If you have neighborhood blog, newspaper Web site, or any other online resource for local news, The EveryBlock Widget is for you.

You choose one of 16 EveryBlock cities, type in a location, choose the types of content you’d like to see, and we give you HTML code you can copy and paste into your blog or site template.

You can show news at an exact address, a block-radius around an address, a specific neighborhood, or an entire ZIP code. You can tweak it to show just crime, or just crime and building permits, and so on. You can also choose exactly which media sources you’d like to display.

Here’s an example: all of the news near EveryBlock HQ here in the Ravenswood neighborhood of Chicago:

Get more local news at EveryBlock(function() { var s, s1, widget = {"id":"everyblock-widget-1280844319498","metro":"chicago","news":{"location":"Ravenswood","n":"5","radius":"8","callback":"EveryBlockWidget.ebWidget_1280844319589"},"width":"480","height":"800"}; if (window.EveryBlockWidget) { if (typeof EveryBlockWidget === "function") { new EveryBlockWidget(widget); } } else { EveryBlockWidget = widget; s = document.createElement('SCRIPT'); s.type = 'text/javascript'; s.src = 'http://media.everyblock.com/scripts/widget.js?x=14'; s.async = true; s1 = document.getElementsByTagName('SCRIPT')[0]; s1.parentNode.insertBefore(s, s1); } })()

One of the best things we liked about developing this feature is the conversations we’ve had with bloggers, newspapers, and other news outlets to ask them what they’d like to see in a tool like this. For years now, we’ve been heads-down on the tasks of creating our infrastructure, obtaining content, and expanding to new cities.

Until today, we’ve had no official way to share content with other sites or to partner with news outlets in the cities we cover. If you’ve ever thought about partnering with EveryBlock, we’d love to hear from you. E-mail me directly at danx at everyblock or just call 773-321-8146. We’re specifically interested in how to make this widget better and encouraging adoption of it, but we’re wide open to all sorts of partnerships around news. We’d love to hear from you!

We have a few examples of partners who have already added widgets to their sites. The My Ballard blog in Seattle uses an EveryBlock Widget to create Ballard Wire to display all news in the neighborhood for all EveryBlock sources, including up-to-the-minute Fire department 911 dispatches. (Disclosure: MyBallard co-founder Cory Bergman is director of new product development at our parent company, msnbc.com, and works on EveryBlock as well).

The Gapers Block Mechanics political blog shows only "locations in the media" for certain sources near City Hall, so any time a news story contains "121 N. LaSalle", they’ll have it on their page.

Chicago neighborhood blogs Edgewater Community Buzz and the Sixth Ward blog use the widget to display news in their areas. Chicago Scanner, a site that broadcasts live Chicago police and fire communications, delivers all news in zip code 60629.

We see other uses for the widget as well. They can provide deep context for a block on the real estate sections for major newspaper Web sites, fodder for posts on neighborhood forums, and so on. Most of all, we’re interested in helping people make their block a better place. In order to do we need to hear from people and find out what you need, and we’re excited about it.

Specifically, we're looking for somebody to lead the growth of the EveryBlock community on our site, on social networks and in real life. This person would help grow our user community, help guide our development team to build the tools our community wants by being a liaison with our users, and help spread the word about EveryBlock by attending community meetings and guiding our social-media efforts.

It's a big, important job. Given that we're a small, "startupy" team, this person would have a ton of impact.

The position is based in Chicago. For more information, check out the more formal job posting. If you're interested, e-mail msnbcjobs@msnbc.com with the subject line "Community and Outreach Manager, EveryBlock."

Now, if you're a user of our DC site, you'll get notified about your neighborhood's demolitions, building additions and other types of building changes that require permits. If you've got more information about a particular permit, make sure to comment on it!

This includes traffic accidents, fires, EMS (emergency medical services) events and a bunch more, all updated every 10 minutes. (Here's an example Houston block page so you can see how the information is displayed.) For our Houston users, this is a great way to find out why you're hearing sirens.

With our focus on timely news organized by location, we think it's particularly important for us to offer a great mobile experience. Browsing your block's news from a desktop computer is one thing, but having the ability to view recent news near where you're standing, when you're out in the neighborhood, is useful and interesting. We've been thinking about these mobile implications for a while now, and ever since we launched our iPhone application, we've gotten a steady stream of feedback from people requesting an EveryBlock application for their type of phone, such as Android or Palm Pre.

As we thought about it, we quickly realized two things. One, we'd go crazy creating and maintaining separate applications for all of these platforms; it wouldn't be the best use of our time. Two, we can create a compelling EveryBlock mobile version without having to make native applications — by making a mobile version of the Web site itself. (This seems to be an issue a lot of Web developers are grappling with. See this Los Angeles Times article for some background.)

So we've built a mobile site, available now. Using an Android phone, Palm webOS phone, certain BlackBerry devices, iPhone or iPod Touch, point your browser at everyblock.com, and you should be redirected to the mobile version. If your particular mobile device isn't handled automatically, you can always go to m.everyblock.com manually. (That also works in a normal Web browser on a desktop computer.)

As you'd expect, the mobile site is heavily optimized for one use-case: finding recent news around where you're standing. For iPhone and Android phones (and possibly other phones with GPS functionality), we can automatically locate you and send you to a page tailored for your block. (You can also type in a location manually or select from a list of neighborhoods or ZIP codes.) The resulting timeline page has been designed to look and work good on small screens, while maintaining the same level of useful information as on our "full" site.

What does this mean for our iPhone application? The new mobile site lets you do pretty much everything the iPhone app lets you do, and the former works on more devices than just an iPhone. Plus, we can make improvements to the mobile site very easily; making a change to the iPhone app involves a much-criticized Apple approval process that can take weeks. We're planning to continue offering the iPhone app in the iPhone App Store, but we haven't decided whether to make improvements to it over time.

Give the new mobile site a shot and let us know what you think at feedback@everyblock.com.

Our friends at SeeClickFix run a site where you can report non-emergency community issues, like potholes, graffiti or street light outages. They've shared their data with us so that EveryBlock users will get notified whenever an issue has been reported nearby. Here's an example in Chicago.

Portland has consistently been one of the most voted-for cities in our homepage poll, so we've always figured it was only a matter of time before we added it. But what helped make it happen was the City of Portland's new open data initiative, launched a few days ago, which resulted in the city releasing a number of local data sets to the public. We've been working with city agencies in Portland for several weeks to collect, analyze and organize the data they've published, and we're happy with the result.

For launch, our Portland site will notify you of building permits, crime, liquor license applications, restaurant inspections and 911 calls in your neighborhood. That's in addition to the great assortment of local news we organize in each EveryBlock city, including locations in the media, photos, business reviews, real estate listings and more. Also, as in our other cities, Portland residents can post neighborhood announcements.

We're particularly excited about how quickly we were able to set up this site, due to the cooperation of the City of Portland and the fact they opened some of their city data in the first place. More and more cities are joining the open-data movement, and we're excited to be there for them when they're ready to pull the trigger.

Take a look at our Portland site and please help us spread the word!

Now, you'll get notified whenever there's a commercial real estate listing near you. It's an interesting way to keep an eye on what changes are happening in your neighborhood. (Here's an example of how it looks on a San Francisco block page.)

The data comes from Rofo, a search engine for office space listings.

First, we improved the signup options to give you more power and granularity in signing up for alerts. Previously, you would select a location (such as your neighborhood or block), select the types of information you wanted to receive (such as crime, restaurant inspections, etc.) and select a frequency for your e-mail (either daily or weekly). Now, you can specify the frequency for each type of information. So, for example, you can specify you want to receive crime alerts daily but photo alerts only weekly. (Technically, this was possible before, but you had to sign up for multiple alerts, which was cumbersome.)

Second, we've added a new type of alert — "as it happens." If you sign up for an "as it happens" alert, you'll get an e-mail as soon as information is published in your neighborhood, without having to wait until the next day's e-mail. This works with our new signup options mentioned above, so that you can receive as-it-happens alerts for announcements, comments and other time-sensitive neighborhood news while keeping other information to a daily or weekly e-mail. These alerts are much more useful for certain types of information, like neighborhood announcements, that might be outdated by the time they appear in the next daily e-mail.

Here's what the new signup interface looks like:

As before, you can sign up for these e-mail alerts by clicking "E-mail alerts" in the upper right of any block/neighborhood/ZIP page on EveryBlock.

Using data from GreatSchools, we now point you to recent reviews about schools in your neighborhood. This is similar to our existing "business reviews" section, in which we show you recent reviews from sites such as Yelp. Whenever somebody posts a review to GreatSchools about a school in your neighborhood, you'll get notified about it.

School reviews show up on your place page with an excerpt and link to the full review on GreatSchools. Here's an example.

Thanks to the folks at GreatSchools for working with us on this. Now's a good time to point out that we're always looking for more useful information to publish, so if you've got any, get in touch via e-mail at feedback at everyblock.com.

Education content on MediaShift is sponsored by Carnegie-Knight News21, an alliance of 12 journalism schools in which top students tell complex stories in inventive ways. See tips for spurring innovation and digital learning at Learn.News21.com.

Roughly two years ago, a group of prominent journalism educators, administrators and academics gathered in a room at Columbia University.

Attendees included Nicholas Lemann, the dean of Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism; Bill Grueskin, the school's dean of academic affairs; Clay Shirky, the noted author, academic and adjunct professor at New York University; Jonathan Landman, who was then a top New York Times editor overseeing the paper's online operations (he's now its deputy managing editor); and Duy Linh Tu, an assistant professor and the director of digital media at Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism. Notably, the meeting also included representatives from Columbia's Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science.

"It was just a small room with eight or 10 of us talking about how we can work together and combine forces between the engineering school and our school," Tu said. "Part of the reason for it was that so much of journalism is online now ... there is a lot of potential that hasn't even been tapped."

That meeting, along with a lot of other discussions, planning and hard work, eventually led to Columbia's April announcement of a new Master of Science Program in Computer Science and Journalism. The program will kick off in fall of 2011 with an expected first class of roughly 15 people.

As MediaShift contributor Megan Taylor outlined in a post last year, many of today's programmer-journalists got to where they are thanks to self-directed education and hacking together courses and other educational opportunities to build their skills. But the new Columbia program, along with other initiatives, suggests that the next wave of programmer-journalists could be trained in specialized education programs that combine a traditional engineering/computer science degree with a traditional journalism education. Universities are working to either alter existing journalism programs or create new joint degrees to formalize the training of these workers.

Along with the Columbia program, Medill has been graduating programmer-journalists since 2008, and Georgia Tech is also home to a class in "computational journalism" taught by computer science professor Irfan Essa. It bills itself as "a study of computational and technological advancements in journalism with emphasis on technologies for developing new tools and their potential impact on news and information."

Along the same lines, former Washington Post database editor Sarah Cohen is now the Knight Professor of the Practice of Journalism and Public Policy at Duke University where her focus is on computational journalism. She recently worked with engineers to create of a new kind of timeline tool built for investigative journalists. Cohen sees a need for programs that bring programming and journalism closer together in order to help change the way newsrooms operate.

"There's a problem with the way things are organized in newsrooms," Cohen said. "Editors are word people and until that changes it will be hard to get reporters to focus on anything but words."

As with any emerging area or discipline, many big questions remain with programmer-journalist degrees. Are there enough people with a background in engineering or computer science interested in pursuing a career that's at least somewhat related to journalism? How many jobs are there out there for graduates? And what role will they ultimately play in journalism?

One of the basic questions about the new Columbia program is exactly how it differs from multimedia journalism programs and instruction.

"I've learned by having to do a bunch of interviews and explain the program that a lot of people confuse it with building websites or learning to use Flash," said Tu. "We have a great program that does that. The analogy I like to use is that our students in the digital media class in the regular program use Photoshop or Flash; people in this degree would invent Photoshop."

Here's what Julia Hirschberg, professor of computer science at Columbia's Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science told Wired in the spring:

The IT Department [at a news organization] comes up with software programs that the journalists don't use; the journalists ask for software that is computationally unrealistic. We aim to produce a new generation of journalists who will understand both fields.

Applicants to the program are required to have a bachelor's degree in computer science or the equivalent. As for the journalism side of things, one of the most important qualifications is a passion for news and information.

"Someone asked what kind of programming languages the student will be learning and that's kind of missing the point: They already know the programming languages," Tu said. "They know C and Java -- they are nerds who want to turn their nerd knowledge into developing whatever technologies can help with the creation of journalism or the distribution of journalism."

To make that happen, the journalism school is altering some of its existing courses. The standard entry level reporting and writing class is being rejiggered for students in the dual master's program, but Tu said the students will absolutely learn how to report, even if that's unlikely to be their role in the workforce.

"The course is being revamped with an emphasis on the profession and teaching them how to be a journalist and [to get them] thinking of how they can apply what they just learned about the process of producing journalism to technology and how tech can make that better," he said. "They will learn to be journalists. There's no watching from the sidelines. They will go on their beat and find sources and have to understand that process."

He said graduates could end up in a range of workplace situations: at a news/information startup, as part of an in-house team at a news organization, or part of a team at an information-focused company such as Google.

Google also came up in a discussion with Rich Gordon, a professor and the director of digital innovation at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. He said it was the launch of Google News that got him thinking about the need to create what he calls "bilingual" people who are equally versed in journalism and programming/engineering.

That resulted in Medill applying for and receiving a grant from the Knight Foundation to create scholarships for programmers to study journalism at the school. To date, nine students have received the scholarships, of which four have already graduated. They study at Medill for 12 months and exit with a master of science in journalism. Since they already have the programming skills, the focus is on building out their knowledge and journalism skills.

(Full disclosure: Medill is a longtime sponsor of MediaShift, and the Knight Foundation provided funding for MediaShift Idea Lab, where Gordon blogs about the scholarship program.)

"It I can have a really great programmer and make them literate in journalism, or take a journalist and give them some literacy in programming, then that's great," Gordon said. "The more we work on both sides of this gap, the more impact it can have. The premise is that we think it will be interesting to have bilingual journalist-programmers and they will come up with ideas, answers, programs and innovations that someone not equally proficient in both would not."

One similarity between the Medill and Columbia programs is that both are looking for people who already have programming skills. In each case, they say it seems easier to add journalism skills to a programmer, rather than the other way around. Brian Boyer was the first journalist-programmer to graduate from the Medill program, and he's now the Chicago Tribune's news applications editor. He agrees with this approach.

"Not to knock journalism, but I think it's probably easier to teach journalism to programmers than vice versa," he said via email. "It takes years of practice to become great at either, but the tools we use to make journalism -- words, etc. -- are generally accessible to a programmer. Whereas programming concepts are not general knowledge. Of course, we also use phone calls and other human contact to make journalism -- so the programmers do have much to learn."

Gordon said the challenge for these programs is to find programmers with a passion for journalism. After all, they may have to accept a lower salary in the world of news than what's offered to engineers in other industries.

"The biggest challenge is to find programmers for whom this would be a good fit," Gordon said. "All have done quite well in our program. I was dreading picking up the phone and having one of my colleagues say, 'Oh this guy who you admitted just can't hack it.' And that has not happened at all. In fact, it's been the opposite: My colleagues said it's one of best things we've done at Medill. They bring a new perspective to classes."

The Medill scholarship recipients have so far had no trouble pursuing a career in line with their degree. Boyer has even hired a fellow Medill grad to join him at the Tribune. In another example, two other grads have launched a start-up, Stats Monkey. It remains to be seen where Columbia's grads will end up, but Tu is confident that they will not go wanting for work.

For the educational world, however, the question is whether these kinds of programs should become an essential part of journalism schools, or if they will remain niche programs at a small number of institutions. How many advanced programmer-journalists will be needed in the present and future? Will the tens of thousands of dollars spent by the Columbia grads be worth it in terms of their career prospects?

"The question I have is, is there a market for it?" Gordon said about the intensive dual degree being pitched by Columbia. "I suspect that without significant financial support for students there isn't a market for it. But if there is a market for a two-and-a-half or three-year joint degree ... and if Columbia proves they can make that work, that would be fabulous."

As much as these are academic programs, they are built to graduate students that can have an impact in the workforce. On that point Boyer, the first programmer-journalist to graduate from Medill, seems fairly optimistic.

"In the last six moths, I've run across job descriptions from a number of news organizations -- at several old-school/printy shops, at AP and Reuters, and at the new-wave web-centric non-profit shops like California Watch and Texas Tribune," he said. "This last bunch ought to be especially interesting to the hacker journalist. From what I've heard, they're getting a lot of traction out of their news applications, relative to their written work."

Craig Silverman is an award-winning journalist and author, and the managing editor of MediaShift and Idea Lab. He is founder and editor of Regret the Error, the author of Regret the Error: How Media Mistakes Pollute the Press and Imperil Free Speech, and a columnist for Columbia Journalism Review and BusinessJournalism.org. He also serves as digital journalism director of OpenFile, a collaborative news site for Canada. Follow him on Twitter at @CraigSilverman.

Education content on MediaShift is sponsored by Carnegie-Knight News21, an alliance of 12 journalism schools in which top students tell complex stories in inventive ways. See tips for spurring innovation and digital learning at Learn.News21.com.

This is a summary. Visit our site for the full post ».

Education content on MediaShift is sponsored by Carnegie-Knight News21, an alliance of 12 journalism schools in which top students tell complex stories in inventive ways. See tips for spurring innovation and digital learning at Learn.News21.com.

In April 2007, Zephyr Basine arrived at school for her noontime biology seminar -- and immediately zoned out. Instead of learning science, the sophomore at the University of Massachusetts Amherst carried out a "fashion-scoping session." While the professor spoke about organisms and evolution, Basine focused on her fellow students' outfits and accessories, scouting for something new, chic or trendy.

Suddenly, mid-lecture, she beheld a sight that made her smile: A bright white shiny patent leather headband, sported by a female classmate two rows in front of her. Her brain raced with possibilities for other students. Should they go with patent, pleather or plastic? Should they rock out the wide or mini size? And should they throw it atop bedraggled bed-head or a dressier updo?

In the end, the biology talk didn't stick. "Science just isn't my thing," Basine admitted. But the class was a success from a couture perspective, and Basine has the blog post to prove it.

The shiny headband treatise was one of the first entries published on College Fashion, a blog Basine began on a whim while a UMass undergraduate. She quickly spun it into a brand name that's known and followed worldwide.

College Fashion is a trendsetter; it's the first fashion blog by college students for college students. It is also wildly popular, boasting more than one million page views per month. (It was identified to me by fans from St. Petersburg, Fla., to Singapore simply by its acronym, CF.)

"I've never been a person who has felt like school is that important, because I feel like I can learn a lot more in real life," Basine said. "I would kind of skip class a lot to do my site, but I still managed to do pretty well. I graduated with a 3.5 GPA. So it definitely didn't ruin my academic standing ... but CF definitely became my main hobby. It was my extracurricular activity."

Basine is part of a select group of students who have constructed worthwhile new media niches -- and become stars -- while still in school. Though student entrepreneurs are not new, it seems that more and more of them are taking advantage of the upheaval in the media world to stake their claim.

Here are just a few examples: Derek Flanzraich started a web-based satirical news program and an online television network, Harvard Undergraduate Television Network, while at Harvard University. Brian Stelter, now a reporter with the New York Times, began TVNewser, the must-read broadcast news industry blog, while at Towson University. Ryan Dunn and Dave Hendricks co-founded an online college media content sharing service while at Ohio University. Josh Abramson and Ricky Van Veen launched College Humor, the web's leading comedy site, while at the University of Richmond and Wake Forest University.

These pioneers, and the growing number of students following in their stead, are upending the old media establishment. They are also realigning higher education by creating personal media fiefdoms and full-scale organizations without relying upon traditional leg-ups like an internship, a campus newspaper editorial post, an advanced course, a campus work-study or a college degree.

For example, Wesleyan University junior Peter Frank works more than five hours daily on his student networking site CollegeACB. He still has time for classes, a club sport, and socializing, but, as he told me in May, "[ACB] is my primary collegiate experience."

An Imprint Magazine profile the previous May confirmed ACB as his top priority: "Peter Frank is a busy man these days. Three months ago, his company closed a major deal that increased their business and his workload tenfold overnight. Right now, he's designing a vision, developing new product features, and selling space to advertisers. Afterwards, he'll take a business call and reply to emails. And once he's done with that, he still has to study for a Psych final and get dinner before the dining hall closes."

For post-millennial student media entrepreneurs like Frank, college is not a way station on the road to success. It is not a farm system for enhancing future professional prospects. It is not a chance to earn credits and bide time for the next step. It is an end -- and an education -- unto itself.

Yet, the real learning is not happening in class. Instead, students' online start-ups and personal brand building have become their most influential educational vehicles.

"My schoolwork certainly took a beating as a result of College Humor," admitted Abramson. "I got so much more excited about building something real than working on a case study in business class or something like that ... Every free second I had was spent working on the site. You know, when everyone else was in the library working on schoolwork, I was in my room, emailing Ricky [Van Veen], trying to sell an ad deal or something else specific to College Humor."

Kelly Sutton has similar memories about his efforts co-founding and overseeing the student advice site HackCollege while at Loyola Marymount University. He began without a plan. Sutton, 19 at the time, enjoyed reading the popular productivity blog Lifehacker and simply thought, "Hey, there needs to be a Lifehacker for college students, and I'm going to do that.'"

In his opening post, Sutton confessed that he did not expect the site to make much of an impact. "We have joined the ranks of 100 million people in the blogosphere," he wrote. "They say a new blog is created every half second. So we guess 6:03:31.5 is our half second."

For Sutton, that half second expanded to more than three years, 10 semesters, and 500 posts. It spread to hundreds, thousands, then hundreds of thousands of unique visitors. It brought him to tech conferences across the country. It spun off a popular podcast, an online video series, a British version of the site, a technology consulting service, and even patented sweatshirts. It became the vehicle through which he obtained internships, media attention, public recognition, and a post-graduation job in New York City as a software developer at Blip.tv. Eventually, it consumed his entire university experience.

"The opportunities that resulted from HackCollege approached, passed and exceeded any definition of 'expected,'" Sutton said. "My later years of school were characterized more by flights to random ends of the U.S. than exams or term projects."

He noted, "It doesn't take much to start a blog and writing for it daily is not the most difficult thing in the world, but everything that you have to learn around doing that is really, really tough."

Almost simultaneously, three time zones away, Derek Flanzraich also found his primary collegiate experience online -- starting the faux-news web series On Harvard Time and the full-blown online Harvard Undergraduate Television Network.

"On a personal level, this is what I live for and I don't think I've ever learned more from any experience than I have with On Harvard Time and HUTV," he said. "When people ask me what I major in, I usually tell them 'extracurriculars.' As much as they usually think I'm joking, it's actually pretty serious. That being said, I'm a fine student. I've just made it pretty clear that that's where my focus has been."

The ultimate value of the university experience, in the eyes of undergrad entrepreneurs: The time and financial freedom it offers to experiment.

"I don't think I could have started my site had I not been in college," said Basine. "College is great because my parents paid for everything. I didn't have to worry about meals. I didn't have to worry about housing. And my classes were even really easy for me ... So I could just work on my site all the time."

Dan Reimold is an assistant professor of journalism at the University of Tampa. He writes and presents frequently on the campus press and maintains the daily blog College Media Matters, affiliated with the Associated Collegiate Press. His first book on a major modern college media trend, Sex and the University: Celebrity, Controversy and a Student Journalism Revolution, is due out this fall by Rutgers University Press.

Education content on MediaShift is sponsored by Carnegie-Knight News21, an alliance of 12 journalism schools in which top students tell complex stories in inventive ways. See tips for spurring innovation and digital learning at Learn.News21.com.

This is a summary. Visit our site for the full post ».

Education content on MediaShift is sponsored by Carnegie-Knight News21, an alliance of 12 journalism schools in which top students tell complex stories in inventive ways. See tips for spurring innovation and digital learning at Learn.News21.com.

What do you get when you cross a lawyer and a journalist? Most of the time, of course, you get a lawyer. You know: The kids who worked so hard on the college paper but jetted off to Boalt when the prospect of years of unpaid internships scared them off. Most journalists remember a few people like that. (I know a dozen or so.)

Sometimes, of course, you end up with a journalist: Take Adam Liptak, the New York Times lawyer who started writing book reviews and ended up covering the Supreme Court for the Grey Lady. The Fox News crowd has their own Liptak in Brooklyn Law School grad Geraldo Rivera. Michael Kinsley started working at the New Republic during his third year at George Washington Law School. But not every journalist who covers legal issues has the time (or the money) to get a law degree. That's where John Nockleby comes in.

For the past five years, Nockleby has been trying to construct a third breed of reporter/attorney hybrid: the journalist with a crash course in the law. To bring this new beast into the world, this avuncular, bespectacled, aggressively friendly law professor is prepared to push the limits of what you can teach someone about the American legal system in three and a half days.

Every summer, Nockleby's Journalist Law School (JLS) brings several dozen reporters to Loyola Law School in Los Angeles for 84 hours of lectures, seminars, and discussion panels on the law. This June, my colleague at Mother Jones, Stephanie Mencimer, who attended JLS in 2009, suggested I apply. That Stephanie found the program useful was a shock: She literally wrote the book on tort reform -- it's called "Blocking the Courthouse Door" -- and I never imagined that she had much more to learn about the legal system. On the other hand, it would be very useful to me to have a bit more of a background in the law. Covering civil liberties issues for Mother Jones, I run into a lot of legal documents -- habeas petitions, Office of Legal Counsel memos, and so on. So I applied and got accepted. Next thing I knew, I was in L.A.

The JLS program is centered around what are essentially miniature versions of standard first-year law classes: Constitutional law, criminal law, civil procedure, criminal procedure, torts, and so on. I had heard a lot of the basic concepts because my girlfriend (not a former journalist) is a law student. You might think a basic familiarity with the concepts would make the classes boring. But Nockleby, knowing that journalists are an "especially critical" audience, did an excellent job of assembling an engaging group of professors to teach the core classes. Even the most jaded of my fellow students seemed engaged.

The core JLS classes are supplemented by a series of small-group sessions focusing on more specific topics. I attended two on terrorism-related issues, and got a number of story ideas (and contacts) that made the entire program worthwhile in and of themselves. In addition, JLS offers a series of talks and schmoozing sessions featuring practicing judges and attorneys. The schmoozing includes one's fellow journalists, too, of course.


The "fellows" (that's what they called us) were a diverse crowd -- television, radio, Internet, and print journalists, with everything from a few years to a few decades of experience in the media. Our beats ran the gamut from local crime reporter to the New York Times' Mexico City bureau chief.

Why does Nockleby even bother to do this? At first, he just got tired of the complaining. Nockleby kept hearing complaints that people didn't understand the legal system -- and that the media did a bad job of explaining it.

"You guys keep going on about how the media doesn't get it," he told potential funders. "Put your money where your mouth is."

They did. The American Board of Trial Advocates (ABOTA), which represents top plaintiffs' and civil defense attorneys, wrote a big check. It has kept on writing them.

Ideally, the goal of the program is to provide an overview so that the particular legal issues journalists cover "can be placed in broader perspective," Nockleby said.

You'd be hard-pressed to find a New York Superior Court beat reporter who doesn't understand how that court works. But she might not know how that court's procedures differ from others, or how to find out.

"It's not that we can provide a legal education in three and a half days," Nockleby said. "We can't show journalists how to go about investigating a particular problem. But we can give a systemic overview so that problems get placed in a context where they make a lot more sense."

Is Nockleby's experiment succeeding? The reviews of the program are certainly positive. Then again, most journalists I know appreciate any opportunity to meet new sources and gobble up some background information -- especially if there are open bars involved. My fellow "fellows" appreciated the experience. If our reporting gets even a little bit better or more informed, that's what counts, right?

Nockleby's ambitions aren't limited to half-week fellowships, however. Longtime New York Times Supreme Court reporter "Linda Greenhouse had a year of legal education and that helped her tremendously," he said. "If everybody reporting on law had a law degree, that would be great."

But not every journalist can be Adam Liptak, or Geraldo. And while the Pentagon may sometimes wish that more military embeds had prior military experience, and scientists may wish more reporters had lab experience, that won't always be the case, either. Even Nockleby acknowledges that there's more to journalism that subject-matter expertise.

"All that is great, but more important is the ability to explain things in simple terms," he said. "A lot of lawyers don't have that."

Nick Baumann is an assistant editor at Mother Jones. He covers national politics out of the Washington, D.C. bureau. Nick's writing has also appeared in the Economist, the Washington Monthly, and Commonweal. Email tips and insights to nbaumann [at] motherjones [dot] com. You can also follow him on Twitter.

Education content on MediaShift is sponsored by Carnegie-Knight News21, an alliance of 12 journalism schools in which top students tell complex stories in inventive ways. See tips for spurring innovation and digital learning at Learn.News21.com.

This is a summary. Visit our site for the full post ».

4MR is sponsored by Carnegie-Knight News21, an alliance of 12 journalism schools in which top students tell complex stories in inventive ways. See tips for spurring innovation and digital learning at Learn.News21.com.

In this week's 4MR podcast I talk about MediaShift's Beyond J-School series so far, including the stories on teaching social media, the 5Across roundtable and Jen Lee Reeves' take on getting j-students over their fear of technology. I talked with Reeves more about how she is asking her students this semester to pay $36 each for Lynda.com courses on learning the basics of Photoshop, Illustrator and Flash. Reeves talked candidly about her students and their fears of failing with technology.

Check it out:

4mrbareaudio9310.mp3

>>> Subscribe to 4MR <<<

>>> Subscribe to 4MR via iTunes <<<

Listen to my entire interview with Jen Lee Reeves:

reeves full.mp3

Background music is "What the World Needs" by the The Ukelele Hipster Kings via PodSafe Music Network.

Here are some links to related sites and stories mentioned in the podcast:

Special Series - Beyond J-School at MediaShift

How to Conquer Journalism Students' Fear of Technology at MediaShift

Making a Change at Jen Lee Reeves' blog

Reporter's Guide to Multimedia Proficiency by Mindy McAdams

How Do I Teach Students to Integrate Multimedia Tools into Storytelling? at Poynter

AEJMC - Teaching Social Media in the Classroom at Reportr.net

Also, be sure to vote in our poll about what you think the biggest change is in journalism schools:

What's the most important change for journalism schools?customer surveys

Mark Glaser is executive editor of MediaShift and Idea Lab. He also writes the bi-weekly OPA Intelligence Report email newsletter for the Online Publishers Association. He lives in San Francisco with his son Julian. You can follow him on Twitter @mediatwit.

4MR is sponsored by Carnegie-Knight News21, an alliance of 12 journalism schools in which top students tell complex stories in inventive ways. See tips for spurring innovation and digital learning at Learn.News21.com.

This is a summary. Visit our site for the full post ».

Education content on MediaShift is sponsored by Carnegie-Knight News21, an alliance of 12 journalism schools in which top students tell complex stories in inventive ways. See tips for spurring innovation and digital learning at Learn.News21.com.

For decades, journalists in mainstream news organizations were shielded from the revenue side of the operation. Many argued their lack of knowledge helped avoid even the appearance of commercial influence in the editorial well. But with increased stress in the news industry and new disruptive technologies giving even entry-level reporters an understanding of audience behaviors and income streams, things have started to shift.

Journalism educators have increasingly been helping students learn the workings of the business side of news. The trend mirrors similar changes in the newsroom. Plus, with many journalists being laid off, having the business skills to run their own media enterprise -- whether it's a blog, podcast or independent news site -- is vital to many more people.

"It came to be recognized that journalists needed to play more of a role in the future of their enterprises," said Stephen Shepard, who talked to me recently in a phone interview. Shepard is the founding and current dean of the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism and former editor-in-chief of BusinessWeek magazine.

CUNY's J-school and a raft of other journalism schools and institutes have introduced business courses into their curricula, teaching students to read and create basic financial statements and the principles of media management. They are also launching new training programs for mid-career journalists and editors.

Janice Castro is the senior director of graduate education and teaching excellence at Medill. She told me that at Northwestern University, the Medill School of Journalism and Kellogg business school have cooperated "for a long time" in developing a media management and research center.

Full disclosure: Medill is a longtime sponsor of MediaShift.

Four years ago, as Medill revamped its curriculum, seats in two courses in media management at Kellogg were reserved for Medill students. Medill graduate students are also required to take either a course in "Audience Insight" or "How 21st Century Media Work," and have the option to take Kellogg classes in finance.

"We think it's really important for students who are going out to operate as journalists to understand the business of media," Castro said. "It's going to help them make better choices in where they're going to work, because they'll be better able to size up the company and its direction and its vision. They'll know more than the brand or the name of a big media organization. They'll be able to assess it."

Students will also better be able to help guide the organization strategically, according to Castro and Shepard. "When you have a student who's graduated and immediately put on the management track at a major media company, that's not something that used to happen," Castro said.

There's also increasing demand from students joining or launching startup ventures.

CUNY this month expects to announce the formation of a master's degree program in Entrepreneurial Journalism, further enriching and extending courses offered since the school's inception four years ago.

At the Cronkite School of Journalism at Arizona State University, the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship" is devoted to the development of new media entrepreneurship and the creation of innovative digital media products," according to its site. (Read this previous MediaShift article about how the school teaches digital media entrepreneurs.)

Retha Hill is the director of the New Media Innovation Lab at Cronkite.
During a lab-focused semester, Cronkite school students "have to think about the business implications of their ideas or the information they are gathering," Hill told me via email.

Even at Columbia University, where school founder Joseph Pulitizer in 1904 wrote that he found the idea of teaching business "repugnant," students are required to learn business principles. All Masters of Science students, about 85 percent of matriculants, take a class on the "Business of Journalism" that was conceived and introduced last year by dean of academic affairs and former Wall Street Journal Online managing editor Bill Grueskin.

The course includes a Harvard Business School case study about a Norwegian media company called Schibsted that moved its business more strongly into digital media; instruction on managing profit and loss in a business; the differences in advertising and circulation revenues; principles of ad pricing; and other business issues.

Grueskin told me via email that the faculty at Columbia overwhelmingly supported the course. In a letter to them, Grueskin wrote that while Pulitzer "went out of his way to exclude business courses from the curriculum," today "journalists are increasingly being called upon to make business models work. We owe it to our students to give them a grounding in that field."

Training institutes, too, are helping journalists and editors learn business principles.

The Knight Digital Media Center, based at both the University of Southern California and the University of California at Berkeley, in May held a week-long "News Entrepreneur Boot Camp."

Full disclosure: Knight Digital Media Center is a sponsor of MediaShift.

Attendees, many of them mid-career journalists, learned disciplines such as business models, building a feasibility plan, customer acquisition and web analytics.

The Poynter Institute, a Florida-based journalism think tank and training center where I contribute articles and have lectured on business principles, in July named two Ford Fellows in Entrepreneurial Journalism who are mentoring startup initiatives and teaching business disciplines.

While some journalism purists may bemoan what they consider fuzzing the lines between "church (journalism) and state (business)," I find the move to integrate business into journalism education encouraging.

It's healthy, I think, that reporters and editors now believe they should understand what it is that brings in the money that goes into their paychecks.

This is not to say they should pander to commercial or financial interests -- and there is certainly a danger as even junior reporters learn how many page views (and by implication advertising impressions) a story they produce garners. One journalism educator told me that even in his "little blog" he considered whether to disrupt the center column with an ad and make more money.

It's always been a balancing act, though, even if the rank-and-file weren't completely aware. At BusinessWeek, "ad placement was always an issue," Shepard said.

That even new J-school graduates now understand some of the struggles is probably a good thing -- as long as they also are grounded in what Shepard called the "professionalism and judgment" to not "cave in all the time to advertising demands in a way that would hurt the reader or viewer."

In the long run, those guiding journalistic enterprises must understand both the editorial principles that over time bring in and maintain a community of readers and participants, as well as the business principles that sustain the operation.

If they can do so successfully, perhaps the new news businesses they are molding and creating can then survive the fate of so many of today's severely stressed news organizations.

A former managing editor at ABCNews.com and an MBA, Dorian Benkoil has devised and executed marketing and sales strategies for MediaShift. He is SVP at Teeming Media, a strategic media consultancy focused on attracting, engaging, activating communities through digital media. He tweets at @dbenk.

Education content on MediaShift is sponsored by Carnegie-Knight News21, an alliance of 12 journalism schools in which top students tell complex stories in inventive ways. See tips for spurring innovation and digital learning at Learn.News21.com.

This is a summary. Visit our site for the full post ».

Education content on MediaShift is sponsored by Carnegie-Knight News21, an alliance of 12 journalism schools in which top students tell complex stories in inventive ways. See tips for spurring innovation and digital learning at Learn.News21.com.

In a time and age when many of my generation assume the younger generation understands technology, I have been surprised by the number of students who walk into my class and announce that they "don't know anything about computers."

It's a rampant attitude. I beg each and every student who says this to pretend they never said it and try everything I introduce to them in my class. Over the last seven years I've been teaching, I've seen a slow change that is now very obvious: It isn't just a belief that they don't know about computers, many students are simply afraid to fail.

I am open to writing about my professional failures for this site. I thrive from the learning experience that comes from doing everything I can, even if I fail. So my students' reaction to failure has been difficult to understand, and even more difficult to verbalize.

When they arrive in my class, I teach students how to go beyond what they already learned in the radio/television sequence at the Missouri School of Journalism. The students know how to produce stories for on-the-air and online. They know how to edit stellar video and audio. But there is another level of multimedia journalism that I try to help them add to an already solid base of knowledge. This can be scary, as many of my students are overachievers who are frightened to get a bad grade. They're afraid to jump into something new before they even have a chance to fail. I used to just think that was funny and it didn't interfere with my teaching. But lately I have decided it is time to teach my class differently.

In the past I taught students the basics of software like Flash, Photoshop and Illustrator. I introduced blogging, video conversion tools and many other web-based tools that can make delivering online stories a richer experience. The students who try it all walk away with a knowledge of how things work. But even more important, they understand how to talk about the technology. They may not be experts, but they can talk to an expert and be able to understand his or her needs when they work together on a project.

I will not stop teaching these tools, but I am going to do it with more help. I think I need to spend classroom time presenting my case for the basic knowledge of software instead of teaching it during class time. I plan on going about this campaign in a number of ways.

Here are the four main elements of my new approach:

1. First, I want to make sure my students know there is no other time in their life when they will have this much free time to experience and be curious about new tools for journalism. I'm handing them access to tools to explore and an outlet to share their lessons. Each of my students work in the KOMU-TV or KBIA-FM newsrooms. (KOMU is a university-owned local NBC station; KBIA is the local NPR station.) They also have a chance to work with a number of social media applications for each of the newsrooms.
2. Second, instead of focusing on the software in the classroom, I will spend more time showing examples of what technology can produce for the journalism industry. I hope to introduce my students to a number of people in the profession (thanks to Skype) who have a wide range of skills. I hope to use their backgrounds to explain why it's important to break past fear of the new.
3. Third, I have added five online courses from Lynda.com to my class, which my students will be able to take at their own pace. I will not teach software in class, but I will hold open, non-mandatory meetings for students who are still confused and want to work through the confusion.
4. At the end of the class, I will ask students to use the lessons they learned with Lynda.com to produce content that will benefit their online portfolio. I will expect examples of photo editing, graphic creation and, as extra credit, a use of interactive graphics. I'm hoping that by requiring content that will benefit the student portfolios, it will motivate my students to jump into learning software.

Not all of my students are afraid of technology. The shifts I am making in my class are focused on helping this group of students succeed just as well as the more fearful ones. And I'm ready to push ahead with these changes with the knowledge that they too could fail.

Jennifer Reeves worked in television news for the majority of her career. In the last six years, she has moved from traditional journalist to non-traditional thinker about journalism and education. Jen is currently the New Media Director at KOMU-TV and komu.com. At the same time, she is an associate professor at the Missouri School of Journalism and was a part of the inaugural class of Reynolds Journalism Institute fellows (2008-09).

Education content on MediaShift is sponsored by Carnegie-Knight News21, an alliance of 12 journalism schools in which top students tell complex stories in inventive ways. See tips for spurring innovation and digital learning at Learn.News21.com.

This is a summary. Visit our site for the full post ».

Education content on MediaShift is sponsored by Carnegie-Knight News21, an alliance of 12 journalism schools in which top students tell complex stories in inventive ways. See tips for spurring innovation and digital learning at Learn.News21.com.

As Australian democracy hangs in the balance, and with the outcome of the August 21 national election unlikely to be resolved for weeks, I'm considering the implications for journalism education -- and how we can invent new models for political reporting.

I am a former Australian Broadcasting Corporation political journalist who now teaches journalism in at the University of Canberra, which is situated just down the road from Australia's national parliament. Parliament House is home to the Canberra Press Gallery, the Holy Grail of Australian political journalism.

I made a small but successful attempt at innovating political reporting in the classroom through the employment of Twitter as a student-reporting platform in a Canberra regional election in 2008. But it's time my school, which bills itself as Australia's "Capital University," embarked on a political journalism project that marries journalism students and media-active citizenry with industry partners, new media players and civic agencies.

Such an approach could enable the implementation of a citizen-informed editorial agenda; the engagement of a now essential social media strategy; and the enhancement of industry partner's political coverage, with the social objective of enabling participatory democracy. It should also provide an opportunity for academic research, so that the outcomes can be appropriately measured and academically published, as well as being reported for mass consumption through a variety of media.

Problematic Australian political reporting, which became a theme of its own during the heavily stage-managed campaign, has been cited as one of the causes of this historic result: The first hung Parliament since World War II, and the upending of Australia's entrenched, highly combative, two-party democracy.

Journalists have been accused of producing superficial stories that were heavily influenced by polls and the major parties' political agendas, but light on critique and context. Citizen journalists bit back on blogs and Twitter, telling journalists to lift their game.

They complained about Press Gallery obsessions with predictions, personalities and political processes at the expense of policies. They also cited the impact of spin and campaign stage management on editorial agendas at the expense of independent, inquiring journalism as evidence of the need for changing practice. They asked why Australia's increasingly costly involvement in the war in Afghanistan wasn't probed during the campaign, and they wanted to know why both major parties virtually ignored climate change. This public critique of professional political journalism provoked defensive reactions from some reporters and triggered a vigorous Twitter debate on political journalism between the Fourth Estate and the New Estate. Witness the below exchange between a journalist and one of my colleagues at the university:

Four independent Members of Parliament, bent on upending the Oz political landscape, are likely to hold the Balance of Power in the new government -- and they've already taken aim at the Fourth Estate for its failures and apparent determination to maintain the status quo. In a National Press Club (NPC) address last week, one MP, Tony Windsor, challenged the journalists present, saying, "if you people are sick of the nonsense, then promote some of [our] concepts." Another, Rob Oakeshott, pointed to what he sees as the essence of the problem. "In focusing so heavily on the [Prime Minister], the cabinet and the polls ... we have lost the focus on the local member," he told the NPC. And with it, the local community.

NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen visited Australia in the middle of the election campaign to speak at a national conference of journalists. He was intrigued to find what he calls horse race journalism being practiced on the Australian election campaign trail. He revived his alternative model for political reporting driven by the "citizens agenda" during his highly publicized visit. He also proposed a new role of media outlet as "explainer" for the national public broadcaster, ABC.

U.S. political journalist John Nichols was another keynote speaker at the conference. His rousing speech invoked Finley Peter Dunne ("afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted") and pointed to the risk that spin increasingly amplifies the voices of the powerful and threatens journalists' capacity to speak truth to power. It made me feel like I'd attended a revival meeting at the Church of Journalism.

Rosen's practical challenge and Nichols' call to faith focused my mind on the role that journalism education might play in reforming political reporting in Australia. Key targets for an overhaul of political journalism in the Australian setting are:

• The missing "citizens agenda" and active engagement with citizen journalists.
• The absence of explanatory reporting and a preference for inflammatory tabloid-style political reporting.
• The resort to the defense of objectivity in the face of political deceit.
• The concentration of political reporting on the national capital and the parliament, and the insistence on focusing campaign coverage on the traveling shows staged by the leaders of the two main political parties, Labor and the Liberal National Coalition.

There has been only limited innovation in the sphere of community and industry-partnered journalism school projects around political journalism in Australia. The best of these was YouDecide2007 project, which sought to explore the role of social media and citizen journalism in partnership with the secondary Australian public broadcaster, the multilingual SBS. This early and very successful research-driven project did not, however, systematically involve journalism students, nor did it directly feed back into journalism training. In fact, most Australian journalism schools don't teach political journalism as a genre, and the training that does occur tends to simply model entrenched industry patterns.

Here's what I propose: A multi-partnered, citizen-activated journalism project based at the University of Canberra in the lead up to the next national election (which could happen swiftly unless a stable government can be established in the current cliff-hanger of a ballot!). The objective would be to take the focus off the agendas of the major parties and the Canberra Press Gallery and look beyond the walls of Parliament House to the experiences and views of the broader Canberra public.

Let's call this proposed project Barrukka, which means "talk" in an Aboriginal dialect. This name is in deference to the historically disenfranchised Indigenous Australians and it is a way of reflecting an underlying objective of connecting disempowered voices with the mainstream media and broader public.

Its four-fold purpose would be to:

1. Produce citizen agenda-enhanced journalism in multiple forms, across multiple platforms (including social media like Twitter and Facebook) and aggregated on a UC-managed website.
2. Produce political reporters equipped to challenge dominant media/political paradigms and produce creative content.
3. Provide opportunities for citizen journalism and community engagement.
4. Enhance mainstream media coverage of the election.

Senior student journalists, with the appropriate training and experience, would be embedded within the wider region's individual electorates (which range from inner city through farmland) for one week, researching and reporting the main issues identified by community organizations, local media and candidates. Thereafter, those electorates would become their election beats and their new contacts their main sources for coverage.

