We Media: Tell Our Speakers What You’d Want Them to Think and Talk About
We Media: Behold the Power of Us, will take place October 5, 2005 at the headquarters of the Associated Press in New York City.
More info on the event is here | Click here to register.
Now, whether you can attend or not, we’d like to hear from you! What questions or issues would you like discussed by a particular participant? By all of the participants? Please post your comments below, and we’ll make sure they see it!
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The Media Center’s “We Media”
Earlier today, The Media Center announced that it would be holding an event later on this year at the headquarters of the Associated Press in NYC - an event called “We Media: Behold the Power of Us.” It’s going to…
greetings, kia orana, i would like to raise two subjects
1. we-media like blogging forms an easy-to-use email-based update platform for a new wave of globalisation - many to many business. some call it we-commerce. see
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=we-commerce
2. access to information technology must become a fundamental human right for all citizens of planet earth. corporate media monopoly control of the minds of tomorrow ends now.
good good luck with the meeting!
jason
It would be nice to address a couple different topics about CJ, which follows the same path that Jason was going down.
The ease-of-use and accessability are very important in anything, but in order to “report local news”, people also need to understand that a journalism degree is not important. If we want average people to report on their hometown news, it needs to be understood that their news does “not” need to sound like their local newspaper’s articles.
The other thing that I’ve noticed is that for the “average” user, local CJ web sites are hard to locate. At this time, there are so many different communities, and even though I agree that the decentralization is a good thing, it would help everybody to come up with some sort of CJ directory to make things easier for the average user.
Those of us that are “involved” in this know where to go, and what to look for. Until my mother, boss, neighbor, and city council members know where to find what’s being said, though, the whole purpose of doing it goes unheard by the people that can use it and make changes.
- I wish I could make it to New York on the 5th.
From the standpoint of one who works for an established news organization and is trying to employ the We Media concepts so that readers have more of a vested interest and stake in what we do, I’d say I need to come away from the seminar with a toolkit for how to create products and services that fully engage readers/citizen journalists. As to the second posting above, we need to understand how to market this stuff to the folks out there in our communities.
I also am deeply interested in how standards get set for what passes for permissible content and what does not — and who makes those decisions and how they get enforced. What are the consequences there? My news organization needs to build on the experiences of others in this regard because we feel allowing the things that come with citizen journalism brings with it some pressing credibility questions.
Of course, a big question on everyone’s minds will be how this concept can make money. At my news organization I’m pitching some small startup costs to initiate a citizen journalism/social networking platform, but even those expenses are not embraced until I can prove this is the right thing to do from a business standpoint. I’d love to hear the approaches different news organizations have taken in justifying the costs and risks of offering readers the tools and latitude that come with participatory journalism.
If there were to be a toolkit for doing participatory/citizen journalism right, it would be great to include a template for a business plan. Since there are so many unknowns in this space, projecting profits and losses is nearly impossible. I feel secure in stating the strategy and purpose of something like this, but I need a way to put some figures to it.
Lastly I would say that for this conference to be worth the $695 investment my organization has made I’d like to have a DVD video recording of all the sessions, done professionally with high-quality sound both on panelists and audience members. I’ll be there, but others in my organization won’t — and I’m sure I’d like to show them key pieces of the discussion.
For the Honorable Al Gore:
Firstly, you are a great man and I am honored in hoping these small questions will actually reach you.
Do you see more stations like CURRENT cropping up in the years ahead with more young people becoming involved in our media process?
Do you also see a shifting in the way news is being reported in the wake of Hurricane Katrina?
Also,
Will CURRENT be evolving eventually into other demographics? As an middle aged woman who is tired of the same old type of biased news reporting from cable stations, do you foresee CURRENT becoming more of a station that will also report the news we don’t see on cable channels? We need that now.
Thank you so much for your time,
Jan Moore