MediaShift

Embedded at UBC::Teaching the Technical Without Losing Sight of Journalism

Fri, 15 Aug 2008 12:53:25 -0800

Recently, MediaShift started running reports from “embeds” at various media outlets and educational institutions. This report comes from Alfred Hermida, an assistant professor at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of British Columbia.

Classic Hollywood movies tend to idealize the job of the reporter, from Cary Grant in “His Girl Friday” to Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman in “All the President’s Men.” All they needed was a pen and a notebook.

Fast-forward to the 21st century and the picture changes dramatically. Not only would they need to have strong research, reporting and writing skills, the journalists would also be expected to file for the website, upload some photos, shoot video and, of course, write for next day’s paper.

The changes happening in journalism have left j-schools scrabbling to adapt to a multimedia, multi-platform news environment. At the recent annual conference in Chicago of the Association of Educators in Journalism and Mass Communication, the topic preyed on the minds of academics wondering how to cope with the technical demands of today’s journalism.

The challenges for journalism schools are two-fold. First, students need to be taught how to use a wide range of technical tools. Second, and more importantly, they have to learn how to produce real journalism using the technology. This is perhaps the hardest part.

Our students are digital natives, living in an always-on, always-connected world. The challenge in the classroom is less about teaching the technology and more about providing an understanding of how new media tools can be harnessed to create quality journalism.

The Big Disconnect

Like so many others, my j-school at the University of British Columbia has grappled with how to add a layer of technical complexity to an already packed curriculum. When I started here two years ago, I ran a course over two terms that sought to introduce students to multimedia journalism. But this approach had its own limitations. The journalism ended up taking second place in the rush to teach a wide range of technical skills. As it ran as its own separate course, there was a lack of connection to the reporting and writing skills taught in other classes.

This past year, we tried a far more integrated, holistic approach, with the technical training taking place side by side with the journalism instruction. This has allowed us to place the use of technical tools in a news context and we have found that teaching journalism and technology side by side makes a big difference.

Students learn how to, for example, record and edit audio, and then this is followed up by an assignment in which they apply these skills as a reporter. This reinforces the technical aspects but also forces students to understand how the technology can enable them to become better journalists.

However, in my experience, you have to keep stressing the connection between journalistic and technical skills. Simply creating a slideshow in Flash is not journalism. It becomes journalism when it tells a story in a powerful and evocative manner achieved through a combination of compelling images and moving audio.

Accessible Tools

Teaching journalism and technical skills side by side presents its own dilemmas. There are only so many weeks in a semester. It can be difficult to strike a balance between covering the basics of research, interviewing and writing; understanding different narrative structures; and getting the specialized skills to work across media.

The good news is that the tools used for multimedia journalism are much more accessible today than they were in the early days of the web. Back then, creating a website involved learning a program like Dreamweaver. As a result, students could spend weeks knee-deep in HTML code. While a basic grasp of HTML is still valuable, students can create websites today in minutes using hosted services such as Wordpress or Blogger. This frees up valuable time in the classroom to focus on issues like information architecture and usability.

We use Wordpress as a content management system in the classroom to power our course site, TheThunderbird.ca, and have found that students pick it up quickly. Tools like this are becoming more intuitive and easier to use. We welcome anything that stops the technology from getting in the way of journalism.

The added benefit of these tools is that they are often free or inexpensive. I will write in detail about the tools I have found useful in a subsequent posting. With so many choices, journalism educators are spoiled with choices. The stumbling block is not the software, but rather having instructors who can teach it. This is hardly surprising as new media didn’t exist when many professors started their careers in academia.

The result is a generational gap in both media use and understanding. Part of the answer is for instructors to go back to school themselves and pick up these new media skills. Some schools rely on bringing in professional journalists as adjuncts to handle the technical training. Others put the emphasis on students, expecting them to acquire convergence skills outside of regular class time.

I believe that the best way for professors to learn new media tools is to use them, even though this can be a time-consuming process. I suspect many academics would rather spend time on research and writing than learning to create slideshows in Flash or exploring the potential uses of Twitter in the classroom. As journalism educators, we have to be part of the media world of our students, rather than observers looking in from the outside.

Alfred Hermida is an online news pioneer and journalism educator. He is an assistant professor at the Graduate School of Journalism, the University of British Columbia, where he leads the integrated journalism program. He was a founding news editor of the BBC News website. He blogs at Reportr.net.

Embedded in Belgium::Walls Tumble Down as Mediafin Integrates Print, Online Newsrooms

Fri, 15 Aug 2008 12:00:14 -0800

Recently, MediaShift started running reports from “embeds” at various media outlets and educational institutions. This report comes from Roland Legrand, new media director at Mediafin in Belgium.

The company where I work is well-known in Belgium for its print publications. Mediafin is the publisher behind the Dutch language business daily De Tijd and its Francophone counterpart L’Echo. But in recent years, the company’s Internet sites have grown to rival the popularity of its print editions. In July, Mediafin websites reached a new high of an estimated 160,000 unique visitors on one single day, an amount roughly equivalent to the average number of readers per day. But even as online journalism continues to reach more and more readers, journalists themselves continue to balk at putting their work online.

Many are still captivated by the nostalgic charm of the printed page. Others just find that old habits die hard. Mediafin company management has thrown its support behind efforts to bring the newsroom into the modern media age, to encourage print reporters to embrace new media. As head of the Internet and new media editorial staff, I have seen first-hand the changes instituted and have seen what works and what — at least for now — does not.

Mind the Gap

In addition to publishing De Tijd and L’Echo, Mediafin also operates websites for both publications. On a normal working day, the websites draw about 140,000 to 150,000 unique visitors and receive more than 1 million pageviews. Yet despite the growth of online journalism, only 18 out of Mediafin’s 140 journalists work for the electronic media (not including 5 supporting editorial staff members).

De Tijd started experimenting with electronic media in the early 1990s, long before the Internet became available for the general public. In those days, Internet reporting was considered merely a stepping stone, a place for young, inexperienced journalists to start out. The online editorial desks were mainly staffed by junior journalists, who were supposed to learn the tricks of the trade before becoming full-blown journalists doing print reporting.

Today, Internet reporting is still the domain of younger reporters: Those working for wire services and websites are typically in their 20s, while those at the print desks are in their 30s and 40s. But the second-class status of Internet reporters is gradually changing, as the newsroom comes to recognize the importance of new media.

There is still a gap between the print journalists, used to working almost exclusively for the print publications, and their younger colleagues at the electronic desks, who have worked for online as well as for print publications.

Even in the digital age, most journalists remain veritable luddites. Many do not use RSS-feed readers, do not blog, do not use social bookmarks, and have never collaborated using a wiki. They consider tagging to be something best left to supporting staff, have no experience whatsoever using video and audio, and have only the vaguest idea about telepresence techniques such as virtual environments. While the public has been quick to adapt to changing technologies, journalists have lagged behind and now risk losing touch with their readers.

How to Fix the Gap

The Mediafin editorial management team decided to take drastic action. We looked at the technological and physical infrastructure of the newsrooms and found several barriers to the integration of the old and new media departments:

> Physical infrastructure: Our newsroom was divided by brick walls, separating the online desk from the print desks. We are now demolishing the walls, which will hopefully encourage the two sections to interact more! (See the “before” picture of the walls being ripped down above, and the “after” picture below.)

> Technological infrastructure: Currently, we have separate publishing mechanisms for print, Internet, wire, and mobile services. We are looking for a system which integrates all those platforms. For example, an ideal system might automatically prompt a print journalist to write a version of her story for several online publication formats. (If any MediaShift readers have any suggestions, please let me know.)

> We also plan to install a central news management, overlooking online and print publications.

Our journalists were shocked by some of the new policies integrating print and new media — especially the Web First Policy. Print journalists were used to reserving big scoops to first run in the print newspaper; but under the new policy, scoops were to be published immediately on the web. Less controversial was the announcement of courses introducing print journalists to publishing on the web.

Growing Pains: What Works, What Doesn’t

Because we’re still in a learning process, not every experiment has yet been successful. But some innovations have yielded encouraging results.

