MediaShift

The Importance of Free Speech Online in Iran, China, Kenya

Thu, 09 Jul 2009 13:23:35 -0800

In a crisis, governments will often curtail freedom of the press, censoring or shutting broadcasts and newspapers. But blocking websites, slowing the Internet or cutting off SMS messaging can be harder to do. Stopping the flow of information online can be a difficult task, as the Iranian government has learned over the past few weeks, as protesters have posted images to Flickr, video to YouTube, and running commentaries on blogs and Twitter. While the Iranian government would prefer to operate under a cloud, the Interent has proven to be a key distribution medium for spreading news to the rest of the world.

This month's 5Across video roundtable focused on free speech online in various countries, from Iran to China to Kenya -- and even a mention of the U.S. government's attempts at curtailing speech online over the years. The discussion gave context to Iranian Internet use, its demographics and the way people there get information via satellite TV from Persian-language foreign news sources such as BBC Persian and Voice of America. Plus, we talked about how China uses psychology in making its millions of Internet users believe they are all being monitored.

5Across: Free Speech Online

Guest biographies:

Cyrus Farivar is a freelance technology journalist based in Oakland, Calif. He regularly reports for Public Radio International's The World, National Public Radio, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, The Economist and others. His forthcoming book, "The Internet of Elsewhere," examines the history and effects of the Internet in four countries around the world, including Iran. It's due out from Rutgers University Press in 2010.

Danny O'Brien is the International Outreach Coordinator for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. He works to help the EFF, the first digital rights group in the world, collaborate with organizations and individuals fighting for online liberties globally. O'Brien has written columns for the Sunday Times, Irish Times, and also founded the Need to Know email newsletter in the dot-com heyday.

Edwin Okong'o is a Kenyan-born journalist, writer and humorist. He's an editor at New America Media, an online news service and coalition of ethnic media in the United States. He is also a reporter for PBS Frontline/World. Okong'o received a Masters in Journalism from UC Berkeley.

Scott Rosenberg is the author of the new "Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It's Becoming, and Why It Matters," as well as "Dreaming in Code." He co-founded Salon.com in 1995 and served as its technology editor and later managing editor for many years. He is also the founder of MediaBugs, a new project funded by the Knight News Challenge.

Kim Spencer, president of Link Media, is an award-winning producer of over 50 documentaries and television specials. A pioneer in using satellite links to foster global dialogue, Kim produced a series of 15 international "spacebridges" including The Moscow Link, a live TV exchange that changed USSR attitudes on nuclear war. Subsequently Kim became coordinating producer of ABC News' "Prime Time Live." Spencer is also executive producer of Link TV's original productions, including "Global Pulse," "Bridge to Iran" and "Mosaic."

If you'd prefer to watch sections of the show rather than the entire show, I've broken them down by topic below.

Twitter Revolution?

Iran in Context

What Source Do You Trust?

Government Interference

Dangers of Free Speech?

China, Kenya...U.S.?

Credits

Mark Glaser, producer and host
Charlotte Buchen, camera

Julie Caine, audio

Location: Vega Project & Kennerly Architecture office space in San Francisco

Special thanks to: PBS and The Knight Foundation

Music by AJ the DJ

What do you think? How important is the Internet at spreading news when governments curtail freedom of the press? How have you followed the news from Iran? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

Mark Glaser is executive editor of MediaShift and Idea Lab. He also writes the bi-weekly OPA Intelligence Report email newsletter for the Online Publishers Association. He lives in San Francisco with his son Julian. You can follow him on Twitter @mediatwit.

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5 Ideas to Transform Newspaper Sites

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 15:34:50 -0800

I sometimes wonder whether we are held captive by old school thinking. At our newspapers at Mediafin, we are in the process of integrating web operations with the print publication, a move which I fully endorse. There's one major risk to this: that we might end up seeing the web as just another way to distribute newspaper articles rather than a radically new opportunity.

People who have spent years writing for print newspapers could easily fall victim to the horseless carriage syndrome -- the belief that they can continue to apply the same thinking that they applied to an old technology to a new, fundamentally different one. At the turn of the century, many saw the automobile as a new variation on the horse-and-carriage, not realizing that the car was in many ways very different. Just as cars are fundamentally different from horseless carriages, or cinema is fundamentally different from theater, the web is fundamentally different from newspapers.

We have only begun to perceive those fundamental differences, like the streaming and social character of the web. Thus, many newspapers are still looking at the web in old print terms -- and not using their websites as anything more than a place to post the exact same material that they put in print. We should at least try to think out of the newspaper box and imagine how our presence on the web could be completely different from what it is today.

Five Suggestions for Change

Let me suggest some possibilities for how a newspaper's web presence could be radically different from the way it's been so far:

1. Create micro-sites.
Instead of having a single website divided in sections which often replicate the sections in the print newspaper, we could have many different sites each focusing on a specific topic of interest to our communities. For example, at Mediafin, we know our community has various interests -- financial services, markets, technology for consumers, technology for enterprises, etc. Why not have a separate website for each to better target community members' interests?

2. Streams of content.
The news on each of those more specialized sites or networks would be like a stream of blog posts or microblog posts. In other words, it would look more like Twitter, Facebook or FriendFeed rather than a collection of newspaper articles. Of course, posts could be longer than the famous 140 characters of Twitter, but overall the look would be far more stream-like. There could be a special section for link journalism, using a tool such as Publish2.

3. Use wikis for context.
Instead of only posting static articles, newspapers could use wikis to help provide background and context. A wiki format would allow both the newsroom and the community to contribute their expertise. Of course, the comments would enable the community members to post links, see members' profiles, and maybe even rate articles and comments.

4. Boost audience interactions.
Forums would enhance both synchronous and asynchronous interaction. One could imagine using some embeddable virtual 2.5-D environment such as Metaplace to enhance the interactive experience. Metaplace is a platform that enables you to make your own virtual environment and connect through hyperlinks or simply embed it on your site. A newspaper could easily transform one of Metaplace's stock "worlds" to match the look and feel of the newspaper and organize chat sessions there.

5. Give participants more control.
It would pretty much be up to the user how all these components of the newspaper site(s) would be organized. Community members would also have the option to either participate in synchronous discussions using avatars in the 2.5-D space or participate in that same discussion using a text-only environment. The idea is to make the participation experience more user-centric: let the users decide how to experience the information, news and discussion flows.

Advantages and Disadvantages

Implementing any of these out-of-the-newspaper-box ideas would require that both journalists and community members adapt to something rather new. This could be a disadvantage for journalists accustomed to old-school print thinking; it could actually be more problematic for them to adapt than for the community.

Another possible objection might be the reaction of the advertisers. Would they appreciate the possibility offered by some of these ideas -- like creating separate websites for each topic -- to better target very specific segments of the community? Or would they instead deplore the fact that the community has been split up, making it harder to reach a broad range of readers?

I think the real benefit of separate environments/sites for advertisers is that they can focus on the relevant audience. The audience's behavior -- reading, commenting, participating in chat discussions, etc. -- will offer insights that are relevant for advertisers planning their campaigns. The only thing is: advertisers will need to be convinced of these new possibilities. Journalists are not the only ones who tend to be conservative in regards to online innovation.

A clear advantage would be that such a model makes it possible to react very fast on the news, with Twitter-like speed. Adopting a blog-stream style of posting would allow newspapers to update much more quickly than if they continued to shovel articles online in the old "online print newspaper" style.

At the same time, wikis would provide in-depth analysis and context. The whole operation would be very much community driven, using sophisticated comments, forum and wiki systems. People would have the choice to refer to existing online networks for their profiles, to create a new profile on the site or they could stay anonymous.

Some sites have already adopted some of these ideas. I was inspired to list some of the above elements by the Columbia Tomorrow site. I especially like that site's combination of a blog-like news stream with in-depth overview pages, and that it offered the possibility for community members to start their own discussions on news posts. The site features a video explaining how this project organizes the interaction and the news.

If you have other such examples or ideas for other components of the news site/network of the future, let us know!

Roland Legrand is in charge of Internet and new media at Mediafin, the publisher of leading Belgian business newspapers De Tijd and L'Echo. He studied applied economics and philosophy. After a brief teaching experience, he became a financial journalist working for the Belgian wire service Belga and subsequently for Mediafin. He works in Brussels, and lives in Antwerp with his wife Liesbeth.

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Edelman's Steve Rubel Switches from Blog to Lifestream

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 13:36:25 -0800

This is one in an occasional series on MediaShift where I discuss issues in-depth with thought leaders in online media. The format has changed to give you a profile of the person, as well as more of our dialogue -- including video clips. If you have suggestions for future Q&As or want to participate yourself, drop me a line via the Feedback Form.

Profile

Steve Rubel

Age: 39

Hometown & Current Location: Long Island, NY

Favorite Websites: Gmail, Friendfeed, Posterous, Google Reader, NYTimes.com, Instapaper

Online Persona (all the places to find you online): Lifestream site, Facebook page, Twitter feed, Friendfeed page, Google Profile.

What Makes Him a Thought Leader: Rubel was one of the first PR people to take up active blogging back in 2004, and his Micropersuasion blog has been a must-read A-list blog since then. Rubel is now senior vice president, director of insights, for Edelman Digital, looking at technology, media and online trends. He has more than 27,000 followers on Twitter and writes a bi-weekly column for Advertising Age magazine.

What He's Doing Now: The biggest change for Rubel was mothballing his Micropersuasion blog and putting all his efforts into a lifestream site run through Posterous. He can now post more frequently and embed more multimedia easily into his stream. He told me the new site gets twice the traffic of his blog, likely because of the higher volume of posts, the curiosity of people who want to see his new site, and his experimentation on the site.

Q&A

I spoke with Rubel a couple months ago when he was visiting San Francisco for the Ad:tech conference. We met at B Restaurant near Moscone Center and I interviewed him with my Flip camera. We talked about his balancing act as a blogger/journalist/PR person, how PR is shifting with the advent of social media, and what lessons Edelman and Edelman's client Wal-Mart have learned from previous missteps online. Here's the edited video from that chat (apologies for the background noise), with notations below on particular questions and subjects if you'd like to jump to topics of interest to you.

01:48: Blogs losing their luster to Twitter and other online forms of expression.

02:52: Elephants (social media) and zebras (old media) mating, creating...?

03:58: What's the next big thing in social media?

05:44: Rubel got in trouble with PC Magazine by saying he doesn't read it anymore.

06:50: Social media has become an integral part of PR.

08:30: Will PR companies hire marketer-programmers?

08:58: What's the biggest mistake PR people make online?

09:55: Celebrities cut out the PR middleman by using Twitter, social media themselves.

11:05: What Wal-Mart and Edelman learned from past PR mistakes online.

12:30: Is the press release outdated, and should it be replaced with "social media press release"?

13:40: What's the best way for brands to track themselves on social media?

