OhmyNews International

Aftermath in Brooklyn. Credit: arvindgrover on Flickr (CC)

A tornado has swept through Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island. Traditional news outlets are incorporating content from acts of citizen journalism in blogs and YouTube to aid their coverage. The New York Times refers to Dan Manco’s Tumblr blog and even stations out in the country, like KRTV 3 in Great Falls, Montana, are using YouTube footage from citizen journalists.

The NYT included a story dedicated to citizen journalists covering the storm.

The Twin Cities Daily Planet, a local citizen news site, offers a variety of classes and workshops to help citizen contributors gather information and publish their stories. The TC Daily Planet combines original reporting and commentary by citizen contributors with the best of the neighborhood, community and ethnic media.

What’s Your Story: Citizen Journalism 101 is a series of classes, which started September 15 and continues the following three Wednesdays.

Here is the class description:

In this series, participants will develop ideas about what they see going on in their communities and turning it into meaningful content. We’ll cover how to best use a blog, using pictures to tell your story and fundamental best practices for telling your story online.

The editor of the TC Daily Planet, Mary Turck will be teaching the classes. In the classes, she focuses on fundamental concepts and practices of developing news ideas and telling stories online. She has discussed how to train non-professionals to gather news and information in Five Tips for Training Citizen Journalists.

The TC Daily Planet also offers a two-hour class, The Difference Between Blogging and Great Blogging on October 13. This class aims to teach how to develop a free personal website and how to start blogging.

Jeremy Iggers, the Executive Director of the Twin Cities Media Alliance that operates the Twin Cities Daily Planet mentions:

The TC Daily Planet emphasizes not only sharing information, but also providing tools that make that information more useful. The tools enable Twin Cities’ residents to not just share information, but also deliberate, organize and take action, and make stronger connections to their neighborhoods.



On a somewhat more positive note for online citizen journalists, The Pew Research Center for People & the Press reports that Americans are using more news these days. Traditional outlets have flatlined or gone down as online sources, including podcasts, social networks and cell phones have gone up to 44% of the American public. Online news is about on par with radio news and has surpassed print news. Television has leveled a bit after a big drop from the 1990s. But it’s not just a case of shirking one medium for another. Americans are integrating different media into their daily lives, but more highly educated people depend on digital news than traditional news.

I knew we had smart readers.

Americans Spending More Time Following the News

Credit: x-ray delta one on Flickr (CC)

Isaac Stone Fish and Tony Dokoupil in Newsweek propose an interesting outlook on the future of news. When private news organizations struggle for ad dollars, what’s to stop the Chinese government propaganda machine Xinhua from filling that void? While other news organizations are slashing their employment and overseas coverage, Xinhua is using its government’s deep pockets to increase staff and international coverage, including getting a big office in Times Square.

Even large corporate news outfits occasionally consider content from citizen journalists. How do you think Xinhua’s attitude would be?

All the Propaganda That’s Fit to Print (Newsweek)

The New York Times reports that the Hollywood Reporter will move from being a daily publication to a glossy weekly one. I wonder if the NYT realizes the psychological projection they’re giving in the first paragraph.

The Hollywood Reporter has been dying a slow death for a decade, bleeding from layoffs, vanishing advertisers and diminished relevance in a news cycle now dominated by cutthroat entertainment blogs.

Sounds like someone we know, Gray Lady?

The HR’s editorial director gives this excuse:

“It’s our negligence — the way we’ve served up our content over the last couple of years has allowed some really poor competitors to emerge.”

The article then goes on to imply that these “really poor competitors” are blogs like IndieWire, TheWrap and Deadline. The elephant in the room is also Perez Hilton. He doesn’t do the serious reporting of the HR and Variety, but he has almost singlehandedly moved Hollywood news to the gossip pages and the gossip pages to the web.

Oh, we won’t see the end of that pun.

A case is going on now involving two award-winning documentary filmmakers being accused of filming one of Donald Trump’s properties without permission. The police confiscated their equipment for five days, and the filmmakers say that their video proves that they indeed have permission.

