Your work in networked/citizen/collaborative journalism.
Right now we work with locals in Iraq and Mexico, and produce to weekly programs, Alive in Baghdad and Alive in Mexico, We hope to expand to other locations and are currently discussing other projects as well. Alive in Baghdad looks at the impact of the war from the perspective of Iraqi citizens, we attempt to cover all aspects of the war’s impact on Iraqis living in Baghdad, and have also covered the refugee crises in Syria and Jordan. Alive in Mexico was started in November 2006, when I travelled to Oaxaca to cover the ongoing conflict there. I met two Mexicans who were hoping to start an internet television project showing events in Mexico and it was a natural fit. We worked together while I was in Mexico and they have been trained as well. We launched a weekly show about life in Mexico. The new show covers everything from political turmoil to Mexican culture. Our hope is to provide a more interesting and nuanced look at life in Mexico.

What are your goals?

Small World News is a collaborative between a small American team and journalists in Baghdad and Mexico City. We partner our skills and know-how in editing, video-blogging, dsitribution, and knowledge of journalism, accuracy, bias, etc. with teams of local citizens and journalists, trained to use small DV cameras and shoot for the web. In this way we’re able to produce powerful local content that has a global impact. We hope to continue building bureaus around the world and change the way we learn about different parts of the world, providing windows on as many under-served locations as possible.

Notable achievements?

We have produced a weekly program on life in Baghdad for over a year, covering stories such as the Adhamiya Wall, visually and more fully than done in the media before, and the plight of refugees in the Al Waleed Camp on the Iraq-Syria border, which had previously been seen nowhere else. We have also taken the time to look carefully at the plight of Iraqi civilians in a way not possible in the current TV news climate. We swept the first awards show for Video Blogs, the Vloggies, taking home seven awards. We were also nominated for a Webby in 2007. We co-produced a documentary for BBC Newsnight and SkyNews solicited five of our episodes for broadcast.

Lesson you’ve learned (including mistakes you’ve made)

I’ve learned that, as always, patience is a virtue. Also, it is important to consider the business model and sustainability of a project, as well as its importance to society. We’ve also found that unfortunately, video on the web is not paying for itself yet, and there doesn’t seem to be a clear model for monetization. The hardest part has been dealing with companies’ fickle interest in our content, and trying to simultaneously leverage our blog status, while promoting our journalistic credibility.

Are you getting revenue for this? How?

We have had a variety of revenue sources over the last two years. They have ranged from donations from our viewers, to small grants, as well as speaking fees, and the largest contribution has been by licensing our content to old media institutions. We hope that by putting together a solid plan for continuing to license content, we can build a sustainable company. Our latest plan for ongoing revenue has been to offer voluntary subscriptions to our viewers, we are now making around $200/mo in contributions of 5, 10, and 20 dollars.

What’s next? What do you need to get to the next level?

We are looking for mentoring in journalism, as we have mostly learned this by the seat of our pants and reading books. We are also looking to train news companies looking to make the transition to video in how to do it. We’re hoping to make contacts with companies that need this help, but also with entrepreneurs who may want to collaborate in order to find the funding/financing/horizontal income to make our work sustainable. We’d be excited to speak with anyone looking to collaborate.

Anyone you’d like to talk with, learn from, or work with at the summit

David Cohn, Michael Rosenblum, Jay Rosen, Arianna Huffington, Tom Rosenstiel, Bill Mitchell, Andy Solomon, Emily Gertz, Lila King, Bill Densmore, John Bracken, Rory O’Connor, Brian Storm, Chrys Wu, Blake Eskin, Donica Mensing, Tom Whitwell, Mark Lukasiewicz, Robin Hamma, Edward Roussel, Jeff Burkett, I gues we should just say there are many people I want to meet at this thing, I hope there are enough hours in the day…

Your work in networked/citizen/collaborative journalism
I’m a Senior Broadcast Journalist/Producer for BBC English Regions and I blog at Cybersoc.com. At the moment I spend most of my time looking after the BBC’s external facing blog network and giving presentations about social media and blogging across all areas of the BBC.

