Summer Portal

Summer Portal • Manifesto• Report Outline • Side Stories • Glossary
Guiding Doc • Case study format • Rejected text

Have a nice day, call anytime 917 523 3594

Looking for: Aggregator, News Agency

Case-study proposals

Roles

These should be defined in: Glossary

1. Authors: Commentators and reporters
2. Editors
3. Publishers
4. Distributors
5. Audience

Publishers

Defined

These media outlets typically integrate all of the functional roles described above under the vertical control of one entity. They include reporters, commentators, and editors to produce stories, and manage the publishing and distribution of the stories to their audience. Publsihers normally aim to build a loyal audience for a definable, consistent product and seel advertising and subscriptions. The overall editorial vision is more important than the identity or status of the authors and the publsihers put significant effort, usually with a professional staff, into maintaining those aspects of design, quality, timeliness, style, point of view, and coverage that they believe their target audience wants.

Classic examples: Slate and Salon. Huffington Post is more recent. (from pages 6-7 of A Typology for Media Organizations)

• http://slate.com
• http://salon.com
• http://huffingtonpost.com

Pegasus News

Local news for the Dallas / Fort Worth area. Produces original content from an editorial structure covering different fields -- managing, neighborhood, film, theater, photography/design, research, more. Pulls content with permission from 59 local "content partners". Registered users can add stories, events, photos, band profiles, lost pet notices, garage sale info. Users' ability to add stories is not particularly highlighted, especially in contrast to some other participatory sites. Users can comment on stories. Some news comes from Topix.

Some advertising is local. For example, the lost pet section has a banner for Adopt A Dallas Pet. Some, oddly, is of the "save on your RX" variety.

A feature called the "Daily You" presents news that is geographically relevant across generic site sections ("business," "sports" ...)

Bought by Fisher Communicatons in 2008.

Solo Journalists (SOJOs)

Kevin Sites - http://www.kevinsites.com -well-known SOJO for Yahoo! News

Vagabond Reporters International - http://vagabondreporters.com -young freelance foreign reporters operating mostly out of Burma. One of the co-founders had story run on front page of WAPO after cyclone last month.

Hanson Hosein - http://www.hrhmedia.com/page3/page11/page11.html -Canadian reporter who left producer job at NBC for entry-level SOJO position in rural Canada. He now teaches multimedia reporting at the University of Washington. We can look at Hosein himself or CBC program as case study.

Sites that try to do Citizen Journalsim but are mostly Aggregators

Newsvine

Launched in March 2006, acquired by msnbc.com in October 2007. Newsvine is in some ways an aggregator: it posts stories by the AP, ESPN, NYTimes, and NBC, as well as snippets and full text from local newspapers (Boston Globe, etc). Some stories are posted automatically, others are added ("seeded" in the site's terminology) by users. Wire articles (on "The Wire") are separated from user-contributed articles ("The Vine"). Newsvine claims that there is little or no editorial control exercised over wire reports. Users can comment and vote on articles -- highly rated posts will appear in better positions on the site. 90% of ad revenue from a post goes to its author.

More information available from the blog of founder Mike Davidson, http://www.mikeindustries.com/blog/

For a short tour: http://www.newsvine.com/_cms/welcome

NowPublic

aggregator -- little citizen journalism -- vc funded -- editors promote articles --

"Crowd powered media." Claims to have approx. 120,000 contributors in 140 countries.

High-profile deal with AP but not clear if any stories have been picked up. Press release from 2/9/07 says:

In the early stages of the relationship, AP bureaus will work with NowPublic communities in selected locations on ways to enhance regional news coverage. National AP news desks also may tap the network in breaking news situations where citizen contributors may capture critical information and images. NowPublic also will help AP extend its coverage of virtual communities, such as social networks and contributed content sites, Ferrara said.

Funded mostly by venture capital and some advertising. 12.5 million in venture capital.

Contributors unpaid but possible AP syndication leveraged as financial reward. (can we cite this?)

NP subscribes to a fluid definition of news and emphasizes “hyperpersonal” over “hyperlocal.” Still, most stories seem to be “newsy”, either national or international, and to originate from professional sources.

