:: ifocos :: » WeMedia 2006

Nitin Desai Draws on We Media Inspiration at Pre-IGF Public Hearing

Gloria Pan — Sat, 20 May 2006 00:58:00 +0000

I think the We Media Global Forum made a good impression on Nitin Desai, special advisor to the United Nations Secretary-General and a keynoter at the We Media Global Forum. At a pre-IGF public hearing in Geneva today, he said:

So I was in a meeting recently in London which was organized by the BBC, Reuters, and Media Center. And that meeting was much more interactive than many — very little preparation, very little paper. It wasn’t as if papers were prepared and circulated in advance on the theme for discussion. They relied much more on panels, directed panels, keynotes, et cetera. But more than that, what struck me was the way in which they brought the outside in, through the blogs.
There were people inside the room who were putting what was going on onto a blog and getting immediate responses. And a space was created there where, let’s say, in the course of a discussion, the chair would turn to the — a person who was keeping track of the blogs, and say, “Now tell us, what’s come from the blogs so far on the topic of our discussion?” And I was amazed at the distances from which comments were coming for this meeting. There are obviously many insomniacs out there in the East, because they must have been doing this at 3:00 at night or something, from as far as I could figure out. There were instantaneous responses coming from Japan, Malaysia, Egypt, India, China. And it was quite interesting.

And I thought, these are the things we must do.

Secretary-General Kofi Annan established an Advisory Group to help him organize the newly formed Internet Governance Forum (IGF), which will hold multi-stakeholder dialogue on Internet governance. Mr. Desai is chairman of that Advisory Group. Today’s public hearing was held in preparation for the first IGF meeting, to take place, also in Geneva, May 22-23. The hearing transcripts are here.

Thank you, Kiernan McCarthy, for reporting this on your blog.

TAG: wemedia

We Media – What’s Next?

Andrew Nachison — Wed, 17 May 2006 19:35:00 +0000

OK, I’m ending my post-London silence. I’ve been in recovery mode, catching up on sleep, reflecting and thinking a lot about what happened at the We Media Global Forum in London. Richard Dreyfuss spoke there about the power and danger of speed, and about the need for reflection and civil discourse. Response to Richard was pretty divided, and I’m pretty sure I heard more negative comments than positive about his talk. I thought it was one of the more challenging and important contributions to the program. You can listen and decide for yourself. I agree with Richard’s central point – that sometimes the best ideas, and responses, take time to form. So … I’ve taken some time to think.\

I hope you heard something about what happened in London – thanks if you loved it, sorry if you didn’t – and thanks especially if you were there, followed online or sent someone. If not, you can catch up at your leisure with reports, audio and more at the conference web site.

Whatever comes next, we want and need help.

To begin with, I hope the conversation here on our blog can resume – not by dissecting what worked and didn’t work in London (plenty of both), but by looking ahead and talking about ideas and actions we need to pursue to expand and improve the conversation. Let us know if you’d like to become a regular contributor to this blog.

We also need to refine and figure out if there’s any interest or relevance in the Call to Action we discussed in London. PLEASE take a look at the wiki and please tell people about it.

1. What Happened

More than 300 people from 27 countries attended the forum, along with tens of thousands of people who connected one way or another through the internet, through coverage in blogs and other media and through a live worldwide radio broadcast from the BBC. More than 47,000 completed an e-survey conducted during the forum. The forum included, as usual for us, an intentionally eclectic mix of participants, representing not only different regions but different industries, professions, personal circumstances and worldviews.

We released new data collected in 10 countries that showed, among other things, that young adults are passionately interested in news and current events, that they prefer to check many sources for their news and, no surprise, that they’re going online to get it. Here’s what else we found: nearly 1 in 3 people said they trust blogs AND 1 in 4 said they dropped a news sources in the last year because it lost their trust. Hmmm …

That’s a tough act to follow. We don’t know that we can reach more people or achieve more impact with our next projects. But we’re going to give it a shot. We do know that any success and any impact will depend on collaboration, ideas and support from around the world. We hope you’ll keep the conversation going and bring others into it.

2. What’s Next

We announced a call to action to support and participate in something big: the We Media Global Initiative.

The intent of the initiative is to harness the power of information technologies and human ingenuity for the common good by inspiring and incubating investment in bottom-up media.

To learn more about the initiative, please study and contribute to this WE MEDIA wiki.

The We Media Global Initiative is a work in progress. It’s meant to be an inspiration and provocation – and a set of specific objectives. We hope many organizations and individuals can adopt and become partners in the Initiative and then act to meet the objectives.

Please spread the word – tell people about the initiative, link to it- and help us refine the thinking and gather commitments. You can start by forwarding this note to your friends, your family, your board, your staff, your investors, your key executives and anyone else you think would be interested. Ask them all to think about how they can get involved. Can they commit time, people, resources, ideas or money?

3. Make a Commitment

Post your ideas in the wiki, or call us if you want to talk privately.

Can you help? Do you want to? How about your organization, or those of your friends? In London last week we saw two examples of corporate commitments: Picsel, a technology company based in Glasgow, said it would provide, at no cost, its mobile content system to any non-commercial pilot project. We’ll work with Picsel to clarify what that means. Meanwhile, Marcus Xiang, CEO of PDX.cn, also made a commitment in response to our call to action. He offered his Chinese language mobile blog platform to Self-Help for the Elderly, a San Francisco non-profit that works with Chinese Americans. He met the group’s CEO, Anni Chung, at the forum last week.

4. Stay Connected

Our events, research, networking and other projects are driven by our social mission: to enable a better-informed idea. The We Media Global Initiative is an explicit attempt to couple ideas and good intentions with actions.

If you’ve followed our work closely then you know that the changing nature of what we call “Know-Trust” networks is one of the three major factors we’ve identified to explain culture in the connected society. (The others are the digital everything and the empowered individual). What is trust? Good question, we don’t know exactly, and that’s why trust was the theme of the London forum and still the primary focus of our research this year. We’ll be working on some additional analysis of the poll data in the next few weeks. The global poll was itself just the first step. We’re also working with one of the world’s foremost experts on trust networks, cultural anthropologist Karen Stephenson, to help us hone our thinking on the role of trust in a networked society.

Our 10-nation study explored trust in media and governments “to operate in the best interest of our society.” Is that part of your mission? One of the theories we’re testing is that social responsibility is a necessary, core value for businesses in the connected society – and the study suggests this is certainly the case for media.

You can dig into the poll data here.

Let us know if you’d like to arrange a private briefing or consultation on what it all means.

One message we heard loud and clear in London: we need to “put more we” in We Media. That will certainly be among our goals for our next projects, and for the projects we hope will emerge long before we meet again.

5. Mark Your Calendars

The 2007 We Media forum will be February 8 in Miami. We hope you’ll be there, bring some friends AND bring some new ideas. We hope some of what you’ll bring will be successes or new ideas to fulfill the objectives of the We Media Global Initiative. We will again do our best to bring people and ideas from a variety of sectors to provoke both conversation and action.

Let me know if you have ideas or speaker suggestions for Miami – or post your ideas in our wiki.

And, of course, we maintain one small outpost of the conversation – let us know if you’d like to become a regular contributor to this blog. We need some help getting it going again. Or, please comment when the mood strikes.

TAG: wemedia

Blogagogy

Gloria Pan — Wed, 17 May 2006 13:49:00 +0000

From the Wikipedia:

Demagogy is the set of methods used by demagogues. It is a strategy of obtaining power by appealing to the popular prejudices, fears, and expectations of the public, usually through an impassioned use of rhetoric and propaganda; centered upon “raising up of the people” for something to be done.

A variation, suitable for our times:

Blogagogy is a strategy of obtaining power by appealing to the popular prejudices, fears, and expectations of citizen or participatory journalism as represented by but not exclusively blogs, usually through an impassioned use of rhetoric and propaganda – online and elsewhere – centered upon “raising up of the people” for something to be done about mainstream media, but without any real purpose or constructive action.

Trish Grier touches on the theme of blogagogy in her Corante post, “The ‘False Divide’ between Journalists and Bloggers,” when she says,

“Still, I wonder how much of the perception of the False Divide is totally that of Big Media, or if there are bloggers who like the division and have no desire to bridge the divide. Perhaps, for some, the Divide serves an ego need, or they feel that their role is best when they are free-speech pitbulls rather than as media compadres…”

TAGS: Blogging, Blogs, citizen journalism, Journalism, media

TAG: wemedia

Previous Comments

It would be a shame if bloggers — individually, or collectively — wanted to preserve the ‘divide’ in order to sustain their status as outsiders (or whatever might motivate them). There is so much opportunity for Big Media to learn from those who practice social media, and vice versa.

Posted by: Brian Reich | May 17, 2006 04:31 PM

Bloggers like Addisferenji
keep us informed as authentic news are hard to come by from oppressive regimes.

Posted by: Messy | June 7, 2006 09:53 AM

A Call to Action

Andrew Nachison — Thu, 11 May 2006 09:56:00 +0000

NOTE: The Wiki for The WeMedia Call to Action is now available. Click here to learn more.Listen to the session: Call to Action | The We Media Global Initiative
Moderated by William C. Weiss (Media Center) and Andrew Nachison (Media Center), with Jeff Belk (QUALCOMM), Jean-Marie Colombani (Le Monde), Graeme Ferguson (Vodafone), Scott Heiferman (Meetup), Dr. Paul Jacobs (QUALCOMM, pre-taped), Katherine von Jan (Infinia)Download MP3s: Part 1 | Part 2

In addition to providing a forum for people who normally don’t have a chance to interact, and as many tools as we can to enable those interactions, The Media Center is also focused on cultivating real, actionable goals to derive from its events and forums. The following is a draft from a Wiki established to help assist in that effort:

The Situation
The media plays a key role in discovering, explaining and distributing information essential to informed self-government and to fostering engaged, knowledgeable citizenship. The internet, wireless networks, and widely available mobile technologies now allow ordinary citizens not only to consume media but to create, share, aggregate, remix and redistribute it – to BE media. Ordinary people, as well as institutions that were once thought of something other than media, are now direct participants in the media, increasing their power to communicate with each other and to hold governments to account.

The Ambition
To harness the power of information technologies and human ingenuity for the common good, we propose a worldwide We Media Global Initiative to invest in bottom-up media. The initiative will connect and inspire individuals and organizations to take action – to materially do something – to give voice to marginalised groups, to encourage government accountability in all countries and to help people not only access but productively apply and derive knowledge from the extraordinary volumes of information distributed throughout the connected society. It is also designed to create and incubate business and donor networks to sustain the initiative into the future.

The Model
The initiative is built around formal and informal collaboration between committed individuals and institutions at a local, national and global level. To utilise the benefits of digital media, the initiative will focus on promoting its activities through the web, but will also use face-to-face training and knowledge sharing events to complement the internet efforts. The initiative will benefit from knowledge and networks of professional and non-professional media producers, as well as technical and financial experts, companies, policy makers, non-governmental organizations and other supporters.

The Initiative will seek to tap into the shared knowledge, collective intelligence and capabilities of a wide range of professionals and industries, including: journalism, advertising, public relations, marketing, entertainment, finance, telecommunications, research, retail, healthcare, technology, philanthropy, NGOs, social activism, policy and academia.

All will benefit from exposure to one another through the Initiative.

The model for investment will include:

Building skills – face-to-face and online training in journalism, media production and technical skills targeted at young trainees, particularly from marginalised groups, designed to deepen their representation in the media.

Building capacity – investment in digital tools, and training to broaden access to digital media. Create a multiplier effect by training professional and non-professional journalists and media producers.

Building trust – bring professionals and non-professionals together and seek collaboration with local, national and global media organisations to educate them in the methods for incorporating We Media into their missions, outputs and business processes.

Building networks – between participating professionals, trainees, experts and management within countries and globally, providing opportunities to share experiences, resources and content.

Mentors – as part of the training, provide direct links to experienced experts and, equally, provide mentoring for the experts on issues facing marginalised groups.

Airtime and distribution – media partners with local, national and global reach provide a platform for We Media.

Social entrepreneurship – Nurture investment and donor networks to create viable economic models to sustain the initiative into the future.

Make A Pledge

1. TIMEBANK

Commit one hour, day or week to mentoring or hands-on training

Commit people and resources from your organization to support the initiative

2. FUNDING

Fund a training course

Fund an online service

Fund an event

Fund WMN administration, investment, research and development and projects

3. TECHNICAL KIT

Digital cameras

Mobile devises

Etc.

4. AIRTIME/DISTRIBUTION

Commit airtime and other means to distribute WMN content

We Media Global Forum participants will be committing their time and energy to specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and tangible goals in support of this call to action. We invite you to use the comments section of this entry to join us in tthis effort.

TAG: wemedia

Previous Comments

Katy has posted a starter list of what she wants to see the MSM recognize as they think about the Call to Action.

http://wemedia.wordpress.com/

Posted by: Brian Reich | May 4, 2006 08:58 AM

Point #2. FUNDING

who’s doing the transparency here.. is there any at all? or rather how’s the transparency of the funing being approached?

thank you.

Posted by: Angelo Embuldeniya | May 4, 2006 11:52 AM

In the Technical Kit there should be recommendations on what software to use, especially on what freeware & open source software.

From Influencing, Informing, thru Living are all nice; more helpful would be:
We Support — with free, high quality advice on free, high quality softwared.

Free Voice to Text SW would be nice, too. So more conversations could be saved and referenced later with text search.

Posted by: Tom Grey – Liberty Dad | May 5, 2006 06:53 AM

I am a Nigerian journalist and journalism teacher who has been trying to understand what online journalism is all about. I’ve been receiving mail regularly from WE MEDIA and it is helping me to understand multimedia and online journalism,blogging and such other concepts.But I’m still not savvy about it all. Is there a kind of short term training you can organize or recommed for me, because I’m eager to tell my students about the new developments in journalism.Thank you.

Posted by: Mudathir Ganiyu | May 14, 2006 03:26 PM

Mudathir,

No training program could possibly be better than keeping an open mind and just diving into the online world: start your own blog and/or play with the social networking tools available for free or very little cost, join discussion lists or start your own, identify some of your favorite Web sites that address the issues you’re most interested in. Here’s an example of what one multimedia professor did with his class:

Inspired Student Media

For an overview, read The Media Center’s seminal We Media report.

Posted by: Gloria Pan | May 15, 2006 09:46 AM

the best opportunies at WE Media

Posted by: Song Za Kam | May 15, 2006 11:32 AM

It is heartening to see a community develop around the needs of those of us who, while for the most part dwell at the ‘bottom of the pyramid, are thinking, acting bi-pedal humanoids. I am reminded of a few line of the great protest song, ‘Alice’s Restaurant’ by Arlo which has remained one on my own mantras -

‘And friends, somewhere in Washington enshrined in some little folder, is a
study in black and white of my fingerprints. And the only reason I’m
singing you this song now is cause you may know somebody in a similar
situation, or you may be in a similar situation, and if your in a
situation like that there’s only one thing you can do and that’s walk into
the shrink wherever you are ,just walk in say “Shrink, You can get
anything you want, at Alice’s restaurant.”. And walk out. You know, if
one person, just one person does it they may think he’s really sick and
they won’t take him. And if two people, two people do it, in harmony,
they may think they’re both faggots and they won’t take either of them.
And three people do it, three, can you imagine, three people walking in
singin a bar of Alice’s Restaurant and walking out. They may think it’s an
organization. And can you, can you imagine fifty people a day,I said
fifty people a day walking in singin a bar of Alice’s Restaurant and
walking out. And friends they may thinks it’s a movement.’
[Ref:- http://www.arlo.net/lyrics/alices.shtml [¬©1966,1967 (Renewed) by Appleseed Music Inc. All Rights Reserved.]]
It is therefor my hope that what we have here is a movement
Regards
Martin G. Smith

Posted by: Martin G. Smith | May 26, 2006 12:33 PM

More audio from We Media available

Chad Capellman — Sun, 07 May 2006 15:13:00 +0000

Most of the sessions from We Media are now available for download in mp3 format.

Sessions with audio uploaded include the following:

Wednesday May 3, 2006 | BBC Television Centre | West London

13.40 Big Idea 2 | Media and Civic Discourse
With Richard Dreyfuss, Actor and Activist | Download MP3

14.10 Citizen Journalism Forum | Who’s Making the News?
:: BBC video on citizen reporting
:: Conversation moderated by Paul Holmes (Reuters), with Helen Boaden (BBC), George Brock (The Times), David Gyimah (Video Journalist), Andrew Hawken (MSN.com), Salam Pax (talkleft.com, via satellite)
Download MP3s: Part 1 | Part 2

15.10 Real World Forum | Meet the Digital Assassins
Moderated by Spencer Kelly (BBC)
Download MP3s: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

16.45 Real Time We Media | World Have Your Say
Live-radio and online broadcast, with Ros Atkins, Vera Kwakofi, Solomon Omollo, Rabiya Parekh, Mark Sandell (all BBC)
Download MP3s: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

Thursday, May 4, 2006 | Reuters Global Headquarters | Canary Wharf

9.45 Global Forum | We the World
Global conversations via satellite from Reuters bureaus around the world

Asia and China (with satellite from Hong Kong)
Moderated by Rebecca MacKinnon (Global Voices), with rapporteur Rachel Rawlins (Global Voices), and Jean-Marc Coicaud (UNU), Rudy Chan (China.com), David Schlesinger (Reuters), Michael Tong (NetEase.com), Marcus Xiang (PDX.CN), We Media Fellows
Download MP3

13.00 We the World (cont’d) | Middle East (with satellite from Baghdad) Moderated by Keith Porter (Stanley Foundation), with Zuhair Al-Jezairy (Aswat Al Iraq),
Wadah Khanfar (Al Jazeera), Rami Khouri (Lebanon Daily Star), Dr. Michael Kraig (Stanley Foundation), Salah Negm (BBC), WM Fellows
Download MP3s: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

14.15 Big Idea 5 | A Global Call to Action
With Jeffrey Sachs, Director of the Earth Institute (via satellite from New York)
Download MP3

14.45 We the World (cont’d) | Africa
Moderated by Rachel Rawlins (Global Voices), with Ory Okolloh (Reuters), via Satellite from Johannesburg, South Africa, Akwe Amosu (OSI), Mathew Buckland (Mail & Guardian), Wilfred Kiboro (Nation Media Group), WM Fellows
Download MP3s: Part 1 | Part 2

16.00 Business Forum | Investing in We: Where’s the Money?
Moderated by Stephanie Flanders (BBC), with Rafat Ali (paidContent), Sebastian Grigg (Goldman Sachs), Carolyn McCall (Guardian), Shoba Purushothaman (TheNewsMarket), Dave Sifry (Technorati), Chris Ahearn (Reuters Media)
Download MP3s: Part 1 | Part 2

17.00 Call to Action | The We Media Global Initiative
Moderated by William C. Weiss (Media Center) and Andrew Nachison (Media Center), with Jeff Belk (QUALCOMM), Jean-Marie Colombani (Le Monde), Graeme Ferguson (Vodafone), Scott Heiferman (Meetup), Dr. Paul Jacobs (QUALCOMM, pre-taped), Katherine von Jan (Infinia)
Download MP3s: Part 1 | Part 2 (Includes closing remarks)

TAG: wemedia

Previous Comments

I have done an article for OhmyNews with a link to the audio.

http://english.ohmynews.com/articleview/article_view.asp?article_class=18&no=289490&rel_no=3

I also sent them an mp3 of the South Asia session as it seems to be missing and I made a recording of the stream.

You’re welcome to copy it and post it here, obviously.

My report implies that the mobile technology could become a challenge to existing western media. There is space to comment there.

I look forward to more contributions around this blog and future events. I found this past week or so a bit strange as I did three reports for OhmyNews from Exeter UK based on web sources. Maybe I have got a few things wrong through not being there but I think some UK background is in the reports somewhere.

Posted by: Will Pollard | May 11, 2006 05:22 AM

what does it mean for the BBC?

Hugh Levinson — Fri, 05 May 2006 13:22:00 +0000

The day after the forum, the BBC held it’s own internal meeting to digest and reflect some of the We Media thinking, with a panel chaired by Richard Sambrook, director of global news. The contributors were : Rebecca MacKinnon of Global Voices: Dan Gillmor, Director of the Center for Citizen Media and Author of We Media: Akwe Amosu of the Open Society Institute and founder of AllAfrica.com: and Salah Negm, newly appointed News Editor for BBC Arabic TV Service, and former Director of News at Al Arabiyah.