What works:

> Web First: When publishing scoops on the Net, we contact the major local news wire, making sure that they credit us correctly. Journalists are pleased that their work is being recognized by colleagues and competitors. Recognition by peers is crucial for journalists.

> Living with comments: Journalists get a better idea of their audience when readers are able to comment on the articles. Although our articles get hundreds of reactions each day, we’ve been surprised to find that site users often use the comments feature more to talk amongst themselves than to give feedback to the reporter. But we are learning that one of the most effective ways to manage communities is…by actually joining in the conversation in a polite and friendly way.

> Constituting communities: We started a community of Belgian expats. People of different backgrounds from all over the world post high quality comments here.

> Blogging: Journalists run several blogs now. One blog in particular has been very successful, Bear & Bull (okay, not that original a name!) about financial markets. We have developed a kind of virtual weekly show around the blog, by holding live sessions with special guests and by allowing the community to participate. Other journalists are involved as “correspondents” — for instance, we have a “banking correspondent” who comments on recent financial developments during the live show.

Unfortunately, not everything has gone completely smoothly. There are a few areas where we are still working out the kinks.

What does not (yet) work:

> Social tools (bookmarks, feed readers, sharing sites, professional networks, life-streaming): Our journalists have resisted using new social networking tools, preferring to rely on their old direct contacts. Some have joined Facebook or Linked In, but the professional results are so far disappointing. There are no rational reasons for this choice. I gather that it is simply hard to acquire these new habits. The heavy workload means that experimenting is not self-evident. The newsroom gets the major news wires (Reuters, Bloomberg, etc.), and reporters avoid other sources as information overload. However, electronic networks and virtual environments do serve as an important source of inspiration — something I will discuss in more detail in a future post.

> Acquiring skills: Learning video, audio, HTML/CSS, JavaScript and Flash skills are very difficult because of heavy daily workloads and the fact that specialists already provide everything beyond simple HTML. Even so, I think it would be useful for reporters to acquire a basic knowledge of these media, if only to be able to communicate more effectively with those specialists.

Now the walls have come tumbling down, literally, but there are still walls to break down around learning. Even though it is not easy for all our colleagues to quickly pick up new skills, they are becoming more aware of new possibilities regarding community management and interactivity. I am sure I will have more to tell you about these changes in the coming weeks and months.

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.

Additional editing for this story by Mike Rosen-Molina

Photo of walls being torn down by Frederik Delaplace; photo of unified newsroom by Nima Ferdowsi. You can see a Flickr photostream of the Mediafin construction here.

Digging Deeper::Locative Media Project Aims to Collect Stories of Atlanta

Wed, 13 Aug 2008 22:13:26 -0800

The technology and journalism fields have long been dominated by men, especially in the upper management of big companies. But the J-Lab and McCormick Foundation want to shine the light on new ideas from women who work at mainstream media outlets but want to start something up on the side.

That’s why they started giving out grants in their New Media Women Entrepreneurs (NMWE) competition, with three winning ideas getting $10,000 in seed money:

> Echo, a locative media project that encourages people to call in their stories about places in Atlanta

> Latina Voices, a website for Latinas to discuss social issues

> Northwest Navy News, a site that will facilitate connections between military families in Washington state

Jan Schaffer, executive director of the J-Lab, told me that women are still struggling in the journalism industry, even though there are less barriers to entry in new media.

“The tools for entry [to new media] are not as much of a barrier,” she told me. “You need airwaves to broadcast, but you can build a website online, and do something on your own in the new media world. If you look at what BlogHer has accomplished in three years, it’s phenomenal. The entry points are less insurmountable.”

Two women who feel like they have no barriers to entry are Karyn Lu and Lila King, two CNN.com staffers in Atlanta, who got funding for the locative media project, Echo. Their plan is to put signs up around Atlanta encouraging people to share their stories about places via cell phone messages — and let people hear each other’s stories via cell phones, the the web or podcasts, turing the voicemails into custom audio walking tours.

“We’ll have the stories and locations where they occured, but we hope to have walking tours on the website that you can download and customize for your iPod and then take them out for a walk,” said Lu. “It would be great for us to partner with local Atlanta organizations that promote walking and biking like the Atlanta Bicycle Campaign. And then we could co-host events with them and get people outside that way.”

While the NMWE site lists all the facts and figures about how women struggle in the journalism industry (e.g. women make up two-thirds of journalism school students, but make up only one-third of the workforce), Lu and King told me they hadn’t felt any limits in their own careers in new media. The following is a video they posted to explain their project:

Introducing the Echo team from J-Lab on Vimeo.

I spoke to Lu, 28, and King, 31, on the phone recently about the motivation behind Echo, their evolving business plan and how audio is an overlooked medium. The following is an edited version of our discussion.

What’s your background and why did you decide to do this project?

Karyn Lu: I have an undergradute degree in English literature from Wellesley College and a master’s degree in digital media from Georgia Tech, which is a great combination for this project. I did do one other public art project for the city of Atlanta in the summer of 2005. It was also a place-based storytelling experiment, and was one of the projects that, when I was talking to Lila, sparked our interest in working together. It was funded by the city of Atlanta for a three-month run in Freedom Park, which is Atlanta’s largest public green space, and it was called StoryScape.

I was working on it with two other friends from graduate school, and we put up signs all over Freedom Park with phone numbers and location IDs, and we asked people in the park to stop and call in and leave us stories about the park and why it was important to them. It was a great experiment. We put those stories into a database so that when people called in they could hear other stories left by neighbors and fellow Atlantans. We had them up on a website, with a small Flash-based interactive map with signs that people could click on and listen to stories that people had left on that sign.

Lila King: One of the things I’m most proud of in my pre-CNN life is that a friend and I built a proto-podcasting streaming radio site before there was podcasting. We were dissatisfied with the radio where we lived, in Atlanta, so we thought ‘this isn’t rocket science, we can do this.’ So we bought some recorders and interviewed our friends and anyone who would talk with us, and started producing radio pieces for the web.

In doing that, it made me develop an appreciation for the power of storytelling simply through sound, with nothing but a person’s voice narrating their own personal story. There’s something about sound, even coming from a computer speaker or the radio, where you can just close your eyes and imagine the person who’s talking is right beside you. It’s not interpreted through a screen. Because I like storytelling through sound, that’s what brought me to Echo.

I’m really excited that this first pass of the project will be exclusively through sound, because it’s a medium that’s overlooked.

Lu: I have to agree with Lila on that. When I was working on StoryScape and listening to the stories on my phone, I wasn’t looking at a tiny screen, I was standing there looking and smelling the air and listening to the stories and their words were almost bringing back ghosts of events that had happened right there.

Tell me about the genesis of the idea for Echo, and what’s your motivation for doing it?

Lu: It came out of a lot of conversations that Lila and I had at work and outside of work. We are kindred spirits in a way, we’re both tinkerers, and we both taught ourselves how to design and code. It’s satisfying for us to make something ourselves, and have creative control of our projects. Every time we talked, we came away inspired, and thought we should work together on something.

You both taught yourselves how to code?

Lu: Yes, not that we’re great at it. It’s the basics, HTML, CSS and basic design. It’s something we’ve done for a number of years.

King: I don’t consider myself to be a supreme software developer, but there’s enormous ease and possibility on the web. You can learn a little bit and do so much with it. That’s so enticing. Over the years, we’ve often talked about what else we might do. It’s so easy to go from having an idea to making it happen on the web, that doesn’t necessarily map to other media.

Lu: We would always share other projects that other people were doing that were great, and say, ‘Isn’t this great? We could totally do this.’ It came out of different conversations like that. I had mentioned my StoryScape project and she mentioned her radio project and the two melded perfectly together in the way mine collected stories in the public and Lila produced audio pieces.

I see that you’re still brainstorming ideas for it. How formed is the idea at this point? How much do you think it will change?

King: I think the core of the idea is that we enable place-based storytelling about Atlanta, and encourage people to walk and get on their bikes and experience the city outside of cars. We have a kernel of an idea of how we imagine it could happen. I feel really strongly that this is going to evolve considerably over time. Part of our development process is setting up brainstorming dinners among our friends who have different backgrounds and expertise. And every time we talk to someone new, they have a new light to shed on how we might direct the project and what we might do specifically. We’re all ears.

