Session 1: How Technology is Changing Public Journalism

Leonard Witt

• Journalism, as we know it, is broken
• 1988 elections were controlled by the “spinmeisters”: it was flag factories, Willie Horton and that photo of Dukakis in the tank
• General idea: Move away from the “horse race mentality” (“Who’se
  ahead? Who’s behind?”) and bring back discussion into the public sphere
• Because of public journalism, we have a body to critique mainstream journalism
• Gillmor: “If you’re not sincere about something, over a period of time, you’ll stop”
• Treating the audience as citizens, not consumers
• PJ reporting is not only on the extremes, but the middle gound
• PJ still not reaching out to all communities, especially disenfranchised ones (“judging by the ethnic makeup of the room”)

Dan Gillmor

• Being blogged immediately teaches journalists a lot about how they’re doing
• His publisher is handing out a free copy of his new book, We the Media, to everyone in the room later.
• Showed
  video he took in Tokyo showing a handheld that scans RFIDs of bottles
  of drugs — scanning one, the handheld says “this will conflict with
  your prescription”; another bottle scanned makes the unit say “this has
  expired”
• Not only will every person have a story — every thing will have a story too.
• Image of Lynndie England and leashed prisoner at Abu Ghraib: it’s hard to keep secrets now
• Image of Treo running RSS software
• Image of man in surgical mask behind phone display: The news about SARS was spread long before the media did it via SMS
• If journalists are going to be learning blogging, they should be using tools that make it easier
• We the Media is “not just about weblogs, but something bigger than that.”
• Image of GPS phone: Maps of Tokyo, a notoriously difficult city to navigate
• Image of Swe-Dish: satellite dish in a briefcase. $100K now, $1M back during Iraq War I
• Image of MoveOn.org: It’s possible for anyone with just basic off-the-shelf software and hardware to make their own agitprop
• Self-assembling journalism: aggregator blogs, wikis (image of Wikipedia — “journalism is just beginning to understand wikis”)
• Wikipedia: “First absolutely open-source journalism” project that he’s heard of — brief explanation of wikis.
• Intriguing
  part of wikis: trolls can wreck the comments section of a blog or
  discussion board, but when anybody can fix the vandalism, it tends to
  get fixed.

David Akin

• When he first made the leap from print to broadcast journalism, the best advice he got was to “just be a tourguide”
• Praised Dan Gillmor as being one of the best tour guides to the tech world

Leonard Witt

• Journalism is now in the middle of a transformative period, thanks to new tech
• Everyone has their own printing press
• “How can I use these tools to get my audience involved?”
• Citizens are getting involved in public journalism at lightning speed
• OhMyNews: Korean participatory newspaper — 30,000 contributors, all citizen-produced — there’s an English version now
• Another example: Back-to-Iraq.com
• “Through blogs, public journalism has new DNA”
• The old way of public journalism: face-to-face meetings, took too much time, episodic, the journalists did all the talking
• The new way: Now we all own presses. It’s the citizens who are now influencing things.
• A first: the DNC letting bloggers in — they got more press than the press themselves
• Quote from Orville Schell (see this NYTimes article),
  dean of the
  graduate journalism program at the University of California, Berkeley:
  “Obviously, the official media don’t quite know how to deport
  themselves in relation to the blogs. If they adopt them, it’s like
  having a spastic arm — they can’t
  control it. But if they don’t adopt it, they’re missing out on the
  newest, edgiest trend in the media.”
• Newspapers still haven’t figured out how to incorporate blogging into how they work
• We Media
• Story
  about pictures from the war (Abu Ghraib / caskets /
  behadings): At a conference, journalists kept asked amongst themselves
  whether they should run these gruesome photos — they
  were, in their minds, still the gatekeepers. A journalist called up a
  site running the beheading video of Nick Berg on his laptop. It no
  longer mattered whether the mainstream media would show the pictures:
  other people would. “There are no more gatekeepers.”

Q&A

• David Akin: This room is an elite talking to itself, talking about issues they find important
• Leonard Witt: We all have to our own affirmative action
• Dan Gillmor: Moore’s Law will make technology accessible in terms
  of affordability. The real hurdle will be intellectual and conceptual
  accessibility, and this will rely heavily on our educational system.
• Peggy Kohr: How do you find time?
• CTV news writer: Video of the beheading of Nicholas Berg — “It
  would be disastrous for journalists to engage in a race to the bottom”
• Marie France: Videos like Nick Berg’s pose a challenge to teaching journalistic ethics