Steve,

It takes real chutzpah to ask Craig Newmark and Jim Buckmaster of craigslist to help newspapers salvage their classifieds businesses and thus save democracy, or at least the part of it that newspapers presumably foster.

Your clever open letter to them, at the same time congratulating and blaming, misplaces responsibility. It assumes they have the authority to solve a problem that the news industry inflicted upon itself: how to replace a subsidy predicated on controlling and authoritarian business practices.

Steve, I can’t decide if your modest proposal is naive, self-serving or tragically poetic.

Craig Newmark never set out to disrupt the newspaper industry. Motivated only by helping people out, he created a simple list for his friends, initially distributed through email, and later on the Internet when one friend showed him how to create a Web page. Their trust in him, as well as a passion for serving others through technology, gave craigslist its authority.

You miss the magic of craigslist. It is Craig’s “friends” — a community that has grown to 40 million people a month in 500 U.S. cities and 50 countries (larger than all news sites combined by several factors) — who disrupted newspaper classifieds. Call them users, customers, an audience, a market, or marketplace, they discovered that through craigslist they could do for themselves what others charged excessively in order to handsomely subsidize their businesses.

Trust in Craig, still craigslist’s chief customer service representative, remains at the heart of it. So are democratic, open markets: the right of the people to conduct commerce and journalism among and between themselves.

Meantime, newspapers charged premium prices for access to an arcane classification system that published a few, annotated lines of shorthand in very small type at the back of a dense product with limited, daily distribution. The hard-to-find, hard-to-read, one-way advertisements were distributed to parts of a relatively small geographic region for sellers and buyers to discover, at least those who happened to buy the newspaper and read the classifieds section on the very day they were prepared to make a transaction.

For a lousy experience, newspapers in growth markets such as Dallas, Denver and San Jose made hundreds of millions of dollars that drove margins of 30 per cent or more with these high-yield liners.

The experience was not significantly improved by importing this business to the online version of the newspaper. What didn’t work in print didn’t work online.

Newspapers used their profits not to expand their social mission, but rather to drive the stock price of the companies that owned them, to finance acquisitions, to reward management, and to acquire additional wealth through cost-management: death by acquisition accelerated by cutting their way to profitability.

Financing news operations has never been much a part of it; ask any editor who has asked for budget increases or additional staff to cover a society growing increasingly complex and competitive. The moral imperative is a myth perpetuated by editors and journalists, not by the publishers you (Steve) are asking Craig and Jim to help.

Now, other forms and systems – a collaborative, more democratic Fifth Estate, if you will — are emerging to replace an institution that is broken. Almost anyone can deploy the simple technology that craiglist uses. Anyone can participate in its journalism and commerce.

Publishers would be better served by implementing enlightened business strategies with a passionate consumer connection at its core. Until then, they will continue to be cast in a survival drama of their own making.

Newspapers are like a broken satellite falling of orbit. The technology is failing; the mission may soon be scuttled. To stay in orbit, the engineers must repair and update the technology systems. More importantly, the flight controllers must restore trust in the mission and its results by relinquishing control. Otherwise, Satellite Newspaper – classifieds and all — will burn up in the atmosphere.

Craig Newmark and Jim Buckmaster may be talented astronauts, but they shouldn’t go down with the pilots of their competitors’ obsolete ships.

I discovered that a lot of folks came to PdF for the same reasons. They played catch with familiar ideas. And they used the event to measure influence, familiar and emerging. PdF soared with both activities. An impressive roster of speakers from the converging worlds of political action, civic technologies and individual empowerment stimulated, and occasionally stirred, a network of Web buddies and budding online politicos.

Missing an Aha! moment that changes the world, PdF is more noteworthy for its momentum. At this moment, you can feel democracy shifting amid civic engagement enabled by technology. PdF is a forum where you can almost get your head around that big idea. Organizers Andrew Rasiej and Micah Sifrey deserve as much praise for their impeccable timing as their star-studded roster of speakers. In two days of dense programming, content frequently rose to the level of the venue, the stunning Frederick Rose Hall at Jazz at Lincoln Center overlooking New York’s Central Park.

Playing catch on an elastic string, a few highlights and insights:

– FCC commissioner Jonathan Adelstein, high-profile tech execs and industry advocates launch an initiative to make broadband access a national priority in the U.S.

– Lawrence Lessig touts the Change Congress movement by using every distracting feature in Keynote.

– Arianna Huffington declares that she knows The Truth that others don’t. About 50 people in the audience who blog at Huffington Post say they agree with her.

– Jay Rosen likens professional journalists to a migrating tribe in the midst of a survival drama.

– Mayhill Fowler demonstrates why she’d be irrelevant without a tape recorder. Did anyone actually read her story (lead buried somewhere in the 7th graph)?

