Mediactive Project – Page 5

Who’s a journalist? Does that matter?

This article was originally published on Salon on August 26, 2010.

What should we call the people who are creating valuable new information in the new-media ecosystem?

If you’re a creator of media, and most of us are these days in one way or another, what should I call you?

Why do I ask? I’m finishing up a new book, called “Mediactive,” to be published this fall. My primary goals are to persuade people to become much more active users, not passive consumers, of media. Part of this is what we’ve traditionally called “media literacy” — among other things, applying critical thinking to what we consume. And because we are all becoming creators in the Digital Age, it also means we need to apply some basic principles so people will trust what we say (assuming we want to be trusted).

One of my dilemmas has been what to call these new trusted media creators. In the era of scarcity, when there were relatively few outlets, many of them were called “journalists.”

This isn’t only my problem, and it’s more than just semantics. Asking the question in the right way has real-world impacts. So-called shield laws, for example, aim to protect whistle-blowers and the journalists whom they tell about government or corporate wrongdoing. Some states specify who counts as a journalist, which leaves out a huge range of people who effectively practice journalism nowadays; it also encourages a pernicious, back-door licensing of journalists. The right approach, if we need shield laws at all, is to protect acts of journalism.

As digital media become ubiquitous and more and more of us communicate and collaborate online, every person is capable of doing something that has journalistic value. Quite reasonably, relatively few of these folks imagine themselves as journalists, and they’d laugh if you called them one.

Suppose you spot a couple of items online that you want me and other people interested in, say, folk music to see. You forward the links, along with short excerpts and a brief comment explaining why these items are worthwhile, to a mail list. If I tell you, “That was an act of journalism: You curated, aggregated, wrote commentary and created meta-data,” your response, appropriately, will be, “Huh? I was just forwarding some links.”

One reason for our terminology deficit, notes Clay Shirky, a friend and author of the brilliant new book “Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age,” is the end of the era when we “assumed that the ability to speak in public was owned by an elite class.” Words like “entertainer” and “journalist” belonged to vocations and professions.

Meanwhile, the words that do apply to large groups — consumer, audience, customer, etc. — have taken on largely passive connotations, for the good reason that these have been largely passive activities. In the mass media world, you take them or leave them, and that’s it.

Another issue: The word “journalist” carries baggage. The journalism business has fallen on hard times for reasons beyond the loss of advertising revenue. Epic failure to do our jobs — Iraq and the financial bubble are Exhibits A and B for the past decade — combined with an obsession for sensational, trivial topics has contributed to plummeting respect the public has for the craft.

I share some disdain for the word. When I was a reporter I called myself a reporter. When I was a columnist I called myself a columnist. Calling myself a journalist, which I did from time to time, tended to make me feel like I was pretending to a higher role than the craft, however vital and honorable it may be, merited.

– – – – – – – –

People often ask who, in the anyone-can-publish world, is a journalist? I tell them it’s the wrong question. The right one: What is journalism?

The mass media creations of the New York Times qualify as journalism. Ditto BBC News. Sometimes they get things wrong, even badly wrong, but they do journalism by any standard.

I hope we can agree that the Blah Blah Blah blog (actually there are a bunch with that name) and the YouTube video of “Nat and Foxy disco dancing” are not journalism. Now, they may be interesting to their undoubtedly small audiences, and we should celebrate their existence to the extent that we celebrate (as I do) any act of hands-on media creation. They just aren’t journalism. (Nat & Foxy do look like they’re having a good time.)

Now consider Talking Points Memo, founded by Joshua Micah Marshall. It’s online only, and it has a politically left-of-center worldview. It’s also unquestionably journalism.

Dig deeper into into new media, and the answer starts to get complicated.

Brad DeLong, a former Clinton administration Treasury Department official, teaches at U.C.-Berkeley and writes a blog about economics and policy. He does something that surely looks like journalism: commentary informed by knowledge. What about the bloggers who write on Lisa Stone’s BlogHer network? There’s a great deal of journalistic value in what they create.

My old neighborhood in Silicon Valley had a Yahoo mailing list where people talked about the community. Some of what appeared there was journalism by any standard I can apply the word. Most wasn’t.

A Facebook wall? It’s news to someone, right? Flickr photos? YouTube videos? Adding a location to someone else’s map?

On Christmas Day 2009, as a blizzard pounded Oklahoma, its residents posted local road conditions and information about where stranded travelers could hunker down with local families. If that can’t be called journalism in a traditional sense, it’s certainly more useful to a family in a sedan on the side of the road than any roundup story by a news organization during the storm.