*****

What do you think about the changes happening in PR? Do you think social media has become an integral part of a PR person's daily routine? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

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Newspapers Try Again with Local Blog Networks

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 05:01:22 -0800

Recently, those who visited the front page of the Miami Herald's website began seeing a sidebar item labeled simply "Your Blogs." If you clicked on the link it would take you to a page containing a series of headlines and little snippets of opening paragraphs in a news feed format. If you clicked on one of the links, it would take you to an independent blog not affiliated with the Miami Herald, written by someone who lives somewhere in South Florida. Many of the blogs, though not all, have a regional bent. Some of the links would take you to film or music reviews, or commentary on national politics.

This blog news aggregator is a joint project between the Miami Herald and BlogNetNews, a company founded by David Mastio. For years now, Mastio has been pushing the idea that newspapers should be fostering closer relationships with local bloggers, linking to their content and in effect exposing their readerships to a wider range of media. Lately, he's been meeting with publishers from local newspapers, alt weeklies, and radio and TV stations to set up such networks using his own software.

Mastio's project is part of a trend in recent years of newspapers trying to team up with local bloggers. In 2006, the Washington Post launched a new ad network in which the newspaper's ad reps would sell advertising on local blogs and split the proceeds with the bloggers. I couldn't find any reference to the blogroll on the Post's front page and old permalinks to it no longer work. (I exchanged several emails with Washington Post publicity and advertising representatives, but couldn't get anyone to go on record before deadline.)

More recently, the Chicago Tribune launched a blog aggregator called ChicagoNow, which aggregates "50 blogs and growing." Newspapers and bloggers hope that such efforts could lead to mutually beneficial relationships, but the jury is out on whether those relationships enrich the business of either party.

A reader on-ramp

In terms of teaming up with traditional news companies, Mastio has worked with organizations in Bowling Green, Ky.; Knoxville, Tenn.; Memphis, Tenn.; and Atlanta, among others. In addition to this, BlogNetNews has separate landing pages aggregating political blogs in all 50 states. He said that the basic idea when working with news outlets is to build an "on-ramp" for readers to find out what's going on in local blogs.

"What we do is use all the blogging services out there to find as many of the local blogs as we can -- that are somehow identified by geography, no matter what they're writing about," he said. "And then our system checks them every hour and runs excerpts of the latest posts, and makes all those blogs searchable in a narrow local blog search. We [include] a topic cloud that tracks what people are talking about in the last 100 posts. And we keep an archive of those topic clouds based on an entire day's blogging, so you can see what people were talking about yesterday, or six months ago or whatever you want."

Mastio explained that bloggers are linking to their local newspapers every day, so it seems selfish in some sense not to recognize the value in linking back. He said that doing so would provide a service that would be mutually beneficial for both the news organizations aggregating the blogs and the blogs themselves. These blog feeds would, in essence, create more content for the news site while at the same time sending valuable traffic to the blogs. He didn't have precise numbers, but based on some click-through counts for one of the networks he set up in Tennessee, he estimated blogs shown on the newspaper site received 10,000 click-throughs a week.

Monetizing Blogs

But what about monetary benefits? Mastio said that right now the main advantage to creating such a network is increased traffic, though he does have plans for future monetization.

"It's our plan that we're eventually going to use these networks to create local advertising networks so we'll be able to sell an ad that runs on the site and on blogs within its network," he said. "And in turn we would be able to share the revenue with the bloggers, but that's not something we're able to do quite yet."

Tracy Samantha Schmidt, editorial director for ChicagoNow, said that the bloggers on the site will get a share of the revenue based on page views. Unlike other newspaper attempts to monetize or aggregate off-site blogs, the Chicago Tribune actually approached dozens of Chicago bloggers and offered them contracts to blog on the ChicagoNow website non-exclusively.

"If the bloggers say, 'Sure, sign me up,' we pair them up with a community manager," she said. "We have four of them, and one of the managers will work one-on-one with them to get them trained on our system -- we use Movable Type -- and then we give them all sorts of support if they need training in social media. Whether it's training in SEO or building community, our managers will do that with them."

The team rolled out the beta site on May 25 and since then it has amassed over 600,000 page views. Schmidt said they have bloggers in several niches, from sports blogs to a blog about the city's parking tickets. Though many of the blogs are written by already-established bloggers, they've also invited some local celebrities and well-connected business types who have never blogged before.

I asked Schmidt why they didn't simply put the bloggers on the Chicago Tribune site.

"We are run by the Chicago Tribune, but we're calling it a flanker brand, because really what we want to do is be a separate website off the Chicago Tribune and have as little crossover between the Chicago Tribune and ChicagoNow as possible," she said. "Because we really want to reach readers that the Chicago Tribune hasn't been able to reach online. So that's why we're creating the separate brand."

In addition to traditional brand advertisement, Schmidt said the plan is to eventually launch "adverblogs," allowing local businesses -- in a "completely transparent way" -- to blog for the site. They will also create events around their bloggers and allow organizations and companies to sponsor them. At some point they want to open a classifieds section of ChicagoNow as well.

Posts, not blogs

I spoke to Tony Pierce, the blog editor for the LA Times who first gained popularity in the blogging world by writing for his own personal site and then later for LAist. Pierce manages writers for several dozen of the LA Times' blogs, but though the newspaper has a few local LA blogs on some blogrolls, it hasn't adopted any kind of feed or network with local blogs. But surely someone who came from the local blogging scene could appreciate the potential for such a network?

"I think it really matters how good the local blogs are and how well they relate to the content in the newspaper," he told me. "I mean, you can have some really great blogs in your town, but if they're mostly personal or fragmented in their direction, then I don't know how it's going to play on a newspaper site. But if you have a city where you have a whole bunch of people writing about sports or politics or local events, then it would be ideal. As someone who competed with a lot of the local blogs in LA, I would say there's only about three or four that would really fit into a kind of a blogroll if we had that at the LA Times."

Pierce thought that simply creating a scrolling feed of every blog in the area wasn't exactly engaging in the medium. Instead, he thought that newspapers should put more focus on actually reading local blogs and linking to individual posts. For instance, several of the blogs he manages do daily link "round-ups," linking to blog posts within their niche. He often encourages his bloggers to click through their blogrolls and find more obscure content rather than simply linking to the latest Gawker piece.

"For the most part, this whole citizen journalism concept is fine for about three or four people per town, but that's about it," he said. "And most of those people are not journalists for a reason. Either they're crappy writers or they're crazy, which makes for sometimes interesting blog posts, but is that something that a major newspaper would link to? I mean, even my personal blog is certainly nothing I would have expected the LA Times to link to. I was swearing a lot, it was mostly very personal, plus I say on it that it's full of lies."

But if the newspaper didn't feel comfortable linking to all the local content, should it at least try to sell advertising on these sometimes highly specialized blogs, creating an advertising network that benefits everyone?

"It's just that if you have a whole lot of blogs getting 5,000 page views a day, you're going to need a lot of them, a whole lot of them," he said. "And even if you have a whole lot of them, where do you put that ad that it's going to be really valuable? It's a really tricky situation, and I might come across as kind of a snob -- I mean, I love blogs more than any other person -- but I'll be the first to tell you that most of them are crappy. Which isn't to say that individual posts can't be great, and I think that's where newspapers should focus."

Pierce said he thinks blog networks are only the first step toward true engagement. Despite the hype over Web 2.0, not all content deserves to be highlighted for a newspaper's readership. To be truly innovative, he said, editors are going to have to roll up their sleeves and wade through drivel to find the gems.

Simon Owens is a former newspaper journalist and an associate editor for MediaShift. You can read more of his writing at his blog or contact him at simon[.]bloggasm [at] gmail.com.

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Brave Citizen Journalists Provide New Images of Iranian Life

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 12:41:27 -0800

Like many people, I have been watching this so-called "Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, [Insert New Media Application] Revolution" unfold in Iran from the comfort of my own home. Watching the dizzying and horrifying images that have emerged on the Internet has triggered a whirlwind of emotions and thoughts.

I was shocked and outraged by the death of Neda. I felt a sense of awe watching a group of women defiantly walking the streets without head coverings as if they were in a Pantene shampoo commercial.

I often felt bewildered watching these videos, for I consider myself to be somewhat worldly, and while I always assumed there to be Iranian dissenters, I had precious little knowledge about them. It turns out I'm not the only one who was in the dark. The image that most of the world has been getting about Iran just does not match up with the one that we've only recently been receiving via social media. But the tools for ordinary Iranians to get their stories out have existed for a while -- so why is it only now that Iranian citizen journalists are using them? And how is the work of citizen journalists in Iran changing the way the world sees their country?

What the world sees

Being a citizen of the U.S. currently based in Israel, I am generally shuttling back and forth between Iran's two greatest enemies.

While it can be expected that Iran would cast both "Big and Little Satan" as a monolithic evil entity in its media, I doubt that either the U.S. or Israeli media do a much better job showing Iran for what it actually is: a culturally rich country with an educated populace with varying political and social views.

I find this a bit disturbing, especially in this day and age.

This formula sums up what the average Israeli knows about Iran:

Iran = Ahmadinejad = Crazy = Holocaust Denier = Hamas and Hezbollah Financier = Finger on Red Button = Nuclear Armageddon = Mommy, I'm Scared = Vote for a Right Wing Government to Assuage Fears

Of course, Iran does a great job bolstering this viewpoint, by acting the part of a maniacal regime bested only by North Korea.

Yet in Israel, one gets the sense that the snake has finally been let out of the bag, and it's not that big and bad and poisonous after all.

While many Israelis I've spoken to are using the current events to validate their claims that the Iranian government is out of its mind, the overriding sense is one of surprise that the Iranian people are saner than previously thought.

Who knew that most Iranians support women's liberation, a more compassionate Islam, and a free press?

A month ago, most Israelis couldn't name one Iranian besides Ahmadinejad. Now some here have actually started wearing green in solidarity with Mousavi and company. Israelis are now realizing that they actually have a lot in common with Iranians, which I imagine is true across much of the world.

Why Now?

The big question I have is why did it take so long?

Couldn't these iReporters, as CNN calls citizen journalists, have uploaded anonymous stories a month or a year ago? Why did it take a fraudulent election and street riots to get the world's attention about the repressed majority in Iran?

I suppose the answer might have to do with the "if it bleeds it leads" business model in news journalism.

Iranian bloggers have long been the only truly independent journalists Iran has to offer, yet they have been largely ignored by the Western media as either not credible or not relevant. It's funny how quickly breaking news and street riots mitigate both of these factors.

The Iranian government, on the other hand, has always taken bloggers very seriously. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, an independent non-profit organization, Iran is considering passing a law that would make the creation of blogs promoting "corruption, prostitution, and apostasy" punishable by death. To date, millions of websites have been blocked, and hundreds of bloggers have been arrested. In March, cultural blogger Omidreza Mirsayafi died in prison under suspicious circumstances. He was only 29.

