My friend John Bell at Oglivy asked me to provide some feedback on what Jay Rosen is up to with NewAssignment.net, a new open source journalism project.

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

Digital Influence Mapping Project: Is NewAssignment New Media?

“Are blogs really that important?” asks Jemima Kiss in this post. That’s the question renowened pollster John Zogby addressed during his presentation on the results of the We Media-Zogby poll.

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):

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

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

February 15, 2007

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

About iFOCOS

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

The “pitch this!” session is unlike any other. The tension is palatable, as people are sitting around the table, as if in a boardroom, ready to pitch their project in 3 minutes or less to professional investors and strategists.

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.

Those of you who’ve visited the Global Voices web site are probably familiar with our core mission, and the ways in which we’ve been trying to fulfill it thus far. The central feature of Global Voices has been our international blog aggregator, which is driven today by a team comprising nine regional editors, six language editors and 60-plus volunteer authors. In the two years and three months since it came online, this edited aggregator has made major strides towards helping foster a more democratic global discourse by amplifying voices from parts of the world which normally occupy the fringes of the mainstream media, if they’re even heard at all.

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For the past twenty years, P.O.V. has presented groundbreaking documentary films on PBS, working with filmmakers both emerging and established to present their perspectives to a national audience. The series has always challenged the notion of television as a one-way medium by pioneering innovative projects such as our Talking Back and Community Engagement campaigns, which promoted the idea of “two-way TV” by featuring on-air viewer responses to films and fostering dialogue within communities in local screenings. Since 1996, P.O.V. Interactive has created companion websites for P.O.V. films, providing articles, interviews with filmmakers and experts, innovative interactive features, and acting as a destination for viewer feedback and discussions after broadcast.

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What does it really mean to be an independent journalist, reporting on the activities of the titans of industry? Well, it means that you can be exposed to some tremendous risk, financial and otherwise. But a recent California appellate court legal decision puts bloggers and other citizen journalists on slightly firmer ground.

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Congratulations to Steve Yelvington for being named 2007 Online Innovator of the Year by the Newspaper Association of America.

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The modern world powered by technology has drastically altered our traditional understanding of what a community is. However, in a shift from physical to the virtual, the term “community” has retained its validity, contrary to the gloomy predictions of doomsayers terrified by the atomization of individuals and the disaggregation of communities that never happened. Instead, many new communities sprung up to take advantage of the wealth of information that became available thanks to the Internet. And although “bowling alone” has often morphed into “blogging alone,” the latter manages to amplify and stimulate a truly global conversation in unprecedented ways.

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BRADENTON, FLORIDA – Two friends and I spent Sunday evening at a local skating rink videotaping a Bradentucky Bombers roller derby match. Bradenton seems to be developing its own roller derby community. There’s already a strong one in the Tampa area, just to our North. And this is just one example of a local community or subculture that gets only scant notice from major media outlets. There are plenty of others, even in a small city like Bradenton, Florida (population 60,000).
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Yahoo was downgraded today by S&P to “sell” from “hold.” Why?

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A novel approach to collaborative filtering launched a couple of weeks ago and is worth a look. NewsTrust is tying to develop a more reliable means of finding the most trustworthy news and information for specific stories – not simply by relying on your hunches and experience with your media, but by relying on the hunches, experience and detailed reviews of a community of news junkies who contribute to the service’s ratings. (Disclosure: I’m an advisor to NewsTrust).

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Newspapers are failing, and my friend and advisor Alan Webber knows why: the problem isn’t technology, shifting business models, the rise of social networks or all the other excuses newspaper executives like to talk about. The problem is lousy products.

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.