“Political campaigns have been having a ot of trouble figuring out how to empower their volunteers to do actual field work.”

Amy Schatz, Wall Street Journal

“This cycle, news organizations are experimenting…  trying Facebook, etc.  We’re not sure how much this is helping anybody.”

Ellen Miller, Sunlight Foundation

“It has been remarkable to see what has happened on Facebook in the campaigns.”

John Della VOlpe, SocialSphere & Harvard University

“Our main interest is in the Millenial Generation… A big part of the story this year is the impact of this generation.”  The role of technology is one of 3 factors of the impact of this generation, also the post-9/11 generational mentality, and campaigns giving away authority to its grassroots.

Catherine Geanuracos, Live Earth

“I think the Obama campaign’s use of text messaging is impressive… That’s where I see innovation, more and more distributed events.”

Carolyn Washburn, Des Moines Register

“I was deep in the Iowa caucus coverage… the biggest thing that happened for us this year is that, we, our community, and the candidates started being more robust…” in technological innovation, including mapping.

Anthony Wojtkowiak, MTV Street Team

“We’re reporting on political news and… social advocacy… What’s innovative about it… is the way the communication that is coming the people…” who are involved and knowledgeable in their community.”

First question: “There are notable examples of innovation, but the campaigns and nonprofit organizations remain the same.  For example Obama campaign spent most of the money raised on traditional political advertising.  Are we going to see true change in the way politics are waged?”

Amy: “We’ve got a lot more reporters out there, ” professional, bloggers MTV street teams.  “It’s very hard for candidates to ever switch off.”

Catherine: “This tension between wanting to control the message and wanting genuine voices to reach laterally to each other… ”

Ellen: fedspending.org.  Fedspending has already had 7 million searches.  “Our challenge is now to make the [wealth of] information easy to digest.”

Brian: “Are campaigns and organizations tone deaf?” Not seeing the desire for detailed information.

Anthony:  “There’s still some fear for these candidate… The way the information can be controlled is different than how it can be controlled through television… Unfortunately… these candidates aren’t [yet] really talking to us,” when they are asking in depth, interesting questions.

Brian: “Is the fear grounded, or should they change tack and respond for the desire for information.”

John: Campaigns are “always running the last best model… We are still a cycle or two away from when the new generation, Web 2.0, really taking over… We know that young people.. are involved in their community.  What’s the next step in terms of government participation.”

Audience question: “Obama’s been criticized for lack of specifics.  Is that true or is that he is so charismatic that the press is following that story rather than substance and detail from the Obama campaign while they cover the substance of the Clinton campaign?”

Carolyn: They are playing positions that work for them (charisma vs substance).

Anthony: “They’re all putting out detailed policy plans.”

Audience: “Where is the innovation in politics?”  Bush campaigns created an amway model of volunteer outreach.  What about non-electornic organizaing?

John: check out the openness of voter files. Need to connect the online with the offline.

Catherine: Working on mobilizing engaged youth to inspire their parents.

Brian: Are there organizing efforts that resolve “little politics” issues?  Is it being covered.

Michael: They should be opening up, but they are in an unfamiliar media landscape.  Positive example: Obama donor matching program.  A lo of what is happening is happening outside of the format of formal organizations.  Examples: Genocide Intervention Network, Step it Up climate campaign.

Audience: How do you reconcile the click and play “e-activists” and hyper active “web 2.0″ activists with a rank and file, command and control field, GOTV strategy or should you even do that?

Catherine: Ideally, you have a robust enough online-offline strategy, you give people as many doors in to enagage at their level of interest.

Final thoughts:

Anthony: “Something has started.. opportunities to open dialogue about issues.”

Carolyn: “How do we take from what we learn this year, including non-national races… to create a story line and intimacy that makes people want to get involved?”

Catherine: “Stop thinking of peopleas a voter where the interaction ends after the election.”

John: “There are more people who want to be involved than are.  There are still barriers to overcome.”

Ellen: “If I could wave a magic wand… I would say more openness and transparecny [to] dispel notions of corruption…”

Amy: We’ll see “some of these things happening at the national level taken to the local level.”

Michael: “Immediately move from treating folks like fans… and come up with ways to make voters have… valuable roles in campaigns.”

Brian: “I would like to see that in policy development as well.”

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As *content creators,* students might sell their work to a publisher, as journalists typically did in the 20th century. Or they might now consider Open Source publishing options and alternatives to traditional copyright. What alternative methods exist for making money as reporter, beyond the present system of working for a corporate news organization?

The synchronicity of Microsoft’s announcement that it would provide some transparency about its code was interesting. Instead of wondering why the heck the teacher was talking about Open Source, Linux, kernels, sharing, responsibility, and democracy, they could see my assignment as newsworthy.

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For more accomplished financial athletes, there’s the Copenhagen Business School MBA Challenge where you can test your executive capabilities in an immersive MBA simulation game.

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The situation reminds me of the fertilizer problem at my golf course. We hire an enterprising service called Birds-B-Gone to chase away the flock of geese that summers by the lake on the 16th Hole. Trained dogs cause the geese to fly off to a nearby course. That course then hires the same service to chase them back to ours. Birds-B-Gone gets good both ways.

Though they share terminology, the two Next projects come from different parts of the goose: JTM from the heart, Newspaper Next from the, ah, wallet. The competing initiatives, both aimed in some way at saving newspapers, exacerbate the rift among journalists and publishers about solving a common problem. Only the goose-chasers make out.

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What are the next steps? We’ll see. The working group is compiling notes for a situation brief and recommendations. The discussion seemed to be leading toward some research topics and an appetite to build something - a proof-of-concept to demonstrate content management best practices essential for “webby” search-friendly publishing - including native integration of web standards, links, search protocols, social bookmarking and ping services.