The student journalists would also be tasked to recruit local leaders for community-based discussion groups. These groups would identify and explore key issues of concern and then feed those ideas into editorial processes, while group leaders would also upload content (audio, video, images, etc.) directly to the main website and via interconnected social media platforms.

Partnerships would provide funding and support for the project. For example, UC's journalism program could partner with the country's respected and community-engaged, multiple-platform public broadcaster, the ABC.

A second potential partnership could be formed between UC and one of the emerging activist media groups invested in social change like Get-Up, which successfully extended voting enrollment rights during the 2010 poll through legal challenges.

A third partnership could be pursued between UC's journalism program and the Australian Electoral Commission, the statutory body which oversees the election process and the registration of voters. One of the roles of the project would be to educate Australians about electoral processes, promote democratic engagement and stimulate voter registration.

Embedding student journalists within individual electorates and requiring them to build relationships with both the candidates and the communities, through a combination of online and traditional reporting strategies, would encourage coverage of issues which may challenge both the major parties' strategic objectives and the Press Gallery's narrow editorial agenda.

The student reporters would be forbidden from covering press-release generated "news" in the interests of countering spin, and they would be required to include two face-to-face interviews from non-official sources in every story filed. Their brief would be to report in an explanatory, rather than inflammatory, manner.

They would be required to file content across a range of platforms including the project website, UC journalism school radio and TV programs, Twitter, blogs and Facebook pages associated with the project. In addition, they would be expected to tweet and blog about the processes of reporting in the interests of reflexive practice. And they would be tasked to produce one podcast during the campaign about the key issues and policies concerning the assigned electorate for showcasing on the ABC's website.

The embedded student journalists would identify leaders for citizen-based deliberative forums to be held in each electorate, every week of the campaign. These forum leaders would be trained in basic technical and professional skills by the project. They would be tasked to collect and file content to the project website with group members commenting on key themes emerging from each forum. They would operate like self-reporting focus groups.

They would also be asked to identify one question they would like to put to each candidate in their electorate during community Q&A forums to be staged in the final week of the campaign.

These Q&A forums would be webcast and accommodate questions from the wider audience via Twitter. They would be moderated and reported on by the student journalists involved in the project, with the possibility of content also being fed to ABC.

UC journalism academics, working with student research assistants from media studies and communication theory courses, would analyze the processes, outputs and impacts of the exercise and compare the coverage to the mainstream media's reporting of each electorate assigned. The results of this multi-faceted academic research (incorporating quantitative and qualitative methodologies) would then be published academically and in a range of popular, accessible media with a view to feeding outcomes back into the curriculum and future projects.

At this stage, Barrukka is just a simple on-paper-only attempt at enlivening and improving political journalism education in Australia. But I am about to return to the classroom after a long stint of maternity leave, with fresh eyes and renewed purpose -- and I will do my best to turn this idea into a reality. Meantime, watch on as Australian democracy undergoes renovation. You may be inspired too.

If you are interested in being involved as a partner or a sponsor in this proposed project, please email me.

Julie Posetti is an award winning journalist and journalism academic who lectures in radio and television reporting at the University of Canberra, Australia. She's been a national political correspondent, a regional news editor, a TV documentary reporter and presenter on radio and television with the Australian national broadcaster, the ABC. Her academic research centers on talk radio, public broadcasting, political reporting and broadcast coverage of Muslims post-9/11. She blogs at J-Scribe and you can follow her on Twitter.

Education content on MediaShift is sponsored by Carnegie-Knight News21, an alliance of 12 journalism schools in which top students tell complex stories in inventive ways. See tips for spurring innovation and digital learning at Learn.News21.com.

This is a summary. Visit our site for the full post ».

Education content on MediaShift is sponsored by Carnegie-Knight News21, an alliance of 12 journalism schools in which top students tell complex stories in inventive ways. See tips for spurring innovation and digital learning at Learn.News21.com.

After the success last month with our Beyond Content Farms series, we decided to do another in-depth special series on MediaShift. This time the series will look at "Beyond J-School," chronicling how journalism education and training are changing, and how journalists need more than traditional j-school. They need multimedia skills, social media knowledge, community management chops, and must learn to collaborate with their audience. It's more than just learning the basics of journalism: They also need more background in business, entrepreneurship, technology and even programming. The entire series is linked below, and we'll be updating it throughout the next two weeks.

> How to Teach Social Media in Journalism Schools by Alfred Hermida

> 5Across - Beyond J-School, a video roundtable show hosted by Mark Glaser

> Revamping J-Schools in Australia to Bring in Citizens Agenda by Julie Posetti

> How to Conquer Journalism Students' Fear of Technology by Jen Lee Reeves

> Business, Entrepreneurial Skills Come to Journalism School by Dorian Benkoil

> 4 Minute Roundup - Helping Journalism Students Get Tech Skills by Mark Glaser, with guest Jen Lee Reeves

> Spending the Summer in Journalist Law School by Nick Baumann

> How College Students Became Mini-Media Moguls in School by Dan Reimold

Coming soon:

Sept. 9: Craig Silverman: Programming Being Taught in J-Schools
Sept. 10: Davis Shaver: Innovations at New York City's J-Schools

What do you think about our series? How could it be improved? Are there other series you'd like to see MediaShift tackle in the coming months? We'd like to hear from you either in the comments below or via our Feedback form.

Education content on MediaShift is sponsored by Carnegie-Knight News21, an alliance of 12 journalism schools in which top students tell complex stories in inventive ways. See tips for spurring innovation and digital learning at Learn.News21.com.

This is a summary. Visit our site for the full post ».

5Across is sponsored by Carnegie-Knight News21, an alliance of 12 journalism schools in which top students tell complex stories in inventive ways. See tips for spurring innovation and digital learning at Learn.News21.com.

Just as traditional media has struggled with disruptive technology and the Internet, so too have the institutions that run journalism education. Most journalism schools and training programs are run by people whose careers were framed by print, broadcast and traditional PR, so how can students get the skills they need in the digital age? We convened a group of journalism educators, a trainer, a student and a J-school dropout to discuss how journalism education is shifting.

The discussion flowed from the changing curriculum to the student's mindset -- why do students still believe in the romance of a journalism career when there are so few jobs? How should educators teach new multimedia skills, as well as collaboration with other journalists and even the people formerly known as the audience? And finally, do students even need a journalism degree or can they learn it all themselves. We discuss this and a whole lot more on this spirited episode of 5Across, part of our two-week special on journalism education at MediaShift. Check it out!

beyondjschool.mp4

>>> Subscribe to 5Across video podcast <<<

>>> Subscribe to 5Across via iTunes <<<

After dropping out of journalism school in 1998, Lea Aschkenas wrote a story about her experiences for Salon. Her post-journalism school career includes a stint as a staff reporter, itinerant freelance writer, and author of the memoir, "Es Cuba: Life and Love on an Illegal Island" (Seal Press, 2006). She has also written for the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and San Francisco Chronicle. Currently, she works as a public librarian and teaches poetry-writing through the California Poets in the Schools program.

Kelly Goff is a senior in the journalism department at San Francisco State University, focusing on print and online journalism. She recently moved to San Francisco from Los Angeles, where she earned her associates in journalism from Pierce College. She is also an assistant events planner with the Journalism Association of Community Colleges.

Jon Funabiki is a professor of journalism at San Francisco State University and executive director of the Renaissance Journalism Center, which conducts projects to stimulate journalistic innovations that strengthen communities. Funabiki is the former deputy director of the Ford Foundation's Media, Arts & Culture Unit and was the founding director of San Francisco State University's Center for Integration and Improvement of Journalism. As a journalist with The San Diego Union, he specialized in U.S.-Asia political and economic affairs and reported from Japan, China, South Korea, the Philippines, Vietnam and other countries.

Lanita Pace-Hinton is the director of the Knight Digital Media Center, a
continuing education program based at the University of California, Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. The Knight Digital Media Center offers free week-long workshops that provides journalists with hands-on training on multimedia storytelling and how to use web tools and social media. Lanita has served as director of career services

and industry outreach for the UC Berkeley journalism school. She advised students on skills development and how to prepare for their entry into the profession.

Full disclosure: The Knight Digital Media Center is a sponsor of PBS MediaShift.

Howard Rheingold is a prominent author, educator and speaker on technology and the Internet. He wrote best-sellers about virtual reality and virtual communities, and was the founding executive editor of HotWired. He also founded Electric Minds in the mid-'90s. Rheingold has taught as appointed lecturer at UC Berkeley and Stanford University and has spoken about the social, cultural, political and economic impacts of new technologies.

If you'd prefer to watch sections of the show rather than the entire show, I've broken them down by topic below.

Credits

Mark Glaser, executive producer and host
Corbin Hiar, research assistant

Singeli Agnew, camera

Julie Caine, audio

Location: Vega Project & Kennerly Architecture office space in San Francisco

Special thanks to: PBS and the Knight Foundation

Music by AJ the DJ

*****

What do you think? Are you an educator or student with thoughts on how journalism should be taught? Do you think a degree in journalism is necessary to become a journalist? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

Mark Glaser is executive editor of MediaShift and Idea Lab. He also writes the bi-weekly OPA Intelligence Report email newsletter for the Online Publishers Association. He lives in San Francisco with his son Julian. You can follow him on Twitter @mediatwit.

5Across is sponsored by Carnegie-Knight News21, an alliance of 12 journalism schools in which top students tell complex stories in inventive ways. See tips for spurring innovation and digital learning at Learn.News21.com.

This is a summary. Visit our site for the full post ».

Education content on MediaShift is sponsored by Carnegie-Knight News21, an alliance of 12 journalism schools in which top students tell complex stories in inventive ways. See tips for spurring innovation and digital learning at Learn.News21.com.

Editor's Note: This is the first in our special series at MediaShift, Beyond J-School where we will take an in-depth look at the state of journalism education and training in the digital age. Look out for more articles all this week and next.

Social media is such a new phenomenon that it is easy for someone to claim to be an expert in the subject. A search on Twitter throws up all sorts of people claiming to be social media gurus. But at journalism schools, professors are working out how to teach social media to ensure that graduating students are proficient, if not expert, in this new addition to the curriculum.

Students use social media in their daily lives, with Facebook an almost permanent fixture on the computer screen. Yet they tend not to think about social media as part of their professional toolkit as journalists.

If anything, anecdotal evidence suggests that students are resistant to adopting social media, seeing it as a personal activity, rather than as part of their work as a journalist. The pressure is on educators to demonstrate the professional value of social media.

The first step is working out what we mean by social media. After all, there has also been a social aspect to media, whether it was people discussing last night's TV in the office or clipping a newspaper article to send to a friend. But there is something new about services such as Facebook, Flickr and Twitter that let people connect, create, share and mash-up media.

European researchers Andreas Kaplan and Michael Haenlein define social media as "a group of Internet-based applications that build on the ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0, and that allow the creation and exchange of user-generated content."
In other words, digital technologies that empower users to interact with each other, and participate and collaborate in the making of media, rather than just consuming media.

Clearly there is more to social media in the classroom than technology. Central to teaching social media is providing an understanding of how these digital tools affect the way students actually do journalism. The issue for many journalism schools is incorporating social media into an established and packed curriculum, within an academic environment where the pace of change is slow.

The question of how to teach social media in a way that enhances journalism reverberated at a meeting of hundreds of journalism educators from across North America. The annual conference of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) in Denver provided a platform to discuss ideas on social media in the classroom. In a sign of the growing recognition of social media, the AEJMC even organized a competition for educators to share some of their best practices for incorporating social media into the classroom. (Read MediaShift's previous coverage of the AEJMC conference here.)

One idea mentioned by several speakers at the AEJMC conference was the value of incorporating social media into beat reporting. There are various ways that this can be done. Students can use Twitter to monitor the community chatter on issues in their beats through hashtags. They can also identify and follow key people connected to their beat.

But students also need to understand how to assess the stream of information on social media. Real-time services such as Twitter have established themselves as primary sources for breaking news, so it is important to teach students to critically measure and check the validity of information.

Social media is one way of introducing students to the notion of journalism as a conversation. The key lesson here is that these tools are not just another channel to distribute the finished story. Social media can help journalists reach out to audiences, seeking ideas for stories and fresh perspectives on stories they are working on.

One of the challenges here is teaching the different norms and practices on different social media services. For example, just posting a message seeking information is frowned upon. Instead, students are encouraged to be active on social media, showing they are contributing to the conversation rather than just taking.

Social media blurs the line between the personal and the professional, so another important lesson is how to build and manage your online identity. Serena Carpenter at the Cronkite School at Arizona State University has students use Google themselves to research their online identity. She has found students are encouraged to adopt social media when they see themselves appear high up on Google.

In a variation of this, I have students Google each other to find out something they didn't know about their peer. The aim of the exercise is to make students aware of how future employers might see them.

The next stage is teaching students how to manage their reputation and establish their credibility. Prof. Carpenter has students complete their bio on numerous sites such as LinkedIn and Google Profile using the same photo, credentials and web links.

Social media has also been used for student-centered learning, for example, to educate students about the strengths and weaknesses of online collaboration. Bob Britten of West Virginia University used Google Maps for students to work together to map retirement homes in the area.

Rather than lecture students on the credibility of Wikipedia, Gary Ritzenthaler, a PhD student at the University of Florida, created a wiki for students to collaborate on study notes for an upcoming test. By participating, the students learned about collaborative writing but also became aware of questions about the credibility of content produced by others.

Practicing social media is not enough in an academic environment. There has to be a place for student reflection on what they have learned, explaining their understanding of social media. Students should have set out their goals for the use of social media and demonstrate they can assess the most appropriate platforms and services.

Teaching social media is more than showing students the mechanics of Twitter. Rather, they should learn how to build a network of relevant followers and how to interact with them to be a better journalist.

In the classroom, we need to stress that social media technologies do not just offer journalists new ways of doing old things. They offer the potential to explore new ways of telling stories, of collaborating and connecting with audiences, of rethinking how we do journalism.

Photo of AEJMC panel by Hunter Stevens via AEJMC News

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.

Education content on MediaShift is sponsored by Carnegie-Knight News21, an alliance of 12 journalism schools in which top students tell complex stories in inventive ways. See tips for spurring innovation and digital learning at Learn.News21.com.

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On August 10th and 11th, 2010, the Department of Play (DoP) hosted its first Summer Institute, a workshop for practitioners and researchers, all with one thing in common: a commitment to improving the lives of youth through technology. The purpose of the Summer Institute was to bring together people from across the globe that were pursuing similar work, but had not necessarily connected with one another yet. Attendees were asked to rethink the role of technology in youth participation, social inclusion and local civic engagement, and in the process form meaningful partnerships for future projects.

Participants included Media Lab professors, researchers and students, representatives from the MIT Center for Future Civic Media, members of the DoP, program officers from UNICEF, the co-directors of the Children’s Environments Research Group at CUNY, and a member of Plan International, West Africa, as well as the founder and director of the Srishti School of Art and Design in Bangalore, India.

The Summer Institute began with each participant creating a map and timeline of his or her professional and personal path, and explaining it to the group. This activity allowed everyone to learn about one another and become familiar with each other’s perspectives and experiences. For example, Nitin Sawney, a DoP member explained, “Seeing how media and arts education programs helped young people deal with trauma in the Palestinian refugee camps has really molded the direction of my work.”

This workshop then took the format of "World Café", a methodology for hosting conversations about questions that matter. The group broke into three smaller teams and had in-depth discussions and debates about three “provocative propositions,” which included:

1. What does true youth empowerment look like to young people, adults, organizations, and communities? How can one recognize it when we see it?
2. In terms of children and young people's empowerment, in what cases should telephones and computers be placed before food?
3. Based on your experience, what are the key qualities of successful projects in which technology is used to empower children and young people? How can we balance the highly innovative technological interventions/research with the realities of the underserved? Where do start when beginning interventions such as this one?

These questions ultimately forced participants to reflect about their role in the field of youth empowerment and the overall effects of their own work. Professor Roger Hart from CUNY went on to explain that in order for each individual to begin to understand this, the group needed to understand why youth choose to use technology versus why NGOs and governments choose to use the same tools.

Each participant had the opportunity to present his or her own projects and receive feedback from the team. These presentations fueled a larger discussion: were social media, blogging, and digital mapping really useful tools for youth in marginalized communities? The group extensively debated why we use these tools and the various tangible outcomes of using them. For example, it was agreed that digital mapping helped youth gain a sense of ownership over their communities.

By the end of the workshop, most participants agreed that a next step for the group should be to evaluate the impact of technology in the lives of youth through methodological research and studies. “We need to see if it is really making a difference and how,” said Geetha Narayanan of the Srishti School. To do this and to continue exploring the questions that were raised at the Summer Institute, the participants formed the DoP Working Group to keep in touch with one another, share ideas, and collaborate on projects.

The workshop evaluations were conducted in focus groups through follow-up questionnaires and group discussions, as well as video-based interviews conducted by youth among themselves. See a brief excerpt of evaluation interviews edited by youth in the 4-min video below.

Both the community and public exhibition and screenings were a huge success with nearly 250-300 people in the audience, Q&A with the young filmmakers, a diploma ceremony that the youth and their families looked forward to, and interviews with youth conducted by Al Jazeera’s Arabic language TV correspondent. The images on the Voices Beyond Walls blog give a sense of excitement about these events.

The youth continue to work on independent media projects and short films, with the support of their trainers through an on-going follow-up program. It’s been an exhilarating summer for everyone involved and we’re proud to have an extraordinary team of young filmmakers pushing the boundaries of participatory media in Gaza.

The photo exhibit and screening events showcase work emerging from two 3-week digital media and storytelling workshops conducted from July 4 – 25, 2010 with 10-15 year old children, in collaboration with the Women’s Program Center in Jabaliya refugee camp, Gaza and the Al Aroub Play and Animation Center in Al Aroub refugee camp, West Bank.

West Bank Event: Al Aroub Camp, Hebron, July 29, 2010

Gaza Event: Al Mat’haf, Sodaniya, Beach Road, Gaza
Photo Exhibit: August 1st – 13th, 2010

Exhibit Opening Reception and Film Screenings:
Sunday 5:30pm – 8:30pm, August 1, 2010

The program has been conducted by Voices Beyond Walls with community centers in refugee camps in the West Bank since 2006. In June-July 2010, the project was launched in Gaza in collaboration with Les Enfants, Le Jeu et l’Education (EJE) and participating community centers.

The program is led by an international and local team of filmmakers, artists, photographers, educators, and youth community animators. The project is supported in part by Les Enfants, Le Jeu et l’Education (EJE), Sharek Youth Forum, Tamer Institute, Canaan Institute for New Pedagogy, the French Cultural Center in Gaza, UNRWA, the MIT Center for Future Civic Media, and the Genevieve McMillan-Reba Stewart Foundation.

The photo exhibition is hosted at Al Mat’haf (the Museum), a one-of-a-kind recreation and cultural center that showcases Gaza’s rich historical past and seamlessly blends it into the context of contemporary life in Gaza. At a time when many in Gaza have forgotten its rich cultural heritage, Al-Mathaf aims to preserve the region’s historical treasures, provide a venue for modern cultural dialogue, and support the new generation in creating a brighter future.

More on our blog: http://voicesbeyondwalls.blogspot.com

During the Vietnam War, the disconnect was between the government and its citizens. With the publishing of the Pentagon Papers, the press solidified a long-suspected belief that the government, through its spokespersons and the military, was misleading the public about the prosecution of the war.

Because they were published in 1971, the Pentagon Papers were late to the game, so to speak, to affect public opinion about the war. Yet they helped turn Americans away from their government: Americans knew their government had failed them, and since then, but for times of extreme crisis, Americans haven't trusted their government to make best-interest decisions.

Today there is another disconnect, highlighted by Wikileaks' publication of tens of thousands of documents purporting to show that the war in Afghanistan is going much worse and with much more innocent bloodshed than the government has admitted. Wikileaks frames this documentation similar to that of the Pentagon Papers, claiming that there's dissonance in what the government is saying and what the public now knows.

But there's not.

The disconnect, instead, is entirely within the public. The unsavory work of special forces, the unnecessary death of civilians, the unpalatable role of Pakistan in propping up the Taliban: all of these were already well documented. The public, however, simply didn't know or didn't care. The disconnect is between hearing facts and then feeling compelled to act on them.

Thus opens a space for Wikileaks and those like 2010 Knight News Challenge winner Teru Kuwayama, a photojournalist trying to break through the shield of indifference by embedding himself with Marines in Afghanistan to tell stories that Americans will--must--pay attention to. As he told journalism.co.uk yesterday:

We've been in Afghanistan for a decade now, and yet the vast majority of Americans have a very limited sense of what we're doing there. That means we [the media] haven't been doing a very good job. We're now in a situation where our press is in serious decline, at a moment when our nation is escalating a war with tremendous costs. That means the public gets even more disconnected from its military, at a time when it should be the most concerned. I can't tell people what to think about this war, but I believe very strongly that they should be thinking about it.

What the Wikileaks episode illustrates isn't that the American government is lying. Rather, it's that we're bad at hearing and processing the truth. We need more compelling methods of journalistic storytelling--whether Wikileaks' data-and-p.r.-intense version or Kuwayama's intimate photojournalism--in order to engage the public, even or especially when engagement is actually enlistment of the public to do more work for itself.

[Edited to include a correction from David Chandler on the extent to which (even less than I'd originally argued) American opinion on the Vietnam War was affected by the Pentagon Papers.]

More photos and updates on our blog: http://voicesbeyondwalls.blogspot.com

The following summarizes our experiences in the final week:

Day 11: A day of ups and downs shooting video in the camp…

A day with many ups and downs - we had left video cameras with all groups and trainers to continue filming over the weekend. All but one group reported in their morning check-in that they were nearly done with their primary shooting. Many had worked hard on the weekend in new locations and reworked narratives.

However, during our video footage review it became clear nearly all had critical challenges, which nearly left their films either unusable or fairly flat. These included very poor audio and lighting for many crucial scenes; interestingly at least 2 groups shot scenes in the center (when they were unable to get permission to shoot elsewhere) but somehow failed to notice the roaring diesel generator running in the background, muting all but the loudest characters in the scenes. Others shot indoors in very poor lightning or composition and outdoor shots at a distance had little or no expression seen in the characters. Natural and dramatic acting was also turning out to be a challenge for many groups in difficult locations with little preparation, coaching or rehearsal.

There seems to be a dilemma to get the right balance between indoor/outdoor shooting to handle light and the inevitable noise in the camp. So we suggested good "location scouting" was most crucial for all groups, along with getting compelling characters in desirable roles. In some cases, simply casting other individuals in critical roles that are more authentic, was the only solution to make the films seem compelling. Finally, we urged some trainers to work closer with the other teams to provide more guidance and support.

One could feel the exasperation of the teams as they watched their footage and we noticed that many scenes re-shot had only gotten worse. This was certainly not an outcome we all wished at this stage of the workshop with all the training and critical reviews we had done. So we simply went around and got everyone to give constructive suggestions to each group as they presented their work; clearly seeing it on large format screen really helps each time. At least two groups decided to completely re-write their stories or choose a new concept, as they saw their current work fall flat. We decided to work intensively with the two groups most in need to get them back on track.

The only group that finished shooting all footage was the one doing the silent abstract film which they shot in a new location around destroyed buildings by the sea - the effect was quite moving and everyone clapped at the end. I suggested they combine their footage from the previous location to retain the urgency and dramatic character they originally achieved. Overall, this group appears to have some powerful footage to go into editing.

With the inspiration from the last group's footage, we got all other groups to meet separately with us to consider how to improve their work. Roger and Maha worked closely with a group where the children quickly developed refreshing new story, which they are excited to shoot tomorrow.

I had one group, which was a bit demoralized due to internal dynamics and trainer issues, to revert back to a piece they originally developed in the first week, focusing on human rights issues and persons injured in Jabaliya camp during the war. They were psyched to get back on-location and begin shooting. So we developed a new angle where we would have one team interview and shoot the emerging story, while another "camera crew" would film them doing so, thus creating a film inside a film. We had the "camera crew" of a 11-year old boy (Mohammed) and girl from another group use Roger's professional Panasonic video camera for the secondary shoot; they both took to it readily panning gracefully between the interview and the team filming it.

The pairing worked really well as we re-interviewed the Hammad family who suffered during the war; they welcomed us back in their home as both teams filmed them in a somewhat odd fashion (one saying "action" after the other). They understood the concept and that it was for training purposes as well. The camera team also filmed the group making decisions about their shots and preparing for interviews while walking along, so the film may turn out to be fairly compelling once it’s completed. The team plans to meet Mezan, the human rights center in the camp and film two other cases as part of their documentary narrative.

This was a great high-point for the frustrating day as the group felt a sense of satisfaction at seeing a concept come together quickly and having a workable plan of action to produce something effective in a short time. Let’s see how the rest goes with all other groups as they wrap up shooting tomorrow, and get into editing...

Day 12: Wrapping up shooting and brief editing tutorial

The day started with all the groups eagerly waiting in the courtyard of the center holding tripods and cameras ready to go for their final shoot. I came in with a large tray of Bakhalava to celebrate the arrival of my little sister's baby boy this morning. Just enough sugar to get everyone recharged for their filming on-location all morning.

Each team went out to their final locations; I took our group to the Mezan Center for Human Rights to see if we could get them to take us out for an interview with a family. No one was around, so we instead went to the Palestinian Center for Human Rights (PCHR), also nearby... they too were hesitant (and asked for formal letters of request), but the young team persisted and the staff finally asked a field officer to take us out to a site in Beit Lahiya where several families and schools had been hard hit. The group worked in two teams conducting the interviews and filming the film; I was impressed at their clockwork dynamic. Even the 11-year old Mohammed closely held his professional Panasonic DVX camera (which was way bigger than his sholders) and shot footage indoors and in the streets, walking rapidly backwards to frame the shots.

The group filmed 3 families two of which were in Jabaliya camp, each with devastating stories of loss and inspiring resilience. Abeer, the 15-year old girl directing the group, conducted most interviews along with Nour, while others assisted with photography and basic production work - a natural team with each one taking turns to manage the shoot. We did many interviews indoors, with several shots in the open to capture the destroyed homes and conversing while walking with our characters in the narrow alleys of the camp. Both cameras captured multiple angles of the shots; with nearly 3 hours of video it will be quite a bit of work for the group to begin sorting out and trimming their final scenes during editing.

In the afternoon, I conducted a brief hour-long tutorial of the VideoStudio editing software using an example of the "Rabbit City" film this group had shot last week. They have subsequently abandoned the story in favor of the human rights piece. So it made for a good example that was fun to edit. They learned the key elements of editing, trimming, sound tracks, audio recording, titling and transitions with only a few special effects in the context of this narrative. They suggested slow motion and repeat takes in some scenes, which all added nicely to the final film rendered.

Tomorrow all groups will begin organizing and capturing their footage to begin editing in groups, so we hope to get them off on a good track, though some may still insist on re-shooting a few scenes with audio/lighting issues. Let’s hope we can keep the full group engaged in the editing process somehow or find other constructive video/photo activities as the Al Aroub team has been trying.

Day 13: Power cuts and video editing...

A frustrating day for many groups as we struggled to begin video editing with just 3 laptops available for 5 groups. One finally finished shooting its last 2 scenes, while the others tried to review their footage, logging scenes, writing up key descriptions, and sequencing them on paper.

The center had no power for most of the day - later we heard it was a scheduled power outage throughout the camp, and the center's only diesel generator simply broke-down. So we tried to use laptops with whatever battery charge was remaining, while some groups reviewed their footage on the tiny video camera screens. At some point 2-3 groups tried to move to other buildings (a nearby UN office and a special needs center) for an hour or so to continue working, however most simply fizzled out by early afternoon with all the logistical challenges and resource constraints.

Only one group managed to finish most of their initial editing (for the abstract silent film) while 2 others made it part way through their footage. My group had shot nearly 3 hours of interviews (using two cameras), so it took a great deal of time to sort through and select some key scenes from just one camera - turns out to be a more ambitious effort than expected. We have a great deal more to do tomorrow. The remaining two groups are still essentially beginning their editing work tomorrow.

So the next 2 days will remain intensive if we can keep groups focused and manage with the power outages; our plan B is simply to move to another center temporarily. We'll review rough cuts tomorrow late afternoon, and hope to get all shorts completed by the end of the week for final screenings.

I expect we'll do our post-workshop evaluations on Sunday morning, so all groups have enough time to wrap-up prior to it. I'm working on a new questionnaire for the evaluation.

We plan to do a community screening in Jabaliya camp early next week with families (Monday), and hopefully a public screening in Gaza the following weekend. That should give us more time to refine and finalize all films with subtitles, print a selection of photos (from both workshops) and arrange some publicity to attract local audiences in Gaza.

Day 14: Power back on and video editing progressing

Today was much better as we miraculously had power nearly all day at the woman's center in Jabaliya camp. After a quick warm-up we asked everyone to discuss their editing and shooting experience thus far, to get some feedback on things we can improve - of course power and access to working laptops on-time were their biggest concerns.

We then broke up into our editing teams and tried to get everyone back on track; two groups waited around for new laptops to arrive which we had to setup with the editing software , both of them had to switch mid-stream twice, as their laptops crashed... and lost their initial edits. This was quite disruptive and frustrating, but the groups pressed ahead.

My group spent a great deal of time reviewing and capturing a selection of key scenes from over 6 hours of video they shot using the two cameras. We finally got through most of it by the end of the day and made an initial rough-cut which fairly coherent. It’s the story about 3 families in Gaza devastated during the war, as captured through interviews by a team of young girls and their camera crew.

We made a brief review of 4 out of 5 films that completed rough-cuts today in a small group of children and trainers remaining late this afternoon. The feedback was very helpful to the groups. One group with the silent abstract film decided to lay a music track over it which nearly destroyed the overall effect of the power footage they shot. Many of us suggested they try creating another version with just natural sounds of the locations and spaces they used, and see what resonates better with everyone in the final reviews tomorrow.

After the long day, I spent another few hours in Gaza city meeting folks at the French Cultural Center, YMCA and Palestinian Red Crescent Society trying to get a venue for our exhibit and screening. I’m also checking with the Museum in Gaza (the "Mathaf") - a newly renovated private space by the sea near Beit Lahiya. Lets see what works out in the next few days. The event will likely be on August 1st for the opening, with the exhibit on for 2 weeks hopefully.

Day 15: youth video shorts making progress....

I think we got a lot done today as all groups were more focused on completing their editing. In the morning, we reviewed a check-list of things each one had to consider for their final pieces, including:

1. Writing up a title, summary, brief synopsis, and group names for each film
2. Ensuring their video sequences are coherent and concise to represent the intended storyline
3. Completing all voice recordings, soundtrack and adjusting audio levels for all scenes
4. Simplifying any transitions and effects to maintain a seamless flow in the visual narrative (and not distract the viewer)
5. Add the title and credits including acknowledging the community center and voices beyond walls
6. Writing up an Arabic dialog script with timestamps for the entire film, and translating it to English for subtitles
7. Ensuring any images or music in the film are copyright free or get permission or credit them. This year we need to ensure that copyrighted material is well handled if we plan to post the youth shorts on YouTube and submit them to film festivals.

The groups got through most items on the checklist, though many still need to adjust audio levels, and complete the Arabic/English scripting and subtitles. We plan to extend the workshop into Saturday to finalize their films (given the power cuts and laptop issues all week). All groups and trainers are eager to wrap up their films and are willing to work through the weekend.

On Sunday we plan to do our evaluations in focus groups for both the video workshop and the Dabke workshop kids (our comparison group). I'm working on the questionnaire this weekend.

Finally, we plan to do our community screenings with the families and distribute diplomas to all children at an event in the center on Monday evening, followed by a more public screening in Gaza at the “Mat’haf” (Museum) next Sunday. A satisfying close for a long and productive week; we are on our last stretch to complete the youth films by early next week.

If you're a journalist asking that question, Jennifer Gaie Hellum at the University of Arizona's Cronkite School has a nice post for you. Turns out, it's not as simple as you think, at least if you're new to Flickr.

Among the items of advice, given that it's nearly impossible to "professionalize" a Flickr photostream that started off with personal items, are:

1. Think through what you want to accomplish with your account before you set it up. If the Flickr support team comes through for me in the end, I’ll be the first to give them a thumbs-up. But I urge you to think it through before you start so you won’t go through the frustration I have in trying to make changes.
2. Use your professional name as your Flickr web address and screen name. As much as possible, use the same name on all your social media accounts to maximize your search potential.
3. Create “sets” of photos that address the kind of work you want to do. Journalists increasingly are responsible for shooting photos as well as gathering stories. If you are considering a particular beat, think of the kind of images associated with the stories you’d be telling and seek opportunities to take photos of people and scenes that would accompany those stories. Organize and label your photos on your Flickr page so it’s ready to be linked to your professional portfolio site.
4. Be your own photo editor. Flickr only allows you a limited amount of uploads per month, so you need to be selective. Show your best work. [Limited uploads only apply to free accounts...but the "be selective" advice is still key -- AW]
5. Find a separate forum for sharing personal photos. If a photo doesn’t tell a story, capture a detail or share a compelling, well-composed image, save it for Facebook or some other personal photo-sharing account.
6. Decide what you want to say through your photostream. Perhaps you aspire to be an award-winning photo journalist. Or maybe you simply want an employer to know that you know how to compose a picture and use a photo-sharing site. Having a Flickr account will allow the public access to your work and evaluate your level of talent, so make sure it supports you career goals.
7. If you are serious about photography, consider joining Flickr groups. Take the time to comment on others’ photos and invite discussion about yours. Actively participating in a social network of photography enthusiasts can earn you “testimonials” on the site and will highlight your commitment to the craft.

More photos and updates on our blog: http://voicesbeyondwalls.blogspot.com

Day 6: Creative story-writing

We began the workshop with a focus on creative story-writing; the session was lead by Asmaa Elghoul, an award winning writer and journalist in Gaza, who's been volunteering some time with our workshops.

After a quick warm-up yoga stance and physical ice-breaker, Asmaa began the session with having everyone introduce themselves to her and describe their dream the previous night; this elicited some hilarious and touching thoughts. She then discussed what children felt were key story elements like place, climax, plot, ending, turning point, dialog, writing style, characters, context etc. We noted these points on a large sheet and referred to them often during the day as they spoke about their own narratives.

We then broke-up in 5 groups and Asmaa handed each one an illustrated storybook to read and decompose the key story elements we had discussed. Each group leader spoke a summary of the story (often acted out in funny ways) followed by one of the children presenting key elements. We then had each group participate in a rapid story-writing game we developed as follows:

1. Children in each group wrote a character, object and place on separate pieces of paper and threw then into 3 baskets.
2. We shuffled each one and handed them back to children in all groups (3 for each person).
3. Then children worked in their groups to quickly write a story comprising of these elements in 15 minutes.
4. Trainers reviewed the stories written among the groups asking about key story elements and the narratives were refined.
5. We collected the pieces of paper and re-shuffled them in the baskets, handing them back once again to children in all groups.
6. Children repeated the exercise and wrote new narratives from the elements they received.
7. After a quick review among the groups, we then collected everyone for a class wide activity called "story chains". Here we asked one person to read their story and then using elements in their narrative, someone else with similar elements (each a character, place or object) had to read their story... this continued till nearly everyone read theirs, while we often chose children who were shy or had not spoken earlier.

The entire activity was devised by us on the fly and it went really well; it got all the groups really engaged and internalizing some of the story elements we discussed earlier.

After lunch we watched two short films made by youth in previous workshops, Lamees Daydream and Street Lesson, to discuss story elements in the films, using the later to develop a storyboard of key scenes. This went quite well as the children understood the reasons for storyboarding, to better communicate ideas and break narratives down to the visual elements for filming.

The final exercise was to discuss stories they wrote over the weekend in their groups; there was less time for this and given the long day I think children were less creative and energetic at this stage. The narratives they read were typical of a day in their life with few if any imaginative elements (though one was about dreaming a trip to the moon). One that struck me was about a magic stick and a couple seeking counseling from a psychiatrist... though the story was under-developed, I suggested making the psychiatrist the one needing help - visiting families in the families in his neighborhood to figure out his dilemma :-)

Trainers felt this was the hardest activity for the children and many thought it would take a long time to get children into a more creative space. They were less optimistic but I mentioned that we've always experienced these challenges at this stage of the workshop.

Overall, I think our creative exercises in the morning were valuable but we need to spurn the children into more imaginative thinking; we'll try a few other exercises the next day, like developing narratives from photographs, story circles where children start a story and others in the circle have to complete it, improvisational stories by acting out character roles assigned to them, and perhaps going back to their neighborhoods or a brief field-trip to activate their imagination.

Day 7: Improvisational play - The psychiatrist and the donkey...

Our day began with the usual warm-up; this time children lined up along a cross-bar and playing a game of swapping themselves like musical chairs quite rapidly. I could barely make sense of it all. I'm just amazing with the creative new exercises they keep devising each day.

Asmaa and I then led our next stage of creative narrative sessions; this time we played the "story-chain" in the full circle of the group of 20 children and their trainers. Asmaa started with one example phrase "One day as I was on my way home ..." and then asked me to continue as I said "I met an elephant" .. and so on. The children at first were a bit slow to keep up the pace but eventually got the hang of it and created quite an imaginative storyline towards the end of the circle.

I then suggested we repeat the "story-circle" and I started with a more specific context to spur a richer storyline. I said "There was once a psychiatrist in Jabaliya camp, who thought he was going crazy and wanted help ..." and then the next person said "and he ran down the street and met a donkey" ... "who told him about his problems" ... and so on... by the end we had a hilarious and touching storyline that had a rich array of characters including "donkeys who protested their working conditions (i.e. DR - or donkey rights)", "mice who stole their petitions", and "a magician on a broom stick" who tried to solve their dilemma. In the end the psychiatrist wakes up from his "dream" but as he washes his face sees a "donkey" in the mirror... and runs back into the street seeing donkeys everywhere... I think they wanted to imply that the psychiatrists' problem was inside him and only he could solve it by introspection - yet instead of a direct message, the children suggested an "open ending" - leaving that up to the audience. It felt more like a version of the "Twilight Zone" :-)

We than asked the children to script-out and storyboard the tale they devised for practice... this worked well as we went through key details for each potential scene devising better characters and transitions within the story. We got the children to make a play with the storyline. We selected Abeer (one of our best participants) as the director and got the children to "audition" for each of the roles, rehearsing key scenes several times, with a virtual film crew. Finally, Roger decided to film the full play and it went surprisingly smoothly (after many chaotic rehearsal takes). The acting was amazing with Abeer finally playing the psychiatrist (after directing many actors to do it) and little Hammad acting as the cool donkey wearing shades. I was impressed that everyone played their roles so well; feels like many children opened up in the exercise and there's pretty good working dynamics within the group.

We then screened the video and children got to see a complete concept to video example in less than 2 hours. It was a huge morale boost and hilariously fun to perform. They also talked about the difficult job of the director and importance of a really detailed script. We then watched another example youth video short "Mother of Palestine" (Jenin 2007) which also had a good storyline and discussed various aspects of the narrative and video shooting thereafter.

In the last hour we broke up into newly selected groups (we thought mixing them up again would bring fresh ideas) and had them each try developing new stories for their films the next day. The groups struggled a bit at first but then after we asked some of the children to close their eyes and imagine a few key characters and situations, got them to develop narrative scripts and storyboards together.

We plan to review the storyboards in the morning and have them act out the key scenes, before doing a sample video shoot in the afternoon. I expect many of their stories tomorrow will still be rather preliminary so they may get better refined/expanded as they shoot or they can simply develop a new one after this initial video trial. I think its best not to push the groups too hard to have coherent narratives in the first go, but let them get comfortable with the full process of concept to video and later develop better narratives as they mature their ideas.

Day 8: Refining story ideas, animation and video tutorial

Today the groups presented their storyboards and scripts for potential films they plan to work on. Here's a quick summary of the key ideas emerging thus far:

1. A folk tale about a lion that harasses a colony of rabbits ("Rabbit City"), asking for one delivered and sacrificed to him each day for his meal; finally the rabbits protest and devise a way to trick the lion into thinking another lion is vying for his share. The lion sees his own reflection in a pool of water and jumps in; it’s a simple tale but the group narrated it with a lot of symbolism and metaphors about Palestinian children under occupation.

2. A film about the "noise" in the camp from generators to street vendors selling watermelons... it was an unfinished story until I suggested bridging it with one they worked on about the deaf girl Amna. Here they story would transition from an annoying noise filled day in the life of a child in the camp to meeting Amna and transforming her world through Amna's impairment, and thus learning to appreciate the richness of the soundscape around her.

3. A child experiences nightmares and is unable to sleep, while his parents complain about his performance in school. The story drifted a bit with an accident experienced by the boy, after which the parents are sympathetic to the boy. We suggested the issue of problems with sleep in the camp may actually be useful to emphasize in the film (as we heard it from many of the mothers in our focus groups). The children are refining their narrative (including perhaps an animated dream sequence) and may try to make the script more dramatic.

4. A story about Ahmad and Anna on their last day in school. Ahmad is a poor child living in the camp and Anna in a more affluent neighborhood in the city. A series of events happen in their lives until Ahmad finds a jewel on the beach - a turning point in the story, after which their roles may switch after which they may both appreciate each other lives better.

5. A story about separation among Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza. It shows children walking lonely and confused in both places looking for each other, with Palestine being their mother. The film is a rather abstract performative piece with much symbolism.

After some long and constructive critique the narratives appear to be shaping up a bit - lets see what the groups try to make of them.

In the afternoon we watched an animated film presented by a guest speaker, Tilda, a photographer from Belgium, who worked with children in Nablus on the short. The kids got excited to try such animations for some scenes in their own films though they were well aware of the efforts needed.

Finally, Roger conducted the video session as planned quite thoroughly with some camera demonstrations on-screen, watching scenes from shorts like the Pole, Lamees Daydream, Theater of Stones and Take it or Leave it, to reinforce camera angles and composition. The session was long and needed to be a bit more interactive and hands-on.

By the end the children were losing steam and we ended the day with a quick review of their scripts in groups to start video shooting the following morning.

Day 9: First day of video shooting on-location

Today we began preparing groups for their first video shoot on-location. After revising their scripts and reviewing them with us, they had to develop detailed production plans with key characters and locations of scenes and also assign roles for the director, photo/video camera persons and actors. In some cases groups had to find extras for their films in the locations itself.

Before leaving we also asked all trainers to conduct brief hands-on video camera trainings with all children in their groups, reinforcing lessons learned on shot framing, angles and composition in the video tutorial by Roger the previous day. Finally, we asked all groups to register themselves in a sign-up sheet with the center so we knew who was on-location and what equipment they took along. We insisted on all group members wearing their badges on-location as well. All the preparations were meant to get them to take their shooting seriously and think through their efforts more professionally as they go forward.

The five groups managed to spend 2-3 hours on their first shoot; each seemed quite satisfied with their experience. A de-briefing discussion among all later that afternoon indicated a few points. Groups took care to shoot several scenes in multiple takes to get it right; some had a hard time getting extras on-location or other characters for their films but managed partly - though will need to go back and shoot more with other characters the next day. One group had a hard time getting the hearing impaired girl to be in the film as she was not around and they felt the sign translation would take more effort, so they may have an actor in her place.

My group recruited half a dozen kids on-location to wear masks as rabbits and over 20 spectators (unintentionally) in the station park (apparently the only open green play-space in Gaza) where they shot their lion and rabbit tale. Most people there turned out to be quite helpful. The group managed to use many sections of the park as key locations for different scenes (but had some trouble maintaining scene continuity shooting a forest in an urban space); they generally enjoyed the shoot, despite the blaring sun.

Getting permission to shoot in other locations was not easy e.g. a UN school and a special needs center, so these needed to be negotiated in advance; some eventually worked out through personal connections. One group wanted to shoot in an open desert area, but when they got there, many new homes were being built to their surprise and they felt uncomfortable shooting due to the police there. They finally got assistance from a popular old man in the neighborhood to get access from the community. Most did not give up easily and tried to get many of their scenes done. "Location Scouting" in advance is an important lesson they recognized.

The groups mentioned that everyone took to their roles easily and many got to use the video camera as well, though often only 1-2 were assigned the video camera. Most said they used lessons learned in the video tutorial the previous day, though I expect many mistakes in their shots. I noted some using zoom and rapid movement too often, so I think stable shots maybe something they learn over time. We'll see how their first day of footage turned out during video reviews the following day, and whether they can turn these into their final films. I expect quite a bit may need to be re-shot or scripts re-worked, but its still a good learning exercise.

Day 10: Reviewing Video Footage and Group Critique

In the morning, we had Jehan, a drama trainer from Tamer, come back to conduct a drama session with the group. This was really refreshing for all after a long day of video shooting the day before. Jehan led them through a series of movements, gestures and role playing exercises. Her goal was to make them less shy, more expressive and improve their body language on-screen while acting out their stories "in character".

We than lead a long session of video footage reviews among all groups. Roger and I had watched and compiled key scenes from the group's footage the night before and we examined these "shot selections" carefully to highlight good and poor examples of camera techniques used, along with overall composition and how the scenes actually convey the narrative intended. We were actually quite impressed with the content and composition of many of their shots (thanks to their photo training), though all noticed critical issues with camera stability and movement. One of the more powerful set of scenes was completely silent, with shots composed of the actors running and searching through a barren and destroyed landscape - almost felt like a surreal David Lynch scene or an apocalyptic Mad Max film.

We downloaded all footage into the VideoStudio software for each group as a separate project to show an overall summary of visual footage shot, and also culled 3-4 shot selections from each for illustrative purposes into its own project folder for review. We had labeled all scenes, shots and takes for all projects and the footage selections over 2-3 hours the night before; this was very helpful during the review as we screened different takes and shots of the same scenes to demonstrate techniques used.

