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.

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.

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.

Of late, I have been thinking a lot about the difference between an enthusiast,an expert and an evangelist.

I describe myself as a social media enthusiast and a mobile for change evangelist, but I’m increasingly being referred to as a “social media expert”, in news articles and elsewhere. 

Every time I am called an “expert”, I crack up. First, there seem to be more social media experts than any other type of experts and it doesn’t mean much to be called one. Second, the word “expert” presumes a certain gravitas that I don’t possess and refuse to assume. Third, I prefer not to be seen as an “expert”, because experts belong to the pre-internet era of newspapers quotes and television sound bytes and the future belongs to enthusiasts and evangelists. (By the way, even journalists want to be activists now.)

I asked my Twitter friends what they think about enthusiasts, experts and evangelists –

Gauravonomics: I’m writing a post about the differences between an enthusiast, an expert, and an evangelist. Any thoughts?

– and received lots of insightful responses –

@twitteratti: Enthusiast is interested. Expert is interested and knowledgeable. Evangelist is interested, knowledgeable, and shares.

On 6 December 2008, after 15-year-old student Alexandros Grigoropoulos died from a gunshot wound inflicted by a policeman, Epaminondas Korkoneas, after an altercation between a police patrol and a small group of youths in Athens, Greece erupted into violent riots that are still going on two weeks later (see Wikipedia, NowPublic, Mahalo, The Boston Globe Big Picture).

The riots have once again shown, just as they did during the 11/26 Mumbai terror attack, that legacy media often lags behind participatory media in crisis reporting. Andrew Liam (via Patrick Meier and Howard Rheingold), who was in Athens to attend the Global Forum for Media Development, quotes Greek columnist and TV commentator Pavlos Tsimas –

Thousands of people were in the street protesting the murder of a boy whose name they didn’t know. Established media have not yet reported the event. TV stations came in a little late. The next day the newspapers did not carry words of the event with the exception of some sports papers that carried the story due to late night printing.

However, the Greece riots have also exposed the scary underside of online citizen activism. It’s widely believed that the flash riots were organized largely by young people, using mobile phones and social networks.

The Computer Freedom and Privacy Conference, scheduled to be held in Washington DC in June 2009, is now accepting proposals for panels, workshop sessions, and other events (via Patrick Meier).

Suggested topics (that are of interest to me) include government transparency, online campaigning, social networks, citizen journalism, and media concentration.

Here are the submission guidelines and here is the submission page.

Last week, The Oakland Press announced the formation of The Oakland Press Institute for Citizen Journalism (via PSFK) –

We will be offering anyone who is interested — from high school students to retirees — instruction in news writing, videography, basics of reporting for news and sports, and still photography.

For those who complete the instruction, we offer the opportunity to get your work published online or in the print edition. In addition, others can work toward becoming members of our freelance stable of journalists.

As Jeff Jarvis says, these classes can become important two way learning opportunities where journalists teach citizens the process of producing news and learn about the new tools for producing news.

By the way, South Korea’s citizen journalism website Oh My News also runs a citizen journalism school outside Seoul.

It’s the season for predictions (see Peter Kim and Rajesh Jain) and here are my top 7 social media predictions for India for 2009 –

1. Citizen journalism will come into its own in India.

We saw a preview of the power of citizen journalism in the 11/26 Mumbai terror attack. We also saw that mainstream media is increasingly willing to integrate citizen journalism in its news coverage. News organizations are not only promoting citizen journalism platforms like IBN Live’s Citizen Journalist, but also engaging with platforms like Twitter (see @DNAIndia, @LiveMint, @BangaloreMirror, @IndiatimesNews). We will see a continuation of these trends in 2009. More news organizations will experiment with citizen journalism, both by creating citizen journalism platforms on their own websites and by actively tracking social media for stories and sources.

2. Social media will play an important role in the 2009 Indian general elections.