User Profile: vivian.martin

Melissa Metzger called from London to interview Jon Donley about his experience dealing with citizen journalism during Katrina and beyond at the Times Picayune website. In the raw transcript Donley shares a lot of wisdom about crowdsourcing. It's an important interview because, unlike many who are speculating, Donley has been in the trenches with the crowds. He also does some mythbusting about certain journalistic skills. Check this out:

"....Sometimes the Times Picayune reporter and the blogger are at the same meeting and holding them up side by side generally the blogger tells a better story. Because he has more background on the situation and—if they are talking about drainage for example—he can back fill with details about the flooded yard and roads and what’s happened since they cleared that big field for a housing development. He’s got all that stuff in this memory. That’s his life. But to me the important thing is how you label it just like everything else. We don’t expect editorials to be totally objective. We hope someone at some point has really rationally considered both sides but we label it very clearly as editorial for exactly this reason. We are not putting a stamp on this saying, “This is true.” We are saying, “This is how people feel.” So in all of our user-submitted stuff, we make very clear to say, “These are our users. This is their stuff.” You take it for what it is. There is an active philosophy out there"

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I haven't filed anything for my blog in a little over two weeks, but I have posted comments to others' blogs and added my two cents here for a couple of Topic Discussions. Given the different choices for posting comments, I've found myself paralyzed at times as I try to decide whether to post a Topic Discussion, Blog item, respond to a Reporting file etc. I think the relationship between all these things will need a rethinking if there's another phase of AssignmentZero. It sort of seems like contributors are often standing on street corners with megaphones, but it isn't clear if anyone is listening.

I click on the tracker each morning to see if there are conversations to look into. My guess is everyone is focused on their interviews right now, and that's a good thing.

Two of the people I have been working with have filed informative interviews.
Supercontributor Anna Haynes, who is working on an essay about her experiences working on six citizen journalism projects, volunteer to do a Q & A with Mrs. Panstreppon of TPM Cafe while contacting her for insights on citizen journalism projects. She's got another coming, too. Anna has a lot of savvy on these matters, so I'm pleased to be working with her. Looking at her interview, it's very clear that Anna has an expertise that a professional journalis would not be able to match in interviews. In some ways I have seen the move toward interviews instead of case reporting as a bit of a copout, but I got some insights into citzein journalism psychology by reading Anna's interview and have been confronting my own ignorance about how deep some of these activities have been on the web.

Maurice Cardinal scared me a bit when he started posting about business models and revenue streams, and his various activities in Vancouver--can this guy channel his energy into a quasi-objective interview? I wondered-- but his interview with Debbie Kornmiller revealed that Maurice is passionate, knowledgeable, and fair. His questions about the role of comments on the website were strong, as he pressed Kornmiller about privacy and raised issues it didn't seem she talked a lot about.

I still have my doubts about the extent of wisdom in the crowd, but Anna and Maurice show that sometimes journalism done by citizens doesn't need a modifier(citizen, amateur, whatever). Sometimes it's just journalism, stupid.

I was a little quiet last week because I was in London at a research seminar. There was the usual rain -- almost goes without syaing, but a couple of sunny days too. I also saw the Billy Elliott musical, a must- see when it arrives in the states in 2008 . Of course, I wonder if the show will cut back on certain Britishism, but perhaps the producers will trust the American audience to "get it."

It's always fun to spend time reading and watching the media while visiting in other countries. I especially like London due to the ideological mix of newspapers. A colleague and I stopped in at one of the papers to visit the readers' editor, or ombudsmen, for some research we're doing. Our interviewee described the role of ombudsmen as an extension of democracy. Letting the reader into the conversation extends the public forum and makes journalism transparent.

That visit got me thinking about our experiment here. Chatting about the newspaper's decision in an online forum, and even answering a newspaper's call for examples, are quite different from digging in to report a story on a phenomenon. Over the past couple of weeks I have sent emails offering assignments to people who have joined the community and are looking for things to do; I've done several blogs and forum posts to put out a call for reporters. There are some really good people who have taken up assignments, but I am wondering whether the topic, which involves interviewing reporters and editors, ie. professional journalists, is a bit more daunting than some other subjects. Meta-analytics--reporting on reporting-- isn't even the cup of tea of many journalists.. I have had exchanges with community members who say they are interested in such questions as how accuracy gets maintained in a crowdsourced project, or why people would get involved. Good question. But the only way we can get close to answers is reporting on crowdsourced projects.

I will drop some assignments if they are not claimed in the next couple of days, so jump in if you are the slighest bit interested. We can negotiate aspects of the assignment.

The limited number of volunteers brings me to another question I am toying with: Are we seeing the limits of crowdsourced journalism within our very project? Is the experience here telling us something that we need to pay attention to?