That’s the search engine optimization and social marketing optimization goodness built in to sites like Wikipedia and into millions of blogs - and yet is somehow missing or more difficult to implement in many “enterprise” web sites that would benefit most from them. Can anyone say: Wordpress? Typepad?

Stay tuned.

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Photos by Alex Fledderjohn (THANKS, Alex)

Music by Van Morrison

Video Mix by Dale Peskin

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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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During his presentation, he indicated that:
- “Only 27% of the public said they were satisfied with the news but 76% of people inside it are satisfied.
- Only 12% of the public read newspapers but 26% of the industry reads them.
- 32% of the public get their news from Tv but only 5% of the media does.
- 40% of the public gets their news form the internet but 60% of the media industry does.
- Just over half the public said blogs are important but 86% of the media said they are.”
(excerpted from Jemima Kiss’s detailed notes)

We caught up with John Zogby afterwards to ask him a few more questions (Click here to view the interview):

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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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But that’s actually a positive spin on a negative situation for Yahoo. While it’s true that Yahoo has been doing significant development in terms of buying or building content sites powered by social networks, I don’t think that Google is doing any worse.

Consider Yahoo: Flickr, MyBlogLog, de.lic.ous, Konfabulator, blo.gs, upcoming.org, webjay, jumpcut. And they’ve built Yahoo Answers and Yahoo 360 and the just announced Yahoo Pipes.

Google: Blogger, dodgeball, YouTube, MySpace (advertising & serach deal), YouTube, JotSpot. Built Google groups, Orkut, Public Calendars and Maps

So, is Yahoo outflanking Google? Not really. But since Yahoo isn’t making any significant growth in basic search against Google, the area that they are doing well in (social search) starts to look like their strategy. Ultimately, though, revenue comes from page views and advertising, and it’s unclear if Yahoo’s social growth will provide this.

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Christine Gambito’s Happy Slip introduced us not only to her work as a performer and actress, but also to the community and lifestyle where she lives. I was definitely drawn to the series of situations she played out in her piece as well as the different ways they were portrayed. Whether she was in the rain even indoors or outside with friends and family, she was consistently engaging. We could have seen just one situation she had conceived, but instead saw a series of portraits similar to what you would expect from a one woman show. When she spoke at the end about some of her goals, it was clear the video represented just the beginning of a process that she would take with her as she moved forward.

JD Lasica took us to yet another space with his work by showing us how much could be done with existing media. Instead of always accepting what traditional media presents as the sole representation of an event or idea, JD’s piece exemplified how media mashups are already reflecting community ideas on the most serious topics. As more and more people use the Daily Show as their source of news, and embrace more comedic interpretations of world issues, the new media community needs to understand the use of the mashups and the influence they have in this participatory media as it evolves.
Finally, there were the students. Whenever we seek to know what the future may hold, we must always look at what inspires a student to create. This group from Miami University was clearly inspired by viewing a story from different backgrounds and embracing the humor that can make the even the most uneasy stories palatable. In the “Minority Hotel” two people were presented with implied stereotypes. The essence of the story begins to reveal the reality. The way they shot, organized, and structured made the piece compelling and kept me wanting to know how it would end. They only had a moment to convey their idea and make me want to follow up for more. The piece was strong enough that I will be looking for their next webisode. Curious what other identity realities and/or misconceptions they may explore.

In the end, the festival definitely reflected the most contemporary ideas being developed for new media environments today. Storytelling today through digital media on various platforms is in a similar space today as film was before Birth of a Nation. It takes one piece to tell the story and create the structure that will lead the rest of the community to longevity. I ended the video festival with more questions, ideas, and a greater understanding of the options. In the end I was humming the same tune presented by one of the pieces “We’re All in this Together” and contemplating what the next image would be.

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First each of the panelists offered up some predictions on the future of news, media, technology, society, and everything else in between.  They said:

Michael Rogers:

• There is an incredible flood of mobile devices coming.  Not just cell phones – the evolution of devices will be substantial.  Origins will be laptops and pc’s, smartphones – extremely powerful multi-media portable computers will become the ‘laptop replacement.’
• What will connect those devices?  Explosion of wireless broadband connectivity… 3G, WiMax.  It will happen and it will be good for us all. “I believe in technology.  I also believe in the invisible hand of capitalism.”  Our society will be constantly on the move and connected all the time.
• Largest generation in US history – the Millennials (10-30 year olds), who grew up with social media, will take the same basic use of social media they are currently experiencing and apply it in their adult life – family pages on MySpace for example.
• Big Media is catching on really fast.  TV, major newspapers, local newspapers, anyone in the news business will adopt the tools of social media.  “Top reporters did not get to be top reporters by ignoring reality.”
• The rest of this decade will be about identity. We will see the creation of true, meaningful identities on the internet (and elsewhere) to prove who we are.  Layered on top of that will be information about who we are as people (clustered in our ID that we can take from site to site, etc.).  This will be a major game player in community.

Jason Pontin:

• Augmented Reality
• Death of Print.  The experience of a discrete editorial package will not go away.  But the ‘form factor’ of a magazine or newspaper has been lost.
• User generated real video in a useful way (eg SplashCast)
• The ability for new technologies to exist in the developing world. (Eduvision)

Sheryl Tucker:

• “Democracy needs diverse voices to give their diverse people the information they need…”
• As a journalistic property, we will be held to a higher standard.  We need to figure out how to make sure – without the censorship that could kill a community only – how to make that still reflect who we are.”
• “We bring real people together too – at conferences, for discussions… its not, and can’t be, all about the virtual.

Cristi Hegranes:

• The future of community and journalism is based on a question of access.  Building up of the 4th estate in developing countries is a big part of the challenge for our future.
• Primary roadblock to access is literacy.  The concept of the internet is useless in a large part of the world where people can’t read, or consume written content of any kind.

