AllThingsD » citizen journalism

What Current TV's Moves Signal for Citizen Journalism

Andy Jordan — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 15:20:24 +0000

Current TV began with a promise to be the great democratizer of media. Some four years into the experiment, it has a new chief executive who is shifting it away from short videos to more traditional cable programming.

In that transition, Current has cut shows and staff, with the most recent layoffs happening last week. The announcement has prompted questions about citizen journalism’s future, though Mark Rosenthal, Current’s CEO and a former president and operating chief at MTV Networks, said that it isn’t in doubt.

“Current’s mission has not changed one iota,” he said in an interview. “Citizen journalism is far from dead.”

The moves are among Current’s first big changes from Mr. Rosenthal, who helped take MTV from videos to reality and entertainment programming in the ’90s. And while he said the network is still committed to viewer-created content, the format still faces plenty of skepticism as a business model.

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Girls in Tech "Journalism 2.0" Panel: Speak Loudly and Carry a Big Stick

Kara Swisher — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 13:07:59 +0000

Last night, BoomTown moderated a really interesting panel for an organization called Girls in Tech, titled “Journalism 2.0 RoundTable.”

Girls in Tech describes itself as a “social network enterprise focused on the engagement, education and empowerment of like-minded, professional, intelligent & influential women.”

With those lofty requirements–combined with the fact that I was a girl when we had yet to land on the moon–I have no idea what I was doing there.

In any case, it was held in the San Francisco offices of MySpace and covered such topics such as: How blogging and citizen journalism have changed the landscape, what works in the highly connected digital media space, and, of course, the ups and down of being a woman in the male-choked tech industry in Silicon Valley.

The panelists included former San Francisco Chronicle tech editor Deborah Gage, ZDNet’s Jennifer Leggio, Ubergizmo Editor Eliane Fiolet, VentureBeat’s Camille Ricketts and TechieDiva’s Gina Hughes.

It was a lively discussion, with highlights such as Fiolet telling a hilarious story about an encounter of the irksome kind at a gaming conference and jokingly recommending violence as a solution, and Hughes talking about the sometimes trollish commenters of Yahoo (YHOO) when she blogged there.

Overall takeaway: Be loud, be proud and ignore all the noise. That, or make some more–and, preferably, via Twitter.

I also did a short interview at the event with social media blogger and PR guy Brian Solis about his latest book, “Putting the Public Back in Public Relations.”

Natch, here is a lovely video I did–interviewing Solis, Hughes and Ricketts–which also includes yet another cruel “no comment” from Facebook’s talk-to-the-hand PR terror Brandee Barker:

[ See post to watch video ]

Digital Overload at Inauguration?

Marisa Taylor — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 18:20:15 +0000

With inauguration excitement hitting a fever pitch inside the Beltway, news outlets are calling on the Average Joes (and maybe a few Joe Plumbers) attending the festivities to seize the moment and capture the Obama revelry for the rest of the world to see.

Most notably, citizen journalism meets photo technology in a partnership between Microsoft and CNN called The Moment. Using in Microsoft’s (MSFT) Photosynth technology, attendees of Obama’s swearing in are asked to shoot photographs of the moment he takes oath and send them to CNN, where they will all be compiled along with CNN’s professional images to create a 3D photographic reconstruction of the very second Obama becomes President. Owners of digital cameras are urged to take three photos of the event–one wide angle shot, one mid-zoom shot, and one full-zoom shot–and the CNN site reads, “We’ll capture the most detailed experience of a single moment ever.”

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Mainstream Media to Webheads: Thanks for the Free Content!

Peter Kafka — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 17:29:41 +0000

Yesterday, in the wake of the amazing U.S. Airways Flight 1549 story, I suggested that the chief benefit of Twitter and “citizen journalism” reports is that they’re very, very fast. That speed is why Twitterer Janis Krums, who took that amazing photo as his ferry headed over to pick up passengers from the downed plane, is now an instant celebrity. Did you catch him on “Good Morning America” today?

But this morning I got a missive from an employee at one of the cable news networks, who tells me I’ve got it all wrong. Speed is nice, but these days, there are other considerations that are much more important for media companies:

It’s not the speed of Twitter photo that’s remarkable. It’s that it’s FREE. In the past, we would have got that pic from one of the agencies. We didn’t need anything from the agencies yesterday. Anything we couldn’t get from our own crews, people sent us FOR FREE.”

See? Who says old media have been slow to adapt to the Web?

There are some Webby start-ups premised on this idea, too. NowPublic, notably, is trying to organize amateur reporters and photographers into something resembling a newswire, or at least an interesting site. But those guys still have to figure out how turn that into a business.

But the big guys already have a business. It’s a pretty good one, too: Selling TV airtime to advertisers for a lot more money than the Web guys will ever hope to get. And if they can squeeze a few more dollars out of free Internet content, via outlets like Twitter and Time Warner’s (TWX) CNN iReport site, so much the better.

Publisher of Jobs Obituary Outs Jobs Heart Attack Rumor Writer

John Paczkowski — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 14:15:41 +0000

So that fraudulent “citizen journalism” report claiming Apple CEO Steve Jobs had been rushed to the hospital with severe chest pains and shortness of breath? The one that allegedly shaved about $4.8 billion off Apple’s market value after Silicon Alley Insider picked it up and published without verifying it? Securities and Exchange Commission investigators have tracked down its author and it’s not the short seller many had expected. It’s an 18-year-old with no clear motive, according to Bloomberg (ironically, the source of the Jobs obituary accidentally posted to news wires in late August). Which means the SEC may not have a case. “If the posting wasn’t directly related to the purchase or sale of a security, it’s questionable the SEC would have jurisdiction,” Michael Missal, a former enforcement lawyer told Bloomberg. “That’s not to say some other agency of the U.S. government couldn’t take action if it felt a law was violated.”