– Virtual Reality pioneer Mark Pesce forecasts that the future looks nothing like democracy “because democracy, which sought to empower the individual, is being obsolesced by a social order which hyperempowers him.” The brilliant-but-huh? text here.

– Obama Girl, because she was there.

– Elizabeth Edwards charms the conference via Skype from her living room because her flight is canceled. Husband, John, the former presidential candidate, wanders into the room and is surprised to find his wife talking into a computer.

– Mark Soohoo, the deputy internet director of John McCain’s campaign, defends his boss for not personally understanding how to use a computer. Tracy Russo, Soohoo’s counterpart on Edwards’ former campaign, takes issue. Then fireworks. The video:

I love the description of Christy by her students at KU: “combination den mother/drill sergeant.” It was the same for us in her newsroom, a creative yet disciplined place where Christy gently demanded — and usually got — our best.

I suppose that many of us look back at a time when people, relationships, and work converged in a moment that we were meant to be a part. I had more of those moments in Detroit than I deserve, and Christy was at the heart of them. In a place as tough as a Detroit, she could find the deeper of meaning of events that became the hallmark of coverage at The Detroit News for a few extraordinary years. It was never easy, but it was always intoxicating. No one understood the ingredients of a good story more than Christy. No one had more fun stirring them into something meaningful or fun. She was a friend who taught me to be a good editor, and a editor who became a good friend.

Never sentimental, she understood that when it was time to go, it was time to go. Too soon. Too soon.

For the past week I’ve been playing with the private “alpha” of a new social bookmarking tool called socialmedian. You can also give it a try. To register as a tester, use this code on the signup page: wemedia. (This code is available for 100 testers).

What’s social bookmarking? It’s Digg, del.icio.us, Mixx, or my favorite of the bunch, Diigo. Here’s another one I have’t tried that sounds similar: Twine. NewsTrust, a non-profit focused on group evalutions of journalism to assess trustworthiness, also fits in this group (Disclosure: I’m an advisor there). I think Publish2 is a similar concept designed for professional journalists and newsrooms. These are all tools that allow you to bookmark your links to a web server, share those links with other people (or professional colleagues) and benefit from their links and recommendations.
Here, for instance, is a page that aggregates feeds and links about social media. It aggregates items from various sources I know well, such as TechCrunch and investor Fred Wilson’s blog, A VC.
But it also includes some sources I don’t know well, such as louisgray.com. Socialmedian allows users to rank the relevance of the sources to adjust the feed. I’m not sure how those rankings impact what I see.

Here’s a longer explanation of how socialmedian works at ReadWriteWeb.

I’m not quite sure where this fits. It’s partly an alternative to del.icio.us or Diigo, and I like Diigo too much to drop it; and partly an alternative to personal feed collections. I track my feeds through Netvibes – and I’m not looking to drop that either. Meanwhile, social feed tools that incorporate all of someone’s online behaviors, like friendfeed, suggest another way to learn from the behavior of friends.
In other words – there are lots of companies playing in this space.

Also worth noting: The company was founded by Jason Goldberg, formerly CEO of Jobster. He told me via email that he’s backed by undisclosed angels and an investment (amount not disclosed) from The Washington Post Co.

On April 19 he’s ripping a page from the tech world and organizing an “unconference” to help the San Jose Mercury News talk with and learn from, well, anyone. He’s calling the effort CopyCamp, an homage to BarCamp and FooCamp, events for software developers and techies without a fixed agenda. They set an agenda, then try to come up with brilliant ideas, new code or at least new friends.

What brilliant ideas, new code or new friends might CopyCampers come up with?

Should the owners of the big newspaper in Silicon Valley give up and shut it down now? Or stay the current course – and painfully plunge from relevance, ever hopeful that there’s a bottom down there somewhere? Or does the San Jose Mercury News, in any form, have a future, a place in the heartland of U.S. technology innovation and investment – and a place in the cultural fabric of community life there? Might Silicon Valley’s best and brightest have anything to contribute to the conversation?

How about the newspaper where you live? Or newsANYTHING – TV, radio, web, mobile, whatever. Who’s producing the journalism you need to inform and influence life in your community?

Even if you don’t care about the future of the San Jose Mercury News you can consider these broad and generic questions about the future of news from a variety of angles. Here’s a new set of essays on the subject from Britannica.com (now a blog!), with contributions from Jay Rosen, Clay Shirky and others. Here’s a new report from the World Association of Newspapers that reviews the many ways newspaper companies can “maximize the Content Value Chain for efficiencies and revenue-making.”

In the U.S., at least, the business outlook for newspapers is grim. Earnings are down, share prices are down, and investment analysts are bleak on what comes next. Eric Alterman wrote last month in The New Yorker:

Few believe that newspapers in their current printed form will survive. Newspaper companies are losing advertisers, readers, market value, and, in some cases, their sense of mission at a pace that would have been barely imaginable just four years ago.