– – – – – – – – – –

We are all creating media. Any one of us can, and many of us will, commit an act of journalism. We may contribute to the journalism ecosystem once, rarely, frequently or constantly. How we deal with these contributions — deciding to try one, what we do with what we’ve created, and how the rest of us use what’s been created — is going to be complex and evolving. But it’s the future.

Back to the earlier issue: Do we need a new name for the modern media creators, specifically the ones who are creating information of value to communities (of geography or interest)? I’d like to find one but I confess I’m not having an easy time of it.

“Creator” has its own baggage. “Participant” and “collaborator” and “contributor” don’t seem exactly right, either.

If you have any ideas, I’d love to hear them.

What you can expect from my blog

This article was originally published on Salon on June 2, 2010.

Media and technology coverage that looks beyond the gloom to ways we can create better, more trustworthy content

I’ve been a fan of Salon since the day it started, and a paying subscriber as long as the company has offered that option. If you visit this site often, you already know why.

So I’m delighted to be bringing some of my blogging here. In coming months I’ll be writing about topics I know well, such as media and technology — and especially the growing intersection of the two fields.

Thanks to the work of people in Silicon Valley and its offshoots around the world, media have become significantly more democratized in recent years. Democratization, in this sense, is about participation and access: Increasingly, we can all create media, and with digital networks we can find what people create.

The impact of this shift is in its early days. Traditional journalists, watching their monopoly and oligopoly business models crumble as a result of technology’s impact, see little but gloom. I worry about what we’ll miss in this devolution, at least in the short term, but I see little but opportunity.

I see opportunity partly because of the work I do at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism & Mass Communication. At the school’s Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship, we’re aiming to bring an entrepreneurial spirit to journalism education — and to help students realize they can (because they may have to) invent their own jobs.

I see opportunity in the countless experiments in media and journalism under way around the world. In company cubicles, labs, garages, dorm rooms, labs and so many other places, people are inventing the future by testing ideas about content, conversation and ways to pay for it. We willget this right in the end.

To get it right, however, we will need to go beyond the experiments. We need to persuade people to use media, not just consume it, in ways that many folks are not doing today. We need to persuade content creators of the advantages of doing things in ways that will be trusted; and we need to persuade the consumers-turned-users of media to demand better quality and trustworthiness than we’ve settled for in the past. Those are my goals in a new book, Mediactive, that will appear later this summer. I’ll be talking a great deal about these topics here.

My writing here comes with a complication. I have co-founded several companies, one of which flopped and another of which was sold last year to Nokia. I’ve invested in several others, and advise others. I’m on the board of two journalism-related nonprofits and co-founded another.

Salon’s editor in chief, Joan Walsh, and I have discussed this at length. I will avoid writing about any enterprise in which I have a financial stake, and disclose — in addition to my full disclosure page at my personal website — anything that we think might be relevant in this regard. This may get tricky at times, I realize. But my goal will be transparency.

I’m jazzed about working with the great people at Salon and the community it has created. I’ll always keep in mind what I learned well over a decade ago when I started writing for the San Jose Mercury News, Silicon Valley’s newspaper: My readers know more than I do.

So tell me what you know, and we’ll keep learning together.

Salon and Me

I’ve been a fan of Salon since the day it started, and a paying subscriber as long as the company has offered that option. If you visit Salon often, you already know why.

So I’m delighted to be bringing some of my blogging there, including many of the items I’d normally be posting here. My arrangement with Salon gives them exclusive access for one week to new posts, after which they’ll appear here — as always, under a Creative Commons license from this site.

Here’s my first post.

Why I’m Going to Publish the Mediactive Book with Lulu

Some members of the traditional publishing industry don’t care for what I write, and some who do aren’t thrilled with one of the ways I try to spread my ideas. So when Mediactive appears between dead-tree covers a bit later this year, the traditional publishing industry won’t be in the mix.

I’m going with Lulu, a company that understands the changes in media. This is a self-publishing service — an operation that takes my work and turns it into books that can be sold, by me and by anyone else who wants to sell them.

Some background: Last fall, when I started serious work on the book part of this project, I was under contract to the publisher that brought out We the Media a few years ago; we parted company in January. At which point, my literary agent — the beyond-terrific David Miller of the Garamond Agency — started looking for a new publisher.