Vin Ray, the head of the BBC’s new college of journalism kicked things off by asking what does the participatory journalism phenomenon mean for the BBC’s journalism. Is it an addition? Or an alternative? Plus he got big yuks by a digression into the joys of Fisking, as defined by Wikipedia.

Richard kicked off by asking how many of the roughly 100 staff there regularly read blogs: about 30%
And how many wrote one?: 6 or so.

Then he asked the panel: what is it about participatory media that really changes the relationship between the BBC, say, and its audience?
Gillmor: It’s a shift from lecture mode to a conversation/seminar. The BBC can bring former audience/participants into the journalism itself, engaging them in your conversation. It’s necessary, but not easy.

Sambrook: Examples?
Gillmor: Disasters are easier to find eg LA Times editorial wiki. But they shouldn’t have given up. You should keep at it.

Sambrook: How’s it playing out in Africa?
Amosu: Newspapers and broadcasters were liberalised in early ’90s and brought in bright people, but there’s no experience with which to build ethical practices. Not up to standards of best of international media. So blogs, although rare (perhaps 1000 across the continent) are often of comparable if not better standard.

Sambrook: Do they hold governments and mainstream media to account?
Amosu: Absolutely. eg Addis Ferengi, still blogging about Ethiopia, but from abroad, since death threats.

Sambrook: What’s been the impact of satellite channels on the Middle East?
Negm: Nowadays no real difference between satellite and terrestrial TV. 154 satellite channels now, including semi-porn. Blogging is very popular but there are lots of blogs financed by poliitical entities or rich businessmen to affect public opinion. Also used a lot to affect the stock market eg in Saudi Arabia.

Question from floor: Who should choose which voices to amplify and how?
MacKinnon: Blogs are sources – just like other journalistic sources. The issues are the same. Is this person credible? What are the biases? In the US some news organisations are thinking that issues raised by blogs reflect the voice of the people. They don’t. Bloggers tend to be white middle-class people with time and broadband access.
Gillmor: Transparency is not a traditional journalistic principle. One we need to add. Also need to help improve media literacy and push up our internal BS meter. We need to come clear about the conflicts and process of journalism.

Q from floor: The BBC can find stories from blogs, source talent, aggregate or produce our own blogs. Which shouldn’t we do?
Amosu: I have a read problem with journalists doing their own blogs. It should be in the story.
Gillmor: Could be in newspaper tradition of “reporter’s notebook”
MacKinnon: I found it a good way of including the material that didn’t fit in a 2 minute TV story eg on the complexity of covering North Korea.
Amosu: More and more blogs are now declaring their disclosure rules.

Q from floor: tips to make the BBC an attractive place for public storytelling
Gillmor: The word is community – creating communities around geography or interest. Would suggest stories should say “here’s what we don’t know” and invite others to fill in the gap.
MacKinnon: good example is radioopensource - stories come from listeners/bloggers and they often return to stories later.

TAG: wemedia

Previous Comments

‘Big yuks’? What does that mean?

Posted by: Fisking Central | May 6, 2006 03:51 AM

Just that for this audince, the unfamiliarity of the term – and it’s surprising appropriateness – caused some humour…

Posted by: Hugh Levinson | May 7, 2006 04:22 AM

Leave the light on

David Gyimah — Thu, 04 May 2006 21:17:00 +0000

We came, some didn’t. We blogged, others made their contributions felt in other ways, and then as the last person left the Reuters building you could almost hear the call: “leave the light on”.

In the last two days, a white piece of paper transformed into a full blown symphony of people meeting in person and online. We agreed and in some cases agreed to disagree. But all along we spoke. Some listened, others ignored the chatter, but we were aware of a presence.

Dialogue is a dynamic process, Newton’s 3rd law in motion . Whatever was started, should not end here. I met a number of interesting and innovative people. I’m sorry I didn’t get to meet as many as I would have liked, including fellow fellows.

But I,we leave with many thoughts and ideas. So to that end, thank yous are in order to wemedia: Andrew, Dale, Gloria, Beth, Chad et al and to the many who queried/interrogated vlogging, exchanged cards to catch up later e.g. Global Voices. It’s been emotional.

To the fellows, I look forward to us exchanging plans of action. A video feature of sorts should be up at some point – when I get around to it. Like I said leave the lights on.

TAG: wemedia

Thanks Chad

Andrew Nachison — Thu, 04 May 2006 17:16:00 +0000

I shut down our wrap-up party for a few minutes to thank a few of the many, many people who helped us hold the forum. My brain was beyond dead and I forgot to thank. Chad Capellman. Chad produced and ran this web site for us. Chad used to be on our staff. He moved to Boston a few months ago, where he’s now working for a startup. Thank you Chad.

TAG: wemedia

WE MEDIA : Calls to action

Philip Cesse — Thu, 04 May 2006 16:30:00 +0000

The two day WE MEDIA crush conference raised many issues, with some room for questions by the floor. WM Fellows were invited on May 2nd (the day before the WM Global Forum started) to brainstorm during an hour on some 15 major issues. WE MEDIA Director Andrew Nachison collected the answers for a tentative call to action, the wikied draft of which can be read here. The Forum’s last panel was pulled to address the same-titled concluding panel : Call to Action / The We Media Global Initiative, with the following members

- Jeff Belk (Qualcomm)
- Graeme Ferguson (Vodafone)
- Scott Heiferman (Meetup)
- Katherine von Jan (Infinia)
with William C. Weiss and Andrew Nachison as moderators

- Jeff Belk commented on how content and technology were wrapped together in the conference, and how technology is going to change in the next 5 or 10 years. Also, the bottum-uo and top-down issues are an US- anglo-centric issue, as he has witnessed things in developpimg countries done in ways that cannot be done in western countries. Mobile telephone was also very much used during the Forum, specially by those participants who didn’t use a laptop.

- Katherine von Jan is a cultural strategist ; her company, Infinia, looks into comsumer insights to elicit comsumer patterns in the next 10-15 years. She feels that consumers were absent from the conversation, specially that as they are now digitally linked, they can follow their inner drives and adjust their purchasing power to their likings. They do not go for marketted products imposed on them. As a consumer herself, she wants to listen and understand consumers first.

- Scott Heiferman from Meetup emphasizes on how people interested in less-publicized subjects meet thanks to Internet. When people have the power to unite and stand up for themselves, they do so, and MeetUp proves it. Meet Up went from free to fees, because their structure has to be paid for. That change first led to distrust whereby they lost half their traffic, but Scott Heiferman says Meet Up now has more people meeting up than ever before.

- Graeme Ferguson from Vodafone says that paying downloads are rising, in part because the price is low

questions answers questions from the floor :

- Katherine von Jan ; community can build on brand names, there is an opportunity for media companies to adapt and surf on a healthy brand. Companies have to be partners, co-create and not just sponsor.

- floor comment : the “WE” of WE MEDIA was not heard much
- Scott Heiferman (Meetup) : is it WE public or WE companies ?

Andrew Nachison invites the floor to pronounce itself on what can be done to build trust, based on the afore-mentionned draft.

- Suw Charman : the best thing to foster trust is to listen to people with experience : bloggers in the first place, because they know what they are talking about.

TAG: wemedia

Who’s going to pay for media?

jburke — Thu, 04 May 2006 15:57:00 +0000

The audience is straying from traditional media and citizen journalism, mostly done pro bono is proliferating. So where is the money going to come from to maintain huge news organizations and how will those that do media from their heart be paid?

Stephanie Flanders of the BBC led the Business Forum, discussing this issue with Rafat Ali (paidContent), Sebastian Grigg (Goldman Sachs), Carolyn McCall (Guardian), Shoba Purushothaman (TheNewsMarket), Dave Sifry (Technorati) and Chris Ahearn (Reuters Media). Below are the main points of their discussion.

- We need to stop talking about “the business model.” There will be multiple models that will work (McCall).

- Media organizations have to be agnostic about the medium. McCall used the example of the Guardian. If it still exists and is influential in 10 years but is no longer a newspaper in the traditional sense, the paper will have won.

- Anyone who creates content should be paid. Now, with current media business models, paying Citizen Journalists doesn’t make sense. But those models will arise eventually so embrace them now and prepare yourselves.

- We will always need the established media we can trust and with the plethora of information, trust becomes key.

- Editors become more important in sifting through the information for their audience; the editor/audience relationship will also be based on trust.

- You need to be big or you need to get specific (Ahearn). The middle will die.

- Old media are venerable franchises. But we have no idea where they are going. Investors are wary. The idea of brand is changing. It depends on the trust you create with your audience.

- There is a huge shift of power to the consumers who are also becoming creators. In ten years we may look back and say “Why did we call ourselves consumers?” Consumers are passive. And we can no longer describe the public as passive. (Sifry)

TAG: wemedia

Previous Comments

The possibility of global reach in specific subjects, i.e., butterflies, birds, creators of new social interactions et. al., is one of the strengths of the new order. Especially for people living in the less treaded Southern Hemisphere. So much to do in cross Equator exchange!

Posted by: Nicolas Luco | May 4, 2006 05:20 PM

So … pretty vacuuous then.

Didn’t any actual ideas or deep understanding come out of this discussion?

Posted by: phil jones | May 5, 2006 11:34 AM

The problem with newspapers isn’t the supposed threat from citizen journalism efforts–the problem is loss of revenue from advertising. When the S.F. Chronicle’s circulation drops 15%, and citizen journalism efforts have had mixed results, it’s pretty easy to see that there’s more to the loss of revenue than cit. j. (Dan Gilmor recently wrote about loss of revenue, and where it was coming from, for the BBC.)

Sifry is right about people creating–but what exactly is it that people are creating? Dave should know from a survey of the Magic Middle that what people are creating is conversation about the news. If that’s what journalists want to call citizen journalism, then perhaps they’re over-estimating what it is for alot of people and under-estimating what it is for people doing solid cit. j. efforts.

If paper’s are losing revenue, they’d be better off looking at who’s taking their ad revenue, look at the popularity of their on-line offerings, and take it from there. Don’t blame citizen journalism and “the people” other more serious factors.

Posted by: Tish Grier | May 14, 2006 08:53 AM

The question assumes that someone has to pay for media.

Information ‘wants’ to be free.

There are those who will say there is no such thing as a free lunch. There are those who will say that you get what you pay for.

I haven’t paid for news journalism for 10 years. The news I have heard/read was:
– in libraries;
– free at the point of distribution (e.g. Metro)
– Taxpayer paid (e.g. BBC);
– loaned or given (e.g. paper on train, or friend wanted my view so gave me a copy); and
– Net.

With time-shifting and concentration I have avoided 95% of advertising.

By far the most interesting, informative, and engaging journalism is Net – particularly bloggers. They pay to tell me what they know, and why. There is a marginal cost to me to receive Net journalism. I need a PC to post my tax return, make a medical appointment, write to my MP, pay my bills, etc., etc., etc. – so my PC and broadband are paid for. News and information is a bonus.

Participatory Media [or: Chip-In Media (CHIM)] does not require a business model – QED.

Posted by: Stephen Wheeler | May 16, 2006 12:30 PM

We The World: Africa

Katy Pearce — Thu, 04 May 2006 15:51:00 +0000

Moderated by Rachel Rawlins (Global Voices), with Ory Okolloh (Reuters) via Satellite from Johannesburg, South Africa, Mathew Buckland (Mail & Guardian), Wilfred Kiboro (Nation Media Group), WM Fellows, Megan Knight, Middlesex University

Running about 30 minutes behind schedule, the Africa portion of the We The World series, began as individuals marched back in from the short break.

After Jeffery Sachs spoke on eliminating global poverty, it seemed very appropriate to discuss Africa.

Thursday, May 04, 2006

We Media Global Forum – the view from Trinidad

We Media Global Forum – the view from Trinidad
Originally uploaded by caribbeanfreephoto.

posted by Katy at 10:51 AM

0 comments

Wilfred Kiboro spoke first after seeing images of Africa on the screen. He said he’s angry. “”Shame on Reuters”" for sharing images of Africa that reinforce stereotypes. He says that Sachs continues to stereotype as well. It isn’t one country, Kiboro says. “”I don’t know the Kenya he was describing,”" referring to Sachs. It takes 8 hours to fly from top to bottom. There are so many ethnic communities in different countries. African countries aren’t like European. MSM does a great disservice to Africa. Media is alive and well in Africa. “”We are not in the stone age.”"

Rachel then asked the rest of the panel to introduce themselves.

Ory Okolloh is a Kenyan blogger in English and Swahili. She started blogging at Harvard while in Law School. She got involved in Global Voices as well. Her stories and others in Africa didn’t feel that their stories were being told locally or internationally. Rather than complain about the lack of coverage, cover it yourself! “”You tell them the real story.”" She is now focusing on “”citizen journalism”" even beyond hard news. She cites photos from flickr which covers many aspects of African life. She also spoke of the Kenyan blogosphere covering a recent corruption story.

Matthew Buckand, the publisher of the Mail and Guardian Online edition. This is a profitable website from online advertising. He also blogs. He also says that Africa is complicated. Northern, Central and Southern Africa are so different from each other. He also says that looking at positive stories is almost never done by MSM. The second privately funded trip into space was in South Africa! It isn’t all doom and gloom. His newspaper has a citizen journalism site. He also mentions Media24, an interactive TV channel. He is in conflict about citizen journalism. There is a problem with connectivity. 1/160 people have access. If no access to the internet exists, why talk about citizen journalism? But on the other hand, citizen journalism is perfect for Africa. Mobile phone penetration is important. It leapfrogged straight to GSM. Entrepreneurs have an opportunity to use moblogging.

Megan Knight also discussed mobile phone penetration. She believes that South Africa will build its own kind of technology based on what it uses. She has no doubt that Africa will invest something itself rather than wait around for someone to bring technology to them. She also sees citizen journalism as coming from a longer rebellious activism in Africa. Radio, for example, is still the most important technology in Africa. MDLF came out of radio. Why not pirate or community radio in Africa? She wants to utilize regular radio, rather than internet, to enable new community activity.

Kimboro discussed that satellite and other technologies are coming in. His site is extremely popular. Trying to balance commercial interests with reader interests.

Fred from Zambia spoke next. Fred has been at the Post Newspaper for over 15 years. He came into journalism from a political background. He was involved with a political party. His newspaper was the second online in Africa. Rachel mentioned that many people consider Zambia to be a “”basketcase,”" so this is impressive.

Okolloh mentioned that all African newspapers must be online. They need the diaspora and to reach others. Even though not a lot of people are blogging, a lot of the blogging posts are circulated via SMS or e-mail. They’re also looking to get blogs printed. There are people that want to hear the bloggers’ voices but can’t reach them. Young people can’t get published in the African MSM but can get published on blogs.

Rachel asked why the Mail and Guardian had political bloggers. Buckland said that they asked all the party leaders to blog the local elections. He said that it was really exciting even in stories about forgetting to brush one’s teeth. They didn’t want to include comments because they were afraid that politicians would be attacked. http://electionblogs.mg.co.za/ They also let users blog on their own Mail and Guardian sites.

Rachel asked about Zambia in contrast to Kenya and South Africa. Fred said he took the newspaper online because of the impact that a newspaper can have on poverty. The problems are so big. There is a legacy of problems. Since the slave trade, Africa has had involvement in the free market. Now they are still trying to go into the free market. Zambia and Maylasia were at the same economic level 25 years ago. Look at Malaysia now! Rachel asked friend who he wants to consume his news. Fred said that he wants to produce for humanity.

Rebecca brought up from the chat room that people liked Kiboro’s words then asked why connectivity is more important than basic needs like clean water? Okolloh said not to take money away from other problems, rather try to achieve a number of things at the same time. She says that it is crap to “”wait for internet access while we’re dying.”" She is tired of these arguments. “”This is a global information world.”" They are not mutually extensive.

Buckland agreed with Okolloh. He says that the Rwandan Genocide wouldn’t have happened with the internet. If there was an information flow through Africa, politicians wouldn’t allow these things to happen.

Knight said in Zimbabwe that things could be worse. Not everyone needs to read the blog – just one person to read it and can pass messages on.

Kiboro says that connectivity will happen in Africa but it is about business rather than development. Newspapers are limited to pages. The internet can go on indefinitely. “”There is so much to be said about Africa,”" that is why there is a blogging explosion. Africa can leap technologies easily.

David from viewmagazine.tv, a vcast, discussed a project in Ghana taking journalists from South Africa. He says there are easy ways for people to get involved in Africa with affordable equipment. MSM could put these sort of things on television. Supply the funding and equipment and make someone a video journalist!

Rachel told Kiboro to do it. He said “”money’s not our problem.”" People with training are the real problem.

Put what Sachs said into a context. Western media “”never puts anything in a context.”"

WeJay Jeff Jarvis was delighted to hear people say that it doesn’t take everyone to be online to get the value of technology. How it is spread and tied into other things is important too. Flexibility is key! Take advantage of opportunities.

A question from the audience emerged from a gentleman from USC. He told a story about how going on the internet was a political move for students.

A question from Michaela, a filmmaker, who asked about entertainment in Africa. Kiboro said that people are involved in some film productions, people engage in online chats.

What’s the best way that outsiders can help correct the stereotypes that the MSM perpetuates about Africa?

Ore said that technology facilitated newspapers online. She mentioned that in Kenya a site for subscribers with alternative media clips. The bandwidth issues are a big problem.

From the chat room: “”Well, people have chosen _one_ of the sessions to miss, and clearly this was it.”"

TAG: wemedia ”

Previous Comments

Running about 30 minutes behind schedule, the Africa portion of the We The World series, began as individuals marched back in from the short break.

The comment on being 30 mins behind schedule is completely useless information without putting it in context of the schedule delays.

Posted by: Bakari Temwa | May 12, 2006 05:17 AM

The beauty of the news

Monique van Dusseldorp — Thu, 04 May 2006 14:33:00 +0000

Today’s We Media Global conference is taking place at the very fancy Reuters Global headquarters at Canary Wharf. Yesterday we met at the BBC, at a different style of building altogether (someone actually compared it to a run down hospital). But both buildings shared something very obvious: these are news organisations.

At Reuters, visitors are greeted by a huge outdoor screen with the latest stories and pictures, inside there are large screens as well as pictures everywhere. In the BBC reception area, there were screens with a video loop on all the great news stories the organisation has covered.

Not that surprising of course, but nevertheless my mind keeps searching for an adequate description of the effects of this abundant news display. While I was waiting at the BBC I saw the Twin Towers exploding over and over again. And drinking coffee at Reuters today, the Kuwaiti oil fields are burning behind the coffee table.

Yes, this what the news looks like. (Especially at Reuters, news looks really wonderful, actually). But somehow, using such material to promote the quality of reporting (BCC) or to decorate the beautiful conference area (Reuters) generates a feeling of unease as well. The news is too good looking.

TAG: wemedia

Previous Comments

Stop confusing news with entertainment.

News is information. Information ‘wants’ to be free. A free people require access to information as a right. When free people acquire information they make democracy work.

A free people also want entertainment. They are free, so they choose to pay for it, or not.

Media messages that are ‘packaged’ fail because it is clear that they aim to influence, not to inform or educate. Thus: Modern ‘professional’ media is failing. The people see through the package. The people seek information elsewhere. End of old media.

Posted by: Stephen Wheeler | May 16, 2006 12:40 PM

A global call to action

jburke — Thu, 04 May 2006 13:56:00 +0000

Jeffery Sachs joined the Forum via satellite from Columbia University in New York to talk about poverty and famine in other parts of the world and how the interconnected world can help those plights. The media is crucial in making the West understand this interconnectivity, how a tragedy in one part of the world affects the whole world. With this understanding, the West would be more willing to help.

Second, the media needs to help people find solutions to these problems in developing regions. The spirit and ingenuity are there, but these people still lack the resources to produce the basic necessities of life. We also need to connect these people to the world by helping them build the necessary infrastructure.

One start is the cell phone. This technology has helped connect people in imaginable ways and will continue to do so.

One comment had to do with the generalities in which we in the West speak. Africa is not one homogenous culture but we tend to treat it that way. And who is this “we” that is always mentioned when referring to the West. Who is it actually that’s going to help?

Sachs responded by saying that he has been all over Africa and he finds hunger everywhere. Lumping all of the cultures and countries under the general term Africa is thus not degrading, it merely simplifies our conversation.

