Several people seem to think I’m nuts for self funding a trip to this Media Giraffe conference. But I need to feed the beast! This is a really good mix of media, techies and academia. But I still haven’t seen any large mammals, at least not any that look like any long-necked safari creatures…
Technorati Tags: citizenjournalism, mediagiraffe, mgp2006
I’m going with the kids session. It’s my top tip for hearing new and inspiring stuff.
Project Harmony takes kids from different cultures and gets them to work together on media projects, in this case high school kids from Vermont and from Jordan in the Middle East who worked with each other on exchange visits. They’ve produced ten two-minute videos on issues from domestic abuse to poverty and violence in the media.
From the mouths of babes:
- “Ninety per cent of [US] media is controlled by six media companies.”?- “It is our right to create and distribute our own stories.”
- “There are 30 million teenagers in the US. Should we let corporate media executives tell us what to think?”
- “Maybe we hide ourselves behind our possessions. Media tells teenagers what’s cool, but we shouldn’t let them control us.”?- “I though Jordan was a warzone or something. But stereotypes diminish through personal experience. Meeting each other and working together we have unveiled… the truth!
Bless ‘em.
Videos online at the project’s vlog. I have pics, but my phone keeps making my Mac crash when I try and connect to copy them off the memory stick. Will try and track down a cable tonight – does anyone here have a USB to mini USB cable?
Technorati Tags: citizenjournalism, mediagiraffe, mgp2006
A guy just walked up to me and said: “Is democracy in this room?”
Laughs. “Well I know it’s in every room, but…”
This is the session on how free media can sustain democracy. Staci’s up, explaining paidContent’s journey from Rafat’s London flat after he chose to go it alone to the heady heights of, well, that blow-out mixer in NYC the other night. Oh, and something about funding too. (That’s sarcasm, Americans.)
Anyway yes, it is possible.
Staci admits that she does blog in her pyjamas (it’s not just me then), that the site is the first thing she thinks about in the morning and the last thing she thinks about at night. And that she feels the site is like a neo-pet. “If I don’t keep feeding it, it will start squealing and die…”
Lord, this is heavy going. I wanted to post last night after dinner and the panel discussion (which finished at 10) but while copying some photos from my phone I realised I’d actually fallen asleep in front of my computer. (In my room that is, not dribbling into my curious dinner of mushroom-shaped potatoes. Did anyone else think they were weird?!)
I’ll finish that later. But things kicked off at 8am today, and now it’s 3.30 and I haven’t seen any daylight since 7.45. We are in a bunker – visual evidence here. They weren’t very into daylight in the sixties, were they?
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Nice pic! This is what happens when you have dinner with people, and wine… That’s Paul Bass, editor of newhavenindependent.org.
Also blogging this:
- Jarvis picks on old lady (Hope those ads are paying well Jeff – ouch…)
- Robert Washburn, Canadian journalism and tutor says opening session was messy
- Fellow PaidContenter Staci Kramer
- Steven Brant for The Huffington Post
- Benjamin Melançon on Narcosphere
Plus live streaming from each session and a live IRC channel. And we get little paper tickets to hand to the waiters at dinner; red for meat, blue for fish, green for vegetarian. How cute.
I’ll add to this later. People don’t seem to be tagging much so it’s hard to find stuff.
Update – I’ve got audio too so if I can compress the files properly and if the quality’s not too bad, I will post that too.
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Just sorting some Media Giraffe pics for this site and all the blander stuff on Flickr. I dunno why I feel I don’t want to share the best on Flickr, but I’m mean.
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I’m opting for the human story and choosing the Hurriance Katrina session. NOLA.com editor Jon Donley is speaking: “When we went into the bunker we were a newsroom and a website that had a big divide. We were like the geeky younger brother – they still thought of us as stealing their stuff and giving it away for free.” So when the power cut out, Donley was running two businesses from his laptop and print journalists were taking turns to blog in the hurricane bunker. (Praise be for laptops.)
“The new ecology there is that through this bonding experience and by forcing the paper online has made the Times-Picayume very appreciative of the power that we have. We’d been training our readers for years to send us information – the common people almost took the website out of our hands and almost invented uses for it. Rescue services were looking at our site to find out addresses of people that needed help.”
I haven’t heard much about the long-term clean up after Katrina but Donley said 60 per cent of New Orleans residents are still scattered around country…
Technorati Tags: citizenjournalism, mediagiraffe, mgp2006
So I went to a party on Friday (back in London, this is). Last minute thing – but Lily Allen only bloomin’ played! Seriously chuffed. Someone said it’s only the fifth gig she’s done or something but it must be more than that.
Some dinghole leant on the light switch half way through, and at one point her deej skipped a beat, but I didn’t care. It was the soundtrack to my Spring, in my step! I was yelling for her to play Knock ‘em out and then she did…
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“We are on the precipice of being able to communicate a much richer form of news,” said Tom Rosenstiel from the Project for Excellence in Journalism. “Don’t confuse the professional routines – the inverted pyramids etc – with the larger principles and purpose which aren’t going to change. Citizen journalists aspire to these things almost instinctively.”
More gems:
- In newsroom terms, a story might have five elements in print but online that could be 35 elements.?- “The idea that journalism should be truthful didn’t come down from Mount Journalism”.
- “Bloggers are traditional journalists’ best customers. They are civicly engaged and they want to talk about stuff.”
Jon Donley, editor of New Orleans news site NOLA.com defended the authenticity of citizen journalism. While him and the news team – and most of the official organisations that provided information during the hurricane – were hunkered down in hurricane bunkers. Meanwhile a reader was trying to hammer his way out of his attic in 150 mile-an-hour winds while his neighbour’s houses floated past – and sent 82 pictures to NOLA.com. “You don’t get a much better definition of journalism than that. We were going to those people that we supposedly look down on, getting their story and writing about it – as it that somehow gives it value.”