Actually, it was imagined. And anticipated.

The trends are similar in the UK – and we’re even seeing signs of declines in traditional media usage in China, which now has the world’s biggest Internet audience.

Perhaps less obvious, or less interesting to those interested only in maximizing revenue, is the corresponding social urgency revealed by the decline of newspapers. Our research finds Americans deeply dissatisfied with their traditional sources of news, but also deeply mindful of the importance of journalism in their communities.

So there’s a gap to be filled – an opportunity to provide better journalism for people who believe it’s important. This is the We Media News Gap.

But what, exactly, does that mean? What does better journalism look like in the culture of We Media – the mediascape of free, networked, digital everything, news unbundled from advertising, ubiquitous, always-on creation, distribution, recommendation, sharing and information overload?

From the CopyCamp web site:

CopyCamp is a one day un-conference that brings community members into the newsroom to meet and discuss important issues with local journalists. After an initial meet and greet, reporters from the San Jose Mercury News and active members of the San Jose community will suggest topics they believe will benefit through an open dialogue in the hopes of improving the quality of journalism in the Bay Area and figuring out how the SJMN can better cover under represented communities.

Several editors and reporters from the newspaper have signed up to attend, including the newspaper’s influential designer/business development director, Matt Mansfield – but he’s also on his way out the door via the newspaper’s most recent round of layoffs/voluntary “departures.” Here’s the CopyCamp participant list.

Analysis: If chatting with members of the community you purport to serve is a novel idea for a newspaper company then CopyCamp is too little and too late to help. But making such conversations a priority, and re-imagining the relationship between a news organization and its community, is a big idea – and taking it more seriously would be a smart step for anyone who wants to meet the We Media News Gap.

You can find more details about CopyCamp and register to attend here.

More to come soon.

First – in case you missed it – here are two big news items announced at We Media Miami that you should review if you missed them last week:

Technorati Tags: journalism, philanthropy, socialentrepreneurs, wemedia

1. iFOCOS Research finding: Two thirds of Americans – 67% – believe traditional journalism is out of touch with what Americans want from their news. For the second year in a row we’ve documented a devastating lack of satisfaction with journalism in American – and an opportunity to do something about it. Details here. You can also find commentary on the results in The Guardian (UK), BusinessWeek and TechCrunch (and, of course, throughout the blogosphere). We’ll have more to say on the study and its implications in the coming weeks.

2. Knight Foundation invests $3 million in Ashoka to fund social entrepreneurs in journalism. This is a big deal – a major philanthropy, and one of the few with an interest in journalism, moves further from traditional containers of news to seed innovative and untested new approaches. Ashoka’s global experience with social entrepreneurs in other fields will be applied to support 30 people who “do” journalism. What does that mean and what will this investment yield? Nobody knows – and that’s a daring basis for any investment, and perhaps as good a definition as any of what social entrepreneurship is all about. Knight Foundation President Alberto Ibarguen and Ashoka President Diana Miller announced the investment at We Media Miami last week, and they answered some questions about it. Here are some of our live blogging team’s initial notes from that conversation, further thinking from Susan Mernit and Ogilvy’s John Bell, and here’s the formal press release.

Location: Storer Auditorium at 4:15 pm

Session Chair: Hal Straus, Interactivity and Communities Editor, Washingtonpost.com

Robin Miller, Editor, Slashdot/SourceForge

Slashdot has a multilayered moderation system for ranking comments. “If you ever get into a content rating system, do *not* call it ‘karma’.” Slashdot moderators are selected at random, and these moderators can rank comments up or down. If you’ve posted a comment, you can’t moderate. To control for group-think, Slash-Dot has “meta-moderators” a small, selected, voluntary group of “super moderators.”

Must haves:

1. Users must be able to rate things up and down.

2. Should, below a certain threshold, should comments be visible?

3. Many users doing few moderations–spread the love.

Steve Arend, Vice President Digital media Services, CMP Technology

I saw opportunities to take “noise” away from what other people want. We are producing a virtual trade show, 2nd life, where you can go in and interact with those who create the products you’re interested in. We have had cases in 2nd life, where we’ve had semi-unanimous interruptions, where we allow interactions to happen, but with the knowledge I can literally throw them off the (2nd Life) island.

There’s noise from the sales side, the engineering side, and from consumers. In the virtual world, that’s the closest I’d seen to real life. Because you can interrupt the audio portion, just like in real life. (View video clip 1.)

Links:

http://life20.net http://howmachineswork.com

Mark Jones, Global Community Editor for Reuters

Question: What’s the worst that can happen?

