(Here’s the update sent to our friends today via email. If you aren’t on the list you can use the form on the right rail of our new web site to sign up.)

We’ve been on the move in Europe and the U.S. in recent weeks - and also hunkered down at We Media HQ working on a group of new projects. Now we want to share with you what we’ve been up to. The big news we hope you’ll share and act on: We’re announcing and seeking nominations now for the new We Media Game Changers Awards. We also want to give you a preview of plans taking shape for We Media Miami 09. We’d like to see you there and urge you to register now to confirm your seat. There’s more, so read on.

Here are the details …

We Media Game Changers Awards - Submit Your Nominations Now: We’re launching these awards to recognize people, projects and organizations leading change and inspiring a better world through media. The We Media Game Changers Awards will identify, amplify and draw lessons from the most significant achievements with media in the connected society. Winners are beacons of inspiration and will be featured participants and speakers at We Media Miami 09.We’ve recruited a stellar group of judges who are game changers themselves, including Fast Co. founder Alan Webber, Hip Hop Caucus founder Rev. Lennox Yearwood, MobileActive founder Katrin Verclas, Associated Press chief strategy officer Jim Kennedy and Real Girls Media founder Suja Araj. The first step is gathering nominees. Read up on the awards and criteria here, then submit as many nominations as you can think of with our online nomination form. This fall we’ll ask you to vote for the Community Award. For now, help us gather nominations. Yes, you can nominate yourself or your company. Tell your friends, clients, customers, readers and employees about the open nomination process. Also, let us know if you’d like to sponsor the awards.

• Nomination Form
• About the We Media Game Changers Awards
• Join the We Media Facebook Group

We Media Miami 09 - Feb. 24-26, 2009: Registration for We Media Miami 09 is OPEN. It’s our 5th annual global forum, so we’ll have reason to celebrate and we’re planning to make it special. It’s still going to be intimate - we cap registration at 300. We’ll be at
the lovely University of Miami for a full two days (ending with mojitos under palm trees at sundown on Feb. 26), and we’ve already confirmed more than a dozen people we admire will be there, including Witness Hub director Sameer Padania, Kenyan Pundit Ory Okollah, DailyMe CEO Eduardo Hauser and WorldChanging founder Alex Steffen; we’re ELIMINATING panels and instituting a new 2max rule (no more than two people at a time in conversations on the main stage), and we’re adding
some optional small dinners and tours in South Beach and Little Havana. Contact us if you’re interested in sponsorships or exhibit space - and check out the new self-service signup for sponsors at the Supporters and Catalysts levels.

• Conference details here.
• Online registration and sponsor signup here.

Pitch It: We’re expanding our Pitch It competition to seed and inspire the next generation of game changers. Stay tuned. We’ll be making the formal announcement and seeking applicants in September. Finalists will do live pitches of their big ideas on the main stage at We Media Miami - and we’ll be offering a $50,000 investment to the winning pitch. Let us know if you’d like to become a sponsor - or plan now to enter your big idea in the competition this fall.

Buenos Aires: Come to the We Media Regional Summit in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Oct. 14-15, sponsored by Clarin. Participation is limited to 150 people. Speakers will include Oglivy PR’s global digital guru, John Bell, Google News GM Josh Cohen and CCR CEO Guillermo Oliveto.

• Register Now
• More Details

WeMedia.com: We’ve launched a new web site to expand our reporting and analysis - and to help anyone create, operate and sustain media ventures in a media-saturated culture. That includes analysis of media business models, partnerships and opportunities for innovation - and of media’s role in the connected culture. The site will also be the online home for the conference, awards and community-organizing around We Media. Please drop by and say hello to the brand new WeMedia.com. You also may want to update your feed reader since this is where we’ll be publishing our analysis and news from here on. You can also find links to our social outposts on Facebook, Twitter, etc. Also: We’re looking for global correspondents to provide reports, links and analysis on trends and innovations in media and communications around the world. Contact us if you’re interested in contributing to WeMedia.com.

As you can see, game changers and dreamers are the heart of the We Media story. Clearly, there’s much more to come.

All of this is made possible by the participation and financial support of members and by our shared commitment to explore, collaborate, inform, inspire, influence and define what comes next in the We Media movement. Thanks for your continued interest and involvement, for renewing your membership or joining the We Media Community if you haven’t done so already - and for urging your company and others to join.

