These are my notes from a talk I gave as part of the City of Sydney Library Talks on social media. I thought I’d get them up sooner rather than later so forgive their roughness.

I’m sure by now most of you’ll know that Whitney Houston passed away last week, but many of you might not be aware that the story was actually broken on Twitter by a girl whose aunt worked for in Houston. She tweeted about it 27 minutes before any official statements.

It’s not the most traditional wording for BREAKING NEWS, but that is what it is.

In May last year, it was Keith Urbahn and who formally worked for Donald Rumsfield’s office that broke the news on Twitter that Osama bin Laden had also been killed by the US government.

I’m not suggesting that twitter is a great place for breaking death notices but these are examples where citizens not reporters have broken fairly significant stories on twitter in a way that they otherwise would not have been able to. I refer to these as “random acts of journalism”, a term coined by NYU Professor Jay Rosen.

The Internet is 40 years old – so it’s been a long journey from the point where the first message sent was “lo” – to today, where anyone can effectively break news like we’ve seen on Twitter.

It wasn’t really until things like blogger, a blog publishing service that was launched in 1999, that everyday people actually had the ability to create content and put it online without any technical knowledge or understanding of HTML.

Flickr was launched in 2004, becoming one of the first and most accessible online communities of photographers which is now used by many organisations as a place to find photos in breaking stories. It introduced tagging, making photos searchable, and groups that made finding photos relating to specific events easy.

Prior to Youtube, which was only launched in 2005, there was no common format for videos. meaning that unless you had a compatible file your video could not be uploaded online.

Before Twitter, which came in being in 2006, there was no way to easily break news is almost real-time fashion.

And Facebook, the one we all love to hate, has played a significant part in bringing together communities of activists as witnessed in Egypt last year.

I think in the last year we’ve effectively seen two forms of citizen journalism emerging, aided by the platforms I’ve mentioned.

The first are those I referred to earlier and are those random acts of journalism. That is, you are in the right place at the right time and something happens and you are able to report on it.

Here’s one of the most famous examples from Janis Krums from Sarasota Florida who was the first to post a picture of US airways flight 1549 on twitter when it landed in the Hudson. He tweeted “there’s a plane in the Hudson. I’m on the ferry going to pick up the people. crazy.”

We see it happen a lot during earthquakes and other natural disasters. It’s not premeditated people aren’t anticipating that they will be reporting news.

The second form of citizen journalism we’ve seen emerging is much more organised. It is where people have the intention of reporting news, but it’s done by citizens outside of traditional news organisations and not for payment.

Mosireen is a media collective responsible for collating some of the most iconic videos of the Egyptian revolution. It is one of the most popular nonprofit channels in the world after just to 4 months of being on YouTube. This comes at a time when citizen journalism is playing an increasingly important role in the Arab world in both newsgathering and challenging official media and state discourses attempting to silence the revolutionaries.

Libna Darwish is one of the founding members and she had this to say about Mosireen:

“The success of Mosireen shows how people need a different type of journalism and how the new form is gaining more and more support. It is not about being a professional filmmaker, it is not about editing. The footage is from people who are volunteers and are not making money out of it. A lot of the footage is donated by people who’ve risked their lives at the scene and are corroborating to make this network of citizen journalists, who want to share their experiences and get the information out.”

Realising they were only getting to people with Internet connections they set up outdoor cinemas so that everyday people could witness what was going on through the stories of these citizen journalists. This led to others standing up and sharing their stories, which in turn became part of the films they continue to distribute.

It’s a story that being repeated throughout the Arab world, with special significance in Syria which has blocked traditional journalists from entering so most of the reporting that is coming out of there at the moment is from ordinary citizens risking their lives to get the story of what is happening. The country, ruled by Bashar al-Assad since 2000, has also been the site of the most brutal crackdowns against protesters. Syrians and the rest of the world have been watching video from a single source: YouTube.

Another citizen journalist site I love is the Kibera News Network in Kenya, started in 2010. It is run by 16 young citizen video journalists – all young Kenyan filmmakers – recording the news and stories as they happen from their perspective. All the videos are uploaded on YouTube as well as their own website. They get stories from local sources and encourage people to SMS in stories because Africa does not huge uptake of smart phones yet.