TAG: wemedia

Previous Comments

Calls to action for human relief for Africa (say Ethiopia, the Soudan, Uganda and the like) have been made at one time or another in past years and decades. Commendable as it may be, just how is this going to help more ?

Posted by: Philip Cesse | May 4, 2006 10:44 AM

Genocide Indeed.

by Sogol Assadbeigi

The Arab Janjaweed militias recruited from local Arab tribes, backed by the Government of Sudan, have bombed and killed the black, Muslim non- Arab population of Darfurians. The Sudanese government while publicly denying its support to the Janjaweed militias has joined forces and arms in the atrocities, destroying their crops and poisoned their water supplies. Now they’re preventing life-saving food and medicine from reaching them. Over two million people have been driven from their homes and face hunger and disease while the remaining are beaten, raped and terrorized. Since the strife started in 2003 one thousand people are dying every day and over 400,000 have been estimated dead already and the death poll may reach an excruciating 1 million.

Over 130 countries, including the US, Canada, the UK and most other EU countries have signed an International Convention committing them to act to prevent genocide anywhere in the world. Thus many governments are not identifying genocide in Darfur and refute all claims.

In 2004, the U.S. Secretary of State, Colin Powell travelled to the devastating refugee camps in Western Darfur and found that the government is evidently and directly involved in committing the genocide. In addition to the Bus Administration, many others, such as Senator John Kerry also denounced it as a genocide.

Time is precious more than ever now. In a matter of months an entire generation of people is about to be whipped off of the face of the planet through starvation, disease and murder and all we are left with is a devastating memory. Together we must urge our government leaders to take the necessary actions to stop genocide and build an independent judiciary in Darfur.

Posted by: Sogol Assadbeigi | May 5, 2006 08:40 PM

Citizen wotsitsname – that film (wemedia)

David Gyimah — Thu, 04 May 2006 12:58:00 +0000

Everyone knows the film, even if they can’t remember the talented director. The film has become part of our visual landscape and set a standard for those who would follow.

And the film was. . . the one that showed the beating of Rodney King, the film showing the botched landing of a plane on the sea off the coast of East Africa, images from London’s tube, from 911, Hurricane Katrina and there are countless many more.

These were films made by Citizen Joe and Josephine. Citizen Journalism has been here as long as we’ve told stories. In the late 1600s leading to 1700s in the UK, story telling turned professional. Addison and Steele, famed for Tatler and the Spectator, both of whom had different professions, could loosely count as early flag bearers of a name that today is a red flag to many.

So citizen journos are not a new phenomenon, but like an army has been professionalised. And on the theme of the army, we might count it’s citizen contributors as members of the Territorial Army – citizens who have their day job, but enlist all the same. No one gets heated about that. Oh, I’m being naive.

It’s not whether we embrace CJ or not. It’s here, has been here, and ain’t going anywhere. In fact the digital economy will ensure CJs increase in number. Some organisations have welcomed blogs, but that’s just one facet of the digital journalist.

There is more we could do, much much more. Not because we’re compelled to, but because we’re interested and need to facilitate greater understanding, education, entertainment and participation amongst ourselves. CJ adds to that. Listen to the CJ podcast and to panelist Rachel North – one of the survivors of July 7th bombing.

So to my one contribution – a perhaps nonsensical idea. Emily Bell ( Guardian ) said this morning, most of the UK’s TV talent is in reality TV. So the programme is this. Broadcasters who claim to have the CJ firmly in site should set up a CJ model news made by guess who to compete with their own bulletins.

The broadcasters facilitate the making of the programme offering support but the editorial comes from we the people. If YouTube and Metacafe are anything to go by, it should make an interesting programme. It may even have a shelf life on broadband.

The best film ever, Citzen Kane? Or was that made by you.

p.s I’ll blog my thoughts on what I thought of the Citizen Journalist debate , as one of the panelists later

TAG: wemedia

Previous Comments

I don’t get it.

Why do we need broadcasters – we have the Net.

Being patronising towards those journalists who are new to journalism doesn’t sound like a recipe for success to me.

Posted by: Stephen Wheeler | May 16, 2006 12:53 PM

Forward thinking it is. Trust in stories will be in the hands of the public. Journalist will have a role as a moderator of UGC first. That is the best they can do to anticipate on what will definitely happen anyway.

Posted by: monique de haas | June 6, 2006 03:02 PM

Day One audio of Richard Dreyfuss, Digital Assassins and the Citizen Journalism Forum session

Chad Capellman — Thu, 04 May 2006 12:30:00 +0000

Media and Civic Discourse With Richard Dreyfuss, Actor and Activist
Download MP3

Citizen Journalism Forum | Who’s Making the News?
A conversation moderated by Paul Holmes (Reuters), with Helen Boaden (BBC), George Brock (The Times), David Gyimah (Video Journalist), Andrew Hawken (MSN.com), Salam Pax (talkleft.com, via satellite)
Part 1 | Part 2

Meet the Digital Assassins – Moderated by Spencer Kelly (BBC)
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

TAG: wemedia

Previous Comments

Hi, I’d love to hear the forum on citizen journalism, only none of the links are valid. Any hints on where I can find the mp3s?

Posted by: Bill Dunphy | May 5, 2006 10:52 PM

9th of May, and still no MP3s, Bill.

Could it be that the absence of medium is the message?

–
Chris

Posted by: Chris Bidmead | May 9, 2006 07:40 AM

The mp3s are up and ready in our archives. The links here should be fixed very shortly.

Posted by: Gloria Pan | May 9, 2006 09:50 AM

The CD is not dead (yet) because MP3 is not CD quality. The CD is not dead (yet) because some people have still to learn how to download. The CD is not dead (yet) because ther is not (yet) Bluetooth in the MP3 player.

Talking about the death, or not, of the CD is wrong-headed on two points:
– The CD is a medium, all mediums are replaced (e.g. telegraph, vinyl);
– Its not about the medium – it’s about the messages.

Talking about “viral marketing” misses the point. Citizen Journalism [a.k.a. Cip-In Media (CHIME)] does not use marketing, it uses reputation – the ultimate measure of trust.

Parts 2 & 3 – meeting the ‘Assassins’ … how embarassing was that… Are there really that many people in Big Media who don’t have a clue?

Posted by: Stephen Wheeler | May 16, 2006 01:24 PM

We the World

William Smale — Thu, 04 May 2006 12:28:00 +0000

While in Southern Africa there is a contrast of Zimbabwe with an arguably “non free” press and South Africa with an arguably “free” press, both countries have similar problems with accessibility isssues for the communities. These issues relate to basic infrastructure issues, such as access to the hardware for blogging, which illustrate the digital divide between developed and developing worlds.

What can new media do to enable to digital have nots, such that they are inlcuded from the beginning of the new wave rather than being left behind.

TAG: wemedia

Previous Comments

http://enoughzimbabwe.org is a project I helped set up last month that aggregates Zimbabwean blogs and multimedia. The front page is edited by a fantastic blogger who goes by the name Zimpundit. Thought that might be of interest.

Posted by: Marshall Kirkpatrick | May 4, 2006 12:11 PM

Middle East media in major flux

Tarek Atia — Thu, 04 May 2006 12:09:00 +0000

Satellite television has been the primary driver or catalyst of the changes going on in the Arab media sphere, says the session’s moderator — Keith Porter from the Stanley Foundation. Porter positions panArab news channels like Jazeera and Arabiya as the spearheaders of this move towards a much more aware and accountable media regionwide,

Rami Khouri — editor at large of the Lebanese Daily Star newspaper — continues this conversational thread by arguing that Arabia and Jazeera are more balanced than any US organization in the way they present more than one point of view on issues like the war in Iraq, for instance. Khouri is so sure of this that he says he is willing to bet a double felafel (or roast beef if thats your fancy) on this point.

Khouri clarifies what he calls an important misconception — that its not that the media that is deliberately inciting anti american sentiment in the region, because this media is just a true mirror of that sentiment among a significant portion of the public. He also denies that Jazeera is a mouthpiece of al Qaeda.

300 million people in 23 countries can absorb even more serious news channels, says Salah Negm, who is working on a new project to establish a BBC Arabic TV channel.

Meanwhile, via a live satellite feed from Iraq, Zuheir Al-Jazeiry of Awsat al-Iraq talks about how the sudden boom in media outlets there may have confounded people at first, but with time the public began to clearly identify the leanings of each organization based on their editorial line.

Jihad Ballout of Al-Arabia argues that the emergence of more channels has also helped improve the work habits of Arab journalists, since healthy competition — which did not really exist in the region previously — tends to do that.

Michael Craig of the Stanley Foundation sees the new media landcape as a reflection of an emerging rebirth of Arab nationalism, which many had already declared dead.

The discussion then moves in the direction of whether or not this newfound and active information society will actually result in more political participation, more audience participation, more interaction between media and society, etc. Too many subjects, not enough time… In any case, the answers may still not be there, but what is clear is that the region’s media landscape will never be the same.

TAG: wemedia

How should the media affect our world?

Gloria Pan — Thu, 04 May 2006 10:05:00 +0000

This post was contributed by Kookie Habtegaber of MediaChannel

The media has the most impact and attention in the North, where life is more or less impossible without telecommunication and digital connection. Since the population of this part of the world also has a monopoly on the world’s riches and resources one way or another, its media should use their position to create a constructive dialogue between different parts of the world. It should make the “masses aware” of how their action/lifestyle impacts the life of those across the globe, specifically those in the South. Here, I am not referring to churning out bad news after bad news; a war here, a disaster there, often without giving an in-depth analysis of the situation, but to showing the link, create awareness, and inform the public about issues that affect millions of lives on the bases of our interconnectedness.

Thus, it is not just about presenting the fact, but also the interpretation of the fact. For instance, how many news agencies who reported on the war in Congo also added the list of multinationals that concurrently operate in that same country extracting minerals? True, most people including myself can not do without our mobile phone these days, but if there would be a survey on whether people are willing to pay extra so that they know the coltan on their mobile phone connecting them to their loved ones is not at the same time depriving others the same opportunity across the globe, I am sure most people would be willing to accommodate; after all what is the point of believing in progress without the belief in the good will of people.

Media outlets of course get their funding from advertising, governments, and often are owned by private shareholders who have their own agenda and want a guarantee on their profit margin. Boards of directors, individual programmers, editors, commissions etc, all have an influence on how things are presented and on emphasis given to certain issues. The way one processes information, one’s personal belief, even at a subconscious level, leads to some level of subjectivity. As Nietzsche contended, no pure fact without interpretation could exist.

Yet many media outlets and journalists alike, claim to tell the truth and continue their rhetoric of objectivism and impartiality. If we take the case of public media, who are less likely to be biased, it should be acknowledged that at times the interest of the “country” will censor certain news analysis or affect the way it is presented. For example, the BBC is re-knowned for its accurate, impartial, objective and exhaustive reporting. Yet, should I have been critical of the BBC world radio (the only news outlet I had to get news at that time) for broadcasting hours after hours about the invasion of Iraq and the weapons used as if it was some kind of science fiction episode? Or does the BBC have an allegiance to British involvement, to protect the interest of Britain? Is the BBC’s mandate first and foremost to serve the British people and its government? After all, it is the British tax payer who is paying for it. The answer is to the latter is probably yes. Otherwise there would not be national media outlets in the first place. In reality, media outlets often will not cover all stories with the same vigor; some issues are more important than others, commercial interest lead to self-censorship and so forth. Therefore what is essential is that the directive and priorities of media outlets should be clear and honest even if this means acknowledging vested interests.

This is even more significant since globalization of the media and new sorts of communications has made information imperative and moved the role of the media to the center stage, influencing all aspects social life. Hence, why not use this leverage and try to make it the media’s (especially the public media) responsibility and duty to inform us and create awareness about how connected we really are. For instance, by putting the link between `why are we wealthy and they still poor¬¥, between political and economic decisions, by promoting discussions about consumerism and its impact on environmental degradation and persisting poverty. But, by also reporting about positive activities that are happening around the world; creating impetus for people to participate and get involved for advancing a better and just world.

This of course carries a bias towards a certain view of the world, promotes some issues more than others, but it is my opinion it should not be seen as undesirable. Once we have acknowledged that the media is not objective and will not cover all issues with the same weight and depth, perhaps then the media can play a constructive role towards a more even world. It can play a role in balancing the good and evil, it can help tip the balance towards the good for all. It might be in human nature to be selfish, but it is also in human nature to show solidarity. If this part of the world was to change places with the deprived part, perhaps the reactions would have been the same; sometimes indifferent and self-interest, and at times amity and involvement.

TAG: wemedia

Previous Comments

Great site…

We don’t always realize how much power the media has. The media, is the the power in the world. I am part of a grass-roots effort to make real change using blogs and it is working. It is growing very quickly, faster than I ever imagined and it is all viral.

We are calling it the Million Person March

www.warriormonks.org

Posted by: Jalali | May 4, 2006 08:13 AM

Media are the guardians of a public trust – we place our trust in media to give us the facts. It is from this public trust that they get the title of Fourth Estate, alongside politicians, and churchmen.

However, like all such trusts, it is based on the assumption of a limited commons. Only so many can afford the printing presses, studios and masts, or disc presses.

The Net is different. Already, poor communities are finding ways of using shared computer and fast wireless acess to publish. There is no post 1970 superstar photographer to match the sixties ones like Lord Lichfield, or David Bailey – we are all photographers now. Now that we all have mobiles with digital cameras in them, we are all news photographers too.

Even if Nietzsche’s contention, no pure fact without interpretation, is correct the best solution is to hear as many reports (a.k.a. opinions) as possible.

You might think that Big Media is not helping itself by being so obviously contemptuous of their public responsibility – their public trust. I, for one, wouldn’t argue with you.

Don’t ask where 40 million blogs came from – and counting [ www.technorati.com ] people want to chip in. Don’t you?

Posted by: Stephen Wheeler | May 16, 2006 02:07 PM

The Internet and China

jburke — Thu, 04 May 2006 08:57:00 +0000

Co-founder of Global Voices Rebecca MacKinnon led a discussion about how technology is affecting Chinese society with rapporteur Rachel Rawlins (Global Voices), and Jean-Marc Coicaud (UNU), Rudy Chan (China.com), David Schlesinger (Reuters), Michael Tong (NetEase.com) and Marcus Xiang (PDX.CN). Although Westerners originally thought freedom of expression and information on the Internet would bring down the Communist Party, the powers in Beijing have become adept at searching out and striking down the information they deem dangerous.

The Internet only reaches about 8% of the Chinese population and this 8% is fairly homogenous; a “thin layer” of educated urban elites. The CPC doesn’t necessarily feel threatened either. Most people stay away from political talk on their blogs, discussing everyday topics like movies, music and their daily lives.

What’s more, there is no organized group of Chinese political bloggers. Dissidents are individuals; this is what the West hears most about.

The Internet may only be at 8% penetration, but mobile phones are a powerful force, reaching up to 4 times as many people. The appeal of mobile phones is portability. But despite 3G technology, the design of mobile phones is not very conducive to Web surfing. Xiang figures that because of this factor, computers will become more popular for surfing the Web.

TAG: wemedia

Previous Comments

A definite highlight of the conference. I think this reaffirms the notion that those inside a particular country may have differing ideas on what needs to be talked about may be different than what the west may want to talk about. It shouldn’t be an either/or practice, but also listen to the other voices out there.

I really do not follow China much, but Andrew Lih’s comments about China’s history and the work with Wikipedia were such a needed and valuable contribution. It also provided much more depth to the regular stories that I may read about China.

Posted by: eduardo avila | May 4, 2006 06:40 AM

Tom Glocer, CEO of Reuters: Where Does Trust Fit In?

Lisa Goldman — Thu, 04 May 2006 08:23:00 +0000

Tom Glocer – Reuters
Originally uploaded by We Media London.

Tom Glocer, CEO of Reuters talks during the session “Big Idea 4: The Democratization of Media – Where does trust fit in?” at Day 2 of the We Media Global Forum. Photo by Paul Hackett, Reuters
Highlights from Tom’s talk:

The growth of participatory media is in inverse proportion to citizens’ participation in democracy. There has been a huge drop in the percentage of people who take the time to vote in elections; in the USA the voting percentage was 69% n 1975; today it is 55%. So why are voting numbers declining in the western democracies?

It’s not because people are apathetic. Maybe it’s because people feel that their voices are not being heard by politicians through voting; blogging is their way of making their voices heard. Of participating. That has some pretty scary implications for the future of democracy.

Some of those themes came up in the trust poll the BBC did before the conference. Trust in media inthe developing world is highest; but in the UK, US and Germany, the population sample trusts government more than the media.

In other words, people of the western media do not seem to feel that they are part of the democratic process.

With so many sources out there, and such a vibrant dialogue going on, who do you trust? What is the role of the more traditional media companies? Used an example of a photo sent in by a citizen, purportedly of deer in front of a forest fire in Dorset. The Reuters staff were able to fact check carefully, and concluded that the photo came from Cass Sunstein’s bok “Laws of Fear.” Photo was taken in Yellowstone, and “deer” are elk. Point is, Reuters has money and staff to do careful fact checking, but who fact checks bloggers?

On the other hand, it can’t be true that only professional journalism is the answer. Participatory journalism can be amazing – great content. The important thing is to find a balance between participatory and professional journalism. For example, citizen journalists can send us photos and we can fact check them.

It’s up to all of us to strike a balance between incorporating outside content an dcreating inside content to get our own message across and encourage people to contribute because they appreciate our values. We do not want to give the message that we have a monopoly on truth. It’s not an “either-or” choice. It’s a complex choice.

Our interaction with GVO is about how to bring GVO into the Reuters environment and make it richer for everyone.

My observation: Tom seems to be participating a complementary view of MSM and citizen journalists/bloggers. Let Reuters report the facts, and let the bloggers debate the issues raised in the Reuters report and add nuance. This is actually a much more conciliatory MSM approach than that which was on display during the first day of the conference.

TAG: wemedia

Previous Comments

this is really about a later session but nowhere to link to yet.

Re OhmyNews. there is a proposal for a version in Japan, working with Softbank

http://english.ohmynews.com/articleview/article_view.asp?at_code=314174&no=277280&rel_no=1

Posted by: Will Pollard | May 4, 2006 06:02 AM

I don’t trust that the media gets the whole story.
When Kerry testified in 1986 that he was illegally spending Christmas in Cambodia (in 1968), the media did NOT report this as false — nor that there are no records to support this claim.

Kerry got 3 purple hearts — how many days did he spend in the hospital? (0, I think).

Dan Rather’s on-screen lie, and near cover-up.

On the other hand, most of what I think I know about the world DOES come from the media, so it is extremely helpful, even when I don’t fully trust it.

Posted by: Tom Grey – Liberty Dad | May 4, 2006 06:11 AM

Intriguing point about the decline in voting and the rise of blogging. Many people must be asking why should they vote for one sleazy politician instead of another sleazy politician. Most people I speak to say politicians are all the same . In the game to line their own pockets. Right or wrong that’s the perception. A blogger can say what they want and if they are clever listen to the feedback that they get. Mainstream blogs don’t really work because they have corporate agendas. Nobody pays me for what I write. As for the facts if I blog a protest I make sure someone I know and trust was there. I don’t make it up!

Posted by: Ceridwen Devi | May 4, 2006 06:44 AM

What happened to Al Jazeera as part of the Middle East session? Shown in advance as there, but not so. There was a question and the suggestion of bias but nobody from al Jazeera to answer

Posted by: Will Pollard | May 4, 2006 08:48 AM

Tom needs to get a clue. It’s not about ‘reporting’ it’s about a conversation.

Meeting a blogger on the Net, or reading a newspaper columnist, for the first time is no different from meeting a stranger in the pub. After an hour or so you start to get a feeling for how much this guy’s stories are fact, fiction, opinionated, offer valuable insight, give alternative interpretations, checked, intelligent, thoughtful, amusing, plugged in, etc..

Reuters trade on their reputation. Bloggers are no different – 100%. Professional journalists (i.e. they are paid to do it – this is the the only distinction) are only very rarely experts on what they report (i.e. by accident). Bloggers are nearly always experts (i.e. by design) on what they blog. Professionals who blog are easy to find – a step up from bumping into people in bars.

Reputations are earned over lifetimes, and lost in seconds. Bloggers who have been around a while understand this.