My former publisher was fine with Creative Commons, as proved by the fact that we did the first book that way. But as David told me at the outset of the new search, I was likely to limit the potential field because I had one non-negotiable requirement: The book will be published under a Creative Commons license. In this case, as with We the Media, the kind of Creative Commons license would say, essentially, that anyone could make copies of the work for non-commercial use, and if they created derivative works, also only for non-commercial purposes, those works would have to be made available a) with credit to me and b) under the same license.

The principle was simple: While I want my writing to get the widest possible distribution, if anyone is going to make money on it I’d like that to be me, my publisher and my agent.

Almost a decade after Creative Commons was founded, and despite ample evidence that licensing copyrighted works this way doesn’t harm sales, book publishers remain mostly clueless and/or hostile. As David explained to editors, the main reason I’m still getting royalty checks for We the Media is that the book has been available as a free download since the day it went into bookstores. Had we not published it that way, given the indifference (at best) shown by American newspapers and magazines, the book would have sunk without a trace.

That logic persuaded no one in New York (not that we got that far in most cases — more about that below). And to my genuine if not major regret, the Creative Commons roadblock forced me to turn down a deal from a publisher that would have been perfect for this project had I only been writing a book and nothing more.

Two points: First, and most obviously, if a principle means anything, you stick by it when doing so is inconvenient, not just when it’s easy. Second, this isn’t just a book, at least not way traditional publishers understand books even as they dabble online.

To publishers, books are items they manufacture and send out in trucks. Or else they’re computer files to be rented to publishers’ customers, or customers of Amazon, Apple and other companies that use proprietary e-reading software to lock the work down in every possible way. In both cases, publishers crave being the gatekeepers.

Mediactive aims to be a multi-faceted project. Over the next few years, I hope to experiment in lots of media formats and styles with the ideas here. And — this is key — I also plan to experiment with it in the broader context of the emerging ecosystem of ideas.

That ecosystem is evolving at an accelerating rate, and the people who have had specific roles in the one that prevailed in the past — authors, literary agents, speaking agents, editors, publishers and others — are going to have to change with it. Some get this and some don’t, but I’m happy to say that the people I work with directly at this point are definitely in the getting-it category. (I’ll talk much more about this broader context in an upcoming post.)

Meanwhile, I’m having terrific conversations with the folks at Lulu. They aren’t the only outfit of this kind around, by any means, but I like the way they see their own part of the emerging ecosystem.

Incidentally, had I signed with a traditional publisher, the book would not have reached the marketplace for a year, most likely, if not even later. With Lulu, it’ll be available this summer.

Rejections

Editors from big publishing houses have a habit of rejecting books in what they must believe is a kind way. They say something to this effect: “It’s really interesting and we like Dan a bunch, and while it isn’t for us we’re sure it’ll find a great home with someone else.”

Please, folks. Any competent author would prefer this: “We didn’t like it, and here’s why….” Honest criticism is more helpful.

One reason several editors did offer was a bit surprising. An editor wrote, echoing several others, “The main problem that people had was that they felt that they knew much of the information that Dan was trying to get across…”

Wow. You mean that people who read and publish books for a living already know the value of deep and thoughtful media use? Uh, one of the major motivations for this project is the ample evidence that way too many other people don’t know this.

In my days as a newspaper reporter, I learned that the only audience that really counts is your editor. It was a reality in the world of highly concentrated media, but no more. Any serious writer needs a good editor, but people who become your audience — and if you do it right, your collaborators — are the ones who really count.

Another reason for saying No had the ring of actual truth: The publisher’s publicity and marketing people “felt that the major media would avoid the book because of the criticism of their techniques.” One reason I’m writing it…

Lulu

It was after I turned down the New York publisher’s offer that I contacted Bob Young, Lulu’s founder and CEO. Bob also started Red Hat, one of the first companies to prove that it was possible to make money with open-source software by providing services, and he’s been an ardent supporter of ensuring that what we call “intellectual property” involves as many choices as possible.

Bob had told me about Lulu several years earlier, and in that conversation he’d suggested it would be a good fit for me someday. Now, we both thought, this might really be the time.

He put me in touch with Daniel Wideman, who runs what Lulu calls its new “VIP Services” for established authors making the move to this kind of publishing. Daniel said he very much liked what I was trying to accomplish in this new project, and we had several further discussions. In the end it was clear to me that this would indeed be a good fit.

So here we go. I’ll be letting you know how all this works, by which I mean many of the details of the process.

Back to work…my to-do list has just gotten a whole lot longer. But it’s my list this time.