Many citizen journalism projects move forward on the basis of partcipants' interest in certain problems, leisure pursuits, and politics. Mainstream media projects that engage the crowd seem to tap a similar type of participation. I think we see some of that focus here at AssignmentZero. The kind of topics with which amateur journalists might be most interested in engaging may be narrower, and the universe of citizens willing to tackle a project like a journalist could be narrow and easily characterized(re..the backgrounds of some of our most avid participants here at AssignmentZero). That might be the story.

"Our goal is to map the continuum of activities in which professional and amateur journalists collaborate to report the news. It is not a list we’re looking to develop here. Rather, in examining a range of different cases of journalism getting crowdsourced, we can ask any number of questions that will allow us to determine the conditions under which such journalism is produced, the challenges, the triumphs, and some of the more problematic dimensions. I speak of “mapping” a continuum because it gives an image—and perhaps some of those out there with artistic skills may find a way to represent our continuum in all its complexities—that has been with me as I read about projects, from the the aborted wikitorial attempt at the LA Times to the free daily newspapers and accompany websites cropping up like Bluffton Today.

Gannet has launched a series of activities across its various newspapers. And just this past week there has come word that the Chicago Tribune has launched a hyberlocal website, TribLocal.com, with an eye toward generating local content from the community. Given the stock battles that have brought a lot of anxiety in Chicago, and other newsrooms and communities where the Tribune owns properties, including the
Hartford Courant, my area paper and former employer from another lifetime.

We can’t romanticize this move toward collaboration with citizens. When I look at the Cincinnati Enquirer’s community pages, I recall a time 15-20 years ago when papers hired entry-level, just-out-of-college students writing that kind of copy, so when news companies announce they’re bringing in some citizens to report the news, we do need to ask certain questions about motivation, as well as the actual benefits to the citizens.

In mapping these areas, we want to think about: who originates the ideas getting worked on (reporters? community members?); the type of ideas; final edit control; who gets credit. A newsroom in which readers are simply asked to offer up anecdotes from their life for a reporter’s story is really just doing the usual stuff—only now they can pull in more examples through the Internet. On the other hand, the new
BostonNow BostonNow project, which is integrating the contents of a free daily newspaper with citizen blogs and video, on the other hand, is boldly going where most traditional newsrooms aren’t going yet.

In addition to learning how a particular model works, we need to ask questions critical to all collaborative projects: How are journalistic standards and concerns with accuracy and fairness maintained?

I’ll pose more questions —and ask you to join in — as more participants join us. I’m also eager for people to post thoughts about collaboration journalism projects they know about, have participated in, or may even live near. We need to examine as many different types of projects as possible position for our continuum to be rich and nuanced as possible. In other words, we need you.

Watching CNN's coverage of the Virgina Tech massacre, I couldn't help but think about America is getting well traied in journalism. I say that with tongue somewhat in cheek, but I also say it with a respectful nod to the crowd's increasing role in helping mainstream media cover big stories. The Virginia Tech student who captured the shootings on his cellphone not only gave CNN footage; he was a pretty good reporter during the interview, showing great care to separate facts from rumor. The latter is what caught my attention. CNN indentified him as a witness, but surely he had performed an act of citizen journalism in a loose sense. I think his actions showed that we can expect certain professionalism from amateurs; it also shows that there are citizens who can be mobilized to help with data collection in certain instances. I don't know where the line begins or ends--different aspects of journalism require higher levels of expertise-- but watching the interview did cause me to think about how the moment connected to our effort to do and gather some cases of crowdsourcing journalism. I'm beginning to wonder whether crowdsourcing journalism is indeed the best way to describe some of the newsroom projects in which reporters put out calls for data. In the meantime, I think it's kind of interesting that technology allows regular citizens to collect real-time images and comb documents like militias that stood at the ready to defend their communities in colonial times. At the very least it's certainly a way for citizens to share the watchdog function with the press.

I came back to add this:

Steve Fox has a somewhat different view on the value of the cellphone video.

Obviously, there will be a time when we’ll stop reporting on this story. As anyone who hangs around in web forum knows, eventually the conversation stops, no more new information comes in; the topic has saturated. But right now, most of the reporting and writing here, even the filed interviews, are part of an unfolding path, the contours of which are revealing themselves as we fall into them(in other words, they’re not listed on the map). Conceivably, anyone walking into the crowd could have a contribution to make (I’m speaking theoretically, not realistically). The reporting being filed will be taken to another level with help from those of you reading the material. Check out filed interviews and see if there are unexplored leads implied in the interview.

Francine Hardaway has posted a writeup of her interview with digital journalism pioneer Dan Gillmor.
Gillmor has become one of the usual suspects to interview when people are writing about citizen journalism or the future of journalism. Sometimes it can seem as though sources like Gillmore have been asked it all, that we’ve heard everything they have to say. Are their openings here that should be explored in more detail?