Content is very varied: from job security issues, to reporting fires or train accidents, as well as cultural events and political activity. There are stories on how two young men have turned to a somewhat unusual, for Kibera, employment: they own and work at a beauty salon, providing services such as manicures as well as hairstyling, to stories on open sewage trenches and high population density resulting in communicable diseases spreading quickly.

Citizen Journalism is also making inroads here and in the US as witnessed through the Ocuppy Movement.

NY Times writer and blogger Nicholas Kristof had this to say about protesters and the media during the Occupy Wall Street protests:

[H]aving people shooting videos everywhere provides a useful level of accountability. A lot of people including me were really taken aback by the videos of police violence during Occupy Wall Street. A decade ago nobody would have known about that because there wouldn’t have been a reporter there and even if someone did write about it, it wouldn’t have been that dramatic.

One of the challenges of breaking news through a medium like twitter for us as news consumers is the ability for us to sort through what is news and what isn’t.

Particularly when you have events like earthquakes and tsunamis you get these large amounts of citizen reports coming out from there and it is hard for people to verify what is actually happening. And there have been false rumours that have been started to twitter. I don’t think anyone find that surprising.

It is also led to get another role in journalism with the undertaken by journalists and Ciit J’s alike in the curation of twitter. Andy Carvin (@acarvin) is probably the most famous curator – he works for NPR which is National Public Radio in America because is not a journalist himself.

Carvin perfected the art of finding sources to following the Middle Eastern uprising. He would question the information that was being tweeted and make sure that he can verify anything he sent on. At one time in libya’s uprising Carvin tweeted 1200 times in 24 hours for many the only trusted source of information that that was happening in Libya at the time.

We’ve also seen newsrooms use storify to put together information that citizens have put out there and publish them on their news sites. Storify lets you collate tweets into a story structure – first tweets at the top, where Twitter reads backwards if you like. If you visited any Australian news site recently you might have noticed Storify.

This brings us to the very interesting intersection of news rooms and citizen journalism.

What role do citizen journalists play in traditional media? And if we are part of media then do we have the same responsibilities as media?

As my good friend Margaret Simons points out “journalism is a practice not a profession”

Most newsrooms have some integration of citizen journalism in their daily news gathering. I’m sure you have noticed on Twitter or Facebook or even up on a news website call outs for tips, scoops or pictures about a specific story.

But many in ways I think newsrooms regard to citizen journalism as the competition. It isn’t.

There are a large number of benefits that can come from further integration of citizen reporting in news rooms, not the least of which is that people feel genuinely engaged with the news when they contribute to it.

There are some things though that citizen news gathering has over traditional news rooms that can’t be ignored. This is a quote from Clay Shirky:

“There are three advantages to citizen video over what is produced by trained press. The first is that the first people on the scene of an event are usually citizens, so it is better for speed. The second is that there are more citizens than press, so it is better for coverage. The third is that it is harder to control citizens than press, so it is better for free speech.”

I think in the examples I have given you go some way to prove this.

It is interesting then to see The Guardian recently announce it is going to heavily invest in citizen journalism as it’s future hope.

It also announced a few months that it would be moving to a digital only news organisation in the future, so it would not have any print presence. As one of the older more established newspapers that fairly significant.

It’s set up what it has called “open journalism.”

Here’s a quote from The Guardian announcement on open journalism and the move to digital first:

[It] is a collaboration between journalists within the building and experts out of the building … who are experts because they care about the subject matter as much as we do. They don’t have to be called professor.
“I think like a lot of industries, you start off as the accidental manufacturer. Presses came along and we distributed content that way. We are now very clear that we have a digital first strategy. We are much more concerned about telling stories than we are about the platform.
“Once you decouple the consumer from the platform, it [the platform] becomes less important. From a commercial point of view, we absolutely can see a time when there will not be as many newspapers on the high street.”

The first really interesting thing The Guardian did was open it’s news list.

A news list is a papers “sacred document” for the day that contains all the stories they are covering.