Lu: We have a couple main guiding principles that we’re working with, like getting people outside and walking and cycling more. And we’re committed to working on an open source platform like Drupal. And we’re committed to using audio to start with instead of video or text. And we want to present personal and historical stories side by side. But there are so many great ideas out there, and we’re open to all that. When we have the system up and running, the users will probably surprise us by the way they use it.

Tell me more about the entrepreneurial part of the project. What’s the business model behind it?

[Both laugh]

King: We shouldn’t laugh about it, but to be perfectly blunt, we haven’t talked a lot about a business model behind the project. The motivation is more about motivating our community and adding something to the community. We’re truly only at the beginning. If there’s a business model, great, but…

Lu: I think it’s something that will have to evolve.

[In their proposal to NMWE, Lu and King mention partnerships with local institutions such as the Atlanta Bicyle Campaign, the Clean Air Campaign, and universities that could secure them more funding.]

What will you spend the $10,000 grant on? For your time or for development?

Lu: Most of our budget will go to hiring a designer and developer to help us get our site and our mobile storytelling infrastructure up and running. There will be some costs for printing and mounting the signs, and equipment and hardware and things like that.

Are there deadlines for when you have to have something up and running?

King: Yes, there are guidelines with the grant, we’re supposed to have a prototype up and running within 10 months. So we aim to have our beta site up and running by then. That’s the end deadline for this grant.

What’s the reaction of people at CNN to your project?

King: I don’t know if I want to speak on behalf of other people at CNN, but as far as my friends go and aquaintances, every reaction has been positive, and a lot of people said, ‘How can I help?’ And that’s why we decided to have a series of brainstorming dinners with them. My husband kindly agreed to cook dinner for us. [laughs] So we’ll sit around and talk about what we’re doing.

Lu: It’s one of those things where every time we tell someone else about it, they come up with another fantasic idea for us.

I’ve heard a lot about locative media, both from Medill’s projects and from projects on Idea Lab. Do you think that the community is demanding them, or is it the kind of thing that they like when they see it?

Lu: When I did the StoryScape project I was doing it for a class called Experimental Media. So that says something about how new this is. Communities have always had lots of stories tied to spots, and I don’t think people are demanding it. But based on the reaction we’ve had so far and in the interviews we’ve done in the pilot phase, people get very excited about the project when they realize how powerful the stories can be.

King: I think in Atlanta there is definitely a demand for improved infrastructure for walking and biking. This project is our answer to that demand. It’s one of many, I’m sure.

Lu: It’s our goal to pleasantly surprise the people who live in this city, so they stumble on something that will make their lives a little richer…Space is a physical location that exists without any meaning, but when something personally or culturally significant happens there, then it’s transformed into a place. I think place-based storytelling plays into that.

King: I’m really excited to build something based on mobile phones that nearly everyone has, and isn’t based on a screen or a smartphone that has a visual capability. I like the idea that using the phone opens it up to everyone, plus you can look around the place while you listen to it.

Do you feel like women aren’t represented well in new media? In blogging, there was a time where people said that female bloggers weren’t getting enough recognition, and then BlogHer came along. How do you see the industry right now?

King: I think BlogHer is an amazing organization, but I don’t really perceive in my limited world of new media that there is limited opportunity or exposure for women. I’m proud to receive this grant and take a women-led project out into the world. I don’t feel like as a woman I’m limited in any way.

Lu: I completely agree with that.

*****

What do you think? Can locative media projects like Echo help people get out and walk and bike more in urban places? What’s your view on women in new media? Do the have the same opportunities as men? Share your thoughts or experiences in the comments below.

How are you experiencing the Olympics -- TV, streaming video, mobile?

Wed, 13 Aug 2008 13:43:33 -0800

This is my first time using Seesmic to ask a Your Take question on MediaShift. You can answer either via Seesmic videos or via text in the comments below.

NBC announced that its Olympics coverage would be a big laboratory for multi-platform media, giving people thousands of hours of the Games on various TV channels, streaming video online, and on mobile. It’s almost a bombardment of video. So where are you watching so far, and what’s your experience been like? I’ve been relying on DVR-taped viewing on TV, with some online news and Twitter feeds thrown in. What has worked for you, and have you also checked out international feeds online? Share your thoughts in a video or in comments and I’ll highlight the best ones in the next Your Take Roundup.

Top Five Week Two Hundred Three

Wed, 13 Aug 2008 12:43:32 -0800

Olympic TAMi
NBC’s multi-platform audience on Monday: 103 million
Cyber-attack on Georgia media
News site moves to Blogspot after attack
TV losing out
Mobile, Net use rising; network TV losing to niches
iPhone 3G problems
Slow connections put 3G name in doubt
Huffington Post Chicago
Grand ‘HuffPost local’ experiment begins

Email Roundtable::Should Copyright Law Change in the Digital Age?

Mon, 11 Aug 2008 14:34:18 -0800

This is the final part of my three-part email roundtable discussion looking at the new Code of Best Practices in Fair Use of Online Video created at the behest of the Center for Social Media at American University.

In the first part, the respondents in this email roundtable talked about what the Code means, how they might put it into practice, and some thoughts on the way artists work without thinking about the law. In the second part, the group talked about ways to spread the Code through a special video explaining fair use to video producers.

In this final installment, the discussion turns to legal options, and whether the copyright law should be updated for fair use, possibly creating safe harbors for certain types of work that would be shielded from lawsuits.

Many people complain that the U.S. fair use rules are vague, and that copyright law hasn’t really been updated for the digital age. How do you think the laws should be changed to help protect copyright holders while also respecting video remixes and fair use? Or do you think the laws are fine as is?

Peter Jaszi
law professor at American University and co-chair of the Code of Best Practices committee

Trying to “fix” fair use through legislation would be a high risk undertaking. The codification of the doctrine in 1976 was, generally speaking, a victory for the creators, educators, journalists, artists, and others. Developments in the courts since then (especially the rise of “transformativeness” analysis) have underlined just how big a victory it actually was! For one thing, as it now stands the doctrine is technogically non-specific, which has proved to be a boon in times of rapid change.

By and large, the doctrine works pretty well most of the time for a wide range of different kinds of users — which is one reason that copyright owners haven’t always been enthusiastic about it. If Sec. 107 were “opened up” for amendments there is a real chance (nay, a near certainty) that owners would seize the opportunity to rework the statute to their own advantage — and (believe me) there are many ways this could be accomplished. We would be looking then at a naked political contest that I’m afraid users would lose, as they have in so many other battles in recent years. It may be the case that the “vagueness” (though I’d call it the “flexibility and dynamism”) of fair use can sometimes be a problem. But that’s where efforts like to Code of Best Practices Can come in.

Anthony Falzone
executive director of the Fair Use Project at Stanford University

I think the open-ended nature of the fair use framework is a net positive. While it can reduce predictability in some situations relative to say, a laundry list of very specific exemptions, it’s that open-ended nature that makes fair use a dynamic tool that can respond effectively to changes in technology and culture.

Fair use was only codified once in 1976, and section 107 has only been amended once since then. If it laid down a series of specific exemptions rather than an open-ended standard, it would have hobbled innovation. Who in 1976 would have foreseen Internet search engines, or understood the tremendous societal benefit they create despite the fact they copy massive amounts of copyrighted information every day? If we had needed to create a new statutory exception to accommodate them, it would have taken years, and there is a very good chance big media companies would have stopped that process altogether.

That’s not to say the burdens of the open-ended framework aren’t real. It makes decisions more complicated and costly. The people who feel that most are the masses — the ordinary people who create for the sake of creating and do so non-commercially. For them, the system is complicated and expensive to use and they are not equipped to bear the risk of guessing wrong. The burdens this system imposes on ordinary people who use copyrighted content in genuinely creative and transformative — but non-commercial — ways is tremendous, and seriously out of whack relative to the tiny impact these non-commercial uses have on copyright holders. I think it would make a lot of sense to create safe harbors for certain uses that will relieve non-commercial actors of this burden.