I will soon put out a call for people to help examine certain crowdsourced projects so we can see if there are certain patterns we can name. We've stumbled a bit over whether we are looking at citizen journalism projects versus crowdsourced journalism, intuitively drawing a line separating citizen-initiated projects from those initiated in newsrooms. That distinction still seems useful when it comes to organizing reporting, though ultimately we might find such projects aren't so different. Jeff Jarvis seemed to be making that point in an interview
with contributor Neal G. Moore, who runs NextNews, an aggregate blog dedicated to citizen journalism.

Moore was clearly interested in knowing how one of the exemplars of blogging sees citizen journalism and crowdsourced journalism in relation to one another, but Jarvis indicated impatience with the desire to make distinctions or rigidly categorize various projects. Fair enough. Rigid categories often cut off thinking and discussion, one of the raps against traditional journalism. Yet some categorization is necessary to get on with the work, and right now that is the spirit in which I think Neal and others are asking the question. I'm not convinced it's incorrect to examine citizen journalism and crowdsourced journalism separately -- easy conflation is as problematic as false dichotomies -- but I kind of like the way the Crowdsourced Journalism page is now listed in the new Topic Index as "Journalism gets Crowdsourced." A good inclusive way of describing a lot of different initiatives while we trying to understand what is really going on.

Neal, by the way, did the interview by email, and I hope he'll soon post some reflections on the experience. Email interviews are still new for many journalists. The view is email is best left for clarifying information, not the main conduit for interviewing. In some ways this concern mirrors some of the same apprehension with which journalists met the journalistic interview when it was getting integrated into regular practice in the second part of the 19th century. Media sociologist Michael Schudson, one of a handful of scholars who have written about the rise of the journalistic interview, has catalogued some of the skepticism people had about the method as a way to uncover truth. Among the issues debated then was whether to take notes. In more recent times, there were debates about taping; questions about the propriety of email and IM interviews are a logical progression.

Yet one benefit of email interviews that can't be overlooked is the way interviewer and interviewee can conduct an exchange that can document the trail of substantive ideas as well as tangents. Many journalists would rightly point out that email interviews allow people being interviewed to take more time to concoct answers and spin views. A more detached observer would say people have more time to be thoughtful.

Jeff Jarvis demonstrated how the rules are being turned upside down when he "scooped" us on our own interview by posting Neal's questions and his responses to those questions. Jarvis has invited people to expand or improve on the questions and answers. I'm hoping that the crowd will do some of that with the interview Neal filed here.

Amanda Michel's plans to write a first person piece about her experiences with the Dean campaign on the Internet has inspired one of the contributors in my group, Anna Haynes, to draw on her experience working several crowdsourced journalism projects to provide a "contributor's-eye view" of the experience,. She's also looking to contact other contributors about their experiences. This piece has the potential to answer questions some of us might not even know we should be asking.

Okay, I am writing this after writing a lengthier entry that disappeared when I tried to figure out the tag needed to hyperlink names. Drat! Here is another try. I'm add more to it later.

We've got several people working on assignments and a couple more who have inquired.

Some of the people are well known to people here.

Robert King will look into the LA Times wikitorial
debacle and the implications for similar projects that have pulled back when some readers get too rowdy or worse. In June 2005 when the LA Times terminated the wikitorial almost as soon as it started the experiment, I managed to download the editorial and some articles about it that gave examples of some of the comments readers had written. My plan was to use the case in my editorial writing class that fall. The semester got away from me, and frankly, the students were not that interested. So the material sat on a disk until I saw that Robert had an interest in the issue. He's going to look into it after he finished an assignment over on the crowdsourced law enforcement desk.

David Hackett is going to explore the doings at WeCan, which seems to have a pretty good idea about working with citizens to build databases of important public info. David is interested in the DOJ memos launched at TPMuckraker, so he will be following other interests, too.

Francine Hardaway and
Neal G. Moore have landed interviews with some interviews: Dan Gillmore and Jeff Jarvis respectively. Get in touch if you have questions they might ask.

Everyone who comes to this site has probably become familiar withAnna Haynes , a prolific contributor in the Exchange. Anna is a source for anyone looking to interview a citizen journalist. She's also going to pursue some reporting with us.

More updates to come (and I think I will need to add the links after posting this because I forgot the tag!).

You'll be hearing from us.

I see that the citizens of Cape Coral just founded down a large building project today. Did the crowdsourced journalism project have an impact on the outcome of the referendum. Reports indicate the voters were upset about high utility costs. The Ft. Myers paper was hitting hard--with help from the many citizens who posted in the forum.

http://www.news-press.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070403/NEWS0101/7...

I have been reading some of the coverage on the website to get a sense of the influence of the forums on the articles. Looking at some instances of crowdsourcing more deeply will allow us to extract some concepts for further comparison and go a bit beyond the typical journalistic feature. A little time in the forum can reveal some of the more active posters, and one could reach them along with some of the reporters ass a way out sussing things out to see if we should move in further. This could be an interesting project for anyone on the ground in Cape Coral, though some time at the computer reading the trail and interviewing via Im/email/phone can work.

Vivian

vivian.assignmentzero@gmail.com