new "audiences," and fill new and un-filled needs of consumers.

But. However. I'm sitting next to Jeff Jarvis listening to all this, and we are shaking our heads.  While acknowledging the report is a good start, Jeff recently wrote: "the task force that made this report and many of the projects that come out of it are still insular, with very little effort to get new voices, fresh blood."

The thing is,  this report still views news - and journalism - as a linear process. The news organization speaks, and the "consumer" and "audiences" receive happily - and even more happily when the newspaper has innovated and figured out how to meet their information needs better. What they miss completely is that media has now gone non-linear. On the Live Web, news has the potential to be a  genuine conversation with citizens and communities. How do you welcome the members of your community into the conversation - to participate in the civic discourse? That should be the central question.

In the Q&A Jeff put it more sharply, pointing out that the N2 report still applies the "old model of consumer.. sitting with our heads back consuming content and crapping cash." [Clarification: Jeff points out he was quoting Doc Searls there.]

News organizations have got to start treating people - fellow citizens - as equals in a conversation about public affairs. The web makes that possible. It's in the public interest and it's how news organizations can win over (or regain) the public's respect.

With trust and respect, business models will follow. Without trust and respect, everything else is ultimately a waste of time - at least if your goal is journalism, not just infotainment and marketing.

(NOTE that the N2 report is available in PDF only, and they require that you fill out a form with your personal info in order to get the PDF. What's more, the page containing the direct link to the PDF says: ("PLEASE DO NOT PUBLISH OR DISTRIBUTE THIS LINK." How un-blogger friendly is that? It demonstrates that they are treating you as a consumer who should gratefully receive their wisdom rather than as an equal partner in a conversation. They're more interested in getting your information for marketing purposes than in maximizing the spread of their ideas - or in engaging in a conversation with  you about their ideas.)

Reuters supports NewAssignment.net

Over the summer NYU's future-of-journalism guru Jay Rosen announced a new participatory news venture. NewAssignment.Net would organize a new form of what he calls "pro-am" journalism: bringing together journalists, bloggers and other members of the "amateur" public who aren't professional journalists to work on investigative reporting projects.

Today, Jay announced on his blog PressThink and on the Guardian's Comment is Free that Reuters will be supporting NewAssigment.Net, to the tune of $100,000, so that Jay can hire a full-time editor to make the whole thing work. An excerpt of Jay's post:

NewAssignment.Net is a not a plan for a company; in fact, it’s closer to a charity, an editorial engine anchored in civil society itself, rather than the media industry or journalism profession. As today’s announcement shows, New Assignment can be on friendly terms with Big Media, which it is is not trying to destroy or supplant.

One of outstanding facts of the Net era is that the costs for like-minded people to find each other and work together are falling rapidly. Someone has to figure out what the consequences of that fact are for original reportage. This is what NewAssignment plans to experiment with if it can find a few more supporters like Reuters and a lot more participants...

Jay writes extensively on NewAssignment.Net's operating philosophy and how it is likely to work. You should read his whole post. But here is another excerpt:

NewAssignment.Net will use the Web as both a “collaboration medium,” the way Berners-Lee intended, and a publishing tool, which he also intended. The site will begin as a niche producer that tries to do one kind of work only: open source reporting projects in the pro-am style. It will follow a middle path between good old fashioned we-bring-you-the-world journalism and the new forms that have exploded on the World Wide Web: blogging, citizen journalism, and what the Neterati call social media. (Social because they connect people horizontally to one another, not vertically to The Media.)

Reuters' Chris Ahearn, who also made the decision last year to fund Global Voices Online, the project I co-founded and which has just won the Knight-Batten Innovations In Journalism Grand Prize, wrote about his support for both of our projects in today's Huffington Post. The news industry is in a crisis, he admits up front. "Without corrective action, we are in danger of the public losing faith in the fourth estate," he says. "As professionals, we need to support good journalistic ideas, encourage broader public participation in the reporting process, and explore different newsgathering business models."

I imagine a lot of Reuters journalists and bureau chiefs wish the money had gone to their operations instead, given that Reuters operations are all run on fairly tight budgets. But Chris makes a rather good case for the need to support innovation outside traditional newsroom and news bureau structures:

While encouraging good journalistic ideas is a worthy goal in itself, Reuters believes that supporting new and varied networks of creators with different perspectives is good for both journalism and business.

Ultimately, journalism is about the story and the pursuit of truth; it is not about the news industry, a j-school or a traditional newsroom structure. By building bridges and finding new ways to augment and accelerate the creation of quality journalism, we believe that ultimately the public will benefit and perhaps change their minds about the noble profession of journalism.