John Zogby:

• The results of our recent study suggest that “We (in this room) are more satisfied with the quality of journalism than the non media-elite” and “We (in this room) trust journalists far more than the non media-elite.”  No surprise there.
• More and more and more blogs will appear and be influential… but on a worldwide scale.  One man = one blog. 
• Anna Nicole Smith will haunt us all (and by that I mean that celebrity news, gossip, things that we don’t consider to be ‘serious’ news will always drive a big segment of the news population.
• There will be constant measurement… what the public is believing, what they are trusting, what they are seeing (on a daily basis).  The internet invites that kind of measurement.  Media must pay attention (but not be overly dictated by it).

Craig Newmark:

• The Wisdom of Crowds sometimes leads to mob rule, panic, or bad decisions.  We need ‘representative democracy’ on top of that.  We need editors.
• Our flagging for removal system make craigslist even more of a democracy, with all its flaws.  It reminds me of a Churchill quote, to the effect that democracy sucks… except compared to all other systems.
• How do I prove that I am me?
• The internet is a means to an end.  Paper has been a very good medium (for about 600 years), but its time may be up.
• Watch out for disinformation gangs… it comes when you decentralize power.
• I am wearing pants.

Donna Shalala:

• The developing world has had communications mechanisms for a long time (and they have used them for political purposes).
• People have to be nimble enough to filter unfiltered information (and deal with the technology).
• Young people ‘don’t know much about history’ and one of the benefits of new media will be the opportunity to advance their understand and help them to learn from the mistakes that have been made before them, as many generations have already.

Albert Ibarguen:

• “I’m a guy who wears a suit to a conference on WeMedia, but I have a blackberry.”  Proof that the world continues to change and must adapt.  Reason enough that we should not compartmentalize all audiences, but instead recognize our differences and our unique community features.
• Buffett, Gates, Omidyar, Skoll… the impact on how Foundations look at the world, approach social problems, will change.  There will be a move away from charity towards a concept of investment. Funding opportunity to leverage instead of funding need only (ie businesslike thinking).
• The definition of community and media has to change… all the time, constantly.

As the conversation went on, there were lots of other Aha! Moments:

• How can we keep the good values of Old Media (not the bad ones) in the digital world, which welcomes bad values and good alike?  In reality, old media has both just like new media – it will have to be figured out on a case by case basis.  Not all of the bad values are bad.  Not all of the good values are good.  It is all being redefined.
• Sometimes you don’t know what you want.  That leaves [the editor] a role in guiding and shaping what people read, think, etc.
• It is important to recognize the difference between reporting and opinion.  That line has been crossed/blurred. People don’t want to just be smarter, they want insights that allow them to make smarter decisions. 
• Its not a single blog (or source) that is going to influence you – its an enhancement of the overall understanding and analysis that you bring to a situation.
• We have to be sophisticated enough to understand multiple sources and capable of using multiple media sources (and technologies).
• Media is the device that we use to go about delivering information.  It is not the information itself all the time (despite what many think it is).
• There is skepticism about philanthropy that presumes some return on the investment.
• “The crowd is out of touch.  Its important that the media figure out what is going on and how to come down to the level where ‘it’ is happening, and become a part of it – not figure out how to make money from this phenomena.”  (Mark Glaser from PBS Media Shift said that, and got huge applause…)
• Is journalism a business or is business the means of support for journalism?
• News already exists as a social network: The Today Show brings a common audience together to talk about issues (notably mothers and such).  The O’Reilly Factor (what about Colbert Report?) gives a voice to people with a particular viewpoint.  And American Idol gives 32 million people a week a voice on what is popular and who is talented.
• We are not a national community, but a community of communities.  How will we speak as one voice from many? 

The good news out of this discussion seemed to be that some things are working.  As Michael Rogers pointed out, young people are getting more globalized – more aware of what is happening and taking a larger interest in having an impact.  Extreme hyperlocalized journalism is taking place, whether the old giants of media are participating, endorsing it, supporting it or not. 

We have been having this conversation for three years, and it will continue – long into the future most likely.  To me that seems like a good thing, because at least we are talking about it.

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Here are some of the other Aha! Moments from the discussion:

• Do only old people use email? Cell phones are a more common way that ‘young people’ communicate with each other (email, IM, txt-ing).  They are constantly on the move and whatever technology will facilitate their communications… and give them access to ‘the crowd’ will be the one they want to use.
• There are different forms of closeness within these communities.  The mode of communication is dictated, in part, by the emotional proximity of those involved.
• What is your ‘digital aura’?
• “It’s a little daunting to sort through all the user generated information that exists in our society.  I go to look for the hub, where there is some validation of what is more interesting (to me) than something else.”
• There is a difference between work time and collaboration time.  We want both, but don’t always have time or energy to get both.
• How much one is wired can be socio-economic… and NOT generational?
• How do you define news?  One panelist said “information put into a format where people understand it,” while another noted that “I was taught to differentiate between news and editorial content” and now the time to produce editorial content has been compressed… “you can go from information/editorial almost instantly.” 
• Where do you go for news?  The answers ranged from “I create it!” to “Local, cable networks (TV) (which they watch with their parents, or because their parents watch), “Maybe CNN.com or similar,” and “YouTube has a wealth of political information; other information on the internet. Most importantly “I wouldn’t think of picking up a newspaper.”
• How often?  “I used to have to watch the news – forced.  Eventually I realized that it was useful to find out interesting things.  I could help pass information along, help educate others (at my school, etc.).  That is my charge.”
• When I look to become informed, I am looking to documentaries, to reports from the field that have bias.  It is impossible to separate content and context anymore.
• Email = account = profile = network = function/purpose
• “We do our own PR all the time”

It was hard to tell if the (older, adult) audience left this session informed, or terrified.  There is this underlying sense that media companies, news organizations, and similar have to find ways to push the Generation Next audience to their content.  I can imagine why that would be scary.  The message I got from this session: It would be easier… and more inviting to “young people” if you integrate information/media into the lifestyle choices that these folks are already making, instead of trying to create new devices (and costly ones at that) and forcing the audience to go in that direction.  The media should try to follow the lead of their audience and then jump in to make things better, not set the agenda and try to move the mountain to them.