NowPublic lists three desired qualities for submitted news: 1. Your eyewitness account: Original, relevant information about a current event that you have actually witnessed, documented, or researched; 2. New information: bits of information you have collected, arranged, tied together and put into a context in relation to a current event; 3. Commentary: your advice or analysis directly related to a current event. (via http://www.nowpublic.com/newsroom/tips/news_values)

The site doesn’t seem to produce a great deal of original content. Even though original reporting is highly encouraged, “Contributors” often post newspaper and wire stories with a line or two of commentary, or more often, a brief summary. Others can then post videos or pictures to appear with the story, but most of these don’t seem to be original either.

In this sense, the site acts as a citizen aggregator rather than a publisher of citizen reporting. Front-page stories have between 50 and 200 views and a handful of comments. Top stories (ranked by users) featured on top of homepage, the rest arranged under sub-headings such as “health,” “sports,” and “world.”

Gothamist & company

A curated collection of links to local news articles. Includes links to food, sports related events as well. A significant number of snippet-length, editor-controlled content is posted daily. A network of 14 *ist sites, mostly US-based, 4 international. 2 sites are "on hiatus" (Paris, Miami). Original blog is Gothamist. Advertising units available; CPM ranges from $3 to $10. Other funding

Topix

Local -- user-curated -- social media -- little citizen journalism -- majority aggregated

Launched in 2004. More of an aggregator: "...aggregate news from thousands of sources, create thousands of topically driven news web pages and populate each of those pages with only news about that particular topic." (http://www.topix.com/topix/about). Forums opened December 2005. Editor-users and discussion in the Open Directory Project model added April 2007 (Topix founders started the ODP).

The site opens with the headline "Your Town. Your News. Your Take." and presents the name of the city in large type, along with sample posts from the local news forum. Most popular general news articles have a secondary position.

Location is probably identified by IP address tracing. Local news is provided by a variety of wire services and other, mid- to large-size publishers (Boston.com, MassLive.com, Cape Cod Times, others for Cambridge). Local business information is provided by InfoUSA.

Prominent on the site are discussion forums (the site claims over 360,000 Forums, 118,000 comments / day, 32.4 million total in June 2008). In the Cambridge forum, there were 2 posts edited in the last day, and 4 edited in the last week. Appears to be more social media than citizen journalism. National and international interest forums were much more active, with hundreds of active threads.

Vistors are invited by a banner to "Become a Topix Editor today!" Editors find stories from the forums, Net, or wire services, edit the stories (summary, headline, photos), and push them to relevant sections of the site. Editors can also contribute original reporting through this process.

McClatchy, the Tribune Company, and Gannett have invested in the company.

??

DetroitYES Forums

From the DetroitYES! Project [use of the ! is inconsistent]

From the about page:

The DetroitYES! Project takes on these questions by providing a setting where an audience of those who care can meet, discuss, and carry forward the evolving portrait of Detroit, far beyond the artist who started it, and guide the socially cutting edge city and region forward its uncertain future.

DISCUSS DETROIT!, the largest forum in the project, has over 41000 posts and 1900 pages (not clear yet if pages = threads in the common forum vocabulary). About 40 threads will be active on any given day. A fair number of threads reference, link to, and summarize news articles. The site is not positioned or used exclusively as an aggregator. Forum members also post original questions, commentary, and research, much of it informal.

One recent post on a police raid started with short commentary, expanded with links to local news article, analysis, and investigation: http://atdetroit.net/forum/messages/5/141046.html The aggregating function is not entirely through the explicit posting of news articles. The forum is a central location for news topic from many sources, including neighborhoods, alternative media producers, and personal experiences.

Yep

Allvoices Organizes "news, videos, images, and opinions" as they are tied to events and people. Thin definition of an "event": 1. Something that happens at a given place and time, something interesting, exciting, or unusual that we want to share with others and discuss! 2. Organized occasion: an organized occasion such as a social function or sports competition (from the about page, http://www.allvoices.com/about)

Posts UGC as well as wire service, newspaper reports. Allows comments on articles. Articles are surfaced by ratings. Each article has a "Q & A" section. Claims to be "open, unedited, unmediated, highly relevant". Traffic of top articles seems low; front-page articles have between 5 and 15 "views". Citizen-contributed articles are not prominently featured on the frontpage.