We try and pull in the best of the rest of the web, what other sites are saying on various topics. Global Voices-Voices without Votes. We cover what major nations around the world are doing around elections, bringing in bloggers from around the world. For instance, you can see what global bloggers are saying about US elections. However, this skews content if the blogosphere is skewed all on its own.

How do you make it clear to users that there is a difference between blogger comments and stories, and Reuters itself? Our single biggest compliant from the public is on neutrality. We get these from users, and also our network of journalists. They feel a little hurt that we’re putting resources towards other’s work. But the last thing we want is for our journalists to feel “dissed.”

Handling comments….For an organization like Reuters, which is keen on neutrality, we have all sorts of problems with comments on blogs. We haven’t cracked the burden of moderation back to the audience. I naively thought, when I started editor’s started blogs, that when we were attacked, that our supporters would ride in and save us–and they did the first few times. But then, there turned to be some mob-rule and our cheerleaders sort of got scared away.

Finally, I really want to get the two sides–journalists and commenters–to enrich the discussion. But until we have a civil discourse, the journalists just aren’t going to engage.

www.blogs.reuters.com

Chris Tolles, CEO, Topix

The real promise of the internet is interactivity. A system that gets more people engaged (even if there are inappropriate comments), is better than a system than doesn’t get people engaged. We’re trying to get the highest number of people engaged. We have over 400,000 topics, all across the globe.

When the cartoons about the Prophet Mohamed appeared on the net, we got over 2,000 comments, when we geo-located where these comments were coming from, we found most of the comments were coming from Scandinavia and the Middle East. Over time, middle ground developed. “We look at it as, are we getting an increasing amount of people, and it’s a Darwinian product, and the one that has the most people wins”.

http://blog.topix.com

General Conversation

About journalists interacting with and within the comments:

“They’re highly skeptical about this. Getting bothered with questions from users, but they’re kinda intrigued by it. They see their job as to talk to policy makers and heads of companies.” -Mark Jones

“The San Francisco Chronicle, uses the public as a club to make a point and support what they’re saying–to use it against the people who are against them. …I think a year or two from now, I will bet you a lot of money, that journalists will take comments and publish them in their stories. ” -Chris Tolles

“At the Post, we have the need to be objective, and we’ve had a lot of our opinion writers who have gotten into the ring with our commenters. For one thing, they worry about this because they’re ‘working without a net.’ -Where they’re not editorialized.” -Hal Straus

Interaction from the audience (not all who participated, but the closest person to me that I could get info from):

Jean-Baptiste, with Le Liberation.fr, where there is a web-comment page within the hardcopy newspaper. These comments are edited and selected before being printed. http://liberation.fr/actualite/media/2293555.fr.php

Other sites mentioned as having interesting interactivity features:

http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/thebigblog/

http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/thebigblog/

PS Video of this event will be posted to this blog today, it was not available immediately.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Two thirds of Americans – 67% – believe traditional journalism is out of touch with what Americans want from their news, a new We Media/Zogby Interactive poll shows.

The survey also found that while most Americans (70%) think journalism is important to the quality of life in their communities, two thirds (64%) are dissatisfied with the quality of journalism in their communities.

Meanwhile, the online survey documented the shift away from traditional sources of news, such as newspapers and TV, to the Internet – most dramatically among so-called digital natives – people under 30 years old.

Nearly half of respondents (48%) said their primary source of news and information is the Internet, an increase from 40% who said the same a year ago. Younger adults were most likely to name the Internet as their top source – 55% of those age 18 to 29 say they get most of their news and information online, compared to 35% of those age 65 and older.

These oldest adults are the only age group to favor a primary news source other than the Internet, with 38% of these seniors who said they get most of their news from television. Overall, 29% said television is their main source of news, while fewer said they turn to radio (11%) and newspapers (10%) for most of their news and information. Just 7% of those age 18 to 29 said they get most of their news from newspapers, while more than twice as many (17%) of those age 65 and older list newspapers as their top source of news and information.

Web sites are regarded as a more important source of news and information than traditional media outlets – 86% of Americans said Web sites were an important source of news, with more than half (56%) who view these sites as very important. Most also view television (77%), radio (74%), and newspapers (70%) as important sources of news, although fewer than say the same about blogs (38%).

The Zogby Interactive survey of 1,979 adults nationwide was conducted Feb. 20-21, 2008, and carries a margin of error of +/- 2.2 percentage points. The survey results were announced at this week’s fourth-annual We Media Forum and Festival in Miami, hosted by the University of Miami School of Communication and organized and produced by iFOCOS, a Reston, Va.-based media think tank (www.ifocos.org). This is the second year of the survey.

“For the second year in a row we have documented a crisis in American journalism that is far more serious than the industry’s business challenges – or maybe a consequence of them,” said Andrew Nachison, co-founder of iFOCOS. “Americans recognize the value of journalism for their communities, and they are unsatisfied with what they see. While the U.S. news industry sheds expenses and frets about its future, Americans are dismayed by its present.