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Some of the Aha! Moments from the third session on Thursday included:

• - What does it say about soft power when the reported death of Anna Nicole Smith (that came across as ‘Breaking News’ on CNN just as the panel was starting) gets more attention than OneWater.org or Global Voices?  The life of the former Playboy centerfold, billionaire heiress (sort of), and larger-than-life reality TV star certainly makes for great content, and ratings/circulation but is it the most important cultural export that the news media can or should offer to the world?
• What will be the role of traditional news with all these blogs and wikis?    Currently the major news organizations and dominant media channels serve as the primary distributor for information.  As grassroots tools become more prevalent, does that change (and if so, is that good)?
• There is a snobbery about the types of content that should be important to the world… and yet much of the world’s news content is firmly pop-culture based. How do you define what is important for news organizations (of any size, shape or form) to cover?  Important to who?
• Will the news industry always be chasing the audience (and the technology)?  How could the model change so that the news industry added value to what the audience had identified as being of interest to them?
• The internet is not (and cannot) be just about informing people.  It also has to be about mobilizing the community to change the minds of people in power. 
• “We have more outlets now, more in sheer numbers, engaged in news presentation than we’ve ever had,” said Tom Rosenstiel, a former political reporter for the Los Angeles Times and now director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism. “The problem is most of them are not engaged in a lot of serious news gathering. They are largely engaged in repackaging material that other people have produced.“ (Via the Associated Press)

There was clearly a lot of energy in the room around this discussion, and a focus by all (driven by the participants on stage) in seeking a definition of the role of news organizations in driving certain influence around the world.  Still, there was also quite a bit of discomfort with the concept of power.  Power is shifting and distributing in new ways (which of course is going to make people uncomfortable) and the media is going to have to figure out what that means, and what role they want to play.

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We Media pulled together a pretty accomplished group of innovators and investors – those who have sought funding and those who have provided it – to help the assembled group sort it all out.  I didn’t leave the room with a clear sense of how to get my big idea funded, and I don’t think I am along in that, but there were a bunch of Aha! Moments, including:

• Consider hybrid models that can drive interest among both audience and advertisers… for example, marrying editorial (‘expert’) leadership with user generated content to produce a higher quality content experience.
• Different types of user interaction and different cuts of the demographic audience can be much more valuable than others.  Going niche may be your best option.  But does that mean that less valuable audiences should be ignored because they can’t make you money?
• Can you ask audience/participants to fund their own start-up… create an information co-op if you will?  Who would lead?  A social capitalist instead of a financial one?  Is there a model out there already?  Where?
• What would an eBay for content look like? News organizations could bid on what content they consider most valuable and the content providers/producers who have the most talent, or who are most effective at selling their content, would rise to the top.
• Ultimately, we need a system where news organization compete to be the best online, rather than a system that equalizes everyone.  That’s what the original newspaper barons would have wanted.
• The ad model is broken.  But for smaller organizations and those who are not connected, other funding models are (currently) hard to find or hard to pitch.  There has to be an opportunity to get funding for ideas that haven’t been proven yet or this whole conversation will remain exactly where it is today.
• If you get the value proposition right, you can bring along corporate sponsors as well as VCs (to share the burden/risk)
• You have to believe that the audience is going to be able to tell the difference between content that is free and content that is not. There will be real economic cottage industries in content.

And then the panelists offered some closing thoughts and predictions:

• There is a wide pool of people contributing investment – smaller firms, social pools, angels, hedge funds.  Look at how the investors measure themselves and target your ask to meet that interest.
• Think about what you are passionate about and what the benefit is – be very sincere about that, be able to communicate that. 
• The next big thing is going to be mobile (so stop thinking about just the internet world)
• Old media is going to have to partner with new media.  But, it is tough to partner a horse with an automobile.  Don’t think it will be easy, but find a way.
• Investors look for things that will forward their business – new networks in newsgathering (that helps augment what people around the world do every day), new platforms for syndication networks, things that add to the collective experience of their individual reporters and editors.  If you are offering something that is not going to meet one of those core strategic objectives, investors are not interested (at least not as an early investor). 
• Big companies historically muck up small businesses because they think they know, but they don’t.  Keep your focus on growing, driving success, etc. That is not very expensive to do, and there will be many more options for you if you meet those goals.

There is much work still to be done before the major news organizations understand better what needs to be funded, and the smaller, independent producers and providers understand how to find backing.  But new ground was definitely broken in this discussion and if you were listening closely, you might have found the key to finding your next big break.

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Lauren C, Executive Director of Rhizome, the online arts organization, introduces the panel of media makers:
Christine Gambito, “Happy Slip” vlogger
Steve Rosenbaum, Magnify Media
JD Lasica, Our Media
And three students from the University of Miami

Christine “Happy Slip” Gambito introduces a sampling of her work, which is very popular on YouTube. Christine is an actress living in New York, and her work is expressive, funny and quirky; compelling and addictive. Her videos engages with and parodies different forms of media, from fragrance commercials to the lonelygirl15 phenomenon to soap operas to music videos. The great thing about Christine’s pieces is that although the production values are low, it’s clear that this work is showcasing a creative, smart, engaging personality. She’s planned them out, really given a lot of thought to each piece, and made pieces that are pithy, well-edited, and that take full advantage of this nascent medium.