The Field Journalist USB Drive: Version 1

When in the field, you can be limited by computers you don’t control. Limitations can be as simple as a library computer without Adobe Reader installed or as complex as a third-world internet cafe where the machines have few applications and none in your language. A USB drive pre-loaded with your own software is a simple workaround, but I haven’t yet run across a collection of portable software packaged especially for the field journalist.

To meet this need, I’ve gathered a range of portable applications one can run from a USB drive. This is version 1 and will develop based on use and suggestions. I chose the initial set with this criteria in mind:

Meet the needs of media consumption or creation
Open-source or freeware
Familiarity and ease (when possible)

The how-to for setting up your own USB drive is below, but first, let me list the applications:

Platform:
PortableApps Platform – PortableApps.com offers an extremely useful foundation for portable software. It sets up your USB drive (or even an iPod) for installing and running other portable applications. It runs on Windows, but can be run on Linux and OSX via Wine. I started with the platform alone without other applications added. However, you can download the platform with lots of extras as well.
Consumption:
Firefox – Other browsers can be portable as well, but I chose Firefox for its universality.
Universal Viewer – This very handy app can view most document and image types and easily covers the doc, pdf and odt bases.
VLC Media Player – VLC plays both audio files and most video formats.
Creation:
Audacity – This covers simple audio editing.
GIMP – This image editor is an open-source alternative to Photoshop.
Inkscape – This vector image editor is a simple alternative to Illustrator.
KompoZer – Though not as robust as Dreamweaver, this web editor covers a lot of bases.
Notepad++ – This is a text editor that can also highlight code. It’s useful for quick edits to HTML and CSS files.
FileZilla – This is an open-source FTP client.
VirtualDub – I’m still sifting through portable video-editing options, but this one should suffice for now. Codec installations in general make adding a portable video editor a bit more involved.
Utilities:
Skype – Other IM clients are available as well. Skype offers voice and is well-saturated.
Eraser – A simple privacy utility for ensuring documents erased on a public machine are gone for good.

How to Set Up Your Field Journalist USB Drive:

You’ll need a USB drive. It doesn’t have to be extremely roomy for applications as the total install of the programs listed here only comes to 258 MB (give or take). However, you’ll want to have room for any files you’ll be working with, so extra gigs doesn’t hurt.
Download the PortableApps platform. Once downloaded, run the file. It will ask for an install location. Here, choose the drive letter of your USB drive.
Once installed, PortableApps should launch. If not, view the files on your USB drive and double-click “StartPortableApps.”
Installing applications is fairly simple, though not immediately intuitive. You first need to download the application you want to install and the files can be found at the links in the list above. There are two ways to install depending on whether the application is customized for the PortableApps platform or not. Both are simple:

To install an app customized for the Portable apps platform, go to “Options” and then to “Install a New App.” Then, just select the file. Note: Files for the Portable Apps platform will carry the .PAF extension.

To install any other portable app, first download and uncompress the file. This will usually yield a file folder with that application’s name. Take this folder and copy it into the PortableApps folder on your USB drive. After this, go back to the PortableApps program, select “Options” and “Refresh App Icons.” Your new application should now appear.
Your USB drive is now ready for digesting, managing and editing a range of media. If you want to customize, more portable applications can be found at PortableApps and Softpedia.

This is just the first version and I’m still exploring portable applications. I’m very interested in suggestions for applications you prefer to those on this initial list or programs that fill other gaps. If you know of similar projects for journalistic purposes, I’m very interested in that as well.

Photo via DavidRGilson’s Flickr stream.

Add Proofreading Support to Your WordPress Dashboard

After the Deadline is a WordPress plugin that adds proofreading functionality to the WordPress dashboard. Once added, the plugin will highlight grammar, style and spelling errors while you write posts. Similar to Word, errors are color coded by type and right-clicking will bring up suggestions for correction. It’s not 100% (it didn’t catch a there/their misuse I tested), but like any proofreading support, it should be a safeguard instead of a brain replacement. The plugin is only available for self-hosted WordPress blogs. The following video shows After the Deadline in action:

Note: After the Deadline is also available as a FireFox add-on.

Digital Storytelling Advice from Public Radio Enthusiasts

Before terms like podcasting and citizen media were common, several sites and public radio storytellers were already on top of helping non-professionals tell their stories. The sites I want to list here offer great examples of what amateurs can do with a recording device and a bit of encouragement.

Transom.org is produced by Atlantic Public Media and is a site for welcoming newbs into the world of public radio. In 2003, it was the first website to win a Peabody award and did so by offering great examples of audio storytelling and solid instruction on how to produce such stories.