If these intrepid citizen journalists are willing to sacrifice their lives to report from Iran, the least we can do is extend them a hand and publicize their work as much as possible, even if it's not about violent or sexy topics.

In general, it would be nice to read and see reports from despotic regimes during times of peace, so that we can have a window into their world before the blood spills. (One good example of seeing into the lives of people in a war zone is the "Gaza Sderot" video show that I profiled on MediaShift.)

Let this be a wakeup call for the Western media that has been collectively hitting the snooze button on Iran since 1979.

Tapping into Citizen Journalism

It's high time to tap into the plentiful and natural resource known as citizen journalists. The advantages are numerous: There's no need for an expensive bureau. They're already on the ground. Plus, they speak the language.

It should also be a stern warning to other governments that forcefully control their people and their outlets for free expression. From here on out, the relationship between press freedom and citizen journalism campaigns will be inversely proportional.

Whether it be China, Egypt, Cuba, or Burma, totalitarian states should note the futility in stripping the powers of professional journalists, because citizen journalists have the tools, the resolve, and the tenacity to fill the void.

Kudos to the brave citizen journalists of Iran who have used their cell phone cameras to finally give us a more complete picture of their country. While this may not be the revolution many Iranians were waiting for, we will look back at the events of 2009 as a watershed of sorts for citizen journalists across the globe, who got the attention of the wider global audience.

Thank you. We've gotten the message. And now let the draconian regimes of the world get theirs: If you don't change your ways, the revolution will be uploaded to the Internet, and then televised.

Jaron Gilinsky is a journalist and documentary filmmaker based in Jerusalem. As a freelance video correspondent for Time, the New York Times, and Current TV, he has produced and directed scores of documentaries on a range of international topics. Jaron is the founder of Falafel TV, a documentary production company, and regularly posts his videos and articles on his personal blog.

Iran protest photos collected but not taken by Misterarasmus via Flickr.

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Zombie Bloggers Create Communal Horror Stories

Mon, 29 Jun 2009 11:55:14 -0800

On June 13, bloggers around the world imagined they were under attack by the living dead, writing short horror narratives for the annual Blog Like It's the End of the World Day (which was especially appropriate for me since it fell on my birthday). But there are some bloggers who blog as if everyday were the end of the world: the zombie bloggers.

And while the bloggers involved in BLITEOTW day imagined exotic fantasy and science fiction scenarios, dedicated zombie bloggers strive to keep their stories grounded in reality. This is a community where writers win respect for their ability to spin plausible explanations for impossible events -- and where readers add to the experience, collaborating in blog comments, forums, and tweets to create a communal story.

A Group Story

Zombies have had a major hold on the zeitgeist lately, with a whole slew of new horror movies coming out as well as books like The Zombie Survival Guide and Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. So it's no surprise that there are innumerable websites dedicated to these shambling monsters. But it's precisely because there's little in the way of an ultimate authority on zombies that makes enthusiasts so eager to discuss them.

"It's because of this, that everyone can have their voice heard," said Ryan Leach, co-creator of Lost Zombies, a social networking site dedicated to an unusual attempt to film a community-generated zombie mockumentary. "It's kind of like an undead democracy."

Lost Zombies community members donate videos, audio recordings and photos of "zombie attacks" in their area.

"When we decided we wanted to do a community film, we knew we needed a website to be at the center to get the content we need," said Leach. "From [the user-submitted content], we are pulling pieces out that we want to be in the final project. Originally we didn't have any rules and just let it be, but over time we realized that users needed more direction and in order to get any narrative, we needed to create a loose timeline. We put a timeline on the website with dates and some events, but even with this, users are free to play around a little."

Since the site's launch in May 2008, Leach said it had received 18 hours of footage submitted and 10,000 registered members and won both the Community and People's Choice Awards at this year's South by Southwest conference.

Zombie Central

"There's no literary tradition of zombies," agreed Andrew Morisson, co-founder of the Zombie Research Society (ZRS) and zombie-themed social networking site Zombie Central. "It's not like Bram Stoker wrote the great zombie novel. Modern zombies as we know them didn't exist until 1968, when George Romero made 'Night of the Living Dead.' That means that a lot of the questions about them are anyone's guess and there's a lot of debate about, if they did exist, what they would be like."

Even so, readers generally have a sense of where the discussion is going. First, there are enough established ground rules about zombie behavior drawn mostly from popular horror films that new participants can quickly learn the ropes and join the conversation. At the same time, though, there are enough gaps in our "zombie knowledge" to provide ample opportunity for pseudo-scientific discussion. The Zombie Research Society has an advisory board made up of heavy-hitters in the zombie world, including Harvard Medical School Co-Director of Psychiatry Steven Schlozman, to help lead discussions with suitably scientific-sounding explanations for the undead.

Social networks like Lost Zombies and Zombie Central are dominated by three main groups of users: arts buffs who are interested in zombie arts and like gathering to watch zombie movies or organizing zombie walks or costume parties; survivalists who like to plan out how they would survive in the event of an actual zombie attack; and philosophers who like to discuss the social, legal and scientific ramifications of a zombie outbreak.

ZRS commenters often get into heated discussions, because everyone has their own opinion on what to expect from zombies. Morisson said he often receives excited emails from readers eager to throw in their own two cents on blog post topics such as whether zombism could be spread by mosquitoes. Keith Harrop, editor of Zombie World News, compared it to online role-playing.

"Having so many people contributing to the discussion provides perspectives and solutions that may have otherwise been overlooked," said Melissa Ebbe of Zombie Defense Training. "Even if zombies never rise up against us, this type of Internet discussion has become a modern storytelling. We are collectively creating a narrative, of which we are all a part."

Staying Real

Other than their central conceit, most zombie websites want to appear as matter-of-fact and realistic as possible, something that helps readers to better imagine that the fantastic events being described could actually happen and to get into the spirit of the conversation.

ZRS's web page could belong to a serious thinktank...on zombie issues. Zombie World News is a mock newspaper written in dry AP style chronicling the rise of the undead. Harrop selects and edits reader-submitted stories to maintain the site's faux-news reel tone -- and the realism which he says is important to instill a sense of mounting paranoia in readers.

"The basic premise is that anyone can take it where they want," said Harrop, "But I was interested in exploring the socio-political aspects of an outbreak, the part you never see in horror movies. How would the government deal with it? Would borders close? How would religious zealots react when the dead start coming to life?"

Harrop has also created a number of auxiliary websites for the sole purpose of feeding into Zombie World News and giving it a heightened sense of realism -- for example, a fictitious pharmaceutical corporation working on a zombie antidote referenced in numerous ZWN articles now has its own 'official' website. Despite his commitment to building ambiance, Harrop was quick to point out that he still includes disclaimers on all his web pages, just in case any readers might be too credulous.

Having contributors from all over the world helped to establish credibility -- a story set in India or Sweden always felt more real when written by a contributor with knowledge of the local terrain and culture. Adding to the faux-news feel of the site, ZWN stories unfold in real time and often incorporate actual current events; during the presidency of George W. Bush, news stories often discussed the potentials of stem cell research in zombie prevention.

Zombie sites strive to give readers a "You Are There" sense of this hypothetical apocalypse. To that end, zombie bloggers rarely break character, always speaking as though zombies were a genuine threat.

"I believe that the appeal in discussing zombies arises from a need to feel proactive in the face of adversity, and moreover in the case of a test of survival," said Zombie Defense Training's Ebbe. "Most civilians have never encountered a life or death situation. There is an incredible disconnect in these modern times between our work and our survival. The zombie apocalypse represents a breakdown of this monotony. Every individual will be forced to step up or become zombie fodder. In a sense, discussing this scenario gives people a chance to explore the direct relationship between their actions and their survival."

A Global Game

Of course, communal storytelling isn't restricted to zombies. Harrop noted how the approach he used on Zombie World News could also be applied to any number of topics. But zombies seem to be a fruitful topic around which to build an online community for several reasons.

"It's the perfect post-modern monster," said Morisson, "They can be explained scientifically. They're a biologically definable creature occupying a human corpse. There's no romance to a zombie. It's not like a demon or a vampire which works by magic. The only mysteries with zombies are the ones that we haven't figured out yet."

Another aspect of the zombie genre that makes it particularly well-suited for discussion in a global forum like the Internet is that zombie attacks are almost invariably presented as causing a world apocalypse, a complete meltdown of society -- in contrast to most other monster movies which pit a small group of heroes against a single monster. So it's easier to suspend disbelief when web surfers from all over the world report similar zombie experiences.

"When I get an email from a zombie enthusiast in South Africa, we may have nothing in common," said Morisson, "but this gives us some common ground. We know that this will hit everywhere when it happens -- when it hits Cleveland, it'll hit L.A., and when it hits L.A. it'll hit South Africa."

Mike Rosen-Molina is a Northern California freelance reporter and an associate editor for MediaShift. A graduate of the University of California at Berkeley schools of journalism and law, he has worked as an editor for the Fairfield Daily Republic and as a managing editor for JURIST legal news services.

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4 Minute Roundup: Michael Jackson's Death Rocks Web; Guardian Crowdsources

Fri, 26 Jun 2009 17:59:00 -0800

Here's the latest 4MR audio report from MediaShift. In this week's edition, I look at the way Michael Jackson's death yesterday played out online, going from TMZ to Twitter to the LA Times blog. Yesterday was a record traffic day for Yahoo, and Google News reacted like it was under a hack attack from the huge jump in search queries for Michael Jackson. Also, the Guardian is doing a massive crowdsourcing project to look over hundreds of thousands of documents of expenses from members of parliament.

Check it out:

4MR podcast 6-26-09.mp3

Background music is "Billie Jean" by Michael Jackson.

Here are some links to related sites and stories mentioned in the podcast:

Outpouring of searches for the late Michael Jackson at Official Google blog

Losing Michael Jackson at Yahoo's Yodel Anecdotal blog

Michael Jackson Dies: Twitter Tributes Now 30% of Tweets at Mashable

Guardian Crowdsources Information about Parliament Members' Expenses at Poynter

Investigate your MP's expenses at the Guardian

MPs expenses -- what you've told us. So far at the Guardian

Four crowdsourcing lessons from the Guardian's (spectacular) expenses-scandal experiment at Nieman Journalism Lab

King of Twitter by Jeff Jarvis

Here's a graphical view of last week's MediaShift survey results. The question was "What websites do you trust most for news about Iran?"

Also, be sure to vote in our poll about when you really believed Michael Jackson died.

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How Will Iranian Protests Change Twitter?

