Summer Portal

Glossary

Report Outline

Possible Case Studies / types of local media:

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

• 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]

from Persephone 6/4/08

Check out: Village Soup Broowaha http://www.pegasusnews.com/about/ http://rethinkcollegepark.net/blog/library/project-map/ For ANY sites you look at, worth putting the URL and categorizing it with the typology categories. It will be useful to have as many examples of each type as possible, we'll put a table of them somewhere. Have a nice day, call anytime 917 523 3594

Emailing the report from 2005 conference to you (large PDF) as it's not online at teh moment. Take a look. Ask Carey if there's a way to print double-sided and bind, I'd like to have a paper copy for reference.

Looking for: Aggregator, News Agency

Case-study proposals

• DetroitYES forums, many other examples http://detroityes.com/

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.

Aggregators

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.

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

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

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
• :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.
• 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: ??

Notes from case-studies

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

todo

A couple lines on each, differences between them

• http://www.topix.com/
• http://allvoices.com
• http://groundreport.com
• http://demotix.com
• http://nowpublic.com
  • commercial more/less
  • localized topics?
  • cit journ or social media

http://silobreaker.com http://chitowndailynews.org

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?

What is linkjournalism?

Is the process of reporting changing?

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