This overall session went really well with much of the critique coming from the children themselves as they saw their footage projected on a large screen, with all of the challenges they encountered on-location including camera movement, shot stability, excessive zooming, sound quality, and acting. Jehan, Roger and I helped summarize key lessons learned on a poster including improving shot stability using a tripod and no zoom, breaking up scenes into multiple shots (instead of zooming midway), using cameras closer to the subjects to get more expressive features and better audio, improving overall shot composition with attention to lightning and framing of subjects, acting tips for being "in character" rather than reading out lines, not looking directly at the camera but not turning ones body to it either etc. We asked them to consider consider when and how the camera itself becomes a unintentional "character" in the film if its used with excessive movement and zooming, while POV shots need to be done intentionally to match story outcomes.

The discussions were very lively and I think the groups loved talking about their shots and recognizing things they had simply not noticed during the shoot. We asked each to refine their storyboards for a visual summary of shots and the dialog in their scripts, before continuing shooting. We've now given cameras to all their trainers over the weekend to continue shooing as they have time to meet, and extended their shooting schedule through Sunday, after which we hope to begin video editing tutorials with them next week.

We are generally going on-track this week and it’s been good to do a critical review of their footage before the weekend to get them to re-think their visual aesthetics and techniques. I have a feeling they'll do a great job on their next days of shooting with trainers, now that there's a higher-bar for what we expect to see. They're really motivated and psyched to work on their films...

The three-week workshop is being conducted with five local staff members from the woman’s center and 5-6 volunteers (from youth organizations like Tamer and Sharek), all of whom participated in the Training of Trainers (ToT) course previously conducted by Voices Beyond Walls at the Canaan Institute of New Pedagogy from June 28-30, 2010. The workshop participants include 25 children (boy and girls aged 10-15) from Jabaliya camp.

Another “comparison group” of 25 children are participating in a Dabke (traditional Palestinian dance) workshop conducted in parallel at the center, as part of the pilot research study led by Dr. Nitin Sawhney, examining the role of interventions supporting participatory media, creative expression, and civic engagement among marginalized children undergoing conditions of protracted conflict.

Pre-workshop Planning and Preliminary Focus Group Evaluations

On July 3rd, one day before the workshops began, we met with the center staff in Jabaliya camp to review all workshop logistics, working guidelines and preparations. We then conducted two preliminary focus group sessions with a small group of six mothers and eight children who planned to participate in the workshop.

We discussed the key issues of critical concern among mothers about the lives of their children in the camp including psychosocial trauma from the war, ongoing political conflict, blockade and everyday concerns regarding the frequent power outages, health, safety and attitudes/behaviors of children at home and in the community. We discussed their hopes and expectations, evidence of creative engagement, and media exposure among their children. The mothers were more than willing to discuss a wide range of issues and appreciated our interest in better understanding these aspects of their lives.

We then probed the group of children (two boys and six girls aged 12-15) about these issues through an exploratory exercise of having them draw their hands on a sheet of paper and noting their background information (name, age, siblings etc) and drawing out a sample daily diary of their everyday lives; this provided some background information on their routines, media consumption patterns, socialization, family life, and sleep, much of it apparently shaped by the nature of power cuts experienced on any given day.

Inevitably, socializing with friends and family through face-to-face and online means constituted an important part of their lives, at least during the summer. When asked about a significant moment in their life over the past year, most discussed effects of the war, personal loss or challenging events at school. As for problems they faced nearly all mentioned power cuts and political situation (particularly factional fighting) as primary issues. Interestingly, children with greater media usage patterns and socialization seemed more open and optimistic – yet this remains anecdotal evidence at this early stage.

The focus groups helped us develop a more detailed questionnaire and approach which we hoped to administer among all children participating in the workshop the following day.

Day 1: Focus Group Evaluations and Introduction to Photography

We began the day with ice-breakers conducted by local trainers, which energized the group of 25 children who came to attend the first day of the workshop. They later watched 2-3 short films including Nablus Tragedy, Memories of Nakba and the Pole (the funny short made in our ToT). The children especially loved the Pole, given its simple message of civic action to keep streets clean.

Maha and Asmaa worked hard to translate the evaluation questionnaire (to Arabic) in time for our focus group sessions. We had at least two facilitators each pair up with a group of 5 children to interview and capture their responses to the questionnaire. The hand drawing exercise worked really well and the daily diary revealed a great deal, though we had to probe some children harder to be more expressive about their opinions. Some questions could be framed better and it would have been helpful to conduct trainings with our evaluators to pose the questions better. All focus groups went well, with reams of hand-written responses and drawings produced by children.

After some home-made pizza at the center we had Jehad from Tamer lead the photo session, which went quite well. He previously had some children take a few shots with his camera over lunch and discussed them, along with youth photos from previous workshops in Jerusalem for review. The children engaged in amazingly critical discussions of photo aesthetics and narratives in the shots. I was quite impressed with their aptitude and they were no longer shy to be expressive.

Our digital cameras arrived just in time (donated by Tamer and Sharek) to begin hands-on photo sessions in groups; with 30 minutes of outdoor shooting, they managed to incorporate many of their ideas from the photo review session. We had an informal discussion in the courtyard about their experience, which seemed both fun and productive. The best part about our first day into the workshop was the genuine enthusiasm and attitude of all the children and trainers involved.

Day 2: Sensing and Mapping Everyday Spaces

We started with a warm-up among the children as usual and quickly moved into focus groups to complete our hopes and expectations evaluation. Shortly thereafter we conducted a photo review of a selection of the children’s work from the previous day, which went very well.

Afterwards Nasser (from EJE) lead a great session on smells, tastes and perceptions by having two children and one trainer blind-folded and passing around various spices and materials; this turned out to be a really fun activity and quite hilarious for all. This lead into each group conducting a mapping exercise within different rooms in the center and presenting their maps after lunch. It was too hot to send children out for fieldwork, so we decided to do some other exercises indoors (despite ongoing power cuts).

We then conducted a session on the rights and responsibilities of children as young journalists in training. Here the children came up with a set of rules and regulations that they would place on their own "press pass". Finally, we watched 2 video shorts "Al Hakawati" (the storyteller) and “Intensive Care Unit” (which they liked most) to prepare them visually for their neighborhood mapping fieldwork the following day.

The first 2 days have been long and tiring for all participants and trainers, but the following days will be more hands-on and fun.

Day 3: Neighborhood Mapping in Groups

Today's workshop was probably the most enjoyable as the teams had a chance to do some fieldwork to develop neighborhood reportage.

We started with a warm-up as usual; I'm amazed to see how many unusual ice-breakers our Jabaliya trainers continue to come up with. Today was the "ship and the lighthouse" - where we gathered in a circle in pairs with one sitting and the other behind, as the "lighthouse" winked to call out someone else in the circle. Hard to describe but quite fun once you get the hang of it.

We then broke out into our teams, this time rearranging the trainers into stable pairs and balancing out the boys/girls and dominant children a bit more, to plan our mapping fieldwork. The center managed to create "press badges" for our young journalists in training as they preferred to call themselves. The badges had the rules and responsibilities that they crafted the day before, on the back.

The 5 groups went out for their neighborhood mapping trips. I "shadowed" one group that decided to examine the human rights situation in their camp through mapping. They met with the PCHR and Mazen offices and interviewed their staff. I was quite impressed with their interview skills and team coordination while some wrote summaries and others photographed. Fortunately, one of the staff at Mazen took them out to meet a family whose home had been bombed during the siege in Jan 2008.

We met the father who lost his right hand and one of his children, while another suffered shrapnel wounds. I only learned about all this as the interview progressed and still taken aback by the warmth and hospitality of the whole family, who insisted on serving tea. The young group conducted their interview tactfully and professionally to the point where I joked with the Mazen staff member that they may make for good recruits in this organization.

While we got back to the center, other groups were already preparing their maps on large sheets; one involved a narrative about a water pollution and a filtration facility near the camp, while another took a field-trip to a Bedouin village nearby. They presented their maps to the groups by the end of the day, which went quite well.

Groups began trying the VideoStudio software in their groups to sequence their photography; some did a quick rough-cut but others got distracted by the software and its playful special effects (mostly due to their trainers). I tried to focus the groups back on the narrative of their neighborhood trips and challenged them to create something they might feature as reportage on Al-Jazeera. Hopefully, their ideas will get more imaginative once we've done more drama and story-writing exercises next week.

Day 4: The Silent Beauty of Amna’s Visual Senses

This was a challenging day for all; we started out fine with the groups going out to their sites to complete their neighborhood narratives.

Roger Hill, a filmmaker from San Francisco who just arrived in Gaza, joined my previous group (doing the human rights story), while I shadowed another one examining special needs children in the camp. We visited a center that introduced us to a young girl Amna who is hearing-impaired. The group managed to conduct an interview with her through a sign translator, which went really well and then proceeded to give her a digital camera to shoot some photos with them to share a part of her world through the language of photography; Amna was really wonderful and the children took a liking to her right away. I asked the children to image a silent world as we walked along with Amna in the busy noisy streets of the camp.

Roger later commented that Amna’s photos were far more engaging; the children in this group plan to work her photos into their narrative (with a silent sound track on her world). They even shot some photos of shadows of their hands doing sign language to add to their montage.

This experience left me to think that we could organize a small workshop with our young Jabaliya team working with some special needs children on joint photo narratives where one does the photo and the other the soundscape, perceiving each differently through their own senses.

That afternoon the children continued to work on their first photomontage using the editing software, despite many frustrating challenges due to power-outages, viruses on laptops, and a steep learning curve to master the technical aspects of the tool without much training. The day took a toll on most of us as we strove to find better ways to tackle such issues going forward.

Day 5: Psychodrama and Screenings of Photomontage

Our final day of the first week in the workshop ended better than expected, after all the chaos and frustration of the previous day.

We managed to address most of the challenges plaguing us over the week regarding computers and pacing of the sessions, though power cuts and trainers out sick are hard to deal with easily.

We started the day with an excellent two hour psychodrama session led by Jehan, a drama trainer from Tamer, who had attended our ToT in Gaza last week. She was amazing with the group, walking them through a series of exercises that helped them moving and physically expressing themselves in ways we had not seen. She eventually got children to meditate and relax to soothing music and some massage, while having them imagine and draw a scenario describing "home". The children later acted out some short improvisational plays.

Meanwhile a group of 25 children showed up in the morning to take Dabke lessons with a team of staff trainers; they were the "comparison" group we requested. The boys were already quite good at Dabke, while the girls were making a great effort; it was rather touching to watch as one of the young trainers who lost his arm (presumably in the war) taught them vigorous dance moves.

After their two hour session, Amani and Mustafa, lead the evaluation sessions with the children. These were conducted as one large group in the center library as we didn't have enough staff for in-depth focus groups. But remarkably the children took to the evaluation quite well and ended up drawing their hand exercise and daily dairy quite well, subsequently writing brief responses to Amani's questions. While it was not structured as key informant interviews in small focus groups, the children provided some good background info. on 2-3 sheets each.

After lunch our groups were eager to complete their photo-montages, even before we had a chance to fully prepare all the laptops. In the morning we worked with the center staff to have all our laptops scanned for viruses, checked software and data, and labeled each one with group IDs so they had stable machines for photo editing.

We got each group to work in a different room at the center so they could do audio recordings easily. All worked out much more smoothly this time around; the children were much more so in control of the photo editing and managed to record voice narratives for all their shorts. One group had to restart all over after the power went out and their laptop had no battery; their patience was impressive despite it all.

Finally, we got nearly all montages ready to screen and I decided to conduct our evaluation de-briefing with them for 30 mins before the final presentations. I would have preferred a more creative focus group-style evaluation but we just ran out of time...

The children were generally quite happy with the workshop - many remarking that this was their best day as they got to complete their photo narratives. Others felt the workshop got them out in their community getting to understand local issues in ways they never did and they really appreciated being asked to take on a responsible journalistic role. Others really enjoyed the photo reviews and editing techniques, not to mention the calming drama session earlier.

We insisted on hearing some difficulties they encountered; the children were frank to indicate some points including their surprise at some local community folks not wanting to be interviewed or photographed (though some children found that they were able to go back the following day and break the ice with many such folks). They complained about not having enough cameras in their groups and not enough time for editing. Others indicated the days were often long and tiring.

They also felt that the changes among children and trainers in groups (particularly in the first few days) was disruptive and with some trainers having to leave early or miss a day (due to exams or illness) lead to swapping trainers affecting group dynamics, and left the children hanging in their assignments at times. I mentioned that we really appreciated their feedback and would take that into account to improve the coming days, while encouraging us to meet us individually to offer more feedback anytime.

We finally watched the photo montages and this was deeply satisfying for all; below are the five main narratives they produced:

1. A photo montage on keeping the streets clean - the children visited a juice factory to ask about their practices to make better products and produced a piece that highlighted the community's responsibility.

2. A piece about the special needs center in the camp and how the group met a young hearing-impaired girl, Amna, whom they interviewed and trained to use a camera. It was a touching story that the children themselves felt transformed their experience spending time with Amna.

3. A detailed journalistic report on the Abu Rashed Pool, a rain-water collection facility in the camp that was often flooded or polluted. They did a great job producing a fact-filled photo essay with some imaginative writing.

4. A piece on the human rights centers in the camp with intensive interviews of the Hamad family that was devastated during the war. The piece was really well done, especially the interviews and photos with the father who lost his arm. The words and haunting music were powerful and I think it left a mark on the children who produced the piece as well.

5. A visit to a Bedouin village outside the camp and the traditional lives they lived, including mud homes they still continue to build. This group probably enjoyed their field-trip the most and produced the most dazzling photo transitions and music thanks in part to their artistic trainer, though we remarked that the special effects were probably unnecessary.

Overall it was a great screening to close the first full week of the workshop in Jabaliya camp. The children here really seem to be looking forward to the week ahead on creative writing and acting out their fictional narratives.

A selection of photos from the workshop are posted online here:
http://voicesbeyondwalls.blogspot.com/2010/07/week-1-workshop-in-jabaliy....

It's useful for...
...when you're organizing a rally, and you wan to draw the interest of passers-by.
...when you've assembled a cool collection of people, and you want to capture a unique photograph of the event.
...when your organization has a storefront, and you want to call attention to your cause.

All it takes is 3 steps to set up a Junkyard Jumbotron

1. Collect people's laptops, smartphones, etc and arrange them in a grid (on a table, in people's arms, etc). Any device with a web browser will work.

2. Point each device at a special url

3. Take a picture of the screens and the special "glyphs" that show up on them (thanks to the special url) and send it to a special email address (see left image below)

Now anyone can send arbitrary images to the Junkyard Jumbotron via email (see right image below)

We need your help.
* Do you have an old laptop that you'd be willing to donate to help us test the Junkyard Jumbotron software? It just needs to be able to get on to the web and to have a power cord.
* Do you have an occasion where you'd like to try out a Junkyard Jumbotron to call attention to your cause?

Please get in touch with me at borovoy@media.mit.edu

Very interesting insights from TechCrunch’s Paul Carr.

I think there is much to be said for periodically cutting back on (or eliminating) anything that feels absolutely essential or habitual to you, to gauge how much you really need it.

In the last year I asked myself, “Do I need a house?” Nope. I’d like to have a house again, but I can be happy without one.

Several years ago I wondered, “Do I need a car?” Nope — and I’m much happier without one. Same with printed books: “Do I need several crammed bookcases around to reassure me that I’m smart or that I won’t get bored?” Again, no — I’m far happier with my Kindle and with being able to make better use of limited space.

I doubt that I’d ever entirely quit using social media because in my case it has vastly improved my life in many ways. But in the last couple of months I’ve cut back on it quite a lot — some days I post a lot, but others I don’t post at all (and a post-free day NEVER used to happen to me). I feel less compulsive about it.

However, I have definitely increased my use of two kinds of social media tools in recent months: social bookmarking tools and Facebook…

I’m always finding stuff that’s interesting or useful, and I like to be able to find it again in ways that make sense to me. Also, I believe that public curation is one of the most lasting values of all kinds of internet-based media — it not only makes stuff findable, it makes particularly good or relevant stuff findable.

This is why I’ve used Delicious for many years to save relevant links — it’s not the most usable or functional social bookmarking tool, but it syndicates nicely to WordPress and thus gives me a way to realize visibility benefits on this blog from my social bookmarking efforts. For me, that’s killing many birds with one stone simply by capitalizing on my penchant for wanting to keep interesting stuff.

But lately, since I’m engaged in some special research projects and a great deal of regular writing/editing/training for clients such as CNN.com, the Knight Digital Media Center, the Society of Environmental Journalists, eMeter and OaklandLocal, I also want to track useful stuff for these projects that may represent only a highly temporary interest and doesn’t necessarily need to be syndicated to Contentious.com.

For temporary project-related links, I’ve resumed using Diigo — which I used assiduously several years ago as my main bookmarking tool when it was Furl then stopped using entirely, then resumed a few months ago. I had been using the Firefox plugin Zotero to save research-related links, but I guess I saved too much stuff in it and it started crashing Firefox so I stopped using it.

I like Diigo for project-related research because I can choose to make it public and shareable — or keep some projects or items private. I generally keep my lists public unless there’s a specific reason to make them private, since I believe in the value of sharing. Also, I use the Diggo groups feature to collaborate with people on projects.

…And regarding Facebook — despite its privacy challenges, I’ve actually been using it more in the last year. But I use it mainly for personal stuff (connecting with friends, sharing info about me and my life). I monitor my privacy settings there pretty closely. I’ve also been going back and systematically removing Facebook “friends” who I don’t actually know personally. I create groups of my friends there so I can check in separately on my closest friends, my Boulder friends, my Bay Area friends, my family, colleagues who also are friends, etc. So for me, Facebook has become a particularly good channel for maintaining personal connections.

I still use Twitter, and I mix it up between personal and professional stuff there. I like it, it benefits me, I see no reason to leave — but I’ve channeled some of that energy elsewhere. Twitter is not a good archiving mechanism, so if I find something I really want to save I’ll often put it in Diigo or Delicious. If I also tweet it, I’ll clarify what other people might find interesting about it; whereas for Delicious and Diigo, some of my notes and categories might really only make sense to me.

I’ve been writing fewer blog posts of my own (like this) mainly because I use Delicious to post interesting stuff here. Not everyone likes that format, but it works well enough for my purposes here. I’ve been doing so much writing for clients and other projects that I frankly rarely have the energy for writing for my own blog.

My remaining personal energy for writing tends to go into my personal journal, which is on paper. Really. It’s the only paper left in my life that I really enjoy handling.

…All of this is the long way of saying I applaud Carr’s choice to leave social media, since it works for him. Almost everything in life — and especially in media — is, in fact, optional. It’s always good to challenge assumptions and explore options, whether additive, subtractive, or shifting. And I challenge anyone who feels compulsive about social media to at least take a vacation and then see what you really need and want. Life is too short to stay stuck in any rut or take anything for granted.

Designed for journalists, bloggers, and lawyers who work with media clients, the conference will be an opportunity to learn first‐hand the latest legal developments and to get your questions answered byexperts in the field.

The program will bring together legal practitioners, journalists, and academics to discuss the latest legal issues facing online media ventures. Topics will include: libel law, copyright law, newsgathering law, and advertising law, as well as the legal issues arising from news aggregation, managing online communities, and business law considerations for start‐up online media organizations. Small‐group workshops will focus on strategies for accessing government information and understanding legal terms in content licenses, freelancer contracts, and website terms of service and privacy policies.

If you need personalized legal assistance before or after the conference, contact the Online Media Legal Network, a legal referral network for independent online media administered by the Citizen Media Law Project at the Berkman Center.

Funding for the conference is being provided by the Harnisch Foundation, which has been a long‐time sponsor of the Center for Sustainable Journalism and recently provided a grant to the Berkman Center to support media law education.

Visit the conference website for more information on the conference agenda, registration and logistics.

But for all of the heated rhetoric blaming news aggregators for the decline of journalism, the fall of civilization and male pattern baldness, many are still left asking the question: are news aggregators violating current law?

Today, CMLP releases a white paper entitled "The Rise of the News Aggregator: Legal Implications and Best Practices" that attempts to answer that question by examining the hot news misappropriation and copyright infringement claims that are often asserted against aggregators, and to provide news aggregators with some "best practices" for making use of third-party content. 

A hearty thanks goes out to the people that helped make this paper possible: Justin Silverman, for invaluable research assistance;  David Ardia and Sam Bayard, for reading and critiquing numerous drafts; and the speakers from the "Saving Journalism from Itself? Hot News, Copyright Fair Use and News Aggregation" panel at our spring conference, for helping to frame and crystalize many of the issues.

You can download the white paper here.

Back in April, the Commission sent a letter to Ann Taylor LOFT raising concerns about a promotion the clothing company ran for bloggers and warning the company not to undertake any similar campaigns. The Commision declined to undertake any enforcement action in that case because it was the firm's first apparent violation, only a very small number of bloggers posted content as a result of the promotion, and the company adopted a written policy in February 2010 stating that it would not issue any gifts to bloggers without first telling the bloggers that the gift must be disclosed.

Now, the Commission has reached a settlement with Reverb Communications, a public relations firm, which the FTC alleged had employees and interns post positive reviews on Apple's iTunes store for games produced by Reverb clients.  According to the FTC complaint,

From approximately November 2008 through May 2009, Reverb employees, including [Reverb owner] Tracie Snitker, and company managers, posted [positive] public reviews about Reverb’s clients’ gaming applications in the iTunes store. These reviews were posted using account names that would give the readers of these reviews the impression they had been submitted by disinterested consumers.

In the Matter of Reverb Communications, Inc., No. 092 3199 (FTC 2010), complaint at  2.

While Reverb did not admit any wrongdoing, under the settlement the company agreed to remove within seven days any previously posted endorsements that misrepresent the authors as independent users or ordinary consumers, and that fail to disclose a connection between Reverb and the game developers.  The settlement also bars such misrepresentations in any future comments. (FTC analysis of settlement here.)

The five-member Commission unanimously gave preliminary approval to the settlement, and will take a final vote after a 30-day public comment period.

While I've questioned the disparate application of the FTC rules to new and traditional media, enforcement of the rules to remedy the apparent "astroturfing" in this case is a good use of the FTC's power to ensure that customer endorsements are just that: honest opinions of actual customers.

One of our allies, New Zealand, is considering a three strikes Internet termination plan. Another ally, France, has already passed such a measure – HADOPI, but can’t seem to enforce it (legally). While I’ve written about the lunacy that is HADOPI, I thought our friends down under might be interested to learn of the hideous side effects of swallowing the Internet Execution program.   

I’ve already written about France’s ill-considered HADOPI law, which mandates termination of accused pirates. Supporters of HADOPI have noted that there is at least a five-minute hearing before the line is snipped. In order to make these hearings more efficient, the French government has considered getting into the spyware business.

In order to defend yourself from an accusation of copyright infringment (and avoid the resulting digital execution), you will need to provide a record of your internet use. The government would make available surveillance tools that users would need to install in their machines. The government has asked that the software include:

• the real time observation of protocol traffic;
•  analysis of configuration files, including static analysis of  the programmes installed and the  router, and dynamic analysis of the use of the connection;
•  logs of all activity on the Internet access  - including activation /deactivation, modification of any security profiles -  to be kept for a year;
•  a system of alerts warning users if they are about to use  a P2P connection: for example, "You are about to download a file using a P2P protocol - do you want to continue?".

So, in order to protect yourself from losing your Internet, you need to offer up some of your privacy? How delicious. There was an old woman who swallowed a fly. . .  A three-strikes policy can usher in a regime of “voluntary” self-surveillance. You don’t want to provide the court with your Internet records? What have you got to hide?

But I figure that many of us would do pretty much anything to keep our Internet in the face of false accusations of infringement. Despite what three strikes proponents (read: friends of the Entertainment Industry) claim, the Internet is not some trifle.  Internet access, or the lack thereof, implicates job training, education, access to government resources, and self-expression. Severing an individual's connection seems akin to mutilation or exile. 

The morale of the story is: when you put in place a system with enormous consequences and little-to-no due process, individuals will take measures (however unpleasant) to protect themselves from arbitrary punishment. Between plans mandating that users password protect their wifi and record their own Internet use, we have seen a moment to an online copyright regime of guilty until proven innocent. With three strikes looming in New Zealand, and the hints of a three strikes plan in the ACTA negotiations, we may soon find ourselves sacrificing our rights in order to safeguard our basic necessities.

(Andrew Moshirnia is a third year student at Harvard Law School and a CMLP blogger. Somewhere beyond him, a wheel was turned and his number came up black thirteen.)

This isn't the first time GateHouse has been in a squabble over its Creative Commons-licensed content. The current case has spurred some speculation on why a plaintiff would want to sue under a theory of copyright infringement as well as one for breach of contract.

To begin with, it is often advantageous to plead breach of contract in the alternative to copyright infringement. Whether a copyright infringement claim against a licensee is available may depend on whether the violated license term is a condition or a covenant. If a licensee violated a condition of the license, she is acting outside the scope of the license. By doing so, she no longer has a contractual right to use the copyrighted material, and her conduct could be subject to a valid copyright infringement claim. However, if the term violated by the licensee was a covenant, not a condition, the licensee would still retain her contractual right to use the copyrighted material. In that case, the licensor could only sue for breach of contract. When the license language is potentially ambiguous, a copyright holder would likely want to keep that option open, in case the court decides the violated term was merely a covenant.

For example, in Jacobsen v. Katzer, 535 F.3d 1373, 1381 (Fed. Cir. 2008), the court interpreted the language of an open source copyright license and decided that the plaintiff could sue for copyright infringement because the license included conditions: "The [license] states on its face that the document creates conditions.... The [license] also uses the traditional language of conditions by noting that the right to copy, modify, and distribute are granted 'provided that' the conditions are met..." (emphasis in the orignial).

Following Jacobsen, a defendant in TGN's position may argue that the Creative Commons license at issue is not clear in identifying "noncommercial use" as a condition of its license. The legal language describes noncommercial use as a "restriction" of the license, which is inconsistent with the use of "terms and conditions" limiting the scope of the license. When the license is read in its entirety, however, it seems clear that Creative Commons intended "noncommercial use" to be a condition. To begin with, the license grant is "expressly made subject to" the restrictions. The public-facing page of the license also explicitly identifies "noncommercial use" as a condition of the license. In addition, when content creators are choosing among licenses, Creative Commons invites them to "choose a set of conditions they wish to apply to their work." Nevertheless, as insurance against potential ambiguity, a copyright holder like GateHouse may plead both breach of contract and copyright infringement in case a judge agrees with the defendant's argument that the restriction is not a condition of the license grant.

While a plaintiff is barred from recovering twice for the same injury, she may still choose to claim copyright infringement as well as breach of contract because different remedies are available under the two theories. The cap on statutory damages for copyright infringement cases is $30,000. If the plaintiff can show that the infringement was willful, the damages range up to $150,000 per infringement, increasing a willful infringer's potential liability to a rather hefty sum.

In contrast, to recover under breach of contract, a plaintiff has to prove that damages were reasonably foreseeable at the time of contract formation and are reasonably certain at the time of the trial. This may be much harder to accomplish than adding up the licensee's acts of willful copyright infringement. Still, if the plaintiff puts forward a robust evidentiary showing, she may potentially collect damages well beyond $30,000 for acts that were not willful. In that (albeit unlikely) case, a plaintiff may prefer to recover contract remedies for violations of a copyright license.

(Marina Petrova is a rising second year student at UCLA School of Law and a CMLP legal intern.)

(Photo courtesy of Flickr user IXQUICK licensed under a CC Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic license. )

I love reading Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree, but it always makes me a little bit sad. Commenting on need, devotion, and mortality, the story revolves around a tree that gives up everything to please a boy. I’ve always kept my eye out for a similar book. So imagine my delight when I discovered that the administration wanted to write the sequel: The Giving ISP.  It goes a little something like this:

"Once there was an ISP. . ."

The FBI wants access to the Internet records of various individuals. And for this purpose, the government uses National Security Letters (NSL).  NSLs allow the FBI to demand user information from ISP’s AND to insist that the ISP keep this demand secret. All this is done without the pesky need for a warrant, provided that the FBI decides the information might be relevant to preventing or investigating terrorism.

ISP’s rarely raise a fuss, especially because spying pays well (see Yahoo!). Even if they wanted to, ISP's have only a limited ability to prevent disclosure. In Doe v. Mukasey, the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruled that an ISP which did not wish to turn over the requested information would need to “give the government prompt notice, perhaps within 10 days” after which time, the government’s needs would have to be met. In the event that an ISP does give such notice (which seems to have only ever happened three times), a judge would rule on the propriety of the request. And this ruling could be based on in camera meetings with FBI officials. How comforting.

But a slight problem arose when the government demanded information that some ISPs believed they could not legally turn over without a court order. The Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986 (ECPA Pub. L. 99-508, Oct. 21, 1986, 100 Stat. 1848, 18 U.S.C. § 2510 et seq.) restricts the types of information that can be gathered without a court order. Currently, the FBI may only (legally) seek: name, address, length of service, and toll billing records.

Of course, the administration wants more. It wants the addresses of the user’s email recipients, the time stamps for any email transmissions, and (possibly) the user's browser history. It is open for debate if ISPs have already been offering up this information, in violation of the ECPA. Now, the administration wants to make sure there is no confusion by amending the ECPA: the ISPs are to surrender “electronic communication transactional records.”  

The administration has offered no definitions for this novel phrase. Which is a bit odd, considering the whole claimed purpose of this amendment is to clarify just how much the ISPs must fork over without seeing a judge’s signature. Could it be that maybe, just maybe, the added language is intended to ensure that all providers remain the Giving ISP.

After all, we already know that telecoms have received immunity for facilitating illegal wiretapping. Could it be that this nebulous “transactional record” language is meant to grow in scope to match the digital appetite of the FBI?

This request is all the more terrifying when you recall that just a few months ago, the FBI wanted ISPs to keep a log of all the URLs a user visits. Under that proposal, an ISP would retain this information for two years. I could see the administration framing the connection of a user to a website as a “electronic communication transactional record.” The FBI could even argue that it was not requesting the content of the communication, just the record of the communication – something more akin to looking at a phone bill than engaging in wiretapping. The problem is that if the FBI has the URL and the timestamp of the “electronic communication” it can easily find out the content of the website – the agency need only look to an Internet archive or even the current URL.  The ISP gets to claim it is still respecting privacy by not turning over content, the FBI still gets to look over your shoulder, and everyone walks away happy.

Surely the FBI will never abuse this awesome power, especially when confronted with absolutely no judicial oversight. Surely, a “transactional record” wouldn’t include potentially embarrassing information related to sexual preference, drug use, political affiliation, or religious beliefs. I feel safer already. (Note: So do all the wikileakers out there.).

So to sum up: The FBI is likely gathering more information than allowed using secret National Security Letters. The administration wants to make sure companies understand that they do not need to see judicial approval before handing over “electronic communication transactional records.” The government merely wants to ensure that providers remain generous in sharing your personal data.

". . . and the ISP was happy."

(Andrew Moshirnia is a rising third year student at Harvard Law School and a CMLP blogger. His teeth are too weak for apples.)

Photo "why is the city chopping down the trees i love? i take it very personally" courtesy of Flickr user emdot, licensed under a CC Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs2.0 Generic. 

As I've explained in detail in prior posts, the Commission revised the guidelines last year for the first time since 1980, with a particular emphasis on endorsements by bloggers and other online citizen journalists who do not disclose that the products or services they review were provided to them for free or at a discount. Despite a number of questionable incidents since the FTC issued its revised guidelines, it has taken only one public action under the revised rules: sending a letter in April to Ann Taylor Loft raising concerns about a promotion the clothing company ran for bloggers and warning the company not to undertake any similar campaigns.

The FTC's new factsheet states that "since the FTC issued the revised Guides, advertisers, ad agencies, bloggers, and others have sent questions to endorsements@ftc.gov," and offers what it says are "answers to some of the most frequently asked questions." But the factsheet also seems to be responding to criticims of the rules, by myself and others.

In response to the question, "Why did the FTC revise its Endorsement Guides to include social media?," the factsheet explains that "[t]he FTC revised the Guides because truth in advertising is important in all media – including blogs and social networking sites. ... The FTC revised the examples to show how these standards apply in today’s marketing world."

Responding to another question, the FTC asserts that "the financial arrangements between some bloggers and advertisers may be apparent to industry insiders, but not to everyone else who reads a blog. Under the law, an act or practice is deceptive if it misleads 'a significant minority' of consumers. So even if some readers are aware of these deals, many readers aren’t. That’s why disclosure is important."

Different Rules Online and Offline?

The Commission also denied that the revised guidelines hold online reviewers to a higher standard than reviewers for paper-and-ink publications. "The Guides apply across the board," the factsheet states in response to a question on this point.

The issue is – and always has been – whether the audience understands the reviewer’s relationship to the company whose products are being reviewed. If the audience gets the relationship, a disclosure isn’t needed. For a review in a newspaper, on TV, or on a website with similar content, it’s usually clear to the audience that the reviewer didn’t buy the product being reviewed. It’s the reviewer’s job to write his or her opinion and no one thinks they bought the product – for example, a book or movie ticket – themselves. But on a personal blog, a social networking page, or in similar media, the reader may not expect the reviewer to have a relationship with the company whose products are mentioned. Disclosure of that relationship helps readers decide how much weight to give the review.

This is a bit of a change from the FTC's prior justification for creating different rules regarding the "material connections" disclosure requirement, which were based on the assumption that traditional media exercises "independent editorial responsibility" in writing reviews and that bloggers and social media users may not, and that freebies for traditional news reporters are "reasonably expected by the audience."

Fines for Bloggers?

The factsheet also responds to concerns that bloggers could be fined for violating the guides.

I’ve read that bloggers who don’t comply with the Guides can be fined $11,000? Is that true?

No. The press reports that said that were wrong. There is no fine for not complying with an FTC guide.

Are you monitoring bloggers?

We’re not monitoring bloggers and we have no plans to. If concerns about possible violations of the FTC Act come to our attention, we’ll evaluate them case by case. If law enforcement becomes necessary, our focus will be advertisers, not endorsers – just as it’s always been.

This is a continuation of previous efforts by FTC officials to downplay the risks to bloggers and other users of social media.

Richard Cleland, assistant director of the FTC's advertising practices division, told Fast Company that bloggers would not, as a practical matter, be fined:

That $11,000 fine is not true. Worst-case scenario, someone receives a warning, refuses to comply, followed by a serious product defect; we would institute a proceeding with a cease-and-desist order and mandate compliance with the law. To the extent that I have seen and heard, people are not objecting to the disclosure requirements but to the fear of penalty if they inadvertently make a mistake. That's the thing I don't think people need to be concerned about. There's no monetary penalty, in terms of the first violation, even in the worst case. Our approach is going to be educational, particularly with bloggers. We're focusing on the advertisers: What kind of education are you providing them, are you monitoring the bloggers and whether what they're saying is true?

The guides were issued under the authority of 15 U.S.C. § 45, which outlaws "unfair methods of competition in or affecting commerce, and unfair or deceptive acts or practices in or affecting commerce," and authorizes the FTC to enforce this prohibition by the adoption of rules and byissuing orders to cease and desist against violators. 

The statute provides that the primary form of enforcement is orders issued by the Commission after hearings, 15 U.S.C. § 45(b), with opportunities for appeal, both within the agency and in the courts. 15 U.S.C. § 45(c).

Continued violations of final FTC orders can, indeed, be penalized up to $16,000, by a civil enforcement action brought by the FTC in federal court. 15 U.S.C. § 45(l),(m) . (Note that while  § 45(l) sets the penalty at $10,000, the Federal Civil Penalties Inflation Adjustment Act of 1990, Pub. L. 101-410 (Oct. 5, 1990), as amended by Pub. L. 104-134, title III, Sec. 31001(s)(1) (Apr. 26, 1996), allows the agency to raise the penalties to account for inflation. The FTC raised the relevant fines to $11,000 in 2000. See 65 Fed. Reg. 69666 (Nov. 20, 2000) (modifying 16 C.F.R. § 1.98).  In 2009, the FTC raised them to $16,000.  See 74 Fed. Reg. 857 (Jan. 9, 2009) (further modifying 16 C.F.R. § 1.98).

It is true that such "competition" enforcement actions are rare; the current FTC report, dated March 31, 2010, states (on p. 102, p. 104 of the pdf) that no such cases are pending.  And Cleland and the FTC factsheet are correct in pointing out that a single violation of the guides will not result in a monetary penalty.  And the FTC has made it clear that it will use its discretion in enforcing the rules, focusing on warnings to bloggers while reserving more serious enforcement actions to advertisers. But there is still the possibility, however remote, that a blogger can, after repeated warnings for violations of the guides, be sued in federal court and possibly fined.

More Examples, and Suggested Disclosures

Aside from the justifications for the rules, much of the FTC factsheet is devoted to answering questions related to specific situations and scenarios. The gist of these answers, like the examples provided in the guides themselves, is that "buzz marketing"— in which compensated "influencers" promote a brand through apparently noncommercial means -- must be disclosed.

The factsheet also includes a series of "answers" on how bloggers and others should disclose material connections.  The problem is that the FTC statements on this issue continue to be vague: there's no special language to use, they say, but a single disclosure on a page or via a link is probably not adequate.

Finally, the factsheet addresses how the endorsement guides apply to affiliate and network marketing programs.

* * *

As we've said before, bloggers and other posters on social media should be familiar with the guides, and can comply with them by acting within the journalistic standards and prinicples of independence and transparency. 

But it's also interesting that the agency has felt the need to respond, in the factsheet and elsewhere, to concerns raised by bloggers, lawyers and commenters about the rules, and their application to the online world.

It seems terribly cruel to debate the potential malignancy of a mole located on a severed hand. At present, two camps are arguing over the rapidity of the spread of broadband, while ignoring a nationwide rollback of potential Internet access for the nation's poorest communities. This would be funny if only it weren't so sad. 

The Federal Communications Commission recently released the latest report on Broadband Deployment in the United States. In a change from previous reports, the FCC upgraded the standard for “broadband” from 200kbs to 4mbs and focused on subscriber counts rather than overall availability. Due in part to these new tallying techniques, the FCC essentially gave the US a failing grade: "broadband remains unavailable to approximately 14 to 24 million Americans." Predictably, Industry reps claim that the report’s conclusion is offbase. Cue the political bickering.

The Republican minority argues that the standard for broadband is far too high, that this amounts to an attempt to fudge the numbers and falsely deny broadband's teleological progression. Democrats respond that previous procedures, such as considering an area covered if it housed a single subscriber, understated the problem.

All this makes for good political theater. But it misses the point. The prevalence of broadband-capable infrastructure is unimportant, so long as a main method of Internet exposure is dying. Dwindling library access, rather than stagnant Broadband penetration, is a far larger threat to the nation’s Internet access. 

Libraries provide the only free Internet access for most poor communities. Individuals without a computer or home Internet connection rely on libraries for assistance in job searching, networking, and e-governance. Of course these needs have become all the more acute during the recession, as individuals are laid off and can no longer afford home access. 

But libraries, especially those in urban centers, simply do not have the capital to continue operating on a daily basis. The ALA reports that in the 2009 national survey of public libraries, one quarter of urban libraries and 14.5 percent of all libraries decreased operating hours. This means that approximately 2,400 public libraries lost hours.

Let’s focus on some of the more high profile amputations, all of which have occurred in the last month:

- The Los Angeles public library and its 72 branches, as of July 18th, are no longer open on Sunday or Monday. Adding insult to injury, the city decided not to push for a revenue measure because of the high cost of putting the matter to vote.

- Charlotte's Mecklenburg County Library system reduced the hours of 21 libraries, with most open only four days a week.

- Brooklyn Public Library reduced the hours of 60 branches, with the great majority going to a five-day only schedule.

Santa Barbara, Wheaton, Trenton, Tempe, and Mount Laurel libraries are similarly afflicted.  I would also add Boston Public Library to this list, as four branches are slated to close and 68 employees to be laid off, but there is a slim chance the axe won't fall until winter. (Note: As should be obvious from the articles above, if these libraries are not forced to close, the solution will involve laying off a great number of employees to make up the shortfall.)

So to sum up: Libraries are the sole means of accessing the Internet for a significant portion of our population. While some politicians have the gall to argue that "[b]roadband infrastructure deployment and investment are a remarkable and continuing success story," our libraries are slicing their hours or shutting completely. Let's not argue whether or not five percent of users don't have access to broadband capable infrastructure. Instead, let's focus on the tens of millions of Americans who are gradually losing their only avenue to a wealth of online resources. 

(Andrew Moshirnia is a rising third year law student at Harvard Law School and a CMLP blogger. He leaves his editor at the foot of this post; one always finds one's burden again.)

The case is part of a long-standing business dispute between Quixtar, Inc., successor to the Amway Corporation (which has since returned to that name), and Signature Management TEAM, LLC, which sells books, seminars, and motivational speaker appearances to the Independent Business Operators ("IBOs") that sell Quixtar's products.  In this action, Quixtar sued TEAM for tortious interference with contracts and business relations, premised on the allegation that TEAM carried out an online "smear campaign" aimed at inducing IBOs to terminate their contracts with Quixtar.

In a deposition of a TEAM employee, Quixtar sought information about the identity of five anonymous Internet speakers, and the employee refused to answer.  Quixtar then moved to compel testimony about the authors of four blogs and a video that were critical of Quixtar management: “Save Us Dick DeVos,” “Q’Reilly,” “Integrity is TEAM,” “IBO Rebellion,” and “Hooded Angry Man." According to Quixtar, statements appearing on these sites were linked to TEAM and therefore supported Quixtar's claims of tortious interference, including: "Quixtar has regularly, but secretly, acknowledged that its products are overpriced and not sellable"; "Quixtar refused to pay bonuses to IBOs in good standing"; and "Quixtar currently suffers from systemic dishonesty."  Slip op. at 9911-12.

After applying the Doe v. Cahill standard to the statements in question, the district court ordered the TEAM employee to disclose the identity of three of the five speakers. Both sides petitioned for a writ of mandamus seeking to overturn the ruling. The Ninth Circuit decision denied both of the mandamus requests on procedural grounds, emphasizing that mandamus is an "'extraordinary' remedy limited to 'extraordinary' causes." Slip op. at 9914.

In the course of its decision, however, the appeals court characterized the statements at issue as commercial speech, which is afforded less constitutional protection than other types of expression. See generally Central Hudson Gas & Elec. Corp. v. Public Serv. Comm’n, 447 U.S. 557 (1980) (holding that truthful, non-misleading commercial speech is entitled to constitutional protection, though less than other constitutionally guaranteed expression).  The Ninth Circuit wrote:

The Internet postings and video at issue in the petition and cross-petition are best described as types of "expression related solely to the economic interests of the speaker and its audience" and are thus properly categorized as commercial speech.  The claimed disparagement goes to the heart of Quixtar's commercial practices and its business operations.

Slip op. at 9913-14.  Having made this determination, the court distinguished Cahill as involving political speech and reasoned that, when dealing with commercial speech, "Cahill's bar extends too far." Slip op. at 9920. The court offered up the following general principle:

[W]e suggest that the nature of the speech should be a driving force in choosing a standard by which to balance the rights of anonymous speakers in discovery disputes. For example, in discovery disputes involving the identity of anonymous speakers, the notion that commercial speech should be afforded less protection than political, religious, or literary speech is hardly a novel principle. The specific circumstances surrounding the speech serve to give context to the balancing exercise.

Id. In formulating its approach, the court relied on two federal appellate decisions, NLRB v. Midland Daily News, 151 F.3d 472 (6th Cir. 1998) (involving a government agency's motion to compel a newspaper to answer a subpoena identifying an anonymous advertiser), and Lefkoe v. Jos. A. Bank Clothiers, Inc., 577 F.3d 240 (4th Cir. 2009) (allowing deposition of an anonymous speaker in a securities fraud class action).  The court also relied on the Supreme Court's recent decision in Doe v. Reed, 09-559 (U.S. June 24, 2010), which held that signatories of referendum petitions generally do not have a constitutional right to keep their identities secret, but that courts should consider in individual cases whether a particular referendum presents sufficiently unique circumstances so that anonymity is required.

While the Ninth Circuit is correct that the First Amendment generally extends less protection to commercial speech, its decision is troubling for a couple of reasons.  First, the court's sense of what qualifies as commercial speech seems unduly broad. It is hard to draw a principled distinction between the derogatory statements here (e.g., "Quixtar currently suffers from systemic dishonesty") from some of the more extreme statements that might appear on a consumer review site or gripe site. Certainly, it would not be too difficult for a business plaintiff to characterize an outraged customer's commentary on Yelp, Consumeraffairs.com, or a free-standing gripe site as "related solely to the economic interests of the speaker and its audience" and going "to the heart of [the plaintiff's] commercial practices and its business operations." As Wendy Davis succinctly put it last week: "If criticizing another company's business operations is 'commercial speech,' then every post on a gripe site couldbe considered commercial."

Relatedly, Paul Levy points out that the Ninth Circuit seems to have simply accepted Quixtar's theory of the case in characterizing the speech in question as commercial: 

To be sure, it is commercial on Quixtar’s theory of the case (derogatory comments posted by a rival for the purpose of stealing business), but the same could be said in any Cahill-type case – on the plaintiff’s legal theory, the Doe’s speech is unprotected by the First Amendment because, for example, it is false statements of fact made with actual malice.   Yet that has never been enough to overcome the right of anonymous speech.  Hopefully there was some basis in the record other than the plaintiff’s say-so for finding the speech commercial.

The court's circular reasoning could tilt the scales in favor of disclosure in every defamation case, where plaintiff by definition claim that the speech in question is not entitled to any First Amendment protection at all. And as Paul suggests, the Ninth Circuit's approach will simply encourage plaintiffs to characterize all criticism of their businesses as a competitor's smear campaign as opposed to legitimate consumer criticism.  The whole point of the Dendrite and Cahill tests is to make sure that plaintiffs can support such allegations with at least some minimal factual basis before they get what they want.

