Dan Gillmor on the Impact of Citizen's Media

Dan Gillmor talked about the impact of citizen's media, grassroots media, DIY media, whatever you'd like to call it.  Highlights:

The read/write Web is about low cost/not low quality.

Rocketboom is a sign of the future.

The newsmakers are also empowered now.  They can talk back to media.

The Daily Me is here:  roll your own reporting from variety of sources.  Also, the Daily We -- collaboarative nature of the community.  I'm skeptical of Digg, just because people vote for a link doesn't mean it's good.  Popularity is only part of the way there.  Need to factor in reputation of who is pointing to it.

We're moving from lecture to conversation.  And the first rule of conversation is to listen. This is not something that journalists do all that well.

The basic unit of all this is the link.  It's the Web's elemental unit.  We point out at others, at things we didn't do.  Lend our authroity to other material out there. The link is the curcial thing.  It makes fact checking global.

The best company blogs are not typically from the CEO.  Sun is an exception.  Jonathan Schwartz is doing something that is a must read.  Great insight.  Writes well.  Uses it to annoy IBM.

I see great potential for publishing full transcripts of interviews.  Sets contexts for quotes. 

News orgs & companies asking for help -- send us photos, etc.  People will participate in stories anyway, whether we ask them to or not.  Examples:  Jakarta bombing, first photos were on flickr.  London bombings, cell phone captured the iconic image of the event.

Zapruder film --- this has been done before.  what is different now -- we're are moving into a world where everyone has cameras, all the time, integrated with networks.  We can have instant distrbbution through networks. 

Imagine how the JFK shooting would be perceived if everyone had had cameras and was recording that day. 

We're moving to self-assembling newsrooms.  Command Post.  Global Voices online.

The community writes:  Wikipedia.  Recommend looking at Wikipedia in part if you want to learn about community.  Look at the meta discussions behind the articles.

Mashups.  I'm jazzed beyond belief about where this is going.  Connectinvg various data and services on the Web.  Won't take much skill at all in the future to do impressive things.  ChicagoCrime.org mashup as an example.

That's journalism, and it's a different kind of journalism.  I could think of 10 different mashups I'd do for a newspaper.

Leaving aside the copyright questions, that [mashups are] a stunning piece of commentary that is not native to my generation, but is native to people coming up.  The generation coming along that remixing media is 'well, of course you do that.'  We need to factor that into our thinking.  This is going to be a much biggger deal over time.

Ohmynews is the biggest experiement in the world today.

40,000 citizen reporters.  They've got a hybrid business model that works.  Tip jars next to articles.  Some writers have made thousands of dollars off of an article.

The real threat to big media --- it's not the journalists.  The real threat for the existing businesses is the world's largest classified company -- Ebay.  They've been taking revenue away from the news industry.  Also, craigslist.    Hard to compete with free.

How do we make sense of things -- Technorati, as an example. 

Still not very good this stuff, and we need to get better news reports.  More sophisticated tools.  Memeorandum.  "I'm dying to hear how he does this.  I'm wondering if it's all Gabe."

I'm intrigued by where he's going, and I think it's the first cut of something we're going to be using much more.

We need beter::

• converastion tools
• reputation systems
• news finding, reading tools
• content creation tools
• metadata, everywhere

The more engaged we are with the news, the more active we are in a political, social, community sense.  A wonderful outcome of re-engaging citizens with news that gets them off the couch and into assembling their own reports, to talking back, to doing their own journalism.  That could lead to more interest in a take action sort of way.

What should media do?

1.  Use these tools to move towards being part of the conversation.  Create blogs, podcasts, etc.  Beginning to get a piece of this.  Having comments.  This is all just a first step.

I'm glad the LA times did the wiki, however poorly they did it.

Using the tools of democratized media is fantastic.  Step one.

1.5  Use the tools to become the center or convener of the community conversations.  Even now, they have some credibility in their communities and could still do things.  Make the paper the convening point of the conversation.  Editorial page.  They are alrady having the conversation there.

2.  Bigger step.  Bring the people who have been 'just' the audience into the convesation in a fuller way.  Even to the point of being competitive with you.  Believing that the readers know more and understanding how wonderful that is.  Not threatening. 

3.  Don't stop doing the macro stuff.  But use the technology to go hyperlocal online to give people & advertisers a way to reach each other at the local level.  Untapped revenues there. 

Example:  distributed investiagative journalism project -- citizen watch on hurricane reconstructuion. 

Don't do this because you're afraid not to. Do it because it's fun.  Ultimate greenfield for journalists if they'll just see it.