Jay asked me in an email what I thought about Reuters' motivations. I wrote back:

Reuters top management clearly understands that news organizations need to re-think themselves. On one hand, the principles of good journalism are timeless: good journalism should provide the information - accurate, timely, and with the necessary context and background - that we as individuals require in order to conduct our lives in our own best interest. But while the point of journalism remains the same, the accepted methods of achieving these aims are now broken or badly discredited.

The challenge is: How do you do good journalism while at the same time participating in a give-and-take, a conversation about events, which in turn helps to inform your journalistic work? Reuters realizes the answer is not as simple as getting some of their journalists to blog. In fact that may not be the answer at all. What’s more important is to help journalists figure out how to interact with the blogosphere— that big global, interactive, viral conversation about the things that matter to people. How do you interact with these conversations in a way that makes your journalism more relevant, more useful - and more true to the point of journalism in the first place?

Unfortunately, news organizations today are so stripped-down and budgets are so tight, journalists barely have time to cover their beats properly, let alone learn new things about the internet, figure out ways to innovate, or learn about RSS readers and trackback pings. There is very little R & D happening in news organizations today - and usually it’s being done by the tech people, not the reporters, photographers, writers, and editors. Ironically, information media innovation is not being driven by professional journalists who are actually paid full-time salaries to create media. The innovation is coming from citizen media creators: the people who blog, who podcast, who use YouTube, who edit Wikipedia, and who write open source code in their spare time.

...and in other related news, Mark Glaser at MediaShift has a piece about the new human rights video partnership between Global Voices and Witness.

Global Voices: We won!!!

Here I am with Global Voices Online Caribbean & Podcast Editor Georgia Popplewell and Francophonia Editor Alice Backer, right after receiving the Knight Batten Excellence in Journalism Grand Prize on behalf of the entire Global Voices community.

The other finalists were all extremely impressive, showing how various media organizations (big, small, grassroots and MSM) are using the Internet to accomplish journalism's core mission: serving the public discourse by helping people not only find the information they need - but also to have the conversations they want to have on issues that matter to their lives.

This Grand Prize for Global Voices vindicates the hard work of bloggers around the world who are so passionately dedicated to amplifying citizen voices from outside North America and Western Europe - and doing their part to redress global media imbalances.

For more about the award see the J-Lab website, and the post in which we publicized the text of our application form for the award.

Here is the text of the press release issued today by the Berkman Center, from which Global Voices was spawned:

Global Voices Online Awarded the Grand Prize for Innovations in Journalism from the Knight-Batten Foundation

Cambridge, MA -- The Knight-Batten Foundation awarded Global Voices Online, a citizen media project run by the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, the Grand Prize for Innovations in Journalism.

The Knight-Batten Awards spotlight the creative use of new information, ideas and technologies to involve citizens in public issues. They are administered by J-Lab: The Institute for Interactive Journalism at the University of Maryland.

"It's an extraordinary site that allows for both editorial gatekeeping and wide access to news and information from underreported parts of the world,” said the Knight-Batten panel of judges. The judges also credited the project and its corps of bloggers with helping to elevate standards in the blogosphere.

Global Voices Online is a network of global news and conversation from more than 160 countries - with a focus on countries and communities outside the U.S. and Western Europe. Co-founded by two research fellows at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, technologist Ethan Zuckerman and journalist Rebecca MacKinnon, the site is run globally by a team of 16 international, multilingual blogger-editors, and more than 80 volunteer contributors.

"People in many parts of the world are frustrated that the international media ignores or misunderstands them. They are now taking matters into their own hands by blogging, podcasting, or uploading pictures and video to the web," said co-founder Rebecca MacKinnon. "This award vindicates the hard work of many people. It gives us hope that innovative new media structures may promote a more democratic and inclusive global discourse."

Launched in the summer of 2005 with seed funding from the MacArthur Foundation, Global Voices Online now receives core funding from Reuters, making it possible to support a global team of blogger-editors who select, explain, and translate citizen news and views from outside North America and Western Europe.

"As a strategic partner, it gives us great pride to see Global Voices Online recognized for innovation in journalism by such a prestigious organization;" said Dean Wright, Senior Vice President and Managing Editor for Reuters Consumer Media Services.  "This is quite an accomplishment for everyone involved and real evidence of the important role bloggers are playing in the global conversation."

Global Voices Online recently launched a content partnership with WITNESS, a human rights video network, to amplify human rights-related video being uploaded onto the Internet by concerned citizens around the world.

The site's parent organization, the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School is a research program founded to explore cyberspace, share in its study, and help pioneer its development.

"We at the Berkman Center could not be more proud of what the Global Voices community has accomplished in an extraordinarily short period of time," said John Palfrey, Clinical Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and the Berkman Center's Executive Director.  "As the Knight-Batten Award has recognized, Global Voices is helping to change the way people access, publish, and analyze information about enormous parts of the world that mainstream media has failed to include meaningfully in its coverage."