Fri, 26 Jun 2009 11:42:40 -0800

There's been much ado about Twitter's role in the political protests in Iran, and for good reason. With the Iranian government expelling foreign journalists, outlets like CNN scrambled to uncover sources where they could. They found these sources among the din of unverifiable messages surfacing on Twitter. It's been fun reading mainstream media accounts of how Twitter is, in a sense, revolutionizing revolutions -- very "meta," no? If you aren't familiar with these recent events, MediaShift editor Mark Glaser has a very useful summary here.

But I've been more interested in the way this story has brought Twitter into the mainstream. That is, not Twitter's effect on the Iranian protests, but the protests' effect on Twitter.

Ok, I'll Join...and So Will the UN Secretary-General

I have a confession: I've made a good chunk of my living recently counseling clients on digital media strategies, yet I myself have abstained from jumping aboard the Twitter bandwagon until this past week. Sure, I've launched Twitter campaigns on behalf of clients and I do consider myself wise in the ways of microblogging best practices. But while I understood how organizations could use this channel to connect with certain audiences, I felt that, for personal correspondence, Twitter had a sort of a navel-gazing, quasi-exhibitionist feel about it. If something's worth sharing with a larger group, isn't it worth more than 140 characters? Besides, I was -- and continue to be -- a stickler for good grammar, so the idea of proudly publishing that SMS-style nouveau scrawl makes me nauseous.

My friend Laura Fitton (who authored the just-released Twitter for Dummies") has been hassling me for quite a while to sign up, but I've been stubborn. Nevertheless, the Western media's reliance on Twitter as a primary source -- along with the technology's power to enable dissent in an otherwise stifling environment -- has inspired me to climb aboard.

Twitter was scheduled to go offline for routine maintenance last week, but the U.S. State Department requested that the service keep the information flow from Iran uninterrupted. If the continuous operation of Twitter is deemed important to our national interest, perhaps there's something to this. Perhaps I should stop being so self-conscious about using such a self-conscious communications tool.

It's not just the State Department that's giving a nod to Twitter in the wake of the protests. The United Nations is adding its voice, too. I've been talking lately with my friend Jim Landale, a public information officer at the UN. Landale's been working on a multiplatform campaign to mark the 100 day countdown to the UN's International Day of Peace. The campaign, called WMD: We Must Disarm, is jettisoning traditional promotional tools in favor of social networks in an effort to reach a "socially active audience." (You can follow the campaign on Twitter here).

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who's shown a willingness to use digital media tools in the past, has even started tweeting. Landale, who was part of the team that encouraged Ban's use of Twitter, shared with me how the Iranian elections have impacted the UN's decision to use Twitter:

This is obviously the first time that a Secretary-General of the United Nations has 'tweeted' and the first time (that we know about) that one of our campaigns has used multiple online platforms at once...There was some skepticism initially within the UN Headquarters at the idea of using Twitter, Facebook and MySpace for such an important campaign, rather than the traditional set of promotional tools, but we managed to overcome this by demonstrating how the campaign would work online...In addition, although we planned the campaign well ahead of the recent elections in Iran, the role Twitter has played in the demonstrations has also probably helped persuade doubters within our own ranks that Twitter and other social networking sites can be an extremely powerful tool.

A Look Forward: Twitter and Limitations

Peggy Noonan, whose column is the sole reason I buy the weekend edition of the Wall Street Journal, had a thoughtful take on new technology's role in the recent Iran protests. She notes that Twitter and YouTube may have become powerful expression tools for existing sentiment, but acknowledges that they don't, by themselves, create that sentiment. What will be most interesting, she suggests, is how Twitter will be used moving forward. Using the French Revolution as a proxy, she writes:

If they Twittered and live-blogged the French Revolution, it still would have been the French Revolution: 'this aft 3pm @ the bastille.' It all still would have happened, perhaps with marginally greater support...The interesting question is what technology would have done after the Revolution, during the Terror. What would word of the demonic violence, the tumbrels and non-stop guillotines unleashed circa 1790-95 have done to French support for the Revolution, and world support? Would Thomas Jefferson have been able to continue his blithe indifference if reports of France grimly murdering France had been Twittered out each day?

The answer, of course, is "no." And the point, of course, is that Twitter can enrich the newsgathering ability of the mainstream media by acting as an investigative tool, a harbinger of public sentiment , and/or a crowdsourcing device. But Twitter itself is not -- and should not be -- the story here (except for outlets like this that cover this beat). Instead, it's part of the storytelling apparatus. It's no longer a grand phenomenon, but is instead a mere fragment of the mainstream media's new configuration.

Journalists should use Twitter to better understand the Iranian rebellion, not use the Iranian rebellion to tout a "Twitter Revolution." By focusing too heavily -- and headily -- on a simple micro-blogging technology, the news media risk distracting themselves from the more macroscopic, geopolitical issues at play here. If the mainstream news media can't get over its impulse to hype their shiny new tool, they will be enfeebled by the same kind of navel-gazing I thought Twitter was all about...until now.

Mark Hannah has spent the past several years conducting sensitive public affairs campaigns for well-known multinational corporations, major industry organizations and influential non-profits. He specializes in issues and reputation management online. Before joining the PR agency world (v-Fluence Interactive and Edelman), Mark worked for the Kerry-Edwards presidential campaign as a member of the national advance staff. He's more recently conducted advance work for the Obama-Biden campaign. He is a member of the Public Relations Society of America and a fellow at the Society for New Communications Research, and he serves as an awards judge for both organizations. A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, he's currently pursuing a master's in strategic communications at Columbia University. He is an independent communications consultant based in New York City and the public relations correspondent for MediaShift. You can reach him at markphannah[at]gmail[dot]com.

Iran protest photo collected but not taken by Misterarasmus via Flickr.

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Your Guide to Iran Election News Online

Thu, 25 Jun 2009 15:54:06 -0800

From time to time, I'll give an overview of one broad MediaShift topic, annotated with online resources and plenty of tips. The idea is to help you understand the topic, learn the jargon, and take action. I've already covered Twitter, citizen journalism, alternative models for newspapers and other topics. This week I'll look at Iran election news online.

Background

After the presidential election in Iran on June 12, incumbent president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was declared the winner by a large margin not long after the polls closed. Then came questions about whether the vote was rigged, and rival candidate Mir-Hussein Mousavi called for protests. The resulting chaos involved mass protests, violence and killings in the streets of Tehran and other cities in Iran, and calls for a new election. During it all, Iran's government arrested journalists, would not allow them to report on protests, and blocked Internet sites or slowed down Net access to make it unusable.

With reporters restricted on the ground, that left the main reporting on demonstrations and violence to the citizens of Iran, who spread stories, photos and video through blogs and social networks. That made services such as Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and YouTube crucial to following the story as it unfolded the past couple weeks. But it also made it difficult to verify the information on all those sources. Soon CNN was warning viewers that the material it was getting from social networks was not verified -- leading to a swipe from Jon Stewart of "The Daily Show":

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

www.thedailyshow.com

Daily Show
Full Episodes

Political Humor

Jason Jones in Iran

How This is Different

This was not the first conflict that included a repressive regime cutting off media coverage leading to citizens reporting online. In 2007, citizens and tourists played key roles in getting news out of Burma during protests by monks there. And the wider global blogosphere helped bring attention to jailed bloggers in Egypt, China and Iran in 2006, leading to their freedom. In late 2004, citizens helped capture the destruction of a massive tsunami in Southeast Asia when major media couldn't reach disaster zones.

But what was different this time was that more Westerners were connected through social networks than ever before. So when news started spreading through Twitter under the #IranElection hashtag, anyone on Twitter could follow reports as they came in minute by minute. Not only could they read what was going on but they could take action, re-tweeting accounts they trusted as true, and changing their photos green in solidarity with protesters.

The myth of this being a "Twitter revolution" was quickly debunked because so few people in Iran were using Twitter, and the authorities could easily go onto Twitter and subvert the memes being spread. But what made Twitter so powerful was its ability to get news out of the conflict zone to the wider world. And Twitter is extremely difficult for authorities to block because of its open API, meaning that people could continue to get news out by text-messaging or via apps such as Tweetie or Tweetdeck even if Twitter.com was being blocked by the government.

Plus, Iranians have long had to deal with the government blocking websites, so they know about getting around those blocks. And they have a flourishing blogosphere accustomed to organizing to help out jailed bloggers or to get information out when the state-run media is censored.

The Ecosystem of News

What's happening online is that the people formerly known as news consumers are now given access to all the raw material being captured by eyewitnesses. What is truth and what is fiction? Who is there and who is pretending to be there? Where and when was that video captured? How do I know that Twitter feed isn't from a government agent posing as a protester?

Soon the viewer starts to figure out that there are various levels of trust they can associate with what they find online. There are the raw unverified feeds found via Twitter hashtags and Flickr tags. Then there are users on those services that have been reporting for a number of days, and who have been quoted or verified by others as being legitimate. Then there are sites such as Global Voices Online that have editors who know which bloggers to trust. Then there's the cell phone video of Neda Soltan, a young Iranian woman who was shot in the street and died. That video started as raw and unverified and eventually was shared, passed around, and the story and context came out to the wider world.

Over time, we start to find places online where we can trust the content, where people have proved their value in sharing valuable pieces of information. And they're not just trained editors and journalists at news organizations, though those people also play a role in verifying information, when possible, and providing context. Here's a roundup of some of the best sources on the fallout of the Iranian election.

Live Blogs

Iran Live-Blogging at Huffington Post by Nico Pitney

Iranian Presidential Election coverage at the NY Times' The Lede blog

Iran Crisis Live in the Guardian

The Daily Dish by Andrew Sullivan

Videos

Citizentube Channel on YouTube

Where Is My Election videos from inside Iran

iReports on Iran Election

Videos from IranDoost09

Twitter Feeds

Iran Unrest on Twazzup

Super-filtered #IranElection info from Current TV's Robin Sloan

Breaking Tweets' Middle East

Facebook Pages

Neda

Protest to Iran Election

Democracy for Iran

Where Is My Vote?

Map Mashups

2009 Tehran Election Protests

Embassies Accepting Injured People in Tehran

Mapping the Protests in Iran at the BBC

Independent Websites

Iran Focus

Tehran 24 photos from Iran

Tehran Bureau

Wikipedia's 2009 Iranian election protests page

Wikipedia's Iranian presidential election 2009 page

Aggregated Information

Iran Election on Alltop

Iran Election 2009 at Global Voices Online

Iran Election Watch at FriendFeed

Iran page on Daylife

Iran Conflict and Tragedy News at Allvoices

Iran Election Crisis at FairSpin (via Stephen Hood)

Yahoo Full Coverage of Iran

Articles and Blog Posts

America's Iranian Twitter Revolution at Open Anthropology

Coverage of the Protests: Twitter 1, CNN 0 at the Economist

Iran, citizen media and media attention by Ethan Zuckerman

Iranians find ways to bypass Net censors at News.com

The Revolution, in real-time by Joe Trippi

Twitter Is a Player In Iran's Drama at Washington Post

Twitter, Social Networks Deliver News of Protests in Iran at Poynter

The Web vs. the Republic of Iran at Technology Review

This list is just a start. Please add any trusted sources you have found to follow the news in Iran in the comments, and I'll update my list with any glaring omissions.