“Meanwhile, we see clearly the generational shift of digital natives from traditional to online news – so the challenge for traditional news companies is complex. They need to invest in new products and services – and they have. But they’ve also got to invest in quality, influence and impact. They need to invest in journalism that makes a difference in people’s lives. That’s a moral and leadership challenge – and a business opportunity for whoever can meet it.”

The survey finds the Internet not only outweighs television, radio, and newspapers as the most frequently used and important source for news and information, but Web sites were also cited as more trustworthy than more traditional media sources – nearly a third (32%) said Internet sites are their most trusted source for news and information, followed by newspapers (22%), television (21%) and radio (15%).

Other findings from the survey include:

• Although the vast majority of Americans are dissatisfied with the quality of journalism (64%), overall satisfaction with journalism has increased to 35% in this survey from 27% who said the same in 2007.
• Both traditional and new media are viewed as important for the future of journalism – 87% believe professional journalism has a vital role to play in journalism’s future, although citizen journalism (77%) and blogging (59%) are also seen as significant by most Americans.
• Very few Americans (1%) consider blogs their most trusted source of news, or their primary source of news (1%).
• Three in four (75%) believe the Internet has had a positive impact on the overall quality of journalism.
• 69% believe media companies are becoming too large and powerful to allow for competition, while 17% believe they are the right size to adequately compete.

Republicans (79%) and political independents (75%) are most likely to feel disenchanted with conventional journalism, but the online survey found 50% of Democrats also expressed similar concerns. Those who identify themselves as “very conservative” were among the most dissatisfied, with 89% who view traditional journalism as out of touch.

Further Details: Zogby Methodological statement

And though i occasionally watched other U.S. presidential campaigns and elections while still in Africa via CNN,BBC and other international broadcasters, this one is special to me because it happens to involve a black male and the first ever female running for president in the United States.

Though my native Liberia has produced the first ever elected Female head of state in Africa, i am having a very difficult time deciding when and how race plays a part in reporting the election campaign.

Though many Americans(including the very democratic front-runners-Hillary and Obama)say race has nothing to do with the 2008 presidential election,i am subtling leaning toward thinking and believing that race does have a major part to play in the up-coming election as seen during these primaries and caucuses that seem not to end now for the democratic party.

And as a journalist who lived and worked in a third world country where it becomes difficult most of the time to be relatively objective and unbias during election times,many questions are on mind:

When is race not the story? But then how to cover the “white”, “black” or “yellow” hot issues of politics and race?How can a journalist deconstruct the forms of racial and ethnic identifications that most often appear in news stories? How best can a journalist describe the way people look during elcetions that involve race?

Then,is it wrong or right for a journalist to vote during primaries and caucuses and at the same time report the news fairly and accurately?

As we( i am flying in next week too) prepare to descend on Miami next week,i hope i could get a rather clear understanding of the above questions. We Media 2008,here we come.

Here’s Lisa’s explanation, from her blog, on the current investigation by the Israeli Police.

And here’s her witty analysis of the investigation:

For me, the most hilarious aspect of this whole story is that it has united a virulently anti-Israel blogger and a virulently anti-Arab blogger – although I don’t think they know about one another’s existence. They would probably say that they are vastly different people, but in fact they have a lot in common:

1. They both really, really hate me – one because I am a right-wing Zionist lick spittle, and the other because I am a dangerous, seditious leftist who panders to the Arabs and endangers the security of the state

Here’s more from The Jerusalem Post, Haaretz and Agence France Press via The Daily Star of Lebanon.

This is outrageous – but think about it in context: professional journalists, bloggers and ordinary people throughout the Middle East are largely cut off from each other because their countries or cultures prohibit formal contact with each other. Arabs boycott Israel and can’t or won’t meet with Israelis; and Israelis face investigation for threatening state security if they venture into enemy countries.

Blogs, the net and satellite TV certainly bring us all much closer to each other. At next year’s We Media conference we’ll hear from the organizers of the One Voice movement, an attempt to use online organizing tools to unite Israelis and Palestinians around peace. In just a few weeks since the launch of our networking platform, the We Media Community has already seen new members join from all corners of the earth (please join if you haven’t already – go here) . Blogs and multi-lingual aggregators like Global Voices connect us to information and ideas that appear increasingly borderless. Censors in China and other countries must use increasingly sophisticated tools to restrict the flow of knowledge. We are global: Yes, of course.

But walls, borders and policies that emphasize our differences remain daunting challenges to a world that could be made better through media. The We Media community has a long way to go.

Go here for details on how to apply: www.newschallenge.org.

Technorati Tags: journalism, philanthropy, investment, socialentrepreneurs

They also posed the question to a few people at this week’s Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco.