Peter Jaszi
law professor at American University and co-chair of the Code of Best Practices committee

I like the safe harbor idea, too, but I have a few worries. My first concern is the notorious indistinctness of the commmercial/non-commercial distinction. This line is difficult in two ways. One is the difficulty of classifying activities that yield indirect (i.e. reputational) rather than direct (i.e. sales-based) financial benefit. The other is the problematic fact that works created for “non-commercial” purposes often get commercialized (by the maker or others) after the fact. The second (and related) concern is that carving out any set of uses from the overall “fair use” scheme could make things tougher analytically for the uses that aren’t carved out. Given the fact that there are going to be many uses that fall on the “wrong” side of the commercial/non-commercial line, no matter how it’s drawn, I think this merits attention.

JD Lasica
co-founder of Ourmedia media-sharing site, new media expert and videoblogger

I’m surprised that none of the legal scholars here have pointed out that, regardless of how the laws are crafted, fair use is, and always will be, a fuzzy concept. We will never have a set of rules that say, “absolutely, in this case, you’re in the clear under the law,” because of all the variables that fair use entails. That’s the shortcoming of fair use — it’s not an affirmative right. In layman’s terms, it’s a set of case-by-case exceptions to the Copyright Act, which means if charges are brought against you, you have this defense to stand on.

In my book “Darknet,” I suggested that the digital generation will eventually come to embrace the concept of digital rights, some of which will be codified in federal law but much of which will become embedded in the cultural norms that are now taking shape. In due time, Congress should specify users’ digital rights by mapping out an expansive, affirmative set of rights delineating the scope of the public’s right to sample, reuse, build upon, and share the digital works they legally acquire. Such a declaration, with reasonable protections for copyright holders, should include the right to time-shift, space-shift, make personal backup copies, change formats, tinker with stuff you buy, engage in personal editing, and share personal media with others, depending on the circumstances.

But as those who have lobbied Congress for copyright reform know, the current Congress is much more likely to impose tighter, not looser, restrictions. At a time when the Internet is collapsing time frames and enabling people to breathe new life into dormant works, it’s still illegal to resurrect and rework movies from the 1920s.

Instead, I think the solution is in our own hands. Individuals ought to use Creative Commons licenses on their videos, photos and podcasts whenever possible, allowing others to reuse or republish the works under the ground rules that the individual lays out. (Tens of millions of photos on Flickr now carry CC licenses.)

More broadly, we’re turning from a society of consumers to a society of users and producers. Whenever we pick up the tools of digital media creation, we’re participating in a shared experience, and together we’re sorting out the rules of engagement for the digital age. People — especially the young — want to access, rip and remix their culture. There’s no going back to the rules and norms of the analog era.

Owen Gallagher
digital media entrepreneur; founder of TotalRecut, a network of fans and creators of video remixes, recuts, and mash-ups

In an ideal world, the copyright laws would be changed to create an established set of rights for legitimate uses of copyrighted material without permission. However, as JD pointed out, it appears that the current Congress appears to be moving in the opposite direction, promoting tighter controls and restrictions, rather than freer access. How many times have copyright laws been extended in the last 50 years?

I’m a big fan of extra-legal solutions, like Creative Commons. Although not without its own issues, this system provides content creators with a choice that they would not otherwise have, i.e. to give explicit legal permission for others to share and reuse their work. I think that Creative Commons is even more important outside of the United States, as many countries do not have a fair use provision in their copyright law. The closest equivalent, ‘fair dealing,’ does not offer as much freedom as fair use. For example, in Ireland and the UK, fair dealing does not extend to works of parody. Unfortunately, Creative Commons is not yet fully established in every country (Ireland still doesn’t have its own country specific version).

The meaning of copyright law has been skewed in recent decades. Copyrights are meant to create a balance, providing benefit to society at large by giving us more creative works while also providing benefit to the individuals who bring those works to us. Copyright was meant to ‘promote the progress of science and useful arts by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive rights to their respective writings and discoveries.’

In reality, copyright law is now being abused to line the pockets of large companies that own most of the well-known creative works in the world. The balance has been lost and the result is the chilling effect we mentioned before, where essentially, less creative works are being made because people are afraid of being sued. Hopefully, with such important initiatives as Creative Commons and the Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Online Video, harmony will be attained.

*****

What do you think? Should the laws be updated or left as is? How useful do you think the Code will be for video mash-up artists who want to learn more of their legal options? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

Report from Beijing::China Partially Lifts Great Firewall for Media, but Access Remains Pricey

Fri, 08 Aug 2008 14:04:41 -0800

BEIJING — Journalists scrambling to make Games-time deadlines might not make it to Badaling or Juyongguan during their trip overseas, but they’re sure to become familiar with China’s other Great Wall: the Great Firewall, that is. On July 31, Olympic officials admitted the International Olympic Committee had not yet secured unfettered Internet access to foreign journalists, leaving everyone to wonder, yet again, what exactly China meant when it accepted the 2008 Olympic Bid with the promise to allow the press to report freely.

Chinese officials maintained that access for foreign journalists was sufficient because information on sports and athletics remain readily available. Just the sensitive material (read: interesting and newsworthy) was off limits. However, after howls of protest from many in the media, the censored web was loosened a bit on August 2. No public announcement, no explanation, just a few more sites stripped from the forbidden list. Still, crisis averted — or was it? Even after the news slowly spread, foreign journalists remained incensed about the lack of action prior to August 2.

When the news of the censored Net access for journalists broke, one of my friends posed a question: were journalists who accepted these restrictions for the opportunity to report on the Games sacrificing their credibility? It’s an interesting question. As late as mid-July, IOC president Jacques Rogge continued to promise Internet access without censorship to journalists planning to report in Beijing. Eleventh hour announcements make impassioned protest difficult with visas long since secured and plane tickets already bought.

Of course, ordinary Chinese citizens — and China boasts more netizens than any other country in the world — are subject to an even stricter censorship regime, with sites such as Wikipedia and YouTube being variously blocked and unblocked over the past few years.

The High Cost of Connecting

But forget access to information on Tibet for just a second — let’s just examine access to the Internet in general for foreign media. Beijing has promised state-of-the-art media facilities to visiting journalists, but the ability to log onto the web will set reporters back approximately $500 and up. A fixed IP and access to the Games-time information system will add even more to the cost.

It’s hardly a problem for large papers able to foot the bill for their team of reporters. But what about everyone else? Twenty-four computers offer free Internet access from 9 a.m. to 12 p.m. each day. The newly constructed media village will house about 7,000 journalists and media support staff. This scenario conjures up images reminiscent of last week’s queues for the remaining Olympic tickets. Asking journalists to pay for their own usage isn’t unreasonable, but demanding $500 for a service that costs the average Chinese family about $20 for the same length of time is.

Many enterprising journalists have taken matters into their own hands, turning the Papa John’s with free Wi-Fi across the street into their unofficial center of operations. Other early hold-outs to the overpriced Internet are accepting their fate and coughing up the big bucks for reliable service.

How important is the Internet to today’s journalist? I can tell you I have six browser windows and over 20 tabs open right now in Safari to help me research and collect my thoughts, but no one needs me to do the math for them. The occasional network crash forces me to fly solo from time to time, but it leaves Word documents hideously flagged with things to Google once everything’s back online.

Fortunately, my accommodations include free Internet access. Of course, it’s only been in the last week that Blogger and WordPress have run with much reliability. When I arrived in early July, I needed a VPN client to connect to the blog I was writing for my parents back home. Sometimes I could connect; other times, I couldn’t.

What Did Journalists Expect?

That’s the thing about the Great Firewall — there’s no master list or helpful placeholder page to tell you what’s restricted. There’s just the maddening sensation of waiting forever for a “server is not responding” error message. As for Amnesty International:”http:www.amnesty.org” (and other recently unblocked sites), I can now access them from my non-Media Village connection, too. However, a search for “Falun Gong,” China’s banned spiritual movement, kicked me offline the other night and forced me to restart my computer. Even more maddening is the number of sites you wouldn’t expect to be blocked — for instance, access to my online banking account.