Christine talks about these video pieces as a way to be and showcase the actress she wants to be. She started creating videos just to have an outlet, and was surprised by the popularity of her videos. Christine also talks about the need for media makers to make a some money from their creative efforts. Hopefully, as the different platforms continue to evolve, the makers will reap some of the financial rewards that they generate for the big platforms like YouTube.

JD Lasica from Our Media talks about alternatives to YouTube in terms of video storage and publishing. He plays a video of a mashup/edited “exchange” between Dick Cheney and George Bush. JD points out that people can now make stories and create pieces with political commentary; they don’t have to rely on mainstream media anymore (except, maybe, to occasionally mock mainstream media). Ourmedia is trying to form a different model, one that is less ad-driven and more concerned with forming a community of video-makers.

Steve Rosenbaum from magnify.net is up next. Magnify.net “lets you find, filter, and share video from the web and gather it your way.” Steve is from a filmmaking background, and he shows a piece that’s completely made up of still photos from flickr, set to music. Here’s another example of taking pre-existing media and recontextualizing it with a strong editorial eye, creating something completely new during the process.

The thing that occurs to me as I watch these videos is how this is an incredible medium for engaging with pre-existing media. Christine’s work builds off of certain conventions from “mainstream” media that we’re all familiar with, and the work that JD and Steve are showing are mashups. This is all fascinating, but does this dependence on other media also highlight one of the limitations of web video? Of course, it’s also possible that the web video medium is so young that this is only the beginning of its creative development, and that as the medium grows, it will become more original and adopt new conventions in ways that are hard for us to imagine now.

A group of students from the University of Miami created an independent study to make webisodes. They show some of their work, the first of which is called “Minority Hotel” which deal with race and class in a series of parody videos. The episode of “Minority Hotel” we saw was a little bit like pieces from “Chappell’s Show,” and now that I think about it, sketch comedy is an important model for a lot of web videos.

As someone who works for P.O.V., the series for independent documentary films on PBS, I’m really interested in watching web videos, and seeing what develops in the medium. There is still such a high financial threshold for making a feature length documentary, but it’s becoming much easier for people to create their own, much shorter, non-fiction pieces. These pieces, however, are going to look nothing like what we think of as “documentary film.” So what can we at P.O.V. and other organizations do to support the next generation of media makers? And what can we learn from them?

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-If you don’t have a revenue model yet, there is no need to worry about it now as long as you manage to create a community around a theme or an issue (to me, that is somewhat redolent of the bubble?)
-It’s wrong to think about how users can pay back for your services in purely monetary terms; their in-kind contributions may take the forms of services (like help with accounting, if they are experts, etc)–there should be a way to make such contributions possible.
-The ultimate product everyone is trying to create is Ebay for content, where different bits can be assessed and traded based on their value.
-It doesn’t really matter if your product is tangible or intangible; you should really think about ways of selling tangible goods every time users access your intangible ones.
-It’s hard to find the right balance between expert and user-generated content, but even the latter, as some panelists suggested, should be fully compensated, if not in monetary terms, then at least in kind. Social capital may be more important for some of them than the financial one.

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“Scrapblog is a free web service that allows everyone to create multimedia scrapblogs.”

Scrapblog allows users to import their photos and video and music or other audio from their favorite photo or video sharing services and lay them out on pages they create. They can add themes, text, stickers and patterns to their media, as well as rotate, crop, adjust the brightness and make other enhancements.

Scrapblog users can invite their friends and family to see their published scrapblogs and people can navigate the pages, leave notes and comments and subscribe to the RSS feeds. Users can also publish their Scrapblogs to other media sharing sites and can print them.

According to Carlos, Scrapblog currently has 25,000 users beta-testing the product and will launch in a few weeks.

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Images and Voices of Hope goes first. The initial pitch is a little fuzzy (by contrast with the “judges”, I have the luxury of being able to pull up the site to read more about the organization), but the judges bring it back on track with no-nonsense, to-the-point questions. Don’t worry, no one gets fired at the end: this session is designed to help community-oriented initiatives deliver a lean and mean pitch to take it to the next level.

NewsTrust has been very visible so far in this conference. The no-frills website capitalizes on all the ingredients of social media, while offering some trust-ranking mechanism (“a Digg-like for grown-ups”) to address the ever-present credibility issue of “citizen media”. “Very crisp pitch”, lots of possibilities. The discussion yields new perspectives to leverage the proprietary technology beyond the mere news business.

Magnify.net is all about communities and video 2.0. Users can come in and create their video channels, skin them, and build their communities. By comparison with similar sites, users can manage the meta-data, yielding powerful metrics to the advantage of advertisers and… users who can benefit from the 50/50 revenue-sharing model. Verdict: definitely interesting, go talk to (investor’s name withheld for obvious reasons

The Press Institute for Women in the Developing World project is a perfect fit for this conference, as hyper-local content and user-generated reporting in hard-to-access places have been a major topic of conversation so far. All judges are impressed by the project, one-upping each other with good advice to help the project scale and find partners.

Pegasus News offers an interesting mix of professional content for local news and user-generated content. Rather than compete directly against local papers, Pegasus provides local news about hyper-local events not covered elsewhere.

The J-Zone, by the International Center for Journalists, gets pitched as a “facebook” for jounalists”. As large media organizations cut back on their international correspondents, the J-Zone offers an opportunity to build up a network of journalists around the world, offering advice, best-practice sharing, and assignment opportunities.

Stateline.org (hey I know these guys) covers policy and political news from all 50 State capitals: inside-the-beltway people to cover outside-of-the-beltway policymaking. How about working with other publications and syndicating content to other media organizations? Otherwise, charging a subscription-fee to lobbyists –a prime audience- appears to make a lot of sense (as long as citizens don’t get shut out in the process).