Reputation: Trust earned over time, by experience. See that? No ‘professionalism’ required. No ‘resources’ required. The name is the brand – a brand is a name – no more, no less.

News is fact. Facts are subjective – they demand interpretation. Citizens are always on the spot. There will always be more citizens than professional journalists, because the journalists are all citizens and the citizens are now all journalists. Only a few are paid to do it – many are prepared to do it to free the information.

Love writing, love recording, love filming, love reporting? Chime with me – Chip-In to Media, on the Net.

Posted by: Stephen Wheeler | May 16, 2006 02:35 PM

Geert Linnebank welcomes the We Media Global Forum to Reuters

jburke — Thu, 04 May 2006 08:10:00 +0000

Head of global news at Reuters, Geert Linnebank welcomed the delegates to the new worldwide headquarters of the world’s largest information company.

He said that new content publishing capabilities are the latest challenge to established news organizations. Reuters has always used the latest technology available to distribute the news. Linnebank said that technology at the end of the day is just an enabler, a means of getting the message to the audience.

Journalists need to redefine their relationship with the world. The megaphone model of communication is being replaced, which represents a real challenge to the traditional roles of mass media.
We will need editors to lead the discussion between traditional and new content creators. We can’t forget the values they’ve upheld forever; balance, fairness and accuracy.

There is great news for us journalists – new media is already leading to a much richer telling of the story. Now is not the time to stand on the side and see what happens. The market is evolving and we have to help it.

TAG: wemedia

Previous Comments

“We will need editors to lead the discussion between traditional and new content creators – to discuss what? Traditional journalists have nothing to teach bloggers. If they did, they would be blogging. If they did, they would be the biggest names on the Net. If they did, blogs would never have stood alone and would never have become mainstream alongside Old Media. If they did bloggers would be beating a path to Old Media’s door…

We can’t forget the values they’ve upheld forever; balance, fairness and accuracy That may be true of Reuters and the BBC but, to many of us, there are too many examples of the opposite. There are those who say; Old Media is dead, shed no tears for Old Media, it goes to a better place. Whether history will agree is entirely another question.

Posted by: Stephen Wheeler | May 16, 2006 02:44 PM

WeMedia 2006 Participants

iFOCOS — Wed, 03 May 2006 20:11:27 +0000

Tom Glocer, CEO, Reuters
Mark Thompson, Director-General, BBC
Jeffry Sachs, Director, The Earth Institute (via satellite from New York)
Nitin Desai, Special Assistant to the Secretary-General of the United Nations
Richard Dreyfuss, Actor and Activist
Wadah Khanfar, Director-General, Al Jazeera Network Channel
Carolyn McCall, CEO, Guardian Newspapers
Richard Sambrook, Director of Global News, BBC
Dave Sifry, CEO, Technorati
Nikesh Arora, Vice President of European Operations, Google
Scott Heiferman, Founder & CEO, Meetup.com
Chris Ahearn, President, Reuters Media
Rafat Ali, Editor & Publisher, paidContent.org
Nihal Arthanayake, DJ & Music Journalist
Ros Atkins, Presenter, World Have Your Say, BBC
Timothy Balding, CEO, World Association of Newspapers
Jihad Ballout, Director of Corporate Communications, Al Arabiya
Angela Beesley, Board Member, Wikimedia Foundation
Emily Bell, Editor-in-Chief, Guardian Unlimited
Jeff Belk, Senior Vice President, Qualcomm
Kamla Bhatt, The Kamla Bhatt Show
David Brain, European President & CEO, Edelman
Helen Boaden, Director of News and Current Affairs, BBC
George Brock, Saturday Editor, The Times of London
Merrill Brown, Founder & Principal, MMB Media LLC; Media Center Advisory Board
Matthew Buckland, Publisher, Mail & Guardian Online, South Africa
Rudy Chan, ex-CEO, China.com
Jean-Marc Coicaud, New York Head, United Nations University
Adam Curry, Podcaster, Curry.com
Nitin Desai, Special Assistant to the UN Secretary-General
Richard Dreyfuss , Actor and Activist
Graeme Ferguson, Director of Global Content, Vodafone
Stephanie Flanders, Economics Editor, BBC Newsnight
Dan Gillmor, Author, We The Media
Nik Gowing, Presenter, BBC World
Sebastian Grigg, Partner & Managing Director, Goldman Sachs
David Dunkley-Gyimah, Video Journalist/ Senior Academic
Andrew Hawken, General Manager, MSN Portal Experience
Paul Holmes, Global Editor for Political and General News, Reuters
Dr. Paul Jacobs, CEO, Qualcomm
Jeff Jarvis, Blogger, Buzzmachine.com
Spencer Kelly, Presenter, BBC Click
Rhami Khouri, Editor-at-Large, Lebanon Daily Star
Wilfred Kiboro, CEO, Nation Media Group, Kenya
Megan Knight, Middlesex University
Dr. Michael Kraig, Director of Policy Analysis & Dialogue, Stanley Foundation
Geert Linnebank, Editor-in-Chief & Global Head of Content, Reuters
Sunil Lulla, CEO, Times Global Broadcasting Co. Ltd., India
Rebecca MacKinnon, Co-Founder, Global Voices
Carolyn McCall, CEO, Guardian Newspapers
Andrew Nachison, Director, The Media Center
Salah Negm, News Editor, BBC Arabic TV Service
Rachel North, blogger, Rachel from North London
Rabiya Parekh, Presenter, World Have Your Say, BBC
Bertrand Pecquerie, Director, World Editors Forum
Dale Peskin, Co-Director, The Media Center
Keith Porter, Director of Communications & Outreach, Stanley Foundation
Shoba Purushothaman, CEO, The NewsMarket
Scott Rafer, Chairman, Wireless Ink
Rachel Rawlins, Managing Editor, Global Voices
Richard Sambrook, Director of Global News, BBC
Mark Sandell, Editor, World Have Your Say, BBC
David Schlesinger, Global Managing Editor, Reuters
Karen Stephenson, President, Netform; Media Center Advisory Board
Neha Viswanathan, South Asia Editor, Global Voices
Katherine von Jan, Co-CEO, Infinia Group
Marcus Xiang, CEO, PDX.CN, China
William C. Weiss, Chairman & CEO, The Promar Group; Media Center Advisory Board
Dean Wright, SVP & Managing Editor of Consumer Services, Reuters

Online Curators:

Brian Reich, Senior Strategic Consultant, Mindshare Interactive Campaigns
Suw Charman, Executive Director, Open Rights Group
Vanessa Fabiano, Editor, Shortcut: A European City Blog

Thousands of comments reviewed by 4 moderators

Monique van Dusseldorp — Wed, 03 May 2006 16:11:00 +0000

The BBC website is a main news source for many people around the world. The site actively invited visitors to discuss items in the news, in the section Have your say. See also this page where the BBC asks visitors for their ideas, pictures and video files.

I had a chat with moderator Sally Taft, also at the conference and showing the moderating process in the exhibition area.

How many people come to the BBC site to discuss the news?: ‘The number of contributions we get is very different depending on the topic. Sensitive issues like Iran, the Mohammed cartoons or recent political allegations can result in thousands and thousands of comments within days. And we read all of those before they get posted online!”

Most discussions run for a few days before they are closed – and there is a difference between actively and fully moderated discussions. Contributions from registered website visitors are published immediately for the less sensitive debates, but still reviewed after the fact.

To get an idea: yesterday a discussion was started on ‘How can we solve The Baby gap‘ , and to date, 851 comments are published – and 428 comments still await approval. In general, one out ten contributions is considered too off-topic or too rude, racist or sexist to publish (the percentage goes up for politically sensitive issues). Sally is one of a team of 4 moderators at the BBC that do nothing but rejecting or approving contributions all day, from 8 in the morning to 11 in the evening. And of course there are also people who just read the discussion and do not comment.

Do how popular is the Have your say page?
“So far today, 97.615 unique visitors visited the section, and they together generated 319.000 page impressions. Of those, 62.816 were attributable to the Baby gap discussion. But discussions about Prince Harry or Home Secretary Charles Clarke generated around 130.000 and 150.000 page views per day when the debate was still on”.

How many people are now handling contributions from the audience?
“The moderators are part of the ‘User generated content’ hub that was established last year after the London bombings. The unit also works with 6 journalists that are actively solicitting information from the audience on behalf of various BBC producers. They also through and organise the incoming photo’s and stories, and they save and store relevant cases and eye witness account. And an additional 4 journalists were assigned specific regions, in and outside the UK”.

How does one get to be a Have your say moderator?
“I had already started working at the BBC working in digital text editing, and moved from there. Reviewing discussion contributions all day is not something you want to do forever, but it is a very nice job to start with!”

TAG: wemedia

Previous Comments

Free speech is off the menu at the BBC?

Posted by: Stephen Wheeler | May 16, 2006 02:46 PM

Who are the Digital Assassins…?

Juliette Powell — Wed, 03 May 2006 15:12:00 +0000

As a We Media Fellow or a ‘”WE-J”, I was asked to blog around today’s 3:10 pm session, provocatively titled: Meet the Digital Assassins. Having just arrived at the BBC and still slightly jetlagged from my flight from New York, I decided to ask what exactly a Digital Assassin is before blogging about it. What in fact are these √Åssassins expected to talk about, i wondered. Embarrassed at my lack of knowledge, I turned to one of the panel participants and inquired why they had agreed to speak as a Digital Assassin, and what exactly that means to them. The response completely took me by surprise: ” I have no idea what it means. I simply received an email inviting me to speak and here I am”. So I pushed, probing for some deeper meaning of what the panel is all about; I didn’t get far; the panelist reiterated my suspicion, he has no clue. Strangely, I received a similar response from one of the WE Media Center staffers…Now here I sit, typing away, trying to figure out who’s who and what’s what. If the conference staffers and the panelists don’t know, who does? I daintily did a quick search on the net – Google would know, they know everything! Sure enough, the first item that came up can be found here posted from the ‘fringe’. Actually, if you look at the author, you’ll notice that he is in fact a BBC employee. Since when is the BBC considered the fringe? From the little that I’ve seen of the WE Media Conference so far, it seems that we need to practice, not just preach the idea of critical thinking, where each of us, whether panelist, blogger or audience member, take responsability for shaping this conference, as opposed to letting the conference shape us.

Below are the main points made by the 30 Digital Assassins, each invited to sit at a table with a group of traditional media representatives. :
-who are these Digital Assassins? Who do they trust?
Answer: they are consumers who represent a psychographic, a group of people, across several demographics that are more likely to get news from websites and more likely to write blogs than read them.

- Are they assassins or are they partners?

Table 27 Richard Harris is asked the following:
‘”Tell us about your media day, someone from the corporate world wants to know. “‘My homepage is the BBC and it allows me to get an idea of what is going on in the world but it is the syndication browsers that give me the details of the world that I care about, I work from home; I haven’t read a paper for the last 10 years; I re-feed the news I find relevant through my site.”

Table 22 Mike Ryan talks about his favorite mode of information delivery
Lillianne, Why do they call you a Digital Assassin?
“I have no idea- saw a posting and was curious”:
Mike watches the morning news on his hand-held device as opposed to his computer or his television. He likes U-Tube. He doesn’t watch TV at all in fact.

Table 23 Neil Roberts
Neil says: “I tend to go to a blog that builds up a reputation and go with it, like word of mouth. It’s far more effective than spam. I am a programmer; I have quick breaks so I like to scan news/info aggregators on the net.”

Neil wants to know whether the members of the mainstream media at the table isn’t relevant- he wants to know what they think about the way he experiences media. So, I asked Peter, also at the table. Peter has worked in the wired news buisness for 16 years now : “Your media usage is quite utilitarian as opposed to general’
“How do you decide what gets reported”, Neil wants to know of Neil’s company policy. “‘Our clients decide’”. responds Peter. Ah, that brings me to the following question, are we talking about a group of Digital Assassins or simply a group of Digital Dissidents?

TAG: wemedia

Previous Comments

I was surpised with my time with our digital assassin who was very good at telling me stuff, but didn’t think to ask me anything. So much for conversation. All a bit ill thought out and a bit daft.

Posted by: Graham Holliday | May 3, 2006 12:10 PM

I think the term “Digital Assassin” is a metaphor for what’s going on in media today. Like any metaphor, it takes a little thinking to be able to express clearly what the metaphor means. Pehaps Juliet didn’t get the answers she was looking for because people were trying to follow a pretty packed conference program and didn’t want to take the time to give a thoughtful answer. Since she obviously was the one person who WAS thinking about it, it’s too bad she didn’t offer her own thoughts of what it means. To me, a “Digital Assassin” is someone who lives in the digital world, embracing innovation, experimenting with new content forms and delivery, and celebrating the connectivity to millions of viewpoints everywhere. They are “assassins” in that they are at the vanguard of change in the mediascape that’s killing, if you will, old media, old business models, old thinking. I hope others will join me here and give their understanding of what the term means.

Posted by: Gloria Pan | May 3, 2006 12:45 PM

The whole point of being a ‘digital assassin’ is that you shouldn’t be taken seriously. Hence.

My new blog gets around 100 unique visitors a day, and around five times as many hits (excluding search engines). This has being growing day by day since I launched the site a week or so ago. At least a 1/3 of people have been coming back. Not bad for a blog with no big names and no money behind it.

Clearly people don’t mind me extolling the virtues of not being taken seriously because they wouldn’t keep coming back.

Posted by: Jack P Toerson | May 3, 2006 12:57 PM

As one of the Assassins, I agree with Graham that the whole thing was a bit ill thought out. We received a scanty brief in advance, little more before we were ushered in and in the 20 minutes allocated to the “conversation” no real time to establish a dialogue. My experience was a quick-fire round of questions I had no time to consider and had to answer off the cuff (let alone respond to with thoughtful questions of my own). It was an interesting idea, but perhaps too gimmicky in its implementation – I’m not sure what the conference delegates were expecting from it, but I doubt it was quite what they got.

Posted by: Anna | May 3, 2006 03:37 PM

I agree with Gloria Pan… I thought the same idea of a metaphor… Digital Assasins… I would say slowly killing old media.
I think it’s rather a peyorative adjective… and I think it’s sad that the panelists didn’t know what they were there for… at least they could have tried to explain if they agreed or not with this idea of being called assasins…
I’m proud of all the people who try to follow up with new techonolgies and adapt the way of thinking and working to these.
If this is being assasins…. OK… in every change there’s people needed to start!

Posted by: MIB | May 3, 2006 05:09 PM

Today was a let-down and this session was the worst of it. Congrats to the BBC for trying to come up with something different (we need more experiments, but this one frankly didn’t work). To quote the increasingly annoying nomeclature of the day, how are we supposed to decode this? A sub-conscious attempt at brand assasination? We’ve managed to wear out the term “conversation” through repetition and we’re only half-way through. A plastic presenter reading tired jokes off his clipboard and a bunch of new media early-adopters plonked in our midst “to make conversation” does not make for meaningful engagement. Ill-timed and a cringeworthy attempt at hip-ness. Perhaps if these “assassins” *groan* represented some facet of YOUTH, CULTURE, anything not already represented at the forum it may have been more meaningful.

Posted by: .M. | May 3, 2006 05:25 PM

My assasin (same table as Graham above) spent the entire time relaying how much time he spends downloading stuff, and which technologies he uses (iPod, bit torrent, etc). He was pretty excited about it! He didn’t ask us questions at all, he was a man on a mission to unload to us all of the ways he spends time online.

What’s fascinating to me is that I spent time this morning prior to today’s start speaking with two BBC people who were very excited about the Digital Assasin segment. They learned a lot of information about how technology is used and how content is appropriated. I think that depending on where you are on the new media continuum, you will have gotten a different perspective from the discussion.

Posted by: Birdie Jaworski | May 4, 2006 03:45 AM

The digital assassins programme was something which the BBC have been invested in for about 2 years, and was intended as a method of informing BBC staff at all levels of emerging technologies and the ‘fringe’ public of those technologies use.

It was a very succesful program within the BBC as more time was allocated in the sessions held internally, and is in principle an excellent idea; bringing those citizens who are actively creating and using new technologies to bypass ‘old media’ – generally this focusses on new ways of consuming media; bittorent,gnutella/limewire,DRM circumvention,time lapse TV and recording habits (thereby circumventing ad models) – thoroughly interesting and hard to find data really.

I was invited to attend wemedia as a digital assassin but unfortunately couldn’t make it; my experience with the program through the last two years was interesting so I am dissapointed that attendees weren’t able to get much out of it.

Posted by: alfie | May 4, 2006 04:02 AM

Being one of the ‘assassins’ I have to agree with the comments about the lack f briefing and also clarity about the role. That said I did get a lot out of the experience and this was due to the individuals on the table I was allocated being interested, polite and curious.

I was thankful for the opportunity and maybe on this occasion the experiment didn’t work but you got to break some eggs to make an omelette

Posted by: DK | May 5, 2006 05:56 AM

Big Idea 3

Eduardo Avila — Wed, 03 May 2006 15:02:00 +0000

Live blogging

16:00 Big Idea 3: Conversation with Richard Sambrook (BBC)
-interviewed by Andrew Nachison (Media Center)

Question: Have you heard anything here that has opened your eyes to send you thinking in another direction?

RS: We easily get trapped in either/or mindset: MSM vs. Bloggers, get over it. We live in a remixed mash-up world.

All of us here at the conference are connected somehow, there are others not here who are not wired and their voices are not being heard. There are social gaps as well and how we plug those gaps is the big issue.

AN: The world is already flooded by info. What happens when that explodes with even more info?

RS: Success is traditionally measured by numbers. In an on-demand environment, appreciation is valued.

AN: New objectives?

RS: BBC must be about appreciation. We are all in this 24 hour world and the immediacy of the internet, but we must provide depth.

AN: How you provide content? Looking at it from the bottom-up perspective, how does this fit?

RS: Citizen journalism can be broken down into eyewitness, blogs and opinions, breaking news, and “Dan Gillmor” moment, as there are experts out there. How to reach and enable the public to improve our service?

AN: How is the conversation within the BBC?

RS: We’ve made big strides. 2005 was a watershed year, recognizing availability and value. This year we must talk about how to access depth of expertise.

Question: Definitions of citizen journalism. Totally missing is small j journalism. What is your definition of citizen journalism?

RS: We are never going to arrive at a agreed-upon definition, I personally don’t like the definition. Citizen media or user content. There are some blogs that want to be about journalism and others about their cats and many in between. Embrace diversity of viewpoints, for example Global Voices.

Question: Audience being more knowledgeable than journalists. To what extent do the language you use to describe content provider and audience is outdated? Does it still hold value?

RS: Everything in between is possible. It is still in play, many just want to consume. For those people that want to do it themselves, fine. There is a mass audience, some want to play and others want to just consume.

TAG: wemedia

Previous Comments

If the Net was a real revolution it would, of course, simply destroy Old Media.

One key trend is now obvious – the more partisan the medium, the more likely it is that the Net will kill it. National newspapers – already terminal. The BBC – trusted to a degree, but a narrow, heavily edited, output means it will never be unassailable.

Beware: Evolution can be rapid, there is no time to prevaricate. Met any nice Neanderthals lately?

The World is not flooded by information. The World is flooded with people who want to know everything, who think it is possible to know everything, who think that knowing everything is helpful… One day they will realise that they can be happy with just the Net and a life of their own. Then the information they need and want will be there, waiting for them. The rest they will ignore. That’s the price of freedom and power – you learn what you don’t know, and you live with it.

Citizen journalism does not need to be broken down into categories. It’s this simple: There are those who want to chip in, and there are those who want to listen, and there are those who don’t want to know. Chip-In Media (CHIME) is flexible.

If I want to chip in on brain surgery I will be ignored – I have no reputation.

When I want to chip in on the the subject of the Net people listen. My reputation is still uncertain – but I am informed, I offer insight, I give value. I sow the seed of reputation. Recognition will follow.

Posted by: Stephen Wheeler | May 16, 2006 03:11 PM

Citizen Journalism Forum – Who’s Making the News?

Andrew Lih — Wed, 03 May 2006 14:14:00 +0000

14.10 session moderated by Paul Holmes (Reuters), with (left to right on stage) George Brock (The Times), Helen Boaden (BBC), David Gyimah (Video Journalist), RachelNorthLondon (blogger), Andrew Hawken (MSN.com)

Live blogging:

Paul Holmes introduces the session, with a video of 4 minutes talking about citizen journalism’s role in the London bombings,

RachelNorthLondon (http://rachelnorthlondon.blogspot.com/) talks about blogging the London bombings, typing the story urban75 london community message board and eventually was asked to blog for BBC.