With the situation smooted over somewhat, and most foreign journalists already in Beijing, it’s too late to hand in press accreditation to protest Net censorship. Perhaps, more importantly, journalists should be asking themselves why they expected anything different. After all, the 2001 announcement of the successful Beijing bid — and successive promise of press freedom — came on the same day CBS reported suppression of footage on a banned Chinese religious movement.

In the months leading up to the Games, numerous organizations attempted to brief journalists on the realities of reporting in China, but few seemed to head the warning. Journalists who today want to call China’s successful bid and resultant promises a farce might be correct, but they fail to see the bigger picture.

If the world were watching Paris or Toronto gear up for the Games, they would not be asking China about Internet censorship, let alone human rights. A modern China? Indeed, and all the scrutiny that comes with it. Outcry over Internet censorship yielded real results. With more tools for a free press than they had even a week ago, the pens (and keyboards) of foreign journalists are likely to produce others.

African Report::LGBTI Communities Come Out of the Closet Online

Thu, 07 Aug 2008 12:40:50 -0800

“The closet I have come out of — it is similar to the wardrobe my relieved parents stepped out of when I unlocked the wardrobe after the police had left. If you’re black in South Africa, the inhuman laws of apartheid closet you, if you’re gay in South Africa, the homophobic customs of this society closet you. If you are black and gay in South Africa, well, then it really is the same closet, the same wardrobe. Inside is darkness and oppression. Outside is freedom.” — Simon Nkoli

The African LGBTI (lesbian, gay, bi-sexual, transgender, intersex) movement traces itself back to the last days of apartheid in South Africa. At that time, a number of gay and lesbian anti-apartheid activists, including Simon Nkoli, founded the first black-led LGBTI organization in Africa, the Gay and Lesbian Organization of the Witwatersrand (GLOW). GLOW, which was a multi-racial organisation, was very much at the forefront of campaigning for LGBTI rights to be enshrined in the new South African constitution and the decriminalization of homosexuality.

Apartheid ended 14 years ago and what was a local campaign in South Africa has become a vibrant and progressive Pan-African LGBTI rights movement. The internet has made an enormous difference to the African LGBTI community. Over the past five years, the community has established a strong online presence in the form of news and campaign sites, advocacy, email lists as well as Web 2.0 media such as blogs, forums and Facebook groups. Activists are now in a much better position to make their own demands, including confronting discriminatory attitudes in the international LGBTI movement and calling for more accountability from that movement.

Email and Listservs

Over the past four years, a number of email groups have been formed to provide a safe and secure online space for human rights defenders to communicate privately, organise campaigns and give support to each other. Whenever there has been the need for an immediate regional or continental response to a crisis such as the recent arrest of activists in Uganda, the rape and or murder of lesbians in South Africa, or the trial of gay men in Cameroon, activists have relied on these groups and emails for communicating and mobilizing locally and internationally. Because of the need for security and privacy, email groups remain an important safe space for human rights defenders from across the continent.

News and Advocacy

Behind the Mask (BTM) was set up about eight years ago and was the first dedicated news resource for LGBTI issues in Africa. Its strength lies in its continental focus and up-to-date news. However the news reports are culled from other news sources and lack original commentary and opinion which would make the site more dynamic and interesting. There appears to be a lack of imagination on how to develop the project; for example, they could recruit local activists to report on local issues and include commentary and a discussion element on the site.

Nonetheless BTM’s importance is not just as a source of LGBTI news. Its very presence and the news it reports confirms the existence of a large number of LGBTI people on the continent, which challenges the argument by many religious leaders and governments that “homosexuality is unAfrican.” More recently a number of established organizations have created websites such as Sexual Minorities Uganda (SMUG), Coalition of African Lesbians (CAL) and Gays and Lesbians of Zimbabwe (GALZ), and the Zambian site African Veil, to name a few.

Having a web presence is a “coming out” of LGBTI activism in Africa but the sites are very much organizational in content and do not provide any features to draw in readers and encourage comments and discussion. This is changing as more and more organizations and groups join social networks like Facebook, MySpace and Twitter.

Social Networks

While email groups act as a secure environment to discuss LGBTI issues, more individuals, groups and organzations are beginning to get comfortable with public media such as Facebook and MySpace for advocacy and campaigns. Forum for the Empowerment of Women, BTM and the transgender group Gender Dynamix each have a Facebook group but with little activity. Recently a group called The Killing of Sistahs was set up by a group of activists on Facebook to highlight the rampant murder and rape of lesbians in South Africa. This is the group’s statement on Facebook:

Hands up, how many of you have heard of Matthew Shephard? Yes, that’s right, he was the American gay student who was tortured and killed for being homosexual. Now let’s take it closer to home. Hands up, who has heard of Madoe Mafubedu? No takers? It seems our community isn’t noticing what’s going on in our own backyard. OK then, she was an openly lesbian, 16-year-old who was repeatedly raped and stabbed until she died.

Killing of Sistahs has by far the largest membership and is the most active of all the groups, possibly because there is a specific focus — violence against lesbians in South Africa, whereas the other groups are organizationally focused rather than issue-led.

On July 20, the SA Sun published a horrendous homophobic article, Call me names, but GAY is not OK (PDF file), in which the author, Jon Qwelane, likened the marriage of same-sex couples with marriage to a goat. Within 24 hours, the LGBTI community had set up a Facebook group, Appalling Homophobia, released press statements via email, set up various websites and blogs, and started a campaign to insist on an investigation by the SA Human Rights Commission and the Press Office.

Like Killing of Sistahs, this group has a specific focus and is campaign-led. In just two weeks the membership has risen to nearly 3,000. The group is actively involved with calling for the removal of the author and appears to have taken on the role of monitoring homophobia in the South African media. Like any campaign, making a Facebook group meaningful requires commitment from both the organizers and members, and Appalling Homophobia has both of these.

Blogs

One of the limits of news sites such as BTM and advocacy/campaign sites like CAL is they don’t provide commentary and personal experience of LGBTI people. Blogs counter this and though the number of blogs by LGBTI persons on the continent are still few and far between, they are growing. Blogs like Gay Ugandan, Naija Homo, Black Looks (my own blog) and My Haven are crucial because they not only shout the words “I exist” to those who continue to deny the lives of African LGBTI persons, they politicize the personal and make the voice and experience more powerful. As Rants and Raves of a Gay Kenyan Man writes on his blog tagline:

In the wider scheme of things, I don’t exist. The Kenyan gay man is a myth and you may never meet one in your lifetime. However, I and many others like me do exist; just not openly. This blog was created to allow access to the psyche of me who represents the thousands of us who are unrepresented. I know it’s anonymous and thus contradicts the essence of what I am aiming to do. But if it does inform, educate and demystify the Kenyan gay man, then the purpose is served.

My own experience of using these sites is mixed. Although BTM acts as a portal of African LGBTI news, I find the lack of opinion and commentary means there is often little depth and therefore one does not always get a full understanding of the issues. The same applies to Facebook groups which simply act as an introduction to an organization or website rather than as a tool for discussion or raising awareness around issues.

If the creators of the site are themselves not seen to be interested in furthering discussion then I as a user will not return. Facebook groups like “Appalling Homophobia” and “Killing of Sistahs,” which have a better focus, will draw in my attention and it is to these two sites that I return regularly. The same goes for the LGBTI blogs which are updated regularly. Because they provide both reportage and commentary as well as making the connection with personal experience, they provide a far more interesting experience for me personally.

The coming out online of the African LGBTI community is still very much in the early stages. In by far the majority of countries on the continent, same-sex relationships remain illegal so there is much work to be done both in decriminalization but also very much in changing attitudes and perceptions. African LGBTI people owe much to Simon Nkoli who rejected the idea that his blackness and gayness were separate. On the contrary, they are both an integral part of the same experience and not in opposition to each other.

Sokari Ekine is an activist with a background in human rights in Africa. She presently works with The Global Women’s Strike and Kabissa: Space for Change in Africa. Sokari blogs at Black Looks, Lovinsky Pierre-Antoine and Niger Delta Solidarity Campaign, and is the African correspondent for MediaShift.