On The Guardian now you can see a live account of the plans in the form of the daily newslist kept by their editors. It provides a glimpse into the scheduled announcements, events and speeches that make up the news day. You are also be able to view what the editors think about the stories by reading their updates on Twitter with the hashtag #opennews. They also tweet conversations they have about the day’s news, story ideas we get from our correspondents and the latest information on stories that we get during the day from their twitter account @guardianworld.

“We won’t quite show you everything. We can’t tell you about stories that are under embargo or, sometimes, exclusives that we want to keep from our competitors, but most of our plans will be there for all to see, from the parliamentary debates we plan to cover to the theatre we plan to review. We reserve the right to stick to our guns, but would love to know what you think.”

It was first done in October 2011 as a two-week experiment, but has continued on from there.

Every week The Guardian also publishes a list of how to get involved in the news, proactively encouraging citizens to get involved.

They’ve undertaken projects with citizen journalists – sending photographers who captured moments from London riots to go back and take pictures months later.

I thought I would go through some iPhone apps that aid reporting from the field, as you never know when you might need them.

Here’s a list from Ohio University’s Society Professional Journalists Blog:

iTalk: From Griffin Technology, this recording app for iPhones or iPads allows you to select from different levels of recording quality and send the file via email, Dropbox, or iTunes.
Flipboard: Converts social media content into a personalized, digital magazine on your iPhone or iPad, and can be used to keep news streams in one location.
HootSuite or TweetDeck: These social media dashboards help you organize social media content. HootSuite works on iPhone and iPad, Android, Blackberry, and Keitai, and TweetDeck works on iPhone and Android..
Police Scanner: Access real-time emergency alerts on your iPhone, and record and save events.
AP Stylebook: Consult the AP Stylebook from the field on your iPhone or Blackberry.
Evernote: Create notes and keep track of story ideas from the field. The app is available for iOS, Android, Blackberry, and Windows phones.
iMovie: Organize, edit, and share video stories from the field.

Of course if we are breaking stories we need to take responsibility for verifying it. I think one of the best ways to do this is to make yourselves familiar with the social media tools you use and to the people you engage with. Learn who to trust

Nothing disappoints me than journalists just following other journalists, I think they’re missing out on understanding who their potential sources are and who they should trust. It takes time and skill.

I have two rules, for my own use:

1.Read links before you RT.
2. Correct tweets – and delete incorrect ones from the stream. (They can be RT amplifying the error.)

In summary, I think Jay Rosen put it perfectly when he said:

Journalism gets better the more people doing it.

I’m sitting on the train tonight, trying to access Twitter.
It’s been the case for a while now, that on the journey home I habitually flip through the stream of disjointed conversations, briefly reading and passing over the snippets of a day that belong to those that I follow (and all their followers). Usually the only moments I’m not doing that, is when we pass under the city loop. But even then I sit with my phone in hand, stealing the moments when “not in service” blink off and I can go back to my lurking. Tonight though, I’m not really getting any access at all, so I’m forced to listen to the conversation going on next to me. Yes, I’m an eavesdropper from way back, but this time I really have no choice in the matter.
The girl sitting opposite me is recounting her break-up to a friend. It’s quite a marvelous story. They had their whole life planned together, including the birth of their first child, which was going to be a girl “because that’s what we both wanted”. Goddam, I’d tweet this stuff if only I could get connection. I’ve even written the tweet in my head.
“Break-up story next to me rather amusing. Girl quite heart-broken as they had their first child already planned. A daughter named, Keesha.” I’m imagining it might be spelt with a $ sign.

Next tweet: “Someone sign this girl a reality cheque. And get her a book on baby names.”
Anyway, I’m not getting any luck with accessing the internet so I put my phone in my pocket, just as Keesha’s want-to-be-mum hangs up and turns to a portly man sitting in front of her.
“I’m sorry about the music playing earlier, I really didn’t mean to disturb you.” He nods and says it’s not a problem, obviously a little taken-back that she’s apologised in such a sincere way.
“Anyway,” she continues, “How was your day?”
He looks unguarded and it gets my attention too. Do strangers really ask each other this these days? Most of the time we’re plugged into iTunes or grazing through Facebook and Twitter. Or even, going old-school, reading a book.
“Um, it was, as usual, quite routine, as most days are in fact.” He answers with a fumbled honesty. She continues to pursue the conversation.
“What is it that you do?”
“I’m retired, but I was a lecturer at TAFE.” She goes on to tell him about her abandoned studies in hospitality, a sleazy boss and her desire to return to learning. She tells him it’s marvelous that he’s a teacher, that he must have worked hard to achieve that, that is must be lovely to have a job where people look up to him.