They were investigating events like the water being shut off by Trump contractors, which sounds like a classic example of journalism for the public interest.

This will be an interesting case to watch to measure the temperature of press freedom these days.

Film-makers arrested on site of Donald Trump’s Scottish golf resort (guardian.co.uk)

Remember when RSS was the cool new thing? You didn’t have to actually go to different websites to get updates. You could just subscribe to them and read them in one place.

That made it easier for citizen journalist blogs, but it also hurt. Bloggers didn’t have to go around and announce when they had new posts. RSS feeds took care of that. But less traffic meant less hits for advertisers. Then Google and other companies came up with ways to put advertising in RSS feeds.

But now Bloglines is finally being put down. Once an extremely popular RSS reader, it stopped updating a couple of years ago when the actual work of updating got outsourced to China. IAC, the company that bought it five years ago is closing it down.

Joseph Tartakoff states that users are moving away from RSS readers, of which Google Reader is one of the only players left, in favor of Facebook and Twitter.

That’s sort of a plus in that links in social networking sites don’t contain entire news stories, requiring users to click to return to the blog sites themselves (better do some house cleaning on that design). The trouble is that it’s harder to reach general viewers again. News popularity isn’t based on RSS feeds but on power users scanning RSS feeds.

The challenge these days is how to get the attention of the power users, which I’m sure will be the next snake oil to be dished out after SEO optimization.

Credit: Axel Bührmann on Flickr (CC)

There are so many gadgets getting our attention and so many that do tasks that we now think are crucial that we’re running out of pocket space. When covering a news event, you have photographers and videographers because it was cumbersome to carry and switch devices.

Then video cameras started to get still photo capabilities. Then digital point-and-shoots got video. Phones could take both, too. But none of them could do both functions well.

Now DSLR cameras are getting into the video space, and they’re even overtaking comparable video cameras for quality to the point that even Hollywood is playing with them. The reason is not just their HD capabilities. DSLR cameras make use of sharp lenses that consumer video cameras don’t have. They can also switch lenses from wide angle to macro, narrow focus depths for super sharp images and all encompassing fish-eye styles.

Take a look at some of these.

Then there is HDR photography, which takes photos using different exposure levels and stitches them together. This can create more realistic effects or create otherworldly images. Only DSLRs have this capability right now. Now some people have put together what may be the first HDR video.

Now, HDR likely won’t have an impact on photojournalism. But consider the possibilities journalists now have with just one device. They can take video and stills without switching media. In fact, some DSLRs let you snap photos while in video mode.

There are blogs dedicated to DSLR videography, and its use by citizen journalists has even sparked some debate from “pros.”

Just something to consider when expanding the repertoire.

Here are a few stories relating to freedom of the press this week.

• Berkeley students get to have press passes–after signing an honor pledge, including maintaining independence from “political and commercial influence.” Discussion here.
• Gitmo relaxes a little–a little–on its press rules. Basically, reporters can report on facts that the public already knows. Thanks, guys. It’s the only bone reporters can get since the Pentagon is planning to further tighten press leaks.
• Good news, Chicago citizen journalists! The city council has broadened the definition of “journalist” in their issuance of press passes.
• Bad news, Chicago videographers.
• Anti-SLAPP. Is it the new savior of journalists (Michael Moore), or is it easily slapped down (John Stossel)?

J-Lab has posted the closing remarks of Executive Director Jan Schaffer at the Melbourne Writers Festival. She mainly addresses the role of the traditional journalist in the digital world as information becomes more easily and cheaply available, making the journalist resort to more clever and efficient means of gathering information. She covers some of the following.

• Eight developments happening in the delivery of news
• Opportunities for added value in journalism
• New journalism as a means to quell bad story editing habits that have sprouted in modern journalism, such as scorecard journalism
• Connecting with readers to find what issues they are most interested in and which questions they want answered
• What traditional journalists can learn from citizen journalists
• Alternative measures for success

Give it a good read. There are a lot of useful nuggets in there.

The New News: Melbourne Writers Festival Closing Address