Digging Deeper::Commenters Mix Conversation, Self-Promoting Links to Defeat Filters

Wed, 06 Aug 2008 15:51:43 -0800

There was a time not too long ago when you could spot spam comments on a blog from a mile away. There were too many links, the comment was off-topic, and they were trying to promote a pyramid scheme website. But as human and automated filters started catching problematic posters, their techniques became more sneaky. Soon, there were comments that were on-topic but included a link to a product; or, the comment began with a chipper compliment to the blogger but ended with an off-topic promotion.

When commenters include links promoting their own services or blogs, they are fine as long as they remain relevant to the topic of the discussion. But more people are pushing that line every day. Now, I end up scratching my head about comments like this one I received on MediaShift about a story on Brightcove’s video service:

As everyone knows by now, video is very exciting. I think in the next few years people will discover that video is appropriate for certain areas of the consumer market; right now it seems like everyone wants to use video for everything. I think the small business arena will benefit the most from video which is pretty much the thesis behind Jippidy.com. —Anthony

While Anthony doesn’t include a link in his comment directly to Jippidy, he does include his Jippidy email address when he made his comment — so I can see that he works there. Not surprisingly, there’s a nearly identical comment on my video-advertising story, left by George, who links his name directly to Jippidy.com. So it appears that they are making a comment about online video on stories about online video. But the real purpose is to get that link to Jippidy and spread the word about their site, without making a comment about the story itself.

(In fact, a Google search for everyone knows by now, video is very exciting turned up 591 search results with the same comment popping up on sites such as Wired News and Lost Remote.)

So where do you draw the line as a site publisher? When does a comment cross the line and become an irrelevant a commercial message? And what about commercial messages that are relevant to the conversation — shouldn’t they be allowed? Many publishers say they can filter out comments that go over the line, while others such as Newsvine and MSNBC put up stringent registration regimes to keep unwanted commercial messages at bay.

Recently, I put this question to my Twitter followers: “When should commercial messages and promotions be allowed in online comments, how do you draw the line?”

Here are some of their answers:

Howard Rheingold (author/blogger and professor): People can link back to whatever they are selling only as long as their comment actually adds to the particular conversation.

Jay Rosen (author/blogger and professor): When you’re pulling more from the conversation than you are putting in with a relevant link, you crossed over.

Lisa Pickoff-White (multimedia reporter/producer): Just debated this myself and posted a link to a report in a comment on Salon because it was on topic and added value.

In my conversations with bloggers and site publishers, they said there were many cases of judgment calls — comments that sounded good at first but didn’t pass the smell test. Steve Hall, who runs the Adrants blog covering the advertising business, says he depends on automated filters and his own common sense.

“It’s all in the eye of the beholder but yes, this sort of comment/forum spam is annoying,” Hall told me via email. “Thankfully, on Adrants, I don’t see much of it due to some pretty industrial strength filters. But these messages can appear organically in the middle of a comment or a post. Some are simple, innocuous references to a company that is completely in line with the subject matter of the comment/forum. Other times, they are blatant self-promotion…If all it amounts to is self-promotion and offers nothing to the comment/forum topic, I’ll delete it.”

Now it’s confession time. I’ve tried to promote MediaShift by having a freelancer leave comments on relevant blogs with a link to MediaShift. I directed the freelancer to make comments responsive to the blogs’ content, but the promotion only lasted a few weeks. Now I wonder whether I was crossing a line by trying to increase in-bound links to MediaShift.

Andy Sernovitz literally wrote the book on word-of-mouth marketing, and also helped create an ethics guide for marketers who are trying win over bloggers and online audiences. Sernovitz says there are no gray areas.

“Those kinds of mixed messages, where [commenters] contribute to the conversation but are shamelessly promoting themselves — most people in the word-of-mouth marketing ethics world would say you should delete those messages,” Sernovitz said. “You already are getting a place to put in your comment [on a blog], and you get to list your website. So adding another promotion for yourself [within the comment’s text] is really taking advantage of the publication….You should always disclose who you are and you should follow the rules set out by the blog.”

(Note that the MediaShift marketer never used pseudonyms and never broke a blog’s rules for commenting.)

Automated vs. Human Filtering

Larger news sites have to go through a much larger volume of comments, but they also have more resources in dealing with spam and unwanted commercial messages. The New York Times has human editors moderating every single comment left on blogs. Jonathan Landman, deputy managing editor at the Times, told me that he didn’t think sneaky commercial messages were a problem.

“When moderators see these [commercial messages] they don’t approve them,” Landman said via email. “But lots of people link to their personal blogs. Nothing wrong with that. Sometimes the line between these and commercial ones is pretty blurry. Obviously it’s impossible to report out each of these so we’re happy to err on the side of allowing people to link to their sites.”

Fair enough. But Landman also points out that there are subjects that can become rife with commercial messages — often placed by people who don’t disclose their connection to the product or service they are endorsing.

“In a few places this is problematical — for example, on travel sites where everybody knows that the travel industry does all sorts of things to try to influence reader-comment sections in its favor,” he said. “Big travel sites like TripAdvisor and Expedia deal with this on a large scale. For us it’s an issue, but a much smaller one. If we see something fishy, we don’t approve it. But I’m sure we miss things all the time. I don’t think, though, we’re seeing any evidence that commercialization of comments is causing any serious disruption.”

Now that MSNBC.com has bought out social-news site Newsvine, it is counting on the new division to help sort out valuable comments from irrelevant commercial ones. Their solution? Newsvine (and MSNBC) requires that people go into a “greenhouse” after first registering, a kind of holding pen that only allows people to write text comments without links. Because people have to jump through more hoops — sometimes waiting 48 hours to become full-fledged members — the impulse to spam the comments is blunted.

Mike Davidson, CEO of Newsvine, explained to me that the greenhouse method has its good sides and bad.

“The greenhouse turns spamming into a high effort, low yield thing, when what they want is a low effort, high yield thing,” he said. “On the upside, it keeps out the sorts of characters you don’t want, but on the downside, it does limit growth somewhat. When we were a startup we didn’t want to have the most users, but we wanted a good number of good users, and that involves turning away people at times.”

On Davidson’s own personal blog, he recently got a long, informed comment from someone who ended up pitching his business at the end. While it irked him, Davidson let the comment stay up because the person’s business was relevant to the blog post. One trick he says that Newsvine and MSNBC use is a brief JavaScript code that times how long someone spends writing their comment. If it is less than 5 seconds, then the comment does not get posted, as most “form spam” is carried out quickly by automated code.

“But you can’t publish things like that [as a commercial plug-in], because as soon as someone releases a WordPress plug-in that does that, then all the Russian bots will figure out a way to delay their form posts by 5 seconds,” he said.

The cat-and-mouse game between spammers and site publishers will continue, with each side coming up with ways to game — and protect — the system. For each new CAPTCHA engine, there will be a spammer who can cleverly look like they are responding to the previous comments while linking their name to a site running a pyramid scheme.

I had heard that you can increase your search engine optimization (SEO) by getting in-bound links to your site, including from other blog comments. However, word-of-mouth marketing expert Sernovitz said that’s not true for links in comments at this point.

“That usually doesn’t work anymore,” he said. “Most of the blog platforms put in no follow code for links in comments and the search engines don’t pay attention to them. So links in comments don’t drive search engine traffic.”

Sure enough, the link that the Jippidy folks put into MediaShift has “no follow” code around the link, generated by Movable Type, which takes away its SEO value.

Community-Filtered Comments

Rather than rely on human editors, automated filters or registration schemes, some sites rely on the community of readers to filter comments, with users voting each comment up or down, thus giving less useful comments less exposure. Steve Yelvington, a blogger and digital strategist for Morris DigitalWorks, told me that communities can police their own in many cases.

“I’ve found that the people formerly known as the audience are pretty good at handling the people formerly known as spammers,” he said via Twitter. “If people come together as a community, they develop community standards and ruthlessly reject deviants, but most news sites have weak community, even if they have busy commenting.”