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Our annual gathering for the global We Media Community will return to Miami Feb. 24-26, 2009. Registration and sponsorship details will be coming soon. Meanwhile, here’s the archive so you can catch up on what happened at this year’s edition.

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Here are the slides (PDF) from Dale’s presentation today at the NewsPaper Association of America conference in Washington, DC. (Current membership and login required for download. To join or renew, click here.)

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We’re please to announce a new service for members of the We Media Community. The iFOCOS Media Intelligence Report is a periodic review of key trends, ideas and issues in media, along with analysis of what these findings mean for the connected society.

In the new Intelligence Report we’ll consider trends in media and their implications from a variety of perspectives (enterprise, social, creative, investment, culture, technology). As usual, the analysis reflects our broad definition of We Media - the world in which everyone and every institution is media.

The report will be made available first to members of the We Media Community - so if you still haven’t joined, now there’s additional reason to make the modest investment as an individual or corporate member. You can learn more about membership here.

The report joins our iSIGHTINGS blog, which includes faster “realtime” analysis and findings. The Intelligence Report is a longer-form PDF, with more reflective synthesis of what we see and what it means - and it’s also more visual than our blog. We hope you’ll find value in both and appreciate the difference between the two.

The first edition of the Intelligence Report includes a recap of the Media Matrix Dale and I have have developed for our consulting and strategy projects, and thoughts on the Amazon Kindle, cell phone novels, the design dividend at CES, endowed social journalism - and more.

You can access and download the January 2008 issue here.

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Here’s a just-confirmed addition to the We Media Miami schedule: Richard Sarnoff, President of Bertelsmann Digital Media Investments (BDMI). BDMI is a venture fund launched in 2006 by one of the “big six” global media firms - and regardless of what you may think of those big six or their dizzying portfolio of brands and products, for sheer might and influence alone it’s worth noting the direction of their investments.

Meanwhile, here are some others coming for what’s shaping up to be a pretty amazing and unusual gathering in Miami later this month:

The Rev. Lennox Yearwood Jr., CEO, Hip Hop Caucus
Darya Shaikh, Executive Director, OneVoice
Ellen Miller, Executive Director, Sunlight Foundation
Catherine Geanuracos, Live Earth
Michael Silberman, EchoDitto
John Della Volpe, SocialSphere
Chris Nolan, Spot-On
Amy Schatz, Wall Street Journal
Anthony Wojtkowiak, MTV Street Team
Josh Cohen, Director, Business Development, Google News
Sara DeWitt, Senior Director, PBS KIDS & Parents Interactive

… and many others.

It’s a strange and wonderful mix that hints at the scope of what we mean by We Media. It spans sectors, causes and professions. It’s independent, it’s corporate, it’s journalists, marketers and bloggers - and it’s powered by people and companies around the world who want to use media not simply to make better media, or more of it - but to make the world better through it.

The We Media conversation is heating up now in the conference blog, so please dive in and check it out.

And, of course, it’s happening in realtime later this month in Miami.

If you haven’t already registered for the conference, yes, there’s still time. But not much. To register now click here.

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For members of the We Media Community, or anyone coming to We Media Miami, or anyone else who thinks the We Media conversation is worth tracking and recommending to your friends: now you can show you’re part of it. Use one of our handy-dandy badges.

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If you’re planning on coming to We Media (Feb. 26-28), you should register for the conference now - and book your travel. It’s peak season for Miami.

Room block is full

We’ve reserved a block of rooms at the nearby Sonesta Bayfront Hotel.

Group Code and Special Rate: Use the group code 10C35X for the We Media event discounted rate of $244 plus tax per night.

You can make your reservation online: www.sonesta.com/coconutgrove/
Or via phone: 1-800-SONESTA.

IMPORTANT: If you book online you need to make sure you include the dates for your stay when you add the group code.

We will have a shuttle to and from from the hotel and the We Media events at the University of Miami.

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Here’s the first installment of our new iSIGHTINGS notes on trends and “things” we’ve spotted.

iPhone. We all worked the scenarios for news, entertainment and info on cell phones more than a decade ago. Apple’s device is worthy of the thinking. Finally a business for mobile content?

First look: Nokia forges ahead with online media labs and  ideas from mobile users. Join the experiment at Nokia Trends Lab, currently in Beta.

Brian Storm’s MediaStorm sets a standard for well-designed, multi-media storytelling.  Quality journalism isn’t dead; it now comes from unexpected places.