“Well,” he says in a quiet knowing voice, “It’s not really that esteemed, most people regard lecturing at TAFE to be that thing you do, when you can’t do anything else.” She disagrees. And he thanks her. He looks a tad more chuffed than just chuffed.
I’m at my stop. My signal returns. I walk off the platform, glad that I hadn’t tweeted earlier.
I type: “Endearing conversation between two strangers next to me. A heart-broken 20-something and a retiree. Feeling a little heart-warmed.”

I walk off wondering how often I’m disconnected from the people around me.

I’m not discounting online connections, I think it’s possible to become close and value those whose 140 characters drop through your day. After four years of some followers, I’d say I’d know them pretty well, and yes, having even not met them I refer to them as “friends”. But a lot of us would admit to being seduced by the Twitter vortex, and it’s so easy to become drawn into – when nothing can happen without a desire to tweet it. I think sometimes there are sadder implications for relationships and family life, when we become so seduced by our need to be constantly connected to others outside of those immediately around us. I’ve seen it happen.

I’m not going to read Twitter on my commutes anymore. And then maybe, a little less when I’m at home. I don’t know how successful I’m going to be. I’ll let you know.

But someone just signed me a reality cheque. And it’s best I cash it in.

MY RESPONSE TO BOB ELLIS:

Oh I get it now, it seems that because popular culture portrays women as being sexually exploited that means that it’s acceptable. For the latter they deserve to be publically vilified, peeked at in the shower, sexually harassed and abused for speaking out on the matter. Oh and broadcast unknowingly on Skype while having sex. As is tradition.

How do these sentences, these statements, these propositions, cohere? They don’t.

But that is how Bob Ellis sees it, in his piece published on The Drum, titled “Why are heads rolling at the ADFA?”.

Ellis appears to argue that because women have been always been portrayed as objects to be leered at by men, then surely men doing just that is acceptable. He gives the example of Hot Lips Houlihan in the movie M.A.S.H. being oggled at when her shower is unwittingly lifted by a crane. Of which, Elllis writes:

“Are these uniformed men thereafter court-martialled, their commanding general sacked, and Congress made to interrogate all participants? No. Extremely hard to see why. They are guilty, surely, as charged.”

Leaving aside the fact that we’re talking about a movie, Ellis claims this behaviour and what happened at the Australian Defence Force Academy, when a cadet was broadcast having sex via Skype, is acceptable. You know, in the traditional way.

Incidentally, in the movie M.A.S.H, Houlihan and Burns unwittingly broadcast an encounter between them over the PA system. Burns eventually cannot stand being teased about the encounter and is sedated, restrained, and leaves.

Ellis doesn’t go there and realistically Burns probably got over it after he sobbed on the phone to his mother. That is after all, what Ellis suggests might have happened to this cadet had the incident not become a national debate.

But M.A.S.H. is only one film and Ellis has TV examples too!

The Simpsons. Seinfeld, Cheers, Frazier, The Honeymooners and I Love Lucy all show “bungled copulation” and as audiences we judge them as “good sports”. And then there’s his historical evidence, with similar incidents in Shakespeare, Boccaccio, Chaucer, Suetonius and Bible (rather notably, Ellis adds.) Men and women copulate, we all get that. Some of this is fodder for sitcoms, some of this is fodder for poetry, but as soon as you introduce any notion that a sexual act is taking place without consent it is not funny or romantic, more importantly it shouldn’t be normalized. I can’t think of any times that any of these sitcoms, or the Bible for that matter, sought to do this.

Ellis goes even further, by suggesting that this young ADFA cadet was just having his “bedroom technique” observed, “in an almost traditional way, by his flatmates.” I’m not sure what Ellis and his mates got up to in their youth, but I’m guessing there’s a sigh of relief among some of his “conquests” that Skype did not exist at the time.