The last orator gets the prize for the most emotional and convincing pitch in terms of improving the livelihood of communities (in sub-Saharan Africa as it turns out) through an ingenuous idea of “buddy payments” via mobile technology. Good idea, already-available technology: next step is to package it and … pitch it.

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Some highlights:

- Big media companies are struggling with the new media world, but they need to let go, they need to understand they can’t control the world
- Relations between new media and old media is like that of parents/teenagers
- Venture capitalists will be open to those entrepreneurs that are product visionaries and understand their communities.
- As a blogger, you might start out doing things to follow your passion, but at the end of the day, as your traffic grows, you’ll start thinking more and more about money.
- People need to be honest about what success is for their company: some will need to accept smaller investments, but in the end they all have to remain responsible to shareholders
- Can we create an information co-op?Who’s going to be the Craigslist for news? What about co-op funding for journalism? Can we ask the audience to fund their own start-ups?
- The issue is how to meld the bottom-up and top-down models. Who will provide the tools and capabilities so that those who have brands don’t destroy them?
- We can’t just use advertising crack, hoping that people will come to a site. First the site needs to provide the users with something they need.
- Need to believe that the audience will be smart enough to distinguish between content worth paying for and content that should be free.
- Today there is a much greater pool of capital
- Make sure that if you approach a VC, you are passionate about what you’re doing
- Be cautious of big business – they tend to ‘muck up’ small, innovative start ups.

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Moderator: Merrill Brown, MMB Media (MB)

Social fabric of contemporary life is at the head of this conversation. Five perspectives on what community means from panel.

Shel Israel, Naked Conversations: “Global neighborhoods,” a new book by Israel. Communities are virtual yet lasting. What’s happening on the net — MySpace, Facebook — are tools for people to find each other by interest. If they love hummingbirds, can start community of passionate hummingbird lovers. People search for others like themselves and influence each other, more so than traditional means.

Let’s look at what happens when the online generation comes of age and replace boomers? How do you communicate with you and to them.

Ian Rowe, of MTV: Community for viewers of MTV? In age of customization; change is constant. young wants content when they want it; the same with issues. Seeing audience is telling us great focused on global warming, HIV, but I have other issues that are important to me. They want to connect with other young people. Getting young people to take action and meet others like themselves.

idea: A common thread for young and old using the web is finding others with common interest. Essential.

Rich Skrenta, Topix: Relationship between technology and community. Net is two-way communication. Print is old style, one way communication. Expensive. Net is people talking to people, not just on certain subjects but on special interest issues.
Facilitates millions of simultaneous conversations. Need robust technical systems to keep conversation on track. Don’t want conversation derailed by lower 5 percent. There is a cultural clash between global community of net and traditional newsrooms. investing in social architecture and systems provided of by the net as a conversation facilitator.

Jan Schaffer, J-Lab: Look at community from bottom up. New research report says hyper local citizen journalism sites are not so much acts of journalism but community building. Deal with naked caring and passion. They are outside of comfort zone of traditional journalists. Don’t make much money, though. Success is defined as impact on community. Increase voter turnout in some cases; others reported that on sites were new and old timers who never spoke out in community got online. Stories are not finished stories, but a fusion of news and chose. Observersational and a rapid growing phenom. We identiified 500 of these sites in October. Hyperlocal.

idea: Web as convener and creator of community.

Lisa Stone: BlogHer: Started as a blogger for women on THEIR issues. Now over 1000 blogs on website. From food family to technology and politics. Women now have took to talk about what they care about. Women are now active about what they see and hear. No longer passive.

idea: web enpowers the individual, a new tool for those who have lacked voice in the past. Invisible communities are now out there and conversing about what is important to THEM. “How do I cook the turkey”

There are elephants in the room. Oh-oh.

MB: What’s local? Community is now fragmented. How do traditional media respond?

Gannett: Looking far beyond geography, but locally at what informs the conversation. We are responding powerfully. IMpact is immediate and way beyond anyone’s expectation. Right under the surface waiting to explode. We are welcoming it.

How will Gannett move forward?

We are in middle of major initiative that is embracing and working at breakneck speed.

idea: Traditional media is responding, finally…

Chideya: NPR host and blogger: In Zimbabwe (pardon my spelling) working on a documentary. People have cell phones but takes hour to connect. There is a consensus there that providing online space and telecom space will increase productively and increase free speech and good governance but government is limiting and controlling this to remain in power.

idea: How do you circumvent government attempts to prevent the conversation from starting? In Cuba only government workers have access to computers and the Net.

Dorian Benkoil: MediaBistro: We are a community on and off line and started 15 years ago and 10 years ago went to web. Now over 700,000 members, smarter than most. IF we ask a question of community we get an answer in seconds. Business and ethical quandaries have arisen. A powerful community of people who have answers to questions. i.e. ethical issues in job interviews…

Where are things going?

Eduardo Hauser, Daily Me: Do people go to local or national website? Where are people going on the net. The net, computer and monitor are inseparable. The net medium is great for collecting and disseminating thoughts. Can we leverage the power of the net and distribute info differently. Many still get their news by traditional means. Can leverage power of net and go beyond the screen, be that abroad or in the U.S.

idea: So newspapers aren’t dead? yet?

Hauser: It may be time to take content that’s online and publish it elsewhere. On paper. We deliver your paper free online and on paper.

Where are we going?

Israel: Hauser speaks Spanish and I speak English. laughing… 23 million papers printed and delivered everyday. meanwhile, 50 million people are clicking on sites. Looking forward will find these numbers will move very quickly. I start with coffee and NYT, but in 63 I walked into college and paper was free. I’d never seen the NYT before. I figures girls would think I was smart cause I read the NYT.

idea: so he’s still reading the NYT.