Backfence bows out with a whimper, not a bang. We love user-generated
content, but  no one wants another bad Metro section. Learn, innovate. Founder Mark Potts  shared  some of his lessons learned - but not all. We want to know about the ugly stuff  - err, lousy execution - that he and the investors don’t want to discuss in public. We have no interest in any of the Backfence-inspired obituaries for hyperlocal business models. They are wrong and tedious.

Let’s bury the derivative myth once and for all: 75% of users 18 to 25 are reading or writing user-generated content. Few are passive participants. Active users of UGC haven’t abandoned off-line media for online, but they are learning to balance the two. There’s something to this We Mediathing.

HanaZuki is a boutique, a creative studio, and a collaboration without boundaries. Is it work? Or play? Yes.

VCs are all atwitter over Fred Wilson’s alway-on blog and the Jason Calacanis takedown of Jeremy Liew over the VC rules of discretion.
 
Online video is such a huge trend that’s it’s hard to keep track. Video Toolboxaggregates more than 150 video sharing sites to manage video
mixers, mashups, converters and more.

Reuters CEO Tom Glocer blogs the annual Allen & Co. media moguls meeting in Sun Valley, where he writes that he can’t tell us anything because the meetings are off the record. Thanks, Tom.

Young, connected activists will rock the vote and have an unpreceented
impact on the U.S. presidential campagin and election. Look for our report this fall.

Can your daddy Facebook? Big bloggers like Jeff Jarvis, corporate captains and a leading foundation have launched pages. Reminds us of the Ana Marie Cox line about MSM trying to blog:  it’s like watching your parents try to dance - awkward and off time. Not kewl. Time for the Facebook faithful to Xanga outta there. Meanwhile, Socialtext founder Ross Mayfield recently used LinkedIn to announce he’s looking for someone to take over as CEO. Ross, that’s sooo 2006 …

Assume the Postion, Robert Wuhl’s history lesson on HBO, makes a comedic connection between pop culture, fact-and-myth, and learning that entertains. Learn from this major mashup. HBO’s Flight of the Conchords also gets it right with cultural insights, music and laugher.

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Come to THE festival for innovators and creators of the connected society. Plan on it: Feb. 26-28, 2008, Miami. Registration coming in October. Speaker, sponsor or program ideas? Drop us a note (andrew AT ifocos DOT org).

Get the latest Flash Player to see this player.

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iFOCOS President Andrew Nachison appeared on the PBS NewsHour on Wednesday, April 18, 2007. He discussed the April 16, 2007, Virginia Tech shooting - and how the digital media witnesses and others used to tell the story reflects the rise of We Media.

Real Audio | Download MP3

“The story is unfolding all around us. Marshall McLuhan used the notion of media being accoustic and you really get a sense of that today, that everybody is a story teller. The information is coming at us from many different sources. And the Blacksburg shooting, for me at least, was a really poignant example of this.”

“Young people do this intuitively and naturally without thinking about it, without a sense of wonder when they send a text message or they send an email or they shoot a video or they post a message to their friends on MySpace. But it’s not just young people. That’s the exaggeration. Technology is allowing people to share information and to share feelings and to tell stories in a way that just wasn’t possible before. And the big story is not that we’ve got all this wonderful fabulous technology making life better, the big story is that story-telling is exploding by virtue of this technology.”

“What’s news and what’s journalism, those are professional definitions that help us define work we do as professionals, or not as professionals. But story-telling is much broader than that, and a lot of what we’re seeing is reflecting the emotional impact of this experience.”

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Photos by Alex Fledderjohn (THANKS, Alex)

Music by Van Morrison

Video Mix by Dale Peskin

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I’ve been reflecting on our experiences at We Media Miami and digesting a great deal of reporting and analysis about what happened. It’s ALL been helpful. The diversity of viewpoints again underscores the eclectic and complex nature of “We” - and the promise of invention and innovation driven by the We Media community.A number of exciting ideas and outcomes emerged from our conversations in Miami, including a variety of projects and collaborations we’ll be talking more about in weeks to come.