News Agency

Definition

Resells its stories to other distributors rather than seeking out its own audience. Reuters, AP.

Author-centric model

Definition

A single author or group of authors controls the publication of stories.

Audience-Contribution

Definition

Content creation relies on significant contributions from the community of audience-contributors who were not involved in founding the entity. Slashdot, YouTube, Flickr, Twitter.

• :Vocalo – (Public radio bold experiment, audience-generated)
  • todo: Tie to typology, additional content analysis of the site, and some up-to-date quotes as the project is really new and changing fast.
• Current.tv TODO

Being written:

• Global Voices by an Annenberg PhD candidate

The Forum – (audience-contributed, nonprofit, hyperlocal, all authors volunteer)

Summer Interns

Best of the ones we have; needs tying in to typology, additional content analysis of the site

• Backfence – (audience-contributed, commercial, hyperlocal, all authors volunteer, a FAILED site)
  • needs to be re-written from the ground up

• Baristanet – (Author-centric, hyperlocal, hobbyist business model)
  • todo: Tie to typology, some additional content analysis of the site, additional quotes, analysis.
• Ohmynews – (Publisher, international, pro-am, unique and possibly non transferable business model)
  • todo: This is a shortened and differently focused version of Mary’s. Needs re-writing to typology and format.
• STEP - (non-media nonprofit using online video for activism)
  • todo:Not a traditional case study, nor part of typology, but an example of non-media NGO. We have a 9-minute video produced by KSG class and a paper. Needs filling out, clean-up and tie into whatever our conclusion is about non-profits and new media.

Others

• Global Voices (Publisher with elements of agency and audience-generated, nonprofit, successful in everything but commercial revenue and mass media reach on non-crisis stories)
  • Lokman Tsui, Annenberg East, to write
  • Date expected for first edits: ??

Vignettes todo

• http://silobreaker.com
• http://chitowndailynews.org
• http://groundreport.com
• http://demotix.com - not yet online
• Village Soup
• Broowaha
• http://www.pegasusnews.com/about/
• http://rethinkcollegepark.net/blog/library/project-map/

To process:

• RocWiki http://rocwiki.org/ // http://civicwiki.org
  • more of a repository, but ours in Ann Arbor is used to document city changes, etc.
• New Orleans citizen media (MH has source through http://thinknola.com/ )

• Local news blogs, ex http://arborupdate.org
• Libraries and local news? (only a couple progressive examples)
• Local digital "newspapers" with organized funding, ex: http://www.metromodemedia.com/ and cousins
• Down to the scale of neighborhood-level discussion lists?
• CurrentTV -- Al Gore TV. UGC. Shorts. Pulled from audience content in some way. They pay for it. They buy all the rights forever and always. Aspiring producers go here to get their stuff? Learn stuff? Launching an IPO.
• The Root. Af am. target. Owned by Wash Post. Not user generated. [started by Henry Louis Gates]
• WikiLeaks
• GroundReport -- an attempt to do national news, most of it submitted by users [actually aiming to do WORLD news - PM] [audience-generated content] [global scope]
• ChiTown Daily News. Knight Grantee. Ex-journalist started a paper. [all-volunteer staff] [Publisher] [local]

notes

lots of experiments in organization, presentation, new techs that allow this happen (structure, presentation) or getting new authors online; little focus on new way of content production. Anyone using crowdsourcing?

Forums -- Wikis -- Blogs -- "Newspaper sites" (ex MetroMode below, describe this better) ad-hoc, citizen funded

What is linkjournalism?

Is the process of reporting changing?

Just new ways to express themselves and reach the end user?

Include the population size as well publication reach (census + reported stats) to give some perspective. The Off Track video is one ex.

Look at what they're doing in terms of community

• • commercial more/less
  • localized topics?
  • cit journ or social media