He is of course right that popular culture continues to objectify women. Yes, a lot of man/woman/sex humour can be funny, but perhaps this complacency has normalized something far more serious for far too long. That a woman could be filmed covertly while having sex with her partner and have it broadcast to his mates is just plain wrong. There are no variations on that fact. That we live in a culture that sends out the message that it could in fact be funny, traditional or normal – Ellis has the evidence (or more correctly, Ellis is the evidence) – perhaps highlights the need for a much broader inquiry.

In an age of apparent gender equality, when I have as many supposed rights as any man in Australian society, when wolf-whistling a woman on the street is frowned upon, how is it that women continued to be objectified by popular culture?

This week a Brisbane Catholic school launched an inquiry into students who were rating female teachers on their physical attributes. A few years ago, members of a Sydney boy’s college started a “pro-rape” facebook page.

Do we all, as Ellis does, shrug our shoulders and say boys will be boys?

If this is the only option, then let me be the first to say, let the wowser-fest begin.

I came across this piece today, written in the New Yorker after the devastation in Haiti, last year. It caught my eye, for a number of reasons. Firstly, it was looking at the challenge for journalists in conveying the scale of suffering in disasters such as Haiti. Where does a story start amongst such devastation, who’s stories form the narrative over others’ suffering?

Steve Coll writes:

I learned something about journalism while covering my first earthquake, in northwest Iran, in June, 1990. Tens of thousands of people died. After some travail, a small group of us newspaper and broadcast correspondents from the West arrived by helicopter, after dark, in a flattened village. I was still pretty green but I had seen enough death and devastation by then to know that it would not affect me emotionally. Nonetheless, as I stumbled into the village off the helicopter, I felt paralyzed, professionally. There were no houses or buildings left standing; there were so many dead; there was so much audible suffering. What was one supposed to write in one’s notebook to capture and convey this scene?

It’s something that a lot of journalists can quite probably relate to. The series of natural disasters in Australia, has exposed more journalists to this dilemma. The floods in Brisbane, the cyclone that followed – these were extraordinary events in the history of Australia. For those not there, the devastation was hard to fathom. But I, like many other Australians, stayed glued to Twitter, as Yasi passed over Queensland. Some of the addiction came from the constant updating of news. But for me, more importantly, a larger story formed from the tapestry of tweets, a story woven together and loosely knitted by the hundreds of people sitting in their houses as the cyclone passed.

“Our lights have gone out now”, “We can hear the windows rattling”, and “It’s eerily quiet now, must be the eye,” are not quotes that would make the news. But that night, in the face of the unknown approaching, it was an insight into the fear of so many in that moment. And, in some strange way, a lot of us felt as if we were there.

And this was also where the New Yorker article caught my attention. Steve Coll writes:

My memory of what followed is vivid. I was in the company of one of those lions of foreign correspondence at the Los Angeles Times—I think it was Rone Tempest. Perhaps he noticed that I seemed confused. Anyway, he said—grunted, actually—like some veteran baseball player spitting tobacco in a nineteen-thirties movie: “Make lists—all the little things.” And so I did. A tin cooking pot with rice still in it. Five boots, none matching. A bicycle wheel protruding from a pile of rocks. Like that. We rode back to Tehran that night on a bus. I wrote my story on one of those ancient Radio Shack portables. When I flipped through my notebook with a flashlight, I gradually came to realize that I had something particular—and for American audiences so distanced from revolutionary Iran—something useful to say.

Sometimes, in the rush to denounce Twitter or even to talk it up as the ultimate breaking news source, we forget that it’s the little things that count. It’s the small stories in the bigger drama that make it so real. The mundane among the madness. The one voice among hundreds.