Obviously it was a loaded question. I’d say fairly loaded given the widepread dissatisfaction with journalism in the U.S. Our research earlier this year  found that 72 percent of Americans are dissatisified with the quality of American journalism.

Common answers in this video: Too little relevancy, too much sad and depressing stuff.

Sigh. Another plea for happy news. Maybe that’s the Podtech niche.

Check it out here: What is Missing from Local News?

Sidenote: Podtech should have been clearer about the nature of this video. The video is explained this way:

"To commemorate Topix’s revamped site, PodTech’s Rio Pesino traveled around San Francisco and attended the Web 2.0 Expo asking journalists, bloggers, and locals what is missing from local news."

Topix CEO Rich Skrenta tells me his company sponsored the video. I have no problem with that. But Podtech should have said so more clearly. The video includes Topix logos at the beginning and end. That may be clear enough for some, or maybe Podtech regulars understand that all its content is sponsored. I don’t know if it is or isn’t, and that’s my point. I can’t tell. I don’t know what the deal is at that site.

No need to re-post here – you can read what I said at John’s blog:

Digital Influence Mapping Project: Is NewAssignment New Media?

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):

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

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.

In the past four days alone, Global Voices’ authors and editors have posted detailed reports on the conversations taking place in the blogospheres of Kuwait, Sudan, Bolivia, Libya, Indonesia, Zimbabwe, Morocco, Mexico, Molodova, China, and various part of South Asia, in addition to the numerous short items posted daily by our regional editors highlighting individual items of interest. As I write, for instance, an article arrives reporting on the suing of a blogger by the Bahraini government, followed by one from Turkey and another on press freedom in the Maldives. This material — which is Creative Commons-licensed — is linked to and used daily by journalists, bloggers and others, and is made available through a variety of customisable RSS and JSS feeds.

Last year Global Voices enhanced its multimedia offerings, with the addition of a branded compilation podcast and the launch of the Witness Human Rights Video Hub pilot program, a collaboration with Witness that resulted in a human rights video editor being added to the team. And an even newer version of Global Voices is rapidly taking shape.

Thanks to a grant received late last year, we’re on the verge of hiring an Advocacy Director who will coordinate Global Voices’ efforts in supporting online freedom of expression; and we’ll soon be looking for an Outreach Director to spearhead our efforts at putting the tools and skills required to create citizen media within the reach of more people around the world.

Another exciting project in the works is Lingua, which seeks to address a deficiency of the project of which we’re only too aware: the fact that the majority of the material on the website is in English. Inspired by the work of the team of volunteers who have been translating Global Voices into Chinese since June 2006, Lingua grew out of discussions that took place among francophone bloggers this past December at the Global Voices annual summit in Delhi, India. Lingua will comprise a series of foreign language pages where Global Voices material will be made available in translation. A key aspect of these pages will be a set of tools designed to connect and build the foreign language communities within Global Voices.

Lingua is one of several Global Voices projects we plan on discussing at the Global Voices breakout session, which will take place on Thursday 8 February at 5pm. Other areas we’re seeking to develop include more organised curation of citizen-created video; expanded photo coverage and the repackaging of some of the tools we’ve created for our own use.

As an interactive producer at P.O.V., the question of community and participatory media in this digital age is of the utmost importance to me. As we approach the redesign of the P.O.V. website for our 20th anniversary season in 2007, we have been thinking about how best to serve the communities involved with our documentary films. In a connected world, community means that people who live in different places can work together based on their common interests and goals; the notion of community, now more than ever, is no longer shackled by geography. Communities of people, who otherwise might never have met, can exchange points-of-view, share resources and work toward common goals. The creation of these virtual communities is especially exciting to us at P.O.V.: We’re thrilled to see communities of citizens actively seeking solutions to the social issues addressed by our films; communities of viewers discussing our films after every broadcast; communities of documentary filmmakers sharing their knowledge and experiences with each other; and a growing community of new-media makers learning, creating and experimenting with new technologies in their work both online and off.

Alongside communities of viewers, educators and activists, this community – of new-media makers – is the one that P.O.V. Interactive would like to do a better job of supporting and encouraging with our website redesign. Digital video has taken the Internet by storm, and huge numbers of young media makers are participating in media and making their voices heard. We can support this community by providing the guidance and expertise of established documentary filmmakers, by cultivating a virtual space where they can meet other like-minded media makers to discuss ideas and best practices and share their work, and by presenting their work on PBS.org, acting as the microphone through which their voices could be amplified.