Hauser: reads the times for sports, etc. My granddaughter has never touched a paper. By time she’ s in college she will get info on line and be influenced by people also online. Media companies will be distribution points for what’s important to people and do it online. Religious aspect of reading newspaper every day is fading, fast.. I head people here still saying ‘we will deliver them…’ but it’s the opposite. We become the media. mike goes off. we chose, we assemble it. it’s easier to assemble what we come across and digest.

Rowe: There’s another elephant. Our entire business model is not on people deciding what’s important to them but this is a show you will watch at 9 on Sunday. But that’s not a concern for top-down media, but for us. There’s a risk of customization. A person may chose to get the news only from sources supportive of their ideas, or speaking to those already converted. From MTV perspective, we are excited about self-publishing (mike is back) we also want to ensure there is also top-down packet of info that is getting to young people. We decide to do story about spiking rates in tuition, and we will put it on the air at the same time that young people are putting out there own info.

idea: a challenge is to balance top down media and self-publishing

audience: Is it community or communities? People will participate in very different communities.

Skrenta: Worldwide discussion going on about various types of issues at a global scale. This is journalism.

Shaffer: Conversations are not journalism.

idea: community media: is it or isn’t it journalism?

Stone: Did we love Lucy or was she just on? Hyper local communities really want to discuss and events of journalism occur within these discussions. example: attorneys were blogging on things that happened incourse that day. There is expertise on blogs that’s not available in the media. That to me is journalism, what the audience is looking for. My recommendation on hyper local sites is to develop and area of extreme expertise where you will be a locus for that expertise.

Question: what is a journalism? Has the notion of a journalist changed?

Shaffer: act of journalism is gathering data and putting it in useful form. There is useful and not useful journalism. There stories are not score cards in the sky; ordinary people don’t’ frame journalism that way. Journalism may need to reexamine our knee jerk convention to get back to question of values.

Rowe: there a difference between true investigative journalism and what is consumed as fact. For the oppressed, they didn’t have a voice. Now they have a platform to speak out. but the danger is that my opinion can be flawed or skewed, but if I put it out there and others like what I said that becomes news or fact and that’s not journalism. Journalists should keep in mind they need to cherish the role of investigation and fact verification and educate the masses.

What’s journalism?

Israel: What’s useful to me. there are people who make living writing on pieces of paper, but births of alien babies that’s not journalism. not all bloggers are journalists. We happen to meet in a certain place in certain time and something happens, if in Lodon Tube and bomb goes off and they post that video that’s how BBC. citizen journalists have the ability to add to what journalists do. But they don’t get paid to go somewhere. Now we are going from A to B. How will journalism look going forward is a question. Now there’s tension between journalists and million of people on the street posting videos, pix, blogs. They are also journalists.

What about advocacy?

Stone: There are thousands of savedarfour being posted on the web every day. We are trying to launch a channel named social change and two editors cover what are we doing online to raise money. The best grassroots example is a person with degenerate disease he will not survive. He’s 10. Someone he met online started a web attempt to raise money for awareness. it caught fire and raised $9,000 in short time.

audience: conversation vs journalism. We’re seeing conversation contains seeds of journalism but not everyone wants to be a journalist. It’s still “we” speak and they converse. We pay a lot of attention on what media is covering and then we pick up there. Every story came from a user comment saying hey this related to what a viewer says.

yes, let’s get back to community on the net

Shaffer: There’s a defensive posture among mainstream journalism without seeing the net conversation as a source for stories, etc.

audience: I don’t see what happens in my community in the local newspaper. I feel corporations not doing the job of covering communities. that’s why hyper local sites have come out of nowhere. How can these mainstream media sources remain relevant to community, to neighborhoods, and make a business out of it?

Rowe: We hyper local to get leads for stories and that’s the great way to embrace self-publishing.

idea: Isn’t it about traditional media respecting its audience, hearing what they have to say, what’s on their minds?

audience: question: we have bloggers, and how do we incorporate what they have to say into the produce? at the beginning, at the end?

Israel: The decision making and power is moving from organizations who decide when to do things to community. from board room decisions to communities where they most influential people don’t have the longest title but the most generous in what they are giving. It will self organize from the bottom to the top.

audience: We are trying to organize to allow in-put from the beginning. You have to the vicious five percent you have to have a system that rewards good behavior, so focus on how to reward people who are productive.

audience: a social entrepreneur distributed cell phones to communities to have a voice. This was an NGO and this is a concept of community we should think about. They are using the tools to get the word out.

idea: Global empowerment will happen if we get the right tools to communities.

Question: How do we organize the pubic?

audience: we are not endangered because of what we see on blogs.

audience: is media the right word for community and conversation. mediation has been removed and we are communicating directly. Let’s create a new language.

Stone: Let’s ask media?

wrap-up:

Israel: I feel I’m radical fringe because we don’t organize what they will get; the community is taking this power. you don’t organize what happens. the community is organizing. The issue is that there is a human, social revolution hat has begun and you should be looking at what the world looks like in 10 or 12 years when online generation has the power.

Rowe: In 2012, we’ll have a different relationship with our audience. We operate with small group of people and we do research and make decisions about what goes on our channels but that will not be process down the road; may not have long-form content. People are saying to us that they want short content. We’ll have a lot more input from young people in terms of creative process. We need a balance between self publishing and what we put on the air.

Skrenta: we are focusing on hyper local and opening doors to the individual. There is no news for most communities in the U.S. but there is stuff going on there but not covered or reported. Why not? There has to be a means for this to be covered online and for people to form communities and bond with their neighbors. We’re still figuring this out.

Shaffer: What’s rising to the top is not ideas being replicated but new missed opportunities that people are turning into something and creating added value. How do you identify those missed opportunities.

Stone: BlogHer will be mainstream media in the future. BLogHer publishes on 165 blogs and in future we will help women use blogs into economic engine.

