Gauravonomics Blog

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I’m a big believer in the power of participatory media, and believe that citizen journalism and citizen activism will play an increasingly important role in business, development and government.

However, even for a die hard enthusiast like me, it’s almost impossible to ignore the reality that participatory news media has an interesting two way dynamics with legacy news media. Participatory news media (still) derives most of its legitimacy from legacy news media, even as it progressively hacks away at the power of legacy news media.

Consider this. Legacy news media — newspapers, television channels, and wire agencies — are still doing most of the first hand journalistic reporting. Bloggers, at best, have taken some stories that were “under-reported” in legacy news media and amplified them, sometimes through background research, so that legacy news media is forced to pay attention to them. This is especially true of online citizen activism.

Even in cases where bloggers have committed “acts of journalism”, and broken stories from a developing crisis scene, often in the form of photos or videos, such acts of journalism have relied on lagacy news media to reach the mainstream.

Greory Lent and I don’t always agree and the subject of citizen journalism in the 11/26 Mumbai terror attack has always been a source of disagreement between us.

If tweets could trample, my god. People proud of themselves acting as “citizen journalists” twittering the uninformed rubbish of tv newsreaders to the waiting world as if it were gospel truth. And then “shouting” (ok, twittering) at other “citizen journalists” about how they had it all wrong. If you were reading that #mumbai thread you could not avoid a headache, and the certain knowledge that nobody knew what the hell they were talking about.

A month later, what do we have? Scholarly papers on the birth of “citizen journalism” in India. God save us from “citizen journalists” and the academics who extol them.

Yes, there was noise in #mumbai but there was signal too, for those who knew how to separate signal from noise.

You could follow specific Twitter users who were curating the #mumbai Twitterstream. You could filter the #mumbai feed so that you only saw tweets from users who lived in Mumbai, or tweets that contained a link. If you tried to follow the unfiltered #mumbai Twitterstream, it’s not surprising that you ended up with a headache.

Bree Nordenson in The Columbia Journalism Review talks about how the abundance of information on the Internet has shortened attention spans, reduced the chances of serendipitous exposure to public affairs news and analysis, and led to a “my news, my world” echo-chamber –

Markus Prior writes in his book, Post-Broadcast Democracy: How Media Choice Increases Inequality in Political Involvement and Polarizes Elections, “Political information in the current media environment comes mostly to those who want it.” In other words, in our supersaturated media environment, serendipitous exposure to political-affairs content is far less common than it used to be. Passive news consumers are less informed and less likely to become informed than ever before.

Our access to digital information, as well as our ability to instantly publish, share, and improve upon it at negligible cost, hold extraordinary promise for realizing the democratic ideals of journalism. Yet as we’ve seen, many news consumers are unable or unwilling to navigate what Michael Delli Carpini (dean of the Annenberg School for Communication) refers to as the “chaotic and gateless information environment that we live in today.”

Ashish Bagga, CEO of Living Media India Ltd., predicts difficult times for the Indian print industry in 2009 (LiveMint via Rajesh Lalwani) –

- Advertising revenue (Rs. 11100 cr. in 2008) will grow by no more than 10% in 2009 due to overall cuts in the marketing budget and the shifting of marketing budgets to digital media.

- Circulation will decrease (from 169 million in 2008) and so will the number of pages, but cover prices will increase in a bid to replace advertising revenue with subscription revenue (Rs. 5850 cr. in 2008).

- Both the number of employees as well as the cost of employment will be scrutinized. Rajesh believes that this will open up an opportunity for Indian bloggers to syndicate their content to newspapers (I disagree).

I was recently asked to comment on citizen journalism trends in India. Here are some quick thoughts.

BACKGROUND:

Citizen journalism is news created by amateur reporters who were previously seen as audiences, viewers or readers. The roots of citizen journalism lie in the self-printed pamphlets that were distributed on the street-side. However, by enabling everyone to report news without the permission of gatekeepers like news organizations or editors, social media has democratized journalism and enriched it by bringing in a diversity of views and voices to it.

There are four aspects of citizen journalism. Do note that when I say blogging, I mean it in the broadest sense, including photo-blogging (on sites like Flickr), video-blogging (on sites like YouTube) and micro-blogging (on sites like Twitter).

1. News blogging: Re-blogging, commenting on, giving context on, or curating news that is often reported in traditional media. WATBlog and Pluggd.in, for instance, curate news on the IT/ Telecom/ Media industry in India.

2. Local blogging: Blogging about local news that is not usually reported in traditional media. For instance, the Metroblogging network, which has chapters in Mumbai , Chennai , Bangalore and Hyderabad, is focused on covering local city news.