As we think about how to best serve the diverse communities in the 2007 redesign of the P.O.V. website, we’re paying close attention to their needs and desires, and to the trends, technologies and practices of participatory, community-building sites around the Net. We would like to attend the We Media Conference to find out more about new ideas, trends, prototypes and success stories from participatory media culture. We’d also like to meet other organizations that are interested in enhancing communities through digital media to explore possibilities for collaboration. The We Media Conference speaks acutely to some of the issues we at P.O.V. are thinking about as we get ready to re-conceive our website to reflect the “points-of-view” of the various communities that we serve. We believe that attending the conference would be a wonderful opportunity to learn from the organizers, panelists and participants about building and improving P.O.V.’s online community in the 21st century.

Ruiyan Xu
Associate Producer
P.O.V. Interactive

In the case of Apple vs. AppleInsider and PowerPage, Apple, which lost, has recently decided to pay the $700,000 in legal fees the bloggers had run up defending themselves against the civil suit Apple had brought.

What’s $700,000 to Apple? 0.0005% of their profit from fiscal year 2005. What’s $700,000 to most independent bloggers or even a blogger associated with a small media company? A hell of a lot of money to come up with if you’re the one being sued, and you’re not sure if you’re going to win.

The court’s decision — finding in favor of the bloggers and ordering their legal fees paid — helps to establish that online journalists are just as entitled to protect their confidential sources as traditional print journalists. The appeals court said, essentially that it was not up to them to differentiate between the journalism done by a blogger and that of a reporter for a traditional media outlet.

I like Steve’s visions of the evolution of media, I like that he still sees newspapers as the anchors of community and journalism. I’m still a big fan of newspapers, despite the industries overall disdain for most of the new media technologies to have come along so far. The only thing I find disappointing about his visions, is that there are so few sites that are implementing the strategies he often gets asked to talk about. Which is why I guess he wins the “Innovator” award and not the “Common Sense That Everyone’s Already Doing” award.

If you’d like to see what sort of community site a newspaper can become, visit BluffingtonToday.com, which now has regular readership levels higher than 60 percent in affluent Bluffton, S.C., and penetration as high as 90 percent when occasional readers are measured, according to Yelvington.

This new digital revolution has brought even more benefits to already existing communities, which have found new means of recruiting new members and establishing links with other communities. One cannot afford to remain passive anymore; one has to be actively on the lookout for partners, colleagues, etc. I think that the emergence of social bookmarking, for example, has greatly enhanced the intellectual lives of many users, who are now trusting each other’s surfing and browsing choices. Furthermore, I have a lot of examples from my current job, where blogging and podcasting creates a huge difference in the work of the real communities.

Thus, a Transitions Online blogging project that started in Belarus allowed us to work closer with political and human rights activists, who with the help of blogging managed to raise awareness of their activities among their constituents. A similar blogging project affiliated with Transitions Online in Uzbekistan gave voice to activists concerned with women’s issues, who with the help of blogging managed to start a nationwide public debate about gender discrimination in the country. If not for the Internet, this community would have remained silent and certainly unable to speak with a loud, national voice. Raising awareness of certain marginalized communities—like the Roma in Europe—is another priority for us. Having the real Roma blog about the issues they confront in their daily lives offers the world a chance to feel the suffering of this community firsthand. It would be hard to recreate the same depth with writing an article or shooting a documentary.

In my work with Transitions Online, I’m trying to build from scratch, with the help of blogging and podcasting, new online communities around specific issues or countries. At the moment, we are also trying to launch user-driven social content websites, which would extensively rely on online communities to rank the content. For this reason, exchanging know-how with other professionals from this field at the We Media 2007 conference would be extremely important for me.

Evgeny Morozov
Director for New Media, Transitions Online (www.tol.cz)
Belarus and the Czech Republic

You’re familiar with Dirty South rap, right?

You’re not? That just shows how white-bread you are. Not that there’s anything wrong with being white-bread; I’m white, 54 years old, and a classical music buff myself, which is as white-bread as you can get. But I’m also fascinated by the many cultures that surround me, especially those that don’t get a lot of outside attention, and it seems that Bradenton is a hotbed of Dirty South rap creativity.

I need to get out to one of the local public golf clubs, vidcam in hand, and talk to some of the golfing community, too. Golf is very big in this part of Florida, but many public courses are being plowed under to make room for overpriced tract housing. The golf culture here — at least its working-class segment — is under siege and may not last long if development continues at its current rate. I hear that due to the increasing shortage of public golf facilities, greens fees have climbed to the point where many senior citzens on fixed incomes can no longer afford to play.

Several years ago I wrote about Florida trailer park culture on my personal site. That article has drawn well over 50,000 pageviews (and had dozens of comments attached to it before I made some site changes in mid-2006 and lost all of them). I think that article has proven so popular because there is little news coverage that mentions trailer parks here unless a crime is committed in a low-end one. Despite the fact that close to 30% of all Manatee County residents live in mobile homes, you almost never see one featured in local papers’ real estate sections, and there is no coverage of the many volunteer activities organized by trailer park resident councils.