Protest photos by Milad Avazbeigi via Flickr.

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The Time is Right for Direct-To-Fan Marketing of Music

Wed, 24 Jun 2009 12:50:26 -0800

As the music industry continues to evolve and search for a sustainable and profitable business model, the direct-to-fan (D2F) approach is making great advances, from artists just starting their career up to superstars with massive fan bases.

Artists marketing and selling directly to their audience is not necessarily a new or revolutionary concept -- one can find examples of artists offering their products to customers directly in every generation of music. For established artists, it is used as a way to inexpensively leverage all the awareness they have amassed. For evolving artists, it is often a necessity. Without a label and distributor, the usual options for new artists have been selling music at live shows, selling through fan clubs or sympathetic indie record stores -- or sometimes just selling out of the trunk of a car (which is how N.W.A. got started). But today, advances in technology have opened up exciting new avenues for direct-to-fan sales.

Successes in the D2F Market

Direct-to-fan sales and marketing have seen a significant spike in recent years thanks to a number of factors. First, technology has given artists at all levels the opportunity to sell and market to their fans in a clear, inexpensive, engaging fashion online. Second, many emerging artists see less value in signing to a label and instead choose to steer clear of entangling contractual obligations. Finally, established artists are choosing not to renew their label contracts at a record pace, realizing that the brand they have developed can be leveraged without a label. All of these situations benefit greatly from direct-to-fan initiatives.

The list of interesting applications of direct-to-fan marketing and sales seems to grow daily. As with anything innovative, a few core examples will always stand out. Most notable is Radiohead's 2007 offering of "In Rainbows" -- interesting both because of the name-your-own-price model and the absence of any middlemen upon initial release. What was revolutionary about this was that the band enabled both the transaction and digital download directly from their site at a price of the fan's choosing; the experiment brought the band a significant amount of publicity and awareness.

Many critics of Radiohead's approach felt it would not scale downwards, but that was proven wrong when the band Metric launched a successful D2F offering surrounding their April 2009 release "Fantasies." A combination of free content (in exchange for email addresses), streaming media widgets, and intelligent social networking strategy resulted in more gross revenue in a few weeks than in four years for their prior release. The band was in full control of their retail presence, and was able to offer heightened packages (at heightened profit margins) to dedicated fans. So as not to exclude fans that preferred a traditional retail experience, the release was also made available at iTunes.

Josh Freese, a studio drummer extraordinaire but not a household name, used the direct-to-fan approach to launch a campaign that completely re-wrote the rules of music marketing. His sales page included everything from a $7 digital download to massive packages in the thousands of dollars that included a level of personal interaction never before offered as a retail music item (e.g. foot rubs, drum lessons, and Josh's 1993 Volvo).

The unique packages generated massive amounts of press, which certainly helped, but the bigger point is that a $20,000 rock fantasy week that included mini-golf with Maynard James Keenan is not the type of offering that the traditional music industry is built around. Selling this type of experience directly to a hardcore fan created an opportunity where each side saw massive benefit.

Why Now?

The biggest hurdle most artists have faced in setting up a direct-to-fan marketplace has been distribution, followed closely by dealing with financial transactions and customer service issues. For many years retailers have been willing to help facilitate the process, a good example being Amazon.com's Advantage Program, where any artist can pay a $30 yearly fee as well as 55% of each product sold. Although this does enable artists with no distribution to sell via a massive online retailer and not be concerned with transactions and customer service, it comes at a major profit hit. Essentially, instead of a label, distributor, and a retailer, Amazon is the sole middleman existing between artist and consumer. Forty-five percent of a sale price is higher than most signed artists get, but far lower than the margin from selling directly.

Fortunately for artists at all levels, technology has allowed direct-to-fan to become much more viable. Digital distribution has significantly leveled the playing field for all artists, and transaction processing has become widespread and easy for most bands to implement. Enterprising companies have created products that offer services typically reserved for those artists signed to a label and distributor.

Companies such as Topspin and Snocap have made it very easy to sell products and collect revenue. Websites such as Reverb Nation and Nimbit offer tools that enable artists to build, interact with, and sell to their fan base. Aggregation services such as TuneCore allow artists to get their music onto digital retailers such as iTunes (not quite true D2F, but cutting out at least one middleman).

Topspin has taken direct-to-fan much further than simple transaction processing. It has developed widgets and technology that gives artist and fans levels of control never available at the DIY (do-it-yourself) level. Artists with little tech ability are able to upload content, create sales offers, and then distribute them in embeddable widgets. In addition to a software platform, they have developed a full methodology and set of best practices for optimizing the D2F process. (Full disclosure: I am a certified marketing partner of Topspin.)

Reverb Nation also gives artists a sizable toolkit to market and sell to their fans, including a catalog of widgets that fill many purposes, including streaming audio and tour routing. The site also provides a back end for managing fan interaction, organizing street teams, and social networking.

Topspin CEO Ian C. Rogers feels that direct-to-fan is helping define the new direction of the music business.

"The greatest thing about the future of music is that artists have choice of who their partners are," he said. "It's not about 'getting signed' -- it's about choosing the right team and running a smart business. At the end of the day there are only two important things in the music business: the artist and the fan. The rest of us are here to provide value and efficiency to them. It's not up to them to provide value to us; it's up to us to provide value to them."

Through the use of technology and a forward-thinking digital strategy, artists at all levels finally have the tools necessary to build and maintain an environment that lets them dictate the terms of their business.

Jason Feinberg is the president and founder of On Target Media Group, a music industry online marketing and promotion company. He is responsible for business development, formulation and management of online marketing campaigns, and media relations with over 1,000 websites and media outlets. The company has served clients including Warner Bros. Records, Universal Music Enterprises, EMI, Concord Music Group, Roadrunner Records, and others with an artist roster that includes The Rentals, Flipper, Thin Lizzy, Sammy Hagar, Primus, Poncho Sanchez, Ringo Starr, Chick Corea, and many more.

Follow Jason on Twitter: @otmg

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Will Digg Users Bury New Digg Ads System?

Tue, 23 Jun 2009 13:12:52 -0800

Since its launch in late 2004, Digg has tried its hand with several outside advertising networks, going from an off-the-shelf Google AdSense arrangement to working with Federated Media before finally signing a deal for Microsoft to deliver its display advertisements. But in April of this year, Digg announced it would end its deal with the software giant in favor of selling and delivering its own ads. Earlier this month, it announced that in the coming months it would introduce Digg Ads, a platform that involves injecting sponsored links directly into Digg's news stream, allowing users to Digg up or bury the ad just as they would any other story.

Over the past several years, it has not been unusual for a Digg user to screenshot a Digg display ad that he found particularly annoying or ironic and submit it to the site itself -- in fact, several such items have made it to the front page. Describing Digg's user base as anti-consumer wouldn't be quite accurate given the daily front page stories of the latest gadget news on Gizmodo and Engadget, but its community has been quick to lash out against corporations seen as having brushes with unethical behavior.

Like all major Internet communities, Digg's hosts a fair number of trolls (though the community itself polices the worst offenders) and the user base has never hesitated to criticize the very site that hosts their comments. Given all this, it's not difficult to be skeptical that advertisers would want to throw their brands right into Digg's news stream, possibly placing them within the cross hairs of an extremely outspoken and acerbic community.

Over the past few week, I reached out to several of the site's most powerful users, people who have pushed hundreds of submissions to the coveted front page. All of them spend sometimes hours a day on the site, commenting and Digging their friends' articles. Did they think that the community would welcome sponsored submissions and treat them just like the dozens of other stories, videos and images that flow across the front page every day?

Power Users react

Steve Elliot became an active user of the site in April of last year, pulled in initially by the idea of promoting his own content. But like other power users, he quickly realized the quid pro quo nature of Digg, in which you must push and network other Diggers' content. He told me that he's hopeful that the new ad platform will work, but that he's worried about the "noise" generated with front page submissions.

"I think that it's possibly a workable system, but for it to be workable, they're going to have to find a way to cut through the noise of the automatic knee-jerk negative reaction a lot of people have to any front page story," Elliot said. "For any paid content, there's going to be even more users ready to react negatively to it. So if there is a way to separate that inevitable sizable negative reaction to an ad, then maybe out of the rest you can get enough usable data of up and down votes to see what kind of advertising is most effective."

He explained that if a company feels like an outsider to the community, then they're going to have a different experience of feedback than if they somehow integrate themselves into the community. The question, he said, is whether they can learn and replicate the formula for a popular Digg submission. He believes that it's possible.

"I'm cautiously optimistic," he said. "And when I say I'm optimistic, it goes beyond the baseline optimism that maybe they can pull this off. It goes for me all the way to the level that I'm hopeful that maybe in their attempts to catch the eye of the Digg community...instead of trying the same little tricks of old media, maybe they'll get creative. Maybe they'll break some new ground, and maybe we'll see some exciting ideas and ways of interacting with the community, which to me is what Digg is all about."

Abusing the 'Bury' Button

A Digg power user named Patrick (he didn't want me to use his full name) told me that he thought that the idea was a "brilliant one on Digg's part," because of the potential for massively higher click-through rates than you'd ever see with standard display advertising. And, unlike some, he was confident that the advertisers could create enticing content.

"I'm sure Digg has people who are smart enough to come up with stuff that's eye-catching, and I'm sure that people who work for Digg monitor the site and know what works really well and what doesn't," Patrick told me. "So they know what formula works. They know the algorithm...If I saw [an ad] that caught my eye, I'd click on it just like any other Digg submission. By the time I opened it and checked it out, and if I'm reading it and checked it out that long, I'm going to Digg it because it held my attention."

As for what consumer products would work well under this new system, Patrick said that anything involving mobile phones and tech products already gets a lot of coverage on the site, but pointed out that, with entertaining content, almost anything could work. His only fear would be that a certain percentage of the site's users would automatically bury all sponsored content.

"They should get rid of the bury button, because more often than not it's misused," he said.

Rami Taibah, who has submitted over 700 stories to Digg, over 100 of which made it to the front page, said that the Digg demographics -- and likes and dislikes -- could be somewhat limiting in terms of what advertisers could be successful on the new platform. He noted that companies that have prior histories of perceived unethical behavior will likely have some negative pushback from Digg, no matter what the content.

"Advertisers will have to try to understand the Digg community and what the users like to click," he said. "It's very anti-establishment, and is pro-Apple, pro-Linux, and very anti-Microsoft. If they try to understand the submission culture, then yes they can succeed. There are a lot of social media experts out there that could help such companies to customize articles and content that would sit well with the Digg community."

