Citizen Journalism

Last week, Global Voices held a summit in Budapest, Hungary for its members and the wider community of bloggers, activists, technologists, journalists and others from around the world. Called the Global Voices Citizen Media Summit 2008, the two day event focused on the topic of "Citizen Media & Citizenhood."

As David Sasaki notes, the summit was held to address questions such as:   read more »

I'll be at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for the next two days at a conference for the winners of the Knight News Challenge. CMLP was a lucky recipient of a Knight News Challenge award in 2007. The conference, which Knight plans to make an annual event, is being hosted by MIT's Center for Future Civic Media (which, incidentally, also won a News Challenge award last year).

It has been a fascinating day and a half so far, with presentations by both MIT researchers and Knight award winners, such as Adrian Holovaty, who showed off EveryBlock, an impressive aggregator and filter of local news by location, and Lisa Williams, founder of Placeblogger.

I won't even pretend to provide comprehensive coverage of this conference, especially when some of the best conference bloggers on the planet are here. For "live" coverage, you can't do better than Ethan Zuckerman and Amy Gahran. Ethan has several insightful posts up already (see here and here) and Amy is putting her fingers to the test by "live tweeting" at amylive.   read more »

Over the next two days, I'll be participating in and speaking at the Journalism that Matters: Minnesota conference organized by the Media Giraffe Project, Minnesota Journalism Center, and Minnesota News Council. It's the third in a series of Journalism that Matters gatherings. The full name for the conference, which gives you some idea of its focus, is New Pamphleteers/New Reporters: Convening Entrepreneurs Who Combine Journalism, Democracy, Place and Blogs. You can view the agenda here.

This will be my first time at a Journalism that Matters conference, and I am very excited to have been invited. What makes these conferences so interesting is that they aren't conferences in the traditional sense, but instead fall into that oxymoronic category of "unconference" conferences, where the participants largely decide the topics and run the discussions. For example, I am slated to join Robert Cox from the Media Bloggers Association for a "coffee klatch" on citizen media and the law.

If you are in the Minneapolis area, please come by. I'll try and post an update or two and may even begin using Twitter (gasp!).

Earlier this week, YouTube announced that it had designated a news manager for the site and created a Citizen News channel. Olivia Ma, YouTube's new News Manager, announced the initiative on YouTube's blog:

Thanks to better, cheaper, and easier access to video equipment, there's an amazing amount of news being reported on YouTube every single day by citizens in all corners of the globe. You're conducting interviews with local community leaders, doing weekly reports on the latest campus news for your school television station, and investigating untold stories you think the world should know about. This stuff is fantastic, but we want to see more from you all and to bring more citizen journalists into the fold.

Of course, there is already a lot of content on YouTube that could be described as citizen news. The new channel, however, will bring much of this content into one place and should serve as a useful platform for highlighting the important contributions that citizen media are making to our understanding of the world.   read more »

The Society for Professional Journalists is hosting a series of one-day "Citizen Journalism Academy" workshops in Chicago (May 17), Greensboro, North Carolina (June 7), and Los Angeles (June 28). The idea is to provide training and information for citizen media creators on topics ranging from media ethics, to standard journalistic practices, to law. From SPJ:

The Society of Professional Journalists believes the world benefits from more news coverage, not less. Through its Citizen Journalism Academy, which takes place May 17 in Chicago, SPJ seeks to help everyone wanting to practice journalism to do so accurately, ethically and fairly. The Society aims to help participants understand how responsible practices could increase their reach and help them have strong journalistic reputations within their communities and around the world.

Two sessions look especially useful from our point of view: one on the basics of media law and another on access to public meetings and records. These day-long workshops cost $25. (I applaud the SPJ for not pricing its intended audience out of the market.) For more details and registration information, see the event page on the SPJ website.