I was captivated, like many, by the recent events in Egypt. Late one night I came across the stream of @ bloggerseif. I think I found his tweets from Andy Carvin, who did an amazing job of creating a “curated” twitter stream of all that was going on. That’s a story in itself. But, that night, it was Ali Seif’s (I do not know if that is his real name) tweets that made the whole situation so real for me. In the chaos of that night, his often disjointed and emotive tweets, told the story of a small child they found; lost among the chaos in Tehran square. They had no way of knowing if the baby’s parents were alive, or even who he was. I think he could only say his name. Amazingly, they located the child’s parents the next day. It was hugely emotional to read, but I felt like I had some insight (and empathy!) to the bigger picture through the tweets of Ali Sief and the plight of this little child – that would otherwise be overwhelmed by the revolution around them.

I think Coll is right, it is about little things.

But that’s what makes Twitter such an invaluable form of journalism.

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/stevecoll/2010/01/earthquakes-and-journalism.html#ixzz1EaGchNbf

I did something the other day I haven’t done in a long time. I turned on the TV.
Some of you may still be familiar with this ritual, but I can honestly say in the last three years, I can count on one hand how many times I’ve even bothered to find the remote.
It’s not that I’m accessing TV shows through other nefarious time-shifted means, though I’m not denying that I have engaged in such acts, but rather that I find TV quite a solitary experience.
Unless you’re watching football, there’s pretty much an unspoken rule NOT TO SPEAK. And yes, before you all collectively scream at me, I know you don’t talk during the replays. Established that one the hard way.
So just who do you screech at when at Courtney produces sub-par pesto? #masterfchef
Why, Twitter ofcourse.
In fact, Twitter is bringing TV to life in a way that time-shifting will never be able to compete with.
Twitter brings a huge collective audience together to watch TV. If you’re yet to experience the magic of Twitter TV, you can’t go past Eurovision to fully appreciate its value. And you don’t have long to wait. Highlight 25, 27 & 29 May, 2010 in your calendar.
A few Australian programs have cottoned on to the this.
Mark Pesce (@mpesce), who has a healthy Twitter following, was one of the early pioneers of rounding up the troops on Twitter to watch the New Inventors, for which he is a panelist from time to time.
Then there was the infamous #nudierun on Media Watch, where twitterers said they would run around their neighbourhoods naked if Johnathon Holmes said “pwned” on TV. He did and there were some sightings of naked bottoms. Silly? Yes, but quite empowering for the audience all the same (not to mentioned damned funny). I think Holmes even cracked a wry smile.
Sally Jackson, who writes for the Media section for The Australian, tweeted recently that Q&A receives between 5000 and 10000 tweets per episode. That’s a very impressive statistic, which indicates if nothing else, that people enjoy having their say. It’s not even that these tweets need to become part of the show, though that is fantastic where appropriate, but rather that people enjoy being able to watch TV together. Quietly, but not alone.
Which begs the question why TV execs don’t announce a Twitter hashtag at the beginning of every show.
And I don’t think it’s something that can only apply to TV. Every major news article too, should carry a hashtag on it. Same for radio.
It would bring those conversations together in a clever, simple way.
Encouraging conversation is a function of the media. And this is an almost accidental chance for media to do that in a way not entirely possible before.
So, that’s my free advice to media execs.
Show us your hashtags and we’ll come to the party.

Here are my notes from the Media 140 talk, the video should be available soon. I will post it, when it is.

It’s great to see so many journalists here who are on Twitter and I think if anything it’s provided a great forum for some robust debate about issues facing media.

Perhaps many journalist’s natural curiosity has been piqued by the fact that they are in danger of becoming largely irrelevant?

I’m not anti-journalist, I’m not pro-blogger, I’m pro-journalism and it’s core function to inform. I didn’t say inform the masses on purpose there. Who performs that function is less relevant to me.

The way I see it, and for the purposes of this discussion, there are two main issues that remain largely misunderstood by journalists working in news organisations when it comes to engaging in social media.

The first pertains to the issue of control, or loss of control and the second is around transparency.

I don’t talk about old media and new media – I think it’s unconstructive and divisive.

But there has been a shift and I’m not averse to calling it a revolution. The revolution in media has largely been about loss of control and that is not necessarily a bad thing.

I use the term ‘control media’ to describe the mindset we have had until the internet came along and disrupted that.

I think it’s an important part of understanding how things like Twitter have turned media-as-we-know-it on its head. It’s also important for journalists in social media communities to fully understand the enormity of this change.

