Joho the Blog
An Entry from the Archives

Dan is giving a lunchtime talk about his new project, a center for citizen journalism hosted jointly by Berkman and UC Berkeley Journalism grad school. Pretty damn cool.

[As always, the following summarizes Dan's comments, which means I am certainly getting them wrong.]

Dan says a moment when he had begun as a reporter at the San Jose Mercury News started him down this course: He realized that his readers know more than he does. At first, he says, that was daunting, but then it was liberating. "It's about changing media from lecture to conversation."

The Center is going to focus on:

1. Research, analysis and advocacy. He's particularly interested in helping to find ways that conversation-based media can be more trustworthy.

2. Tools.

3. Education and training — help people to be more media literate and train people how to be better citizen journalists. In addition, he'd like to help media organizations learn how to listen and to work better with citizens.

Q: Is there room for editors and traditional media?

A: Absolutely. Editors have long careers ahead of them.

Q: How about international?

A: (Dan hands it to Ethan Zuckerman): Citizens in countries around the world are already beginning to do this.

Q: Should we be certifying bloggers? Training them to some standard?

A: No. The only people I want in education or training are people who want to learn something new. Not all blogging is journalism, nor should it be.

Q: What do bloggers need gto learn to be taken by the media?

A: More important is how they can talk effectively with other citizens. Transparency is important. (By the way, Dan adds, when he says "blogs," he has in mind the broad range of ways that people express themselves on the Web.)

Q: Not only is the Web the second superpower, it's the second social welfare delivery mechanism. Any synergies with this and citizen journalism?

A: "I'm working on a book outline on this topic, based on a hypothesis that I believe to be true, but I'm still gathering data:" The more people become engaged with current events — starting at the most modest level, i.e., not being a couch potato but getting a report by assembling it from various sources...all the way to becoming journalists — my conjecture is that people on that trajectory are likely to become activists.

Q: How about video?

A: Video is on the cusp of getting really interesting. In general, it's easier to do a good blog post than a good podcast or videoblog, although that may be less true for the younger generation. The tools of video creation are surprisingly sophisticated and inexpensive and only getting better.

Q: How important is anonymity?

A: It's a really important issue. I'd be horrified if there were an attempt to end anonymity in some governmental way. I do believe, though, that journalism in general is a better process when people stand behind their words. Maybe being pseudonymous, and not entirely anonymous, is enough.

Q: What do you think of Digg.com?

A: I like it. We need to get better at knowing what to trust. We should combine human and machine intelligence for this. In California there's a project called NewsTrust to get people to rate articles on reliability in a number of dimensions, to build up a database of bylines.

Q: Anything you say, write, or think (just about) is now publicly available, without context. In today's world we seem to be less forgiving than years ago. Do you see a change where people will accept the humanness of people, and avoid the gotcha's?

A: Someday in the relatively near future, we're going to elect a president who had a blog when she was a teenager. It'll be full of things that no politician would find to be anything but a disaster. We need to grant each other zones of privacy (as in David Brin's book). And everyone has said something unbelievably stupid for the public record, so we're going to have cut each other a lot of slack. We're going to have to wait a while for that to happen, and we'll have a messy interim.

Q: Do we have or need tools to segment trust: I trust this person's restaurant recommendations but not political statements?

A: I wish we had them.

Q: (me) Who's going to pay the editors?

A: The dominant media of today are not threatened in a journalistic way by bloggers because journalists are competitive and they'll respond with better journalism. The serious business-side threat to mass journalism is the fact that the real cash cow has been classified ads, and it didn't occur to them that the largest classified ads business was eBay, Craigslist, etc. The attack on the revenue side is coming from nimble, well-capitalized organizations. That's hard to compete with. TiVo is hard to compete with. I don't know how we're going to pay journalists. Maybe foundations will help. We'll lose some of the good that good journalists do. People will come up with business models, but I don't know if it will come out the way I want, which is a ecosystem that includes big and small, up and down, competing and cooperative.

Q: How about the threat that carriers will control content?

A: That's a real threat not just to citizen media but to democracy itself. Really bad things are going on.

Q: With the rise of local media, we have this weird idea that they're going to make particular stories important to us — salmonella down the street is more important than genocide in Rwanda. So far, citizen media seem most interested in technology, etc. Do we run the risk that we'll be really shittily informed about what's going on in the Democratic Republic of Congo?