Photo "Fight the power" courtesy of Flickr user C-Monster, licensed under a CC Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 Generic.

I first became aware of this study as I prepared my Knight News Challenge proposal. During the submission process, I consulted quite frequently with one of the co-authors of the CCPIO report, Chris Davey. Davey and I agreed that if I was fortunate enough to get funding we would test some of the ideas that surfaced in the CCPIO report.

More than 16,000 individuals in the court community were invited to participate in the electronic survey. Of the 810 individuals who completed the full survey, 254 (or 31.3 percent) were judges or magistrates. The majority of the respondents were court system staff. Partners in the project include the National Center for State Courts, the nation's leading center for research assistance to the nation's state court systems, and the E.W. Scripps School of Journalism at Ohio University.

Though the response to the survey was somewhat limited, there are some compelling topics outlined in CCPIO's final report. For those of you who don't want to take the time to read the 100-plus pages of text, I've boiled down some of the highlights in the text below.

Major Objectives

From the report:

The CCPIO New Media Project had five primary objectives: (1) clearly define the current technology, (2) systematically examine the ways courts use the technology, (3) empirically measure the perceptions of judges and top court administrators toward the technology, (4) collect and analyze the literature on public perceptions of the judiciary and court public outreach programs and (5) offer a framework and analysis for judges and court administrators to use for making decisions about the appropriate use of new media.

Court Culture vs. New Media Culture

The study succinctly described the culture clash between the courts and new media realities:

• New media are decentralized and multidirectional, while the courts are institutional and largely unidirectional.
• New media are personal and intimate, while the courts are separate, even cloistered, and, by definition, independent.
• New media are multimedia, incorporating video and still images, audio and text, while the courts are highly textual.

Checklist on Using Social Media in the Courtroom

Probably the most important part of the report for us at Order in the Court 2.0 is found in Appendix B. There you'll find a valuable checklist that we plan to incorporate into our project. I've edited the checklist, but have tried to retain its essence. Here's the edited checklist:

• What do you want to achieve? Public Education? Release of decisions? Highlight the activities of individual judges or courts? Explain court processes and procedures? Develop ongoing dialogues with the public to increase transparency?
• How will you know if the resources you are dedicating to social media technologies are a good investment of time and money?
• Do you have an efficient mechanism to monitor these technologies on a regular basis to ensure quality control?
• Does your organization have a policy on how to handle defamatory or inappropriate remarks posted to social media sites outside the department?
• What kind of involvement should the court's information technology division have in the decision to use social media technologies.
• What are the technical requirements of introducing social media technology?
• Are there criteria in place as to what topics can and cannot be discussed?
• What safeguards are in place to ensure nothing is posted that jeopardizes a case or trial?
• Do you have a prepared plan of action in place in the event a spectator is inappropriately using new media technology in your courtroom?

You can see we have a lot of work ahead of us.

This summer, as the federal 5th Circuit Court of Appeals prepared to hear arguments in a challenge to the University of Texas's affirmative action policy, Texas Tribune complemented its coverage of the case with nearly 200 pages of annotated court documents, including the original district court ruling, the university's appellate brief, as well as that of the plaintiffs in the case.

The Las Vegas Sun incorporated quite a trove of documents into its series on hospital care in Las Vegas. Readers were invited to browse everything from Department of Health and Human Services reports to individual records, right along with the Sun's reporters. When they say that hospital-acquired infections cost the country $30 billion per year or account for close to 100,000 deaths, they back each number up with original documents.

The Columbia Missourian annotated the city budget and took a local blogger to task for exaggerating Columbia, Missouri's cash reserves.

When Texas Governor Rick Perry challenged reporters to find anyone who can out-work him, Texas Tribune posted the governor's May 2010 schedule alongside that of Florida's Gov. Crist, New York's Gov. Paterson and California's Gov. Schwarzenegger and invited readers to help them skim over a hundred pages of briefings, receptions and photo ops for stories deserving of a closer look.

The Washington Post supplemented its reporting on the cozy relationship between the oil industry and the federal agency assigned to regulate them with an annotated report on the prospects for "Moving beyond Conflict" between regulator and regulated. Their document cache also included reports outlining just how cozy things had gotten by 2008. As Emily Keller pointed out in Free Government Info, a transparency project, documents like these give more transparency to journalism itself.

We're also hard at work fine tuning the document viewer, transforming it into something that users could reasonably plug into a template with a narrower content column. Thus far folks have been stuck with a full page viewer. We haven't fully rolled it out yet, but we've worked with a couple of our beta testers to implement it already.

Iowa State has a new men's basketball coach, and the Des Moines Register included all 14 pages of his contract to their coverage of the finer points contained in it. Among the unusual clauses? Hoiberg can walk away if the university decides to increase academic standards for student athletes beyond the NCAA's minimum.

Meanwhile, at the Santa Fe Reporter, Alexa Schirtzinger opted not to publish tables of information right inside her story on elder abuse in New Mexico, but she did use her staff blog to share the data that she had such a hard time tracking down. An annotation highlights the numbers that showed her that New Mexico fields more abuse complaints per nursing home bed than any other state.

DocumentCloud watchers will notice that they posted the contract right on the same page as Randy Peterson's writeup instead of displaying the document in a full page. We'll be making tweaks like this a lot easier for all of our users. In the meantime, if you're skilled at the art of reverse engineering JavaScript, you can view the source of the Register's story (or the Reporter's) to see just how they toggled the sidebar or zoom on those documents.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the country, professor Michael Mateas and his Expressive Intelligence Studio at UC Santa Cruz have been working on the problem of game generation by creating artificial intelligence tools to create a virtually infinite number of games.

The goal of our two-year Knight grant is to create a tool for generating newsgames on the fly, making it viable to create a videogame about a breaking event. This is done by identifying the issue and an angle for editorial or reporting, boiling the story down into its constituent agents and their relationships, and selecting from a range of rhetorical archetypes. Anyone who understands how to use the tool will be able to create a newsgame, remixed from the structures and mechanics of popular arcade games, within five minutes or less. The game will output to Flash and HTML 5 for instant uploading to the web, where it can be paired with reportage, columns, video, infographics, and cartoons covering the same current event.

Our project strives to enhance the online viability of local newspapers and to lower the technical barrier required to produce videogames with editorial intent. We see it as as an extension of, rather than a replacement for, the tradition of editorial cartooning. The creator of the earliest newsgames, Gonzalo Frasca, was the first to describe his work as "playable political cartoons." The French-language history and geography textbooks Frasca encountered in high school featured many cartoons drawn by an artist from Le Monde, and they were, according to him, all that made civics education bearable.

By now, anyone studying or working in journalism understands the great loss to news revenue caused by the shift of classifieds to online sources such as Craigslist and eBay. It is our contention that the abandonment of staff cartoonists at many papers -- a tragic and highly visible symptom of overall budget cuts during the recent recession -- represents a similarly vital loss, though of a different kind. For over a century, editorial cartoons drew attention to issues of local importance and generated a sense of regional pride. Their contribution to the wellbeing of local papers has never been easily quantifiable, but it's clear that they've always served a pivotal role in maintaining product loyalty and funneling readers toward the rest of the paper.

Games accomplish a similar goal: Studies by the New York Times, the London Times, and a number of local papers showed that a significant percentage of their readerships bought the paper primarily for the puzzles. Although the crossword retains its loyalists, and despite the advent of Sudoku having ushered in a new generation of puzzlers, the rise in popularity of online web game portals represents yet another threat to the growth and retention of news readerships.

The new online news media require a new form of game, one that draws from the accessibility of arcade games and the capability of videogames to present an editorial opinion. Indeed, The Cartoonist has uses far beyond interactive cartoons, and as a result we will be changing the final product's name to reflect its broad potential. More on that as things progress.

Once it is fully developed, our studios will work with local reporters, columnists, and cartoonists in Atlanta and Santa Cruz to introduce them to the authoring system. Later, we'll make the tool and its source code available to everyone, from veteran cartoonists, to indie game developers, to citizen journalists. Until then, we'll be publishing findings, problems, and points of interest twice a month on this blog, along with other articles on our own Newsgames and Expressive Intelligence Studio websites. We look forward to your questions, comments, and continued support.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the country, professor Michael Mateas and his Expressive Intelligence Studio at UC Santa Cruz have been working on the problem of game generation by creating artificial intelligence tools to create a virtually infinite number of games.

The goal of our two-year Knight grant is to create a tool for generating newsgames on the fly, making it viable to create a videogame about a breaking event. This is done by identifying the issue and an angle for editorial or reporting, boiling the story down into its constituent agents and their relationships, and selecting from a range of rhetorical archetypes. Anyone who understands how to use the tool will be able to create a newsgame, remixed from the structures and mechanics of popular arcade games, within five minutes or less. The game will output to Flash and HTML 5 for instant uploading to the web, where it can be paired with reportage, columns, video, infographics, and cartoons covering the same current event.

Our project strives to enhance the online viability of local newspapers and to lower the technical barrier required to produce videogames with editorial intent. We see it as as an extension of, rather than a replacement for, the tradition of editorial cartooning. The creator of the earliest newsgames, Gonzalo Frasca, was the first to describe his work as "playable political cartoons." The French-language history and geography textbooks Frasca encountered in high school featured many cartoons drawn by an artist from Le Monde, and they were, according to him, all that made civics education bearable.

By now, anyone studying or working in journalism understands the great loss to news revenue caused by the shift of classifieds to online sources such as Craigslist and eBay. It is our contention that the abandonment of staff cartoonists at many papers -- a tragic and highly visible symptom of overall budget cuts during the recent recession -- represents a similarly vital loss, though of a different kind. For over a century, editorial cartoons drew attention to issues of local importance and generated a sense of regional pride. Their contribution to the wellbeing of local papers has never been easily quantifiable, but it's clear that they've always served a pivotal role in maintaining product loyalty and funneling readers toward the rest of the paper.

Games accomplish a similar goal: Studies by the New York Times, the London Times, and a number of local papers showed that a significant percentage of their readerships bought the paper primarily for the puzzles. Although the crossword retains its loyalists, and despite the advent of Sudoku having ushered in a new generation of puzzlers, the rise in popularity of online web game portals represents yet another threat to the growth and retention of news readerships.

The new online news media require a new form of game, one that draws from the accessibility of arcade games and the capability of videogames to present an editorial opinion. Indeed, The Cartoonist has uses far beyond interactive cartoons, and as a result we will be changing the final product's name to reflect its broad potential. More on that as things progress.

Once it is fully developed, our studios will work with local reporters, columnists, and cartoonists in Atlanta and Santa Cruz to introduce them to the authoring system. Later, we'll make the tool and its source code available to everyone, from veteran cartoonists, to indie game developers, to citizen journalists. Until then, we'll be publishing findings, problems, and points of interest twice a month on this blog, along with other articles on our own Newsgames and Expressive Intelligence Studio websites. We look forward to your questions, comments, and continued support.

Our first meeting took place at the Quincy District Court where we met with Judge Mark Coven, the first justice of the court, the clerk of the court, the state court's public information officer, the state court's chief information officer and the state's director of court operations.

Judge Coven set the tone of this meeting with his welcoming remarks and reinforced his enthusiasm for this project. He stressed its importance and how it was critical for the courts to have greater accessibility in order to build confidence in the judicial branch. He also made it clear that he wanted his courthouse to serve as a national model in determining the best practices for providing digital access to the public. After introductions, the judge provided us with a tour of the court.

After taking a few steps into the courthouse's lobby, the judge was approached by a young man who didn't look a day over 14 years old. He came to court that day to specifically thank the judge for his help in getting clean of drugs. It turns out the young man was in his late teens and had been in and out of court so many times that the judge knew him very well. He recently graduated from a drug treatment program the judge had sentenced him to in order to deal with a heroin addiction. It was easy to see the judge was touched by this man's special visit. Judge Coven took a father-like pride in the fact that he had offered this man a second chance.

Our tour continued through the busy courthouse with trips to the lock-up downstairs and meetings with court officers. I then spent the rest of the morning with the assistant court clerk who will be the day-to-day facilitator of this project. He too could not have been more enthusiastic. It was humbling to see that an idea that came out of the Knight News Challenge process was going to come to fruition and was going to have tangible support.

Since that initial meeting at the courthouse there have been meetings with the chief information officer of the state courts, Craig Burlingame. Burlingame is one of the most highly respected people in his field. He had just returned from Australia where he was helping the national government improve its computer records processes. Burlingame is incredibly knowledgeable about the particular challenges of getting the court's data out to the public. He is aware of the rewards of transparency, but he is also helping me understand the risks.

Here's an example. One goal of Order in the Court 2.0 is to post the daily docket at Quincy District Court. The docket lists the names of each defendant and cases that are scheduled for the day. The docket is produced by the state's computer system, which is called MassCourts. The docket is sent to each court in a searchable PDF document. If Order in the Court 2.0 were to post the docket through its website (which is not yet under construction), data mining agencies would have easy access to the information it contains. This, understandably, is an issue for the court.

Burlingame explained that it could seriously impact victims of crimes coming forward if they thought it might affect future job prospects or housing, since landlords use these services. He acknowledged that the docket is a public document posted at the courthouse; but to ensure the public's safety he needs to come up with a way to provide the document in a non-searchable PDF, and to seek the input of the judge assigned to preserve the integrity of the court's digital records.

It was striking to hear how something that initially seemed simple could be so complicated and require further judicial review. It was a perfect example of how the lessons we learn from this project will make it easier for future efforts to build greater court transparency.

One final footnote to this post. During a phone call with Judge Coven to set up another meeting, he reminded me of our conversation in the lobby with the young man who had come to thank him. He told me that the man was back in custody, and his family had come forward to request that he be recommitted because he was back on heroin. You couldn't miss the sadness in the judge's voice.

Our first meeting took place at the Quincy District Court where we met with Judge Mark Coven, the first justice of the court, the clerk of the court, the state court's public information officer, the state court's chief information officer and the state's director of court operations.

Judge Coven set the tone of this meeting with his welcoming remarks and reinforced his enthusiasm for this project. He stressed its importance and how it was critical for the courts to have greater accessibility in order to build confidence in the judicial branch. He also made it clear that he wanted his courthouse to serve as a national model in determining the best practices for providing digital access to the public. After introductions, the judge provided us with a tour of the court.

After taking a few steps into the courthouse's lobby, the judge was approached by a young man who didn't look a day over 14 years old. He came to court that day to specifically thank the judge for his help in getting clean of drugs. It turns out the young man was in his late teens and had been in and out of court so many times that the judge knew him very well. He recently graduated from a drug treatment program the judge had sentenced him to in order to deal with a heroin addiction. It was easy to see the judge was touched by this man's special visit. Judge Coven took a father-like pride in the fact that he had offered this man a second chance.

Our tour continued through the busy courthouse with trips to the lock-up downstairs and meetings with court officers. I then spent the rest of the morning with the assistant court clerk who will be the day-to-day facilitator of this project. He too could not have been more enthusiastic. It was humbling to see that an idea that came out of the Knight News Challenge process was going to come to fruition and was going to have tangible support.

Since that initial meeting at the courthouse there have been meetings with the chief information officer of the state courts, Craig Burlingame. Burlingame is one of the most highly respected people in his field. He had just returned from Australia where he was helping the national government improve its computer records processes. Burlingame is incredibly knowledgeable about the particular challenges of getting the court's data out to the public. He is aware of the rewards of transparency, but he is also helping me understand the risks.

Here's an example. One goal of Order in the Court 2.0 is to post the daily docket at Quincy District Court. The docket lists the names of each defendant and cases that are scheduled for the day. The docket is produced by the state's computer system, which is called MassCourts. The docket is sent to each court in a searchable PDF document. If Order in the Court 2.0 were to post the docket through its website (which is not yet under construction), data mining agencies would have easy access to the information it contains. This, understandably, is an issue for the court.

Burlingame explained that it could seriously impact victims of crimes coming forward if they thought it might affect future job prospects or housing, since landlords use these services. He acknowledged that the docket is a public document posted at the courthouse; but to ensure the public's safety he needs to come up with a way to provide the document in a non-searchable PDF, and to seek the input of the judge assigned to preserve the integrity of the court's digital records.

It was striking to hear how something that initially seemed simple could be so complicated and require further judicial review. It was a perfect example of how the lessons we learn from this project will make it easier for future efforts to build greater court transparency.

One final footnote to this post. During a phone call with Judge Coven to set up another meeting, he reminded me of our conversation in the lobby with the young man who had come to thank him. He told me that the man was back in custody, and his family had come forward to request that he be recommitted because he was back on heroin. You couldn't miss the sadness in the judge's voice.

The following post comes to us from Sameer Bhuchar, who is helping Spot.Us from Austin.

It has been said a thousand times before: The landscape of the modern media is changing. With today's more complex, active Internet ecosystem, the accepted norms of journalism are constantly being rewritten or tossed out all together. The Internet has bypassed the once highly regarded norms of gatekeepers at a news desk, and it now seems to be challenging the long held model of objectivity in journalism.

If there is an underlying theme to Spot.Us it is the idea that we expect our community to tell us what is important in journalism, rather than dictate it ourselves. With that in mind, several weeks ago, thanks to a generous sponsorship from Clay Shirky, we asked for your honest feedback about objectivity and journalism. We let the 500 users who took the survey decide where the sponsorship dollars should go. In other words, we handed over a part of our budget to community members who let us figure out what the ethos is around objectivity in journalism. Community-focused sponsorship for the win! (Try our newest CFS. Let us know about important story ideas in your region and fund a story on Spot.Us for free).

Survey Results

Is there a clear divide between those who support the traditional idea of objectivity and those who take a different stance? Are there exceptions to the standard? How should journalism work for you? Some believe objectivity means reporting facts without bias, and that an article must be balanced and include multiple points of view. To many, objectivity in journalism is the most important standard of the profession. It was once considered the glue of the business, the one aim that let media consumers decide for themselves what was right and wrong.

Increasingly, however, the idea of traditional objectivity is being challenged by this new, proactive age of media consumers. To those who challenge the ideal, it is an outdated standard that has crippled journalists from digging deep into stories.

Keep in mind the survey results are not scientific and, as the political leanings graph shows, there was perhaps a self-selecting audience (the Spot.Us community). Nonetheless, with 500 respondents there was a diverse set of answers.

First and foremost it is important to note that about 52 percent of the survey takers were female and 48 percent male.

Also, close to 60 percent of the respondents identified themselves as liberals, with only 10.8 percent identifying as conservative. Close to 30 percent said they were independents. This could be reflective of where Spot.Us' traffic comes from (heavy in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle and New York).

Responses to the question, "Is objectivity even possible?" show there are a large percentage of people with a changing idea about objectivity. Of the survey questions, perhaps this one and the responses associated with it were the most telling when it comes to attitudes towards objectivity. Only 13.5 percent (60 respondents) very clearly identified "objectivity" as being what journalism is all about.

This view point can best be explained through Spot.Us member Craig Gaines' extended response. "I define an objective piece as one that represents all viewpoints in a piece and allows readers to make up their minds about those viewpoints," Gaines said. "To do anything less is a disservice to, and disrespectful of, the reader."

A staggering 44.6 percent (199) people agreed with the answer, "Objectivity is possible but difficult. It separates wheat from chaff." In essence the answer implies that objectivity should be seen more as a quest for honest, factual reporting. Spot.Us member (and NewsTrust executive director) Fabrice Florin summed up this viewpoint well.

While objectivity is difficult to achieve, it is an important journalistic quality to strive for, particularly for factual news reporting, not for opinion pieces," Florin said. "For news reports, a neutral perspective helps present views from different sides without interjecting the author's personal opinions. Authors are welcome to post their own perspectives in their own opinion pieces, as long as they are clearly labeled as such. But journalists who want to serve society as neutral observers and referees should continue to report objectively on public issues they cover.

Of the respondents, 27.6 percent (123 people) chose the answer "transparency is the new objectivity," implying that it is the reporting of truth that is most important, rather than a detached account of a scene.

"I think that reporters ought to reveal their biases in each story as part of the narrative so as to partially disarm whatever criticism of bias they may receive," said member Paul Balcerak. "Doing so will provide a better service to the public and will create better journalism."

There were also 55 people who believed objectivity was impossible, and 9 people went as far to answer that objectivity "is a crutch to prop old media up."

This is all just the tip of the iceberg. Other questions sought to discover the community's view of how important objectivity is (always required, sometimes, never, etc.), and to help gauge the respondents' relationship to journalism (a professor or as an avid news reader, for example). We believe that in aggregate this survey provides unique insight into what people from the Spot.Us community want and expect from the media.

To drive the point home, we've included anecdotal responses from our insightful community members who gave us permission to publish their answers. (These were used to create the above Wordle.)

Perhaps what we can learn from all of this is that objectivity, while important as an ideal of fairness, should not be seen as a way of achieving "detached-ness," if you will. But heck, this blog post is by no means unbiased, so even that assumption may not be accurate, or apply to you personally. One thing the respondents did uniformly agree upon is that reporters should unabashedly seek truth. While pure objectivity may be impossible, being honest isn't.

Community Views

Below is a selection of comments from the wisest people we know -- our community. Here's what they had to say about objectivity:

"In journalism school I was very swayed by the 'Transparency IS the new objectivity' school of thinking, and the notion that everyone has bias and perspective, and so any attempt to avoid that is foolhardy. From my insider perspective, my own biases and opinions seemed magnified and huge. However, since I haven't been working as a journalist and have been, instead, consuming local media (increasingly independent and citizen/blog driven, as the local establishment journalism withers away) I've longed for the ideal of objectivity while recognizing it might never have been truly practiced. I've grown to strongly dislike the strongly and biased opinionated citizen journalism I am now surrounded by, because it so often willfully refuses to dig deeper and more broadly and is so very proud of its 'perspective'. I am often left with a long list of simple questions I think *I* would have asked just to get the whole story." -- Saheli Datta

"I don't believe what we've traditionally defined as objectivity in the media is actually objectivity--it's more like perceived impartiality. I think that reporters ought to reveal their biases in each story as part of the narrative (writing in first-person would make the process a lot less awkward, by the way) so as to partially disarm whatever criticism of bias they may receive. Doing so will provide a better service to the public and will create better journalism." -- Paul Balcerak

"Objectivity was a marketing technique invented by the AP 100 + years ago. It's well suited for monopoly style newspaper production but shits the bed when media representation of similar events increases... Debunking objectivity as a concept is as easy as shooting ducks in duck hunt, but fact of the matter is that if *we didn't* believe in objectivity our lives would be intolerable.

"Therefore the question isn't about whether objectivity in journalism is possible, it's how does a person come to see media as objective? That's where things get interesting and where a lot is getting disrupted. The meaning of an event doesn't happen until it's represented and what we are seeing is an explosion in meaning at the sign of *any event*. See Stuart Hall, he's pre-Twitter but his points are just as valid." -- Cody Brown

"Transparency means more than understanding where the journalist's bias lies; it means that the journalist or reporter does things like crowdsource some questions, work in partnership with community journalism initiatives already underway, blog about the progress on a story and explain what the next steps are (unless it's a super-secret undercover investigation), record interviews and give public access to the full transcript as well as the audio file, etc. Transparency means addressing reader concerns and input about pieces and continuing the conversation after one story is published." -- Suzi Steffen

"A journalist's background certainly matters in how they interpret subjects, but the job is to look close, ask questions, and get the details right. More and more, unfortunately, it's also about checking out sources and making sure none of them are lying. With more and more resources dedicated to "spin" this part is important and often accounts for why a lot of people reject a good story as objective or biased - because they've been dished the spin in other platforms. But objectivity really is the name of the game." -- Lee van der Voo

"In most mainstream news reports I hear, including a good number on NPR, there's an annoying trend toward presenting one side and then the other, while completely evading the question of which side might be right! This is a perverted effect of the mania that journalism has for supposedly unbiased an objective reporting. Too often in the name of objectivity journalists avoid taking principled stands on anything; too often monied interests can distract the public's attention from their own dubious business practices by trotting out a voice of dissent rationalizing their stand -- which, of course, will get equal air-time." -- Anneke Toomey

"There is a saying somewhere: Objectivity is not possible, but fairness is. That is to say: are all sides, all points of view represented honestly and with the same weight? Ultimately, I'd say objectivity is a personal trait, fairness is a professional trait that pertains to our profession as journalists. Strive for fairness." --  Barbara Gref

"No journalist is truly objective, if that term is meant to mean someone who has no opinions about the subjects he or she covers. Subjectivity starts right from the point at which a journalist chooses a subject to cover and goes right on through to who is interviewed, what quotations are selected, how the headline is written, and on and on. But what makes journalism different from other practices with which it is sometimes confused, such as PR or politics, is that journalists are in the business of *independent* verification of fact." -- Robert McClure

"No one is truly unbiased or objective but that doesn't mean that a good reporter doesn't look for the truth behind everyone's agenda. Objectivity means not sitting on a story that would make someone look bad just because you're invested in their success. I almost said "Transparency is the new objectivity" only because it is the latest and most fabulous word to throw around. Transparency only helps identify lapses in objectivity, it doesn't replace it. As for transparency, it certainly helps identify lapses in objectivity, but it doesn't replace it." -- Amanda Hickman

"Objectivity often means portraying both sides of the story but without considering power & privilege, you can never get both sides of story. It would be like looking at African Americans & crime in inner cities without looking at the effects of institutional racism and how poverty/availability of drugs/housing blight/welfare policies etc contributes to crime. Journalism needs to put more emphasis on telling the stories of the underserved and marginalized and those most impacted the those who have power." -- Micky Duxbury

"No one is objective. The best we can do (instead of  pretending to be objective) is being transparent about our biases so readers are aware and can judge our content as they feel is appropriate. That said, it doesn't mean we should turn every article into a ranting, biased blog post, or even take a side on an issue we're covering. We just need to stop pretending true "Objectivism" exists." -- Lauren Rabaino

"While objectivity is difficult to achieve, it is an important journalistic quality to strive for, particularly for factual news reporting (not for opinion pieces). For news reports, a neutral perspective helps present views from different sides without interjecting the author's personal opinions. Authors are welcome to post their own perspectives in their own opinion pieces, as long as they are clearly labeled as such. But journalists who want to serve society as neutral observers and referees should continue to report objectively on public issues they cover." -- Fabrice Florin

"I find writing by people who disclose and discuss their biases/backgrounds dramatically more compelling than sterile I-refuse-to-take-sides-so-decide-for-yourself writing. I think it's possible to explain and analyze both sides of a story and fulfill a journalistic purpose without sitting on the fence." -- Katie Lohrenz

"Everyone has opinions, and we are all entitled to have them. Journalists are no different. I like it when a journalist tells me how he/she arrived at an opinion, and any part of his/her backstory that will help me to assess credibility. Transparency is certainly part of the picture. What isn't helpful is a journalist who simply reports the sound bite from one side and then gathers the sound bite from another side and calls it a story - without stopping to investigate whether the facts can back up either side." -- Laurie Pumper

"I don't think it is absolutely necessary to be objective, but if you aren't going to be objective, it is absolutely necessary to be honest about it." -- Luke Gies

"Objectivity should be the goal for journalism. Reporting all sides of the story without bias is ideal. Unfortunately we live in a very polarized climate. Shock value, knee jerk reactions and stubborn opinion rule the day. I really appreciate news sources that don't resort to playing to that audience." -- Marie Rafalko

"Basically, 'objectivity' in journalism began post WWII as a strategy to make news content more palatable to a broader advertiser base. That worked -- and it helped enable newspaper consolidation in many cities. But the strategy took on a life of its own -- and while it yielded some benefits, it's a fundamentally not credible premise. Journalism is created by people, and people are not objective. As media has become multidirectional, it's become ridiculous to try to ignore that reality. News organizations that choose a veneer of objectivity over the practice of transparency undermine their own credibility. The sad thing is, many news orgs cling to their veneer of objectivity because they think it builds credibility. They're eating their own dog food." -- Amy Gahran

"I chose my answer by eliminating the others. I know it's not always possible. It's really tough. But transparency is absolutely not an alternative to objectivity. Fox News is transparent. It's not good journalism. Saying transparency can replace objectivity basically says that journalism can be produced by interest groups, as long as they're honest about who they are. That's no good for anyone, except for the interest groups." -- Molly Samuel

"The U.S. journalism establishment has determined that they are smarter than consumer sand therefore must talk down, water down, simplify news stories. Their fear was that no one would read the paper. Really.

"If all the facts were reported AND an effort was made to make media literacy an elementary school requirement we might have real journalism again in this country in a generation or so. Or promote and support online platforms that present facts and commentary separately. Then let traditional media fend for themselves." -- Todd O'Neill

"It's never possible, but always desirable. That is, complete objectivity is probably impossible, because we aren't always aware of our prejudices. But, it is what we should strive for, regardless. So, it is very important to attempt, but also to be aware that we may have blind spots, in order to avoid the arrogance of believing you are able to step completely out of your own biases." -- Rebecca Church

"To an extent, I agree with 'Transparency is the new objectivity,' but I don't think it's sufficient. I think pursuing objectivity while being transparent is crucial. Journalists should make every effort to escape their biases, explore other perspectives, and challenge their assumptions of what are and are not significant/authoritative voices, but they shouldn't do so at the cost of reporting and storytelling. However, they should acknowledge where they can where they are coming from, what perspectives they might take into the discussion, and what assumptions they are starting with so readers/audiences are able to make an informed analysis of the journalist's credibility." -- Bill Lascher

"'Transparency is the new objectivity' is a fun riff, and it's close, but I think we (in the media business) grossly overstate the public's interest in our affiliations and conflicts." -- Ryan Sholin

"Science, going back to the Heisenberg principle in the 1920s has proven that observation has an effect on the thing observed. Also, you can play 'he said-she said' journalism, but one statement has to come before the other. Determining the order is the reporter or editor's subjective choice and determines the slant of the story." -- Kellia Ramares

"Objectivity is not rewarded by anyone, not the public and not the corporate new organizations. It's become like Don Quixote chasing windmills." -- Shari Brandhoy

"Objectivity is impossible. There is no such thing as a human or institution without opinion. Therefore, it's best for us to know the bias of the reporters. That said, a statement of bias doesn't give license to lie or omit facts. Transparency is twofold:
• a statement of bias
• a commitment to releasing all information in an honest manner." -- Joey Baker

"Shirky has made me bias on the topic - journalist was a special class of citizen when you needed a press. Now every resident has a responsibility to be a journalist. Who is going to write about neighborhoods - when crime is not the topic? Newspapers and other media outlets have always done a poor job covering my home. So who does that responsibility fall to - someone with a stake in the future of that neighborhood. And while I want accuracy and independence, I want the reporter, journalist, or citizen to offer their educated take on what this all means for the future of the area." -- Eddie North-Hager

"The very definition of dialectic is pastiche. How can anyone be objective while still being informed? Transparency at least offers honesty and a path for the reader to follow." -- Clarisa Morales Roberts

"I define an objective piece as one that represents all viewpoints in a piece and allows readers to make up their minds about those viewpoints. To do anything less is a disservice to, and disrespectful of, the reader." -- Craig Gaines

"There is fairness but not objectivity. Everyone decides where to look, what facts to portray, how to frame what they're seeing. Even a pointed camera is not objective -- where the lens is pointed, how the zoom is set ... these all determine what's seen and how." -- Dorian Benkoil

"Debating object/subject is an endless philosophical waste of time. Facts, and trends, data, information, systems analysis all are much more relevant to discourse around solving the complex problems we face today and in the future." -- Stephen Antonaros

"I believe that objectivity is the single most dangerous goal journalism can work towards. It is impossible for a human being to produce a genuinely non-biased piece of writing, but it is simple for a writer to mimic the tone of authority that a member of society is educated to frame as truth. Journalism should strive for transparency - not as a new objectivity, but as a drastically different and more democratic concept of media's responsibility to present and portray information." -- Rebecca Glaser

"Objectivity is impossible, it's an illusion and a myth often used to maintain flat, two-dimensional reporting that implies there are simply "two sides." What's far more important is accuracy, vigorous inquiry and story dimension--looking for texture and layers of debate, and letting the facts tell the story; two 'sides' are not 'equal' if one is heavily fact-based and the other is just opinion." -- Christopher Cook

The following post comes to us from Sameer Bhuchar, who is helping Spot.Us from Austin.

It has been said a thousand times before: The landscape of the modern media is changing. With today's more complex, active Internet ecosystem, the accepted norms of journalism are constantly being rewritten or tossed out all together. The Internet has bypassed the once highly regarded norms of gatekeepers at a news desk, and it now seems to be challenging the long held model of objectivity in journalism.

If there is an underlying theme to Spot.Us it is the idea that we expect our community to tell us what is important in journalism, rather than dictate it ourselves. With that in mind, several weeks ago, thanks to a generous sponsorship from Clay Shirky, we asked for your honest feedback about objectivity and journalism. We let the 500 users who took the survey decide where the sponsorship dollars should go. In other words, we handed over a part of our budget to community members who let us figure out what the ethos is around objectivity in journalism. Community-focused sponsorship for the win! (Try our newest CFS. Let us know about important story ideas in your region and fund a story on Spot.Us for free).

Survey Results

Is there a clear divide between those who support the traditional idea of objectivity and those who take a different stance? Are there exceptions to the standard? How should journalism work for you? Some believe objectivity means reporting facts without bias, and that an article must be balanced and include multiple points of view. To many, objectivity in journalism is the most important standard of the profession. It was once considered the glue of the business, the one aim that let media consumers decide for themselves what was right and wrong.

Increasingly, however, the idea of traditional objectivity is being challenged by this new, proactive age of media consumers. To those who challenge the ideal, it is an outdated standard that has crippled journalists from digging deep into stories.

Keep in mind the survey results are not scientific and, as the political leanings graph shows, there was perhaps a self-selecting audience (the Spot.Us community). Nonetheless, with 500 respondents there was a diverse set of answers.

First and foremost it is important to note that about 52 percent of the survey takers were female and 48 percent male.

Also, close to 60 percent of the respondents identified themselves as liberals, with only 10.8 percent identifying as conservative. Close to 30 percent said they were independents. This could be reflective of where Spot.Us' traffic comes from (heavy in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle and New York).

Responses to the question, "Is objectivity even possible?" show there are a large percentage of people with a changing idea about objectivity. Of the survey questions, perhaps this one and the responses associated with it were the most telling when it comes to attitudes towards objectivity. Only 13.5 percent (60 respondents) very clearly identified "objectivity" as being what journalism is all about.

This view point can best be explained through Spot.Us member Craig Gaines' extended response. "I define an objective piece as one that represents all viewpoints in a piece and allows readers to make up their minds about those viewpoints," Gaines said. "To do anything less is a disservice to, and disrespectful of, the reader."

A staggering 44.6 percent (199) people agreed with the answer, "Objectivity is possible but difficult. It separates wheat from chaff." In essence the answer implies that objectivity should be seen more as a quest for honest, factual reporting. Spot.Us member (and NewsTrust executive director) Fabrice Florin summed up this viewpoint well.

While objectivity is difficult to achieve, it is an important journalistic quality to strive for, particularly for factual news reporting, not for opinion pieces," Florin said. "For news reports, a neutral perspective helps present views from different sides without interjecting the author's personal opinions. Authors are welcome to post their own perspectives in their own opinion pieces, as long as they are clearly labeled as such. But journalists who want to serve society as neutral observers and referees should continue to report objectively on public issues they cover.

Of the respondents, 27.6 percent (123 people) chose the answer "transparency is the new objectivity," implying that it is the reporting of truth that is most important, rather than a detached account of a scene.

"I think that reporters ought to reveal their biases in each story as part of the narrative so as to partially disarm whatever criticism of bias they may receive," said member Paul Balcerak. "Doing so will provide a better service to the public and will create better journalism."

There were also 55 people who believed objectivity was impossible, and 9 people went as far to answer that objectivity "is a crutch to prop old media up."

This is all just the tip of the iceberg. Other questions sought to discover the community's view of how important objectivity is (always required, sometimes, never, etc.), and to help gauge the respondents' relationship to journalism (a professor or as an avid news reader, for example). We believe that in aggregate this survey provides unique insight into what people from the Spot.Us community want and expect from the media.

To drive the point home, we've included anecdotal responses from our insightful community members who gave us permission to publish their answers. (These were used to create the above Wordle.)

Perhaps what we can learn from all of this is that objectivity, while important as an ideal of fairness, should not be seen as a way of achieving "detached-ness," if you will. But heck, this blog post is by no means unbiased, so even that assumption may not be accurate, or apply to you personally. One thing the respondents did uniformly agree upon is that reporters should unabashedly seek truth. While pure objectivity may be impossible, being honest isn't.

Community Views

Below is a selection of comments from the wisest people we know -- our community. Here's what they had to say about objectivity:

"In journalism school I was very swayed by the 'Transparency IS the new objectivity' school of thinking, and the notion that everyone has bias and perspective, and so any attempt to avoid that is foolhardy. From my insider perspective, my own biases and opinions seemed magnified and huge. However, since I haven't been working as a journalist and have been, instead, consuming local media (increasingly independent and citizen/blog driven, as the local establishment journalism withers away) I've longed for the ideal of objectivity while recognizing it might never have been truly practiced. I've grown to strongly dislike the strongly and biased opinionated citizen journalism I am now surrounded by, because it so often willfully refuses to dig deeper and more broadly and is so very proud of its 'perspective'. I am often left with a long list of simple questions I think *I* would have asked just to get the whole story." -- Saheli Datta

"I don't believe what we've traditionally defined as objectivity in the media is actually objectivity--it's more like perceived impartiality. I think that reporters ought to reveal their biases in each story as part of the narrative (writing in first-person would make the process a lot less awkward, by the way) so as to partially disarm whatever criticism of bias they may receive. Doing so will provide a better service to the public and will create better journalism." -- Paul Balcerak

"Objectivity was a marketing technique invented by the AP 100 + years ago. It's well suited for monopoly style newspaper production but shits the bed when media representation of similar events increases... Debunking objectivity as a concept is as easy as shooting ducks in duck hunt, but fact of the matter is that if *we didn't* believe in objectivity our lives would be intolerable.

"Therefore the question isn't about whether objectivity in journalism is possible, it's how does a person come to see media as objective? That's where things get interesting and where a lot is getting disrupted. The meaning of an event doesn't happen until it's represented and what we are seeing is an explosion in meaning at the sign of *any event*. See Stuart Hall, he's pre-Twitter but his points are just as valid." -- Cody Brown

"Transparency means more than understanding where the journalist's bias lies; it means that the journalist or reporter does things like crowdsource some questions, work in partnership with community journalism initiatives already underway, blog about the progress on a story and explain what the next steps are (unless it's a super-secret undercover investigation), record interviews and give public access to the full transcript as well as the audio file, etc. Transparency means addressing reader concerns and input about pieces and continuing the conversation after one story is published." -- Suzi Steffen

"A journalist's background certainly matters in how they interpret subjects, but the job is to look close, ask questions, and get the details right. More and more, unfortunately, it's also about checking out sources and making sure none of them are lying. With more and more resources dedicated to "spin" this part is important and often accounts for why a lot of people reject a good story as objective or biased - because they've been dished the spin in other platforms. But objectivity really is the name of the game." -- Lee van der Voo

"In most mainstream news reports I hear, including a good number on NPR, there's an annoying trend toward presenting one side and then the other, while completely evading the question of which side might be right! This is a perverted effect of the mania that journalism has for supposedly unbiased an objective reporting. Too often in the name of objectivity journalists avoid taking principled stands on anything; too often monied interests can distract the public's attention from their own dubious business practices by trotting out a voice of dissent rationalizing their stand -- which, of course, will get equal air-time." -- Anneke Toomey

"There is a saying somewhere: Objectivity is not possible, but fairness is. That is to say: are all sides, all points of view represented honestly and with the same weight? Ultimately, I'd say objectivity is a personal trait, fairness is a professional trait that pertains to our profession as journalists. Strive for fairness." --  Barbara Gref

"No journalist is truly objective, if that term is meant to mean someone who has no opinions about the subjects he or she covers. Subjectivity starts right from the point at which a journalist chooses a subject to cover and goes right on through to who is interviewed, what quotations are selected, how the headline is written, and on and on. But what makes journalism different from other practices with which it is sometimes confused, such as PR or politics, is that journalists are in the business of *independent* verification of fact." -- Robert McClure

"No one is truly unbiased or objective but that doesn't mean that a good reporter doesn't look for the truth behind everyone's agenda. Objectivity means not sitting on a story that would make someone look bad just because you're invested in their success. I almost said "Transparency is the new objectivity" only because it is the latest and most fabulous word to throw around. Transparency only helps identify lapses in objectivity, it doesn't replace it. As for transparency, it certainly helps identify lapses in objectivity, but it doesn't replace it." -- Amanda Hickman

"Objectivity often means portraying both sides of the story but without considering power & privilege, you can never get both sides of story. It would be like looking at African Americans & crime in inner cities without looking at the effects of institutional racism and how poverty/availability of drugs/housing blight/welfare policies etc contributes to crime. Journalism needs to put more emphasis on telling the stories of the underserved and marginalized and those most impacted the those who have power." -- Micky Duxbury

"No one is objective. The best we can do (instead of  pretending to be objective) is being transparent about our biases so readers are aware and can judge our content as they feel is appropriate. That said, it doesn't mean we should turn every article into a ranting, biased blog post, or even take a side on an issue we're covering. We just need to stop pretending true "Objectivism" exists." -- Lauren Rabaino

"While objectivity is difficult to achieve, it is an important journalistic quality to strive for, particularly for factual news reporting (not for opinion pieces). For news reports, a neutral perspective helps present views from different sides without interjecting the author's personal opinions. Authors are welcome to post their own perspectives in their own opinion pieces, as long as they are clearly labeled as such. But journalists who want to serve society as neutral observers and referees should continue to report objectively on public issues they cover." -- Fabrice Florin

"I find writing by people who disclose and discuss their biases/backgrounds dramatically more compelling than sterile I-refuse-to-take-sides-so-decide-for-yourself writing. I think it's possible to explain and analyze both sides of a story and fulfill a journalistic purpose without sitting on the fence." -- Katie Lohrenz

"Everyone has opinions, and we are all entitled to have them. Journalists are no different. I like it when a journalist tells me how he/she arrived at an opinion, and any part of his/her backstory that will help me to assess credibility. Transparency is certainly part of the picture. What isn't helpful is a journalist who simply reports the sound bite from one side and then gathers the sound bite from another side and calls it a story - without stopping to investigate whether the facts can back up either side." -- Laurie Pumper

"I don't think it is absolutely necessary to be objective, but if you aren't going to be objective, it is absolutely necessary to be honest about it." -- Luke Gies

"Objectivity should be the goal for journalism. Reporting all sides of the story without bias is ideal. Unfortunately we live in a very polarized climate. Shock value, knee jerk reactions and stubborn opinion rule the day. I really appreciate news sources that don't resort to playing to that audience." -- Marie Rafalko

"Basically, 'objectivity' in journalism began post WWII as a strategy to make news content more palatable to a broader advertiser base. That worked -- and it helped enable newspaper consolidation in many cities. But the strategy took on a life of its own -- and while it yielded some benefits, it's a fundamentally not credible premise. Journalism is created by people, and people are not objective. As media has become multidirectional, it's become ridiculous to try to ignore that reality. News organizations that choose a veneer of objectivity over the practice of transparency undermine their own credibility. The sad thing is, many news orgs cling to their veneer of objectivity because they think it builds credibility. They're eating their own dog food." -- Amy Gahran

"I chose my answer by eliminating the others. I know it's not always possible. It's really tough. But transparency is absolutely not an alternative to objectivity. Fox News is transparent. It's not good journalism. Saying transparency can replace objectivity basically says that journalism can be produced by interest groups, as long as they're honest about who they are. That's no good for anyone, except for the interest groups." -- Molly Samuel

"The U.S. journalism establishment has determined that they are smarter than consumer sand therefore must talk down, water down, simplify news stories. Their fear was that no one would read the paper. Really.

