I’ve been meaning to write this since the announcement a few weeks ago, but I’m happy to have been elected on to Australia’s Foundation for the Interest of Public Journalism. The initial plan is to model the Foundation along the lines Spot.us, set up in the US with a grant from the Knight Foundation by David Cohn (who incidentally taught me how to eat burritos). We are holding our first meeting on September 18, so I’ll have more to say on the project after then, but I can’t tell you how thrilled I am to be part of such a great team. And obviously, this is something very close to my heart.

The Foundation has been set up with help from the  Swinburne University’s Institute for Social Research, which has been exploring new models for journalism. This is a big part of that experimentation.

From the press release we put out when the board was announced:

The foundation will support investigative, interactive journalism while exploring ways of making good journalism sustainable in the new media age.

The board members are:

Professor Michael Bromley: Head of the School of Journalism and Communication at the University of Queensland.

Ms Bronwen Clune: Director of Norg Media (http://www.norg.com.au/)

Mr Chris Graham: Co-founder and editor of the National Indigenous Times newspaper.

Mr Jonathan Green: Editor, Crikey

Mr Steve Harris: Strategic consultant

Mrs Elaine Henry OAM: Chief Executive Officer, The Smith Family,

Mr Chris Masters : Freelance reporter and author, and Adjunct Professor at the University of Queensland

Mr Gerard Noonan: Freelance business journalist, chair of Media Super, and active in the Australian Council of Superannuation Investors and the Australian Institute of Superannuation Trustees.

Professor Julianne Schultz AM: Founding editor of Griffith REVIEW, and a professor at Griffith’s Centre for Public Culture and Ideas, a member of the board of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and the Arts Minister’s Creative Australia Advisory Group.

Dr Margaret Simons: Freelance journalist, author and lecturer at Swinburne University, Simons has published seven books and numerous essays and articles over her 29 year career as a professional journalist.

Ms Melissa Sweet
Freelance journalist and author, with adjunct positions at University of Sydney School of Public Health and University of Notre Dame’s medical school (Sydney campus)

Professor Julian Thomas
Director of the Institute for Social Research and Professor of Media and Communications at Swinburne University.

Dr Margaret Simons has been appointed interim chair of the board, and Melissa Sweet is the interim secretary.

Simons said there had been more than 40 nominations for the Board positions, suggesting that there is great public and professional interest in developing vigorous new models of journalism.

In addition to the board members, Dr Simons said she was delighted that many other journalists, academics and community members had volunteered to lend their expertise and experience to advising the Board.

“We look forward to drawing upon a large pool of talent to assist with the Board’s work,” she said.

“We expect the new board will hold its first meeting next month, and that its priorities will include establishing a website and work-plan, as well as developing fundraising strategies,

“We will be seeking support from philanthropic organisations and individuals who appreciate the importance of a healthy, active media for our society.”

Donations will be tax deductible.

The foundation will fund worthy journalism projects initiated by either members of the public or practising journalists. Its first project will be to establish a website through which members of the public and journalists can come together to organise journalistic projects without the intervention of Big Media. This will be partly modelled on USA experiments such as www.spot.us

And if you’re still wondering how to eat burritos – the trick is not to eat the butt, it’s the biggest part of the burrito and tends to be messy and fills you up just that “bit too much”. It’s just gluttony. And we all know where that ended for Big Media

A few weeks ago Rupert Murdoch announced News Corp new sites would begin charging for content in the near future.

“Quality journalism is not cheap,” Mr Murdoch said. “An industry that gives away its content is simply cannibalising its ability to produce good reporting.”

The Punch (owned by News Corp) looked at the issue of paid content with a few pieces, one by Paul Colgan Psst, Twitter:  You might want to help save Big Media, another by Leslie Nassar (better known as fake Stephen Conroy) Not all media dinosaurs have small brains and  some comment from UTS journalism students about how they see the future of journalism.

David Penberthy also asked readers if they would pay for content.

Of the 177 comments (at the time I wrote this) on the Punch  thread, most people  say they would NOT pay for content, and Penberthy conceded that “we don’t have the answers,” which is probably why he asked the question in the first place. Still I think it’s an honest admission, because nobody knows if paid content will work.

Of course the argument for paid content is about defending commercial news organisations and not journalism. Problem is the two aren’t mutually exclusive anymore.