Until recently we’ve lived in a control media environment – the ability to report and share information was limited to those that controlled the technology that made it possible – those who owned the printing presses, radio and TV licences. But more importantly news was controlled by those in charge of deciding who /what /why and when something was newsworthy.

Twitter is an example of almost the exact opposite of “control media” because journalists are not in control the flow of information anymore.

It wasn’t journalists who covered the recent Iran uprising.

It wasn’t journalists who broke the news of the last major earthquake in China. in fact the previous earthquake of a similar magnitude was reported three months after the event and the Chinese Government still tried to deny it ever happened.

It wasn’t a journalist’s twitpic – that’s a picture posted to Twitter – I saw 3 minutes after the cable snapped on the bay Bridge in San Francisco – just over a week ago.

Participatory media doesn’t mean you letting your audience participate in the creation of news, it about acknowledging that you participate in news creation along with your audience.

It still astounds me how many journalists on Twitter, many of whom have spoken here today (I know because I checked) only follow other journalists – and who are the first ones to complain that the internet is an echo chamber?

My second point about journalists using Twitter is the need for full transparency, which can run counter to the notion of objectivity.

How can you be honest and open about things – or have a personal opinion – when it might align you with one party in a story over another? It was something Mark Colvin and Leigh Sales touched on in their talks with regard to being cautious in letting their opinions on a subject known. I believe that if we knew where journalists stood on a matter, it would in fact increase their credibility and create a greater trust with their audiences.

As journalist Amy Gahran put it “when journos pretend to have NO opinions/biases, it *undermines* their credibility.”

The Washington Post recently published some guidelines for their journalists in using social networks like Twitter and Facebook, in which it said, and I quote:

All Washington Post journalists relinquish some of the personal privileges of private citizens. Post journalists must recognize that any content associated with them in an online social network is, for practical purposes, the equivalent of what appears beneath their bylines in the newspaper or on our website.

It’s quite alarming really. Instead of finding ways to encourage engagement, these guidelines are in fact doing just the opposite.

Its important in this time of change, that journalists are encouraged to have open conversations, not have restrictions placed on those.

Truth is, objectivity as an ideal was always somewhat flawed, and in part is responsible for the large cynicism that exists among audiences today.

I subscribe to the disclosure of personal views and opinions whenever and wherever possible, rather than a pretense that they don’t exist. And I encourage all journalists to do the same.

Can journalists do it better?

We’ve heard Jay Rosen’s quote here a few times today about “the people formerly known as the audience.” To which I’d like to add:

Journalists are the audience formerly known as the media.

People have been telling me spam appears under my blog headings in their RSS.
Thanks for the heads up. We’ve tried a few things and it keeps happening, so I’m doing a clean reinstall tomorrow.

I was thinking last night, with regard to my previous post, that it would be great to have a forum to discuss the future of journalism – Australian journalism in particular.

I have set up a Google group that is free for people in the industry, or those with an interest in media, to join. It is an open group at present, but depending on how it is used (or abused) we could close the group (and we will!) I want it to be an open and intelligent space for us to throw around ideas on what we can do to save the things that are good about journalism and work on those things that need improving.

I’ve set the group up so that replies are sent to the whole group – I’m on another email group and this seems like a good way to make the discussion useful for everyone. I can always adjust settings as we go along.

So please help me spread the word, it would be great to get a large pool of working journalists on the list as well – from a variety of news organisations, as well as those working independently.

You can join the group here. All posts from a new member are moderated to control spam. I’m guessing that falls on me as the one who set up the group and I’ll try to keep on top of it as best I can. I think others can be given this duty as well, so let me know if you can help and I’ll see what I can do in the settings.

Lastly, please take a minute to fill out your profile on the group as I think it will make it a more useful experience for others.

Again, thanks and help spread the word!

Twitter is about realtime conversation. Yes! It’s a *buzzword*, but it’s also pretty true.