Meanwhile, here are some We Media links:

• You can find a still-growing archive from the forum - now with audio and some lovely photos: here.
• Robin Miller of Slashdot produced a nice montage video - just ignore my babbling about cheese and skip ahead to the palm trees and sunshine.
• The We Media blog includes a compilation of the “ahas” suggested throughout the forum.
• Steve Rosenbaum, a film-maker-story-teller and newly funded CEO of Magnify.net, has been hanging and talking with us for several years. He sees how our conversation and the work of iFOCOS has moved forward. “Since my last visit with the WeMedia team, things are different. In an important way. It’s changed. the WE in WeMEDIA got bigger, the ‘MEDIA’, got smaller. Or more intimate, more more focused. Not sure which.” Steve, yes - and thanks for noticing.
• Jemima Kiss must have typed her fingers to the bone with all of her live blogging and follow-up reporting for The Guardian, starting with our opening-round fire alarm and continuing this week with an item about Craig Newmark, who spent some of his time in Miami doing virtual battle with Wikipedians over the content of his own biography.
• Rebecca Weeks, the director of business development for Real Girls Media (which just launched Divine Caroline) captured the frenetic flavor of a real-life forum with lots of people and ideas swirling around everywhere - sometimes you’re not sure who’s saying what. Kinda like when you say, “I saw it on the internet. Somewhere.” In Rebecca’s case, the Miami story incorporates the insights of “a panelist” and “an audience member.” Yes, I heard them too.
• Rich Oppel, editor of the Austin American-Statesman, wrote for his newspaper that Miami seemed less rancourous than the previous two We Media forums - and I agree, “but a few grenades were tossed between the new and the old.” Rich wrote:
  

  The media are an unsettled lot today, with new media drawing audiences but rarely making money. Some rather ceremoniously swear off the almighty dollar.But not all. The angst rose when a panel of venture capitalists said they would insist on financial returns, traditional as that may be, and when foundation executives spoke of “investments” in new media based on performance instead of merely handing over money.

• More on the angst and ennui of making money in Rich Skrenta’s follow-up thoughts. Rich, CEO of Topix, must have had a bleak flight back home. Citing the failure of Dan Gillmor’s Bayosphere, and many other citizen journalism projects that have “largely failed,” Rich wrote:
  

  By implicit definition, participatory media is non-commercial. If it’s commercial, someone owns it, and it’s not “we” anymore.

  That’s got to be especially bad news for the failed projects on his list that are new or still breathing - such as NewsTrust; but good news too, since NewsTrust is non-profit (Discosure: I’m an advisor). Is Rich right? I don’t think so, and I’ll elaborate on this down the road. To begin with, most new businesses fail. Period. Meanwhile, the definitions of success and failure have changed for media (though I’ll stipulate that going out of business counts as failure). Modest success - and profitability - is not failure. It’s the long tail, which leads to …

• Wired Magazine editor/Long Tail author Chris Anderson was not in Miami, but like many others who weren’t there, he contributed to the conversation. He responded to Rich: “We Media is alive and well. It’s just the would-be We Media institutions that are not. A phenomenon is not necessarily a business. That doesn’t make it any less of a phenomenon.”

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Online survey finds general public, media conference attendees agree that traditional news outlets could do a better job

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

February 15, 2007

A majority of Americans (55%) in an online survey said bloggers are important to the future of American journalism and 74% said citizen journalism will play a vital role, a new We Media - Zogby Interactive poll shows.

Most respondents (53%) also said the rise of free Internet-based media pose the greatest opportunity to the future of professional journalism and three in four (76%) said the Internet has had a positive impact on the overall quality of journalism.

The We Media survey results were released by iFOCOS and pollster John Zogby as part of an iFOCOS conference on media innovation hosted by the School of Communication at the University of Miami, with major support from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

In the national survey of adults, 72% said they were dissatisfied with the quality of American journalism today. A majority of conference–goers who were polled on the subject agreed – 55% said they were dissatisfied, and 61% said they believed traditional journalism is out of touch with what Americans want from their news.

Nearly nine out of 10 media insiders (86%) said they believe bloggers will play an important part in journalism’s future.

“We are now seeing mainstream acceptance of what we call the Power of Us - the value, credibility, and vital expression of citizen and collaborative media,” said Dale Peskin, a managing director of iFOCOS, the organization that conducts the annual We Media conference. “We’ve arrived at a tipping point. A new definition of democratic media is emerging in our society.”

Peskin said that, until recently, many traditional news enterprises have been skeptical about We Media. “They were either fearful or dismissive of our 2003 research forecasting and documenting the change in the media ecosystem,” he said. “Now the Zogby poll provides additional evidence that “We Media” is an essential component – perhaps THE essential component – for the agenda for news and information into the future.”