These days I actually do very little journalism or production but I hope, and the evidence seems to suggest that, my ideas are helping inspire BBC journalists, program makers and editors to embrace social media.
Over the years I’ve worked with developers to create or improve various discussion platforms and have given editorial training for those managing those services or integrating them into their programs.

My primary focus at the moment is looking after the BBC’s network of around 40 blogs, running training courses for those bloggers and encouraging them to think of blogging not just as a publishing tool but as a technique that involves finding, tracking and joining into the conversation with other bloggers.

I’ve also been behind a pilot project in Manchester where we work with local bloggers, helping them to building their audiences whilst, at the same time, giving us the opportunity to highlight and editorialise the very best of their content for use online and on-air.

I’m also involved in a project with BBC Leicester where we’ve recruited members of staff, as well as some volunteer members of the public, to help us create weather content using a clever mix of 3g cameraphones, yahoo’s experimental zonetag software, flickr and twitter. This effort should be launching publicly any day now.

What are your goals?

To help BBC journalists and program makers think creatively about how they might embrace social media, technology and blogging in their work. (Often times a large element of this is simply telling people it’s ok to take risks and it’s ok to use third party services!)

* To encourage BBC people to participate in social media without forgetting that the emphasis is on social rather than media.

* To have fun, and show other peole how to have fun, playing with this stuff!

What are some of your notable achievements?

I’d like to think that I’ve influence the thinking of quite a lot of people within the BBC - in the past in helping them to build and manage successful audience communities on bbc.co.uk and, these days, to get them to think of the whole web, blogs and social media services included, as their canvas (hat tip to Tom Loosemore).

Lesson you’ve learned (including mistakes you’ve made)

I believed, and a lot of others thought, that with the BBC Manchester blog we’d come up with the holy grail - a way to build positive, honest relationships with audience contributors whilst, at the same time, avoiding the usual legal, technical and editorial risks involved with that. I still think the model has some legs to it but we’ve also learned some lessons:

* even cherrypicking content from RSS feeds takes a lot of time
* it’s difficult to motivate yourself to plow through content that isn’t of personal interest, even if that content would be great in the eyes of your audience
* being local requires actually being local (one member of the team, Richard Fair, is based in Manchester whilst I am based out of London)

I think the thing that surprised us most was the reaction from local bloggers who were at first a bit sceptical but who, once they’d seen the model we were using, fully embraced us as part of their community and even helped us where they could.

Read the rest of this entry »

Introduction and Narrative: In 1988 Rosenblum left his job as a producer for CBS. He was unhappy, “young and idealistic. I quite this very good job and took the video camerae to see if I could do it myself,” says Rosenblum. Using a small camera and laptop, he went on to become one of the first solo video journalists - producing quality work that was cheaper for network television to purchase. Since then, he has taught newsrooms and television stations across the world to adopt his methods.

Main Goal: To drive the democratization of television and video online. “It’s easy for somebody to start a novel because it does not cost anything to try to write one. Sometimes you get a novel like Harry Potter, sometimes you don’t. In television the industry is not structured to encourage somebody to go out and get a camerae and get a job. There are too many barriers between the technology and the end product at the end of the day,” said Rosenblum. Those are the barriers that Rosenblum hopes to break down.

Notable Achievements: Rosenblum Associates has gone on to change newsrooms around the country: New York One, The Voice of America, Video News International (today New York Times Television), Oxygen, BBC and was an advisor for Al Gore’s Current Television.

Rosenblum has also created DVdojo - a video bar/cafe and Citizen TV (ctzn.com) to create venues for citizen video journalists. And now, the Travel Channel Academy, in partnership with The Travel Channel.

A Surprising Realization:

1. How difficult it was to get it done. “I walked back to CBS and I got a meeting with the chairmen, I thought I would walk in the door, show him a piece and sell it right away,” But the business side of Rosenblum’s work has been slower than Rosenblum himself.

2. The enormous amount of talent that is buried not working for networks.

Biggest Practical Lesson/Mistake:

During a video journalist conversion, it isn’t enough to just train people and send them back to the station. For example, Rosenblum trained 750 video journalists at the BBC, but put them back in the old newsroom systems. “In fact you have to restructure the entire way the network works.”