The granddaddy of community-filtered comments is Slashdot, a technology forum that relies on people rating each other’s comments. And comments are the lifeblood of the site. Rob “CmdrTaco” Malda, who founded Slashdot, told me he’s seen a lot of variations of commercial messages in comments — but in most cases, the audience can see through the smoke-screens.

“I think the key difference is motivation: if you are posting to make your advertisement, no matter how valid your contribution, I think most people see through it and you tend to get moderated down,” Malda said via email. “But if your post is insightful, informative, or intelligent, no amount of commercial component will outweigh that. I think my audience has a strong BS detector, and a lot of folks are posting just so they can spin their message.”

In mature communities like Slashdot, it’s difficult to find acceptance for your commercial message, especially if it’s irrelevant. But in newer systems with less safeguards, spam and self-promotion can flourish. Where there’s a will to spam, there’s a way to get it posted. Longtime blogger and social media consultant Tish Grier told me that this issue is not going away with so many people determined to boost their commercial schemes through blogs and social networks.

“Perhaps it’s an issue that the business blogging and marketing communities have to address,” she said via email. “I know that sometimes they do. But the message doesn’t necessarily trickle down to the right people. And there always seems to be some new guru, every day, trying to sell another ‘get rich quick from blogging’ scheme involving spam commenting, faux social networking and the like. As long as people believe they can make big money from their blogs via ads, they’re going to do what they can to get traffic to them.”

What do you think? Are unwanted commercial messages ruining conversations on your favorite blogs or news sites? Or do they have a place in the conversation if they’re somewhat relevant? How do you draw the line on your own sites? Share your (non-spam) thoughts in the comments below.

Photo of Akismet spam filter by Jochen Wolters; photo of Rob Malda by Scott Beale, both via Flickr.

Embedded in Bowling Green::How Outside Firms Like TownNews.com Can Help Small Newspaper Sites

Tue, 05 Aug 2008 11:59:00 -0800

Recently, MediaShift started running reports from “embeds” at various media outlets and educational institutions. This report comes from Mark Van Patten, general manager for the online efforts at the Bowling Green (Ky.) Daily News.

I decided early on that the best strategy for our newspaper to grow its web presence was to not to hire people, but to find other firms to partner with.

This took us from working with a guy with a server is his apartment to working with a phone company and finally a newspaper-specific host/content management system. We gave up control over many aspects of our website in order to remain flexible.

Today, we partner with the largest newspaper Internet hosting publishing firm you’ve never heard of, TownNews.com. I’ve been the catalyst for the Daily News online activity since it began in 1995. The Daily News is located in Bowling Green, Kentucky, home of Western Kentucky University and the only place in the world where Corvettes are built. Bowling Green is located in southern Kentucky, 90 miles south of Louisville, 70 miles north of Nashville. The Daily News employs about 100 people in a growing county of 100,000.

I’m still the catalyst today for our online activities. Am I saying that with pride or braggadocio? A little of both, but more out of frustration. The problem? Only a handful of employees in the building are wishing we could do more online. But we’re as deep with features as most newspapers, despite our smaller size.

I’ve used the same strategy for our online newspaper as with any other venture in the newspaper business: try to hire or partner with people smarter than me.

Chris Houchens is a smart guy that I hired to bring a different perspective to our online newspaper. He had a marketing perspective with plenty of non-newspaper media experience. Be careful when you hire a smart guy, they have a blog and aren’t afraid to use it.

Reacting to a comment that Mitch Joel wrote in his marketing blog about print publications needing to become multimedia productions, Chris said:

But even at this very moment, the offices of newspapers, magazines, radio/TV stations, and other traditional media are full of people who: 1) don’t understand this; 2) don’t want to understand this; 3) are afraid of this; 4) feel that they are already on the cutting edge just by replicating their content online; 5) are so caught up in a traditional stylebook of the ‘way things ought to be’ that they are actively fighting online ventures.

We have all of those people in our building at the Daily News.

Enter TownNews.com

TownNews.com provides hosting and a publishing system for over 1,500 newspapers and shopping circulars. A newspaper entrepreneur (yes there are a few left) Marcus Wilson was working for the Bigfork Eagle and saw the potential in the hundreds of newspapers like the Daily News. We wanted more, but just didn’t know where to turn. His International Newspaper Network (INN) was the forerunner to TownNews.com, of which Lee Enterprises is now a majority partner.

Like the partners before TownNews.com, we have been the squeaky wheel that, hopefully, has kept them on their toes. We have pushed and they have pushed back sometimes, but we always have been pushing in the same forward direction.

Here’s some of what TownNews.com brings to the table to help newspapers “own the Internet” in their communities (CEO Marcus Wilson’s mantra):

> The Job Network: to compete with employment sites
> YP (Yellow Pages) Engine: a directory to compete with telephone directories online
> The Port: a social networking component
> Ad Owl: placing and paying for classified ads online
> Wheels Lite: automotive inventory management system
> Real Estate Lite: real estate inventory management system
> SWAT: a person that comes into the market to build revenue

Here is their current menu for newspapers. We have integrated all these modules into our site, except for The Port. We appreciate their efforts, but often ask them: “what will you do for us today?” We don’t want to be bleeding edge, because we can’t afford it, but we want to be leading edge.

With TownNews.com, we are backed with a staff of designers and developers that would be totally unaffordable to us. Our readers expect teeny-weeny newspapers like ours to have the same features as the big news sites. TownNews.com gives us a shot.

Underserving Newspapers

Yet, it is very frustrating that the very features that should be routine for a newspaper website cause me the most grief:

> Video player embed code doesn’t work after 24 hours because of their
link-naming convention.
> RSS feeds have no formatting. RSS readers are fed an unreadable block of text.
> The photo gallery is so poorly designed that it is embarrassing.
> Not enough capacity for a huge traffic spike /opportunity-missed.html

These sweet spots, as Houchens refers to them, for newspapers are woefully underserved by TownNews.com. Yet Marcus Wilson, TownNews.com CEO, touts their importance on a regular basis.

As with most partnerships, communication is important. TownNews.com is as good as the newspaper business at communicating with customers, i.e. very poor. TownNews.com knows we want to be among the first to implement new tokens, widgets, features, modules. Yet, more than once, our online director Houchens has learned of something totally new by serendipity.

I’m glad we hooked up with some smart guys at TownNews.com, but I wouldn’t be true to myself if I wasn’t constantly looking for other smart guys to partner with. Giving up some control has served us well and it’s a strategy most other newspapers would do well to follow: no matter their size.

Mark Van Patten isn’t as smart as he thinks he is. He has compensated by surrounding himself with smart people. As a result, he in his 38th year of working at small newspapers, starting on the street as an ad sales rep and working his way up to publisher. Currently, Van Patten is general manager of the Daily News in Bowling Green, Kentucky. He blogs, Twitters, Flickrs, Diggs, Stumbles, Tumblrs, and Woopras his way through the web and is Linked-in. He blogs at MarkVanPatten.com for business and GoingLikeSixty.com for fun.

Embedded at UBC::University of British Columbia Takes Integrated Approach to Teaching Journalism

Mon, 04 Aug 2008 14:51:10 -0800

“Multidisciplined” and “flexible” were just two of the words in a recent ad for a paid internship at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch newspaper. The posting listed a whole series of multimedia skills as mandatory. There was no mention of traditional journalism attributes such as accuracy, good writing or ethics, perhaps because it goes without saying.

The posting demonstrates how the demands of the industry are changing as news organizations grapple to reinvent themselves for the digital age. The issue for those of us who have moved from the newsroom to the classroom is how to make journalism education relevant for the 21st century.

As a result, money is pouring into new projects such as the Carnegie-Knight News21 initiative, bringing together 12 U.S. universities to “direct a bold, experimental digital media program” or the Tow Foundation grant to Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism for “the research and teaching of professional journalism in new and emerging media.”

These are much-needed programs and go to the core issue in journalism education about what and how we should teach at J-schools. It is something that we have wrestled with at the School of Journalism at the University of British Columbia. We are a small graduate school with around 50 students enrolled in a two-year Masters program.