George – is it newsworthy? What goes through mind with any – does it help fill out the picture, and is it true? Difference between journalism and communication.

Helen – “It’s easier when you have a massive story.” Someone had the wit to film their clock, to record what time it happened. The “truth” is important in reporting.

David – Compare journalists with the army – conscripts are drafted to fight in the army. Compare professional journalists and citizen journalists. Characterize it as a dynamic flow. Citizens have always been repositories for stories but now say, “I want to tell the story myself.” Traditional media is grappling with this.

Andrew – A reader of RachelNorthLondon, and understood the story by reading her diary. But he says he would not have seen the content if it had not been for the BBC pointing to it. Blog content can add to your understanding of the story.

Paul – Was originally going to have Salam Pax (the Iraqi blogger) by satellite, which gave inside view of what was happening in Baghdad. Some doubted he was really in Baghdad. How to decide what’s true and credible when bombarded with so many messages?

Helen – BBC has a desk with good journalists who check the facts and determine “what’s real.” For example, Daily Mirror photos of soldier abuses were quickly identified as fakes by photo experts.

George – Anybody can be a publisher or broadcaster, consumers will choose, sifting, popularity rankings.

Paul – What questions do you ask yourselves when blogging?

Rachel – She first wrote about personal events, then became more political blogger, and “how it affected me.” She was originally a news hound, but became even more so after July 7. She checks out IndyMedia or Al Jazeera for other perspectives. You are pulling information and cross reference with your own experiences, and has caused her to question everything.

Andrew – Journalists are fallible, makes mistakes. Need to be transparent when they are wrong, to gain trust over time.

George – Papers should have the words “About 80% of this is true.”

Helen – Journalism is journalism, it’s not history.

Rachel – For the blogosphere 80% is pretty good, “because about 90% of it is rubbish.”

David – There are bloggers that we go to for news, and it’s allowed us to find new voices.

Paul – Values, is there a room for values on the MSN portals?

Andrew – Yes, we have to be 100% accurate in the headlines that are written.

Helen – Being “bullied by blog” is very real. Need to see the downsides as well as the upsides.

Rachel – Bloggers will to a certain extent settle on an issue and become a feeding frenzy. It’s representative of human nature, rather than journalism. People get excited about stories.

Question from Leonard Witt, PJ Net – People don’t need mainstream media to decide what’s the truth. Journalists have never been good at ruminating. How does the MSM see themsleves as part of the greater truth?

David – Journalism is also a business, there is not an issue with what Leonard’s saying.

George – MSM never set themselves up as the ones deciding the truth. Reliability is most important, and it’s an iterative process.

Question from South Asia perspective – Bloggers perceived to lack credibility, which is not valid.

Andrew – Important how good it is, how insightful it is.

Report from chat rooms – MSM is the necessary starting point of conversation for bloggers. Some sentiment there is a resentment of bloggers.

Panelists list blogs they read, including BBC, Slate, and others.

Question from audience – Blogs generally don’t feed back into mainstream media.

Helen – They do, by email and other ways.

Andrew – Regarding Iraq, citizen journalism as deepening understanding of a subject, corrective function,

Helen – Reminds folks of older form of citizen journalism – the phone-in. Provides an amazing diversity of opinions, plurality of voice, challenge to conventional wisdom.

Paul – But someone selects who gets heard.

Rachel – About 50,000 people read her blog a day

Question from Michael Tippett, NOW – If you have folks on the ground reporting, editorial views, and Technorati and Digg, where does MSM fit into the mix?

David – Citizen journalists don’t have to fit into the mainstream.

Group question – Where are we going to be in debate in one year’s time? What can we do to get there?

Andrew – I hope we won’t have the same debate. We need to move on, from journalist vs. blogger. The discussion should be about quality. Developers and technical people need to be involved

Rachel – Like Guardian and BBC let people feed directly into stories, introduce some element of moderation. Lightly moderated talk boards, feed into main story to enhance it.

David – Corporations to adapt will have greater dialogue. There is a way now to have a dialogue.

Helen – Rather than wanting something to happen, describe what will happen in time – There will be a terrific hoax that someone will take stock of their quality as a journalists. A citizen journalists will get hurt or “even worse” and who is going to look after this person?

George – Three things won’t change – words will be important, there will still be MSM, those “MSM will be upturned by something we can’t foresee.”

TAG: wemedia

Previous Comments

Journalism is not history, but, should journalists need to put their stories into historical context?

Posted by: Thu Nguyen | May 3, 2006 09:49 AM

I keep hearing that phrase – 90% (or some other high number) of the blogosphere is rubbish.

What does that mean? Every blog out there is someone’s baby, someone’s words and deep thoughts. Any particular blog may not speak to everyone, but it speaks to its author.

To cover the blogosphere with a blanket of negativity takes away the experiences that any individual and perhaps mostly unheard blogger is trying to relay.

This doesn’t mean that any blog is accurate in some kind of news media sense. But any person’s experience and emotion is valid for that person, and certainly not “rubbish.”

Posted by: Birdie Jaworski | May 3, 2006 09:50 AM

I think the entire hit counter/ number of links from/ rankings really affect the perception of what is a good vs. “rubbish” blog.

Posted by: eduardo avila | May 3, 2006 10:55 AM

I think it would be clearer if we talk about 2 things:

* News facts – which can come from citizen journalists – and I think the news media will continue to present the overall picture of what is happening

* Comment – and here I think the bloggers are very important. In particular I have the feeling that normal media does not think like I do – or like my friends do. They seem to have an agenda and are tolerant ofcompanies that you shouldn’t be tolerant of – and at least sometimes to politicians that you shouldn’t be tolerant of.

I think that part of the reason that we have been so slow to respond to global warming is that it has not been reported with urgently in the media. Because it upsets the powerful.

What has not been mentioned is that it’s the job of the media to speak the truth to power – and currently they aren’t great at that.

Bloogers have nothing to lose and that’s why they can be outspoken – they’re the voice of the people! And they have passiion about what they do – they really want things to change – they don’t just want to report the news.

So I think part of this debate should be about the overall role of the media – and then if that is in place, it would change the way forward!!

Cheers

Mike

Posted by: Mike Bennett | May 3, 2006 11:40 AM

Most of this conversation seems to be focused on the same old thing: reporting.

There’s no discussion about interaction, and no discussion on transparency. Credible bloggers have transpanency and the ability to interact, which is something that journalists, for the most part, are *not* allowed to engage in at the same level that bloggers are capalbe.

Even if they are “disaster bloggers”–getting noteriety thru the old-fashioned “if it bleeds, it leads” way, their transparency and ability to interact are key components to their success.

Eduardo is also very right on another level–numbers and links, right now, show authority. People go to blogs where there is a perception of authority based on numbers. Hence, the biggest “citizen journalists” are often those folks who used to be journalists. When there isn’t a on-the scene disaster, a person’s “cred” or “authority” is what makes them a credible cit. j.

Posted by: Tish Grier | May 3, 2006 02:09 PM

So much of this polemic has been focused on the antagonism between the citizen journalist and the professional journalist. What of the symbiosis between the two? It seems that at every point in this discussion the coexistence of CJs and PJs is mutually beneficial. I have no idea, but I would imagine that CJ blogs increase traffic to nearly all mainstream news sites.

If the issue is truth and a public better informed to make political decisions then I would say that the combination of the two will better achieve this end, or at least making available truer forms of the truth. Even the antagonism has produced fruitful debate.

Who will guard the guards? Who has guarded the press in its role as the fourth estate? Will bloggers be a check to the traditional media that people have become increasingly disenchanted with?

Posted by: Doug Hughes | May 3, 2006 06:41 PM

George: Does it [presumably blogging] help fill out the picture, and is it true? Difference between journalism and communication
+
David: Citizens have always been repositories for stories but now say, “I want to tell the story myself.”

We can’t see the difference George. That’s why you’re redundant.

David: Journalism is also a business
Err, no it isn’t – most bloggers are not paid to do what they do, just as most artists are not paid to do what they do. Of course, that might be because most citizens have seen too much artistry in professional journalism…

Helen: There will be a terrific [presumably Net-based] hoax [and therefore?] someone will take stock of their [bloggers?] quality as a journalists
To quote Baloo the Bear: “Get with the rhythm Baggy!” Hoaxes are a part of everyday Net life today. Hoaxes are a part of everyday life everywhere. The quality of journalism is highly variable. You, no doubt, believe everything you read in the Daily Sport… GIVE ME A BREAK!

Helen: A citizen journalist will get hurt or “even worse” and who is going to look after this person?
At last, a serious subject, but one that requires far more attention than we can give it here, as this story illustrates:
http://www.rsf.org/country-47.php3?id_mot=246&Valider=OK
Judith Miller worked for the New York Times, but she was still thrown in pokey for not revealing her sources. So much for Big Media who trumpet their independence and their ‘protection’ for ‘professional’ journalists who live in countries that [supposedly] value free speech and [claim] leading roles among the World’s democracies, and who never tire of telling the rest of us how it’s done. Right on. We let the Net lose anonimity at our utmost peril.

George: …things won’t change – words will be important, there will still be MSM… etc.
Dream on George. Ignorance is bliss, eh?

Posted by: Stephen Wheeler | May 16, 2006 03:50 PM

Want a romantic version of Star Wars?

Monique van Dusseldorp — Wed, 03 May 2006 14:09:00 +0000

Future Forward is the name given to the small exhibition in the BBC studio where today’s Wemedia global sessions are being held. British Telecom mans a small stand, showing off the early results of a research project modestly called ‘New media for a new millennium‘ (NM2) .

Future Forward is the name given to the small exhibition in the BBC studio where today’s Wemedia global sessions are being held. British Telecom is showing the early results of a research project modestly called ‘New media for a new millennium‘ (NM2) .

It happens to be one of those multi-country-multi-organisation beasts supported by the European Union’s Framework 6 research programme, and has 13 partners in 8 countries working on new software tools for broadband TV. But let’s not dismiss it right away: companies like BT, Telefonica, Sony, Cambridge University and the like would not dedicate time and staff to it if they did not feel they could use their results in the near future..

What NM2 is developing is a set of software tools aimed at creating personalised productions from a larger pool of original content. Putting together writers, TV producers and technology experts, ‘story structures’ are developed, and tags added to separate and identify different programme elements. From genre, to topic, to place in the schedule. All this with the idea that individual users have very specific desires: do you want the 5 minute version of this particular show, you want to decide on length and genre and be surprised otherwise, or do you want a 20 minute romantic version with this particular main character? The ‘adaptable interactive videos’ resulting can be viewed online on the NM2 website..

As its says on the site, NM2 aims to identify ‘a new mass market media genre’. I am sure we will only see what it really means when all the programme elements as well as the tools to re-combine them, are released to the wider audience. After all, it might not be so much about building your own personal TV show – it may be much more about sharing your own TV show with others…

TAG: wemedia

Previous Comments

To become a reality IPTV needs carriers to move the political goalposts.

This is already happening in the US:
http://dw.com.com/redir?destUrl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.politechbot.com%2Fdocs%2Fensign.telecom.bill.072705.pdf&siteId=22&oId=2100-1035-5807278&ontId=1035&lop=nl.ex

European carriers, and BT in particular, cannot expect an easy ride for such changes.

All of which avoids the obvious question:
What is IPTV for exactly?

If carriers stopped spending money on political machinations they could easily afford the cost of testing very big bandwidth. If carriers stopped spending money on putting electronic toll gates for information, at the front of every home and business, they could afford to instal very big bandwidth instead.

If we all had very big bandwidth we would be paying the carriers enough to make a living.

IPTV, or NM2, means
– Charging for connection; and
– Charging the user to download; and
– Charging the publisher to upload.

Or: Charging three times for one message.

Ergo; It seems to me that this is about the carriers making more of a killing than a living. I don’t mind people making a living, but I do mind people killing my bank balance…

Posted by: Stephen Wheeler | May 16, 2006 04:12 PM

What makes a citizen journalist? Any disaster will do

Monique van Dusseldorp — Wed, 03 May 2006 13:26:00 +0000

In the Ciziten Journalism Forum being held right now, the main question is: “What can we do to energise this army of citizen journalists out there?”

A short BBC item first highlighted how many videos and images made by citizens are already part of mainstream news reporting. Tsunamis, bombings, floodings, accidents: there is little that can happen these days, without witnesses responding immediately, recording images, audio and video. And at the moment, many of these materials reach mainstream media: within 15 minutes of the London bombings on July 7 2005, the BBC started receiving images that were later shown on TV and on the BBC websites. And companies like Scoopt are assisting citizens to sell relevant material to the media.

In the Citizen Journalism Forum being held right now, the main question is: “What can we do to energise this army of citizen journalists out there?”

A short BBC item first highlighted how many videos and images made by citizens are already part of mainstream news reporting. Tsunamis, bombings, floodings, accidents: there is little that can happen these days, without witnesses responding immediately, recording images, audio and video. And many of these materials reach mainstream media very quickly: within 15 minutes of the London bombings on July 7 2005, the BBC started receiving images that were later shown on TV and on the BBC websites. Companies like Scoopt are now also assisting citizens to sell relevant material to the media.

Of course citizen reporters are more than the free ears and eyes of mainstream media companies – but this is often where it starts. Or as “Rachel from North London” told the audience, ‘I was writing as a survivor’. Rachel is an active weblogger who started blogging after being trapped on one of the trains during the London bombings. She got treated for minor injuries in the hospital, made it home through a chaotic London, and found a commuter message board where people had been posting messages all day long. ‘I felt a a real need to tell my story, and was frustrated with there being no reports on what had really happened in my train’.

A few days later she got a request from a BBC journalist to write an online diary on the BBC website for seven days after the bombings. “Passengers from my particular train started to follow my blog – in my case my blog was born out of a need to tell the truth and to just tell everyone what had happened. I was writing as a survivor.”

So rule one: major news events can make ordinary citizens into citizen reporters, just like that. Or as someone on the panel said: this simply was newsworthy material. But what else can citizen journalists do?

TAG: wemedia

Previous Comments

“What can we do to energise this army of citizen journalists out there?”

Provide the tools and the training for groups who typically do not own digital means to become citizen journalists. I wonder what the ratio of journalism schools to populations might be in some of the developing world. Training can help instill some of the qualities needed by citizen journalists.

Posted by: eduardo avila | May 3, 2006 10:33 AM

Old Media has always used ordinary [more often the not-so-ordinary (a.k.a. Stringers), in a privilaged position, true - but the ordinary too] to gather its news.

The only thing that has changed is that the Net has levelled the barriers to entry to publish.

The result is that, to the delight of many, niche subjects are being properly covered – for the first time – and citizens are, at last, free to tell their own story without having to suffer the humiliating experience of seeing a reporter and editor make a hash of it.

You fall into the trap of only thinking that what are considered newsworthy events today are what makes good blogging at risk of severe embarassment – probably from your children.

This is because there is a big difference. The Net has feedback. Shysters are found out very quickly already. The Net arrived without the ability to find the cream – and skim. Reputations all started uncertainly – particularly given Old Media’s inability to get a clue and get connected.

But, nature abhors a vacuum. New sites and software that help to find, filter, store, classify, and judge are arriving every day. The best will win hearts and minds and within as little as two years the Net and bloggers will be the primary source of news and news comment.

Posted by: Stephen Wheeler | May 16, 2006 04:30 PM

Media & Civic Discourse

Anni Chung — Wed, 03 May 2006 12:29:00 +0000

Richard Dreyfuss, Actor and Activist

Commented on previous panel—–

- Entertainment. The future of network news. It wasn’t meant to make money. Now it’s all about profit.

Part of the Oxford U Research in teaching curriculum. Not teaching civics affects the Republic of Democracy. Sovereignty given over to Special Interests.
* Reason
* Logic

Old rules of dissemination no longer applies. Now, facts are known instantaneously everywhere.
Now, people can’t afford to think things through. Knowing things cannot prevent doing damages.
It’s still better to know than not to know. We should still be thoughtful about our actions.

The new technology is demanding how we re-think things. The challenge is how fast and how responsible can one make decisions nowadays?

From the western world, we don’t allow or honor debate, thus no civility. Democracy is sharing with those who dissent.

Technology can lead us to fatal decisions, it does not allow for any errors.

He is in Oxford to develop tools that can be taught with fun and reason, logic.

Questions from participants:

* How are traditional filmmakers doing?

DF: Storytelling for over 3000 years, hope people can go back to that.

* Fostering civic discourse is not profitable, sometimes people in media have to look at the bottom line. Question is whether the market can sustain media and democracy?

DF: People will keep lowering the bar if news equate entertainment. One has to think quality and not just profit.

* Can new technology support more diversified opinions?

DF: The pressure now is media don’t have the time to respond thoughtfully.

* How much conventional media contribute to civic discourse?
DF: How do you create a generation of kids who like to learn?

DF: The war on terror—–journalists are not demanding clarity, not asking enough questions.

** How students from 4 different countries contribute to citizens democracy. Cite students’ questions.

DF: older versions are virtuous. Nervous about this generation running the new technology, they are not giving it enough time.

TAG: wemedia

Previous Comments

From the western world, we don’t allow or honor [sic] debate Speak for yourself – I see it every day, on the Net.

Now, people can’t afford to think things through. Knowing things cannot prevent doing damage Demonstrably not true. As my grandmother always used to tell me: “More haste, less speed”.
This is a question of philosophy. If the good people of Oxford University had taken the trouble to think this through (!) they might have concluded that there is a weakness in our poor education:
– We do not teach our children even the basics of philosophical reflection – and only logic is seriously alluded to as a technique for evaluation;
– We only teach our children deductive skills through the cause and effect they find in basic science classes (much to the chagrin of many scientists);
– We teach our children a fixed curriculum – thus ensuring that most are taught by rote thus ensuring that the vast majority never discover lateral thinking:
http://www.edwdebono.com/debono/lateral.htm
let alone develop such skills; and
– Creative teaching is limited to expression at near the lowest level (the double entendre is about as far as it gets).

A proper education would mean that the next generation would have the skills to make decisions in a World that can offer all the information you could ever want.

Fostering civic discourse is not profitable, sometimes people in media have to look at the bottom line. Question is whether the market can sustain media and democracy?
This question manages to completely avoid adding any value to this discourse. Fostering public discourse is of enormous value over time. Why else would the vast majority of democracies be richer today than any other form of government? The question should be:
Is the public trust of fact dissemination and taking the chair in the political discourse between the politicians and the citizenry best served by preserving resource limitations that create publishing oligopolies and limiting free speech through copyright monopolies?

Given the severe penalties imposed by an oligopoly of Press Barons engaged in a race to the bottom of the lowest common denominator of ‘News as Entertainment’ with the power to set the political agenda, the vast wealth that Private Media Barons corner as parasites on the political discourse, and the ability of Old Media to undermine true discourse by pandering to, and promoting, special interests – I know my answer.

The real question is:
Can we make the Net into a place where citizens feel they are plugged back into the politics? Again, I believe that the current state of affairs speaks for itself. The best Net is an unregulated Net.

Posted by: Stephen Wheeler | May 16, 2006 05:13 PM

Free mobile software for a good cause

Monique van Dusseldorp — Wed, 03 May 2006 12:23:00 +0000

The WeMedia conference is about ‘a society connected by digital networks’ and most of the discussion revolves around the new relations between audiences and traditional media companies. So far little has been said about specific technology advances – we know about blogs, we do, but what else is out there?

One of the companies showing off its services in the small exhibition in the BBC studio where the event is held today is a UK based mobile software house called Picsel. What is their offer? In short, their main product is mobile-phone independent software which can be used to view a wide range of document types while on the move (see their demo ). The software usually makes it into the world bundled with mobile phones or specific content services, but can also be purchased online by individuals.

As part of Picsel ‘s contribution to mankind – or as part of their ongoing marketing effort if you take a more cynical view of the software industry – Picsel CEO Imran Khand just announced that Proviewer will be available at no charge to specific non-profit organisations: “We invite all non-commercial pilot projects that endorse democracy of access to contact us!”

TAG: wemedia

Previous Comments

What functionality would you like to see on a mobile device? What would most help journalists?