Money: Money: Training individual video journalists saves a significant amount of money on production. Traditionally, 35 full time employees might only result in 11 cameras, creating a high cost overhang to produce video. After the conversation the station could have 30 or more cameras in the field.

Future Goals: Currently Rosenblum Associates is working on a new project with the Travel Channel, teaching people how to document their travels, which will start airing in November.

Rosenblum also recently created a site Citizen TV (ctzn.tv) - a cooperative of citizen journalism documentaries.

What do you hope to get from people attending this conference?

I’m always happy to listen to other people, you never know whats coming up.

Introduction and Narrative: GroundReport started as a side project for Rachel Sterne after reporting on the United Nations Security Council on events taking place in Darfur. Sterne, who worked for LimeWire at the time, was concerned and agitated by the lack of public awareness about these events. About one year ago GroundReport, a network of over 1,000 citizen journalists from around the world, went from being a side project to Sterne’s full time job.

Main Goal: To democratize the news in three ways.
1. GroundReport allows everyone to participate by posting articles, videos or livestreaming content.
2. The community decides what is on the front page through voting - there is no editorial control.
3. GroundReport shares revenue with all contributors based on traffic to their stories.

Notable Achievements: GroundReport has 1,000 different contributors from all over the world including Zimbabwe, Mali and Pakistan.

Using various tools, GroundReport has media offerings comparable to a large news outlet. GroundReport has its own television channel and will soon be launching GroundReport radio. GR Television allows listeners to become deeply involved in the programming and reporting of content for specific time slots.

A Surprising Realization: “I’m always surprised and happy about how passionate a lot of our users are and how they identify with the mission that we have,” says Sterne.

There is also the surprise of having to strictly define things. Sterne’s original motivation was to create an open forum, but she found a need to be more of an editor than originally intended “because people need to know what you are trying to create and if what they have is appropriate,” says Sterne.
Read the rest of this entry »

Introduction and Narrative: My Football Writer started when Rick Waghorn read a piece in MediaGuardian on his 40th birthday (16/01/06) quoting Clay Shirky. Shirky drew an analogy between journalism and the music industry; people still want to listen to good music, just not on CDs. By the same token, people still want to read good writing, just not on a traditional newspaper. Ergo, this should be a golden age for both musicians and journalists alike. At the same time, Waghorn’s newspaper employer was cutting a third of the sports desk where he and his wife worked. The layoff compensation was used to build the first version of MyFootballWriter.com, a generic hub of soccer news in the United Kingdom.

Main Goal of MyFootballWriter: To take a print press off a journalist’s back and Google out of local advertisers’ loop, by putting locally-sourced and respected sports reports in the palm of everyone’s hand, whilst at the same time giving local advertisers the chance to put their brand in front of their neighborhood audience. The advertising and editorial product then becomes both a league and nation-wide network offering further opportunities for syndication fees for all our fresh, organically grown quotes and copy; all of which is equally applicable to any sport out of any town or city.

Notable Achievements: “Still being here 14 months later and taking my first proper wage packet out of the business.” Since launching, Waghorn has been invited to attend a POLIS seminar at the LSE on the future of online journalism and has been described as ‘a threat’ by the head of BBC Online, according to Charlie Beckett from POLIS. So far Waghorn remains optimistic - he has even received advertising queries from his former employer. Today MyFootballwriter.com uses no Google advertising and is looking to expand its network to Ipswich and Colchester. Waghorn’s former employer, the Evening News, Norwich, is even advertising on the site, promoting its GoingOut supplement.

A Surprising Realization: How a journalist’s traditional contact book can yield all manner of fruit in terms of potential investors, advertisers, legal advice, etc. Waghorn has also found:

1. The benefits of blogging - or rather responding on blogs
2. The confusion among local advertisers as to just what do with their internet ad dollars; where do they go next to get the most bucks for their click - or most clicks for their bucks - if its not to a fading newspaper?
3. The ease with which traditional reporting practices switch to the web
4. The freedom of having no print press deadlines to worry about
5. The fun it is to work from home
6. The way that for the punters it makes their lives so much easier - ie I bring their football news to them; they don’t have to look for me…

Read the rest of this entry »