“The research documents the widespread recognition that control and influence on how we know what we know is shifting to a vastly more distributed network of empowered individuals and organizations,” said Andrew Nachison, co-founder of iFOCOS. “This obviously will have a big impact on how media organizations evolve and conduct business, but it’s really about how we all discover, create, share and apply information, and that’s important to all industries, to entrepreneurs, to non-profits, to governments, to individuals and to society as a whole. We are all part of the ecosystem.”

We Media Miami was conducted Feb. 7-9 with major support from Knight Foundation. The conference brought together more than 250 leaders engaged in media innovation. Participants represented a range of sectors impacting media, including new and traditional media organizations, investors and analysts, information technologists, educators and researchers, as well as bloggers, citizen journalists, and news-and-information entrepreneurs.

The Zogby Interactive survey of 5,384 adults nationwide was conducted Jan. 30-Feb. 1, 2007, and carries a margin of error of +/- 1.4 percentage points. The Zogby Interactive survey of 77 members of the media who attended the Miami conference carries a margin of error of +/- 11.4 percentage points. While periodic audits show the results from Zogby telephone and Internet surveys closely track each other, a companion telephone survey of this topic was not conducted.

Dissatisfaction with today’s news reportage is greater among those nationwide online respondents who identified themselves as conservative – 88% said they were unhappy with journalism, while 95% of “very conservative” respondents said the quality of journalism today is not what it should be.

Among those respondents identifying themselves as liberal, 51% said they are dissatisfied with the quality of journalism. Dissatisfaction levels were also highest among older respondents – 78% of those age 65 and older said they are dissatisfied. Most respondents (65%) also said they believe traditional journalism is out of touch with what Americans want from their news, with the highest levels of dissatisfaction with traditional journalism among those age 70 and older (74%), the very conservative (95%), and libertarians (89%).

Despite concerns about its quality, 72% of those in the national survey said journalism is important to their community. More respondents (81%) said Web sites are important as a source of news, although television ranked nearly as high (78%), followed by radio (73%). Newspapers and magazines trailed – 69% said newspapers and 38% said magazines were important. While blogs were rated as important sources of news by 30% of the online respondents, they were not considered as good a news source as the backyard fence – 39% said their friends and neighbors are an important source of information.

However, a majority of the nationwide online respondents said Internet social networking sites and blogging will play in important role in the future of journalism. But they added that trustworthiness will be important to the future of the industry – 90% said trust will be key.

Liberal and progressive respondents were more likely to say newspapers are their most trusted source than those with more conservative ideological mindsets. But radio is the most trusted source for 28% of those who describe themselves as “very conservative”, compared with just 9% of liberal respondents.

More online respondents nationwide said the Internet was their top source of news and information (40%), followed by television (32%), newspapers (12%) and radio (12%). The youngest adults in the poll, those age 18-24, were far more likely to say they mostly get news from Internet sites—58% said the Internet is their main destination for news, with television coming in second at 18%. Fewer than one in 10 in this age group said they get the majority of their news from newspapers.

For comment or reporting on We Media, contact dale AT ifocos DOT org or andrew AT ifocos DOT org.

For a detailed methodological statement on the survey, please visit:

http://www.zogby.com/methodology/readmeth.dbm?ID=1170
For more on the We Media conference, please visit:

http://ifocos.org/2006/09/01/we-media-miami-overview/

About iFOCOS

iFOCOS is an independent not-for-profit organization committed to enabling a better-informed society. It provides a variety of services, activities and training that help individuals and organizations worldwide understand and use expanding media and communications technologies to innovate as well as to create better-informed global citizens. More about at iFOCOS at: www.ifocos.org

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Companies and individuals are invited to join and participate in the We Media community.
iFOCOS today announced a series of action and educational programs to spur global innovation in media. The media action tank also announced key leadership and advisory appointments as well as support from partners and foundations across a a variety of sectors.

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Here’s a news release we’re distributing today about the We Media Film Festival …

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Online Festival Celebrates the Power of “My Community”

ifocos.org today announced a call for entries and viewer-judges to the 2007 We Media Film Festival. The user-generated online film festival, launched in conjunction with the We Media Miami conference to be held Feb. 7-9, is organized in cooperation with the University of Miami School of Communication and Magnify.net, an online resource for community-powered video.

Video creators can upload or link to their videos and anyone can review and judge the entries online at: http://video.ifocos.org

The theme of the video festival is “My Community.”

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