Posted by: Mark Selby | May 3, 2006 03:02 PM

WeMedia 2006 Program

iFOCOS — Wed, 03 May 2006 12:09:13 +0000

BEHOLD THE POWER OF US

We Media fosters collaboration through conversations, connections and shared knowledge. We organize conversations with individuals and organizations who are using the Internet as a collective force of unprecedented power. We create a setting for you to talk to them and to each other – a day for learning, sharing, ideas and opportunities.

No ordinary conference, We Media is about how we create a better-informed society by collaborating with one another. Arrange meetings in advance or during scheduled meet-ups at the conference.

The Media Center encourages engagement by all attendees. We rely on attendees to set the course for We Next.

Wednesday May 3, 2006 | BBC Television Centre | West London

8.00 Registration

9.00 Welcome | The We and The Media
With Richard Sambrook (BBC) and Andrew Nachison (Media Center)
:: About the conference
:: Dale Peskin (Media Center) introduces the WeJays: Emily Bell (Guardian Unlimited) and Jeff Jarvis (buzzmachine.com)

9.15 The Power of Trust Forum | How Trust and Empowerment Shape Our Global
Society

:: Transformations: Know-and-Trust
:: BBC-Reuters-Media Center global poll
:: Conversation: Trust, Media and Society, moderated by Merrill Brown (Media Center), with Nihal Arthanayake (BBC), David Brain (Edelman), David Schlesinger (Reuters), Karen Stephenson (Media Center)

10.15 Future Forward | Exhibition, networking and break
Moderated by roving reporter Andrew Nachison, with BBC, British Telecom, Integrated Media Lab, Microsoft, Nokia, Picsel

10.45 Big Idea 1 | Media and the Connected Society, Part 1
With Nitin Desai, Special Advisor to the Secretary-General of the United Nations

11.15 Leaders Forum | Media and the Connected Society, Part 2
Moderated by Nik Gowing (BBC), with Akwe Amosu (OSI), Timothy Balding (WAN), Wadah Khanfar (Al Jazeera), Nikesh Arora (Google), Mark Thompson (BBC)

12.30 pm Future Forward: Exhibition, networking and lunch

13.40 Big Idea 2 | Media and Civic Discourse
With Richard Dreyfuss, Actor and Activist |

14.10 Citizen Journalism Forum | Who’s Making the News?
:: BBC video on citizen reporting

:: Conversation moderated by Paul Holmes (Reuters), with Helen Boaden (BBC), George Brock (The Times), David Dunkley-Gyimah (Video Journalist), Andrew Hawken (MSN.com), Rachel North (blogger Rachel from North London)

15.10 Real World Forum | Meet the Digital Assassins
Moderated by Spencer Kelly (BBC)

16.00 Big Idea 3 | Conversation With Richard Sambrook (BBC)
Interviewed by Andrew Nachison (Media Center)

16.20 Future Forward | Exhibition, networking and break

16.45 Real Time We Media | World Have Your Say
Live-radio and online broadcast, with Ros Atkins, Vera Kwakofi, Solomon Omollo, Rabiya Parekh, Mark Sandell (all BBC)

18.05 Tomorrow | Meet the World at Reuters
With Dale Peskin (Media Center) and Dean Wright (Reuters)

Thursday, May 4, 2006 | Reuters Global Headquarters | Canary Wharf

8.00 Registration

9.00 Welcome | We, The Media and The World

With Geert Linnebank (Reuters)
:: From yesterday to today, with Dale Peskin (Media Center)

9.15 Big Idea 4 | The Democratization of Media – Where Does Trust Fit In?
With Tom Glocer, CEO of Reuters

9.45 Global Forum | We the World
Global conversations via satellite from Reuters bureaus around the world

Asia and China (with satellite from Hong Kong)

Moderated by Rebecca MacKinnon (Global Voices), with rapporteur Rachel Rawlins (Global Voices), and Jean-Marc Coicaud (United Nations University), Rudy Chan (China.com), David Schlesinger (Reuters), Marcus Xiang (PDX.CN), We Media Fellows

10.45 Break and Exhibit Rooms
With BBC World Service Trust, Reuters Foundation, We Media Global Initiative, Interviews

11.00 We the World (cont’d) | South Asia (with satellite from Delhi)
Moderated by Rebecca MacKinnon (Global Voices), with rapporteur Rachel Rawlins (Global Voices), and Sunil Lulla (Times Global Broadcasting), Neha Viswanathan (Global Voices), Khamla Bhatt (The Khamla Bhatt Show), WM Fellows

12.00 pm Lunch and Exhibits

13.00 We the World (cont’d) | Middle East (with satellite from Baghdad) Moderated by Keith Porter (Stanley Foundation), with Zuhair Al-Jezairy (Aswat Al Iraq),
Jihad Ballout (Al Arabiya), Rami Khouri (Lebanon Daily Star), Dr. Michael Kraig (Stanley Foundation), Salah Negm (BBC), WM Fellows

14.15 Big Idea 5 | A Global Call to Action
With Jeffrey Sachs, Director of the Earth Institute (via satellite from New York)

14.45 We the World (cont’d) | Africa (with satellite from Johannesburg, South Africa)
Moderated by Rachel Rawlins (Global Voices), with Ory Okolloh (Reuters), Megan Knight (Middlesex University), Mathew Buckland (Mail & Guardian), Wilfred Kiboro (Nation Media Group), WM Fellows

15.45 Break and Exhibit Rooms

17.00 Call to Action | The We Media Global Initiative

Moderated by William C. Weiss (Media Center) and Andrew Nachison (Media Center), with Jeff Belk (QUALCOMM), Graeme Ferguson (Vodafone), Scott Heiferman (Meetup), Dr. Paul Jacobs (QUALCOMM, pre-taped), Katherine von Jan (Infinia)

17.45 Closing Remarks | We Media Next
With Dale Peskin and Andrew Nachison (both Media Center)

18.00 We Party | Reception and Reuters Photo Exhibit

Hosted by Reuters and sponsored by Neighborhood America

WeMedia 2006 Sponsors

iFOCOS — Wed, 03 May 2006 11:53:33 +0000

QUALCOMM is a leader in developing and delivering innovative digital wireless communications products and services based on CDMA and other advanced technologies. Headquartered in San Diego, Calif., QUALCOMM is included in the S&P 500 Index and is a 2005 FORTUNE 500 company traded on the Nasdaq stock market under the ticker symbol QCOM.

RECEPTION SPONSOR

Only NEIGHBORHOOD AMERICA provides you with the complete solution designed to help you engage your audience, build strong communities of interest, and offer your advertisers effective interactive marketing opportunities. Web-based and easy to use, Neighborhood America’s solutions empower you to easily manage the capture and review of online content including audience feedback, large video and audio files, images and surveys – without worrying about resources or your network. So go ahead.encourage citizen journalists to help you break the next big story; launch the next wildly successful advertising campaign; or cast next season’s hottest new reality stars. With the help of our solution, the sky’s the limit. Find out how Neighborhood America is helping media companies interact with millions of audience members by visiting us online at neighborhoodamerica.com .

The Technology, Media & Telecommunications (TMT) industry group at Deloitte consists of more than 500 partners, directors and senior managers supported by other specialists dedicated to helping clients evaluate complex issues, develop fresh approaches to problems and implement practical solutions. We understand the challenges linked to decreased technology spending, industry convergence and new management strategies. Our greatest strengths include our professional principles, multidisciplinary capabilities and outstanding thought leadership publications – which all add up to a wealth of trusted and worthy resources. We invest heavily in TMT industry-specific training, audit approach, research and knowledge management, to ensure that our people are continually learning and applying global best practice to our clients. This means we deliver a more informed service, tailored to each client, which focuses on key issues and risks, and draws on global best practice and knowledge in each industry area.

SESSION SPONSOR

THE NEWSMARKET: Global journalists – representing 7,500 media outlets in 140 countries – visit www.thenewsmarket.com to search, preview and download free broadcast-standard video for their news stories. The NewsMarket services journalists at all European stations, including the BBC, ITN, ARD, RAI, TF1, TVE, the U.S. networks and international media, including CNN and Bloomberg, and agencies like Reuters and APTN. Its fastest-growing user base is in Asia and the Middle East, within Channel News Asia, ZeeNews, CCTV and Dubai TV. Organizations such as Adidas, UNICEF, World Bank, BMW, PUMA, Google, Yahoo!, Volvo and the UK Ministry of Defence use The NewsMarket to distribute video content in support of their media relations. The NewsMarket has operations in London, New York, San Francisco, Munich, Singapore, Hong Kong and Mumbai. For more information, visit www.thenewsmarket.com.

SUPPORTER

TOPIX.NET: Founded in 2002 with the specific mission of providing users with the ability to quickly and easily find targeted news on the Internet, Topix.net is a news aggregator with unique technology to find and categorize news into 300,000 topics, from Autos to ZIP code level local news. Topix.net enables Internet users to talk back to the news through a network of over 300,000 local and topical news discussion forums. Topix.net is a privately held company with equal investment from Gannett Co., Inc. (NYSE: GCI), Knight-Ridder, Inc. (NYSE: KRI) and Tribune Company (NYSE: TRB). Topix.net distributes content via partnerships with Citysearch, Ask Jeeves, My Yahoo!, Bloglines, Metro Newspapers, Newsgator, Findory, Wondir, Infospace, Link Silicon Valley and HelloMetro.com

PLUCK Corporation’s mission is to empower media companies to embrace and monetize open content models. With a suite of social media products, Pluck transforms how online editorial teams and their site users discover, create and distribute information. Powered by Pluck, publishers can aggregate rich content, build vibrant communities, foster user-generated content and deliver new syndication services. Pluck SiteLife products enable capabilities ranging from community blogs, to photo galleries, comments, submissions, user profiles and more. A hosted and managed software platform ensures seamless site integration, editorial management, search and other shared services. Ultimately, Pluck products increase user registrations, time on site, page views and revenue. Clients and partners of Pluck Corporation include CNET, Cox Newspapers, The Hearst Corporation, Reuters, TheStreet.com and The Washington Post. The company is backed by $10M in funding from Mayfield and Austin Ventures. More information is available on www.pluck.com. To explore a meeting, please email bizdev@pluck.com.

MEDIA PARTNERS

WORLD EDITORS FORUM: The Paris-based World Editors Forum is the organisation of the World Association of Newspapers that represents senior news executives. WEF publishes The Editors Weblog, a unique professional source for editors around the world seeking advice on newsroom management, editorial quality, online strategies and citizen journalism. WEF is a platform where you can share ideas, experiences and new initiatives on how to defend editorial excellence.

TECHNORATI is the world’s leading authority on what’s happening in the world of blogs. Currently tracking more than 30 million blogs in near real-time, Technorati surfaces new content within moments of its being published. With services for bloggers, readers of blogs and businesses interested in the blogosphere, Technorati helps you to see who’s saying what — right now — on the world wide web.

The Guardian is currently the UK’s ‘Newspaper of the Year’ and its website, Guardian Unlimited, is the UK’s most popular online newspaper, with a massive global audience. Last September the Guardian relaunched in the ‘Berliner’ format, a UK first, combining the sensibility of a broadsheet with the convenience of a smaller format. Since this, the paper’s circulation has achieved sustained growth, outperforming its market. Last year Guardian Unlimited was the first UK newspaper to win a Webby, the Oscar’s of the Internet, and in this year’s awards the paper is short-listed in two categories, once again demonstrating that the Guardian is firmly established as one of the world’s leading news brands.

Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide is a global communications firm built upon the best brand-building heritage. In this age of complex, networked marketing, our strengths in consumer marketing, corporate communications, social marketing, health, public affairs, technology, entertainment and our new 360 degree Digital Influence offering fuel innovative and creative solutions for the most important brands: our clients.

The United Nations University (UNU), headquartered in Tokyo, Japan, with Research and Training Programmes in Africa, North America, South America, Asia, Europe and the Middle East contributes, through research and capacity building, to efforts to resolve the global problems that are the concern of the United Nations, its Peoples and Member States. UNU is 1) an international community of scholars 2) serves as a bridge between the United Nations and the international academic community 3) a think-tank for the United Nations system and 4) a builder of capacities, particularly in developing countries.

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Media and the Connected Society, Part 2

jburke — Wed, 03 May 2006 11:25:00 +0000

Wadah Khanfar – Al Jazeera
Originally uploaded by We Media London.

Wadah Khanfar of Al Jazeera speaks during the session, “Leaders Forum | Media and the Connected Society, Part 2″ Photo by Photo by Paul Hackett – Reuters.
Nik Gowing of the BBC led this discussion about how the Internet is changing traditional business models of big media and the global society as a whole. Panelists included Akwe Amosu (OSI), Timothy Balding (WAN), Wadah Khanfar (Al Jazeera), Nikesh Arora (Google), Mark Thompson (BBC). Here’s the round-up.

- Big media needs to adapt the way it thinks about journalism; should it be top down or bottom up? Thompson thinks the traditional broadcaster idea of news organizations dictating to the audience is over.

- the Internet is like a global WalMart; it has changed the economics of the media game, as so far as business models go, and news organizations have been slow to adapt.

- The local of yesterday is global today because of the Internet. It has also brought about the unbundling of media; people don’t just use one source anymore. They don’t read the international page of their local paper; they turn to international online sources.

- Newspaper companies may have been slow to make the digital transition, but today they have some of the most read websites on the Internet, they have developed the most popular mobile services and they produce some of the most popular blogs.

- Editorial boards will be led just as much by viewers and readers as they are by employees.

- Big media needs to divert resources to focusing on the voices that aren’t already voiced; interview the politician or businessman but get down to the grassroots and talk to the real people that are being affected by their decisions.

- The media in developing countries performs a heroic task often against economic, political and technical odds. But not only do we need to empower the media in these countries but also the people.

- Conferences such as these are patronizing – why is it that large corporate media needs to tell the people what they think?

-It’s not up to anyone in this room to determine the proper role of media in developing countries. Strong local voices in developing countries will drive growth – there’s a tremendous need to hear those voices and help them develop within those nation.

- When it comes down to it, mainstream media and bloggers must remain relevant to stay in business.

- News companies are competing for shrinking audiences; most people are looking for entertainment which is also proliferating online.

- Big media can’t be gatekeepers – to what extent do we still bring enough to the party that people want to use? The demand is out there for traditional kinds of content, but there’s much more change to come.

TAG: wemedia

Previous Comments

The [Net] … has changed the economics of the media game
Again; Net media does not need a business model. Bloggers (vid-loggers, posters, journalists, podcasters, whatever) do it for love first. For those with a reputation, there will be an audience. For those with an audience there will be advertising. It will be a beauty contest of the mind – those who look good will make money, if they want.

Big media needs to adapt
Big Media will survive if they protect their names by reporting straight and reporting many points of view. It is pretty clear that many will find this too hard. Too bad.

The unbundling of media; people don’t just use one source anymore
Wake up and smell the coffee! People have never just used one source of news media – but they were still suspicious of the oligopoly. Now they know where to look for independent views. In addition, RSS means I can read 20 on-the-spot, expert, views in 5 minutes – beat that for accuracy, depth, breadth, relevance, quality… Address that, or die.

Newspaper companies … have developed the most popular mobile services and they produce some of the most popular blogs
Whoopee for them. Do they make money out of them? I bet I can find bigger bloggers than any UK-Newspaper branded site. They still have a lot to learn.

Editorial boards are not needed by free journalists who connect and resonate. Want to be a free journalist? Blog.

Big Media needs to divert resources to focusing on the voices that aren’t already voiced [presumably 'voiced' means heard]
Big Media isn’t needed to make voices heard, but that doesn’t mean that organisations such as Reuters and the BBC couldn’t make a significant contribution – and some very positive PR – by helping those left behind by the Nets rapid advance.

The media in developing countries performs a heroic task
Bloggers in developing countries perform a heroic task:
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,9075-2032242,00.html
Get a clue: Blogging is journalism

Conferences such as these are patronizing [sic]
That’s a bit too hard. There are a lot of clueless journalists, coumnists, editors, publishers, advertisers, and politicians out there. Give them a break.

It’s not up to anyone in this room to determine the proper role of media in developing countries
Conferences are like publishing on the Net. The audience feed back – and sometimes (horror of horrors) they’re not nice!

When it comes down to it, mainstream media and bloggers must remain relevant to stay in business
True.

News companies are competing for shrinking audiences; most people are looking for entertainment which is also proliferating online
Somebody is confused – and it’s not me. Bloggers come in all shapes and sizes, but those who blog fact know the difference between news and entertainment.

Big media can’t be gatekeepers
Damn, they noticed.

The demand is out there for traditional [sic] kinds of content, but there’s much more change to come
Repeat after me: Change happens, get over it.

Posted by: Stephen Wheeler | May 16, 2006 05:53 PM

Big Idea 1 with Nitan Desai, Special Advisor to the Secretary-General of the United Nations

Birdie Jaworski — Wed, 03 May 2006 09:15:00 +0000

Nitin Desai – UN
Originally uploaded by We Media London.

Nitin Desai, Special Advisor to the Secretary-General of the United Nations speaking during the session “Big Idea 1 | Media and the Connected Society, Part 1.” Photo by Paul Hackett – Reuters.

Live from BBC Television Center, at the We Media Global Forum

Intro with Nick Gowing:

Nick talks about how the focus is on the developing world. Is media top down or bottom up?

Nitan Desai begins:

Nitan comments on the prior panel. He senses something missing in the prior discussion. They spoke about accuracy, but relevance wasn’t mentioned. He prefers watching the local Indian news channels even though he can watch anything. He feels their coverage is far more relevant to his interests than other news media such as CNN.

Nitan feels that if media is to be trusted, relevance is of importance. In the developing world, many people don’t have access to the internet, but they do have access to mobile phones. When you speak of media in a developing country, the roles that mobile phones make is of primary importance, many of these households don’t have internet, television, etc.

He also stresses that we should not loose sight of the fact that there are many countries where basic media freedoms are still not available.

Nitan proposes things that will shape the media business:

Politics – a shift in the balance of the world economy – the immergence of China and India which could give rise to media giants coming from those countries.

Growing vigor of people exercising democratic rights – a free media is part of the fight for democracy. The media has grown from street protests – protests are theatre, the gestures are as important as the words, street protests can lead to regime changes, ideological changes. It’s safer for media to cover street protests as opposed to armed conflict.

Nitan discusses how we have seen an incredible number of grassroots-based organizations participating in UN Conferences. (Women’s rights, children’s rights, civil rights groups, environmentalists, etc.) This has led to action on behalf of the UN (anti-land mine initiatives, etc)

The media scrutiny in various emergencies has led to the UN and other governing bodies to take action, because people see what is happening in some community and want things to change.

Nik Gowing – BBC
Originally uploaded by We Media London.

Nik Gowing of the BBC introduces Nitin Desai, Special Advisor to the Secretary-General of the United Nations during the session “Big Idea 1 | Media and the Connected Society, Part 1.” Photo by Paul Hackett – Reuters.
He feels that the media society hasn’t been changed by networking society very much yet. We still have central bodies in charge from which information disseminates. New tchnologies are changing how the media is being distributed. The biggest changes will come from users and particpants being engaged in the media conversation.

Nitan describes how Web 2.0 and other new technologies will offer new changes. These new tools are most cost effective, and lower costs mean that information is more accessible to more people.

He feels that the challenge we face is to find a business model which includes conventional media with community building and distribution channels. The We Media Global Forum is a good example of how these things can come together. Remember that the models we are looking for are relevant to all areas and peoples. We must change or we become irrelevant.

End of talk

Points brought out in Q and A:

Governments are slow to adjust to the idea of people power, they underestimate it. Media hasn’t underestimated people power but they don’t understand it fully. People power is coming.

Each special interest community thinks its issue is Number One. But there is no one community that is of primary importance.

Nitan gives examples of issues which were brought to the forefront via people power and not through media. Land mines, Poland solidarity, etc.

Stability is always an argument for preserving power. If you want change, you must deal with instability.

TAG: wemedia

Previous Comments

I like the discussion of grassroots organizations and “people power”. I do think that the mainstream media focus on large events and governmental actions, without much acknowledgement that the people of the world are changing societies in a big way from behind the scenes. Blogging is one such example.

Posted by: Bonnie Willow | May 3, 2006 11:20 AM

Trust Forum – The Power of Trust

jburke — Wed, 03 May 2006 08:16:00 +0000

Conversation – Trust, Media and Society
Originally uploaded by We Media London.