Any Eisman said in her role at the American University she’s really teaching citizens to become journalists. Students are wonderfully involved and hungry for information but need help navigating it – and added that BBC.com is the first source for news for them because they find it the most neutral. [Discuss…]
Josh Wilson of Newsdesk.org struck a chord – are we coming to the end of a golden era of blogging? “The next five years will see the commoditisation of blogging – incentives for bloggers to produce certain types of content like gig tickets if they write positive reviews.” And that makes me think of Scoopt’s recent monetise-your-blog thing… one of several initiatives to commercialise blog content, along with increasing commercial awareness of blogs as a marketing tool – so what is the cost of that?
How do you define journalism?
Helen Thomas: Seeking the truth and telling it. No-one goes into journalism to be loved.
Josh Wilson: Conversation has a lot to do with quality control and standards.
Chris Peck, Memphis Commercial Appeal: Helping people make sense of the work around them in a way that they can understand.
Jon Donley: Giving people the information they need to make democracy work. It’s not my job to impose my world view on them but to objectively gather data and educate people. This new era includes bring them into the process.
Chris Daly, Boston University: Irreducible core is finding out stuff that people don’t want you to know.
Amy Eisman: It’s our responsibility to make sure that a diversity of voices is part of the conversation.
Technorati Tags: blogging, citizenjournalism, mediagiraffe, newspapers
The American Press Institute’s Newspaper Next project helps news organisations move from being monolithic businesses to ones with a broader, more flexible business model. It’s a 13-month, $2.7 million initiative with seven ongoing projects, one of which is working with news giant Gannett to develop a flexible business model that can accommodate innovation and transition. Why isn’t there anything like this is the UK?
Innovate or die is too strong, said executive director Stephen Gray – it’s more like innovate or fade away.
He gave good Powerpoint on disruptive innovation: Using a chart that looked like it had been created by spiders pattering through an ink spill, he explained why big businesses are often slow to pick up on new innovations (cue anecdotes on Western Union rejecting Alexander Graham Bell’s crazy ‘telephone’ idea and AT&T pulling out of mobiles, albeit 110 years later…).
“Every dynamic in the business world tells you to respond to your upper end customers – the managers hear from the most demanding customers. But the blinders that you wear when you try and improve and existing product make it very hard to see the possibilities that exist below your customer set and below your profit margins.
“You have to sustain the core product as well as you can for as long as you can but at same time you have to invest in new products and solutions. Often even the disruptor doesn’t know what the solution is for – it takes time to work out what it is and how to make money from it.”
The approach here is really refreshing – it’s about challenging the fixed business mindset that restricts innovation, creative thinking and ultimately the growth of these businesses. In Richmond, Virginia, the Times-Dispatch had a readership of 370,000 in a population of 806,000. The focus is on incremental gains in that readership – but what about the majority of the population not using the newspaper? The typical growth potential is 54 per cent among a group of people that say they are too busy, not interested in traditional news and get their information from other sources. Gray said the focus should be on those reasons.
In its advertising market, the similar growth potential is much greater – a staggering 78 per cent in a field where those free online classifieds are making big in-roads into traditional newspaper revenues. That potential audience say ads are too expensive, too un-targeted, too cumbersome to post and ineffective in reaching audiences when they are most receptive.
“Your focus on what gets lost means you don’t notice what gets gained. You have the opportunity to expand your business and your advertiser base, but newspapers have to be willing to undergo the transformation in order to succeed. There’s a lot more to it beyond news.”
Technorati Tags: mediagiraffe, newspapers
Yes, my site is back up.?No, there wasn’t anything I could do to get it back up sooner.?Yes, my server spontaneously combusted.?No, I’m not happy at all. But c’est la bloomin’ vie.
I’m in the grand ole’ US of A, currently utilising the Soho NYC branch of my favourite international free wifi network (Apple stores) and heading off to Massachusetts in a bit for the Media Giraffe conference. Thanks to Vin Crosbie for the lift!
I’ll be blogging here and on MediaBistro’s Fishbowl blog… with plenty of time for more blogging and comment, etc, if anyone’s up for it. Drop me an email – jemima@ this domain.
Just had the best pancakes I’ve ever had at Jerry’s diner on Prince Street just up from the Apple store. Buttermilk pancakes with Maine blueberries and divine frozen cream with nutmeg. Out of this pancake lovin’ world. Wonder if that was Aunt Jemima pancake mix?
The last thing I fancied doing after my race was celebrating in front of the computer, so apologies for any tenterhooks you may have been on. I’ve done the Race for Life and I loved it!I started at the front but sensibly let the whippersnappers run past – and then overtook them down the road when they ran out of puff. I came about 25th out of 2,000 women and finished 3.3 miles in 27 minutes. That’s not too bad (considering I’m new to all this) but if I’d known I was so near the front I wouldn’t have taken it so easy! It’s a good distance to run because you have enough energy to sprint-ish some bits – like the last 100m over the finish line. She shoots – she scores.Eden was stunning. The whole thing was extremely well organised and it’s quite an emotional event.Most runners were there in memory of someone dead or dying and those names were written on our backs. Quite overwhelming to be surrounded by so many names; glimpses of all those horrific, heartbreaking stories just too familiar to us all now.This was for Joan Glass, Wilf Simms and also for Dad – a special message from me to him on Father’s Day and one I know he’d be proud of. Thank you very, very much for supporting me and helping me feel so much better. I’m going to keep on running.Video of me on YouTube at the start and at the end. Photos on Flickr? And you can see my sponsorship total and messages too.So that’s it! But if you ever fancy going for a run, let me know.
Technorati Tags: RaceForLife
