This is an archived blog from when I ran Conscious Public Relations Inc. from 2008-2018. Excuse the potential outdated-ness!
VIVO Media Arts Centre in Vancouver has started to host a series of “What’s Going On” salons, moderated by the one and only ultra-academic when it comes to media: Sue Biely.
Skipping last month’s social media salon, I popped in last night into the Citizen Journalism salon and heard some interesting things from both the panelists and the guests.
The Panelists included Mike Tippett, creator of NowPublic.com, Leif Utne of TheUptake.org, and April Smith of AhaMedia.ca and the Fearless City Mobile project.
Each panelist talked for about 10 minutes about what they or their sites did, which was pretty straightforward – telling stories with a video camera, and uploading them on a site to be distributed globally in real time.
Utne explained that Uptake uses a share network called Zanby that allows groups (a la Meetup.com) to aggregate content while maintaining their brand look.
April’s work with the Fearless City Mobile project – which recruits Vancouver DTES residents and artists for an exciting mobile video streaming showcase of ideas and views from their neighbourhood – takes place at the new W2 centre. Next month during the Olympics, W2 will be showing their work at the W2 Culture Media House.
Sue sat down with a more intimate conversation with the panelists and guests around how citizen journalists like you or I would ever get the reputation – and importantly, the financial stability – of traditional media. Currently, there are very little business models available that can answer the question – with the exception of NowPublic’s success story. To put things in perspective, 1000 hits on a website equals a $5 return in Google advertising.
One solution is to license your content (videos and photos) to traditional media like the big networks, who no longer have the ability to transport cameras to simultaneous events around town. For example, Canada’s envelope-pushing Vice Magazine has launched VBS.tv, which is now licensing its content to a US network. Censorship to children will now become an issue here.
Mike pointed out that TMZ – the source for entertainment news in Hollywood, stands for the “Thirty Mile Zone” – meaning that the staff doesn’t even have to go outside that geographical range to find interesting news – and they make money doing it.
Also, it will take a while for the masses to begin trusting citizen journalists more than traditional media – one person argued that Twitter‘s 140 characters were still no replacement for opening up a paper.
In footage that we got to see of April being documented at live events, she’s often side-by-side with news cameras and traditional reporters – who are now starting to source her Nokia video footage for their newscasts. Some argued that news is starting to become socially driven; we now get our news from word of mouth, or mouse, on social media. Sue had a term for this: “participatory curation.” In other words, news is moving into the hands of the consumer, moreso than the reporter.
Leif argued that transparency and accuracy in citizen journalism reporting will be a big factor – which is why they have a mandate for volunteers who are involved in Uptake’s reporting.
One skeptic – who cited the fact that Canadian Olympic commercials were being made in Lithuania with our tax dollars – was eager to know how one meagre citizen could make a difference in making the lesser known news, er, known, worldwide. Mike’s answer to that was Google. Google is still the king when it comes to finding content, so you have to make sure that your site or story is easily found.
One guest then proposed the idea of becoming on Orwellian society – if the future is online, will anyone hold the power to tell which news is most important? Mike said it will mean the end to privacy. Even now, it’s easy to find information on each other via Google. Leif said it will not be so much Big Brother but more “little brothers.” Is it really that bad to be connected to everyone? I’d like to think technological globalization helped the Haiti situation more than we would have if text donations and social media hadn’t existed.
One website that was shared is NewsChallenge.org, which funds digital, open-source technology projects that distribute news. Check it out.