Nihal Arthanayake (BBC), Karen Stephenson (Media Center), David Brain (Edelman)and David Schlesinger (Reuters) during the session “The Power of Trust Forum | How Trust and Empowerment Shape Our Global

Society.” Photo by Paul Hackett – Reuters.

In the WeMedia’s first session, Merrill Brown chatted with Nihal Arthanayake (BBC), David Brain (Edelman), David Schlesinger (Reuters) and Karen Stephenson (Media Center) about how the world can trust the media and the enormous amount of citizen reporters that now have voice on the Internet. Below are the main points:

-The medium isn’t the message, the message is the message

-TV is so popular worldwide because it brings you immediacy and relates you directly to the information. This is why blogs have proved so popular. They relate you directly to a person or group of people expressing their experiences and opinions.

- It’s hard to determine trust in bloggers at this point because the medium is so young; we’ll learn with time

- Citizen journalism has always existed; news organizations get down to the grassroots to find out what the everyday person is thinking. In doing this, there’s always the issue of credibility; making sure information given by citizens is credible, that photos aren’t doctored, etc.

- There is a digital divide. Among the connected, it exists between generations. Among the un-connected, what would they say, how would they change our opinions if we could hear them?

- Trust is a social phenomenon. We have to get back to the basics of bringing people together, need to create social relationships that create trust. Technology enables us to bring communities and individuals together.

- People are sophisticated enough to decode biased and unbiased news. Most don’t only read one perspective but many voices between media and the blogosphere to obtain a well-rounded, educated opinion (Karen – I watch John Stewart for some credible news and watches CNN for some humor) (audience comment; increased proliferation of media increases consumption, but not necessarily sophistication.

- Still need traditional editorial boards to point people to the important news they should know.

- Although news organizations are losing people’s trust, even among themselves, they want to get the story right. In doing this, they’ll maintain the public’s trust.

- Our conversations are too much US/European-centric – what happens in the rest of the world? There are places where there is no mainstream media. How does this affect those citizens? How can we include them?

- The media is becoming too commercialized; commercialization breaks down people’s trust in the media.

- What can media companies do to establish trust? Outreach, collaboration, communication and transparency above all.

- Speed and time are changing everything; the speed with which information is diffused and the limited amount of time we have to absorb a never-ending amount of sources.

TAG: wemedia

WeMedia Global Forum opens

jburke — Wed, 03 May 2006 08:11:00 +0000

After an introduction from Richard Sambrooke, Media Center director Andrew Nachison opens the forum admitting that although the purpose of the Media Center is to develop a better informed society, it doesn’t really know what that means… By the end of the day, we’re sure to have a better idea.

Andrew continued saying a major part of the conference will be focused on trust and introduced Merrill Brown, who will tell us all about trust, beginning with the BBC/Reuters/WeMedia Trust Poll.

TAG: wemedia

We Media about to start, but first, the poll results!

Chad Capellman — Wed, 03 May 2006 06:54:00 +0000

How cool is this? The We Media Global Forum is being held in the studio for the BBC’s Top of the Pops!

Final touches are being made (I just got a place to plug in a power cord, whew!) but that doesn’t mean the information digestion has to wait. The results of The Media Center / BBC / Reuters trust in the media poll are in and provide some interesting insights.

A 10-nation poll conducted for Reuters, the BBC and The Media Center across four continents, finds that in a world of committed news junkies, trust in the news provider is a key issue. While some 72 percent of respondents characterized themselves as keen news followers, almost three in ten people have abandoned a media source over the past year due to a lack of trust in its content. In developing nations the media is trusted more than government, but government wins out over the media in the US, Britain, and Germany. Americans are the most critical of news providers, with 69 percent not believing that news media report all sides. Conducted by polling company GlobeScan as part of this week’s Reuters / BBC / Media Center ‘We Media’ Forum, a major 10-nation public opinion poll exploring trust in the media has found that even though the media is more trusted than the national government in half the countries surveyed, significant numbers of people are switching news sources because they do not trust the information they receive. A total of 10,230 adults were questioned in the UK, USA, Brazil, Egypt, Germany, India, Indonesia, Nigeria, Russia, and South Korea in March and April 2006.

We encourage you to weigh in with your comments either on this post, or on the live chat on the main We Media Forum site.

TAG: wemedia

Previous Comments

The poll, as presented, seems totally counterilluminating. Country with government run media=more trust. As in Egypt; three times more trust media than government, even if they are the same. Free media=less trust. Does poll mainly reflect sophistication of those polled?

Posted by: Helge Ogrim | May 3, 2006 04:30 AM

I have taught journalism all over the world, and certainly agree with the findings in broad outline. But I suspect the effective sample sizes are vastly different from country to country. In the US, comparison with similar surveys suggest that of the 1000 sampled, only 300 or so are actually regular consumers of news, although they would never admit that to the poll taker!

In developing countries, of course, you are sampling urban elites — a small percentage of the population and one that is often closely tied to government (or are government employees).

In the US and UK, the numbers do not come close to tracking what people actually read and watch! For instance, in the US network news has about 10 times the ratings of cable news and about the same CUME over a week, yet the cable channels, CNN and Fox, are mentioned 3-4 times more frequently. C-SPAN, with a CUME of about 390 million a week, doesn’t show up at all.

This may be a better way: Poll known subscribers/viewers of various media. Use local journalism students to go into the countrysides and interview face-to-face.

Posted by: Steven Ross | May 3, 2006 08:48 AM

A New Blog Search Launches

Andrew Nachison — Tue, 02 May 2006 11:29:00 +0000

Noted: A new blog search called Sphere launched today, just in time to help us track anything tagged wemedia.

Technorati Tags: blogs, information overload, knowledge management, wemedia

TAG: wemedia

Previous Comments

Same tag for flickr?

Posted by: Katy | May 2, 2006 04:12 PM

Yes.

Posted by: Andrew Nachison | May 2, 2006 07:47 PM

We Media Photo Analysis

Andrew Nachison — Tue, 02 May 2006 07:25:00 +0000

Salam Adil writes a wonderfully nuanced analysis of the Reuters image we’ve used to promote the We Media Global Forum, which starts tomorrow in London. The photo shows a veiled woman raising one finger stained with blue ink – a symbol of having voted in Iraq. As Adil notes, the image itself is challenging on many levels. Was it spontaneous or staged? Is it an accurate reflection of Iraq, or Iraqi women?

What I love about this post is not merely the analysis but some research behind it – Adil found another image taken by the same photographer – one which appears to be staged and which, thus, casts further doubt on the spontaneity of the “finger” image.

Technorati Tags: wemedia

TAG: wemedia

Previous Comments

That’s probably true that it’s staged, but a lot of photos are staged. It’s still an amazing image and very thought provoking. My only question would be how it relates to We Media…. Looking forward to the show!

Posted by: Mark Glaser | May 2, 2006 04:05 PM

Salam Adil’s post is really interesting but I think there are two different issues tied together here – the relevance of the image, and whether it was staged or not..
Perhaps the idea of the logo was to evoke the power of ‘free expression against the odds’, but the image also throws up many other reactions that aren’t really relevant to the themes of the conference (for example, the image partly evokes the universally recognised gesture for telling people to be quiet and that doesn’t seem to encapsulate the idea of media exchange and trust). In that sense, the logo doesn’t tightly express and focus us on the idea of the meeting.
I’m guessing that the image was partly chosen because the idea of muslim women silenced-but-defiant is one the Western media loves to sensationalise. The sensationalism irritates many of us who are neither Iraqi, nor muslim, nor directly implicated in any other way, and to judge from Salam’s post, it also appears to be a self-administered bullet through the foot if we wanted to advocate greater trust between mainstream and citizen media (and presumably their consumers). But I would disagree that the possibility that the original picture was staged is relevant, at least while it is being used as a logo.
If I wanted to use one powerful image to symbolise the pro-immigrant campaign in the US at the moment and I picked a person of colour raising a fist in front of a US flag, that would be agitprop to express a powerful idea. If I got the person to stand in front of the flag and took the picture, would I be falsifying anything? I don’t think so. If the photographer who set up the woman with the inked finger wanted to make a a piece of agitprop in favour of voting and to express the power of voting even for, or especially for members of that society with otherwise restricted chances of being heard, that’s not falsification, it’s advocacy and I don’t see what’s wrong with it – it’s just something we can agree or disagree with.
All that changes if it was meant to depict a real event, i.e. it’s a news picture – if it was staged to look as though something really happened but it was in fact manipulated, that’s a lie. But we’re talking about a logo here, not a news picture. Why would it have to be spontaneous?

Posted by: Akwe Amosu | May 2, 2006 06:25 PM

I agree with you, Akwe about your deconstruction of the iconography of the image, and I think it’s important. But I also think that in the context of Iraq the concept of, for want of a better word, “authenticity” of images is important too.

The image is part of a continuum with includes the carefully marshalled crowds in Baghdad for the TV cameras to record the pulling down of the statue of Saddam Hussein, and the subsequent photoshopping of a screen grab to include “more people” to provide a suitably impressive front-page picture for a British newspaper.

Trust is important in the visual as well as verbal realm and I think while We Media had no intention to mislead with their image the issues this debate has raised – of cultural sensitivity and authenticy – are timely for the Forum.

Posted by: Rachel Rawlins | May 3, 2006 02:29 AM

We Media Fringe Event

Andrew Nachison — Thu, 27 Apr 2006 23:40:00 +0000

If you’re in London next week for our We Media Global Forum – or for some other reason – you might be interested in another blogging event planned for a secret location the evening of May 3. It’s a “fringe” conference, and sorry if I somehow taint its fringiness by saying how great I think this is. I don’t know the organizer, Robin Hamman, but I hope someone out there in cyberland appreciates how amazed and humbled I am that he or anyone is paying attention to what we do at The Media Center. Details here. I understand space is very limited. Good luck Robin.

TAG: wemedia

Previous Comments

so glad that both events can collaborate. i will be at the fringe event but will also be tracking the forum as much as possible.

Posted by: Tall Skinny Kiwi | April 28, 2006 08:51 AM

Nice work. I thought the entry ticket for We Media was rather pricey, so nice to see you cooperating with a fringe event.

Posted by: neil baker | April 28, 2006 05:02 PM

The wemedia global forum sounds very exciting.I will be monitoring it from Honiara, Solomon Islands.

All the best.

Posted by: Joseph Inomae | May 3, 2006 12:58 AM

He Tells Two Friends, They Tell One Billion…

Rick Robinson — Thu, 27 Apr 2006 04:36:00 +0000

What is perhaps the greatest driver of consumer choice in business? (should I buy a Toyota or a Buick? Sony or Sanyo?) It is, of course, old-fashioned word of mouth (WOM). Still. Yep, the future of business looks a bit more like the past than you might think.

What’s been happening around us is the application of WOM to the digital medium. It’s not much of a leap from the oral reviews of Shakespeare’s latest to the printed recommendations of Benjamin Franklin to the broadcast voices of amateur tinkerers of the early 20th century – hundreds of personal broadcasters on this new thing later to be called radio. (The earliest podcasts, I might add.)

To help buffet my point, in Margaret Penrose’s 1922 “The Radio Girls of Roselawn” two characters discussed whether they might, pretty soon,”carry receiving and sending sets in our pockets” which would allow them to “send or receive any news we wanted”.*

Send or receive any news we wanted. Hmm.

So the latest method of carrying that news (gossip, advice, pointed suggestions, criticisms, warnings) is of course the online manner. All these avenues opening up to deliver assistance with choice of what to buy, what to sell, where to do it, how to do it, what to charge… are making it both simpler for the savvy and possibly overwhelming for the rest. “I’ve got opinions on that latest film from Spike Lee but how can I choose among the thousands of outlets from which to pass it on?”

Setting aside the profusion of choices – and the dilemma that might be creating – the fact is all this chatter is making its way naturally above the din and creeping into the public consciousness. How this happens has always included a bit of magic (I like to think so), and a lot of common sense.

People pass on passion along the extreme edges: what they deplore and what they love. For anyone running a business of any kind this should be a blessing wrapped in a challenge. The blessing is that it is becoming easier for folks to comment on “Shakespeare’s latest” and know that not just the schlub gnawing on a drumstick next to him will be persuaded, but maybe thousands at once. The challenge for business is simply not to produce crap.

Seems to me the challenge is one of imagination: to be bold and create with the WOMers in mind. It is soon that the masses will allow substandard, overpriced and over-hyped stuff to rot on the shelves. People are being motivated by virtual, temporary acquaintances and it’s all about to meet up on a grand scale.

Businesses need to continue preparing for this not by creating thinly veiled marketing ploys in the form or a wikis, but prepare for it by putting all their energy into pleasing people with their results. Because no longer is John Smith just passing an opinion to Sally Jones on that Buick… He’s passing it on to 10,000 of them.

* earlyradiohistory.us

TAG: wemedia

Previous Comments

You’re right. It’s a WOM-a-rama out there. Just think of Tivo, one of the biggest beneficiaries of WOM. People didn’t just talk about it, they evangelized. The product had such an impact on people’s lives that they became sellers themselves. Businesses need to realize they are now dealing with empowered consumers: Wayne and Garth in a virtual Speakers’ Corner. WOM on, everyone. WOM on.

Posted by: isabelle | April 27, 2006 10:32 PM

On Starbucks, franchises, media brands and eroding trust in your brand

Chad Capellman — Mon, 24 Apr 2006 16:12:00 +0000

When is a Starbucks not a Starbucks? Apparently only when I’m in the grocery store, or a hotel or, I don’t know almost every place I ever encounter the behemoth’s logo in person.

Confused? Me too.

All I wanted was a bottle of water, a delicious slice of marble cake, and to pay for it with a Starbucks card I received as a gift.

Believe it or not, I’ve been having trouble clearing it out, due in large part to the fact that I’ve been working from home for the past six months (I DO love the Internet and also because I’m in Boston and Dunkin Donuts is still putting up a good fight.

Anyway, when I do encounter something claiming to be a Starbucks, I want to use the card. I don’t want to hear anything about “Oh, we’re a franchise and not a real Starbucks and that card doesn’t work here.”

So, they pay Starbucks to use the logo, get the merchandise delivered, yet can’t configure their registers to accept this card.

These are my encounters with the Starbucks brand, and I’m not happy about it.

The same can largely be said for media companies. I’ve worked at more than one Big Newspaper that seems to have a Kane and Abel approach to dealing with its web operation.

Corrections that only appear in the late print editions but not the Web version that more people end up reading through the course of the next Web cycle? Not the newspaper’s problem.

Invented URLs to sites on either the newspaper’s site or other sites? Who cares! You can’t click on the newspage anyway.

I could go on, but it’s too easy and depressing.

Sure none of these things will hurt the newspaper but they are examples of how users can be turned off by their experience with the company’s brand.

It’s probably a lot like being in a Starbucks with a caffene jones and a giftcard you can’t use.

TAG: wemedia

Previous Comments

As much as I hate Starbucks, I admire their business model.

Posted by: Katy | April 25, 2006 04:56 PM

Less Information, better information

Philip Cesse — Fri, 21 Apr 2006 16:48:00 +0000

I have been in two minds these days, caught between the inner conviction I had nothing new to add to these week’s posts (plus I agree with most), and a faint surge to get down to basics & do some devil’s advocacy for good measure. As Internet can link me to any website in the world at light speed or so, the current system suits me fine, not to mention that as Irina I am no geek to see what is next in technology. But one thing is sure: considering how my little lifetime has witnessed the successive births of fax, e-mails, internet, w3, mobiles, chats, fora, blogs, newsletters, RSS and the like, chances are we will keep on talking as much, if not more. That reminded me of this 20th century pun: “totalitarianism is shut up, democracy is keep talking“… That was for politics, but it also suits the media, and here is why.

Informing is commendable, but Jeffrey says the media majors are now all happy and jumpy with the idea of hopping into bed together, thereby breaking the spirit of the Sherman Act and that of other anti-trust laws. It should be noted at this point that information is at the core of modern market economics: two tenets, nay, two founding hypothesis are atomicity of actors (so no one can influence prices or society as a whole) and both perfect & symmetric information: all knowledge is available & everyone knows it (plus you know I know you know that I know you know…). But that requires sheer interest in knowing, and to ensure the system is secured. In his book Gag Rule, On the Stifling of Dissent and the Suppression of Democracy, Harper Magazine editor Lewis Lapham is one of the daring few to give a daunting and outspoken vision of how the media are channelled, and their sources unchallenged. Technology is not to blame, but rather how it is used. Moreover, according to him, neither citizens nor scholars seem to care about cross-checking or deepening the information poured on to them, to say nothing about their actually being interested in just the principle of verifying the whereabouts. Reasons are to be found both in intellectual apathy and the comfort of not raising un-PC questions or negative feedbacks.

So This leads to several questions:
1. in democracy, what are people interested in?
2. in democracy, how do the media ensure people are informed?
3. journalists often claim “the People have the right to know”, but why should the media impose their interests if the ‘consumers’ are not interested?
4. therefore, what is the compatibility of mass media and democracy?
As with economics, research has long debated over this common nagging question on the independence of media and that of Central Banks (like the Federal Reserve): both these independences are theoretically & morally there to secure and optimize the system. Yet their instances and actions are neither elected, nor subject to democratic scrutiny. They are not only imposed on us, but We The People have no say, whether before or after, and that is that.

Next: the democratization of media. Gloria says the media are often dubbed the Fourth Estate. Well, they certainly are in that they make the news, they decide what is a headline news and what is not worth mentioning, and when to break them to us (or not). And isn’t the World a rich place: everyday has its toll of good news to fill 60 minutes and the tabloids’ 64 pages or so… Those are some reasons why, as this blog basically said, people don’t really trust the media and welcome the sprout of the hundreds of millions of personal sites worldwide. As the concept of Estates was Made in France, a reminder of the current situation there may be appropriate: nobility was officially trounced two centuries ago, and a century ago the Church was basically confined by law to janitor its precincts. So the media are an Estate in this other way: the people might listen but not follow and even joke about them. That leaves the country with one Estate only: the merchant class. What a coincidence: it is the merchant class that sells or controls the media, the hardware, the internet providers, and most diffusion & distribution networks. Whatever its noble motives, that is its business at heart: earn enough to sustain itself and pay the thousands of salaries it hires. And to develop itself, the best way is still to buy all your pals’ shares, just as in Monopoly. M&A in Media are the rule, though somewhat less blatantly than in Italy, Spain or the UK: media conglomerates are the rule.

So what about democracy in grassroots media and ‘personal’ websites many contributors here run in their spare time? Technorati will soon cover over 36 million blogs. Supposing one were curious enough and wanted to have a quick glance at every such weblog, and assuming furthermore one has large BW and restrains oneself to one second at every URL, that alone would require 1,000 days on a 10 hours daily basis (week-ends and holidays included). And that is only the top of the tip of the iceberg, as the rest of the world is in line still waiting for their turn: is it not just awesome how many people have things to say? And the fact Web 2.0 is talked about so much only underlines how much people are interested in virtual media and how much they yearn for a system more customized to their likings. But as Juliette pointed out : “What shall we do with this opportunity to shape the world we live in?“. That may require some clear objective for the future, something akin to Kennedy’s exhilarating Last Frontier to gather all the hundred millions of media users…

Nevertheless, much of the available information is redundant, either because watered down or because relayed on other sites (quoting, syndication, links, newsletters, RSS, etc). In a way, spread of information resembles what Harvard professor Edward O. Wilson says about ants (one should also read his Consilience and On Hulman Nature): when finding food, an ant leaves a scented trail which another soon follows thus doubling the scent, so that in no time more and more ants flock in, in a self-reinforcing boot-strapping mechanism until they form a full armada and clean up the place. That’s one way to modellize trendy information, you know the kind everyone talks about (celebrities, news, politics). The trouble is that as with everything in life, any information breakthrough has its own object-oriented devil ingrained in it: what were really good positive-discriminating tools (links, RSS feeds) are soon diverted to other ends, such as to increase visibility and pagerank. To make it short, this leads to white noise, a synonym to random walk after the property of light (a sum of all wavelengths). Because people are talkative (and if you got here, you now know how much I am), democratization of media leads to exponential white noise.