I'll be quiet for a few days because I'm off to Los Angeles for a forum organized by Media Re:public, a Berkman Center project that examines the current and potential impact of participatory news media. The forum, which kicks off Thursday night and goes all day on Friday, will feature talks, panel discussions, and small group breakout sessions on a wide variety of topics and issues relating to participatory media, including "Parsing the Political Blogosphere," "Supporting the Emerging Media Ecology," "Finding Viable Models," and (the catchiest) "It's 2013: Do You Know Where Your News Is?" It should be great -- see the agenda for a full list of topics, speakers, and panelists. In conjunction with the forum, the CMLP will be holding its first in-person Board of Advisors meeting on Thursday afternoon. All in all, a busy but fascinating end to the week.

Registration for the Media Re:public forum is still open, so drop by if you're interested in media (new or traditional, commercial or public) and happen to be in L.A. All are welcome -- journalists, academics, business-types, activists, anybody.

(Note: I am a fellow at the Berkman Center, and the CMLP is housed there, along with Media Re:public.)

In a project headed by Associate Professor Geanne Rosenberg, CUNY's Graduate School of Journalism has launched a new website -- Top 10 Rules for Limiting Legal Risk. The project, which is carried out in collaboration with the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and the Knight Citizen News Network, aims to provide training to citizen journalists on the legal rights and responsibilities that go along with newsgathering and online publication. From the press release:

"We are pleased to provide this resource to citizen journalists," said Stephen Shepard, dean of the journalism school. "The law in this area is rapidly developing, and citizen journalists don’t have the resources of a legal department to draw upon. Many of the rules are based on the same principles of fairness and caution that we teach to professional journalists at the school," Shepard added.

"This vital module with advice that could help keep bloggers out of jail is a great new addition to the Knight Citizen News Network, which already is the best one-stop-shop site for citizen journalism training," said Gary Kebbel, journalism program officer at Knight Foundation.

Basically, it's right up our alley AND its got some nifty videos in the teaching modules featuring David Ardia, the CMLP's co-founder and director, and yours truly. Self-aggrandizement aside, the website looks great and its ten rules are organized around practical strategies rather than legal doctrine, which makes it user-friendly.

Some of  these rules include:   read more »

The Associated Press is reporting that New Hampshire will no longer issue identification cards to journalists. According to a report in Seacoastonline:

The man who handled the chore — Jim Van Dongen of the state Department of Safety — says the decision is based on the proliferation of online and specialty news outlets and technology that allows just about anyone to call himself a journalist. Van Dongen says that put him and his bosses in the uncomfortable position of issuing cards to all comers or having to decide who is a legitimate journalist.

This change is largely symbolic, however, as event organizers usually issue their own credentials to journalists and don't rely on the state to determine who should get a press pass.

UPDATE: Scott Gant has written an excellent article on the Huffington Post about the difficulty of deciding who should get press credentials: A Broad View of Journalism. 

This is terrible news. CNN and TechCrunch reported Friday that city officials in central China beat a man to death for attempting to record a protest on his mobile phone. Apparently, there was some sort of confrontation between villagers in the central Chinese province of Hubei and local municipal "inspectors" over the dumping of waste near the villagers' homes. When Wei Wenhua, a 41-year-old construction company executive, tried to film the altercation with his camera phone, a group of more than 50 of the inspectors attacked him, beating him for five minutes, according to China's Xinhua news agency. Government investigators later recovered Wei's mobile phone, but the video had been deleted.

It is not entirely clear whether Wei's filming was a spontaneous act of citizen journalism by a complete amateur, or whether he was a blogger trying to cover the story. The headlines on CNN and TechCrunch both refer to Wei as a blogger, but neither article gives any details on his blogging activity, and the CNN articles says that he "happened on [the] confrontation."

Reporters Without Borders issued a statement about the incident:   read more »

This week, David Ardia talks about threats to the Internet in Pakistan and Colin Rhinesmith speaks with Sam Bayard about a recent entry in our new legal threats database.

Download the MP3 (time: 7:30)

Music used in this podcast was sampled and remixed from a track titled "Jazz House" by the Wicked Allstars, available on Magnatune.

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