For starters, it excludes the competition from government subsidised media – SBS and ABC - who probably can’t wait for News Corp and Fairfax to start charging for their content. A senior news person at SBS told me just yesterday that he “WANTS those sites to charge!” – not because he believes in paid content, he doesn’t, but because it certainly brightens his future.

James Murdoch (son of Rupert), made a similar, but misguided, point on the weekend with regard to the BBC saying that it inhibited the ability of commercial competitors to invest in news and implied it could put newspapers out of business. But News Corporation (of which James is chairman and chief executive) has only increased the threat of sites like the BBC and even ABC and SBS by deciding to put its content behind a paywall. The issue is not about good journalism, which the BBC, ABC and SBS have proved they can do well online, but about saving “Big Media” (a point Colgan made in the heading of his Punch piece.)

The question then is what is the value proposition of news sites like theage.com.au, smh.com.au and news.com.au. What can they do better than anyone else? The answer in their CURRENT form is not much. That’s exactly why most people would not be willing to pay for what they can essentially find elsewhere for free. Quite simply their product isn’t good enough. This isn’t bad news for journalism.

The issue of paid content  has led to some internal questions about ways news organisations can better what they offer their readers. And if news sites had any doubts about how they are “valued” by their readers, I think the Punch comments should go someway in cementing the fact that it’s not very high.

It’s not all bad news though.

I think there is commercial value in a number of niche sites that news rooms are still in a strong position, in Australia at least, to make an impact on. Advertising has proved successful on a number of these sites overseas – advertising is highly relevant to their audiences, which means a higher CPM (the current ad standard of measuring per thousand impressions). And because I could never imagine doing it any better, I think the Niche Manifesto is one of the best pieces written on this area,  in fact on media. Ever. Read it.

As Umair Haque so eloquently puts it:

“The 21st century’s great challenge isn’t selling the same old “product” better: it’s learning to make radically better stuff in the first place.”

As for whether paid content will work or not remains to be seen. There is still the question about the ethics of it. And journalists do like bang that drum when they need to.

Do we really want a world where knowledge is a privilege for a few willing and able to pay for content? Don’t we all have the right to be informed?  A point BBC business editor Robert Preston made earlier this year when he asked whether it was desirable we have news only available to those who will pay for it.

Free online news has increased our democratic value, why would we the Fourth Estate want to take that right to be informed away from us now? What are we protecting ? Journalism or big media?

Disclaimer: I’ve written a few pieces for The Punch. I don’t get paid, which only adds a whole new layer of irony. As long as people are willing to produce good content for free, news organisations are stuffed. I’ll save that for another day

There’s a good reason we don’t have an easy view of our own bums – most of us would not be happy with what we saw, no matter how hot someone else may find it.

Besides the odd look over my shoulder in the mirror, I’m quite happy not to be really know what others are seeing, or more precisely what you don’t know won’t hurt you. I have enough complexes about the parts I can see already.

Everybody knows the standard answer to the question “Does my bum look big in this?” is somewhere between NO and “it looks like two peaches on a windowsill,” so why mess with convention?

Enter Jeans West and their decision to install butt cameras in its change rooms so that customers can easily see what their touche looks like in a new pair of jeans.
Apparently here’s the advantage:

“The camera snaps an image of your backside on your own personal screen in the changeroom so you no longer have to venture into the main store and run the gauntlet of unflattering light and mirrors.”

It’s not like you get to see it that often, but now they make you stare at it in the most vulnerable of moments – jeans shopping?

Any good shop understands the delicacy of trying on new jeans and thoughtfully installs low-lighting and quality (tilted slightly upwards) mirrors.

Until they develop the technology to give me a bum-lift at the same time, I’ll be keeping cameras out of my changeroom.

Skank is such a great word. There’s just something about those underused-slang-insults that give them that extra punch.

The power of anonymity on the other hand is not always such a great thing, especially when its used by skanks in the name of free speech.

Liskula Cohen, a model from NY would understand the full effects of both.

She has just won a landmark case against Google forcing the company to reveal the person responsible for calling her a “psychotic, lying, whoring … skank” and an “old hag” on a blog called Skanks in NYC, which was hosted by Blogger (and owned by GOOG). The anonymous blog was almost entirely devoted to insulting her and contained just five entries all posted in August last year.

The issue about whether the marks are defamatory aside (and this is yet to be decided), anyone can relate to the hurt a personal attack like that on a public domain may cause. Trading insults openly over Twitter is one thing – this appears to be the latest celebrity past-time – but cowardly anonymous personal attacks are another.