Just a few hours ago I was having a very interesting discussion on Twitter about whether paywall could work for news. Without Twitter the conversation could not have taken place, we had @julie_posetti in Canberra, @jason_a_w in Woolongong, @natecochrane in Sydney, @Mediamum in Colorado, @barrysaunders in Sydney, @GreenJ Melbourne and me in Perth – there may have been others chiming in that I’ve missed. The point is, we are all people with some industry insight who, limited by geography/time/connectivity, would not have had that conversation otherwise.

It was one of the most intelligent and informed conversations I’d seen on the subject too, with input from many people in a thoughtful way.

I wish I could direct you to it, but I can’t. And that is Twitter’s biggest failure (bigger than the FAIL WHALE). Our conversations, insights and comments are unarchivable, unsearchable and lost the moment after they finish. Twitter search only goes back three weeks at the moment and then it’s still hard to track a conversation with so many involved, replying to different points and different people. Even if we’d used a hashtag (which we didn’t) the conversation would not be there after a month in Twitter search. Who is to know it ever happened?

The same goes when people comment about a blog post through Twitter. Those comments are gone in a moment.

Over the three years I’ve been on Twitter it’s become an easy habit to let my thoughts be known through Twitter over posting on my blog, my archive is testament to that fact – and the same goes for a lot of us I suspect. But 13, 493 tweets later, I’m starting to wonder if Twitter is actually a f**ked place for us to have these conversations. Thoughts?

Citizen journalism was around long before the iPhone, but I thought I’d take a look at apps on the iPhone which can be used for citizen journalism. I use all the apps I’ve mentioned, and I may have missed some obvious ones (let me know) or you could think of others to add to the list. I couldn’t figure out how to link to the apps in the Apple store, but I’m sure they are easy enough for you to find.

Twitter
There is no quicker way to get news out of something happening other than Twitter – *by default it is one of the most important developments in citizen journalism.
*By default, because who would have thought a site that asked simply “What are you doing” and limited it to 140 characters would become one of the most powerful news “networks” we have ever seen.
I use Tweetie, but as far as I can tell there is no reason why Tweetdeck or any other of the myriad of iPhone apps for Twitter wouldn’t do as good a job. The power of Twitter has more to do with its real-time news reporting abilities than people’s preference for an app. But if you can think of a reason one Twitter app would be better over another for the purposes of citizen journalism let me know in the comments.

Audioboo
Audioboo records audio as an MP3 and posts it to its own site, but can also autopost to Twitter. Its potential is in its simplicity. I’ve seen it used for impromptu interviews or reports from the scene of something. It’s fast, is good quality and the app is dead simple to use. Audio can be up to three minutes long and you can add titles and include a pic as well as locate where the recording was made. It’s free and you don’t need to sign up to Audioboo to start using it, but I’d recommend it to keep track of your recordings.

Twitpic
Twitpic is one of the many ways to upload pics quickly to Twitter. I like the way the Twitpic app is very simple and it’s been my photo service of choice on Twitter for a while. I actually have it integrated with Tweetie so I can post from there. Others may find the app easier.

12 seconds
The iPhone 3GS officially brings video to the iPhone (though a hack to the 3G also made it possible). Not everything requires a long video, and 12 seconds has a lot of great uses as an easy way to make a quick video update on a situation that requires a bit more than a photo. Like a lot of the other apps I’ve mentioned it is integrated with Twitter and you can set 12 seconds updates to go to Twitter if you choose. 12 seconds videos are also easily shared on other sites, an important feature when it comes to disseminating information.

YouTube
The inbuilt YouTube app on the new 3GS comes with an easy way to upload longer videos to your YouTube account. It’s simple and easy to use once you have set it up.

The top Cit J iPhone App that’s missing
The biggest way in which the iPhone fails as a mobile reporting device is that you are unable to livestream video from it because Apple won’t allow any apps that livestream from your phone – the reason is understood to be related to the deal they have with AT &T in the US as the network could not handle large amounts of livestreaming video. 3G users got around this with a hack, but this is not supported on the 3GS. Qik, which was built as a livestreaming service has an iPhone App, but it doesn’t allow for livestreaming. Hopefully Apple will do something about this soon, as it’s a major drawback in the capabilities of the iPhone as a truly breakthrough Cit J device and gives the upcoming Android a big heads up in this space.