There is no doubt modern media provide users with so much more information than ever before, at the personal level. At the world level however, that is unclear: with globalization, people tend to embrace similar interests at the expense of particularisms. An example is the difference of cultural/traditional diversity within the US and within patchworked Europe, itself pretty homogeneous compared to what it was in the 18th and 19th centuries (Germany and Italy were not even unified for instance, and each had very different folklore and dialects). This naturally requires many caveats and robust research, but the trend towards homogeneity is clear. Yet, as Florian says, there is also little doubt we actually are less connected to each other. For one thing, we are not using any of our five natural senses, except the eye to recognize text, a very modern invention that lacks human touch. Images, webcams and Skype help somewhat, but they are nowhere near a table conversation. This not only shuns all body language which so often tells more than language per se and allows cross-checking, it also reduces communication to a handful of tongues. And basically, to a same culture: as the world map of this blog’s last 500 connections shows at any one time, browsers either come from English-speaking countries as most contributors here, or probably have close affinities to them (by education, living, or habit). That is fine, but one should not forget who and how many are not connecting, and what is it we are not talking about.

Last, I go for “quality connections” as John advocates, but then qualifying quality becomes tricky: information depth and topics’ interest all depend on personal perception and culture, as much as on one’s interests and ability to infer or fathom by induction. I sometimes wonder how much I learnt from all my hours spent reading the media day after day: all it takes is a few seconds for a few ideas. Those fields that so much further human knowledge (technology, sciences, history) are comparatively covered very little, or not at all. So most of what is said in the media is actually expectable, and support a basic truth: people talk about what they deem is important to them, and that can be cut down to a small number of ideas, infinite variations notwithstanding (like keeping track of friends and relatives). Repeating one way or another, and having umpteen variations on a same theme, both have a name. Despite its condescending acceptation, gossip serves a fundamental social function: to keep track of what others do, and that in turn often gives a feeling of community. No one likes secrets because they are perceived as eerie; at national level, that has led to intelligence, to learn what the others are doing. Gossip may be older than trust in human history: how can trust breed if the others are withholding information? Long gone are the times when tribes gathered and chatted round the fireplace and individuals told each other what they had leant in the course of the day. Now that humanity has expanded to all six continents, the media are a sophisticated variation thereof: tell all the others what is done in a particular place (the Olympics for instance). In terms of information flow, the media seem thus to foster worldwide gossip, and people like it. I do. Need to hear people. Not everything, not everyone, but when and what I feel like.

Thus, along Birdie‘s ideas, the evolution of digital media is probably less in more information and new technologies, than in just better information. As Gloria also said, it is connectedness, not technology that is transforming society. Connectedness is not just multiplying connections, it is also about securing a wide array of trustworthy and useful information. Which in turn requires :
1. “strong reporting and informed commentary” as Clark Davey underlined, else information is superficial and hollow ;
2. synthesized information to the full to avoid yawns and ‘d√©j√† vu’. Some people can read fast, very fast: JFK (again) could reportedly read all of the NY Times in 40 minutes, and remember it. That shows how the information is immersed in noise: new information is always little, but immersed in recalls of facts people actually have integrated already.
3. communicate only when something really interesting (understandably, that is not in the interest of periodicals). Or credibility suffers: I personally do not use RSS, because I make sure I visit every once in a while those sites I’m sure are consistent and only post when appropriate.
4. targetting one’s interlocutors and topics, as Vanessa outlined when talking about connecting in different ways.

So, all in all, whatever the new developments in the future, they shouldn’t underlook information quality, and should allow variable geometries to suit every possible profile. Democratization of media, trust, social media, community, celebrities, etc : funny how topics discussed these past weeks now intertwine…

TAG: wemedia

Previous Comments

I couldn’t agree more. But there is a word missing from your post – and I think generally from the discussion about the future of news. That word is ‘substance.’ As technology increasingly defines how people receive news (and in some cases how they collect it), our news gets shorter, more focused, and less substantial. Where have all the long articles gone? Where have all the explorative documentaries run away too? Our news may be more interesting, consumable by more people in more places, and more easily discussed or passed to a friend. But if the substance of the news continues to decline, we will have a problem on our hands.

Posted by: Brian Reich | April 22, 2006 07:38 AM

Very good points. I’m not sure though about the loss of particularism brought about by globalization. In the digital sphere people meet because of shared topics and interests. But they are relatively removed from their socio- economic and cultural trappings: these don’t affect online exchanges of information or only in minimal ways, so that often we gloss over actual differences that lurk in the offline and very real context. There are cultural differences, it’s simply that they don’t weigh much online.

I am assuming English speaking readers flock to the wemedia blog because the organizers advertise on English language media and blogs – there’s an active non English language blogosphere (Global Voices proves it), but many of us Western bloggers never care to go look for it. Could it be the language barrier?

Posted by: Vanessa | April 25, 2006 04:34 PM

Not So Random

Irina Slutsky — Fri, 21 Apr 2006 07:18:00 +0000

Florian Brody asks: Should we wait for a random start-up to come up with some new web technology to find out about the next major change of the media that defines our society?

Well, from someone who hangs out with “random start-ups” here in San Francisco and Silicon Valley, I proffer that they are not quite so random. Defining society and defining technology and defining media — these “definitions” are all connected by two-way streets, so one cannot happen without the other.

So the “geekstars” putzing around on the Internet right now are being influenced by where society and media are going, so their new web technology is going to be influenced by how they live and what they see and what they do. It’s unavoidable.

Kids had cell phones that could record video….boom! Random start-up YouTube gives us the society-defining gift that won’t stop giving.

Kids love flirting on MySpace….boom! We have more online social networks than we have friends.

Unfortunately, I’m just an observer and a consumer — I can’t imagine what the kids will do next. So I had some trouble with Florian’s next question:

“I would like to steer our discourse into the direction of how digital media can enhance and augment other media types that – for the lack of a better definition – function without computers. How does thinking about these media types help us to define the next step in digital media?”

I could feel my brow furrow. “I don’t think I know any media that function without computers.” Surely, a silly response but that was the first thing I thought. Then I looked up media in Wiktionary just to make sure I understood correctly. “Formats for presenting information.” That don’t use computers? Painting. Singing. Collage? They’re always talking about mixed-media collage in art history books.

Collage!

TAG: wemedia

Previous Comments

It’s “We Media” not “Media with Batteries” – so I hope there is more to human communication and expression than the boxes we have been using since the early 80s. And then – Computers will go away, the same way LPs and CDs and Linotype became obsolete.

It’s all about We Media Mix – there is a reason why Moody’s cuts Knight Ridder, McClatchy to junk: “concentration on a single industry creates vulnerability”.

Posted by: Florian Brody | April 21, 2006 10:20 AM

Will Digital Advertising Doom Quality Journalism?

Jeffrey Chester — Wed, 19 Apr 2006 12:23:00 +0000

There is a great deal of understandable excitement about the potential of digital communications to help unleash the public service potential of journalism. Many journalists hope that new digital technologies will provide them with an opportunity to bypass the mainstream gatekeepers. Others believe that a non-professional form of public journalism can create a vibrant new model for reporting and editorial analysis. Such new approaches are desperately needed (as demonstrated by the failure of much of the U.S. print and electronic press to effectively cover the issues related to the run-up to the war in Iraq).

But there are a number of obstacles that must be addressed. First, as I mentioned in yesterday’s post, the structure of new media distribution doesn’t automatically guarantee that content providers will have the necessary range of access to distribution. To succeed in the digital environment, most content providers will require unfettered connections to what the broadband industry calls its “triple play.” That means programming seamlessly available on PC’s, IPTV (or interactive TV), and mobile devices. It’s not just in the U.S. where closed or highly controlled models of broadband distribution, especially for IPTV, will emerge. It’s a issue that should be on the agenda in London. News programs and content should automatically receive prime distribution on all platforms: satellite, broadband, cable, etc. There should not be any gatekeepers for news-related content. News providers must also be given access to all the necessary tools for promotion, including electronic program guides, personal video recorders, and default portals. (I think such access should be for free.)

Two, the core of the business model for digital content–the seamless weaving together of information, data collection, profiling, and targeting–is problematic. The market will require content providers, including news producers, to deliver unique information about individuals. While the advertising industry likes to claim that such personalized ads are a service to consumers, it ultimately means violating their privacy (and engaging in deceptive behavior). The relationship between content and marketing online–where everything will be a form of virtual infomercial–is also troubling. I fear that the same ad dynamics that have helped `dumb’ down much video news will also greatly influence broadband. If you can’t deliver the right demographics and targets, advertisers won’t support the service. That’s why we need to develop new policies and business models for news in the digital era.

TAG: wemedia

Previous Comments

What about micro-targeting? Can’t advertisers make an educated guess about what type of user is looking at certain content and promote ads accordingly? The technology supports it. The content supports it. The user doesn’t mind that much. So it seems the folks who don’t seem to get it are the publishers.

I work in public affairs, so I spend a lot of time trying to position advertising alongside relevant news in order to drive action among key audiences online. We have statistical evidence that suggests that people who see an ad that relates to the topic of the article they are reading is more likely to click through than if the ad if that ad appeared randomly. But did we really need to run lots of tests to confirm what our gut told us from the start? No, but we needed the data to demonstrate to the venues that our demands for specific inventory were not unreasonable. They will sell advertising to the highest bidder, the person who will pay the most. I could have an ad for a humanitarian organization trying to respond to a crisis that is being covered extensively in the international section of an online news site, but if a financial services firm comes along and offers a higher CPM, I will get bumped.

Targeting advertising online (or via mobile, or via iTV, or whatever) is not easy. There are billions of impressions available on millions of different sites. But its also not as difficult as a lot of organizations seem to think it is. When data is available about who an audience is, we use it to tailor and target our ads more appropriately. When it is not avaialble, good ‘ol common sense seems to work pretty well. The challenge is that the venues just want to make money and haven’t realized that allowing context to rule will lead to profits.

Posted by: Brian Reich | April 22, 2006 07:51 AM

We Media Global Forum Goes Live Online on May 3-4

Gloria Pan — Tue, 18 Apr 2006 19:55:00 +0000

For those of you who prefer to hang out in pajamas, you can participate in the Global Forum from home.

We Media GOES LIVE on May 3 and 4, at 9:00 am GMT / 4:00 am EST, on the conference Web site ), with live video, blog reports, live-chat discussions and podcasts. You can tune in, have your say, and maybe see your words come out of the mouths of one of our online curators, who’ll be bringing the questions, insights and comments of our Internet audience to the live conference.

TAG: wemedia

Earth Institute’s Jeffrey Sachs, UN’s Nitin Desai to Speak at Global Forum

Gloria Pan — Tue, 18 Apr 2006 19:55:00 +0000

So, one of the 100 Most Influential People in the World (Time Magazine, in both 2004 and 2005), Jeffrey Sachs, will beam into the We Media Global Forum via satellite from New York. Isn’t technology wonderful? Prof. Sachs is director of both The Earth Institute at Columbia University and the UN Millennium Project.

Also new to the program is Nitin Desai, who is special assistant to the UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan. Mr. Desai will speak about media and the informed society.

Hmm, let’s see…

In one place, we’ll have a VIP rep of the UN, plus the likes of Tom Glocer and Mark Thompson (Reuters and BBC), Dave Sifry (Technorati), Scott Heiferman (Meetup.com), Wahdah Khanfar (Al Jazeera), Joanna Shields (Google), Graham Ferguson (Vodafone) and Jeff Jarvis (buzzmachine.com). Should be interesting…

TAG: wemedia

Will the U.S. Get the Democratic Media We Deserve?

Jeffrey Chester — Tue, 18 Apr 2006 19:30:00 +0000

The answer is that for the short-term–even in the broadband era–it isn’t likely. First, our largest media companies have a current political agenda that will further weaken the institution of journalism. They now seek – at the FCC and in Congress – to remove what remains of critical safeguards designed to ensure the public receives a diverse array of information sources. Newspaper and broadcasting companies want to kill the broadcast-newspaper cross-ownership safeguard. That rule has prevented one company from dominating the two most powerful sources of information in a single town (a number of such combinations were “grandfathered” in 1975 when the rule went into effect). Once that rule is killed, expect more newspapers to be swept up in TV-oriented empires, forced to focus on TV industry tabloid, sound bite, business models.

The TV networks and major broadcasting companies also want to scrap what’s left of the “cap,” the number of stations a single company can own in a town and nationally. Expect fewer voices, less news, more commercials. As my colleague Tim Karr wrote recently for this blog, the big cable and phone companies want to control the future of the broadband Internet in the U.S. Under their proposed business model, they would become powerful digital gatekeepers. The content owned by a Comcast, Time Warner or AT&T would travel to TV’s, PC’s and mobile devices on a super-fast highway. Competing content, such as new forms of news, would likely have to face an expensive toll road or resort to what will be the equivalent of a digital dirt road. In the next few weeks, both the House and Senate–now being heavily lobbied by the cable and telephone lobby–will decide whether such a scenario is likely to come to pass soon. The big cable and telephone companies will very likely win–since they are currently spending many millions for lobbying and on political donations.

The current crisis in U.S. journalism reflects two decades (and more) of such special interest lobbying by the media lobby. The cut-backs in overseas bureaus, elimination of most investigative reporting on TV, and the lack of electoral related coverage is all linked to the sweeping away of FCC safeguards (including limits on media ownership). A business model that has little regard for public service dominates.

If the media lobby has its way, we will have even fewer owners controlling newspapers, radio, broadcast TV, cable, satellite, and broadband access. Is this what we really want for the U.S.? In my next post, I will discuss the future of alternative media in the emerging digital world.

TAG: wemedia

Previous Comments

Check out Tim and Jeff’s campaign to ‘Stop Fake News’ to see that their battle against the big media companies is as much about the substance of the news as it is about the fairness of the process. We all deserve real news. Thanks to Tim and Jeff for stepping up to lead the fight for all of us.

http://www.freepress.net/fakenews/

Posted by: Brian Reich | April 22, 2006 07:56 AM

Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) Author of The Declaration of Independence said that “We hold these Truths to be self-evident that Governments are insituted Among MEN, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed. We, the people give our representives the power and right-the authority-to govern us. We, as citizens, have the right to control how our government uses the authority we have given to it. As citizens in a free society , all of us have the responsibilty to deal intelligently with issuses of authority and make informed decisions about it.

Posted by: Mazine B. Johnson | May 20, 2006 02:05 AM

What makes you think that the US public deserves any better media than it now has, i.e. chooses to watch, i.e. supports by purchasing?
I’d say the American public is getting exactly what they deserve, by buying into the dumbed down mainstream.
Hence ignorant blunders like Iraq.
Hence the scorn of the rest of us.

Posted by: jeb | June 28, 2006 09:56 AM

The Democratization of Media: Icarus Retold

Gloria Pan — Sun, 16 Apr 2006 22:49:00 +0000

The news media is often referred to as the Fourth Estate, alongside the other three Estates (church, nobility and merchant class) described by Edmund Burke, that comprised the body politic of 18th-century France. The Estates represented the acme of the social hierarchy – the powerful, established elite who determined how everyone else should worship and be governed, who owned the means of production and commerce, and who told the masses what they should think.

Over time, the members of the Fourth Estate (at least in western civilizations) began to see a different function for themselves beyond exhortation. They started to see themselves as the fountain of knowledge, responsible for delivering objective, fair and accurate information that enables an enlightened, knowledgeable citizenry. This change in focus only served to raise the Fourth Estate even higher, setting up its members as superhuman in their ability to be perfectly unbiased and always right.

In the latter half of the 20th century, the news media solidified their position as the final arbiters of what information should recieve the attention of the public, and as the best interpreters of that information. They were able to do so because there were no means to challenge them – no easy and timely mechanism for others to call them on mistakes, no channels through which alternative interpretations of events or information could be offered. The news media began to believe their own hype that their sense of fairness and accuracy was greater than that of mere mortals.

Then came the Internet, and discussion lists and blogs and citizen journalism and we media, which illuminated the news-gathering and reporting process, uncovering all-too-human errors in judgement, interpretation and accuracy. Icarus began to fall.

The democratization of media is a retelling of that Greek myth, where a youth with man-made wings and great arrogance decided he could soar as high as the gods and flew too close to the sun, which melted the wax holding his wings together and sent him tumbling back to earth. If the news media had not reached such heights of hubris, would they seem to be falling so far and fast today?

In mythology, the story ends with Icarus’s death, but such an outcome seems unlikely for the media. For all their faults, they are still the best agents we have for collecting and disseminating the huge amounts of information that serve as our common reference points, promote social cohesiveness, and oil our democratic systems of governance. And their fall is but the introduction to a much larger story. Thousands of years ago, Icarus fell to a pre-biblical earth of passivity and ignorance, but today he would fall to a digital world – limitless, potentially borderless, filled with millions of voices, and characterized by diversity, transparency, nuance and action. It is a world where the dominance of every long-established institution, not just in media, can be challenged. It is a world where all underdogs – be they individuals, start-ups, non-profits or developing countries – can have the means to, if not to soar with gods, then at least walk among giants.

Is the democratization of media the beginning of true, cataclysmic change? In what ways can underdogs stand tall, and how are the giants reacting? Will democratization eventually happen across all social sectors equally? Or is it possible for some sectors to ignore this transformation and survive? And what other developments and issues in this topic am I missing?

TAG: wemedia

Previous Comments

There’s an interesting discussion in the most recent For Immediate Release podcast about MSM now being best an providing analysis since they can’t really break news anymore.

Likewise, I find info quantity and organization to be best provided by RSS, search, metadata, etc.

Posted by: Marshall Kirkpatrick | April 17, 2006 01:27 PM

Icarus hasn’t fallen yet here in Denmark. To my great dismay, most of my friends and acquaintances – well-educated, internet savvy people – have no idea what a blog is and little conception of its inherent grassroots power. The traditional media is still largely the main fountain of information and no serious “challengers” have emerged as far as I can tell. Popular blogs tend to focus on IT or travel, rather than politics and in general have made no significant impact so far on mainstream opinion. (I haven’t heard of any blog front in the Italian election for instance). Nor have blogs made an impact as business models. In DK, only one blog seems to be making any money. Many business people I speak to seem to find the idea of advertising or running PR campaigns on blogs and other social media slightly ridiculous. There is still little if any cross-pollination between social media and mainstream media.Does all this reflect a more entrenched media establishment here in Europe? A lack of grassroots user activity? A more passive electorate? Or just the usual lag of 2 to 3 years that characterizes innovation originated in the US? Europe?

Posted by: Vanessa | April 19, 2006 06:49 AM

Staying Connected Across Time

Little Judy — Sun, 16 Apr 2006 19:09:00 +0000

In his kickoff post, Florian talks about well-connected societies using a “range of different media types available to them to exchange news, establish and maintain connections and establish history.” The last word, history, made me think about connectedness across time through your personal history.

I use new media in so many different ways to stay connected to people and places from my past.

My childhood home is pinned on Google Maps. I’ve visited the web sites of my grade school and high school. I’ve bookmarked pictures of snow in Michigan so I can play “you think this is a blizzard, check out what winter was like when >I< was a kid!" with my friends in New York. I like staying connected to my midwestern roots so I listen to webcasts from radio stations in Detroit, visit the Freep and am on the Pistons' e-mail list.

I stay in touch with my grade school best friend and two of my high school roommates via email. Of course, I’ve Googled old boyfriends and found out that the boy I went steady with in sixth grade ended up being a state attorney general who resigned after being accused of ethics violations. Good thing we broke up before summer vacation.

I belong to classmates.com. I’m on MySpace, too, and have added several acquaintances that I’ve lost touch with over the years by finding them on other people’s pages. I’m just getting started with LinkedIn and hope to find some former co-workers there, too.

I recently started using my AOL Instant Messenger again and reconnected with some old friends there as well. My new job’s messaging standard is AOL, but I stay connected to my pals at the previous job via Yahoo, and at the job before that via Hotmail. Thank you, Trillian!

I wonder if the Next Big Thing will be a tool to make it easier to keep your own personal history and stay connected to the places you’ve been and the people who’ve been in your life. Of course, privacy would be a big concern, but it would be interesting to see your own personal history all in one place.

TAG: wemedia

Previous Comments

As a person who is outside her own country – I am particularly amazed by how much social software and the net can dissolve borders.

Despite being out of my country – I don’t feel like diaspora. As long as I have a computer on me – I feel intricately connected with India. Aware of every bit of news. Random chats with friends back home.

It would be interesting to see what the internet does in terms of identity-politics in the life of diaspora.

Posted by: neha | April 17, 2006 05:25 PM