“I’m a human being. I bleed. I have feelings. When I saw that blog, it was awful. All I can say for this person is, I really truly hope that they have more in their life than this,” Cohen is quoted as saying.

There’s no argument that this should serve as a warning for those that think this sort of behaviour is justified or welcome online. It’s just skanky.

Cohen’s lawyer, Steven Wagner put it well when he said “The rules for defamation on the Web — for actual reality as well as virtual reality — are the same. The Internet is not a free-for-all.”

That’s not to say the latest decision might not set an unwelcome precedent in the blogosphere where anonymity has its place when used for justified protection of sources. The laws protecting those that protect their sources have never been clear and have justifyingly been a bone of contention for Australian journalists, some of whom have been jailed for the act.

On a larger scale what are the consequences of the ruling for sites that operate in the spirit of Wikileaks, where people can post classified and censored information anonymously. Wikileaks promises to “protect internal dissidents, whistleblowers, journalists and bloggers who face legal or other threats related to publishing.” According to the site it has received 1.2 million documents from dissident communities and anonymous sources.

Notable anonymous “leaks” include details of Guantanamo Bay procedures that included reference to detainees that were off-limits to the Red Cross, despite the US Government repeatedly denying such prisoners existed; the publication of members of the far-right British National Party, which included “well-standing” citizens; and earlier this year a document from Iceland’s Kaupthing Bank, just prior to the countries financial crisis, showing large sums of money loaned to various leaders of the bank and large amounts of money written off.

Anonymity can be a powerful privilege, but it should be used for good not evil. I guess Google is going to learn its own lesson here.

In the meantime, let’s not devalue its power by being skanks.

UPDATE: On a related note this:

“… the District of Columbia Court of Appeals weighed in on what procedural safeguards are necessary to protect the rights of Internet users to engage in anonymous speech. In Solers, Inc. v. Doe, the D.C. high court set out a stringent standard for its lower courts to follow and emphasized that a plaintiff “must do more than simply plead his case” to unmask an anonymous speaker claimed to have violated the law.”

UPDATE 2: The blogger whose name Google revealed has been identified as Rosemary Port – she is now suing Google.

“When I was being defended by attorneys for Google, I thought my right to privacy was being protected,” she told the NY Daily News.

“But that right fell through the cracks. Without any warning, I was put on a silver platter for the press to attack me.

“I would think that a multi-billion dollar conglomerate would protect the rights of all its users.”

Her suit claims Google “breached its fiduciary duty to protect her expectation of anonymity,” Ms Port’s lawyer, Salvatore Strazzullo, said.

“I’m ready to take this all the way to the Supreme Court,” Mr Strazzullo said.

“Our Founding Fathers wrote The Federalist Papers under pseudonyms. Inherent in the First Amendment is the right to speak anonymously.

I recently gave a presentation at Jeff Pulver’s 140 Character Conference in New York. It was on Twitter, the media and chaos theory. Here’s the video (not only is it widescreen, but I had to scrunch the video to fit my blog margins resulting in fat face!) Ah vanity. Hopefully, what I say makes up for it

I just had a play with Tinychat.com and thought it was worth doing a quick write-up on as I know a few people are interested in video-conferencing and it has just recently added that capability. I’ve seen Tokbox used most often these days, Cameron Reilly has been using it for his G’Day World Live editions and it’s worked pretty well, but Tinychat has a couple of key differences that make it rather interesting.

No sign-up
Firstly, you don’t need to sign-up to use it, it’s simply a matter of hitting “create a room” and you have a dedicated URL to send to people to join the chat. Joining a chat is just as easy, you just give yourself a username and you’re in. You can chat as well as join the video conference simply by hitting “broadcast”.

Better controls
If you set up the chat room, you are able to boot people out of a room if needed. But one of the things I liked is you can mute other speakers, which can make it easier for anyone recording a podcast, for example, to have better control quality. As far as I can see, if you are the one to create the chat room you can’t override other people in the conference by muting them, which would be a handy (and powerful ) feature. As the person who sets up a room you can also make a room private by giving it password access, which is handy if privacy is necessary, if you were using it for a business meeting for example.

Auto recording
Tinychat video conferencing has recording built into it. From what I understand it’s up to the person who set up the room as to whether the conference is recorded or not. I’ve not tested the recording quality, but it’s great to see this built in as a feature.