I was recently asked to comment on the similarities and differences between Indian and Chinese social media users. Here are some quick thoughts.

Out of the next billion Internet users (and the next billion mobile users), a substantial number will come from emerging economies like India and China, which are also the two most populous countries in the world. Therefore, to understand the future of new media, it’s important to understand how new media is being used in India and China.

China and India are similar in several ways. In both countries, Internet penetration is low and Internet access is often shared. In both countries, mobile penetration is much deeper than Internet penetration and mobile phones are the only personal communications device for most people. Neither country has led the world in Internet or mobile innovation, but both countries have been quick to adopt international innovations into local clones. Internet users in both India and China have large social circles both online and offline and are heavy users of social media, possibly because of a strong early adopter bias. Both countries have vibrant blogging communities which have played a leading role in covering natural disasters, like the 2004 South East Asia Tsunami, the 2008 China earthquake and the 2008 Mumbai terrorist attack. Both the Chinese and the Indian Internet communities have flirted with online activism but struggled to use social media for social change in any meaningful way.

Earlier today, I had suggested that Global Voices and Desipundit lead the effort to create a ‘State of the Indian Blogosphere 2009‘ collaborative report. Going by the positive reaction to the idea, it seems that the report will happen in one form or another.

To start things off, here is a list of the top five newsworthy events in the Indian blogosphere in 2008 –

1. Citizen journalism played an important role in covering the 11/26 Mumbai terror attack.

Citizen journalism came to age in India during the 11/26 Mumbai terror attack.

Several bloggers posted first hand updates during the three day crisis (Amit Varma, Sonia Faleiro, Rahul Bhatia, Arun Shanbhag), several others live-blogged reactions on legacy media news, and some of us played the role of curators (Global Voices, DesiPundit, Mumbai Help, Dina Mehta, Gauravonomics).

Almost a month after the Mumbai terror attack, Indian bloggers continue to discuss the tragedy and many observers believe that this engagement will continue till the 2009 Indian general elections.

2. Corporate blogging and, even CEO blogging, made a tentative start in India.

Douglas MacMillan in BusinessWeek highlights the trend of online news websites relying on donations from their users to fund part of their costs –

So, if online advertising can’t save the media any time soon, what will? A growing number of entrepreneurs and journalism advocates around the country are experimenting with a new type of business model for news: community-funded online journalism.

Organized around a group of readers bound by location or an area of interest, these new web sites solicit donations to pay for the work of professional journalists. While the collection plate is small, and in most cases the sites are relying on supplemental funding from advertising, grants, or other institutional donations, their founders say that readers who help underwrite the news become engaged in the process of reporting and storytelling in meaningful ways.

Spot.us (sponsor-a-story), Locally Grown (sponsor-a-reporter) and MinnPost are all interesting models of how a combination of grants from foundations and donations from users can support journalism that is relevant to local communities.

My favorite news website, however, is Global Voices, which curates user generated content from around the world via a network of more than 150 active volunteer authors and translators and more than 20 freelance part-time regional and language editors.

Here’s a great video from Ethan Zuckerman’s talk at MIT on how to find something that you aren’t looking for –

Apart from his usual talking points on serendipity, homophily, xenophilia and cultural bridging, he talks about the importance of editors by highlighting an important difference between the NYT paper edition and the NYT online edition. The front page of the NYT newspaper has 25 links, whereas the front page of the NYT online edition has 350-400 links. In the paper edition, the editor tells you to look at interesting news. In the online edition, he trusts you to find interesting news. As a result, we are less likely to look at things we aren’t looking for. That’s something to think about.

Also see: Ethan Zuckerman’s interview at The Christian Science Monitor.

James Surowiecki argues in The New Yorker that the dichotomy of higher popularity and lower profits in the newspaper industry can’t continue indefinitely –

The peculiar fact about the current crisis is that even as big papers have become less profitable they’ve arguably become more popular. People don’t use the Times less than they did a decade ago. They use it more. The difference is that today they don’t have to pay for it…

For a while now, readers have had the best of both worlds: all the benefits of the old, high-profit regime—intensive reporting, experienced editors, and so on—and the low costs of the new one. But that situation can’t last. Soon enough, we’re going to start getting what we pay for, and we may find out just how little that is.

Matthew Yglesias at Think Progress points to Felix Salmon’s post in Portfolio and agrees that “the problem newspapers are having with online isn’t that the readers won’t pay, it’s that the advertisers won’t pay” –