Each trailer park is a community. Most have newsletters for residents, but that’s about all the press those communities get. Shouldn’t there be at least one video feature about Bingo night at the Casa Loma mobile home park? This is a major recreation hot spot for retirees — and not just for retirees who live in trailer parks, either.

(Note for non-Floridians: Trailers do *not* all blow away in hurricanes. Most of them survive just fine. But TV cameras never focus on the ones that aren’t damaged. There’s no drama in post-hurricane shots of intact mobile homes.)

Communities all around us

I have given up on the idea of “the community.” A “community” like Bradenton is full of subcommunities and subcultures. You can’t even talk about the “black community” as a single entity. There are black churchgoing groups, black motorcycle groups (and white ones), black gangsters and wannabes, and black entrepreneurs who are more likely to be found at Chamber of Commerce meetings than at black power gatherings.

We have religious communities all over the place around here, ranging from evolution-denying, hands-in-the-air, ultra-Christian congregations to Unitarian/Univeralists and Bahá’ís who believe all humans tread the same spiritual path regardless of their specific beliefs. We have a sprinkling of Jews and Muslims. Again, not a single “religious community” but lots and lots of communities, each centered on one faith or another.

It is possible to be a member of more than one community. I’m sure that somewhere, not far from me, there is a woman who belongs to a conservative Christian church and a motorcycle club, and also loves roller derby. For all I know, she is also into tattoos, and is a member of one of the cliques (communities?) that seems to surround each local tattoo studio. And she might be part of a local Republican women’s group, which is yet another type of community.

Maybe in some parts of America, Bowling Alone is the norm, but around here it’s hard to stay completely disconnected from “the community” unless you work darned hard at it. Even my wife, Debbie, who is as shy and unsocial a person as you’re ever likely to meet, has gotten sucked into the local Village of the Arts community.

Debbie is also close to getting dragged into the local roller derby community, which was founded by a woman who was already a well-known member of the arts community hereabouts.

Indeed, Sunday’s roller derby meet was well-attended by Village of the Arts people, many of whom held signs for “our” team, the Mensa Misfits, and screamed just as loud as the biker-type crowd cheering on the Cutthroat Cuties (who won in the end).

After the roller derby, we went to the nearest bar, roller derby partisanship forgotten, where we all redivided into another pair of communities: Bears fans and Patriots fans, as we watched the last third of the NFC championship (football) game.

When the football game ended, and the long-faced Patriots fans had been consoled, the “citizens video journalism community” (that’s Wheat, Chris, and me) piled into my old Jeep and headed out, worn out, talking excitedly about our editing plans for the roller derby tape we’d just shot, along with plans for the next community event we’re scheduled to tape, and about what other communities and events we ought to cover. What about the community radio community? We’d love to do videos about our two local community radio stations. And one about the local blogging community that gets together (in the virtual sense) at TampaBlab.com. And so on. We came up with idea after idea, non-stop, on our way home.

So many communities, so little time!

Well, it just jumped 8%, but S&P believes “Yahoo faces notable competition from emerging social media businesses.”

That is, the ones it hasn’t bought yet… Yahoo also today removed the ability to comment on its news articles, which it had rolled out not too long ago.

It will be interesting to watch as Yahoo tries to build and/or buy success in harnassing user-generated content.

[Oh, by the way, I'm Travis Smith and I'll be guest posting here for the next while!]

My take: Trust is a big deal, and our trust research earlier this year with the BBC and Reuters demonstrated massive shifts in media consumption based on people’s trust – and distrust – in their media. NewsTrust is like Digg, del.icio.us and other social recommendation systems – all of which help break down the value proposition of individual media brands so users can evaluate trust story-by-story.

NewsTrust will need a much bigger audience to test its effectiveness. Right now, a handful of reviews for any given story don’t offer a great deal of insight to the news.

FYI, Fabrice Florin, founder of NewsTrust, will be at We Media Miami in February. He’s a smart and experienced entrepreneur and has built an impressive beta. I’m sure he could use your feedback to make the project event better – so check it out.

Also note: NewsTrust launched as a non-profit. That doesn’t mean it appears out of the ether and costs nothing to produce. But it does mean commercial channels of financing expansion and development are out of bounds. I’d like to know if it can fly as a non-profit. Will a community of dedicated individuals swarm around it and contribute, like Wikipedia? If not, my hunch is: no, non-profit won’t work. Too little cash.

From Alan’s Nov. 13, 2006 post:

What’s happened, I think, is that newspapers have stopped asking the right questions. They’ve stopped provoking public conversation about the great issues of our time. They’ve stopped seeing themselves as provocateurs of public discourse. … Why do movies, the Web, TV, get to have all the fun? Ask all the good questions? Carry all the inspirational, challenging, provocative answers?

Good questions.

Alan was the founder of Fast Company magazine.