When I pointed out the sometimes-trollish behavior of some Digg commenters, Taibah said that this is simply the nature of the Internet and that he didn't believe that such a thing should or would deter companies from promoting their brands through the social news site.

Digg Ads

Mike Maser, Digg's chief strategy officer, told me in a phone interview that they first approached a few of the site's advertisers with the idea years ago and were met with enthusiasm. As their ad budgets have continued to contract -- especially in the last year or so -- the companies have been looking more toward performance-based advertising and less toward the traditional branding approach.

"They believed in this model that Digg was leading, which was this user-generated, user-led definition of what's popular content," Maser said. "But they wanted to apply those ideas in some way to their advertising as well. I remember a conversation with Intel, which has been a longtime advertiser with Digg, in late 2007. We came in and said, 'What if we could apply a Digg platform, the Digg model, to advertising?'...And they were absolutely interested in that because they were seeing that consumers were part of that conversation already, whether they like it or not."

Maser explained that a large percentage of Digg's front page stories are already directed toward promoting consumer products, and he doesn't think it will be very difficult for advertisers to sponsor that kind of content. Not only that, but they would have monetary incentive to tailor their submissions to those users.

"So let's say an advertiser comes in and has a $10,000 budget," he said. "We place their advertisement into the system. Let's say it starts a baseline of $1 cost per click. So the ad gets shot out to the Digg audience in the stream of news. If that ad is really resonating, and people are clicking out to see the content...that dollar will come down so every time there's a click maybe they pay 90 cents, or even better 80 cents and so on. So even more people are clicking on that advertisement and it's spending more of their budget, but the incremental cost of that ad is going down."

The flip side is that if people aren't Digging the piece, or if they're actively burying it, the cost-per-click will go up until it hits some pre-set maximum, causing the ad to fall out of the system.

User control

But what if a so-called "bury brigade" forms that automatically buries every sponsored post?

"When we announced this last week, we saw a lot of generally positive reactions from our user base," Maser said. "The notion going into this is that there will be more control over the ad experience, so when Digg is transparent with their users and gives them that control over the site, they've actually really taken it to heart and appreciated that control. So we feel like the users being able to sort of have a more relevant content experience on the site is one way we'll mitigate any sort of backlash."

And then there's the Digg algorithm. For years the site has refined the algorithm to weed out organized attempts to "game" the system, so Maser was sure that they were well equipped to locate any sort of advertisement bury brigade and neutralize its efforts.

The ad platform is still a work in progress and won't be rolled out for a few months. Maser said they announced it early so they can work with advertisers over the coming months, developing the kind of content and ideas that will attract Digg's user base.

"I do think innovation is the name of the game," he said. "I think that sites need to come up with advertising experiences that are more endemic to their own property and their user base. So I don't think there's a one-size-fits-all approach to advertising anymore. Does that mean that display advertising is going away? No, but I do think systems like Digg Ads speak directly to our audience; it has a pricing mechanism that works for advertisers. Being more performance-oriented advertising, it gives them a more innovative option than display advertising."

Of course, Digg's display advertising isn't going away. But with continuous reports that advertisers are getting frustrated with the lack of effectiveness of traditional CPM advertising, it's not unfathomable that they would want to take the risk and inject their brands right into the user base. What the users do with the brand once it's in their hands will likely determine whether Digg has come up with an advertising program that will truly break the mold.

Simon Owens is a former newspaper journalist and an associate editor for MediaShift. You can read more of his writing at his blog or contact him at simon[.]bloggasm [at] gmail.com.

Photo of Mike Maser by Scott Beale of Laughing Squid.

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Rules of Engagement for Journalists on Twitter

Fri, 19 Jun 2009 12:21:24 -0800

Twitter's role in the Iranian election aftermath leaves no doubt about its power as a global, real time, citizen-journalism style news wire service, along with a tool for facilitating dissent, while countering the view of Twitter as simply a zone for egotistical banality. But it also highlighted Twitter's role as a platform and content generator for traditional media outlets, along with some of the key dilemmas being faced by professional journalists in the Twittersphere.

I've been researching the ways in which journalists and traditional media outlets are using Twitter and exploring the ethical dilemmas raised by the clash of the private and the public for journalists in the sphere via interviews with Australian, US and South African journalists. And, while I'm convinced Twitter is now a vital journalistic tool for both reporting events and breaking down barriers between legacy media and its audiences, there are still multiple questions around professional journalists' activities on Twitter that require thoughtful, open debate.

While many journalists recognize Twitter's power as a reporting tool, some news organizations are still reluctant to embrace it while others have issued rules restraining their writers' use of the service. In this third installment of my Mediashift series on the intersection of journalism and Twitter, I'll attempt to determine the rules of engagement for tweeting journalists.

Rules of Engagement

Some media outlets are making tweeting almost compulsory for their journalists but others are much more cautious, or even ban journalists from tweeting on the job. The Wall Street Journal, the New York Times , Bloomberg and AP (among others) have all introduced policies covering social media, partly in response to problems resulting from the unique mix of personal and professional information in the zone. Some of these policies have been criticized for missing the point of social media -- humanized interaction -- and too rigidly regulating journalists' tweeting.

[EDITOR'S NOTE: The previous paragraph had referred to the newspapers' social media policies as "conservative." That descriptor was removed in recognition of the distinctions between their various policies, and in light of a comment from the Times' Jonathan Landman, below.]

But in Australia, journo-tweeting is largely unregulated by media outlets. None of the 25 Australian journalists I interviewed for this study (from Fairfax, News Ltd, ABC, ACP, Sky News and a range of smaller outlets) was aware of such a policy in their workplace. According to some of the interviewees, management ignorance could account for the absence of such policies. When asked why he thought his Australian employer didn't have a policy like the WSJ, one journalist responded, "They just don't get it."

There's growing realization among employers, however, that guidelines may be a helpful adjunct to corporate editorial policies in the brave new world of social media. There's evidence of a policy shift at the powerful Fairfax group, publisher of the Sydney Morning Herald and Melbourne's The Age. Asher Moses (who was at the center of the tweeting controversy featured in part two of this series) indicated that, even though there was no official policy, the company had expectations that he could tweet either for professional or personal use but not both.

And the ABC is currently consulting staff as a precursor to publishing new guidelines.

"I think they're still feeling their way on social networking sites. It's a new world and they're trying to figure out exactly how to approach it," prominent ABC presenter Leigh Sales said.

Newsrooms Blocking Twitter at Work

But some employers are either so afraid of the platform or so disdainful about its journalistic potential that they've tried to bar their reporters from even accessing Twitter in the workplace. The Sydney Star Observer's (SSO) Harley Dennett says he's denied access to both his Facebook and Twitter accounts at work via web filters on office computers.

"The publishing editor said staff can make those contacts in their own time," he explained. "But I get around that by using the Tweetie desktop and iPhone applications. I do so openly and unashamedly."

Nevertheless, Dennett's newspaper happily prints copy generated by his extra-curricular tweeting.

"During news conferences I declare if a story originated from Twitter, but my editor has never verbally acknowledged that," he said. "I can't explain the resistance to popular social media and networking websites. Personally, I would welcome some guidance from my employer on Twitter use, if it made sense at least."

The SSO's policy is clearly a short-sighted and narrow-minded approach to managing the issues raised by journalists' interactions with social networking sites but it's not an isolated example.

Jonathan Ancer, from South Africa's Independent Newspapers group, which publishes Johannesburg's The Star along with other influential titles, plans to use Twitter to help trainee journalists to write with brevity and clarity, but he is also barred from Twitter at work.

"When I tried to log onto Twitter a few days ago, I was surprised to find myself blocked with a note saying my attempt to access porn had been recorded," he said. "I think media companies should open up access to Twitter, Facebook and other social networking platforms because this is where people -- readers, eyeballs, etc. -- are going."

However, while individual journalists with the Independent group may have difficulty accessing Twitter, the company's online publication has a moderately active Twitter account. South Africa's media certainly need to make active use of Twitter ahead of the 2010 soccer World Cup when they'll be seeking the world's eyeballs.

Meanwhile, in Australia, the Speaker of the Federal Parliament recently approved live tweeting from the floor of the House of Representatives during Question Time via cell or PC. This breaks a decades-long ban on reporting from inside the House. This will likely both enliven political reporting and make it impossible for resistant journalists and media outlets Down Under to continue holding out.

As Twitter becomes entrenched in daily reporting practice, it would seem appropriate for media organizations to update existing editorial guidelines to make them relevant to social media platforms like Twitter. But if they want to bank on the significant benefits that can flow from their participation in the Twittersphere (such as developing new audiences and enhancing traffic to their websites), they will need to ensure their journalists have unfettered access to the site and also be flexible about interactions in the space to encourage reporters to engage in conversations with their followers.

What principles guide J-Twits?

So, for those journalists who tweet according to their own personal code, what principles guide them? For the ABC's Leigh Sales, it's a mix of gut instinct and rules derived from industry experience.

"If I have even the slightest hesitation about posting something, for example, a slightly off-color witticism, I choose not to post it," she said. "I don't post gags about stories on which I may have to report seriously. I don't put any significant personal content on Twitter. I may occasionally say that I've been to a movie or express a like or dislike, but I don't engage in personal chit-chat...I view it as a professional tool."

Dave Earley from Brisbane's Courier Mail has changed his approach since Twitter began hitting the headlines.

"Until Twitter's recent media exposure, my Twitter account had remained relatively unknown in my workplace," he said. "Now that it's on the radar, I'm probably more conscious of what I say."

Early also chooses not to "tweet angry."

"I do try to make sure my tweets are never inflammatory, there's no point setting out to make enemies," he said.

For John Bergin of Sky News, it's a case of common sense and basic training.

"Our journalists receive legal training," he said. "Issues such as defamation, contempt of court, statutory restrictions and so forth should apply as much to the online world as they do in the offline. Obviously, anything that is private and confidential in a newsroom should remain so -- again, common sense and respect for the workplace and its people is paramount."

But Harley Dennett's approach is to tweet independently of his employer. This allows him to publicly criticize his paper and its policies if he desires -- an act which he believes demonstrates transparency and buys him credibility with his followers.

"Increasingly, I'm confident the best model is for the journo to have a direct relationship with their Twitter followers independent of the media outlet that employs him or her," he said. "The spectre of a big media outlet appearing to control what a journo says online would also really hamper that personal quality that Twitter can bring out of a conversation."

Lessons from Iran

What information on Twitter is fair game for a journalist to report? There needs to be further discussion between media professionals, their employers, journalism academics and social media experts to help navigate this complex territory. But my preliminary views go like this: Although social media etiquette may not recognize a journalist's right to report any material published openly, the reality is that open Twitter accounts are a matter of permanent public record and fair game for journalists. While attribution is vital and it might be polite (but not necessary) to seek the approval of a Twitterer to quote them, I don't see anything unethical about using tweets in mainstream news coverage. However, the locked Twitter account is a more delicate matter. I'd suggest that a locked account amounts to an "off the record" comment which requires permission from the tweeter before re-publishing.