Joining Second Life

Meet SteelJade Yun, my avatar in Second Life. I have finally signed up, nearly a year after I was introduced to this online, user-created, interactive world. I have been hesitant to start playing around in virtual worlds out of concern that it would prevent me from getting any work done ever again... But Professor Charlie Nesson at Harvard Law School and founder of the Berkman Center (where I'm still a Research Fellow until the end of this year) has finally given me an excuse to join. He'll be teaching a course both in real life as well as in Second Life, called Law in the Court of Public Opinion. I'm hoping to sit in for as much as I can, at least virtually. (On the right is a picture of SteelJade in front of the poster announcing the class.) 

Here's how the class is described on the course blog:

If we do say so ourselves, the course will be unlike any that has ever been taught. It is a course in persuasive, empathic argument in the Internet space. Throughout the course we will be studying many different media technologies to understand how their inherent characteristics and modes of distribution affect the arguments that are made using them. Students will be immersed in this study through project-based assignments in which they will be using these technologies to make their own arguments.

Should be fascinating - not only to learn about persuasion and the use of online media, but also as an exploration in how to use Second Life as an educational tool.

Strangely enough, within 30 minutes of my showing up on Berkman Island, I ran into Andrew Lih (avatar: Fuzheado Commons), whose shoes I will be unsuccessfully attempting to fill teaching New Media at Hong Kong University.

I first learned about Second Life last year when I helped moderate a panel about virtual world journalism at a fascinating conference called "State of Play". I knew almost nothing about virtual worlds or the journalists who cover them, so I was brought in to ask questions from the perspective of a journalist who is generally more concerned that the real world isn't covered well enough as it is - and concerned that the last thing we need is more distractions from covering the real world of real human beings in a thorough and responsible manner. Still, I met some fascinating people like Wagner James Au who spoke about his experiences as an "embedded journalist" in Second Life. Interestingly, U.S. politicians are starting to make appearances inside SL. Pretty wild.

One disappointment about Second Life - in my view, anyway - is that while you can use their handy text chat function to talk to other people you meet in the game, the chat function does not support Chinese characters (some characters appear and some don't), so you can't have conversations in Chinese. It would be nice to use SL as a place to meet up with some of my Chinese friends who can't travel very easily, but I guess that won't happen. I wonder if there are any plans to make Second Life compatible with Asian character sets.

Second Life is a fun and fascinating place where one is only limited by one's own creativity (and time). It has great potential as a virtual meeting space, bringing people together in new kinds of communities. But as my friend and colleague Ethan Zuckerman points out, hanging out in Second Life is unlikely to be helpful in solving most of the world's most pressing problems. He has spoken very critically of those who believe they can use Second Life to raise awareness about the plight of people living in conflict-torn and impoverished parts of the world. Read his whole post, it's very important, but here is a small excerpt:

In conflicts not consistently on the editorial page of the New York Times, there’s often no journalists on the ground capable of transmitting data to an international audience. And citizen’s media requires citizens who have access to the Internet…

When I consider the issues I’m most interested in, collecting information - especially from people who are actually affected by these issues - is a much higher priority than presenting this data in a 3D format. Given that roughly 100,000 people log into Second Life in a given month - compared to roughly one billion using the Internet as a whole - I suspect people trying to call attention to global issues are better off making a website than a 3D space.

Second Life is also not immune to the same social predjudices and inequities that exist in the real world. My friend Andy Carvin found this out when he created an African avatar - modeled specifically after a Somali child soldier. In an excellent article about Second Life, the Boston Phoenix quoted Andy about his experiences:

Another real-world person experimenting with an entirely different SL persona is Boston-based blogger Andy Carvin. Last fall he joined SL as Andy Chowderhead, but he got “bored with it” and decided to create Abdi Kembla, an African refugee he modeled after photos he found online of former Somalian child soldiers.

“Previously, when I used my old Andy Chowderhead avatar, I found people were more likely to come over, say hello, and start a conversation. But with Abdi, people tended to just act as if I just weren’t even there,” says Carvin, who estimates that he spent between 20 and 30 hours in February and March exploring as Abdi. “The more I traveled through SL, the more I realized I seemed to be the only African-looking character around anywhere.” He adds, “I encountered gnomes, floating beams of light, characters that were shaped like boxes, elves, everything you can imagine — but no African-looking characters.”

Alas, virtual societies are no better and no less biased than the sum of the people who create and populate them. That doesn't mean I won't spend some time in Second Life exploring ways that I can use it as a tool for communication and teaching. But it's important to remember: ultimately technology will not change human nature, and it will not enable us to escape all aspects of our human-ness, both the good and the evil - no matter how much time we spend roaming cyberspace as sci-fi action figures.