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My friend Jo White (@Mediamum) recently asked for my thoughts on why citizen journalism matters as she’s teaching a class on the subject. So here are some of my views for your perusal and comments:

The internet is the natural environment for news to take place.

Traditional Western news organisations exist as they do because the distribution of news was previously limited by its means of production and the dynamics of capitalism. You needed a printing press, a TV license etc. to produce and distribute news.

To counter those constraints and deal with the enormity of that responsibility, we structured largely false, and “ideal”, notions of what was news and how that was reported. We developed terms such as newsworthiness and imparted notions of objectivity to sort through the practicalities of “telling stories” to the masses.

News became big business and news organisations became big corporations. All of this was not a bad thing in itself, but born out of social constructs and economic necessity.

The internet has changed this. The barrier to broadcast is essentially access to the internet (not discounting some social challenges), but while this remains a problem in some third-world countries, the existence of large mobile infrastructure is quickly overcoming at least the technical problems.

For me, the impact of this change was made evident during the second-Iraqi conflict, when a group of local bloggers set about writing what was happening from cafes and with limited internet access. Traditional journalists were often unable to go out and report on the situation in any meaningful way because they were compromised by having to go out with the US army or simply unable to leave their hotels for fear for their safety. In fact, it was were the term hotel journalism was coined.

What the Iraqi bloggers were able to do was report on what was really going on in a way that traditional media could not. Their opinions were better informed, personal (free from the falsehood of objectivity) and told the news to the world in a way that could not be done through traditional journalism.

Modern news rooms are somewhat remnant of the situation in Iraq - reporters are often tied to their desks and beats with little time to get out and discover what is happening outside of what is fed to them through sources and press releases. While there are exceptions, this is the harsh reality of the costs and time it takes to write for a large news organisation and the internet has only added to these pressures.

Those on the street now have the ability to report directly on what is happening around them. Our own personal experiences of our neighborhood will always be better informed than that of a reporter, surely? (Hence I was inspired to start the norg.)

News is no longer limited to the false dichotomy of “one side versus another” - there are often many views/sides/opinions to a story and as long as all have equal opportunity and access to sharing that information then we can leave the shackles of control media behind. Open comments on news stories is an important step in the right direction (and also Citizen Journalism).

Lastly, “citizen journalism” is not the best term, but possibly the easiest to understand. I think we are all news makers. Journalism has never been an official profession, but a prescribed name for a skill set many people can learn and contribute to outside of mainstream media.

Also the term Citizen Journalism does not account for the fact that many experts now have access to audiences.

Really what we are seeing is an age of hyper-connected news as opposed to that we have only been drip-fed. We are all news-makers engaging in what is only natural to us - telling our stories.

Photo shared under creative commons.

Well it’s less than two weeks to go until Edge of the Web and it’s great that we have two of the most in-demand speakers in Australia when it comes to the social web (for lack of a better word) coming over to talk at the conference. Laurel Papworth and Stephen Collins will be talking on How to Develop a Social Marketing Campaign
and Enterprise 2.0 respectively.

I caught up with Stephen earlier in the week to have a chat about what wisdom he’ll be sharing with the crowds at the conference, so here’s a taste of what he has to say:

1. When talking about Enterprise 2.0 it has to be a team approach.

It’s no good talking just to management or people on a project about collaboration, there has to be an overall desire from within an organisation to work this way. Often this can be a challenge, so Stephen recommends that YOU be enthusiastic, don’t be afraid to challenge the way things are being done and have evidence to back up what you are trying to do. There are a lot of case studies out there that look at different aspects of using enterprise 2.0 in companies. Arm yourself with examples and use them as evidence.

2. Start small and grow from there.

Start in a business unit of 10 people or 50 people - or one that you can manage - is Stephen’s advice on taking initial steps. Co-ordinate on one or two projects initially and see how it works - often this is a great way for convincing others to try in on their own projects. As you do that, you build momentum from the inside and you get internal entrepreneurs who say “I also want to work that way”.

3. When talking to business types about these things - show them the money!

Often when talking to “grey suit wearers” Stephen recommends a different approach. This is where you need to talk in terms of ROI. If you can show them, for example, that you can go from spending six to two hours to find a piece of information (these are real case studies) then that’s a big cost saving. Encourage them to do things like open their product development window to incorporate opinions from their valued clients. Show them how it increases productivity by reducing time it takes to get a job completed - often people are able to do a job that used to take them two or three days, in a day. “There’s obvious bottom-line business benefits in these sorts of things and you know if you are talking to business and you are trying to convince them to work this way - then they need to see ROI on it and fairly quickly so they are able to justify it in budget terms,” he says.