“We Journalism panel”

Hosts: Michael Tippett, NowPublic; Chris Nolan, Spot-On

How do partnerships with public impact on traditional site.

How do you encourage people to build community?

Participants: 30

part: Hal Straus:

Pay up to 10,000 depending on page reaches. It affects ability to recruit people with deep roots in the country.

Two levels of participation: a panel of journalists or experts and we pay them; but we have reader responses, things we think are relevant to the conversation and then more responses for everyone who wants to say something.

Is this affecting editorial work in newsroom?

I don’t know. People who moderate it are well-known columnists and they listen to what goes on and each have written columns that directly played off of questions they have asked to responses they got.

Micheal Maness, Gannet: DID AN EXPERIMENT IN GEORGIA …citizens in cape coral — were able to get gov docs right away…benefit of FIO process and small m working together…
seeds were asking the ? how do you involve people from the very beginning…asking on line — “what do you want us to cover?” within hours, a whistle blower sent us documents! we had a forum set up, also a phone number…a bulletin board set up.
normally, it would have been “citizens upset at city council meeting….”

MICHEAL: the aim of this session is to pull out ideas …does this change our editorial policies in journalism…

MANNES: we have reporters embedded in the community…someone sits in the student union all the time …hyper-local community info gets posted, the bigger stories come out of that.

MAN: most of what i learned professionally, socially, etc, i learned in the news room — are they missing something?

WOMAN: this is the most profound change…i used to always be out at first … the skills are different, being out talking to people — when i hear stuff like this, it gives me faith in the business.

ANDREW HAEG: we found that there can be that “town hall” dynamism with having that conversation.

MICHEAL SKOLER: now fewer people gathering news, more people re-packaging, distributing news.

we’re all covering more complex communities, issues are also complex. harder to have context .,..

MARTIN: maybe communities and issues always complex, just not covered in that way.

WOMAN: how many of you have skype on your desk top? i run an entire business using skype…important for reporters to get out

WOMAN: geography is very relevant! disconnect in neighborhoods, so if news is only gathered by those who have the technology (PDA, blogs, etc) what news are we missing? we need to go out to the gatherings…

WOMAN: what info/advice for educators?

WOMAN: teach them how to report…get a camera, use the computer and skype…

MAN: need to reach communities in multiple ways. on a lot of platforms.

WOMAN: embedded notion of being out in the communities have given us the opportunity to be back were we belong…if we are just on the discussion online, we are not giving our audience the way to have a transformative experience walking in someone else’s shoes.

AROCHA: no need to put it in the context of “good or bad” citizens can help us do our job better…when i started, i went out to farm labor camps, did shoe leather reporting…over time, we have become richer, older, fatter, have become part of upper middle class and do not reflect many communities…now onus is on us to re-connect.

SKOLER: i will describe a model we have been using. Minn Public Radio and American Public Media created a database to learn about many sources…daily in MPR newsroom…on a daily basis, can tap people to have the info they have into the editorial process.
Citizen journalists vs people sharing their knowledge, e.g. on K-12 education…we pulled people who had knowledge and pulled from this to influence day’s reporting

another example, all pilots on the database informed our story on plane crash…

we create continuing relationships…

WOMAN: how did you find people in the workplace?

SKOLER: asked on the air…using technology to track and manage sources…

WOMAN: you are connecting the connectors?

SKOLER: we also do outreach to groups not in our regular listener base?

MAN: how will this thing evolve?

SKOLER: we find over time, we can get more specific.

HAEG: analysts work with journalists to shape stories from the very beginning…

SKOLER: our process goes through regular journalism, editorial process. Continue the conversation about involving the public in journalism!

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 Media Literacy as a Family Value  and We Media Community Forum(Andy Carvin)

We Media LiveBlogging Intro+Community Forum (Publictivity.comBlog)

We Media Kicks Off (Down the Avenue)

We Media Conference, Miami (Media Guardian/Organ Grinder)

We Media 2007 Community Forum (Hyku)

We Media Forum: “online communities are real” (Editor’s Weblog)

Blogging We Media Miami (part 1) (Magnify.net blog)

At Miami’s WeMedia Conference (Web Strategy by Jeremiah)

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Other Aha! moments from the first session included:

- Proliferation of journalists vs. proliferation of sources.  Our real challenge is to bring sources toether so journalists can add value.

- People and connections — bringing an audience together to communicate with each other is critical.  Lets talk about how the audience talks to each other, not how we should talk to the audience.

- How are we going to create a vast social network where people can consume news?  We currently lack the technological and other infrastructure (and possibly the know-how) to do that.

- One thing that big organizations still provide is an element of trust in the information that is delivered.  Can’t say that about all sources.

- Important thing is not who is reading information/articles/blog posts, whatever… but who is producing new output as a result?  We should measure media as a platform for promotion not consumption.

- This conversation is not just about journalism, but rather about information more broadly.

- We is a really hard idea to figure out.

And that was just the first session.  Lots of good things to come.  Stay tuned.

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Andy’s story:  as a kid, he was taught to read and respect what he read in newspapers, but also to question what he read–to try to find out more about an issue or story.

My story:  when I was 7, my Dad (a WWII vet–with a third-grade education–)taught me to read a newspaper.  He also taught me to take in tv news broadcasts, and to listen to the different interpretations of the different broadcasters.  He believed that an informed opinion on issues could only come from following different reports and perspectives. 

Andy and I thought that perhaps the best media literacy education actually begins in the home.  Media habits, like many other habits, might come from our parents.  It’s the way both Andy and I were taught as children to consume media with the intention to understand, not re-enforce a preconceived notion–that has made us savvy media participants, not passive media consumers.  Inquisitive minds, a passion for perspective and and a desire to participate in what we had been engaged with since childhood is what motivated us to become a part of media culture–writing and communicating with ot