"If all the facts were reported AND an effort was made to make media literacy an elementary school requirement we might have real journalism again in this country in a generation or so. Or promote and support online platforms that present facts and commentary separately. Then let traditional media fend for themselves." -- Todd O'Neill

"It's never possible, but always desirable. That is, complete objectivity is probably impossible, because we aren't always aware of our prejudices. But, it is what we should strive for, regardless. So, it is very important to attempt, but also to be aware that we may have blind spots, in order to avoid the arrogance of believing you are able to step completely out of your own biases." -- Rebecca Church

"To an extent, I agree with 'Transparency is the new objectivity,' but I don't think it's sufficient. I think pursuing objectivity while being transparent is crucial. Journalists should make every effort to escape their biases, explore other perspectives, and challenge their assumptions of what are and are not significant/authoritative voices, but they shouldn't do so at the cost of reporting and storytelling. However, they should acknowledge where they can where they are coming from, what perspectives they might take into the discussion, and what assumptions they are starting with so readers/audiences are able to make an informed analysis of the journalist's credibility." -- Bill Lascher

"'Transparency is the new objectivity' is a fun riff, and it's close, but I think we (in the media business) grossly overstate the public's interest in our affiliations and conflicts." -- Ryan Sholin

"Science, going back to the Heisenberg principle in the 1920s has proven that observation has an effect on the thing observed. Also, you can play 'he said-she said' journalism, but one statement has to come before the other. Determining the order is the reporter or editor's subjective choice and determines the slant of the story." -- Kellia Ramares

"Objectivity is not rewarded by anyone, not the public and not the corporate new organizations. It's become like Don Quixote chasing windmills." -- Shari Brandhoy

"Objectivity is impossible. There is no such thing as a human or institution without opinion. Therefore, it's best for us to know the bias of the reporters. That said, a statement of bias doesn't give license to lie or omit facts. Transparency is twofold:
• a statement of bias
• a commitment to releasing all information in an honest manner." -- Joey Baker

"Shirky has made me bias on the topic - journalist was a special class of citizen when you needed a press. Now every resident has a responsibility to be a journalist. Who is going to write about neighborhoods - when crime is not the topic? Newspapers and other media outlets have always done a poor job covering my home. So who does that responsibility fall to - someone with a stake in the future of that neighborhood. And while I want accuracy and independence, I want the reporter, journalist, or citizen to offer their educated take on what this all means for the future of the area." -- Eddie North-Hager

"The very definition of dialectic is pastiche. How can anyone be objective while still being informed? Transparency at least offers honesty and a path for the reader to follow." -- Clarisa Morales Roberts

"I define an objective piece as one that represents all viewpoints in a piece and allows readers to make up their minds about those viewpoints. To do anything less is a disservice to, and disrespectful of, the reader." -- Craig Gaines

"There is fairness but not objectivity. Everyone decides where to look, what facts to portray, how to frame what they're seeing. Even a pointed camera is not objective -- where the lens is pointed, how the zoom is set ... these all determine what's seen and how." -- Dorian Benkoil

"Debating object/subject is an endless philosophical waste of time. Facts, and trends, data, information, systems analysis all are much more relevant to discourse around solving the complex problems we face today and in the future." -- Stephen Antonaros

"I believe that objectivity is the single most dangerous goal journalism can work towards. It is impossible for a human being to produce a genuinely non-biased piece of writing, but it is simple for a writer to mimic the tone of authority that a member of society is educated to frame as truth. Journalism should strive for transparency - not as a new objectivity, but as a drastically different and more democratic concept of media's responsibility to present and portray information." -- Rebecca Glaser

"Objectivity is impossible, it's an illusion and a myth often used to maintain flat, two-dimensional reporting that implies there are simply "two sides." What's far more important is accuracy, vigorous inquiry and story dimension--looking for texture and layers of debate, and letting the facts tell the story; two 'sides' are not 'equal' if one is heavily fact-based and the other is just opinion." -- Christopher Cook

The devastating floods in Pakistan have been covered by trained reporters and mainstream media outlets around the world. Citizens, often on the front lines of the flood, have also been contributing thousands of reports though mobile phones, in part enabled by the citizen journalism service SeenReport.com.

SeenReport (a name derived from "see 'n report") is a citizen journalism service through which users can submit photos, videos, and text accounts of news as it is happening via SMS, MMS, or email. SeenReport won a 2010 mBillionth award, a first-ever contest which recognizes mobile content in South Asia. (This YouTube video explains more about the service.)

The SeenReport platform is designed to augment stories on online news sites. As a result, it has been purchased and customized by other media organizations in Pakistan, which helps to both promote citizen journalism in the country and to create a revenue stream for SeenReport.

MobileActive.org talked with Sharjeel Qureshi, a founder of the service, to learn more about it.

A citizen reporter captures an event on a mobile phone and sends the content to SeenReport. There is no manual intervention at this stage -- the content is automatically published on the SeenReport website to better ensure real-time reports which augment larger ongoing events. Further, citizen reporters can register personal information on the site after submitting material.

The system accepts content via SMS, MMS, and email. If images or photos are sent, some basic text is required as far as description and location. The SeenReport platform is intelligent enough to detect this text and suggest related content and news stories. So, if several citizen reporters are submitting reports from the same event on their mobiles -- the floods, for instance -- the system will make a single thread from the incoming reports.

Some users create detailed online profiles. One freelance journalist, for example, includes his picture, email address, phone number, professional membership affiliation, and has established a subdomain on the SeenReport site with tabs for all of his uploaded content. Qureshi refers to it as a version of LinkedIn for freelance journalists. Others can post anonymously if they choose and are not required to create complete profiles.

The service has been integrated with social network sites so that when stories are published on the website, they are automatically posted on Twitter and Facebook for SeenReport. If a citizen journalist registers personal social media accounts, their reports will be automatically posted in those locations, too.

In general, mobile citizen reports open the door to spam, offensive content, and potentially non-newsworthy posts. SeenReport deals with this through a self-policing or "social censoring" system. Whenever content is posted, readers can comment on it, rate it, and flag it if they find it offensive. SeenReport administrators then remove the flagged content. This topic has been an ongoing discussion for the group behind SeenReport: the idea of how news stories are authenticated, how best to integrate citizen journalism into mainstream media, and what is good journalism.

Qureshi and his team began working on the SeenReport platform in 2007, at a time when there was a media blackout in Pakistan. Heavy censorship was imposed on media organizations. The Internet was the only free medium of information, Qureshi said. During this time, the mobile market in Pakistan had proliferated and "we thought it would be a great idea to empower people to report news right from the cell phone and broadcast to the world in real-time," he said.

When the site was launched in April 2008, it came on the heels of Pakistan's Long March, the social unrest following firings of the judiciary. During this time, media coverage was heavily censored. SeenReport, Qureshi said, provided an alternative medium to cover the scale of the event and enable citizens at home to witness the historical moment.

SeenReport allows every mobile user in the crowd to become a reporter. In terms of the Long March, SMS reports provided minute-by-minute and mile-by-mile updates from eyewitnesses. The role of SeenReport in the march was a boost to the fledgling service and was covered by many international news outlets, including Global Voices, the BBC, and CIO Pakistan.

The SeenReport software, which is cloud-based open source technology, was created in-house by a small team of engineers. SeenReport also sells this software-as-a-service to other media organizations interested in developing their own citizen journalism initiatives. This helps to generate income: The monthly recurring license fee model for adopters is the most significant source of revenue for the "modestly funded start-up," Qureshi said.

SeenReport was designed in such a way that it can be adapted and customized by other users. Several news and media sites have purchased the platform, including Samaa, GeoDost, Aaj, and PlayTv. The first three use the technology for citizen journalism purposes while PlayTv, an entertainment and music channel for youth in Pakistan, uses it to engage young viewers through mobile interaction.

Because organizations have their own policies for driving citizen journalism, adopters can customize the functionality and tweak the editorial control. Some sites, for example, require a thorough review of content before it is published, unlike SeenReport's system of instant posts and social censorship.

By providing the software to others, SeenReport contributes to citizen journalism in Pakistan. Across the spectrum of organizations using the platform, there have been over 10,000 news reports relating to the floods. GeoDost, for example, has established a unique section on the main page for natural disasters and an initial flood portal. More than 500,000 citizen reports have been submitted by all users across all organizations, Qureshi said, which gives "an idea of how strong citizen journalism is in Pakistan."

The devastating floods in Pakistan have been covered by trained reporters and mainstream media outlets around the world. Citizens, often on the front lines of the flood, have also been contributing thousands of reports though mobile phones, in part enabled by the citizen journalism service SeenReport.com.

SeenReport (a name derived from "see 'n report") is a citizen journalism service through which users can submit photos, videos, and text accounts of news as it is happening via SMS, MMS, or email. SeenReport won a 2010 mBillionth award, a first-ever contest which recognizes mobile content in South Asia. (This YouTube video explains more about the service.)

The SeenReport platform is designed to augment stories on online news sites. As a result, it has been purchased and customized by other media organizations in Pakistan, which helps to both promote citizen journalism in the country and to create a revenue stream for SeenReport.

MobileActive.org talked with Sharjeel Qureshi, a founder of the service, to learn more about it.

A citizen reporter captures an event on a mobile phone and sends the content to SeenReport. There is no manual intervention at this stage -- the content is automatically published on the SeenReport website to better ensure real-time reports which augment larger ongoing events. Further, citizen reporters can register personal information on the site after submitting material.

The system accepts content via SMS, MMS, and email. If images or photos are sent, some basic text is required as far as description and location. The SeenReport platform is intelligent enough to detect this text and suggest related content and news stories. So, if several citizen reporters are submitting reports from the same event on their mobiles -- the floods, for instance -- the system will make a single thread from the incoming reports.

Some users create detailed online profiles. One freelance journalist, for example, includes his picture, email address, phone number, professional membership affiliation, and has established a subdomain on the SeenReport site with tabs for all of his uploaded content. Qureshi refers to it as a version of LinkedIn for freelance journalists. Others can post anonymously if they choose and are not required to create complete profiles.

The service has been integrated with social network sites so that when stories are published on the website, they are automatically posted on Twitter and Facebook for SeenReport. If a citizen journalist registers personal social media accounts, their reports will be automatically posted in those locations, too.

In general, mobile citizen reports open the door to spam, offensive content, and potentially non-newsworthy posts. SeenReport deals with this through a self-policing or "social censoring" system. Whenever content is posted, readers can comment on it, rate it, and flag it if they find it offensive. SeenReport administrators then remove the flagged content. This topic has been an ongoing discussion for the group behind SeenReport: the idea of how news stories are authenticated, how best to integrate citizen journalism into mainstream media, and what is good journalism.

Qureshi and his team began working on the SeenReport platform in 2007, at a time when there was a media blackout in Pakistan. Heavy censorship was imposed on media organizations. The Internet was the only free medium of information, Qureshi said. During this time, the mobile market in Pakistan had proliferated and "we thought it would be a great idea to empower people to report news right from the cell phone and broadcast to the world in real-time," he said.

When the site was launched in April 2008, it came on the heels of Pakistan's Long March, the social unrest following firings of the judiciary. During this time, media coverage was heavily censored. SeenReport, Qureshi said, provided an alternative medium to cover the scale of the event and enable citizens at home to witness the historical moment.

SeenReport allows every mobile user in the crowd to become a reporter. In terms of the Long March, SMS reports provided minute-by-minute and mile-by-mile updates from eyewitnesses. The role of SeenReport in the march was a boost to the fledgling service and was covered by many international news outlets, including Global Voices, the BBC, and CIO Pakistan.

The SeenReport software, which is cloud-based open source technology, was created in-house by a small team of engineers. SeenReport also sells this software-as-a-service to other media organizations interested in developing their own citizen journalism initiatives. This helps to generate income: The monthly recurring license fee model for adopters is the most significant source of revenue for the "modestly funded start-up," Qureshi said.

SeenReport was designed in such a way that it can be adapted and customized by other users. Several news and media sites have purchased the platform, including Samaa, GeoDost, Aaj, and PlayTv. The first three use the technology for citizen journalism purposes while PlayTv, an entertainment and music channel for youth in Pakistan, uses it to engage young viewers through mobile interaction.

Because organizations have their own policies for driving citizen journalism, adopters can customize the functionality and tweak the editorial control. Some sites, for example, require a thorough review of content before it is published, unlike SeenReport's system of instant posts and social censorship.

By providing the software to others, SeenReport contributes to citizen journalism in Pakistan. Across the spectrum of organizations using the platform, there have been over 10,000 news reports relating to the floods. GeoDost, for example, has established a unique section on the main page for natural disasters and an initial flood portal. More than 500,000 citizen reports have been submitted by all users across all organizations, Qureshi said, which gives "an idea of how strong citizen journalism is in Pakistan."

Violence, murder, theft and crime are a constant in Medellín, Colombia and its metropolitan area; issues all people must learn to live with and a social phenomenon that has grown in the last year. Members of the Rising Voices grantee Hiperbarrio expressed their feelings and different viewpoints on this matter in their personal and group blogs.

Yuliana Paniagua, in the Hiperbarrio site [es], highlights the area of Castilla, where members of the blog Hope Revolution (Revolución Esperanza) went to take pictures. She also shows the importance of Hiperbarrio as a positive alternative for the community.

Jorge Vasquez wrote at Villactivos collective blog [es] about the influence of a lack of values as a result of an uncontrollable situation, despite the government's investment in military spending:

Se ha configurado aquí un mundo del sigilo, de la desconfianza, de la prevención, en el cual reconocer un error es resbalar, un mundo con sus propios leyes, iconos y figuras ejemplares para los jóvenes provenientes de los bajos mundos, de las imágenes de los comerciantes de los medios de comunicación serios, que han hecho de la apología del violento un negocio lucrativo. Un mundo despiadado, donde al niño se le enseña con el ejemplo, que ser bondadoso con el otro es ser tonto, que disputar el centímetro de calle, el pupitre en el colegio, el favor de la pareja es lo que vale. Y aquí están algunos de estos barrios hechos a imagen, semejanza y escala del egoísmo de los poderosos, unos más, otros menos, como vórtices de fuego, mientras la autoridad, de este país, que está entre los 10 de mayor gasto militar en el mundo, no ha podido controlar la sinfonía de fusiles que arrulla el sueño de sus habitantes.

Photo of Comuna 13 neighborhood in Medellín by author Lully Posada

Luis Elías, a member of Convergentes, cries out in his personal blog [es] for the war in the neighborhoods to stop. He wrote a second post [es] where he also refers to unemployment and laziness as causes for this violent situation:

Estoy harto de esta guerra , no respetan ni los niños menores de edad, ya lo utilizar como carrito para cargar armas, pero eso también va en los padres que no se han dado cuenta de lo que están haciendo sus hijos o también de los hermanos que están metidos en los grupos armados le piden en favor para que le lleve el cuerpo del delito , y para mal de todos acabar con los barrios que son buenos para vivir, ¿esto cuando se va a terminar? ¡Ojalá rápido! Matan a los que no tiene nada que ver con el conflicto.[

(…] cuando llega el desempleo o la falta de estudio para los jóvenes buscan otras opciones para salir de la misma rutina en la que estaban y probar cosas nuevas, cosas fáciles para sobrevivir en mundo que está lleno de corrupción.

[…] when it comes to unemployment or lack of education for young people they look for other options to get out of the routine in which they were and try new things, easy things to survive in a world that is full of corruption.

Jaider Ochoa makes a positive comment about Hiperbarrio in the collective blog Revolución Esperanza [es]:

La idea de recuperar la memoria social y cultural de los barrios, de destacar esas cosas buenas con las que se cuenta, pero que se ven opacadas por el despliegue mediático sobre la violencia, permiten ver que estas comunidades no sólo tienen delincuentes, sino que también hay quien pueda decir que en ellas hay un sinfín de rasgos, personajes, tradiciones y actividades que hacen la diferencia y que permiten conocerla como un lugar donde también se puede habitar en condiciones dignas.

Finally, Henry Osorio at the Funacrate collectibe blog, raises some questions after narrating an event [es] experienced by an acquaintance called Manuel.

Pasaban los minutos, Manuel seguía observando desde la terraza y vio a un miembro del Ejército, como alienaba con su fusil a un señor que se trepaba por otra terraza de la vecindad, cuando el primero tuvo la oportunidad le disparó casi botándole el brazo. Después que Manuel me narró su versión, quedé con una cantidad de interrogantes que me hacen reflexionar sobre la situación violenta en algunos sectores de la ciudad y la intervención de la Fuerza Pública en las comunidades.

¿Cuál es el tipo de intervención que debe hacer la Fuerza Pública cuando suceden estos hechos? […] ¿Cuál es el tipo de confianza que brinda la Fuerza Pública cuando interviene las comunidades afectando algunos habitantes de estos barrios? ¿Las personas que corren en busca de refugio ante estos hechos acaso son delincuentes?

What is the type of intervention the Public Force should have when these things happen? […] What type of confidence does the Public Force bring when it interpheres in communities, affecting some inhabitants of these neighbohoods? Are the people looking for refuge in these events deliquents?

Ninja gold miners digging in evaporated river. Image by Flickr user chenyingphoto. CC BY

Gold production in Mongolia is growing rapidly and it saw a seventeen-fold increase between 1991 and 2001. But the real boost came in July 2001, when a Canadian company called Ivanhoe Mines found a large gold and copper deposit at Oyu Tolgoi (turquoise hill). Foreign investment in the country on explorations soared. And the great Mongolian gold rush began with mining companies from around the world coming to the Gobi desert.

But not only the mining companies, this gold rush has also changed some of the lives of the Mongolian poorest. Thousands of people, called the “Ninjas”, have left home to take up digging and sifting for gold full-time. Otgonsuren Jargal writes in the Nomad Green blog:

A Ninja gold miner. Image by Chenyingphoto. CC BY

“Ninja”–or artisan miners–in Mongolia means people who dig dirt, live outlaws and seek for gold on old/used mining fields. There are around 5000 artisan miners working in Uyanga soum (village) of Uvurkhangai aimag (province) in Mongolia, today.

There was some false information saying that the number of ninjas was decreasing in last few years. Actually the number increased to 10,000 during summer season at the area where Ongi river starts which is the range named Taats coming from Khangai mountain.

The average ninja earns about $10 in a week. Lured by this small fortune, they consist of not only destitute, many students on summer break come to search for golds in potential locations with their parents to help pay tuition. But their work damages the environment. Otgonsuren Jargal explains:

Image by Chenyingphoto. CC BY

The evaporation of Ongi river made many who live in Gobi suffer for past ten years. Mongolia is the most effected area from desertification, especially in Gobi, the water is a really hard issue at this moment. The Ongi river was the only one water resource of Gobi's life. But, there are more than 10,000 ninjas digging dirt at the very beginning of this river and destroying and poisoning the source of water.

A group of journalist including Nomad Green members and Italian journalist Gabriele came to this place to report about the artisan miners.

Many people were working here and there between dump, picking up some dirt and washing them in the pools among the hills. You can see a lot of ghers /traditional Mongolian yurt/ of different shapes-round and roofless and tumbledown etc. These were the accommodation of ninjas.

Here is the video they produced:

They saw that excavators were destroying the highest dump which is called “Eifel” by local people.

The rest of this big mountain will be diminished if they continue digging for another 10 years.

The gold rush is not going to end anytime soon. The Gold price across the world have reached an all-time high at $1100 an ounce and it is predicted to rise further. Christian A. DeHaemer at Wealthdaily puts it this way:

You may not be aware of it, but there is a new gold mine in Mongolia. In fact, it is the world's largest — a mine bigger than the state of Ohio!

The spending on this mine will double the GDP of Mongolia. That's right — double… which means Mongolia will become to Central Asian minerals what Dubai is to Middle Eastern oil.

So the Ninja miners will not be stopping any time soon.

The droughts in Mongolia are a big problem which decreases production of wheat and other crops. However Mandah shares an expert opinion:

Mungunbaatar, coordinator of “Rain richness” state manufacturing agency says “Having rain by shooting rain clouds has great economic efficiency”.

Meanwhile the Nomad Green citizen journalists continue to write about their trip to Taiwan. Botanist Dorjgotovariungerel writes how environmentally friendly the Taiwanese people are. Dorjgotovariungerel thinks that the irresponsible action and processing of Mongolians have already brought desertification and land degradation in the country and they could use the examples of the Taiwanese people to turn things around.

Lunch at Tea firm. Image by ariungerel, Nomad Green.

Dorjgotovariungerel also writes about the experience of the Nomad Green team who visited a tea garden and factory in Taiwan.

They cook all meal in the tea such as bean, cans and rice. All food was very delicious.

Fatma showed us some of the posts by the attendees and added that this is just the start - as the projects organizers are waiting for more articles to arrive.

The first output of the workshop was a blog post written in English by “Rebel” titled “Sexuality education woes in Egypt“. The post starts by explaining why sexuality education became a need in the Egyptian society.

The talk about sexuality hardly ever surfaces in Egypt. Even when an article or a speech is given by an enlightened intellectual, waves of rejection and censure usually follow. Discussing sexuality usually stirs accusations of spreading vice and encouraging promiscuity. Consequently, the debate on sexuality education here is starkly lacking and flawed, just like the process of sex education itself.

[…]

Public education ignores sexuality information, except for a class on human reproduction during preparatory school and some skewed information on sexually transmitted infections. A lot of young people remember that awkward science class where the teacher was too embarrassed to effectively convey useful lessons on sexuality, or skipped the class altogether.

He then explains the role of the civil society in such process saying:

Civil society organizations have recently recognized the importance of delivering sexuality education programs to young people.

[…]

Reality is unfortunately far from this. Instead of providing a positive approach to sexuality, it is often portrayed as an evil desire that needs to be controlled. Instead of promoting tolerance and understanding, it’s not uncommon to find Sex Ed programs that foster negative attitudes towards sexuality and gender.

He ends his post by further explaining why opening such talks are important.

Sexuality is closely associated with people’s happiness and productivity. Providing comprehensive information regarding sexuality is a goal that must be achieved equally and effectively for a better nation.

Another output of the first workshop was an Arabic blog post written by “Just a human” titled “Men also Cry.” Fatma said that she's happy with this post as it is so bold that it comes from a male who questions the typical gender roles assigned for men, and even raising the homosexuality dilemma in a very candid way. She's also glad it is in Arabic to break the fear of the social stigma.

The post starts with these words:

Since my childhood and I have a real problem with the word “male”, which was then replaced by the word “man” as I got older. I don't imagine that I have ever understood this word, or the standards it complies. I don't remember a day I've been in harmony with the society I have been living with its members with feeling of weirdness, for nothing except that I don't respect its masculinity.

The post sheds light on various aspects of how “Just human” feels this strangeness in the society, where the climax starts when he talks about crying in an Eastern society:

Ever since I was a child, I was raised to believe that men never cry. And if a man cried, then he turns into a “woman” - losing the honor of being a man. The strange thing is that I have the ability to cry. I cried many time. I cried when Jack died in Titanic. I cried when Hani Salaa died in Enta Omry (Egyptian film). And I cried when Jack Twist died in Brokeback Mountain.

I also cried when my friend died few years ago. Yes, I committed this crime of crying - and I felt tears flowing from my eyes onto my face, and then my clothes. I touched it, and saw through it my humanity without fear or shame.

He then tries to define masculinity the way he relates to, from his own perspective, and according to his experience.

The truth is that I failed to find a proper definition for masculinity other than the biological classification, which I don't like in anyway. And the truth is also that finding a definition for the meaning of masculinity became of no concern any longer. Because I know that at any point, the definition I will reach will be incapable of concordance with the society's definition. And maybe that's why I prefer the title “Human being”. I find it more intimate and closer to my heart - for it is in the end protects me from anything that disturbs my belonging to this title. Therefore, nothing concerns me now except how to be just a human being.

The Guide can now be downloaded in the languages of Macedonian and Albanian, adding to other versions in English, Spanish, French, Mongolian, and Bangla.

We will be adding more languages in the coming months. If you are interested in helping to translate our two existing Guides into other languages, please contact us.

Map of Liberia. Image by Flickr user MercyWatch. CC BY-NC-ND

It was founded and colonized by freed American slaves with the help of a private organization called the American Colonization Society in 1821-1822, on the premise that former American slaves would have greater freedom and equality there.

These colonists formed an elite group in Liberian society, and, in 1847, they founded the Republic of Liberia, establishing a government modeled on that of the United States, naming Monrovia, their capital city, after James Monroe, the fifth president of the United States and a prominent supporter of the colonization.

So what are the problems in this war-torn country that had kept it from progressing? In fact Liberia started to walk backwards after the military-led coup in 1980. The country struggled with two civil wars which have killed hundreds of thousands of people and devastated the country's economy.

Now the country is battered with many problems including corruption. Nat Bayjay quotes Father Tikpor, the National Orator of Liberia:

Unless the government buries the deadly corruption virus that is currently eating the energy of the government, all else achieved will go down the drain.

Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the President of Liberia. Image by Flickr user Bahia. CC BY

The issue of land disputes became a post-war crisis in Liberia, with Nimba County at the center of it, causing several misunderstandings that have led to fears of a potential return to war.

Although debt reliefs can be a boost for the country, they are not a panacea for Liberia’s considerable challenges, which are, according to Jahbulleh Cicero Dempster:

• A sense of common national identify is required for the Liberians engaged in sectarian disputes.
• There is this misconception among Liberians that aged old problems can not be solved. This needs to be changed
• Many policy makers and planners propagate a system that exhibits cruelty towards the weak.
• The difference between rich and poor is extreme- the privileged one percent, the rich and powerful, are negligent about the plights of the 99 percent of population, who live in abject poverty without sufficient food, water, health, education and sanitation.
• The Liberian people must become active participants in the nation building process rather than being passive spectators.

A street in Monrovia, capital of Liberia. Image by Flickr user Tweefur. CC BY-NC-SA

The citizen journalists of Rising Voices grantee Ceasefire Liberia are doing their parts in addressing the challenges by providing news and information on the anomalies in the society and the government. Nathan Patio Charles writes in Ceasefire Liberia Blog:

An independent investigation conducted by Ceasefire Liberia, in collaboration with Liberia’s Journalists for Human Rights and Good Governance (a) four month justice reporting workshop for students from several universities in Liberia, has discovered that the Monrovia Central Prison, popularly known as South Beach in Monrovia, is overcrowded. [..]

Crime continues to increase and the justice system in Liberia is notoriously slow, leaving the prison overcrowded with pre-trial detainees.

The Justice system seems to be a problem for the country. Nat Bayjay reports that Liberia’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) submitted its findings and recommendations to the National Legislature and accused the justice system as a hindrance to peace and reconciliation in Liberia:

“Reconciliation is a process, not a commodity that can be purchased in the absence without the building of a just and equitable society founded on the rule of law. There can be no peace without any justice”.

However, there are signs of progress in the justice system as the Liberia National Police have finally charged and sent to court a 48-year old, who raped a 13 year old girl in Central Monrovia, which sparked fresh violence.

Read more such stories in the Ceasefire Liberia Blog.

This was my first visit to Minya, even though my father is originally from Upper Egypt. Minya is often known as the “Bride of Upper Egypt” and a statue of Queen Nefertiti is prominent in the city's entrance. It is the only governorate which has a woman as a symbol, but Nevine replied that “it does not symbolize the well-being of women here.” Upon arrival, it appeared to be that the governorate seemed to be neglected, as it has been one of the poorest areas in the country over the last 15 years according to Human Development reports. The percentage of the population that is illiterate is 67% Some of the comments and statistics would provide the context of some of the stories that we heard from the young women that we met.

Harsh Working Conditions

Our destination was a village called Dawadeyya and we knew we were arriving soon when we spotted Minya Mountain. It's known for being a source of marble, and where local workers spend around 16 hours a day breaking rocks and preparing them for manufacturing. Unfortunately about a quarter of the quarry workers in Minya are minors. Working on the mountain also poses serious health problems, such as lung, vision, skin, and some have even lost a limb from the machines that use a very high voltage of electricity. However, it is not only men and children who work in the quarry because women also can be found collecting rocks under the hot sun.

Minya mountain where many of the quarries are located.

In Dawadeyya, we were received by three nice women who are representatives from the high board of the Ben El-Reef (Daughter of Countryside) Society, the organization that the New Woman Foundation will be partnering with to teach the citizen media project. All three were wearing the traditional Abaya and a hair scarf, even the male accountant working with them, was dressed in a Jellabiya. They do not wear formal attire because they are able to better relate to the community that they serve, when they dress with local customs. This is especially important since the women often visit other women in their homes to talk about family issues or reproductive health issues.

We met some of the young women who will participate in the program. Approximately eight entered the modest office of Bent El-Reef, with big smiles on their faces. The head of the organization explained why they were smiling, “they are very happy to have visitors in Dawadeyya.”

Hearing the Stories of the Young Women

The first young woman introduced herself as Shimaa, the oldest sister of four brothers. She is responsible of helping her mother in making a living since her father passed away some years ago. “I first worked in construction, I used to carry blocks and sandbags on top of my head from 7 a.m. to 6 p.m.,” she would say with self-confidence and with a smile. “But I was only paid 4 or 5 pounds a day” (equivalent to approximately to 1 $US), while men who did the same job were paid triple. “Now I am farming and take the harvest to the market myself,” she added and revealed that she did all this while attending evening school to learn how to read and write.

Women of Minya

The next girl, Aya was still in high school. She said, “sometimes I don't attend school in order to work, otherwise, I would not even the tuition fees.” Even though she received good grades in middle school, her father wanted her to drop out of school because he did not want to pay for anything. She spoke honestly and angrily about how her father treated her and her four sisters, as if they were like “animals”. However, she is eager to learn and thinks that others should learn about how some people live in her village.

After hearing some of these stories, I joked, “women here are as tough as men!” and everyone laughed except for Huda who looked sad. She introduced herself briefly, “I'm Huda. I do not work, but I want to learn how to use the internet.” However, she also thought that she was not as impressive to the visitors as compared to the others because she said she only does household chores for her three brothers and her aging father, while her mother works.

Citizen Media to Tell Their Stories

These stories remind us that women in Upper Egypt often work equally as hard as men and in equally harsh conditions, but are paid less. Yet, when the work is over and men can lay down to relax, the work for the women does not end. There are household chores that need attending to. In the village of Dawadeyya, baking is a common chore for the women. They often spend 10 hours or more baking for her family and the neighbors, and also to sell. A traditional mud oven can be found inside the house, but it is unhealthy for the woman and her children because of the fumes. With funding from the UNDP, Bent El-Reef developed an oven equipped with an air exhaust pipe and a sliding door to prevent carbon monoxide from coming into the house. With more of these ovens in the community, women and her daughters can earn a living by selling gas for the oven.

Learning how to use a digital camera

Hiperbarrio team in Campus Party 2010

Deisy Alvarez in Hiperbarrio blog reflects [es] about the impact of Campus party in their lives:

Since 2008, the year in which they conducted the first campus party Colombia, it has become well established in what it is today, an event which is not only national but international, and that from its inception it has become a center for conversion work, collaborative experiences and it is also clear that it is the biggest technology festival in the country.

Therefore we have implemented a “give to receive” approach, which means each person transfers his or her learning to an individual who does not have this knowledge in areas such as campus blog, development, free software and more.

Today I reflect and conclude that in CAMPUS PARTY technology is not about only human relations, information sharing, or a monetary value [..] it is a friendship that is generated from what others think. [machine translation]

This year HiperBarrio was invited for the Campus Party Colombia and was told to do something different [es]:

The proposal was to use the pin hole camera technique to record the activities of CampusBlog among others.

Franky Posada's pin hole camera

Now what is a pin hole camera?

A pinhole camera is a simple camera without a lens and with a single small aperture — effectively a light-proof box with a small hole in one side. Light from a scene passes through this single point and projects an inverted image on the opposite side of the box. (Wikipedia)

Franky Posada explains [es] in a three part video how to build a pin hole camera:

Here are the results of using the pin hole camera technique for photography:

You can watch more pictures taken in this technique from the Hiperbarrio Flickr page.

Apparently this technology has created a sensation in the community. So HiperBarrio started arranging workshops [es] on Pin hole photography for its citizen media projects.

Some HiperBarrio members wrote about their experiences in the Campus party. Henry El Sucio wrote about the talks and lectures given in Campus party, especially learning about Creative Commons License and its implication in using others contents such as texts, images etc.

Yeskenia writes in Convergentes blog:

Campus Party Colombia, is a digital event in which many people around the country gather with guests from other regions to share knowledge. In the 2010 version new areas were introduced that did not exist in the minds of the previous Campus parties: Innovation, Creativity, Security and Networks.

I'm impressed and also the group of HiperBarrio was also impressed to learn that in the field of astronomy it became practical and easy to handle the tools required and we should not be “Astronomers” to develop satellites and learn to observe the sky. [machine translation]

She also shares a video about a campus party attendee:

Stéphane Guédé, Théophile Kouamouo and Saint Clavier Oula, the detained journalists. Image courtesy Richman.

The African blogosphere exploded with anger and concern when Théophile Kouamouo was arrested with his two colleagues of the Ivorian Daily Le Nouveau Courrier. Ivorian bloggers like Manasse Dehe used blog posts and Facebook groups to update latest information and spread the news to the world. Théophile, also the project manager of the Rising Voices grantee Abidjan Blog camps, was charged for refusing to name the source of a leaked report published in Le Nouveau Courrier describing the high profile embezzlement in the cocoa-coffee sector of Côte d'Ivoire (Ivory Coast).

The three journalists were freed on 26th of July after spending two-weeks in prison. Richman reports:

The law has spoken. A court sentenced the journalists to a fine of 5 million CFA (roughly $10,000 USD) and released. It is a punishment which fits over the press law rather than criminal matters where we had boarded the prosecutor, provoking disgust and shocking the world. The Ivorian court has restored the image that would harm the other.

Beyond the three journalists from The New Courier, the two other defendants in the entourage of attorney (his secretary and his communications advisor) have been released. The flight has not been demonstrated, the better the trial revealed the ignorance of computer security measures in the prosecutor's office, such as a confidential file had no protection due to his rank. (machine translation)

Théophile Kouamouo and Saint-Clavier Oula talking to press after the release. Image courtesy Richman

John Henry Kwahulé at Nouvelle Afrique magazine says that Côte d'Ivoire is probably the only country in the world where journalists are imprisoned for publishing truthful information. He comments:

It is a verdict that makes a double mistake to the colleagues. So, after they have been deprived of liberty for two weeks, their newspaper will not appear for two weeks also. This is not fair. But then, why have them jailed?

Tim Newman at Change.org reports about international support for Théophile and his colleagues:

Over 1,150 activists on Change.org wrote to Ivorian President Laurent Gbagbo and the U.S. Embassy in Abidjan to register concern about this attack on the freedom of the press. Last week, the U.S. Embassy issued a statement in response that expressed concern and emphasized the importance of press freedom.

Théophile Kouamouo thanks his fellow bloggers for the support and activism:

I'm browsing the web, and I'm aware of support and remarkable activism in the blogosphere, in addition to the natural relay that the press is “classic”. The blogosphere exists, and it may take flesh, beyond our thoughts “thrown” on the Web. I do not know what words can contain my gratitude to you all. I feel a great responsibility weighing on my shoulders. I have the duty to be better, more concerned with the interests of the community in my way of practicing journalism, worthy of the mobilization that was yours. (machine translation)

Cairo street scenes. Image by Flickr user Ed Yourdon. CC BY-SA

Cairo - The capital city

The population of Egypt, according to a survey conducted in July 2007, is estimated to be around 80 million, where the estimated rate of growth of population is 1.721%. Cairo is regarded as the 19th largest city in the world, with a total population exceeding 16 million people, and among the world's most densely populated cities.

Although the government is trying to encourage migration to the newly irrigated land reclaimed from the desert, the proportion of the population living in rural areas has continued to decrease as people moved to the cities in search of employment and higher standard of living. Most of the facilities and governmental institutes are centralized in Cairo.

Map of Egypt. Image by Flickr user elicrisko. CC BY

But Egypt is not Cairo

The concentration of population is in major urban areas in Egypt and Egypt is not only Cairo. People live in three major regions of the country: Cairo and Alexandria and elsewhere along the banks of the Nile - as well as small communities spread throughout the desert regions of Egypt. Below is a list for some of the most important cities in Egypt, and famous citizen voices within these areas.

Alexandria, with a population of 4.1 million, is the second-largest city in Egypt, and is the country's largest seaport. It is also an important tourist resort and an important industrial center because of its natural gas and oil pipelines from Suez, another city in Egypt.

Recently Alexandria witnessed a terrible crime where Khaled Said, a 28-year-old Egyptian citizen from there, was allegedly tortured to death at the hands of two officers who wanted to search him under the emergency law. My name is Khaled Said [Ar] is a Facebook page that was created after his murder - and in no time became an important network for arranging silent sit-ins condemning the emergency law, and police brutality in Egypt.

El-Mahalla El-Kubra is a large industrial and agricultural city in Egypt, located in the middle of the Nile Delta on the western bank of the Damietta branch. It is known for its dominant textile industry.

It is home to the largest public sector Egyptian textile company, the Misr Spinning and Weaving Company , and during the calls for the first national disobedience in 2006; blogger Kareem El Behery [Ar] did a great job covering workers protests. Since then, he’s been popular with covering labor issues in Egypt in general, and El Mahalla El Kubra in particular.

Al-Arīsh is the capital and largest city (with 114,900 inhabitants) of the Egyptian governorate of North Sinai, lying on the Mediterranean coast of the Sinai peninsula which historically has been the center of conflict between various political factions. Al Arish is mostly inhabitant by Bedouins, a predominantly desert-dwelling Arab ethnic group.

From Al Arish there is a blog entitled “Sinai where I am” [Ar], by Al Anany, that turned as a portal to the daily news and events happening in the city.

And also, not to forget the famous blogger, activist and poet Mosad Abu Fagr, who’s just been released after detention for three years because of his writings about the demands of Sinai Bedouins, expressing their life and seeking equal rights of citizenship.

Port Said. Image by Flickr user dolanh. CC BY-NC-SA

Port Said is another major Egyptian city in north-east Egypt, near the Suez Canal, with an approximate population of 515,007.

One of the earliest websites that was opened, PortSaid online [Ar] has been launched to act as an important portal to follow news happening there, as well as a way for PortSaidians to follow job listings and events taking place in their city.

Lastly, Minya Governorate is one of the governorates of Upper Egypt. It is located approximately 245 km (152 miles) south of Cairo on the western bank of the Nile River, which flows north through the city - with population around 4.2 million.

Minya is dubbed by the locals “Bride of Upper Egypt”, in reference to its strategic location in Middle Egypt as a vital link between the north and the south of Egypt.

In Minya, our 3rd winning project “Women of Minya day by day” should take place. It is expected to amplify voices of working women in informal laborers, and shed light on the many difficulties and obstacles they face.

Representative or not?

Well, since there are no detailed study about the demography of the blogs in Egypt is available, it is still difficult to tell whether the blogs are representative to all ethnics and geo-locations within the country or not. However, no doubt the high concentration of population within Cairo, as well as the low Internet access rates in other cities - stay as an obstacle towards spreading the usage of citizen media evenly through out the whole country. Yet hopefully, with initiatives similar to Women of Mineya Day by Day seeing the light, the future of citizen media in Egypt would take a different route.

Mongolia has a high growth rate in Internet penetration and its broadband index is really high - with average speeds of 7.3Mbps, Mongolia is at No. 35 of world ranking. While the urban areas have broadband many rural areas in Mongolia have no power or internet.

Workshop in Mörön, the administrative center of the Khövsgöl province

Nomad Green, the Rising Voices grantee in Mongolia is training local citizen journalists how to use blogs, digital video, podcasts, and map mashups to report on environmental news. They are also expanding to faraway places from the capital Ulaanbaatar to bridge the gap of digital divide between the urban and rural areas. From June 23 to July 3, Nomad Green arranged workshops in the North Eastern Khövsgöl Province. The region is well-known for its natural beauty and Lake Khövsgöl is one of Mongolia's major tourist attractions. The team included the project organizer Axiou Lin, chief editor Otgoo, and devoted environmentalist and advisor Boum.

Workshop in Khatgal village in the Khövsgöl province

Portnoy, the project manager of Nomad Green writes:

The team visited the biggest lake in Mongolia-Lake Khovsgol, and met with local environmentalist and nature protectors. The natural environment of this aimag is also under severe pressure from mining business and desertification, just like most other aimags (provinces) in Mongolia.

Murun and Khatgal are the two major administrative and business towns in the aimag. We were very excited to spread our message this far and enroll new citizen journalists with high ambition.

Workshop with the children in Ulaanbaatar

On July 3rd the team came back to the capital Ulaanbaatar to conduct a special workshop for kids which was organized by students of National Taiwan University. Portnoy writes:

We taught these kids how to become small citizen journalists by drawing what they saw in their daily life. Education is considered as one of the most crucial issues along with environmental protection. NomadGreen wishes to combine those two issues and make kids the initiator of change in their families.

More photos here courtesy Portnoy:

1) Workshop in Mörön (Murun) city in Khövsgöl Aimag (province)

2) Worshop in Khatgal village on the southern tip of Lake Khövsgöl

3) Workshop in Ulaanbaatar for children with the help of NTU students.

Here some of the posts of the Nomad green bloggers are highlighted.

Bolorerdene writes (translated by Mongoloo) about the value of nature that we do not realize. The blogger reminds:

One of the Mongolian famous poets Choinom said “The more you know the life value, the more you receive the life favor. If you don’t realize its importance, you would be blown like dust”.

Batzul (Bazu) writes about his experience of visiting the stadium for World games in Taiwan. Although the stadium has Solar panels, he learnt that “producing solar panel makes pollution and uses a lot of pure water.” Moreover cleaning of roof panels requires a lot of time, energy and resources. That is why Solar panels are not yet a cost effective alternative energy.

Please read more of their posts in the Nomad Green site.

From within San Francisco’s Tenderloin district, this festival will celebrate the rich possibilities that art and technology offer for urban communication of place and place-based media. City Centered focuses on the use of locative media and wireless technologies for site-specific and neighborhood-based interventions. Artists, designers, architects, community and cultural workers —people, places, … ]]> http://www.locative-media.org/blog/cuty_centered_a_festival_of_locative_media_and_urban_commuity Thu, 04 Feb 2010 06:52:00 -0600 http://www.locative-media.org/blog/cuty_centered_a_festival_of_locative_media_and_urban_commuity About the festival
Recent exhibitions, festivals and conferences across the US and in Europe have taken wireless networks, public space, locative media and urban environments as sites of intervention, creativity, and critique. Formulated within the emerging context of networked urbanism and mobile media, City Centered: A Festival of Locative Media and Urban Community will focus upon dynamics of the shifting, locative, cartographic and social space of the city. It is organized by educational, arts, community-based and civic organizations and asks how locative media can act as a platform and venue for community-led expression.

From within San Francisco’s Tenderloin district, this festival will celebrate the rich possibilities that art and technology offer for urban communication of place and place-based media. City Centered focuses on the use of locative media and wireless technologies for site-specific and neighborhood-based interventions. Artists, designers, architects, community and cultural workers —people, places, … ]]> http://www.locative-media.org/blog/cuty_centered_a_festival_of_locative_media_and_urban_commuity Thu, 04 Feb 2010 06:52:00 -0600 http://www.locative-media.org/blog/cuty_centered_a_festival_of_locative_media_and_urban_commuity About the festival


Recent exhibitions, festivals and conferences across the US and in Europe have taken wireless networks, public space, locative media and urban environments as sites of intervention, creativity, and critique. Formulated within the emerging context of networked urbanism and mobile media, City Centered: A Festival of Locative Media and Urban Community will focus upon dynamics of the shifting, locative, cartographic and social space of the city. It is organized by educational, arts, community-based and civic organizations and asks how locative media can act as a platform and venue for community-led expression.



From within San Francisco’s Tenderloin district, this festival will celebrate the rich possibilities that art and technology offer for urban communication of place and place-based media. City Centered focuses on the use of locative media and wireless technologies for site-specific and neighborhood-based interventions. Artists, designers, architects, community and cultural … ]]> http://www.locative-media.org/blog/liminal_time Tue, 26 Jan 2010 18:04:00 -0600 http://www.locative-media.org/blog/liminal_time Twilight serves as a liminal time, between day and night. The name of the television fiction series The Twilight Zone makes reference to this, describing it as “the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition” in one variant of the original series’ opening. The name is from an actual zone observable from space in the place where daylight or shadow advances or retreats about the Earth. Noon and, more often, midnight can be considered liminal, the first transitioning between morning and afternoon, the latter between days.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liminality

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• To keep notes on long-running stories -- such as court cases, bankruptcies or police investigations -- that require journalists to keep track of ongoing developments.
  

• To compile material in a way that might make it easier to look at the relationship between various events and stories.
  

• To organize information for narratives and the reconstruction of events.

• DocumentCloud: How to make the most of your documents
  

• Sunlight Foundation: How to use data to cover politicians, lobbyists and campaign contributors
  

• Patchwork Nation: How to understand your community's voters
  

• Tableau: How to use data visualization to tell interactive stories

• Matt Waite, Senior News Technologist, St. Petersburg TImes/tampabay.com and PolitiFact
• Rich Gordon, associate professor and director of digital innovation at Northwestern's Medill School of Journalism
• Burt Herman, Journalist and entrepreneur, Hacks/Hackers
• Niran Babalola, Software Engineer, The Texas Tribune
  

We start freaking out.

This post is a detailed overview of how I personally manage media content in my life. (I won’t include how I manage other types of information like financial and contact information — that’s a whole other story.) I should emphasize that there is no single media management system that will work for everyone. Everyone has different types and amounts of information to process. Because of my job and my own interests I probably consume much more media than others, and so have developed a fairly intricate system that, though extremely automated, still requires more daily attention than most are probably willing to invest.

There are three main factors that influenced how I designed this system:

1. Media types — above all else, I categorize media by whether it is text, audio, or video. Each has its own advantage. I love text because it is searchable and easy to copy and paste. Audio is fantastic because it is the only media type that allows me to multitask. I listen to podcasts and audiobooks as I bicycle to the office, work out in the gym, clean my apartment and wait in Mexico City’s round-the-clock traffic. Video, on the other hand, demands your full attention which is probably why it can make such a big impact on our lives. I tend to only consume video at night, either on my television or my iPad.
2. Device types — another strong consideration is that I consume media every day on four different devices. I want access to all my media from all four devices: 1) my iPhone where I listen to podcasts and frequently discover new media via Twitter, Google Reader, and email; 2) my iPad where I read books, feature-length articles, academic papers, and watch 10 – 15 minute videos from TED, PopTech, YouTube, and Vimeo; 3) my laptop computer which serves as the home base for all my media and documents; and 4) my television which is hooked up to a Mac Mini media server — this is where I watch most movies and documentaries, and occasionally where I listen to podcasts as I clean my apartment.
3. Info-snacking versus deep reading — after a while I came to realize that I consume media in two different ways: 1) info-snacking in which I scan a vast amount of content to get an overview of a particular topic or to get a feel for the day’s news; and 2) deep reading which usually takes place on my couch with a cup of tea or on a park bench in Parque México. Many observers like Nicholas Carr point out that we are increasingly spending more time info-snacking at the expense of the time we spend reading deeply and reflecting. While I think that Carr tends to exaggerate the inability of my generation to read deeply (just look at Goodreads), I do think it’s important to set aside a certain amount of time each day to commit to a single piece of media for at least 45 minutes to an hour.