And does re-tweeting (or RT) -- re-publishing someone else's tweet -- equate to giving their tweets your professional stamp of approval if you tweet openly as a practicing journalist? If you are passing on information to your "followers," do you have an obligation to first establish the information's authenticity or acknowledge it as "unconfirmed" -- an obligation many journalists would feel if they were doing the same for a newspaper or broadcaster?

When I raised concerns this week about the practice of tweeters who openly identify as professional journalists re-tweeting without verification, in the context of the indiscriminate dissemination of tweets claiming to emanate from Iran, I found myself engaged in a lively discussion on Twitter. I asserted that when Patrick LaForge, an editor at the New York Times, re-tweeted (without acknowledgement of verification or absence thereof) a list of Iranian tweeters sourced from expert blogger Dave Winer (who had, in turn, passed on the list without verifying its contents) it amounted to an approval of that list. LaForge disagreed. NYU's Jay Rosen then reminded me not to expect open systems like Twitter to behave in the same manner expected of editorial systems.

But while I agree with Rosen, my concern wasn't directed at the unmediated Twittersphere. Rather it was directed at the way journalists approach this flood of information. I'm of the view that professional journalists will be judged more harshly by society if they RT content which later proves to be false -- particularly in the context of a crisis. This goes to their professional credibility and their employer's.

Therefore, while I wouldn't for a minute suggest journalists step back from reporting on social media contributions flowing from zones like Iran, nor from repeating tweets purporting to represent witness accounts -- clearly these are valid contemporary storytelling devices -- I do think they need to critically assess information to the best of their capacity before republishing it and, if there's no way to do so, flag this with "unconfirmed" or some other abbreviated signal that the information has not been substantiated by the journalist.

In many international settings, there are legal as well as ethical imperatives to consider here. If you inadvertently RT a defamatory tweet in Australia, for example, arguing "I was just passing on a link," would not be a defense against a defamation action.

Writing in The Atlantic, Marc Ambinder advises readers to treat the flood of information from Iran like a CIA analyst would -- sifting it and weighing it up. I think that's sage advice for professional journalists operating on Twitter, too. The ABC provided a good example of an appropriate approach to this problem in their online amalgamation of the social media coverage of Iran by simply acknowledging that some of the content was unable to be substantiated. (These issues will be a theme at the #media140 conference to be held in Sydney later this year.)

Top 20 Take Away Tips for Tweeting Journos

1) Think before you tweet -- you can't delete an indiscreet tweet! (Well, you can, but it will survive in Twitter search for three months and it's likely live on as cached copy somewhere.)
2) Think carefully about what you're re-tweeting and acknowledge if it's unsubstantiated.

3) Be an active twit: tweet daily if you want your followers to stick.

4) Determine your Twitter identity.

5) Be human; be honest; be open; be active.

6) Don't lock your account if you want to use Twitter for reporting purposes -- this fosters distrust.

7) Twitter is a community, not just a one-way conversation or broadcast channel -- actively engage.

8) Check if your employer has a social media policy.

9) Be cautious when tweeting about your employer/workplace/colleagues.

10) Be a judicious follower -- don't be stingy but avoid following everyone as your list grows to avoid tweet bombardment.

11) If you quote a tweet, attribute it.

12) Expect your competitors to steal your leads if you tweet about them.

13) Don't tweet while angry or drunk.

14) Avoid racist, sexist, bigoted and otherwise offensive tweets and never abuse a follower.

15) Scrutinize crowdsourced stories closely.

16) Find people to follow. Foster followers by pilfering the lists of other twits.

17) Twitter is a 'time vampire' (via @anne_brand) -- you don't need to keep track of all tweets, so dip in and out through the day.

18) Prevent information overload by using an application such as Tweetdeck.

19) Add applications to your Internet-enabled mobile device to allow live-tweeting on the road.

20) Add value to your tweets with links, Twitpic and other applications for audio and video.

A useful resource: You can find a list of the top 100 Australian media professionals on Twitter compiled by @earleyedition here.

UPDATE: Jonathan Landman, deputy managing editor of the New York Times, responds in comments to the contention that the Times had a "conservative" social media policy:

Actually, The New York Times does not have a conservative code of conduct for social media. It does not have any code of conduct for social media.

What it does have is a comprehensive set of ethical and practical standards compiled in a handbook, last issued in 2004 and updated and amended from time to time afterward. It is a guide for Times journalists in print, online, over the air and in life. One of the updates is entitled 'Using Facebook in Reporting.' It says, among other things, that social networking sites 'can be remarkably useful reporting tools.' It also sets forth some reasons for caution -- any tool, misused, can be dangerous.

You can read both the ethics guidelines and the Facebook update here and judge for yourself whether they are 'conservative' and/or clueless about social media. Personally, I think that's a bum rap...

The Times also has a social media editor, a new position. Her job is to identify the most promising journalistic uses of these tools and then to teach and encourage Times journalists to deploy them. It is quite possible that her work will include publishing her recommendations for all to see and use, maybe even in the form of a code. It will not miss the point of social media.

Julie Posetti is an award winning journalist and journalism academic who lectures in radio and television reporting at the University of Canberra, Australia. She's been a national political correspondent, a regional news editor, a TV documentary reporter and presenter on radio and television with the Australian national broadcaster, the ABC. Her academic research centers on talk radio, public broadcasting, political reporting and broadcast coverage of Muslims post-9/11. She blogs at J-Scribe and you can follow her on Twitter.

Green Wave protest photo by Hamed Saber via Flickr

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Why is American University Becoming Center for New Journalism?

Thu, 18 Jun 2009 10:50:59 -0800

I visited American University last month to try to answer a burning question for me: Why was the School of Communications there becoming such a hotbed for new forms of journalism? The Center for Social Media is there. The J-Lab, the Institute for Interactive Journalism, moved to American from the University of Maryland. And Charles Lewis, the founder of the non-profit Center for Public Integrity, decided to start his new Investigative Reporting Workshop at American University as well.

I met with all the folks representing these centers at American and asked them my burning question in a series of video interviews, below. The answer kept coming back to a few factors: 1) the dean Larry Kirkman was an alchemist, a producer who brought people in from across disciplines; 2) the student body is interested in social justice and change; 3) Washington, DC, is a great place for academics to be part of the political action.

After my visit, Kirkman, the dean, wanted to clarify even more what he told me in the video interview. Here's part of what he said:

We share a social mission. We can imagine a communications environment that supports a vigorous and inclusive public culture. We are anticipating and helping to shape it through educating the next generation of media professionals, innovative production that demonstrates what's possible and communication research that informs and validates our work. Public affairs and public service cut across our three programs -- journalism, film and media arts and public communication. The school is dedicated to media and democracy, media as a tool for public knowledge and action and the social responsibility of our professions and industries...

We are a communication laboratory, working at the intersections of these three disciplines, that provides a powerful platform for these centers, especially in contrast to the traditional silos of most journalism, film and public relations programs. So, among our professors: Lynne Perri, former editor for design, graphics and photography at USA Today, works with Dotty Lynch, former senior political editor and chief pollster at CBS News, who is in our public communication program and heads up our public opinion and audience research courses and projects. They both work with Bill Gentile, who is a former Newsweek photojournalist and a pioneer in backpack video, with an MS in Journalism from Missouri, who is in our film and media arts program. For example, all three of them are working with Amy Eisman, former USA Today founding editor, and David Johnson, former Scripps Media Service Chief Technology Officer, and Gannett on research, production and training projects.

Here are those video interviews:

Pat Aufderheide, head of Center for Social Media

Jan Schaffer, director of the J-Lab

Charles Lewis, director of the Investigative Reporting Workshop

Amy Eisman, head of writing classes at School of Communications

Larry Kirkman, dean of School of Communications

What do you think about American University's bold moves into new forms of journalism and communications? Are you impressed or do you think the school could do better? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

UPDATE: In the comments below, American student Ethan Klapper says he likes what the School of Communication has been doing, but could be doing a better job with curriculum:

While J-Lab and the Center for Social Media are leaders of new journalism, the undergraduate journalism curriculum itself lags behind in my opinion.

For undergraduates, the only required 'new journalism' class is a new class called multimedia productions skills (added last year) that teaches students about basic HTML, audio recording and video production. However, I feel that my skills (and the skills of some of my friends) are already beyond the scope of this course. I will be taking it in the fall.

Perhaps most frustrating is the rumor that AU SOC is adding a new track to its journalism program -- interactive journalism. I know many people who would jump at the opportunity to major in that instead of choosing the existing broadcast or, especially, print tracks.

Kid me not, the AU School of Communication is a great place to go to school. The professors are top-notch and I've been happy. However, I'd like to see SOC accelerate the implementation of its new journalism curriculum at the undergraduate level.

I've put in a query to the dean, Larry Kirkman, to get his reaction to Ethan's comment and will update with his comment.

UPDATE 2: Here's a comment I received via email from Jill Olmsted, the journalism division director, in response to student Ethan Klapper's concerns about the school's curriculum:

Curriculum reform is the No. 1 challenge facing all journalism programs. Just as newsrooms struggle to balance digital media skills with traditional skills and values, so are we. While we have made several curricular changes, more are on the way and it is good to read that our students are pushing for more.

I took over as journalism division director in January and reform is my first priority. So far we have added a required course called Multimedia Production Skills and added Writing for Convergent Media as an elective. I expect both to evolve with the times. We've held some undergrad focus groups on proposed tracks that Ethan may have heard about; we're revising those plans based on input.

In the meantime, less systematically but just as important, we're adding digital content to existing courses. Students are doing podcasts, weblogs, live blogs, using digital audio recorders and Flip cams for newsgathering, putting newscasts online in a program called 'District Wire News,' and of course are using social networking platforms. Professor David Johnson oversaw a partnership with CBS.com and NPR for an acclaimed Twitter report on the Inauguration. Both grads and undergrads were involved.

Continued undergrad curriculum reform is coming.

Reform is difficult for journalism and communication schools that have been focused on legacy media for so long. And just when they have a new media curriculum in place, it's bound to shift quickly as technology changes so rapidly. We'll see how American deals with the fast pace of change and whether they can satisfy the expectations of the student body.

(Note: AU professor David Johnson has another view on curriculum at AU in the comments below.)