4. Shared knowledge is a long-term investment (and here is some of that evidence!)

There are a lot of really good case studies from big banks or big mining companies that have proved the effectiveness of shared knowledge. There are mining companies up in Queensland for example, using a Wiki so that when guys come out of a mine after a shift and have broken kit, they register that so that they know that it is going to get it fixed. But there are added long-term benefits as well because, you’ve also got guys who have interim fixes for things, guys who have been working in the mine for 20 years, who may know what you can do while that equipment is being fixed. There is knowledge there that people can go back to.

Best thing of all is that Stephen feels your pain, having worked in government for 12 years and having that feeling of “smacking your head against the wall thinking there must be a better way to do this.” It was while he was in a position of an IT manager in a bigger organisation that he started thinking there must be a better way for him to co-ordinate all that was going in a way that people could contribute to. So let his insights from this tortured experience be your gain

Hoping to catch up with Laurel this week sometime - meanwhile, if you have not read her blog I suggest you do. Same for Stephen - always gems to find there.

Film-maker Jesse Dylan has put together a video for Creative Commons to explain why we need to save the world from failed sharing. It’s a great introduction to the idea of creative commons and an example of why we should support it - the video uses a lot of images shared under the cc license and the music is from NIN. You can see the full list of artists here.

Creative Commons is in the midst of its 2008 fundraising campaign. Find out how you can support Creative Commons at its support site.

I think it is a very accurate description!

Should your blog be your destination site?

I’m finally putting together some changes I’ll be making to this blog, which is sadly neglected at times - not because I have a lack of things to say, but more because I’m often communicating on other sites these days - mostly Twitter, but also the Norg (of course!), 12 seconds, blip and a number of other social networks.

It’s tempting to pull all those interactions back on to your blog - you see it less now, but there was a time when some bloggers were posting all their day’s tweets on to their blog as posts. You have Twitter badges now, which have replaced that somewhat, but the interaction is still happening on Twitter. Then there’s video that you can produce on sites like 12seconds, Seesmic and Phreadz which can often take forms of video blogging, but this is happening on a site other than your blog and in all together different community than others you may belong to. A lot of those sites have been integrated with Twitter and you can post any updates automatically to your Twitter stream, but that is also not incorporating the interaction and community with which you engaging. And then ofcourse there is Friendfeed, which pulls all these streams together in another community of its own. I guess that sort of leaves one’s blog, out in the cold, so to speak.

Don’t get me wrong, I think a personal blog has its place, but rather than pull all the lifestreams back to it, I think they have just become part of the constant fractured stream/identities that we create. I guess they are no longer our central destination site. Perhaps our need to make it one is born out of a sense to quantify the influence we have - it’s hard to know your reach on Twitter for example - sure, you have X number of followers, but how many read your views at any given time?

Blogs still have an important role, but I think they are just now part of the fragmented identities that so many of us have across a number of networks. I don’t think that’s a bad thing and just like “control media” needs to learn how to let go, in some sense we have to as well. I think we gather different audiences across different sites and that diversification can actually add to our online profile instead of detract from it. Just because I care what you say on Twitter might not mean I read your blog, but that’s one avenue you have my attention on, that you may otherwise not. Those of you interested in my blog may not care whether I’ve wasted an hour one morning looking for white socks.

I guess wanting to hold on to our online identities in one place is an old-way of looking at things. Growing your profile in future might mean more fragmentation, but that’s something we’ve been telling larger monolithic corporations like news sites to get their heads around for years. Time to taste our own medicine perhaps?

Photo: Venetian Glimpse by BombDog

Any readers who have started following this blog from talks I give from time to time on Public Relations may recall me mentioning Nick Hodge. It usually involves me putting up this picture and telling people that “this is the face of Microsoft”. Well, the man will be in town for Edge of the Web and I had a chat to Nick about what we should expect from him on this outstanding occasion. So here’s what he had to say:

IE6 is an abomination and one of the worst things for web development productivity EVA according to Microsoft evangelist (and Professional Geek) Nick Hodge. (Geek kudos accrued.)
One thing you learn about Nick pretty quickly is that he’s not one to shy away from criticising his employer when he thinks they’ve got it wrong. At the same time, you can also pretty much guarantee that anything good he has to say about Microsoft he truly believes in. Nick will be presenting a talk at Edge of the Web on “Not your father’s Microsoft” and is hoping to convince even the most hardened and cynical code-monkeys that Microsoft has learned from past mistakes and wants to engage in an “internet frame of mind”.
This is something Nick is really passionate about, having been a big supporter of open-source software for years.
Nick admits Microsoft has been late to the game in embracing open-source, but there are some interesting developments that he wants to communicate to developers. He’s particularly excited by the IronRuby project that is bringing Ruby into the .Net platform, a step that has seen Microsoft accept external contributions. The other thing he wants to highlight is the Silverlight tools for Eclipse it has released, which is the more common framework for development compared to Microsoft’s commercial Visual Studio. And yes, he even wants to tell you about cool ways you can use Microsoft on a Mac (he owns one himself.)

Ofcourse, Nick is looking forward to hanging out with the Perth web community, one he feels other Australian cities could look to emulate (it is true, we do rock!) He’s here to listen as well as give a presentation, so even if you are most cynical about what he has to say - seek him out and have a chat.

If you haven’t got your tickets to the conference I suggest you do. It’s not often that you’ll get to experience something like this in your own city. Hope to see some of you there.

PS. I’m hoping to get a much more incriminating picture of Nick, so I can keep my tricks fresh!

Nick that does NOT mean I want to see you with your shirt off - a LOLcode shirt will do

In the spirit of the Australian web community, I’m pleased to announce I’m doing a new podcast with Elias Bizannes on TPN called Silicon Beach Australia. We’ll be talking to Australian web entrepreneurs about their companies, dreams and motivations. Our first podcast is with Mike Cannon-Brookes from Atlassian and we have some great guests lined up already. Have a look and leave feedback. It’s all about the conversation people

My new movie muse Fidlr told me about the Drunk History series, which I just have to recommend everyone to look at. I was really busy and didn’t get round to watching them till yesterday - but it is just frakin BRILLIANT.

This is my favourite one *hic* but make sure you look them all up on YouTube.

I spoke on a panel yesterday at the MEAA’s Future of Journalism summit in Brisbane on, “Tools or toys: techniques and technology for the digital age.” Margaret Simons opened the conference with some very straight-shooting talk on where she saw the industry heading and it looked vastly like unexplored territory. What makes her points so interesting is that she is one of the few journalists I know who is trying to forge a living from journalism outside of established media companies and she is very frank in saying that she is still trying to find out how to do that exactly. As Cameron Reilly pointed out the economics of media have shifted fundamentally and its time we looked for new models, but we are not going to find them by relying on the old way of doing things. Margaret said she believes the most exciting journalism in the future will not be happening in traditional media - something I agree with wholeheartedly. It’s not happening often yet, but it is starting to happen and there will come a time when traditional media is not the place where the most interesting stories are happening or even where most news is made.

The other point then is how do we find these stories? I like Jay Rosen’s video on “How to Digest News“, which goes some way in explaining why crowd-powered aggregation sites are so important. You can’t assume that on your own you can find the best news out there - finding a trusted site that filters news for you makes more sense.

My own advice for journalists on how to prepare for the future is to start investing in themselves and to experiment in online participation. Going from writing news in a straight non-personal style to writing online is quite confronting - I remember it took me some time to find my voice and gain some confidence in writing from a personal perspective. The best place to start to learn the nuances of online communication, in my opinion, is Twitter - and the key is not then to just create content, but to participate as well - a point Jean Burgess from QUT made during the day. It’s those who start taking the risks now that will be better off in the future. I know it’s a confronting situation, but it’s time to face reality - things are not going back to what they were.

UPDATE: You can find more coverage on the seminar on Lavartus Prodeo,  and Wooly Days.

I’ll be speaking at The Future of Journalism Summit in Brisbane next week on Saturday, 13 September. I decided I’d give the MEAA a call after I looked through the panelists and found most were from control media companies, who quite frankly, are no longer the authority on all things media.

Details for the event are:

The Future of Journalism Conference
2 George Street, Brisbane QLD 4000
9am to 4pm, Saturday September 13, 2008

Members: $66 Students: $44 Non-members: $88
Enquiries & Bookings: 1300 656 513
or email melissa.mcallister@alliance.org.au

I’m also hoping Brisbane Twitterers can organise a BTUB on the Friday as I’d love to meet some of them.

I’m even willing to sponsor the event - well Brisbane Norg is anyway Nothing like free beer to spread a bit of love.