Before I even get out of bed I reach for my iPad and start up my NPR app. As I listen to the five-minute morning news roundup, I look through all of the latest NPR stories and make a personalized 30-minute playlist of the four – six stories that interest me the most. I listen to this playlist as I shower and make breakfast. With my toast and coffee in hand I walk the ten feet to my home office (now green at the request of Tricia).

Every morning I spend about an hour to 90 minutes scanning various sources of media to get a general feel for the day’s news. During this time I never read anything longer than three paragraphs. First I read through my email and click on all the links to articles that people have recommended to me. If these articles are less than three paragraphs then I read them right away. If they are longer, and I determine that they are worth my time, then I save them to Instapaper to read later on my iPad or iPhone.

After email I look through my three Twitter accounts (@oso, @civicinfolatam, @infocivi) to see what articles my contacts have been recommending. Very few of the Twitter users I follow write about what they ate for lunch; rather the service is much more like a list of cleverly worded headlines written by individuals I trust. Each of those headlines then links to the main article. I probably read about 3% of the articles that my Twitter contacts link to. Still, I find it valuable to know what they find valuable on a daily basis. Of those articles I do read, if they are less than three paragraphs then I will read them right away; if they are longer then I save them to Instapaper to read later in the day. I use Nambu to read through my Twitter accounts on my laptop, the official Twitter app for my iPhone, and Twitterific for my iPad.

Next I read through the feeds in my RSS reader. I use Google Reader to store all of the most recent articles from the 307 feeds I am subscribed to. While all of the information is stored in Google Reader, I use NetNewsWire for my laptop, iPhone, and iPad so that I can continue to read the articles even when I’m not connected to the internet (which is often when I am traveling). Every morning there are an average of 600 – 800 new pieces of content waiting for me. As you can imagine I skim quickly through all of the headlines, but only read a small minority of the articles and blog posts. From a total of 800 new articles every day in my RSS reader I probably read around 15 short articles (less than three paragraphs) and two long articles on average.

In addition to long articles and blog posts that I save to Instapaper, I also often come across PDF reports and short video clips that I want to watch later. PDF reports I save to my Dropbox folder, which I can access automatically via my iPhone, iPad, and both of my computers. While the Dropbox applications allow you to read PDFs directly inside the apps, I prefer using GoodReader which has more functionality and connects automatically to your Dropbox and Google Docs accounts (in addition to other services). If I discover a 5 – 10 minute YouTube clip that I want to watch later, I drag the link to Evom which automatically downloads and adds the video to iTunes, which then syncs to both my iPhone and iPad.

The podcasts I listen to on a regular basis.

Lastly I open up iTunes where I am subscribed to around 25 different audio and video podcasts. Currently iTunes tell me that I have 75 episodes waiting for my attention, and that it will take me 1.4 days to listen to everything. I try to download podcasts selectively so that I realistically can listen to everything I download, but often I am only able to catch up when I take a long flight or road trip.

Instapaper allows me to read long articles on any device with an interface that doesn’t tire my eyes. It removes all advertisements and unnecessary text from the articles.

After my morning routine of info-snacking I usually have around two to three hours of media content to consume throughout the rest of the day. I tend to do this in hour-long blocks. I listen to around 90 minutes of podcasts and audio books during my afternoon run and my time in the gym. I read for about 60 minutes on a bench in the park. Then I’ll read for another thirty minutes when I’m at home on my couch and before I go to bed. Often times I watch a documentary movie while I eat dinner.

I read e-books on my iPad, and occasionally on my iPhone. I use both the Kindle and iBook apps to read various books (though I prefer iBooks). Both applications synchronize what page I am on and my bookmarks so that if I finish off at page 113 on my iPad it will automatically start me at 113 on my iPhone as well.

Admittedly, I tend to info snack a couple more times throughout the day, though I am trying to spend more time reading deeply and less time info-snacking. I use Twitter, FlipBoard, NetNewsWire, and Google FastFlip to info-snack throughout the day, mostly from my iPhone and iPad.

Flipboard for the iPad feels just like a traditional magazine, but it’s content comes from recommended links by my Facebook and Twitter contacts. I can send longer articles to Instapaper directly from within the app.

Everything so far relates to how I organize and consume media. But there is a more important guiding question: Why the hell am I reading/watching/listening to this? In part it is to become a better person: more informed, worldly, empathetic. But I am also aware of my place in the information ecology, and my role in spreading information across different communities. With each piece of content I consume, there are nine possible outputs:

• Do nothing – either delete the content (if I never ever will use it again) or store it in my media archive so that I can search for it in the future. This is what I do with 75% of content I consume. I use a program called Together to manage an archive of content I’ve read. Instapaper also keeps an archive (though there are no promises that it will be permanent.)
• Share via email – if the content is directly relevant to a particular person or small group of people then I will send an email with the link and the relevant excerpt(s).
• Share via twitter – I manage three different Twitter accounts – one personal and two for work. Twitter is a great social way to share information related to recent news, but it is especially bad at building an archive of well-organized bookmarks.
• Share via Delicious – when I need to organize bookmarks by category so that I can find them later on I use Delicious. I have both a personal and a work account, and they help me build bibliographies for future blog posts and essays. I use Pukka to easily post to both accounts without having to log in and log out. Pukka is also great for quickly searching past bookmarks.
• Share via Facebook – Sometimes I find information that strikes me as oddly intriguing, such as how porcupines have sex. This, in my opinion, is requisite reading for anyone I consider a friend. Many applications now have a “share via facebook” option. In my browser I use the Facebook bookmarklet.
• Share via Tumblr – though I haven’t been using Tumblr lately, an essay by Steven Berlin Johnson about the 18th century practice of keeping a commonplace book convinced me to start collecting scraps of content that influence the evolution of my thinking.
• Share via Goodreads – if it is a book. I usually also leave a small review with my thoughts and reflections.
• Create an outline – often times I choose to read/listen/watch particular types of content because I’m working on a blog post or research paper. I use MarsEdit and OmniOutliner to take notes on my laptop and Simplenote to take notes on my iPhone and iPad.
• Translate an article – I often feel that the most valuable output is when I decide to translate an article from Spanish to English or English to Spanish. I do this with the help of Google Translator Toolkit, which remembers how I personally like to translate key, common phrases.

That may seem like a ridiculous number of outputs and a lot of work, but it literally takes me about 10 seconds to share information via email/Twitter/Delicious/Facebook/Tumblr, and I hardly ever spend more than an hour a day writing blog posts.

At this point you probably thing that I do nothing more with my life than submerge myself with media. While it’s true that I probably spend more time consuming media than most, I never spend anytime watching advertisements and I don’t play video games. Still, I’m increasingly aware of the need to step away from media completely. @shirafu recently pointed me to the NY Times article “Digital Devices Deprive Brain of Needed Downtime,” which really struck a chord with me. If we don’t step away from media we fail to engage with it meaningfully. At least once a day I try to spend time simply staring at the ceiling and/or going for a walk around my neighborhood. I am trying to spend more weekends out in the mountains away from connectivity. Cooking dinner has also been a recent source of calm for me.

Here is a list of some of my favorite sources of content (not all are legal):

• NetFlix – movies, television series, and documentaries.
• Avaxhome – ebooks, audiobooks, videos
• AAARG.org – academic papers
• iTunes U – university lectures
• MVGroup – documentary movies
• BBC Worldservice Documentaries – consistently interesting audio documentaries. I listen to almost all of them.

I rarely watch television, but when I do, this is how. (Again, I never watch advertisements.)

In traditional print publishing a colophon is a brief description of the printing and publication of the book. Early bloggers like John Gruber re-appropriated the term to describe a list of tools used to produce digital media. Below is a list of all the applications and services I have mentioned above.

Please feel free to leave a comment below to explain how you manage the river of media.

I’ve been thinking lately about fashion and class. It’s Mario’s fault. He’s the kind of friend you can sit down with for hours over a few microbrews to discuss the evolution of advanced capitalism through the lens of hipster fashion. I’m still not really sure what that means, but the man does have great taste in beer and threads, and he has me thinking about a thing or two. I live in Condesa, not far from the border with Roma, hipster mecca of Mexico City. It’s where you find people dressed like this.

It’s one of the few places where my little sister, looking like she does these days, fits right in. Like others in her aesthetic cohort, I’m amazed by the time, energy, and nonchalance that goes into perfecting the image. I love the creativity behind the impulse, and yet am frustrated by the vanity.

Did I mention that just about everything costs double in my neighborhood? Rent, food, a cup of coffee. This is a place for the middle-upper class, the young and the restless, the type of kids with enough money to spend entire days in thrift stores to be seen at parties looking like this:

Despite the working class, bohemian aesthetic, most of these kids are the sons and daughters of CEO’s and politicians. And most of them were raised in the gated communities of upper-class suburbs like Santa Fe. My theory is that growing up surrounded by suburbs and sitcoms is venom for the creative soul. It’s a plague that affected so much of my generation. So we moved from mass-manufactured, cookie-cutter houses to Silver Lake, the Mission, Williamsburg, West Oakland. But unfortunately, for so many, ‘creativity’ meant dressing up like this to go to parties, to create an ‘alternative scene’

If only a small percentage of that creativity could be channeled into something that goes beyond supporting beer and cigarette companies.

People have suddenly realized that there are so many things that they desire that they were not even aware of before. And the truth is that most of these television channels are commercially driven, and so the Bhutanese people are driven to consumerism. That’s inevitable. And that is, to some extent, unfortunate. But inevitable.

Lyonpo Jigmi Thinley, Bhutan’s Foreign Minister

Booger is here in Mexico City visiting me this week, but unfortunately neither of us are feeling 100%, which has meant lots of movies in the evening. Actually, it’s exactly what I’ve needed after weeks of stressful work and traveling. We started out on a Clint Eastwood kick, first with Invictus and then Gran Torino. Boogs very well might be the worst person in the world when it comes to making decisions so as she flipped through Netflix’s steadily growing selection of streaming movies last night I knew I would need to take over or else we’d spend the evening reading reviews.

We settled on the 2003 Travelers and Magicians, which, says Wikipedia, “is the first feature film shot entirely in Bhutan.” The protagonist of the film is Dondup, a young, chain-smoking government official who is obsessed with American culture … and leaving his country for the American dream.

Throughout the whole movie I was tripping out. God damn, homeboy looks just like my friend Tshewang. But I figured it couldn’t be. If Tshe had been in a major film production I would have known about it.

Tshe and Lisa, Camden, Maine, 2008

I loved the movie. It made me yearn to be back in the Himalaya, where I lived and studied for most of 1999. There is an authenticity to the movie that probably comes from the fact that the cast is made up of almost entirely non-professional actors. I highly recommend it to anyone who has Netflix Watch Instantly.

The movie finished, the credits rolled, and sure enough it really was Tshewang who I met while in Camden, Maine in 2008 as part of PopTech’s Social Innovation Fellows program. What else has Tshe been up to that I wasn’t aware of? I wondered.

Unrestrained Western culture was a force that the Bhutanese had long feared. Until 1999, television and the Internet were illegal in Bhutan. Royal decrees were intended to safeguard the country against what was feared to be an onslaught of Western values. Not until Bhutan could offer its own television service would Western digital media be welcomed into the Kingdom. So in June 1999, the country crossed the threshold of modernity on two fronts: television and the Internet were legalized, and the Bhutan Broadcasting Service (BBS) was born.

Alexis Bloom, Documentary Filmmaker

Tshewang became one of the first Bhutanese journalists to travel around the country with a camera and microphone and appear to appear on only television channel, the state-run Bhutan Broadcasting Service. But he lacked the technical production skills, and so he traveled about as far as possible, to Berkeley, California where he enrolled in the documentary film program at the Graduate School of Journalism. There he met a fellow foreign student, South African-born Alexis Bloom, and the two headed back to Bhutan in 2002 after their studies to produce “The Last Place“, a ten-minute piece for Frontline World that looks at the impact of satellite and cable TV on the country.

The quote from Bhutan’s Foreign Minister at the beginning of this blog post comes from the Frontline piece, but it could just as easily sum up “Travelers and Magicians” which Tshewang must have started working on immediately following his return to Bhutan from Berkeley.

“Expectations create anxiety,” quips the talkative yet endearing monk who follows Dondup on his hitchhiking tour to get to the United States. It is something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. Everyone reading this blog already has everything he and she needs in life. Yet our lives are still filled with anxiety. We need to make more money, launch more projects, see more places, have more to show for our lives.

“The Last Place” is a fascinating and well-produced piece, and a reminder of the strangeness (and evilness) of Western television programming. It underlines Clay Shirky’s assertion that far too many of us wasted the 80’s and 90’s watching terrible sitcoms.

From my own elitist ledge, I think that importing foreign television programming into Bhutan was a net bad. Lyonpo Jigmi Thinley says that the one positive effect of bringing television to Bhutan is that the Bhutanese began to realize just how peaceful their country is compared to most. But it also led to youthful fanatics of WWF and a quick transition from isolated Buddhism to capitalist consumerism.

But what about the internet? From my same elitist ledge can it be judged as a net good or net bad for the country? I have no idea. I’ve never been to Bhutan. But I am intrigued by the thoughts of Sonam Ongmo, Global Voices’ inspiring Bhutanese author. She was born and raised in Bhutan where she worked as a journalist and then moved to New York where she is now, in her own words, “a displaced stay-at-home mother of two.”

In 2006 – just six years after the internet first arrived to Bhutan and the same year as freedom of press was guaranteed – she published a piece in the Bhutan Times that speculated how the country would react to the network of networks. She recently re-published that piece on her blog.

In a country with limited resources like ours, individuals will have to play a more decisive role in managing Television and Internet but the State has to help them. The west as a long media history and the public are very familiar with how a free press functions and it impacts them. Their people have matured with it and so management of the media has come with a certain amount of education and exposure to it. While we often claim to be in a position to learn from other’s mistakes we have seen that it is only when the elephant is in the room that we are scrambling for solutions.

Nearly four years later and it seems that Sonam still doesn’t know how to weigh the positive and negative effects of the internet on Bhutan. Like most of us, she feels that there is simply not enough time to reflect on all the information that passes by us:

Bhutan has seen drastic changes within society – good and bad – but the fact that it is happening all very fast is indeed very disturbing. Much of the time the problems that have come with such exposure have made the problems run ahead of themselves allowing hardly any time for thought. We are a nation now, in some ways, like a deer caught in headlights.

For Sonam’s own life it is clear that the internet and social media has been a blessing, but she’s also aware that there is too much of a good thing, and that we need to step away to regain our balance, to regain ourselves.

I agree. I told myself that I would stop using my computer and ipad after 10 p.m. But last night I broke that rule. So enchanted was I by “Travelers and Magicians” that I read through every link I could find on Global Voices about Bhutan. I got to know Tshokey, “Penstar“, Dorji Wangchuk, Tshering Tobgay, and Unagi. I was amazed by how thoughtful the discussions were in the comments that followed. It reminded me of the good old days of blogging in 2004 and 2005 when the majority of posts would inspire in-depth conversations with 15 or 20 or more comments. More than a sense of conversation, there was a sense of lasting community. These days we hardly have enough time to align our lives for long enough to participate in one coherent conversation. More than half the people who started reading this post don’t have the attention span or the interest to make it this far. I hope that Bhutan’s blogging community isn’t headed down the same path.

I also hope that Tshewang considers making a documentary about the impact of the internet on Bhutan. It is something that the BBC would surely fund, and I know that he’d do an amazing job producing it.

(For now I highly recommend the fascinating 2008 “Bhutan Media Impact Study” carried out by the Ministry of Information and Communications with financial assistance from UNDP. Another worthwhile read is “Bhutan Goes Online” by Geoff Long, which provides a more historical and technical perspective of the internet’s arrival to Bhutan.

When I finally finished reading through all the blog posts I drifted asleep thinking about how much I’d like to one day visit Bhutan. But I am trying to travel less, both for my own health and the environment’s. Fortunately I can count on documentary filmmakers like Tshewang and bloggers like Sonam to help me become more familiar with their country from afar.

I met Tshewang at PopTech where he was a fellow for his work training a new generation of Bhutanese journalists in digital media production. Gideon and I trained the fellows how to create a 5-minute video using their Nokia N95 phones and iMovie. Perhaps with the sole exception of Erik who breathes technology, Tshewang picked up the digital editing process faster than anyone else. (Surely from all his filmmaking experience.) But he didn’t have his own Apple laptop to continue producing the videos when he returned to Bhutan. I had just purchased a new MacBook myself so I said, “go ahead, take mine, just don’t use any incriminating photos against me.”

I had visions of Tshe taking the laptop back to Bhutan and training a new generation of digital storytellers who would do for their country what California is a Place is doing for California. I’ve unfortunately lost touch with Tshe and so I’m not sure how the training program is going, but I can’t imagine anyone better suited to lead it. Here’s his presentation from PopTech. If you notice, the computer that is giving him problems as he flips through his slides is my old, stickered, white MacBook.

Mexico’s “General Population Act” is similar to, or at least as racist as, Arizona’s SB-1070

The powerful arrival of SB-1070, even in its now more moderate form, represents a setback regarding the respect for human rights for those seeking work in other countries because of a lack of opportunities in their own. Stopping someone for merely appearing to be a “migrant” (who knows what that means or how it’s determined) is to be condemned because it represents an act of discrimination.

In Mexico we have protested against this law, and we are willing to demonstrate in the streets, but we haven’t even stopped to question our own treatment by local and federal authorities of migrants who pass through our country on their way to the United States.

Have we taken the time to review our own “General Population Act”, which has some of the same parameters as Arizona’s SB-1070?

The General Population Act (LGP) and its regulations governing the stay of foreigners in our country, requires that every authority must verify the immigration status of aliens applying for a process or service. Our foreign friends who have attempted to open a bank account or work even part time without carrying their documentation with them can confirm the enforcement of the act.

Groupo Beta undercover police agents grab a youth near an immigration checkpoint in Chiapas, Mexico. Along the rail line, Beta agents pursue robbers who prey upon hapless migrants. ( Don Bartletti / Los Angeles Times )

Just like in Arizona, getting a job in Mexico is risky if you’re undocumented. Article 74 of the Act states that:

No one should give employment to aliens who have not first verified legally in the country and without obtaining specific authorization to provide that particular service.

Supposedly only the National Migration Institute (INM) can detain those who do not prove their status, but just like in Arizona, they can solicit the help of local police and, if necessary, place the migrants in prison according to Article 94:

The authorities of the Federation, states and municipalities, will be auxiliary to the Interior Ministry in functions that correspond in terms of population registration.

Just like in Arizona, police are given the possibility to question immigrants anywhere in Mexico, and if they find any violation of the law, they are “the authorized personnel to carry out their duties for public safety,” says Article 152 of the General Population Act:

If in the course of the investigation a violation of the provisions of the Act is revealed, the regulations that merit their expulsion abroad of migrants will be carried out by the authorized personnel [including police].

The “charge” of appearing Central American

In Mexico operations against undocumented immigrants across the country who are classified in a discriminatory manner by having “Central American features” are common. They are persecuted, harassed and, if even if they are Mexican but have a strange accent different from that of the center of the country, they are classified as “non-Mexicans.”

It’s depressing the stories of the abuses subjected by citizens who travel “The Beast“, the freight train from Chiapas in the south to the border with the United States. Rape, extortion kidnappings, and if for some reason they ask help of the police, then they are doubly extorted.

Undocumented Central Americans crowd the tops of freight train cars in Mexico. They will be treated as lawbreaking foreigners if caught, but cargo rail lines have become a major passageway north to the U.S. border. ( Don Bartletti / Los Angeles Times )

We should pause a bit to think as we protest the treatment that they want to give us in Arizona, why are we not outraged by the treatment we give to immigrants across our country or those who settle here, such as our Argentine friends, in search of a better future.

Here’s a little proof that Twitter is now not simply location aware, in terms of latitude and longitude or address, but is now place-aware.  I checked in to both of these places on FourSquare and Twitter recognized these places by name:

Then, I decided to click on the Trader Joe’s, Falls Church link beside the little map marker, and lo! there was the following pop-up window, which is very much aware of not simply location anymore but they’re following the trend of Facebook Places and the other location-aware social networks by starting to connect to businesses:

Via Marketing Conversation and Chris AbrahamChris Abraham is co-founder and principal of Abraham Harrison LLC, an international consulting group with specialties in online word-of-mouth/conversation marketing and online business & technology strategy advising. See his profile, contact Chris via email, Twitter, or leave a comment below.

Photo by tantek on Flickr

Since I have become addicted to Foursquare, the location check-in service, I set out to find the best tips to get to the top of Foursquare’s leaderboard while playing fair.

Here are the top 5 tips I discovered:

1If you want to become mayor, check in to places that you know that you’ll be able to check in to frequently, as many times as possible. Didn’t find your place on Foursquare already? Add it. Don’t forget and don’t neglect — someone else may steal your mayorship from you.

2Foursquare resets its leaderboard on Sunday nights. To maximize your weekly tallies, make sure you start early in the week.

3Check in to new places — every time you do so, these grant you 5 extra points, and these can add up quickly.

4Get familiar with how to unlock your special badges and work on unlocking them. Here are two great badges lists: TonyFelice.WordPress.com and TheKruser.com.

5Don’t cheat. For the sake of the community, don’t check in to places if you’re not really there. This only hurts the whole user experience on Foursquare.

One feature I feel is missing in Foursquare: Once I check in to a place, I want the app to scan all my contacts and tell me the 5–10 users who are closest to my proximity at any given time. This will enable users to maximize the potential of meeting people in their network more frequently and make for a more cohesive user base.

And finally, here’s a good, short Foursquare tutorial for you:

How To Unlock Your World With Foursquare on Howcast

• Foursquare Focuses on Privacy on Eve of Expected Facebook Location Launch (Mashable)Ayelet Noff is founder and CEO of Blonde 2.0, a New Media PR firm specializing in helping brands use social media tools such as social networks, the blogosphere and social software to create brand awareness, buzz, find leads, recruit employees or achieve any other goal. See her business profile, contact Ayelet, follow her on Twitter or leave a comment below.

Google Webmaster Tools is a phenomenal free resource.

Guest post by Danny Dover
SEO moz

For as long as I can remember, the best way for me to learn has been to do. I have gone through countless checklists while trying to understand search engine optimization. The following is a compilation of the most useful checklists I have completed in order to learn SEO. My intent is that this list can be used by people who are inexperienced in SEO but want to learn more.

Before diving into SEO techniques, it’s important to know the basics of web development. The following tasks will develop the necessary web development skills needed to become successful at SEO:

Learn how to code a basic website without using a WYSIWYG editor – Don’t fear the word code, writing HTML is much easier than you think. If you can make a sandwich with two pieces of bread and put something in the middle, you can write HTML. For help, check out this excellent tutorial. Remember, don’t worry about SEO techniques at this point. Focus on learning how to build a website first.

Code a website that contains the following:

• All styles with CSS. No tables!
• Homepage has 3 unique paragraphs about you
• 3 pages total; homepage, contact and portfolio

Pick your keywords — Pick keywords that are uncompetitive. This is very important as the words you choose will become the center of your SEO efforts. I recommend using your name. Go to Google and search for yourself. If a small amount of low quality websites show up, use your name as your keywords. If your name is competitive to rank for, find a variation of your name that is easier. Example: Danny Ben Dover.

Register a domain name and find hosting — This is not nearly as difficult as it sounds. I recommend SiteGround as good option. However, there are literally thousands of choices. Use your best judgment, but remember you shouldn’t be paying more than $7 a month and the domain name should be included for free. Your only requirement is that your host can’t have immovable ads. These could be crawled by the search engines and ruin your rankings. For your domain name, use your keywords from above. Eg., dannydover.com or dannybendover.com. If your keywords are not available as a domain name, choose different keywords. (Note: In this exercise, the keywords you are optimizing for and your domain name should be the same. Although this is not always the case in the real world, having similar keywords to your domain name makes SEO much easier.)

Upload your website files to your new hosting account -  The easiest method is to use FTP to drag and drop your files. See your hosting provider for details.

Sign up for Google Analytics and verify your website – This free tool will allow you to track visitors to your website. Installation instructions are included by Google.

Wait a week and search for your keywords in the big four search engines – I generally use the rank checker tool (immediately above) as a shortcut. It is all right if your website doesn’t show up. That is what SEO is for. If you do find your website ranking (even if it is not on the first page), record how it ranks in the major search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing) in a spreadsheet.

Wait two weeks to allow search engines to find your site and for Google Analytics to gather data.

Now for the fun part. Learn basic SEO techniques and apply them to your glorious website. This will allow you to see how SEO can help your website rank.

Read the entire Beginner’s Guide to SEO – This is essential to building a strong SEO foundation. I also recommend reading the completed parts of the new Beginner’s Guide and Aaron Wall’s SEO Overview.

Read all of the Google Search Engine Ranking Factors – These will reinforce what you already know and give a perspective on variation. These factors are based off of the experience of some of the SEO industry’s most successful people.

Sign up for Google Webmaster Tools, verify and read everything – This phenomenal resource will show you how Googlebot sees your website and point out any SEO problems you have on your site. Be sure to familiarize yourself with it. The information it provides is formulated toward Google but applies to all the search engines.

Run your website through the SEOmoz tools – Specifically, I recommend the Term Target Tool and Page Strength Tool. These tools will point out areas where you can improve your website.

Add a robots.txt file and a sitemap — Although these are not really necessary for such a small site, familiarizing yourself with these files will be indispensable.

Apply your knowledge – Optimize your Title Tags, URLs, Anchor Text, HTML structure (H1, H2), and keyword usage. This is the bread and butter of onsite search engine optimization.

Link build – Add a link to your website on all of your favorite social media/networking sites. Feel free to try your luck with linkbait, although for a site with no competition this isn’t really necessary.

Track your site on Linkscape and Yahoo! Site Explorer – Wait a month for Linkscape and Yahoo to find your links and then check to see what links are being counted. On Yahoo, be sure to select “inlinks except from this domain to entire site.” Only the links on Linkscape are displayed in the order of importance.

Check Google Analytics – By this time, you should see more interesting data from your analytics tool. Use this data to learn the basics of analytics and use it as a reference point while link building.

Update your spreadsheet – Search for your keywords in the big three search engines again and look to see where your website ranks. Record these results in your spreadsheet. Tracking your data lets you see what techniques are working what techniques are not worth your time.

Test your own SEO theories and record the results — This is not really a task you can ever complete. 90% of all SEO information is already freely available if you can find it. Testing your own theories and getting good results will help you uncover the remaining 10% necessary to outperform your competition.

I sincerely believe that if you complete all the tasks on this list, you will be well on your way to becoming a successful SEO. I recommend printing this post and pasting it somewhere visible near your computer. That way you can complete all of the tasks in your spare time and develop your skills. Best of luck to all of the new SEOs!

If you liked this, be sure to check out The Beginner’s Checklist for Small Business SEO.

On Friday night I appeared on KQED’s “This Week in Northern California” discussing the open letter Google and Verizon cowrote to the FCC proposing new broadband requirements for mobile and some type of second Internet. The letter bent everyone out of shape and caused a flurry of response from traditional journalists and bloggers. While the protest at Google on Friday was a dud, anger in the blogosphere remained very high, with most everyone trying to extrapolate what Google and Verizon meant with their rather vague proposal. Google and Verizon responded to these various theories trying to clear up some myths that had developed over the week. But in the end it appeared the two elements that most upset everyone, mobile and this “second Internet” being exempt from the FCC’s net neutrality regulation, were still very much on the table according to the two powerhouses.

If you haven’t been paying attention, or need an overview, watch my five minute segment from the KQED show with Belva Davis.David Spark helps businesses grow by developing thought leadership through storytelling and covering live events at Spark Media Solutions. He blogs at The Spark Minute and can be heard and seen regularly on ABC Radio, Cranky Geeks with John C. Dvorak, and KQED in San Francisco. See his business profile, contact David, or leave a comment below.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported.

Image by smi23le on Flickr.

Guest post by Anthony Piwarun
SEOmoz

Like most in the SEO (search engine optimization) community, I’m always looking for ways to improve content for my clients. Whether it’s a website, blog or a press release, there is always a way to make it rank better. Recently I began optimizing profiles on LinkedIn, the social networking site for business professionals. Using my own LinkedIn profile as a test, I’ve discovered that the same principles we use in the SEO field.

For two months, I altered various fields of my profile and logged the effect on the number of searches that it appeared in according to LinkedIn analytics. While I’m not one to rely heavily on a single method of measurement, LinkedIn doesn’t offer an option for analytics so my primary method of measurement was the in-house tracking system. The results I found were conclusive: It is possible to optimize your LinkedIn profile to rank better in search.

Before diving into the results of my study, I’d like to point out a few areas that I believe are key to achieving an optimized LinkedIn profile and also give a brief “how-to” on optimization techniques.

The first and most important field to optimize on your LinkedIn profile is the headline. The headline field can be most equated to a meta description in SEO terminology. It’s a way to explain what you do and how you do it (in as few words as possible) to the world without having to use one of those awful labels known as a “job title.”

For my headline, I opted to go with three keywords and my contact information. For those that aren’t too familiar with LinkedIn, contacting a non-connection isn’t easy unless you’re in the same group or you have a mutual friend, so adding contact information is helpful for new business development. Like its SEO counterpart the meta description, it’s the first thing a searcher sees when searching on LinkedIn.

A LinkedIn summary is a chance to describe who you are, what you want to accomplish, and what you aspire to be. In SEO terms, I like to think of it as the first 100 words of the page. This is a great opportunity to add a ton of keywords, related terms, and longer, more descriptive strings. While it’s important to use your targeted phrase a few times throughout your summary, keep in mind this is a professional profile and if you sound like a robot you most likely won’t win the bid, get hired, or be able to go more than 4 consecutive hours without your coworkers calling you R2D2. Just like any effective website, a LinkedIn profile optimized with user experience in mind will get the sale long before a keyword-stuffed can of Spam.

Another important field when looking to optimize a LinkedIn profile is the job title and description. I’m not going to open myself to hate mail from HR reps, so I’ll bypass job title optimization and cut right to the description. The job description you provide doesn’t have to and most likely shouldn’t be word-for-word verbiage from your job offer letter. Be creative, yet truthful; descriptive, yet succinct. Remember, your target audience has even less time than you to spend reviewing job applicants or proposals so cut to the chase.

Group memberships and the total number of first-, second– and third-degree connections also play a part in determining your ranking in LinkedIn search results. Group memberships and connections are a lot like incoming links– they serve as a “vote of confidence” of sorts, and the closer your connection is to the searcher, the higher up you will show if they use the one-click filter option to sort by relationship. My best advice would be to join as many (relevant) groups that you can and connect with a few LIONs (LinkedIn Open Networkers) from your industry. Note: Don’t connect with random strangers, it’s just plain rude!

A little-known perk of having a LinkedIn profile is the strength of the domain and the presence of doFollow, customizable anchor links. Your profile allows three links for your website, blog, or Twitter with default anchor text like “My Website” or “Other”. The “Other” field, when selected, allows for customized anchor text. Instead of selecting “My Blog” or “My Website”, use the “Other” option and give yourself some link love from a trustworthy PR 8.

Because we’re all results-driven marketers, optimizing content and leaving it alone simply isn’t an option. We need to track, and we need to measure! Throughout my 8 week test on LinkedIn I kept a log to track changes and measure results. The fields that I changed over time were headline, summary, and work description– each of which were explained in detail above. Some other notable variables included a new recommendation from a vendor and a premium LinkedIn subscription.

While the actual numbers aren’t something to write home about, they show an increase of search impressions by as high as 5.5x the baseline measurement. Changing the headline, summary, and work experience alone increased search impressions by a factor of 1.8. Because a new recommendation is an uncontrolled variable, there’s no accurate way to measure (or predict) the results of this type of action. Upgrading to a premium membership slightly increased the number of search impressions but, in my opinion, not enough to justify the cost.

After reading this HOW-TO, I hope to drive home the following points:

• Adding keywords to the 3 high-traffic fields of your LinkedIn profile will provide a measurable increase in the number of it will display in search results.
• Optimizing your profile will not only help it rank better in search results but also pre qualify potential connections.
• Sometimes it’s best to think of optimizing your content for user experience, not for search engines.

I hope this How-To was helpful — if anyone has done LIO testing on their own, please leave feedback in the comments below for all to see. For more internet marketing tips, be sure to visit my blog and follow me on Twitter.

My friend Effie Kapsalis helped make something very, very cool. Something brilliant, actually. Something you need to check out: Anthologize.

A brilliant idea is defined by how hard you slap yourself in the forehead, saying, “gee, that’s awesome — but so obvious, why didn’t I think of that?” Anthologize is that simple, elegant, “it never occurred to me” idea that I have been waiting for forever: a WYSIWYG way of drag-and-dropping together a linear narrative out of what is often an amalgam of reverse-chronological, jumbled-together, blog posts. Export it into an online, web-accessible “book” or even a proper ebook in the PDF, ePUB or TEI formats that can be exported and popped into your favorite ebook reader like the Amazon Kindle or Sony eReader.

Anthologize and presents itself as a free, easy-to-install and easy-to-grok WordPress plug-in.

Anthologize is a project of One Week | One Tool, a project of the Center for History and New Media, George Mason University. Funding provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities. © 2010, Center for History and New Media. For more information, contact infoATanthologizeDOTorg. Follow @anthologize.

While I have already installed it into both Chris Abraham and Marketing Conversation, I am overwhelmed with how many posts there are on both blogs that I have yet to organize my thoughts and do something with it. However, there has been quite a bit of press on the Anthologize project already.

Digital Campus

In our first-ever live broadcast, Digital Campus hosts the big reveal of what came out of One Week | One Tool, a National Endowment for the Humanities–sponsored institute at the Center for History and New Media that brought together a diverse group of developers and scholars to produce a useful software application for the humanities (and beyond) in just one week. Joining the regulars on the podcast are four members of the One Week team, Boone Gorges, Kathie Gossett, Effie Kapsalis, and Steve Ramsay. The tool revealed, Anthologize, is a WordPress–based platform for book publishing. Regular Mills Kelly finds Anthologize as beautiful as his Hawaiian vacation. (Download the .mp3)

Smithsonian 2.0

And you can now see and experiment with what we built, Anthologize.  It’s not a tool with a big scope — it does one thing well (although it is an alpha, so there are known issues). It enables researchers, curators, writers — and bloggers in general — to compile, edit, and publish anything available through RSS feeds. From Anthologize, you can send out your compile work as an eBook, paper publication, or TEI (an open XML format for storage and exchange).

ReadWriteWeb

Anthologize enables anyone working with WordPress to easily publish their content in a variety of book formats, including PDF, ePUB, and TEI, an open XML format. Anthologize can handle WordPress blog content as well as feeds from other sources, allowing these items to be updated, reordered, and edited, and then exported.

Blogging has become an increasingly important tool for scholars and educators to share their ideas, but once blogged, that’s often the end-of-the-line for that writing. Anthologize organizes this content and enables users to publish and distribute their work in additional ways — via print or e-readers.

BBC Tech Brief

Tim Carmody at Snarkmarket reports on the success of “one week I one tool”, in which a group at the US Center for Digital Humanity spent a week designing and building a digital tool from scratch.

They posted teasers about the project online but did not reveal the result of their work until the seven days were up:

“They put together a great open-source tool: Anthol­o­gize, a Word­Press plu­gin that helps you take online con­tent like blog posts and col­lect, edit, design, and for­mat them into a book — for either dig­i­tal or print. Solid soft­ware, with obvi­ous util­ity for lots of peo­ple, not just aca­d­e­mics.”

And it’s open source too — which makes it a free for all. Bookbinding is certainly a lot less fiddly these days…

The Atlantic

Anthologize is a WordPress plugin that allows scholars, conference organizers, and bloggers to create eBooks out of websites. Its creators imagine it could be used by researchers to “sketch ideas, collaborate with co-authors, edit and develop research notes into arguments, publish conference proceedings, and engage in public scholarly communication without the typical barriers.” Or perhaps teachers will turn their class blogs into custom publications.

So, what separates Anthologize from commercial blog-to-book services like Blurb or Lulu? (Both fantastic services, IMHO.) First, it’s a WordPress plugin, so if you’re familiar with that tool (as many are), it should be easy to manipulate.

“Because it’s open source, third-party developers can create translators and importers for other formats as well, and contribute them back,” added Doug Knox, director of publication and digital initiatives at the Newberry Library, and part of the One Week, One Tool team. “Lulu and Blurb — and others like FastPencil — are focused on commercial blog-to-book publishing. They don’t have as much flexibility in importing existing content, and they aren’t as open to extending the range of output formats.”

This was all the result of the One Week One Tool project and, to be honest, shows that Rapid Application Development can be the start of a true gift and a true legacy to the world of coding, open source, and online publishing and personal publishing empowerment. Via Chris Abraham.Chris Abraham is co-founder and principal of Abraham Harrison LLC, an international consulting group with specialties in online word-of-mouth/conversation marketing and online business & technology strategy advising. See his profile, contact Chris via email, Twitter, or leave a comment below.

Image from Bite Daily.

 
How do you measure the ROI of social media? This is a question that we are often asked by companies that want to enter the social media realm but are afraid or unsure of how to prove its success to their superiors. Want to show your bosses that social media works? Below is a great video from Erik Qualman (@equalman) at Socialnomics that showcases several social media ROI success stories.

Here are the top 10 facts you should remember from this video:

1) Gary Vaynerchuk grew his family business from $4 million to $50 million using social media.

2) Wetpaint/Altimeter found companies that widely engage in social media surpass their peers in both revenue and profit. (See Ranking the Top 100 Global Brands — PDF.)

3) Lenovo has experienced a 20% reduction in activity to their call center since they launched their community website for customers.

4) Burger King invested  less than $50,000 in their Whopper Sacrifice Facebook application and received an estimated return of over $400,000 in press/media value. They received 32 million impressions as a result of this campaign.

5) Blendtec quintupled sales with its “Will it Blend” series on YouTube.

6) Dell has already made $3 million in sales via twitter (I’ve heard this number has already increased to $6.5 million).

7) Only 18% of traditional TV campaigns generate a positive ROI.

8 ) 37% of generation Y heard about the Ford Fiesta via social media before its launch in the US. 25% of Ford’s marketing budget is spent on digital/social media. They are the only US auto company that didn’t take a government loan.

9) Naked Pizza set a one day sales record using social media: 68% of their sales came via Twitter and 85% of their new customers.

10) Software company Genius.com reports 24% of social media leads convert to sales opportunities.

Here’s the video:

As Alex Bogusky, Co-Chairman of CP&B says: “You can’t buy attention anymore. Having a huge budget doesn’t mean anything in social media…. The old media paradigm was “pay to play.” Now you get back what you authentically put in. You’ve got to be willing to “play to play.”

71% of companies plan to increase investments in social  media by an average of 40% because:

1) It’s low-cost marketing

2) Getting traction

3) We have to do it

If you don’t do it, you can be certain that your competitors will.

“Think of Twitter as the canary in the coal mine” — Morgan Johnston, JetBlue Airways

“Our head of social media is the customer” — McDonald’s

The time for social media is now.

Repubished from Blonde 2.0.Ayelet Noff is founder and CEO of Blonde 2.0, a New Media PR firm specializing in helping brands use social media tools such as social networks, the blogosphere and social software to create brand awareness, buzz, find leads, recruit employees or achieve any other goal. See her business profile, contact Ayelet, follow her on Twitter or leave a comment below.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported.

United Breaks Guitars: The interview from JD Lasica on Vimeo.

Asmart company these days understands that everybody has a voice. So the best way to avoid a public relations nightmare is to give great customer service right out of the gate. “It’s a bad day when a customer’s upset,” says Dave Carroll, creator of the viral three-part musical trilogy United Breaks Guitars.

Click to see full-size ad

The incident has gone down as perhaps the ultimate self-inflicted customer relations screw-up by a major corporation in the social media era of empowered customers. The original video has been seen 8.8 million times since it went live a year ago and is the 12th most-watched video in the history of YouTube.

“Companies providing poor customer service can’t ride out the situation as in the past,” Carroll says. United ran Carroll through the bureaucratic ringer for 9 months before giving him a definitive answer about his compensation claim: No.

“I was almost out of options but I wasn’t because social media allowed me to express myself in a creative way,” he says.

Watch, download or embed the interview on Vimeo
Watch or embed the video on YouTube

In the interview, Carroll discusses his take on the idea of “a market of one” — the notion that today there are no statistically insignificant parts of the marketplace. “The market of one is everybody,” he says. Incorporating good customer service should be part of a holistic approach to a company’s business processes — not because it’s right but because it makes sense from a competitive business standpoint.

A Taylor guitar

As for Carroll, his viral hits on YouTube have helped juice his career as an independent musician and, now, a public speaker. CD sales are “through the roof,” he says, and he’s fielding offers to play gigs and to write songs. (The trilogy has taken on a life of its own: see Taylor Guitars’ video response and UBG Song #3.)

All in all, great fun — and definitive proof of how social media has shifted the balance of power toward customers and away from arrogant multinational corporations. (For another example, see Greenpeace’s takedown of Nestle this past spring.)

JD Lasica works with major companies and nonprofits on social media strategies. See his business profile, contact JD or leave a comment.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported.

From easy-forex’s fantasy team campaign

We began working with easy-forex to combine their forex trading and social media activity back in February 2010. We knew right away that teaming easy-forex’s expertise, vibrancy, and fresh approach to FX with our knowledge of the nuts and bolts of social media would invariably produce a winning combination.

When we first took stock of easy-forex’s social media efforts, it was clear they had already recognized the value of social profiles and had already laid the groundwork for us on Twitter and YouTube. We knew too, though, that easy-forex’s full potential was only beginning to be actualized, and so we set out to create a home for their traders, a place where they could come and chat with one another regarding their trading habits, methods, tips and strategies — basically, anything and everything related to forex.

easy-forex has always made an effort to be on the cutting edge of trading innovation, and we made sure that bloggers were made aware of this fact by letting them know all about easy-forex’s great customer service and any releases of new products, all through our blogger outreach campaign. This consisted of an extensive search and mapping effort to find the most relevant and high-profile blogs read by the target market. We created a blogger kit detailing easy-forex’s most promising products/services and set our sights on the top 90 bloggers in the tech and forex industry. Our efforts paid off and we received coverage in such tier 1 blogs as VentureBeat, as well as GoMo News and Currency Trading. We were able to reach over 500,000 unique readers with easy-forex’s compelling story of how their unique approach was impacting online trading. Our story was also heavily retweeted and shared by others, furthering its overall social ROI.

Speaking of Twitter, we worked closely with easy-forex to procure real time actionable trading data, directly from their dealing room, to send out as tweets. This close relationship added industry relevant substance to our tweets which set us apart from the average FX tweeters and contributed to a spike in easy-forex’s Twitter following by 25% in just two months.

Taking off in all these various directions simultaneously, with each venue showing an exponential growth rate, we created an easy-forex Facebook page to act as a central hub for all our forex trading and social media efforts. We use the social network as a coalescing tool with which to announce and trackback any and all forex trading and social media collateral including blog posts, videos, tweets, news feeds, and discussions, keeping the page active and alive.

Our easy-forex FB page also served to replace the typical forex forum pages traditionally used as a place where traders can come to share their thoughts. By replacing the traditional forums with a Facebook style setting, the discussion is made more real and more personal. It also serves as a barrier preventing any anonymous person/competitor from writing whatever they like without taking responsibility for their words. On social networks, where one has their picture posted, their information written and is connected to friends and family, one feels a responsibility for their actions and words, and will think twice before posting something.

Since launching the easy-forex page at the tail end of February 2010, we managed to go from zilch to over 5,000 fans. An easy-forex YouTube channel features easy-forex’s Emma Andreou’s engaging and informative daily dose of FX happenings and has built a growing loyal audience. In three minutes these forex trading daily videos cover the top 10 market reports, saving hours of research for individual traders. A LinkedIn group was also opened with the same daily diligence for sparking group interaction and information sharing, within and among all easy-forex’s members.

We also built a blog for easy-forex where we publish forex related news and market views. Here too easy-forex became an active partner in helping us to build their brand by encouraging their own FX specialist to write and participate in the blog. Their keen insights and bold predictions have led to the blog becoming a weekly must read amongst the easy-forex community and beyond.

One of the main goals of our social media activities has been to create full transparency between easy-forex and traders via our discussions on all our social channels as well as the information we provide on our blog. This massive online presence within social networks as well as blogs, not to mention the sharing of our content by others, has had the added effect of helping easy-forex’s SEO efforts.

It’s important to note that across all our platforms, members are by no means passive assets. easy-forex’s campaigns are highly interactive with broad open channels being kept for our various online communities on a daily basis. After all, happy members are the best ambassadors your company could ever ask for, a fact whose full reach and value is beyond measurability.

Take our first easy-forex Facebook campaign, for example. The campaign was called easy-forex’s Fantasy Team. It began June 8, designed to coincide with and build off the internationally popular World Cup soccer games. The campaign content consisted of asking our Facebook members to create their own fantasy soccer team, using as random and as outrageous a selection of personalities that they could think of. Participants were encouraged to get even more creative by presenting their selection in the form of doctored photographs with superimposed heads, or upload video versions, or any wacky way that their imaginations could conjure up.

The results beat all expectations. During the three-week campaign, easy-forex’s FB member count increased by a staggering 2,600 people, approximately 50 submissions were entered, and easy-forex received over 800 lead applications requesting more information about their company. All in all, a super successful and highly interactive campaign combing forex trading and social media efforts.