HearingVoices.com is a series featuring the best of public radio. It hosts its own “Learn Radio” list with great links related to both storytelling and production.

SoundPortraits.org hosts a great Interview Checklist by David Isay. Its beauty is in its brevity and would make a great pre-game rundown before interviews until you get the hang of it.

The Teen Reporter’s Handbook at RadioDiaries.org is another great reference for getting started in audio. As well, Radio Diaries itself is a commendable project replete with good examples of citizen storytelling. The goal of the project is to find folks whose voices are rarely heard and get a recording device in their hands to begin a personal diary. Hosted documentaries include the voices of prisoners, unique teens and carnival retirees.

If you’re still hungry for digital storytelling links, McLellan Wyatt’s list will keep you busy for weeks.

Finally, check out Ira Glass on Storytelling. He gives an excellent breakdown between merely reporting and telling a story people want to hear:

Project: Report Offers Helpful How-To Videos

YouTube Project: Report is holding its second contest for aspiring journalists, offering $10,000 grants to five winners. Partnered with the Pulitzer Center, the contest asks journalism newcomers to film a day in the life of a compelling person. Because of this newbie focus, the YouTube page offers several videos with basic, but solid production advice for amateurs. You’ll find videos on camera basics and lighting tips, but this one on reporting composition gives an idea of what they offer:

WordPress for Android

Keeping in spirit, I’m producing this post on my G1, using the app described.

The new WordPress app for Android has been released and it’s quite nice. While blogging from a phone still feels a bit limited, this app is a good option for blogging away from a machine.

The application integrates with self-hosted blogs and features tabs for managing comments, posts and pages. The screen for writing posts integrates with Android’s image gallery. (Here, it becomes an even greater travesty that Android doesn’t provide an easy way to take screenshots.) Once written, posts can be published or uploaded as drafts.

Also nice is the comment alert feature, allowing the user to get updates when new comments show up. If you require comment approval for new posters, this can free you from your machine and frequent dashboard refreshes.

In all, it’s nice to see this app taken seriously with bases well-covered in its initial version.

How to Set Up Your Own Paywall with drop.io

Update: Drop.io’s technology was acquired by Facebook in October 2010 and the site was discontinued as it was. I’ll be hunting for site’s that offer a similar approach to easily upload content on the fly and charge users for access to it. If you run across anything on your own, please send it our way.

With the discussion over the New York Times’ paywall plans this week, I thought it would be interesting to explore how an individual could set up her own paywall. This isn’t to make a call either way on whether a paywall is good or bad business, but individual experiments in this area could yield interesting results.

While there are multiple ways to host and charge for content online, drop.io offers a fairly simple option. Drop.io is a collaborative, file-sharing service that becomes interesting when you add its privacy options and real-time nature. In addition to file-sharing, drop.io offers the user a feature (appropriately named Paywall) to charge for uploaded content.

Many kinds of media creators can find benefit in a streamlined system for charging for files. Drop.io offers several use cases, which include the independent journalist who wants to charge for monthly access to an insider news service and the photographer who wants to sell high-resolution versions of his images. To this, I also see usefulness to the data journalist who wants to fund her document digging and visualization time by charging for curated data sets. As well, this could be an option for quickly selling that newsworthy photo you caught at the right place at the right time.

Drop.io has a thorough and well-done how-to on their site, but I’ll give the steps in broad strokes here:

Create a new drop on drop.io’s homepage. You have the option to add a file in this step and you’ll have to create an admin password.
Access Paywall and follow the setup instructions. This is done by appending your drop’s URL with “/admin/paywall/”.
Setup your Amazon Payments Business Account. Drop.io will take you to Amazon to set up a new account or you can use an existing one. One thing to note is that your Amazon Payments name will be visible to buyers. So, keep this in mind if there is a desire for anonymity/pseudonymity.
Finish by entering your Amazon Payments info and agreeing to terms.

It’s important to note that each site will take a cut from transactions. Drop.io takes 1% and Amazon takes 1-3% and some change based on payment method. As well, free accounts on drop.io go up to 100mb, but it’s $20/month to upgrade to 10gb.

All in all, I believe the simplicity of this approach allows for fast experimentation in terms of the kind of content an individual can sell. For example, PaidContent.org began as a one-man trade newsletter by Rafat Ali. As well, the system could fit into the 1000 True Fans model being adopted by entrepreneurial media creators. This is ripe for creativity.