Desktop sharing
Tinychat has done something a bit different here, that I don’t think exists on any other video sites I can think of (correct me if I’m wrong) by allowing people to share what is on their desktop with people on the chat. This will be a handy feature for people using video conferencing for meetings and the demo I saw of it worked pretty well. The image is a good size and pretty easy to use.

100 people
Dan Blake from Tinychat told me you can have about 100 people in a chat room with about 12 on video. I think any more than 12 would get a bit much, but 100 is a good size for chat.

Embed the chat on your own site
One of the stand out features to Tokbox is that you can embed the chat on your own site or a social network. I haven’t tried this yet, but I think it’s a great feature and something that will make it appealing to podcasters and videocasters doing live shows. And we appear to have a stable of those in Australia 

Tinychat video was originally built with a premium model, but I understand at the moment they are letting people access most of the premium features for free while they build up their user-base. It’s definitely worth having a look at as there aren’t many players in this space yet and Tinychat has an interesting take on video-conferencing. Besides Tokbox I don’t know of any other players in video-conferencing space. In fairness, Tokbox also has a myriad of other  “social” features – sending video mail, profiles and friends – which make it a different service in lots of ways.

Overall, I think Tinychat has got a great interface and is very easy to use. When I was in a video chat there were a couple of bugs with the sound, but as it has only launched today, I’m sure they’ll smooth things out. Best of luck to the Tinychat team.

Last week I attended the Future Summit as a member of the Twitter crew, the ‘unofficial’ official back channel of the two-day conference. Our mission was simply to attend the event and twitter about what was said and our thoughts on the summit. It’s something I’ve seen referred to recently as event-casting. As well as ‘pushing’ out what was happening at the event, our goal was to ‘pull’ some of the conversation from outside back into the conference. We had a number of questions come through Twitter that were asked of speakers and panelists. We were given free-reign as to what we said and there was no expectation that we didn’t voice anything negative about the conference. I wouldn’t have attended had there been any direction against what we could tweet, but I think it’s something that’s worth acknowledging as fairly progressive especially given the rigid formal nature of these events. And we certainly did the avant-guard proud, despite our scrubbing up, I can certainly say the Twitter Crew stood out among the sea of grey suits.

Quite a bit has been written about the event itself, but I’d like to give a few thoughts on the logistics of event-casting and what I learnt from my Future Summit experience. I always like to think about how we could do things better next time, so these are my thoughts on improving the effectiveness of the conversation with the Twitterverse.

Spamming the Twitter timeline

Admittedly there was some hesitation about flooding my Twitter followers with a whole lot of #futuresummit tweets. There were some public complaints about it from my followers, others just unfollowed me and added me back after the event was over. All of which is fair enough, but it does raise the question about how willing we are to accept these sorts of Twitter interruptions as they become more mainstream. It’s not happening often at the moment and not at saturation levels like it does during #SWSX for example, but I suspect it will become a more common occurrence.

Most of us who were invited have been on Twitter for some time and have a decent following (I hate to focus on follower numbers as I find that unhelpful, but necessary to discuss here) which was part of the reason for our invitation, getting the event out to as wide an audience as possible. My advice to someone who complained to me was to use a filter on a Twitter desktop client to weed out #futuresummit tweets, but I think overall we should be supporting the intentions of conference organisers who try and implement Twitter engagement. As little as three years ago, we couldn’t have done this and I think most of us would agree that we certainly brought ’something’ to the event – dare I say edginess?

The limitations of 140 characters

The challenge of reporting fairly dense (and heavy) topics in 140 characters was made pretty plain to me at the conference. It was quite hard to give some context to what was being said and by whom (we often added speakers names to the tweets, but realistically I doubt many followers knew who any of those people were.) Some sessions were easier to tweet than others, but my overall feeling is that we may have relied on Twitter a bit too much. It occurred to me afterwards that using more video and perhaps taking turns in writing short blog posts (about what was coming up and what was said) could have better created a context around what we were then tweeting. Kate Carruthers did some great vox pops using video and in hindsight I’d like to have experimented using video a bit more. Perhaps a video of few of us giving a brief summation of talks straight after they happened would have been good and kept up with events. Ideally streaming is the way to go, but logistically the mesh network (which was brilliant) would not have coped with it that well (if at all).

In conclusion, it was a great initiative by Steve Hopkins to have organised for us to be there. I think the response and experience was very positive. I write this post as a big supporter of twittering at these sorts of events. I learnt a lot about the logistics and challenges of event-casting and I hope some of my thoughts can improve on future conversations. Long live Twitter and the Twitter Crew!

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.

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