We’ve only begun to scratch the surface of the great potential waiting to be uncovered in the realm of forex trading and social media. We are hard at work thinking up new creative ideas and campaigns that can help take us to the next level of our social media activity with easy-forex. Stay tuned for what comes next — we promise to keep things interesting.
Ayelet Noff is founder and CEO of Blonde 2.0, a New Media PR firm specializing in helping brands use social media tools such as social networks, the blogosphere and social software to create brand awareness, buzz, find leads, recruit employees or achieve any other goal. See her business profile, contact Ayelet, follow her on Twitter or leave a comment below.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported.

The summer’s half gone already! Here’s our roundup of social media, tech and marketing conferences and events scheduled for the month of August.

For the full year, see our Calendar of 2010 social media, tech and marketing conferences. We’ve also published a roundup of nonprofit and social change conferences and events on our sister site, Socialbrite.

We’ll publish a list of noteworthy conferences and events at the beginning of every month during the year. Hope to see you at some of these! If you know of other must-attend events, please share by posting the info in the comments at the bottom.

Conference	Date	Place
August
Techonomy Conference	Aug. 4–6	Lake Tahoe
We’ve seen the failure of markets in September 2008, the failure of international action in Copenhagen last December and the great difficulty Washington has getting things done. If we want solutions to major problems, the institutions, tools and resources we have now will not suffice. We have got to look to innovation, both technological and social.
BlogHer	Aug. 5–7	New York
BlogHer’s sixth annual conference (Aug. 6–7) will be held in conjunction with BlogHer Business (Aug. 5). The conference for women bloggers attracts about 90% women, 10% men.
Big South Social Media Summit	Aug. 14	Nashville, Tenn.
This gathering will feature forward-thinking business executives from companies like Southwest, SAP, Comcast and Domino’s as well as social media loving celebrities who will speak directly on how they drive ROI through social media. Speakers will share real-world success stories, pitfalls and case studies to demonstrate the true value of social media.
Affiliate Summit East	Aug. 15–17	New York City
This gathering includes an exhibit hall with affiliate merchants, vendors and networks as well as multiple tracks of educational sessions covering the latest trends and information from affiliate marketing experts.
Gnomedex	Aug. 19–21	Seattle
Gnomedex is a top gathering of geeks, open source pioneers and cool kids.

JD Lasica works with major companies and nonprofits on social media strategies. See his business profile, contact JD or leave a comment.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported.

"But the Technician can take heart in the advent of small campus publications that have sprung up online on smaller budgets, often surving and thriving without print editions."

Just a note to let you know that my latest in-depth post just went up on PBS MediaShift, this time a new episode of 5Across, a video roundtable discussion about the environmental impact of media such as books, newspapers, computers and e-waste. Surprisingly (at least to me), many roundtable participants believe that reading a newspaper or print pub is less harmful to the ecosystem than using electronic devices that could end up polluting developing countries in 18 months. In fact, Joe Kelleher, the production director of the San Jose Mercury News, says that his newspaper uses mostly recycled fiber, and the "virgin" fiber actually comes from the leftover chips from timber mills. In a comparison of carbon footprints of reading a print newspaper, website or electronic edition of the Merc, Kelleher says there isn't much difference except when you add in the energy consumed by delivery vehicles. Participants included Kelleher, Sarah Westervelt of the Basel Action Network (monitoring e-waste), Jean Walsh of the San Francisco Dept. of the Environment, Shona Burns of Chronicle Books, and Charles Uchu Strader of Gaia Host Collective. Key quote: "A lot of times you hear people say 'I won't read a newspaper or a book because I'm killing trees by doing so.' It's simply not true. We only purchase newsprint from places that harvest trees sustainably. Newsprint is made from a combination of recycled fiber... and the virgin pulp we use is a byproduct of lumber production." -- Joe Kelleher, San Jose Mercury News

What’s missing from sites focused on a city? Community organizers. It’s the same leadership dilemma facing any organization, whether physical or virtual. Hyperlocal sites need to be driven and organized by hubs and influencers of the local community, and these hubs need to feel invested and committed to their “city site”.

Hyperlocal “news” sites like Outside.In and Topix automatically pull feeds from local publishers to re-create a local newspaper. Although there are sporadic comments to articles, there is little community engagement. CitySearch and Yahoo! Local serve as online Yellow Pages.

Engaging hyperlocal sites need “word of mouth”

In many cities, the best hyperlocal sites are developed by somebody, some company or group in the community. In Santa Barbara, Edhat.com, developed by a local software company, has distinguished itself in providing compelling local content.

Hyperlocal social networks a la Ning generally don’t gain traction (show me one that does) because it takes too long for anybody to invest the time to set up a complete profile. Twitter makes hyperlocal communication easy because it can serve as a proxy social network for a local community that “follows” each other. There’s no login/profile setup requirement, just tweet.

Breaking News City sites that aggregate local Twitter feeds across various categories are being developed in cities across the country by individuals, and groups like chambers of commerces, who are hubs of their communities. They invest their time to create a useful hyperlocal community site by providing local Twitterers a venue to gain exposure in the community. There’s energy in facilitating the community conversation that “national” sites like Topix and CitySearch don’t have.

Example Breaking News City sites:

Asheville NC
Boston
Del Mar
London
Long Beach
Los Angeles
New York
Orange County
Sacramento
San Francisco
Toronto

…Syndicaster is adding one-click distribution options to the major video sites so that local TV affiliates or station groups can post their videos to AOL Money & Finance or their YouTube channel, and manage it all from one place. One feature that TV customers will appreciate is the ability to set embargo windows for each service, allowing a TV station to publish hot news immediately to its own site, then 24 or 36 hours later to video partner sites where it makes the most money, and then maybe finally to YouTube.

While the article focuses on Syndicaster’s business model and its potential to rejuvenate local broadcast news organizations, it does make short mention of the startup’s inability to generate a profit from consumers. Until they can turn a profit on user generated content, they wouldn’t be including features for it. And beside it being costly and unpredictable to manage, I’m not convinced that any national (media) company needs to enable user generated news.

That job belongs to the local news organizations. And the only way they can be successful is if they provide the one thing that national entities cannot produce: A strong, valuable relationship with a local community.

Every month we ask a question on news perspectives, and the most compelling video response is aired on TV for hundreds of thousands. It’s a big deal for us, but a bigger deal for citizen journalism— and a tall order. We need to find the best video from across the globe. This is why I would like to ask for your help.

Our first question is ‘What’s your advice for President Barack Obama?’

Please share this email with your networks of citizen journalists, activists, video producers and brilliant, engaged citizens. Or even better— post a video response yourself. This is an amazing way to bring attention to your cause, issue or mission. If you are part of a citizen journalism entity, we can feature your logo as well.

To respond, log in to http://GroundReport.com and upload your video of advice for Obama— all videos on GroundReport are automatically entered.

Or, if you’d prefer, visit the video page on YouTube, log in, and upload your video directly: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SlVSQ8zzHsE

The deadline is next week, so time is of the essence.

I’m coming up on four entire years out here on the front lines of the media revolution being waged across the nation, across the world. In that time, a lot of other similar sites (some with millions of dollars of cash injected into them) have fallen. A lot of other sites continue to thrive, though, all over.

Personally, my first site was Muncie Free Press. The launch was ok and I got the traffic up to around 20,000 visitors a month. A couple years after starting it, I also launched some other sites for nearby counties. One, Anderson Free Press, has, in less time, overtaken MFP - both in traffic and, more importantly, participation.

I’ve talked about AFP here before, I believe. Since then, though, I’ve made a lot more progress. It started last summer. I was able to put together (on my own, using photoshop and email) an 8-page tabloid prototype for the AFP website. I mailed to three zip codes - around 17,000 copies. I’ve never really been good at sales, so I hired someone (with a low, low salary and high commission) to sell ads for the next issue. Sales were … ok. I only had enough to pay him for 10 to 20 hours a week, which really isn’t enough.

The second issue came out, though. Then the third - mostly supported by the local political campaigns. The fourth issue I still lost money, but it was very, very close. With a little more effort - and a sales team or full time salesperson - I’m sure it can be done. The easy money dried up after the elections, so I stopped printing. The process taught me a lot, though. I took it all back to the drawing board. (The publisher of the Herald Bulletin called it a “rag,” but I’m not sure if he knew I know it was a term of endearment. Maybe. Heh.)

For one, I learned I’m not going to be able to do it all on my own. I need other people. So, I’m working with the local Small Business Administration to come up with a business plan to shop around for a local investor. That may never happen, but with even 1% of what some of the other community journalism start-ups have gotten, I’m sure I could get the ball rolling, in motion.

Even if I don’t get funding, there are other ways I’m looking at to get at least a quarterly or bi-monthly printed edition out. Even if they don’t pan out, though, the website is what it’s really about. In fact, a few have privately told me to forget about print and concentrate more on the website.

Doing the printed edition, though, I saw my traffic quadruple. Not only that, people started to sign-up and participate. By this time, the user started “Scanner News” thread had become one of the most popular features on the site. The local journalists at the CNHI owned The Herald Bulletin may look down their noses at it, declaring it “non-journalism,” but you know what? It’s information. It’s pure and raw and unedited mostly (at this time!), but it’s information.

Anderson Free Press has become known as the website to go to first to see what’s breaking, what’s happening. The Herald Bulletin lumbers along hours later usually to do the full story, but people know AFP is where to get it first - most of the time. There was a fire New Year’s Eve that came over the scanner. Within minutes, dispatchers, EMTs, and everyday citizens were contributing whatever information they had. Hours later, the next day, The Herald Bulletin rolled into action and covered the story “properly.” A couple weeks later (during the day), we hit our front pages with the news about the same time. AFP even had an amateur photographer go out and get shots of the fire, though.

An interesting thing that was pointed out by members of AFP is that since the Scanner News thread is so popular and so talked about, The Herald Bulletin has started running little mini-stories - “Just heard on the scanner…” types of things. They’re getting better at closing the gap and are more frequently beating AFP to the punch with at least an acknowledgment that something is happening. They are watching AFP and trying to adapt, but being a Stegasaurus, they’re too slow and they just don’t “get” online, imho.

For example, in December, they decided to close down their public forums. Yup, you heard that right. Their editor said it was an ethical responsibility, but the word on their forums and AFP was that it was either because they were afraid of being sued, or were too lazy to moderate their forums. Whatever the reason, I couldn’t believe my ears. After it happened, I emailed the HB publisher and thanked him, telling him that closing their forums was the best Christmas present I’d gotten that year. I told him my offer for a lunch meeting was still open. He replied with a simple Thanks. (You see now why I hit the ceiling early in my corporate career? Smile.) This was the third great wave of new users on the site.

Oh, I’ve matured a lot out here in the front lines of the struggle, but it’s still fun, still about more than just the money. If you have time, check out this video. In it, Anderson Mayor Kris Ockomon takes The Herald Bulletin to task for an editorial they wrote about his administration. Before AFP, he might not have had a voice to respond. Earlier in the video, I ask him about a local landfill battle going on. I received an email thanking me for asking the question other local media wasn’t asking because it was a county issue rather than a city issue. To me, these are wonderful things that make me want to keep going.

Hopefully hammering out (finally) a real business plan and getting a little more organized, I can really take this to the next level. I invite you, though, to stop by Anderson Free Press. Either to just look around at all the activity or better yet, sign-up and engage the community, asking them what they think about AFP.

Anderson Free Press still has a long way to go, but all the numbers continue to rise - little by little. I just wanted to send a little “note in a bottle” to the intrawebs (thanks, David) to let others know that it’s working, that the media landscape is changing in America. We still have a long way to go, but it’s happening. (The spot.us idea is really cool, btw ;)

If you’ve ever been so tired of your local media that you wanted to start your own, now’s the time. It’s a hard, long road, but as more and more of us early pioneers (some have been at it longer than me), as we learn how to make it work, the knowledge will filter down and a thousand or more grassroots journalism efforts will bloom across this nation. That’s when things will really start to get interesting.

As I mentioned, I’d love you to stop by Anderson Free Press and let me (and the local community if you want) know what you think about what we’re building here in the Midwest.

Ever the dreamer,

K. Paul Mallasch - Publisher

http://www.kpaulmedia.com

Please note: this is not a simple news reader for people to check the latest headlines wherever they are. This is an application that is best served as a tool for reporters — citizens and professionals alike.

Only two other applications offer functionality similar to the KnoxNews’ app: the CBS eyeMobile and FOX’s uReport. Of course the case can be made that the Facebook application also allows for instant updates of news, but its not directly affiliated with a news organization.

What’s interesting about the KnoxNews app is how the developers have managed to surpass the large broadcast stations in terms of functionality. Both applications from CBS and FOX are limiting to users wishing to conduct a report due to the components required for submission.

“The FOX application won’t even let you begin the report until you take a picture,” says Senior Software Engineer Ben Henderson of Firefly Logic, whose company was commissioned to do the KnoxNews app.

Henderson and Firefly Logic partner Chris McPherson explained to me in an interview that they wanted to allow the users to decide how to best use the features rather than forcing them into snapping a photo as is the case with the applications from the broadcast media companies.

“What we did was basically take KnoxNews’ content management [system] and extended the functionality to the iPhone,” McPherson says.

Cell Journalist, the company behind KnoxNews’ Content Management system, have commissioned a similar iPhone application for their other clients as well.

“Kathleen Rice is progressive, she’s tough and she will be an excellent attorney general,” said Liu.  “From her work taking on corrupt public officials and sexual predators, to her tireless commitment to protecting consumers, immigrants and taxpayers from fraud, Kathleen has proven that she is the candidate most capable of reforming Albany and most capable of managing an office that is so vital to New York families.  In addition to her unrivaled law enforcement and legal experience, there is no doubt that Kathleen gives our party the best chance to keep this office in progressive hands after November.  She’s got my support and I look forward to campaigning hard with her over the next week.”

This is a major endorsement for Rice who is trying to make inroads into New York City. Sen. Eric Schneiderman’s campaign has racked up a list of impressive city based endorsements in the last month.  And the tide has not stopped.

Schneiderman’s most recent endorsement comes from Rep. Anthony Weiner.

“I am endorsing Eric Schneiderman for Attorney General because he has been a lifelong champion for middle-class families and those struggling to make it into the middle-class,” said  Weiner. “No one has fought harder for fair wages, for equality and flexibility in the workplace, for foreclosure protections than Eric. We need a strong, lifelong progressive Democrat to fight for the working people of this state as Attorney General. We need a real leader with guts, who fights for what’s right, not just what’s politically popular. The choice is clear. The only choice for progressives is Eric Schneiderman.”

There primary is on Sept. 14.

Bing was the sponsor of an unsuccessful bid to change the current system of laying off teachers, which depends on seniority. This spring, when the city feared massive teacher layoffs, Bloomberg’s school chancellor, Joel Klein, repeatedly endorsed altering the “last in, first out” system.

In the primary, Bing faces Gregg Lundhahl, a longtime teacher backed by the teachers union. The winner will compete against Republican Paul Niehaus in November.

Here is a statement from Rivera regarding Padernacht’s decision:

“Dan Padernacht is a tireless community advocate who ran a great campaign, and his selfless decision today puts our community first.  With a united front, the thousands of voters in the district who are seeking change can turn to one place.  That’s the message that Dan and I are going to be getting out together over the next 9 days. I am deeply grateful for his support.”

Rivera also received the endorsement of the New York Times.

Here is a snippet from the endorsement:

“New Yorkers might be understandably wary of drawing their next attorney general from the state Senate, a body that has symbolized dysfunction. But Mr. Schneiderman has long distinguished himself as a cut far above the rest in that chamber. Whether he was in the minority or the majority, he has been an eloquent, progressive voice, speaking out for reform, sensible gun control, marriage equality and equal protection for all New Yorkers.”

The endorsement notes that Assemblymember Richard Brodsky has a strong reformer buy says he “grates on even his allies.” It describes Kathleen Rice as having done “some good work,” on local government corruption but questions her independence from Cuomo and her experience. It cites Eric Dinallo’s time in the attorney general’s office under Spitzer but questions his record as Insurance Superintendent. The endorsement says that Sean Coffey could be called the “most independent” but worries about his political contributions that seem to have lead to business for his firm.

The endorsement could come as a surprise to some as Schneiderman recently no-showed a debate in Albany hosted by public radio station WAMC. He was slammed by the other four candidates and Alan Chartock, the host of the debate, for not appearing.  But Schneiderman did host a forum on gun violence in Albany in the last few weeks.

Schneiderman has raised the most money during this period but Nassau County District Attorney has the most cash on hand heading into the Sept. 14 Democratic Primary.

It has been said that Schneiderman is relying heavily on votes from minorities in the city but the Times Union endorsement should solidify him as a force upstate.

A general admission ticket will cost you $100, VIP tickets $250 and “host” tickets $1,000. The senator has been known as a prodigious fundraiser since her days as the congresswoman from the 20th district.

Gillibrand is facing primary challenger Gail Goode in the Democratic Primary and will face one of three Republican challengers in the general election, if she wins. Her Republican challengers are Joe DioGuardi, Bruce Blakeman and David Malpass. If anyone goes please tell me how the BBQ was– press are NOT invited. Hurumph. I tried! And to think I was born in Hudson. Have a happy Labor Day!

Here is the text of the invite:

Please join Kaye & Chuck Abraham, Jon Arnason, Phebe & George Banta, Margaret & David Bova, Mary Burns & Vince Clephas, Paige Crable & Ray DeMarco, Kathleen H. Dittus, Esq., Joan & Wolcott Dunham, Fran & Steve Edelstein, Karen Feldman, Julie Fenster, Kristin & Charles Flood,
Paula & Philip Forman, Joan & Harvey Friedman, Judith B. Grunberg, Cyndy Hall, Linda Hirshman & David Forkosh, Sylvia K. Johann, Barney Karpfinger & Eric Marcus, Jamie Kibel, Katherine Kolbert & Richard P. Rubinstein, Debbie Lans & Sharon Grubin, Jeffrey Lick & Steve McCarthy,
Kerry Madigan & Neal Rosenthal, Stephen Mazoh & Martin Kline, Robert Montgomery, Sue & Henry Neale, Susan & Harry Newton, Polly N. Rutnik, Susan & Roger Tilles, Ulster Cty Democratic Women, and David B. Wood, III for a Labor Day Weekend Barbeque at the home of

UNITED STATES SENATOR
KIRSTEN GILLIBRAND

Saturday, September 4
The home of Kirsten & Jonathan Gillibrand
Hudson, New York
VIP Reception and Photo Line: 4:00 p.m. – 4:30 p.m. | General Reception: 4:30 p.m. – 6:00 p.m.
Host: $1,000 (write or raise) | VIP: $250 (per individual) | General Ticket: $100 (per individual)

*Update* I goofed a bit–District Council 37 endorsed Brodsky in July–so it doesn’t change any of Schneiderman’s plans for victory via the city vote.

In other news for the race for attorney general, fund raising numbers are coming in and Sen. Eric Schneiderman has raised the most this period with $380,000 raised in an 18 day period (the New York Times endorsement likely helped out a bit.) Schneiderman has approximately $1.3 million on hand.

Nassau County District Attorney Kathleen Rice raised $278,405 and has $2.8 million on hand. She was the top fundraiser in the last period. Eric Dinallo raised $66,908 and has $1.6 million on hand. Brodsky raised $98,999 and has $335,494 on hand. Sean Coffey raised $39,120 and has $1.57 million on hand. He loaned his campaign $1 million.

For more on what differentiates the candidates (besides money) check out our recent story on the race.

The paper analyzed his campaign donations and found Dinallo had far outpaced other candidates in money from Wall Street, bringing in $109,000, compared to the $65,000 financial companies gave Nassau County District Attorney Kathleen Rice.

The paper also found that eight of Dinallo’s 10 top donors work in finance, including Jim Chanos, who gave $50,000 himself and $16,500 through his hedge fund.

The irony is that Dinallo worked former Wall Street nemesis Eliot Spitzer when he was attorney general. But, Blair Horner of New York Public Interest Research Group, told the Times that Dinallo may have tuned that to his advantage, going back to contacts he made in his earlier job to “shake the money tree.”

For his part, Dinallo told the paper that his Wall Street supporters know that, while he can be “tough on people who’ve cheated, who’ve had conflicts of interest … ultimately I am fair.”

Dinallo also has worked in finance — at Morgan Stanley and Willis Group. And he won the endorsement of Crain’s. In the editorial the paper praised Dinallo for having “a profound understanding of financial services, which he is eminently prepared to police — without the ego and the mean streak that made Mr. Spitzer the industry’s enemy” and chided two of his opponents, Assemblymember Richard Brodsky and State Sen. Eric Schneiderman for having priorities “not aligned with the business community.”

The News does not hold back in their contempt for Rivera’s opponent Sen. Pedro Espada. Here is an excerpt from the endorsement:

“The grounds for dumping Espada, poster boy for Albany insanity, are almost beyond imagining.  He was the party-flipping, power-grabbing instigator of the Senate coup last summer that paralyzed Albany for a month.  He also stands credibly accused by state Attorney General Andrew Cuomo of looting $14 million from a taxpayer-financed chain of health clinics.
On top of that, Espada notoriously lives outside his district, in Mamaroneck; persistently ignores campaign finance laws, and is even being sued for allegedly stiffing his tailor on $7,200 worth of fancy suits. Rivera bears no such ethical taint. His professional background consists mainly of campaigning for Democrats, including President Obama. He most recently worked as an aide to U.S. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand. He also teaches political science part time at Pace University.  While this page is not in sync with Rivera on some issues, he is likely in line with the sensibilities of the district and is surely in tune with the economic interests of working New Yorkers.”

Sharpton recently endorsed Sen. Eric Schneiderman  for attorney general. Sen. John Sampson stood alongside Sharpton and Schneiderman on that day but don’t expect to him to show up for the Rivera endorsement.

I got a few minutes with the conference leader during the Schneiderman endorsement and asked for his thoughts on Gustavo Rivera. “Who?” he asked. “The man who is challenging Pedro Espada,” I replied. “Well senator Espada is a colleague,” Sampson said flashing a smile.

Sampson will host an immigration forum with Espada on Sept.9 from 5 p.m. to 9 p.m. at Bronx Community College.

The 219-page document includes the two proposals that will appear on the November ballot — one on term limits and the other a potpourri of measures related to “elections and government administration.” These include requiring disclosure of independent campaign expenditures, reducing the number of signatures prospective candidates must receive to qualify for the ballot and increasing the penalties for conflicts of interest. The commission did “not recommend change at this time” to loosen the mayor’s iron grip on the Conflicts of Interest Board, which seems to make members of his administration exempt from penalties, whatever their size.

The report offers background on the issue, texts of the proposed amendments and lots of supporting materials along with information on commission members, staff and procedures.

It also includes a section on items for future consideration, including nonpartisan (or to use the current parlance, top-two) elections. Although the commission heard testimony on this issue from experts and the general public, the report said, “Many commission members, regardless of their personal feelings about top-two elections, expressed doubts about placing a proposal on the ballot without further consideration.”

Amid its official tone, there are some nuggets here and there. For example, on term limits (the issue that for all intents and purposes led to creation of the commission) the report attributes the move to extend them in 2008 to the City Council. As for the mayor’s role: He established the Charter Commission and ” asked that the voters be given another opportunity to weigh in on the issue.”

Somehow that isn’t quite how we remember it.

From Mick Souder, E-Democracy.org co-founder, Board member and Rules Committee Chair:

Greetings,

Every few years E-Democracy.org reviews the rules we ask our forum participants to abide by.  We are currently collecting input for a rules review we have scheduled to complete by the end of this year.  We invite our forum participants and moderators to submit suggestions on rules adjustments that may enhance our forums’ effectiveness.

The rules can be found at [e-democracy.org]

At this time the request for input is open ended.  Later in our process the Board of Directors will decide what changes (if any) our rules committee should focus on based on the input we receive and in light of E-Democracy.org‘s mission and strategic plan.

If you have any suggestions on rule changes or re-wording, please send your suggestions to committee members at rules@e-democracy.org') //-->rules@e-democracy.org [Email address: rules #AT# e-democracy.org - replace #AT# with @ ] .

The suggestion should include:

1)      The specific rule that you are interested in E-Democracy.org reviewing.
2)      What change or rewording you suggest E-Democracy.org make.
3)      Why you suggest E-Democracy.org make the adjustment to the rule.

Please submit these suggestions by Tuesday 14 September 2010. You may also post copies of your submissions on the blog, but official input should go in via e-mail') //-->via e-mail [Email address: rules #AT# e-democracy.org - replace #AT# with @ ].

Thank you.

Mick Souder
E-Democracy.Org Rules Committee, Board of Directors

Editors Note:  Our home grown rules have evolved since 1994. We uniquely use a warning and time-based suspension process for violating our rules rather than a moderate everything or delete violating posts process. These rules are not just “terms of service” that don’t matter. They give participants rights and limit our power as hosts based on our democratic ideals and mission. – Steven Clift

Please read the full rules, but here is the current summary:

1. Real Names – Sign posts including your real name and city.

2. Limits on Posting – Two per member per day in most forum charters.

3. Keep Topics within Forum Purpose – Local issues on a local forum for example.

4. Be Civil – No name-calling. Respect among citizens with differing views is our cornerstone.

5. No Attacks or Threats – This keeps the forums safe. If content is illegal it will be forwarded to the proper legal authorities.

6. Private Stays Private – Don’t forward private replies without permission.

7. Avoid False Rumors – Asking for clarification of what you’ve heard in the community can be appropriate if issues-based. You alone are responsible for what you post.

8. Right to Post and Reply – Sharing your knowledge and opinions with your fellow citizens is a democratic right.

9. Items Not Allowed in Forums – No chain letters, etc.

10. Public Content and Use – You are sharing your content forever, but retain your copyright.

11. Warnings – You may receive informal or official warnings from the Forum Manager.

12. Suspension – With your second official warning in one year, you are suspended for two weeks. It goes up from there.

13. Appeals Process – You can appeal a warning(s) once you receive a third warning and six month removal. Rare appeals are not received most years.

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Here are is an excerpt from their two pager and some questions I’ve posed:

Here is some text from the Big Society site (an excerpt from the two
pager David Wilcox linked to) – then some questions below:

There are 93,000 square miles in the UK. We tend to only hear about
two of them, the square miles of the City and Westminster, and have
felt badly let down by both of them in recent years. “Your Square
Mile” is about enabling citizens to make changes in as many of the
other 92,998 square miles as possible.

There are an estimated 900,000+ community groups in the UK and 238,000
Social Entrepreneurs. We want to enable citizens to find and join
these organisations easily, using their own needs and passions as a
start-point, and to feel able to start their own neighbourhood groups.
We want to link these groups, social enterprises and communities to
each other to share ideas and resources, complementing the role of
existing umbrella organisations.

We want to create a platform to enable and empower all kinds of
citizens and social entrepreneurs to achieve things their way: be an “
i-phone for their apps.”

We are therefore going to create the U.K’s biggest mutual: to which
all citizens will be able to belong.

Over the summer and autumn, we will engage in a public co-designing
process to gather ideas and best practice, to raise awareness and
solicit feedback on our proposals. Concurrently, we will work with
commercial and non-commercial partners to develop a benefits package
for membership and a delivery platform that will be as inclusive and
easy to use as possible (including PC’s, mobiles, public kiosks and
other technologies as well as printed materials, community centres and
face-to-face meetings.)

By December 2010 we will have launched Phase 1 of the mutual providing
national tools, advice and practical benefits such as highly
affordable liability insurance for all kinds of local volunteering and
events.

My questions:

1. “Neighbourhood groups” – do they mean general interest resident
associations (which is a very different frame than “social action”
around specific issues? How does this jive with the neighbourhood
efforts of local councils where existing resources seem to support far
larger areas often designated by the government?

2. Does the “co-designing process” have a home on the web where
detailed proposals outlines will be shared?

3. What the heck does “be an ‘i-phone for their apps.’” mean to
everyday people?

4. So, who is leading the effort to outline the technology platform -
finding existing voluntary sector groups seems straight forward – but
does this envision everyone having their own dynamic square mile of
online interactivity with their neighbors or are you going to break up
the country into 93,000 pieces people can identify with? (We’ve been
pondering dynamic and personalized neighbour circles for private
exchange among groups 25-100 nearby people – http://neighbour.be -
with a design the connects people into public life online at a larger
scale where we have our historical base of experience. To me the
“platform” sounds quite complex … almost like something twice as
complex as Facebook behind the scenes.)

5. Is there any evidence that neighbourhood Facebook Pages/Groups are
so successful that you’d mention them by brand (in the evaluation
section)? They seem pretty darn lightweight engagement-wise even if
they theoretically attract numbers compared to other community blogs
and online groups I’ve seen.

6. As a “mutual,” will members be required to pay? Where will/is seed
funding come from to make this all work?

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By Boa Lee,
Community Outreach and Information Leader, Greater Frogtown Neighbors Forum

A post appeared on the Minneapolis citywide issues forum in mid-March 2009. The poster, Jay Clark, the director of the Minnesota Center for Neighborhood Organizing and a well-known community organizer in the North Minneapolis and Hmong communities, told forum members about a recent Minneapolis Park Board meeting. At that meeting, Clark wrote, Latino kids and their parents were separated from the wider audience – and eventually removed from the premises – without having been given a fair opportunity to air their concerns. The Latino community members had attended the meeting to advocate for soccer fields at Powderhorn Park in Minneapolis; the meeting was taking place in another part of the city. Even before attending the park board meeting, the Latinos who were extracted from the meeting – with Clark’s help – had began a large awareness campaign to put pressure on the park board and city leaders to create soccer fields for the Latino kids already playing soccer in Powderhorn. The group had also been distributing hundreds of postcards to residents, asking the residents to send the notice of support to decision-makers like the mayor of Minneapolis.

Soccer at Powderhorn - Photo by Gayla Ellis for Powderhorn 365

Meeting organizers saw Clark’s post and one park commissioner responded the next day, explaining that park commissioners were aware of the group’s campaign to get the soccer fields. Neighbors responded to the topic.

My mid-April 2009, the topic had moved to the Powderhorn Neighbors Forum, where dozens more posts from residents both in support of and against the soccer fields shared their thoughts. One Latino teen who played soccer at Powderhorn logged on to the forum using Clark’s name (but signing his own at the end of post). The teen invited neighbors to come watch a game. By this time, the issue was also receiving wide media attention and several neighborhood newspapers picked up the story and/or published Letters to the Editor written by the Latino teens asking for the soccer fields.

The best success indicator of the community’s campaign to get the soccer fields was not necessarily that the soccer fields actually came to be or even that a public official responded to Clark’s original post; rather, it was the ability to reach many more people – neighbors – through the forum and garnering a wider and more diverse base of supporters that Clark would later note in an interview with me as the most positive part of the project. Clark said he has used the forum to help highlight other campaigns – for example a campaign spearheaded by Hmong teens to get more Hmong-speaking officers to work the day shift in North Minneapolis – and intends to continue using the E-Democracy forums as another tool in his community organizer’s toolbox.

While community organizing is not E-Democracy’s direct mission, the organization’s desire to increase civic engagement by providing an online space for neighbors to meet and discuss issues lends well to also aiding in, or perhaps inciting, organizing work. Giving neighbors and organizers a venue in which to share information can complement traditional community organizing. At the same time, this raises the question of how E-Democracy might enhance community organizing and social change in the 21st century.

Lessons Applied in Frogtown

In June 2010, I seeded a topic asking the Greater Frogtown Neighbors Forum members where they got their hyper-local (neighborhood) news. No one responded to that thread. But one person did start a new related thread that same day in response, stating that Frogtown was at a disadvantage by not having a dedicated newspaper and asking for creative ideas to get community news distributed to neighbors. The following day and just eight posts later (the thread ballooned to 19 posts), Tony Schmitz – a Frogtown resident and the former owner of the now defunct Frogtown Times newspaper – offered to take the online discussion offline. Schmitz offered to host a brainstorming session at his house.

Seven days after the thread started, Tony and two other residents (one of whom was Tony’s wife), Mary Turck from the Twin Cities Daily Planet (an online news site) and I discussed the idea of starting a Frogtown neighborhood newspaper. By the time the meeting ended, those in attendance had each volunteered to do more research or outreach about the idea. The neighbors become their own community organizers.

The two stories shared above represent the convergence of new technologies with old organizing models. What we know of traditional community organizing is that results are met when a group of people can come together to push for a common benefit. To build a foundation of support requires outreach, strategic planning and, oftentimes, good timing. Organizers will need to determine whether and when E-Democracy is the proper venue in which to share information and receive input. As community organizing takes greater advantage of social media and the Internet, adding a new tool like posting on the E-Democracy online forums can become part of the strategic outreach method that capitalizes on changing technology and a growing and attentive audience.

Editor’s Note: The soccer field story is ongoing with some Powderhorn Park changes and a permanent artificial turf field being built in next door in the Phillips neighborhood (after making this post, I received a telephone call from an elected official crediting in large part the campaign described above even if the permanent field will be in a nearby park).

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Also, speaking of the UK, Networked Neighbourhoods is having an unconference on September 25th and CityCamp London is October 8-10. E-Democracy.org is a big supporter of CityCamp and host the ongoing online exchange. We invite those attending the London neighbourhoods online event to join their international peers on the similar Locals Online exchange.

Neighbors Online Presentation from E-Democracy.org on Vimeo.

Below are the slides from the Activate Conference which I adapted for the presentation above. Sorry about the abrupt end to the video. Want more? How about a 90 minute webinar reviewing the field? After I concluded with comments on our Inclusive Social Media efforts and Neighbors Online stats, the event went into discussion mode. It was a great event. Thank you Kevin and Hugh for making it happen.

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By Julia Opoti

When I first started as an outreach coordinator for e-democracy, I thought that my work was cut out for me. After all, I had been writing about the Cedar-Riverside community, particularly its large Somali population, for several years. It was not long before I realized that I would have to re-think my strategy. However, not all my efforts have been in vain. I will share here what I have found and over the next several months I will share how I navigate these challenges.

Over the last several months, I have met with community activists, health care advocates, university employees, students, and residents. I walked from store to store discovering a mall I did not know existed. I even attended neighborhood meetings, neighborhood safety meetings and community events. I spent time at the Brian Coyle Center where I got further acquainted with community organizers. Every Tuesday, I would buy my vegetables from the small farmers’ market These opportunities allowed me an almost-insider’s look into the community.

For the small business I quickly learned that many of the owners did not have an online presence neither did they have emails. In some instances, the store owners and their employees did not speak English making communication a challenge.

Still, I gathered emails where I could, but haven’t seen an increase in member’s posting new content or responding to forum topics. However, a quick glance at forum stats show that readership is steadily increasing. I also found that many of the community organizers are already registered on the forum, but only lurk. I sought to know why.

At an informal meeting with several Somali women I learned that the negative press and abrasive online comments on websites such as the Star Tribune newspaper have resulted in a complete distrust of non-Somali websites. One woman said that as a community organizer, her daily battles are constant, and she did not have the energy to constantly “defend her community.” While e-democracy forums are facilitated, and users are required to use their real names protecting members from such diatribe, these women are still hesitant to participate.

What about softer, cultural issues like explaining Ramadan, the Muslim holy month of fasting? Again, they spoke about online attack fatigue. As I look ahead to future postings and building trust it will be important to include topics that do not rile up controversy such as profiles of businesses and people in the community; and resources.

E-Democracy is a unique position. Unlike many organizations the forum doesn’t want anything from the community. Not in the literal sense anyway. Of course, for the vibrancy and the posterity of the forum, participation is key. A key factor is making sure that people understand the the forums diversity is only as rich as its member participation.

When Brian Noy posted on the forum about the low sales in the Brian Coyle Center’s farmers’ market, I met with him to see how he could best promote it. He was creative in his postings by featuring a weekly vegetarian recipe. However, the reality was that the people who needed to see it most were not accessing it. His best approach, it turned out, was speaking to community organizers housed at the Brian Coyle Center that I introduced him to that day who could in turn communicate to their different constituencies.

As I continue with my outreach efforts I am keen on developing strategies that would allow the community to trust this particular forum. For a community that is very oral with most information relayed through word of mouth and community gatherings; how does e-democracy fit in? For literate Somalis digital engagement is actually not an issue as there several popular forums (Hirraan, Somalia Online, Somali Life, SomaliNet) and social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook. However, how do we engage them in a wider issues forum like the e-democracy one? Considering digital inclusion, how does e-democracy make a case for communities with little or no access to the Internet?

PS. There are other communities of color, like immigrants of Oromo, Ethiopian, Eriterian, Korean and Mexican descent, in the Cedar Riverside Neighborhood that I will be profiling over the course of the month.

Kids at National Night Out at Riverside Plaza. E-Democracy.org recruited 15 new forum members that evening using paper sign-up sheets.

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We’ve created a new section on our site with links to all of the print materials we are generating in our Inclusive Social Media effort promoting neighbor Issues Forum for all.

Here is the text of that page as of today.

• 1. General Brochure – Meet Your Neighbors Online!
  • Adapt this two-page trifold brochure to suit your local forum and distribute copies at community events to raise awareness and grow your forum. (Publisher file)

• 2. Minneapolis-St. Paul Multi-forum General Poster – Join your neighbors to discuss local issues, exchange information, build community, and simply be neighborly.
  • Post these to bulletin boards at local businesses and public venues throughout the neighborhood. The simple tear-off URL serves as a “take away” to remind people to look up your forum when they get home. (Editable version at Google Docs)

• 3. Customizable Poster (Power Point Template)
  • Tailor this poster to your forum and post to bulletin board in your neighborhood. Be sure to update the tear-off URL!

• 4. General Flyer – Two per page – Multi-forum flyer to support recruitment across neighborhoods.
  • Adapt this two-up flier to suit your local forum and distribute copies at community events to raise awareness and grow your forum. (Editable version at Google Docs)

• 5. Sign-up sheets à la carte
  • We’ve used a variety of these tailored to specific forums such as Frogtown and Cedar-Riverside, as well as put together these “multi-forum” sign up sheets to support recruitment across neighborhoods.
  • To successfully add these new members after your outreach efforts promptly scan (or to speed uploading enter the data into a spreadsheet yourself with at least first name, last name, and e-mail in their own columns – keep your forms handy because some will bounce) and e-mail to: signups@e-democracy.org') //-->signups@e-democracy.org [Email address: signups #AT# e-democracy.org - replace #AT# with @ ] OR fax to: +1-612-605-0137
  • While Forum Managers may invite people via the website, we prefer to upload 5 names from paper sign-ups for you. When a Forum Manager does it themselves, people must click on a link in their e-mail to verify – which most people miss. Behind the scenes, our technical support team can upload people without verification. New members only need to set a password on the web if they want to post via the web.
  • Tip: Use a black pen (no soft point without a soft tip) bold stroke and definitely read the e-mail address back to confirm. Double-checking the handwriting can improve your success rate by as much as 30%!
  • Minneapolis Neighbor Forums Sign-up (MS Word) (PDF)
  • St. Paul Neighbor Forums Sign-up (MS Word) (PDF)

• 6. Customizable Single Forum Sign Up Template – MS Word – US Version (MS Word A4 – UK/NZ Version)
  • Tailor these to suit your needs to help you collect names and e-mail addresses at neighborhood venues and events.
  • See submission instructions above. We will pay the cost to do manual data entry for any forum in our network. In-person outreach where you get people to sign-up right then and there is the most effective way to grow participation in a local forum. We want to make it as easy as possible.

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At the Guardian’s Active conference I asked, why major online news sites are so content with empowering the angriest people in society with the design of their online news commenting systems. I am personally most interested in the local level where I see the mainstream media with online news commenting essentially promoting division and discord by intent online in local communities. They are not reflecting a conflicted society, they are giving mega phones to the 1% on the extremes and allowing the other 98% of us to be driven away. At some point I hope media sites begin to survey their communities on the damage to their own reputation for poor stewardship of online interactivity. Our own experience is that simply promoting real names as the default (and I recommend pre-moderating those unwilling or unable to stand behind their words with their real name) deals with 80% of the incivility problem.

While I certainly oppose government requirements that people must use their real names online, I strongly encourage democratically spirited organizations to promote real names because it gives people far more power and influence not to mention making online spaces more attractive with greater civility. Facebook is eating the interactive lunch of online news sites stuck in the 20th Century of “no one knows you are a dog” online. That said, I don’t care if World of Warcraft uses aliases or real names (link to Guardian article that tipped off the BBC).

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Thanks to the folks at The Guardian and their Activate 2010 conference I’ll be in the UK next week.

The “official” Twitter hashtag I’ll use for updates during the week is #edemuk – I’ll use this for logistics and announce any spontaneous opportunities to connect.

My big message all week will be Local Matters, Civility Matters, Inclusion Matters. In terms of “what’s new” and exciting since my last UK visit are the emerging digital inclusion lessons from our Inclusive Social Media efforts in lower income, high immigrant neighborhoods. If you can’t make any of the event, watch my recent webinar.

• June 29-30 – Bristol – Straight from the airport to the Knowle West Media Centre, then later a pub gathering at 8 p.m. at Llandoger Trow with Brislington and Greater Bedminister participants from the Neighbourhood Issues Forums that we host in Bristol. Everyone welcome. On June 30, Stephen Hilton with Connecting Bristol is hosting a discussion on digital inclusion and e-democracy. Contact Stephen for details.

• July 1 – London – Activate Conference – Watch the video preview of my keynote speech. Other speakers include Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, Tom Steinberg with mySociety, Clay Shirky, Beth Noveck with the White House, and many more. My job, as described so well recently by a BP official, is to tell the story of how we “small people” are using the Internet to empower ourselves.

• July 2 – London – Community Organising : What contribution local online? – Please register now for this free event organized by our friends with London Networked Neighbourhoods runs from 3 to 5 p.m., followed by a pub gathering at The Albert, 52 Victoria Street. If you can’t make the event, I invite all my e-democracy friends to join us there.

• July 3 – London – E-Democracy.org UK Meeting – At 10 a.m. on Saturday, our UK-based Board Members Mary Reid and Edward Andersson invite any of our local Issues Forum leaders and volunteers (potential volunteers welcome too!) to join us near Kings Cross. Contact us for the full details. (Mary Reid is new Board Chair of E-Democracy.org, blog announcement pending.) No plans as of yet for Saturday evening, but I hope to connect with some of our Newham forum friends.

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I had the honor of speaking to the national League of Women Voters conference in Atlanta last week. It was a great crowd.

In the coming two months we will be developing the first draft of the Sunshine 2.0 guide for local Leagues (and anyone really including governments themselves) to evaluate their online “sunshiny-ness.” In addition to my prior blog post, these slides help illustrate some of my thinking going into this work. As I prepared these slides, I wondered if those who use terms like “Government 2.0″ see that reality in these slides or if the real transparency and interactivity is still too challenging to happen widely in most communities. Your thoughts?

Our survey remains open for drafting input.

Key to the League’s approach is working with local governments to help them score as high as possible for the benefit of their community. So, rather than beat governments over the head with poor grades from out of the blue, the guide will suggest key measures or indicators to look for online or in policies. Imagine a League volunteer sitting down with a government communicator or webmaster for a thoughtful exchange. Some missing democracy items be “fixable” in a day by interested local governments and others will likely require them to put pressure on their vendors to upgrade them to the democratic standard or for new features to be installed. We certainly hope to hear from more governments on how they would like to be “judged” so the Sunshine 2.0 standard connects to reality in the years to come.

As the work progresses, we encourage you to comment on the blog and watch this space or Twitter for updates or my broader @democracy Twitter account.  Sign-up for blog e-mail updates on the left so you don’t miss a beat.

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Special Invite – Note the Pew Internet and American Life report author special Q and A discussion on the Locals Online community of practice.

According to the just released Neighbors Online report from Pew Internet and American Life, 27% of American adult Internet users (or 22% of adults overall) use “digital tools to talk to their neighbors and keep informed about community issues.”

This is an amazing number and a great starting point.

Today, we finally have baseline for the growing neighbors online movement. The other week we hosted a webinar on how  to use technology for community building. This week we have some real numbers to help us develop strategies to broadly serve and connect as many people as possible not just those who easily show up – because if we don’t we will soon be talking about how we red-lined neighborhoods out of the community and democracy building opportunity of a generation.

In summary, to reach the 27% of Internet users engaging locally online:

• 14% read a blog dealing with community issues at least once in the last year (while the frequency of visits wasn’t measured in this survey, 1/3 of general blog readers check blogs each day)
• 13% exchanged emails with neighbors about community issues (think informal “to:” “cc:”)
• 7% say they belong to a community e-mail list (this intensive and typically daily experience is the cornerstone of E-Democracy.org Neighbors Issues Forums experience) – this equates to about 10 million American adults connected most days with their neighbors online in community life!
• 6% communicated with neighbors by text messaging on cell phones
• 5% joined a social network site group connected to community issues (like Ning and Facebook)
• 3% followed neighbors using Twitter (note the embryonic trend of geo “hashtags” like #nempls – we feed it too)

Aaron Smith, the report author, in a private exchange noted to me that 2/3 of respondents only did one of these items. This bolsters my view that the “there there” very local spaces online is almost a natural monopoly – so making a unified online space available via multiple technologies is essential (we use e-mail, web, web feed, Facebook, and Twitter in an interconnected way for example) to reach more people.

Update: Aaron provided Locals Online with a special cross-tab on the “joiners” which is quite interesting. Access from here. Here is one tidbit: 74% of those who talk digitally with their neighbors (77% of e-list members) have talked face-to-face about community issues with their neighbors compared to 46% overall

It has been our experience that the vast majority of “organic” local online places started by passionate volunteers (some placeblogs are quasi-commercial, but outside of such blogs, this is not an adjunct of journalism) serve middle and upper income communities – urban homeowners. The people who know about neighbors forums – LOVE THEM – based on the feedback we’ve received on our forums (including the one I host) and the all the new volunteers emerging to serve the 10+ new communities (often jealous of what they see just next door to them).