UPDATE 3: The SOC dean Larry Kirkman also has responded to Klapper's comments on the curriculum. Here's part of his email response:

The School of Communication (SOC) is accredited every six years by ACEJMC, The Accrediting Council on Education in Journalism and Mass Communications. Accreditation, with its commitment to a strong liberal arts education, limits our undergraduates to only 40 credits in communication courses, out of 120 credits required for a B.A. It's a tight fit to cover writing, reporting and editing, and legal aspects, ethics and history, media production skills. We are continuously reinventing core courses and introducing new elective courses. For example, we've recently added Race, Ethnic and Community Reporting, International Investigative Reporting and Visual Strategies.

We count on students, in the spirit of Ethan Klapper's comment, to push us to meet their needs and help us define, and shape, emerging professional roles. And, we learn from regular review by our peers. Last year, an Accrediting Council site visit team, chaired by Carla Lloyd, associate dean of the Newhouse School at Syracuse, and including Karen Dunlap, president of The Poynter Institute and Brooke Kroeger, director of NYU's journalism program, found a curriculum that 'provides a balance between theoretical and conceptual and professional courses (and) equips students for multi-media storytelling.'

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Criminal Cases Push Newspapers to Identify Anonymous Commenters

Wed, 17 Jun 2009 16:32:46 -0800

Anonymous comments on newspapers blogs are drawing attention from prosecutors seeking information about criminal matters, once again raising the issue of whether newspaper blog comments are protected under state press shield laws. Last fall, I wrote about two civil cases involving claims of defamation, where two separate courts refused to order newspapers to disclose information that would lead to the identification of anonymous commenters on their blogs.

In criminal cases, the issues are similar, but the stakes can be higher for everyone involved. A refusal to turn over information in response to a grand jury subpoena can result in a contempt proceeding and a coercive jail term, as individuals as diverse as New York Times reporter Judith Miller and video blogger Josh Wolf have learned.

In one recent case, an Illinois court upheld the issuance of a grand jury subpoena seeking information on anonymous newspaper blog commenters who had, the court concluded, relevant information about the defendant in a murder case.

I Know Who You Are and What You Did

In 2008, Frank Price was arrested in Madison County, Ill., and charged with first degree murder for the death of a 5-year-old child, a development that was reported in the local newspaper, the Alton Telegraph. The article was posted on the newspaper's website and drew the attention of a number of anonymous commenters, some of whom purported to have personal knowledge of Price as well as past incidents of his abuse against children. Detectives investigating the case contacted the newspaper informally, seeking to learn the identity of the anonymous commenters, but the newspaper refused and told the detectives that the information had to be requested formally.

Shortly thereafter, the newspaper was served with a grand jury subpoena requesting records that would lead to the identity of five of the commenters, including full names, addresses and IP addresses. The newspaper filed a motion challenging the subpoena, arguing that the comments fell within the protection of the Illinois reporter's shield law.

Journalist Shield Laws

As we noted in our prior blog post discussing the two rulings in civil cases, individual state journalist shield laws vary greatly in their provisions. The Montana Media Confidentiality Act is worded very broadly, and covers "any information obtained or prepared" by a news outlet. In Doty v. Molnar, the court focused on that language in concluding that anonymous comments were protected under that Act from disclosure in a civil suit.

The Oregon Media Shield Law protects "the source of any published or unpublished information obtained by the person in the course of gathering, receiving, or processing information for any medium of communication to the public." In Beard v. Doe, the Oregon court ruled that anonymous comments fell within that language and were thereby protected from disclosure.

The Illinois reporter's shield law, 735 Ill. Comp. Stat. 5/8-901., provides that a court may not compel "any person" to disclose the "source of any information obtained by a reporter" unless "all other available sources of information have been exhausted and...disclosure of the information sought is essential to the protection of the public interest involved." A "source" is defined as "the person or means from or through which the news or information was obtained."

The Alton Telegraph v. The People of Illinois

In the Alton Telegraph case, the newspaper argued in its brief that the Illinois reporter's shield law protected the identity of the anonymous commenters because the commenters were both "persons" and "sources" within the meaning of the Illinois law.

The newspaper also argued that the subpoena should be quashed because the prosecutor had not shown that all other sources of information had been exhausted, and that the disclosure was essential to the protection of the public interest. The prosecutor argued that the commenters were not "sources" for the newspaper or its reporters because the comments were posted after the newspaper's article on the topic was published, and the commenters were not "individuals who approved a reporter as an anonymous or confidential source."

In its ruling, the court construed the statutory language narrowly, agreeing with the prosecutor that the commenters were not "sources" for a story that had already been written and published, and therefore the identity of the commenters fell outside the protection of the shield law. But the court did recognize the importance of newspaper commenters (whom the court refers to alternatively as "bloggers" and "commentators") and their potential to serve as future leads for reporters, and suggested that arguments that they should be protected should be directed to the legislature:

While the bloggers were not used specifically to write this article, there is the possibility of the commentators becoming sources. It can be argued that the commentators are persons through which the information was obtained. However, the information is not necessarily obtained for the purpose of gathering the news. The commentary section provides readers with a platform for discussing the case at their leisure. Bloggers feel the comfort, and sometimes too much comfort, of freely conversing with the protections normally provided through the expected anonymity of the Internet. A lack of these protections and/or anonymity might well have a chilling effect on future bloggers.

On balance, the court concluded, that while the newspaper's interest in protecting the identity of individuals who made unsolicited, public comments was "not negligible," that interest did not "go far enough to serve the larger purpose of the reporter's privilege, which is to allow 'the public to receive complete, unfettered information.'" The court concluded that ordering the newspaper to reveal the commenters' identities would not "make the public unwilling to express their opinions or to provide information during the course of a reporter's actual investigation, in future cases, nor does it deny the public the right to receive complete unfettered information in this and future instances."

The court ordered the newspaper to provide information on only two of the five specified individuals, however. As to those individuals, the court found that the state had met its burden to show that the information they sought was relevant, that the information could not be obtained by other means, and that the individuals had "relevant information about the defendant's prior conduct, his propensities for violence, and the relationship with the child."

Grand Jury Subpoenas and Gag Orders

The Alton Telegraph case is not the only recent instance of law enforcement seeking information from anonymous commenters. Unlike civil proceedings, grand jury proceedings are secret; thus these incidents may fly under the radar unless a party who is served with a subpoena chooses to publicize it or challenge it in court. But some grand jury subpoenas contain "gag order" provisions warning recipients that mere disclosure of the subpoena may obstruct law enforcement, thereby suggesting but not stating that the recipient of the subpoena might be prosecuted if the subpoena is disclosed.

Such a gag order provision was contained in a grand jury subpoena issued in 2008 by a prosecutor in the office of the Bronx District Attorney to the operators of the New York political blog Room 8. The subpoena sought the production of identifying information about a single commenter on the blog, and warned that disclosure of the subpoena "could impede the investigation being conducted and thereby interfere with law enforcement." The subpoena and the included warning were subsequently withdrawn and the operators went public concerning the incident.

An article posted on the website of the Las Vegas Review-Journal on May 26, 2009, concerning the federal prosecution of a Las Vegas businessman, drew over 100 comments. Thomas Mitchell, the editor of the paper, revealed in an editorial on June 7 that a short time later the newspaper received a federal grand jury subpoena seeking information about the anonymous commenters, including "full name, date of birth, physical address, gender, ZIP code, password prompts, security questions, telephone numbers and other identifiers [and] the IP address." This subpoena also contained a warning: "You have no obligation of secrecy concerning this subpoena; however, any such disclosure could obstruct and impede an ongoing criminal investigation."

In a story published by the Review-Journal on June 17, Mitchell stated that the newspaper had reached an agreement with prosecutors to limit the amount of information that the newspaper would be compelled to produce, narrowing it to only two user accounts. Prosecutors indicated that they sought the information out of concern for the safety of jurors hearing the underlying criminal case based on what they regarded as threatening statements in the comments. According to the story, the American Civil Liberties Union remained concerned about the chilling effect of the subpoena, however, and filed a motion to quash the subpoena.

Mitchell also pointed out something that seems to get lost in the shuffle in these controversies: The newspaper may not even have the identifying information that law enforcement is seeking. As Mitchell noted: "We don't require registration. A person could use a fictitious name and email address, and most do. We have no addresses or phone numbers."

This is probably the case for many newspaper websites, in which case server logs that record the IP addresses of website visitors might provide the best clue to a subscriber's real identity. Resolving IP address information to yield a user's real identity is possible, but it can be a complex process and would probably require additional subpoenas to Internet service providers.

The Las Vegas Review-Journal can't fall back on a state shield law in this case, because the proceeding is in federal court. Currently, there is no federal journalist shield law, so newspapers seeking to challenge a grand jury subpoena must argue that the information requested by a prosecutor is protected under federal constitutional law principles. There is currently an ongoing move in Congress to adopt a federal journalist shield law.

Do Blog and Website Operators Protect Anonymity?

While some newspapers like the Alton Telegraph and the publications involved in the civil suits discussed above have taken legal action to protect the identity of anonymous commenters on their websites, not all media organizations do so. Typically, a site's online terms of use, terms of service, privacy policy or similar document will address the issue by reserving the right to provide information on website users in response to legal process, with no promise that they will even notify a user whose information is sought by law enforcement.

As noted by the court in the Alton Telegraph case, the newspaper's website required commenters to read and assent to a user agreement stating that comments submitted to the website "are not private," and its privacy policy stated that the newspaper reserved the right to disclose user information "when the law requires it." In The Alton Telegraph v. the People of Illinois, the law required it.

Jeffrey D. Neuburger is a partner in the New York office of Proskauer Rose LLP, and co-chair of the Technology, Media and Communications Practice Group. His practice focuses on technology and media-related business transactions and counseling of clients in the utilization of new media. He is an adjunct professor at Fordham University School of Law teaching E-Commerce Law and the co-author of two books, "Doing Business on the Internet" and "Emerging Technologies and the Law." He also co-writes the New Media & Technology Law Blog.

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4 Minute Roundup: Special Iran Election Edition

Tue, 16 Jun 2009 15:54:12 -0800

Here's the latest 4MR audio report from MediaShift. In this week's special edition, I look at the way that social media have played a vital role in the breaking news happening in Iran after their contested presidential election. Though the government has cracked down on the opposition, censored the media and blocked websites and even text messaging, the news has continued to spread on Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and YouTube. And when CNN was seen as lax in coverage of Iran last weekend, the #CNNFail meme sprouted up on Twitter and they paid attention, increasing coverage the next day.

Check it out:

4MR podcast 6-16-09.mp3

Background music is "What the World Needs" by the The Ukelele Hipster Kings via PodSafe Music Network

Here are some links to related sites and stories mentioned in the podcast:

#IranElection hashtag on Twitter

#CNNfail hashtag on Twitter

Iran Election Live-Blogging on Sunday at Huffington Post

Tehran Bureau independent website on Iranian news

@persiankiwi on Twitter

@IranElection09 on Twitter

#CNNFail: Twitterverse slams network's Iran absence at News.com

The Revolution Will Be Twittered by Andrew Sullivan