When I joined in 2006 after 16 years at the BBC, we still had separate courses in news-writing, multimedia and research methods. Students learned key journalism skills such as strong reporting, as well as gaining a grounding in online writing or producing slideshows in Flash. But we found it provided a fragmented learning experience that didn’t make enough of the connected way in which journalism is evolving.

This past academic year, we decided to combine these three disciplines (news-writing, multimedia and research) into an ambitious team-taught integrated journalism program. Over two days every week for the two semesters, students receive training in core journalism competences. They get to apply these skills through assignments that take them from covering social issues in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside to tackling questions of diversity, with the work published in TheThunderbird.ca, an online magazine.

Questioning What Is News

The philosophy behind this change is to provide students with an integrated approach to journalism, taking its cue from the shift at universities toward interdisciplinary collaboration. This builds on the idea of convergence journalism with its focus on training students in how to report for different platforms.

But it goes beyond teaching the next generation of reporters how to tell stories and understand the best way to deliver that story, be it in print, in a podcast or in a Google map. While this is important, our aim is to reconceptualize what we mean by journalism in a digital age, when the boundaries of what is news and who is a journalist are becoming increasingly blurred. As Andy Guess writes in InsideHigherEd:

bq. In today’s landscape, defining ‘the media’ isn’t nearly as clear-cut as it used to be. Big-name newspapers and networks mingle with cable channels, all-purpose websites and blogs in the minds of the average news consumer, and for good reason: They are, in many cases, converging, with widely read blogs run by newspapers and online web stories originating from cable networks.

We adopted a business school model, bringing together a core group of academics and media professionals with different areas of expertise, from places as diverse as the BBC, CBC, The Globe and Mail, CanWest Global, and “60 Minutes.” As journalism itself gets more complex, teaching in silos is no longer appropriate.

Fortunately we had buy-in from all team members — even from the ones who were self-professed digital newbies. Of course, there were different points of view but these took place in a collaborative environment without rancor. It probably helped that we are a small and relatively new J-school — just 10 years old — so there are no political empires to defend.

Getting such a project off the ground requires a high level of coordination. Much of our time over the summer of 2007 was devoted to devising a syllabus that coherently blended the different elements that make a great journalist. From a practical point of view, this involved breaking down who was teaching what and when, down to the hour of each day, and then making sure the syllabus ran on schedule.

Demands on Students

Part of our approach involved decoupling journalism from any particular medium, not just in the curriculum but also in the minds of students. On Day One at the school, we ask students where they see themselves working. For many, journalism is equated with a career in print, where it is simply about good writing. This is something that other J-schools face, what Jo Geary at the UK’s Birmingham Post described in a discussion on the Online Journalism Blog on the role of J-schools as a “rather outdated, ‘mono-medium’ view of working in journalism.”

The hard part, though, is trying to do all of this in 24 weeks, even with two days of classes every week. Many students come in with little or no journalism experience. By the end of the first year, they have to learn to research, report and write accurately and fairly, acquiring a wide range of technical skills working in sound, vision and code.

If that were not enough, we also want students to gain a conceptual and critical understanding of what makes journalism, how it is changing, and to experiment in new forms of media such as blogs. The demands on today’s students are much higher than when I went to J-school more than 20 years ago and reflect the complex industry they are entering.

After just one year, it is too soon to reach a conclusion. But the students landed some great internships over the summer from the Village Voice in New York to CBC London to Deutsche Welle in Washington, D.C., and three won scholarships to the student newsroom at the Online News Association annual conference in September.

This summer we are revisiting the course, seeing where there is room for improvement. As Emap’s David Cushman observed in the discussion on the Online Journalism Blog, everything is in beta now and university courses should be no different.

Just as prospective journalists are asked to be flexible and multidisciplined, so should J-schools. Technology is enabling new forms of journalism and new news outlets that were unimaginable a generation ago. But journalism is too important to be left to the technologists alone. Journalism educators have a vital role to play in helping students gain the conceptual, critical and practical skills to flourish in today’s newsrooms and the newsrooms yet to come.

Email Roundtable::Creating a Video to Help Educate People on Fair Use

Mon, 04 Aug 2008 13:20:41 -0800

Last week, I ran the first part of a special three-part series on fair use in online video. With the release of the new Code of Best Practices in Fair Use of Online Video, the question was how this Code might help video producers, remixers and mash-up artists use copyrighted works legally under “fair use” rules.

In the first part, the respondents in this email roundtable talked about what the Code means, how they might put it into practice, and some thoughts on the way artists work without thinking about the law. Now we turn to ways that people think the Code could be spread, and what role the video-sharing sites might play in that. While representatives of YouTube, Veoh and Blip.tv were informed of the discussion or watched the discussion play out over email, none of them have commented publicly about what they think of the Code.

Most people have said they like what the Code says, but how can it be spread into the world of video producers? Can sites such as YouTube and Veoh help educate video mixers and producers in some way?

rx
political video mash-up artist at ThePartyParty.com

Why not make an “Idiot’s Guide to Fair Use and Best Practices” video, post it to YouTube, with YouTube featuring it on their homepage? It’s sort of in their interest to do it, and as I said, I found the Best Practices very helpful. Sort of like knowing how to balance your checkbook, which I’m not very good at either.

Peter Jaszi
law professor at American University and co-chair of the Code of Best Practices committee

I know that Blip.tv has alerted its users to the existence and value of the Code, and we hope that other sites will do likewise. Our experience with the Documentary Filmmakers’ statement also suggests that — even in this day and age — it’s important to get durable paper copies into the hands of as many makers as possible. And, of course, the Code itself and various related materials are available at the Center for Social Media website.

Soon, we’ll be opening a space in which controversial examples will be posted to generate discussion around what’s fair and what’s not. Incidentally, I love the idea of a video illustrating fair use and the application of the Code. That’s something we need to work on.

JD Lasica
co-founder of Ourmedia media-sharing site, new media expert and videoblogger

That’s a great idea, rx! Seriously. I could see a collaborative effort. Maybe a round-robin of participants talking about various aspects of the code for 30-60 seconds apiece, with someone stitching it all together. I’ll take part, if others will.

I suspect we won’t see the video hosting sites incorporate the Code into their upload process, for both user-interface and legal reasons. Anything that slows down the process is a barrier. Anything that offers a hint of legal advice worries the lawyers. But I hope we will see some sites either point to the Code from somewhere on their site — perhaps as part of a Learning Center or Community Forums or Customer Support — or summarize its chief points.

Too many sites are still wearing blinders and leaving their users to fend for themselves. Certainly, most users won’t care — they want to produce videos, not read legal guidelines — but the Code can help inform those who want to dive deeper or those who want to know why their content was removed.

Owen Gallagher
digital media entrepreneur; founder of TotalRecut, a network of fans and creators of video remixes, recuts, and mash-ups

I really like rx and JD’s idea too, and I think it could be a great way to help expose the Code to the world of online video producers. Another thought could be to run a video remix challenge, similar to the one we’re hosting on Total Recut at the moment (What is Remix Culture?), to get people thinking about what the Code and fair use itself really means to them and to help others better understand the concepts involved.

I do agree with rx’s earlier point, however, that the last thing an artist is thinking about when creating art is the law. Sometimes the boundaries of the law need to be tested in order to create new industries and new ways of doing things. After all, and rather ironically, this is how Hollywood itself became established, right? Pirates using Edison’s patented motion picture methods fled to the West Coast where it was more difficult for the MPPC to enforce its patents. And the rest, as they say, is history.

In terms of video hosting sites incorporating the Code, I feel that JD’s instinct is right and most of the major sites would be unlikely to slow down their upload procedure or get involved in potential legal entanglements as long as they can avoid it. I do think, however, that some of the niche sites like RemixAmerica.org or our own TotalRecut.com are in a good position to adopt the code in a meaningful way and I would hope that we can effectively do so in the near future.

*****

Stay tuned for the final part of this email roundtable, which will cover the possibility of changing the copyright law so that remixers and other online video producers can better understand what they can use legally in their mash-ups.

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Email Roundtable::Creating a Video to Help Educate People on Fair Use