First some good news focusing mostly on 7% on neighborhood e-mail lists (although we do see local social networks, blogs, etc. all blending together at some point anyway):

• Whites and Blacks participate equally at 8% of Internet users
• Urban participation  is 10% and suburban isn’t far behind at 7%
• Women participate strongly at 9% in fact, we could say we need more men who are only 5% (this is not the case with political interaction online where white men dominate)
• With the community blog numbers, both young adults (16%) and African-Americans (18%) Internet users have read a blog with community issues at least once in the last year compared to 14% overall.
• Update – Some further analysis specially provided by Pew on the 22% of all adults who use “digital tools to talk to their neighbors and keep informed about community issues.”:

Household income comparison – percentage within each group who “talk digitally with neighbors”:

Among all adults
Total: 22%
Less than $30,000: 12%
$30,000-$49,999: 20%
$50,000-$74,999: 26%
$75,000+: 39%

Among internet users
Total: 29%
Less than $30,000: 19%
$30,000-$49,999: 26%
$50,000-$74,999: 29%
$75,000+:41%

We launched our Inclusive Social Media effort with Ford Foundation and St. Paul Foundation support to develop inclusive Neighbors Issues Forums in lower income, high immigrant neighborhoods – or what we felt are areas that are completely missing out from the community building power of local online engagement. We see the Internet as the most cost-effective “ice breaker” opportunity out there that can create new bridges and sustained bonds. With intervention and resources for real outreach and inclusion, neighbors online will do far more than just reflect existing social capital.

So now we have numbers on the digital participation divide we must close – among Internet users (not just the general population, so we are talking connected people):

• Only 2% of those with household incomes under $30,000 are on a neighborhood e-mail list, still only 3% up to $49,000 while between $50-75,000 it is 7% and over $75,000 it is a whopping 15%
• Only 3% of Hispanics (both English and Spanish Speaking) are on a neighborhood e-mail list – while they don’t measure Asians or immigrants specifically, our guess is that the percent would be even lower – our efforts target the highly East African Cedar Riverside neighborhood and the plurality ~40% Southeast Asian (Hmong) with African-American (20%) and White (20%) Frogtown neighborhood)
• Only 2% of rural residents belong to a neighborhood e-mail list (while terminology may have been a factor here, we’ve learned a lot from our Rural Voices effort to launch 4 community forums in rural communities and would like the opportunity to invest more in this area – in fact we’ve recently submitted small grant proposals to bring the majority Native American and also lower income Cass Lake Leech Lake forum into our Inclusive Social Media effort which will put a simple one hour a day Community Outreach and Information Leader on the ground)

Here are some rough thoughts that we add to over time:

1. Inclusion Matters – As an organization, E-Democracy.org needs to focus on bring these powerful online community building opportunities to all – especially the people and communities being left behind. We need more partners and funders to make this happen in the next phase of our Inclusive Social Media effort in 2011 and beyond. Interested in helping? Contact us. In the near term, we need to find resources to work with the vibrant Powderhorn Park Neighbors Forum to build on their expressed interest in recruiting more Latino participation. They have had some bi-lingual postings, but the community in looking for ways to build more connections as they confront in part a summer of youth/gang related violence.
2. We Need a Good Directory Look-up – Most people don’t know about online community spaces (I think). If they did far more would join. We need to create a technology/format agnostic directory with geographic and map based look-ups for these two-way local online communities. We need to build on the work of Placeblogger and the UK-based GroupsNearYou site which isn’t actively being developed.
3. Neighbors Online Week – With a good directory, we can then promote such sites nationally/globally. I want the President of the United States to be able to say (like the White House did with the launch of Serve.Gov), go to X site, connect with your neighbors – ACROSS the political spectrum – and build your community.
4. Move the Field – OK, so while we’d love to have many more people start a forum with us, most of you will do your own thing. It is human nature. As part of our inclusion-oriented Participation 3.0 initiative we’ve convened dozens of local “hosts” for peer to peer exchange on Locals Online. Let’s make it hundreds, share effective practices and lessons, and inspire thousands of new “hosts” to start or effective grow local online spaces that work. Based on the Pew numbers, we estimate that there could be 30,000 neighborhood e-mails list hosts for example. They are almost all working in isolation. Time to connect!
5. Neighbor.be Open Source? – I think there is a need to connect nearest neighbors online and wonder what we could do collaboratively with interested developers.

If the Internet was first about going to the world, then connecting privately with friends and family via social networking, the revolution is finally coming home to everyday public and community life. We don’t want the Internet to replace a face-to-face conversation over the back fence, we want it to make those real connections among neighbors possible for everyone in a busy modern era where getting to know your neighbors is extremely difficult. We don’t want the hyped location-based mobile technology to be viewed as the way to connect with your existing friends because you are surrounded by uninteresting strangers. We’d rather use technology to have fewer strangers starting from where you live everyday. In short, meeting your neighbors online might just be the best opportunity to connect a nation in public life and counter those intent on pulling us a apart with online partisanship and political diatribe masked as online interaction.

Special Invite – Join the Pew Internet and American Life report author in a special Q and A discussion on the Locals Online community of practice now!

• Jeffery Smith – CivSource
• Marisa Trevino – Latina Lista
• Kevin Harris – Networked Neighbourhoods (UK)
• Leonard Witt – Public Journalism Network
• ReadWriteWeb – Led to the most Tweeting about it …
• Chicago Sun Times
• Next American City

Fun to watch “neighbors online” tweeted around the web. Hmmm. PewInternet should adopt a hashtag with the release of each new report.

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The Definitive Guide to Drupal 7 accelerates people along the Drupal learning curve by covering all aspects of building web sites with Drupal: architecture and configuration; module development; front end development; running projects sustainably; participating in the community; and contributing to Drupal's code and documentation.

Check out the website today! http://definitivedrupal.org/

GenArts Visual Effects Software made the 2D special effects for pretty much every major movie you've seen. GenArts needed, and Agaric provided, an update to Drupal 6 and a far more usable content posting flow.

Thank you so much for your invaluable contribution to the 2006 Fall Fundraiser! The new website is handsome, full of great features, and you were very responsive in correcting problems. You have really helped make 2006 a big success!

Sincerely, Liza

Thanks for everything.

very very impressive gentlemen, on all fronts...

Specifically:

• Always being able to give a person something they, personally, can do
• Making people the possible believable.
• Achieving that epic win after great individual effort and collaboration with others.

All of those mean connecting people (both into smaller dream teams of compatible, complementary talents and into a large number of supporters).

I'm more interested in bringing what makes games satisfying to self-organizing to make things better, than to making games a vehicle to saving the world, which is the direction she goes in, but please, watch:

http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/799

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— Benjamin Melançon

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— John Perry Barlow

— Kasey Qynn Dolin

I am trying to find exactly when Paralympic recap coverage is today, and if it is possible to watch online to share the link with people, and a site-wide search for paralympics turns up nothing and your schedule lists nothing before 8pm!

Very disappointed with NBC.com.

Fortunately you can read that the time that the Paralympics recap is being shown today is 3pm EST (yes, on NBC) at
http://usparalympics.org/news/2010/03/09/nbc-sports-and-universal-sports...

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http://www.whitehouse.gov/CONTACT/

Submitted the note under "I have a comment" and "Foreign affairs"

Investigate and demand the Colombian government drop support for threats and acts of violence against farmers in Tolima and Arauca, in particular the targeted Association of Campesinos in Arauca, of whom 15 people were murdered by members of paramilitaries and the Colombian military.

Funding to the Colombian government must be stopped and the state must protect its people not attack them.

— Stefan Freudenberg, on Havana Club Cuban 90 proof barrel cask rum

In watching the rapid mobilization against this virus I know that the public health infrastructure works when our government, our media, and our medical leaders are motivated to mobilize it. H1N1 is not getting any attention it shouldn’t – it’s getting the attention all public health crises should.

http://bitchmagazine.org/post/swine-dandy-what-if-we-did-as-much-to-prev...

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One pig, if only in the news topic logo*, usually gets a cameo in television coverage of swine flu. The lonely pig is out of context, though- separated from the three-quarters of a million caged, crammed, and fattened pigs slaughtered annually at the massively polluting pig factory in the town with the first human case of the virus.

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Captioned Public Service Announcement from President Obama celebrating the 20th Anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act. Video was posted to Youtube by the AAPD.

Interview of Rhianon Gutierrez, Deaf Woman Director and Writer of "Transients".

Interview produced by Jules Dameron of Deaf Women in Film and ASL Master for "Transients". Subtitles provided by Alex Lotz.

To learn more about the Deaf Women in Film project, you can visit their blog, twitter account or facebook page.

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Film editing and equipment was provided by Vriezen Photography

Starring
Kendall Kail
Breanna Murray
Shawn Vriezen

Special Thanks to Jessalyn Frank and Sarah Houge for providing emotional support.

Casa de Frank provided by Jessalyn Frank

Kendall Unltd
www.kendallunltd.com

The Alternative Solutions Center in Bethesda, MD provides a v/blog to inform the deaf community about mental health topics. With their permission, I am reposting their videos to help share this information. This video is about suicide and what you can do to prevent it.

Their videos are available through their v/blog, blip.tv and Youtube.

Due to the sensitivity of this subject matter, comments are closed. If you wish to discuss these issues, please do contact a professional.

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Their videos are available through their v/blog, blip.tv and Youtube.

Due to the sensitivity of this subject matter, comments are closed. If you wish to discuss these issues, please do contact a professional.

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The IRS implemented a new rule in 2006 requiring all non-profits to file with the IRS. Organizations that earned under $25,000 a year were previously exempt. If organizations do not file their returns for three years, they lose their non-profit status. As this is the third year that this rule has been in effect, this May 15th may be the execution date for many non-profits.

Most non-profits earning less than $25,000 a year only have to file the Form 990-N or "e-Postcard" which is a simple electronic application which requires 8 basic pieces of information, including the organizations contact information.

To find out if a non-profit organization needs to file, or is in danger of losing their tax exempt status by checking the database at the National Center for Charitable Statistics

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They need $25,000 to fund their cause, and are asking for contributions.
The Mozilla Foundation will match dollar-for-dollar all contributions to their cause (up to $25,000) from their Open Web Fund.

Their project page is on Mozilla Drumbeat, and you can go there to join their project, donate or just learn more about it.

This UnConference will let YOU decide which issues are important, and discuss how to take action.

What is an Unconference? Its a conference that turns traditional lectures on its head. There is no panel, and no audience, there are only participants. We believe everyone has value, and the sum of our skills is far greater than any one 'expert' alone. This conference is designed to allow all participants to propose, discuss and lead the topics that matter to them.

Are you Passionate about our Community? Then we look forward to seeing you there!

Saturday May 22nd 2010
9am-2pm
Cherokee Heights Park, St Paul MN

A Picnic Lunch will be provided.

(Free) Registration is requested

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"... the independent, family-owned Californian is preparing to take the idea of Web-created niche magazines national. Using an $837,000 grant from the Knight News Challenge and about $200,000 of its own money, it's launching a site called Printcasting.com later in March. The site will allow individuals, schools, homeowners' associations, wine clubs, and the like to create their own digital magazines. 'If we see a magazine that really has potential, we'll print it, place additional ads in there, and distribute it, [first in Bakersfield, then in five other cities as early as this summer],' Pacheco says. The Californian will get a cut of ad sales while spending little on the product itself. 'This is cheap and targeted,' Pacheco explains. 'Even though there's an ad recession, it doesn't mean there're no more ads.' "

"This reinvention is taking publishers such as Bakersfield Californian away from selling ads just for their own news content. 'Our future may be very different from how we started, in newspapers,' Pacheco says. '[Going forward], we are the network that allows people to communicate among themselves.'"

Technorati Tags: printcasting, knight news challenge, newspaper industry

Scripps Executive and media consultant Jay Small has a shout-out to Printcasting in his Small Initiatives blog. Here's what he says about Printcasting in a post about decapitalizing printing.

"Watch Dan Pacheco's Printcasting developments closely. My read: This project attempts to cut cost, waste and inflexibility out of producing printed periodicals, while adding customization and speed to market for publishers of most any scale. I don't know if it will work -- Pacheco doesn't either, I'd guess. But it represents a creative, logical and valiant effort, with realistic chances of success."

And later ...

"I imagine, therefore, that Pacheco's experiments and others like them may favor new entrants to local economies for printed news and information. Incumbent holding companies might be able to free up funds for capital investment by consolidating printing if they are fortunate enough to have local newspapers clustered geographically in ways that would support regional printing centers. One press rolling off 10 newspapers in a 100-mile radius saves money vs. 10 presses, or even five, printing the same titles. That short-term efficiency might release funds to invest in digital printing that could, eventually, replace even the remaining central press."

I'm reposting my comments on Jay's blog entry here, as I think they speak to how Printcasting is primarily about preserving the news and information function of local communities in a sustainable way. Our use of print (or more accurately, printable content) supports that goal, but we're not intentionally trying to "save print."

The reality is that the future of print is digital, and there's no reason to print every single publication people create. We do want to print and distribute the highest-quality publications that come out the other end of this grand experiment, and only where the potential for ad revenue is higher than what those editions could receive from online self-serve ad revenue alone. This approach turns traditional print business model upside down, and also inside out thanks to the way it invites collaboration with people in the local community.

Here are my reposted comments, with a few additions:

I indeed do not claim to know 100% that the Printcasting experiment as currently defined will work exactly the way we except, but thanks to the Knight Foundation (which funds the project via the Knight News Challenge), we will have 15 months after launching to tweak things based on local community response. We will learn a lot during that time, make changes where we need to and end up with something that is more than just a theory, and hopefully a big success. For the record, I do believe it will be a big success -- I just can't point to anything that proves it will be. That's the nature of innovation. It all comes down to making intelligent bets and staying flexible.

Our objective is not so much to "save print" as it is to find new, sustainable ways to meet the news and information needs of local communities -- beginning in Bakersfield, but ultimately serving many different local communities.

Our idea for Printcasting came out of our experience in Bakersfield of creating multiple niche-focused social networking sites. We noticed that the brands that had a lot of user-generated content and printed magazines that locally distributed that content attracted more ad revenue than the sites that had less user-generated content and no print component.

As the business model supporting the general-interest printed product (the daily newspaper) began to crumble, while the business for niche digital-print hybrid products remained steady or increased, we asked ourselves, "what would need to happen in order for this new niche model to replace what we're losing in the general-interest space?" The answer was that we needed not just a handful of niche sites and magazines, but hundreds or thousands, all in a network that was supported by affordable self-serve advertising. We then submitted that idea to the Knight News Challenge, got funding and got to work.

I also want to point out that we're not assuming that all delivery of Printcasting publications needs to be via physical printing. And since the focus of our product is democratized publishing, where anyone can be a magazine publisher, we also don't want that. As with blogs and any type of user-generated content, there will be a wide range of quality and we will only invest in printing those that merit printing. Does this assume that a large quantity will be of low quality? Most likely, yes. Look at the blogosphere. Most of what's out there isn't up to the quality standards we expect from The New York Times, but it does have its fans who are willing to apply a different quality standard in exchange for getting the niche information they don't get from their newspaper.

Another theory we will be testing out is what I think of as the "American Idol" approach to print publishing. After a few months of outreach, we anticipate having a hundred or more Printcasts out there. Most will be subscribed to online so that readers who want to be informed receive an update in e-mail about new editions. They can read the content online -- in HTML form as well as in a "pageflip" view of the PDF -- or download and print the magazine on their home printers.

We will track each Printcast's online traffic and PDF downloads, as well as reader ratings, and use that information to identify high-quality citizen publications that we think could attract even more advertising revenue if they were printed in larger quantities and locally distributed.

Here's just one example of how this may play out. Numerous people at the Californian over the years have suggested creating a local wine publication, but creating that ourselves would be risky. It would take a lot of up-front investment in design, planning, sales outreach and content creation, and it may take many years for such a publication to break even. It could also fail.

With Printcasting, we'd reduce our risk and increase audience engagement by partnering with the community to generate a great new local wine magazine. We know there are people in town who know far more about wine than we do, and some are already blogging about it. Others -- such as local wine shops -- could write wine columns in their sleep, but they may not be doing it yet because they don't have an online audience to make it worth their while. We'd reach out to all of these people and get them to register their content (or post it on Printcasting.com), then in 5 minutes make a self-updating wine Printcast that features their content. Others may come along and create their own Printcasts about wine, or use the wine reviews in Printcasts with a slightly different focus. We may print a few thousand copies of our wine Printcast, or possibly even a citizen-produced version, and place additional pages of ads in it.

Meanwhile, the vast majority of other Printcasts may have a good online following of people who print copies from home, and those Printcasts will be supported by self-serve ad revenue alone. Each will each make a little money and reach only a handful of people, and that will work just great for their publishers and readers who are currently getting no compensation for their online content.

Some topics may be so niche that we would never, ever want to invest in printing them ourselves. But no matter -- the community is full of people with home printers, and they can use their $60 ink cartridges to print them out if it's worth it to them. I should also point out that the Printcasting network will take a small portion (around 10%) of ad revenue from all Printcasts to support this activity, so it will be in our interest to foster wide adoption of mostly-digital subscriptions.

The revenue from the self-serve ads as well as the additional ads we sell would be shared with those bloggers. Why do that? We want them to continue contributing high-quality content, and letting them share in the rewards is one way to motivate them. But it will also cost far less to share a portion of ad revenue than it would to hire a writer or two or three to write about those topics -- let alone a publication designer, dedicated salesperson, and so on.

As you can see, while we will be using the print medium in some cases, this model is completely different from how print-based media businesses operate today. It merges the best of the Web with the best of print, and throws out all the inefficiency and waste.

I also hope that Printcasting will remove once and for all the artificial, largely institutional barriers that exist between "the print side" and "the online side" at most newspapers. In the Printcasting model, all content originates online, and flows into print where the ad revenue can support it. If not, the content is still printable by millions of home printers where readers think it's worth the cost. The dividing line between print and online departments, not to mention staff and community, will become very difficult to discern -- as it should be. Then we can all get along with the business of serving new audiences, collaborating with them and supporting our efforts with shared revenue.

Ever since the Knight News Challenge was first announced in 2006, I've been fascinated and inspired by its open nature. While the primary goal of the contest is to fund great ideas for new local news and information projects, it has a larger mission. It also requires those projects to eventually be released under open source licenses. To me this has always meant that News Challenge projects have a responsibility to a larger community of people who will one day repeat our successes in their communities.
Read the full post on PBS MediaShift Idea Lab ...

"... the independent, family-owned Californian is preparing to take the idea of Web-created niche magazines national. Using an $837,000 grant from the Knight News Challenge and about $200,000 of its own money, it's launching a site called Printcasting.com later in March. The site will allow individuals, schools, homeowners' associations, wine clubs, and the like to create their own digital magazines. 'If we see a magazine that really has potential, we'll print it, place additional ads in there, and distribute it, [first in Bakersfield, then in five other cities as early as this summer],' Pacheco says. The Californian will get a cut of ad sales while spending little on the product itself. 'This is cheap and targeted,' Pacheco explains. 'Even though there's an ad recession, it doesn't mean there're no more ads.' "

"This reinvention is taking publishers such as Bakersfield Californian away from selling ads just for their own news content. 'Our future may be very different from how we started, in newspapers,' Pacheco says. '[Going forward], we are the network that allows people to communicate among themselves.'"

Technorati Tags: printcasting, knight news challenge, newspaper industry

• The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and The Bakersfield Californian for giving us the funds and other support to make Printcasting happen.
  
• Mary Lou Fulton, my boss and long-time colleague and friend for encouraging us to submit our concept to the Knight News Challenge -- and all of the great marketing and outreach ideas.
• Justinian Hatfield, for helping us fine-tune the proposal, and lending his image and likeness -- as well as his camera and tripod -- to a video we submitted with the proposal.
• Lead developer Ron Robinson for, well, turning Printcasting from a concept into a working tool ... and then some!
  
• Designer Don Hajicek for design, Drupal consulting, camaraderie and wicked funny jokes that continue to keep everyone sane.
  
• The good people at Photon Infotech for ongoing development and testing in conjunction with Ron.
• Tom Webster, our brand spanking new marketing evangelist, for jumping into Printcasting with such fervor.
  

Scripps executive and media consultant Jay Small has a shout-out to Printcasting in his Small Initiatives blog. Here's what he says about Printcasting in a post about decapitalizing printing.

"Watch Dan Pacheco's Printcasting developments closely. My read: This project attempts to cut cost, waste and inflexibility out of producing printed periodicals, while adding customization and speed to market for publishers of most any scale. I don't know if it will work -- Pacheco doesn't either, I'd guess. But it represents a creative, logical and valiant effort, with realistic chances of success."

"I imagine, therefore, that Pacheco's experiments and others like them may favor new entrants to local economies for printed news and information. Incumbent holding companies might be able to free up funds for capital investment by consolidating printing if they are fortunate enough to have local newspapers clustered geographically in ways that would support regional printing centers. One press rolling off 10 newspapers in a 100-mile radius saves money vs. 10 presses, or even five, printing the same titles. That short-term efficiency might release funds to invest in digital printing that could, eventually, replace even the remaining central press."

Girls and women in many parts of the world are deprived of opportunities for education and advancement, especially in the realm of technology. The Global Fund for Children (GFC) recently launched an experimental program to address this issue by providing young women with training in video production. Taking part were four GFC grantee partner organizations serving adolescent girls—Mahita and Kolkata Sanved in India, and Kudirat Initiative for Democracyand Girl Child Concerns in Nigeria—along with two regional technical partners Video Volunteers (India) and Communicating for Change (Nigeria). The participating girls learned to how to use media to amplify their voices and share their stories with a wider audience, while toolkits detailing the process were developed to help guide other community-based organizations in the future. By sharing these toolkits, GFC hopes other organizations will develop programs that teach girls and young women how to harness the power of digital media.

If you would like to receive a print version of one or both toolkits, please let us know. If you find the toolkits relevant to your work and are interested in developing a video storytelling program for girls within your organization, please email us at toolkit@globalfundforchildren.org. We would be happy to provide guidance on how to get started. If you are currently involved in a video storytelling project and would like to submit videos to share on our website, please email us.

The Global Fund for Children believes in the importance of empowering girls in media and supporting girls in using video storytelling as a platform to voice their thoughts about social issues and as a tool to educate their communities.

Click here to view the video storytelling toolkit from Nigeria
Click here to view the video storytelling toolkit from India

The impact story comes at a time when community media is just starting to gain ground in India because mainstream media is widely seen as obsessed with TRP ratings and advertisement revenues.  But when met with these facts, the media players hit back with ‘will such media work?’

Well this story presents the proof that it does.

This video was shown on IndiaUnehard website on 24th May. As a fellow community member, Daniel had been witnessing the plight of the villagers of Bongli – the village with no healthcare – for years. He was pained to see the poor villagers being forced to use herbs and faith healing to take care of their sick and even the dying. To reach the nearest public health centre they would have  to trek a distance of 10 km  through dense forest and hills.

Within a week of the publication of the video, IndiaUnheard team was contacted by Devakishor Soraisam – a member of a Human Rights organization called the Burning Voices. They were deeply moved by video and would like to reach out the villagers, they said. Would IndiaUnheard help them?

When told of this, Daniel was overjoyed. In mid-June Daniel met the Ronid and Devakishor – representatives of Burning Voices who had brought with them a carload of medicines for villagers of Bongli. It was a moving sight when Daniel went to the village with the donors and distributed these medicines in the village, as well as other neighbouring villages that needed it.

Says Daniel, “I joined IndiaUnheard because we had no media telling out stories and covering our issue. So IndiaUnheard was a platform where I could share our stories. But now, it has become the forum where we can make changes. I have just turned from a story teller to a change maker. It feels great!”

The video, thus has created 3-fold impacts.

1.         It made possible for over 500 people access healthcare in more than one village which had no hospital, no medicine whatsoever.

2.         The video inspired locals take action to find solution to local problems

3.         The video has, deepened faith of the correspondent and the whole community into the power of community produced media.

The skeptics of people-powered media can take a re-look at their own thoughts.

Meanwhile, community reporters like Daniel should take a bow.

The goal of the project ‘Life in a Day’ is to create a single day’s snapshot of life on earth, in order to leave a message for future generations to tell and show our grandchildren and great grandchildren what life was like on an ordinary day in 2010.

For this project, VV partnered with Bangalore-based media production house Ixoraa Media. Ixoraa media approached us after learnt of our work  from Technology Entertainment and Design(TED).  TED, of which VV’s  founder director Jessica Mayberry is a Fellow, had suggested that if Ixoraa was looking for community-produced content, then Video Volunteers, with it’s countrywide network of Community correspondents, had the best capability of  providing  a done day’s captured snapshot of life  in India.

The entire project was done in less than a week’s notice – a huge challenge, considering almost all of our correspondents were based in remote areas where communication facilities are poor. Since this was peak of monsoon, weather was another concern as poor light and rain posed serious hurdles for the correspondents. Yet all the 15 correspondents, some of who learnt of the project only on 23^rd July, managed to complete their videos within the steep deadline of 24^th July. In fact each correspondent was enthusiastic about shooting the video. The reason: It was an opportunity to profile their community.

However, since India is a multilingual society, there was a big concern of translating the conversations between the CCs and their community members.  To deal with this, the CCs were given a set of questions that they would ask to each person they interviewed.

The questions they asked were these:

Tell me about yourself (Work, education, life)

What or whom they love?

What they are afraid of?

What makes them laugh?

What is in their pocket or bag today?

To answer these questions, 15 community correspondents chose people of 15 professions who, when put together, present a vibrant montage of the diverse means of livelihood that Indians follow.

Here they are at a glance

A milk man who sells milk door to door,

A Transgender person, performing on street,

School and college going students Govt employee,in the conventional ‘sarkari’ office

An apple farmer in his orchard

Shepherd and Goatherd boys, tending their cattle

A barber

An ironsmith

A laundryman

A tea seller

A Chaat (snack) Stall worker

A Paan(betel nut) Stall worker

An electrician

A traditional craftsman A vegetable vendor

For VV, the project “Life in a Day” project was a good way to learn 3 important facts:

1.Our wide community outreach – we were able to speak to sixteen community representatives in fourteen states within three days and document their daily activities

2. We have the logistics and skill to complete a project in short notice.

3. Our community reporters are able to recognize their communities’ forgotten members – goatherds and paan stall workers.

According to Youtube, eighty thousand videos, amounting 4,600 hours of footage have been submitted to “Life in a Day” project.  While editing of the huge amount of footage will take quite some time, the individual submissions, including those from VV will be available for viewing soon. Youtube is building a special gallery, created to feature ‘Life in a Day’ channel which will show all the videos once the site goes live in September.

The TED talk of Ethan Zuckerman, the founder of the international blogging site Global Voices, is quite an amazing insight into the challenges of telling international stories online, told in the great TED way of painting lots of pictures and using a ton of anecdotes. He says it’s a big myth that the web is bringing us closer to other cultures or countries – when we’re on the web, we’re basically in our own small islands of our social networks. Most of us who are building businesses/nonprofits around non-traditional media content know this, but he has got some great powerpoint slides that add a lot of meat to the arguments.

In addition to giving us some very telling facts (did you know that Madagascar the movie is a bigger brand than Madagascar the country?), he talks about translation. And not just the challenges of literal translation from one language to another, which is something Video Volunteers faces in our work all the time, especially now when we have community video correspondents working in nearly every state of India, a country with dozens of official languages. But also cultural translation.

He makes the point that we need more “deejays… skilled human curators” who can speak the language of the west and of other cultures at the same time. The incredible editors at Global Voices fit that bill, and so does the blog Afrigadget. Video Volunteers, in the articles that accompany the online videos made by our community correspondents in our new IndiaUnheard Community News Network, attempt to do this too.

This is really interesting to me because at Video Volunteers, we talk a lot about the need for “unmediated” voices – essentially, voices that are not culturally translated. This is one of the differences between community video, which to us means equipping traditionally “unheard” communities to tell their stories in their own words, and documentary film, where a professional uses his or her artistry and insightfulness to translate community voices for outside audiences.

At VV, we believe, in fact, that so much is lost in translation that you want to keep “cultural translation” to a minimum. And so, with our newly launched IndiaUnheard community news network, we want to bring voices out voices in their rawest form. As my partner Stalin K. often says, “if I say the words “masai warrior” you get an immediate visual in your head. You don’t, in a similar fashion, hear their voices in your head.” We know from TV what the Masai look like. But we don’t know what they sound like, because in traditional National Geographic-type media, we just see the Masai with a narration – their whole culture, never mind their language, is translated for an international audience.

There are real limits to the possibilities for translation. As I’ve heard Ethan Zukerman himself say at a Civic Media conference, it’s hard enough to find cultural translators for English to other cultures. But what about all the learning that could happen between the readers of, say, Kurdish media in New York City and Haitian media in New York City? How is that translation going to happen? I don’t know that we could ever have enough translators to solve that problem.

So how do we get people to watch – rather, to WANT to watch – videos like these two posted below, made by our IndiaUnheard correspondents? If the world had an ideal system for the poor representing themselves in the media, which I would say is something like one community journalist per village (or even per 20 villages), how would we interest people outside those villages in watching this content?

Here are two recent videos to check out and see what you think: Children Carry Trash, Not Books

The video shows how children of poor families do not benefit from the current schemes on compulsory free education. The video is produced by Pratibha Rolta, a Community Correspondent from the mountain state of Himachal Pradesh, who works as an activist on women’s issues.

The second video, titled Children Denied Education captures the plight of child labourers in Haryana’s brick kilns who are deprived of several rights including education.

The correspondent here, Satyawan was a Sarpanch (village head) for five long years before joining IndiaUnheard and has in-depth knowledge of corruption within the local administration.

Besides our own website and within the communities where the producers work (where most of our work is shown) there are some forums for videos like this. I showed these two videos two weeks ago as a panelist at the IFP/UN-sponsored “ENVISION 2010: Addressing Global Issues through Documentaries“, an event organized by the IFP, UN Communications Department, and New York Times. This was a one day conference on education and documentary films, and happily, there was space for user-created content. A few years ago there probably wouldn’t have been. I was on a panel about the impact of user-generated media, along with with Mallika Dutt of Breakthrough, John Kennedy of World Without Borders and Ryan Schlieff of Witness – all good friends in the field of media and human rights. People in the world of documentary film, or in the UN sector with its huge budgets for traditional communications, were getting a taste of what’s possible when you turn the camera over to communities. This is a progress towards receptiveness to these voices.

With our work, I take a long term perspective. (Wanting every village in the world to have someone skilled and motivated to represent his neighbors’ concerns in the media kind of requires that!) I think that media preferences are not fixed in stone. What Americans liked on TV and in the movies in the fifties is different from what we liked in the seventies and today. Who knows where people’s tastes will be twenty years from now? I’m an optimist. I think we will only get more global and more curious, and more open to raw, unfiltered reality. I believe there are even studies that show that kids today who’ve grown up with mashups and social networks are much more open to gritty media their parents wouldn’t look at. In the meantime, we keep telling our correspondents to tell their stories in their own words, with their own style, their own analysis, no matter how challenging it may be for outsiders to understand without translation.

Wokha of Nagaland is just another hill town of the North Eastern India with the usual picture of poor civic facilities and rich tribal traditions. Like the rest of the region, people here are emotional about three things – forest, land and ethnic traditions. And like the rest of the state, people in Wokha too are supportive of the Naga’s struggle for self rule – often marred with violence – which has been going for several decades now.

Ironic, therefore, is the fact that, despite the decade-long fierce struggle to save their tribal identity and refusal to be ‘Indianised’, Wokha, quite like the rest of the state is today having a unique scenario where the young generation is under a spell of Korean culture.

While it is difficult to date back the advent of Korean culture precisely, by 2007 it had already been around for long enough for the government of Nagaland to have included Korean wrestling and songs in the annual Hornbill Festival.
Breaking this incomprehensible silence, one IndiaUnheard Community Correspondent from Wokha filed a story on this Korean invasion.  Shot on streets of Wokha, the video report of Renchano Humtsoe captures the disturbing trend of unquestioningly accepting all things Korean by the younger Naga population.

Breaking this barrier of this incomprehensible silence, one IndiaUnheard Community Correspondent from Wokha filed a story on this silent Korean cultural invasion. Shot on streets of Wokha, the video report of Renchano Humtsoe, titled Wave of Korean Culture Hits Nagaland captures the disturbing trend of accepting all things Korean by young Naga population, without a question.

Says Renchano,“ I always felt, this isn’t normal that everyone is adopting Korean style and Korean culture so much. But I wasn’t sure if that’s worth making a news story because nobody seemed to talk about it.”

However, once Renchano’ story was done, there was more revelation made by IndiaUnheard’s other correspondents from the region: From Ukhrul of Manipur to Itanagar of Arunachal Pradesh, the influence of Korean culture has been growing at an alarming speed. In fact in Manipur the insurgents have banned Hindi films which has, in turn, thrown the gate wider for Korean consumer goods and films and videos to flood the state.

A Kamei, a journalist with AIR stationed in Imphal does not at all find the advent of Korean culture surprising. She says, “People always liked non-Indian things here. So we were anyway using non-Indian products. Korean products are just an extension. In fact Koreans are so similar to us, specially the way we look.”

As I watched Renchano’s video, it sparked a number of questions: How do the Korean consumer goods manage to reach the market so easily? Why do the cable operators subscribe to Arirang TV? Why did people choose to prefer Korea over Thai, Taiwanese or, for that matter, any other Asian country of the region? Why people who are so vocal against Hindi, have no issues with the Korean?

But above all, the story makes me wonder why the media, which is always so quick to point out the foreign invasion of any kind, especially in the region, is so silent about this overwhelming influence of Korean cultural especially on their young generation?

These are questions that will be pondered over by many in coming days. Meanwhile, reporters like Renchano should take a bow for bringing forth a story that has gone unheard for a long time.

Goa, primarily known as a land of sand and sun, also has some beautiful forests.  Cotigao Wildlife Sanctuary in Cancona of South Goa is one of them.  For centuries, this forest has been the home of hundreds of Velip tribals. Devidas Gaonkar, a Community Correspondent is one of them.

In recent years Goa has seen unprecedented economic growth. While the government attributes this to tourism boom, locals say a lot of the money is coming from the flourishing real estate and mining business, most of which is unplanned and illegal.

The tribals of Cotigao Wildlife Sanctuary have gained little out of these developments. In fact, several of them have lost their livelihood since the Forest Act’96 came in force which restricted the tribals’ movement inside the forest area. Adding to this, now, is building of dozens of new temples through diversion of funds allocated to develop the villages.

The temples, built by a group of people who will soon be in the board of  temple trust and hence share the money donated by devotees – a big business these days- are being built inside Cotigao Wildlife  Sanctuary. “There were enough number of temples already in our area. These were small shrines, very simple in structure, but for ages we worshipped there. Now suddenly they are pulling down these old temples and building big structures,”  says Devidas.”

The current population of Cotigao is about 4 thousand. For such a large number of people there is only one healthcare center with just one male nurse and no doctors. There’s also no higher secondary schools.  The drinking water is supplied only for 1 hour a day. Says Devidas, “In past 5 years the village panchayat has spent 11 lakhs, which is 50% of it’s total budget, only on building new temples.  With that money we could have schools, better water supply system and better health care”, says Devidas.

But who are these builders? And where is the money coming from?

“They are from the local panchayat and the money that they spend are actually for village development. But temples are not going to develop our villages. Some of these temples which are complete, host fairs and other events. Makeshift shops come up during these events and money paid by them going to the temple trust. The trust also collects a lot of donations. The temples use loudspeakers. So we, the forest people have no development, but just noise and pollution.”

This year, on May 3, Video Volunteers launched India’s first Community News Service ‘IndiaUnheard’ and Devidas, a Community Correspondent of the news service has started bringing to our view, unheard stories of his communities such as this.  With that, there is finally hope of hearing real community voices and getting to see more of the real Goa.

Being in VV and working here often reminds me of Guyana, my home. With citizens from or with roots in many places, such as Africa, China, Europe and India, Guyana is a country of great diversity.

Growing up in such a diverse society had its dividends. To begin with, I knew about curry and roti (Indian bread) before I arrived; I have worn ghagras, salwars and saris (female Indian attire) back home, in Guyana, and also know some Kathak and Bharat Natyam dancing; I pray in Hindi and Sanskrit and I’ve read parts of and know about the Vedas, Ramayana and Bhagvad Gita.

So when I arrived in India, I didn’t feel like being in a foreign land as there was a lot I already knew. And yet there was so much more to learn and pick up for me, whether it’s Hindi or other intricacies of a daily life in India.

I have the same feeling while interning with VV.

One gets to see India through so many media – such as films and news. But the work of VV gives a complete picture to the world which is about the same India, yet previously unseen.

One of my tasks at Video Volunteers has been to edit information about videos that are uploaded to the YouTube and Channel19 websites. As a result, I sit and look at every video before I make any changes. Through this task I’ve seen videos covering so many issues – children needing playgrounds, a female rickshaw driver, street artists, the need to care for pets, water problems, educational problems, land rights and this list can go on. These videos show both positive and negative versions of the Indian society; as the masses see it and through them one discovers and learns a lot about the real India.

I might never get to meet the producers of these videos but for some reason, I feel like I know them. They come across as sincere, objective individuals who are willing to take that step to make a change instead of just talking about making a change.

At birth, I was named Taij/“Bright” due to being born in the Hindu religious period of Naav-raatri that preceeds Diwali – the Festival of Lights while Rani/“Queen” follows because my parents though it was a nice ending for Taij. Thus, the name Taijrani.

My name might mean “Bright Queen” when put together but I have seen brighter queens (and kings) associated with Video Volunteers. They are the people who utilize their time to create very moving content to share with the world about the problems they face through the use of videos. These queens and kings are hardworking individuals who are involved in research work and production of videos that address problems from health and water to lack of proper educational systems and discrimination. They are fearless in their tasks as they bring to the front problems affecting their societies; they are the voices of the marginalized, truly brilliant leaders!

The question is, how do you ensure these rights to people who don’t get to know their culture in the first place?

Aleya Akhtara Begum, a Community Correspondent for Video Volunteer’s IndiaUnheard community news service comes from West Garo Hills of Meghalaya. A Bengali Muslim, Aleya represents a community which is both lingual and religious minority in Meghalaya.

Her village Halladiyaganj is located along the Indo-Bangladesh border. Like everyone else in her village, Aleya’s mother tongue is also Bengali. But to get admission in a school, she needed to learn Assamese. Why? Because there are no schools in her area offering education in Bengali medium. Why so? ‘Because being we are not Garos or Khasis – the majority tribes. In fact we are often branded as ‘foreigners’ and told to be happy with whatever options we got’, she says.

Aleya stopped studying once she completed high school. Because there was no Assamese college. All the state colleges had English as the official language, which she had little knowledge of.

5 years after that, Aleya got married. A day before the marriage, her mother arranged for a few women to come and sing wedding songs while Aleya had Henna applied on her hands. Like the mehandi/henna, the geet/music had been part of a wedding in that village for generations. But this time it caused an uproar nobody ever expected.

‘The Maulavi who was to perform the rituals of getting us married’, recalls Aleya, ‘came to know there were women singing at my home. He stormed in, without a notice and scolded my mother for having such “indecent” event. He said by singing songs about other gods, we had violated our religion. We couldn’t believe just by singing songs we could become ungodly’

The shock notwithstanding, Aleya’s mom had to send everyone back home because the Maulavi had threatened to call the marriage off if the music didn’t stop at once. What made him furious was that all the songs that the ladies sang were about the love story of Krishna and Radha – the Hindu god and his consort. It was a common theme of wedding songs in both Hindu and Muslim communities along Indo-Bangla border. ‘For centuries folk writers and singers of both communities wrote and sang them and nobody ever saw it as a religious issue. But now we were told, these were not our songs’, Aleya says, with a wry smile.

So here she is – a community voice who, as a child, was denied the opportunity to study the language she speaks, and as an adult, barred from celebrating her culture. She is here, so no more stories like hers go unheard.

- Séverine Lenglet

“We don’t write to delight or to blame people but to put the pen inside and reveal the lives of others”, said Albert Londres. This famous French writer left his foot print on the 20^th Century travelling the world while pioneering the field of investigative journalism. When I was 12, his name and exploits had me dreaming of being a journalist. Exotic lands, different peoples and foreign languages filled my mind. Working for Video Volunteers evoked these same feelings in me.

My dream is to utilize the media skills I have to support vulnerable people around the world and to accompany them in building better futures. At the beginning of March, I left Berlin, Germany, where I live and work as a journalist, to volunteer three months of my time with Video Volunteers’ (VV) IndiaUnheard program.  I just wanted to give from my time and my skills to this wonderful media development NGO. Five years ago, a Spanish filmmaker told me about VV and I always kept it in mind and I knew that one day, I would manage to go to India and take part in this great adventure.

Until now, it has been incredible. I took part in two-week training for the Community Correspondents (CCs) of Video Volunteers’ new program “IndiaUnheard”. We were in a small village, 30km from Ahmadabad, and met people from all over India: from rural areas and slums, be they Dalits, tribal, sexual or religious minority.

I can’t go into all their personal stories but let me try to describe some of them. One of the CCs is a transgender. He was born a female but knew he identified as a man. During his childhood, he was so abused at home that he tried to commit suicides many times. After leaving home and living on the streets, he met another person who identified as being transgender. Through this, he was finally able to realize he was not alone. I also met amazing women who championed women’s rights even after years of severe domestic violence. There was this particular Muslim woman who told us that this training was the first time in her entire life that she had not been forced to wear her hijab. I had the opportunity to work with all of them while creating scripts for their “profile videos” (for those who spoke English). Additionally, I filmed all the footage for the video profiles as well as videos during the training and when they were reporting. We, my boyfriend Javier (who has joined me in this great adventure and is creating the website for IndiaUnheard) and I, want to visit the CCs in their home communities in June when we will be travelling around the country for 20 days.

In Ahmadabad, I was also working with all the VV team members and we had a lot of fun. I love intercultural work and was quite moved during the training; I realized the chance that been given to be there, to meet these incredible people, the real India…With some of them, I have built steadfast friendships.

From all the footage of the training, I produced a promo film for the IndiaUnheard program which was published on the website a few days ago. We had a lot of discussions about the ways of doing this promo and everybody had different opinions and likes to debate about them. Thus, sometimes the work did not go as fast as I am used to when I work for mainstream media. But while editing, I learned more about using Final Cut Pro and doing some graphic effects. Here, I also learned about working for an NGO and with Indian colleagues. The VV team is also very helpful. When there is a stressful situation like the IndiaUnheard launch, they kept relax. Indian people are relaxed when under stress which is really different from most of the Western countries where I worked. In a stressful situation in the west, colleagues would start to become very unpleasant most of the times…

Throughout this experience so far, I am really enjoying myself and don’t feel like going back to work for mainstream media. In fact, I now want to continue to work for NGOs, foundations or institutions engaged in social change or in environmental issues and to create documentary films about their issues. Here I want to thank VV for all of this, for having given me the chance to realise my dream and more energy to continue in this way. Before coming to India, I read books about cultures and traditions in India. Most of the time, they just described the Indian culture as very traditional and patriarchal. I knew that the people from VV would be very open-minded and different from what was stated in the book. What I did not realise was that their passion for their work, their ideas and ways of seeing the world and just the way they are would be so innovative and would give so much hope for a better future and change for poor and marginalised people. Thanks also for this!

[Read more about Séverine Lenglet ]

Through a scholarship program, I, “TJ” Rampersaud, migrated for two years from the Land of Many Waters (Guyana, South America) to the City of Pearls (Hyderabad, Andhra Pradesh, India, Asia) – almost half way around the world. Now, I am at Video Volunteers’ office as an intern in Goa – “India’s Little Western Treasure”, as I like to refer to it. Goa is popularly known as the land of sand, sea and surf (very much like the Caribbean islands I know) but it also combines hills and forests, amazing flora and fauna and a diversity of cultures (which is a little like my Guyana).

Internship is a mandatory part of my masters program at the Department of Communication, Sarojini Naidu School of Arts and Communication, University of Hyderabad. With multiple possibilities for both paid and unpaid internships inside and outside of India at news agencies, public relations firms, production houses, etc., choosing somewhere to complete the 4 – 6 weeks out of class assessment was not very easy. All of the mentioned areas will help to strengthen what I have learned in the classroom over the past year. However, I am in Baga, Goa at the office of the non-governmental organization Video Volunteers, India – paradise…

How did I end up staying at a cottage, built into a hill, surrounded by trees, in Goa, as opposed to a prominent media house, or some other journalism related field in a major metropolitan? Two words: Developmental Communication. This is a new perspective on the communication discipline where communication and its related fields such as public relations, advertising and, definitely, journalism (newspaper, radio, television, internet) are used to foster development worldwide. This new field has definitely caught my interest as it is possible to combine many of my interests in one occupation: videos, photography, communications and, most importantly, development. For as long as I can recall, I have been a major supporter of giving opportunities to the marginalized, empowerment of the less fortunate and working towards the eradication of poverty.

Video Volunteers encompasses all of the above and so much more. The organization was built on the central premise of giving the voiceless a voice through video, a truly amazing concept. Video is a very powerful medium of communication.

So far, my internship has been good. I find myself in a relaxed atmosphere where communication is encouraged among all; it is peaceful yet vibrant. Just a few days into my internship and I feel like I have learned a lot already through the interaction with the Video Volunteers team here in Baga, regardless of where they are from: India, USA, Spain or France. As we say back home in Guyana, “yuh cyan wan guh ah crab dance and nah get mud…” – one cannot be in the presence of others and not get affected by their personalities. Therefore, I hope the rest of my days here take pattern from the previous few: work in a relaxed atmosphere where all are concerned with the betterment of society, inclusivity, communication and development.