CPUT Annual media conference tomorrow

The Cape Peninsula University of Technology is hosting its annual media conference from 8:30 tomorrow morning.  I will be speaking about citizen journalism and locative media, using the Mail & Guardian’s Thought Leader and The Grid as examples of how, on the one hand, mainstream media can incororate the productivity of its audience into its offering and, on the other, how location detection and social networking compliment user-generated content.  Charl Norman will be speaking about social networking, Melissa Attree will be talking about social media and branding, the uber-cool Jayne Morgan will be talking about podcasting and more.

Here is a map to the venue, the event is in room 2.58.

How newspapers and mobile media can work together but probably won’t

With MTN bringing up its location lookup service, and Vodacom’s already in place, it now means that media companies can deliver news targeted at a Personal Content Area based on the user’s actual location. Where personalisation has mostly gone un-used on the desktop web, I think people will be more likely to use a service that filters news based on their location.

For starters it will be more contextually relevant for classified ads like auto sales, personals and other information that is local in nature. If users can set the radius of their area even better.

Place and time are two of the most important pieces of meta-data associated with content because they directly relate to relevance, before personal interest and taste. As an example, someone may not be generally interested in crime news, except when it happens next door to them. They may not be interested in restaurant reviews, unless the restaurant is nearby.

The down-side is the cost of the location-lookup but generally speaking this cost can be offset against the increase in value of locative advertising. Not only does locative advertising offer the potential of much more relevant information, it expands the sellable inventory exponentially. Before, ads would be delivered ina single rotation queue, now a queue can exist for every suburb in the country and the inventory can be sold in smaller volumes to smaller businesses who would previously have used the Yellow Pages or small but very local newspapers.

The question then is: what type of company is best suited to leverage this potential successfully. The answer is a conglomeration of smaller news providers who already provide local news and have the sales infrastructure to deal with smaller advertisers who need to reach an areas with a radius of 20km or less. The national newspapers are at an immediate disadvantage because their sales teams aren’t scalable enough or geared for many smaller incentives to sell. And, of course, they don’t produce enough local content to service the entire country.

A solution to the content problem could be localised citizen journalism but, again, this will require a massively scalable editorial team to gatekeep. It’s not impossible though, it just requires some money and faith in the model, or a proper business plan. In my experience a business plan like that is unlikely to emanate from a newspaper, and even less likely to get board approval because there are too many risks and it detracts from the core business which is still, sadly for many, selling paper.

Anyone have a strong opinion on this? I’d love to know what you think.

Dear citizen journalists, this is your chance

With all the talk about the major storm warning on Joburg today at 5PM, I think it’s only appropriate that we take full advantage of the prior knowledge of a major news event. If there is a tornado [there won't be, but just in case], please will someone take a photo of it or some video and submit it on our News In Photos web site – assuming you can do this without endangering your own life. If, however, you decide that this is how you are going to exit the level, please make sure we get hi-def footage from the eye as you swirl around with sheep and corrugated iron, a personal message at the top of your voice would be great too.

Citizen Journalism of the UK floods? Really?

Nic and I are about to start an argument that will last for weeks if not months or years. Here is Nic’s argument in his post Citizen Journalism floods in:

1. Isn’t it great we can all record our own videos?
2. Isn’t it wonderful that we can send them to Sky News?
3. Wow citizen journalism is COOOL!!!

Right, so now let’s take a look at the “citizen journalism” going on in the UK about the flooding.

1. People are sending video and pictures to the mainstream media. Given that these submissions are being selected and filtered by the media they do not qualify as citizen journalism, it is user-generated content. Is this an alternative voice to the mainstream media? No
2. But what about the bloggers? The front page of Technorati does not mention the word flood once. Not once. One can argue that those affected directly don’t have access to power but the rest of the population do. The Flood tag is equally unhelpful.
3. Next stop: Google blog search. Searching for UK floodds for posts in the past week we get 4,690 results. Not bad considering that if each post were written by a different person, and they all lived in the UK, that would account for 0.007817% of the population who thought it appropriate to blog about the topic this week. Go citizens.

Now let’s give some thought to the definition of “citizen” journalism in this context. The entry criteria for the Nokia Citizen Journalism Awards state:

The entrant or nominee must not be working as a freelance journalist or a journalistic employee for any media/publishing/broadcast or online news organisation.

The entrant’s/nominee’s picture/footage must have been published/used in a recognised magazine, newspaper, broadcast service, self-published blog, citizen journalism website, photo-sharing website or internet news service company…

So what can we glean from this fairly common definition? That citizen journalism means media recorded by people who are not journalists, regardless of where and how the results are published.

What somehow seems to be lacking in this definition is the earlier sense of destabilizing the mainstream media or providing an alternative voice. The promise of citizen journalism was that it would show up inaccurate reporting [presumably by being more accurate than a journalist] and would deliver quicker and faster than the mainstream media. I think what a lot of people have realized is that this happens on the rarest occasions and the combative edge has been dropped in favour of a more pro-MSM style of co-operation.

But does that even describe it? No – what actually happened is this:

1. Ordinary people realised they could record their own media with the devices they acrry around with them
2. Some academics and angry journalists saw the potential to challenge the traditional media through a tidal wave of journalism created for the people, by the people
3. The people never gave a rat’s ass about up-ending the traditional media. In fact all they wanted was to be on it.
4. The media, who do a good job 99% of the time caught on to this and realised two things:
   1. Hey, we can suddenly get a ton of content we previously would have had to pay for – great!
   2. By making everything on our web site “social” we can effectively double our traffic and increase our ad revenues accordingly
5. So the media embraced this trend under the guise of democratising their processes. In fact hardly any traditional media companies have seen much impact on their core editorial processes – you know, the ones the citizen journalism pundits originally took issue with
6. Now the media get lots of user-generated content, reap the financial rewards and the citizens get their minute of fame.
7. And from the perspective of the citizen, this is a good deal because they are doing this as a hobby or for the saturation of their egos, not because secretly they wish they were journalists.

Here are some links to photos and videos of the floods:

Photos on Scoopt.com
Photos on Flickr.com
Videos on Youtube

Google Map mashup of South African snow photos by citizen journalists

We have just created a Google Map of the snow photos we are publishing on our News In Photos web site.

Citizen journalism at work as snow covers South Africa

I didn’t think today was going to be very interesting as I wiped a sheet of ice off my windscreen, I just figured it was going to be damn cold.

When I got into the office there was a buzz – Riaan Wolmarans, our online editor, was excited about our News in Photos site. For the first time since the launch of the site, citizens are rallying around a topic – snow across most of the country. In the hour or so since its been live its had more that two thousand views and some of the pics being sent in are very creative. People are writing messages in the snow and sending in the pics. i love it.

Have a look at the photo gallery of citizen submissions, submit a photo or email a photo.

Virginia Tech shootings coverage shows how citizen journalism and traditonal media can work together

I have been watching the live CNN coverage of the shooting at Virginia Tech today and the video shot on a cellphone showing basically nothing except the sounds of the shooting.  This is, however, a good example of how the mainstream media and citizen journalists (i.e. eyewitness with cellphones) can work together and compliment each other.

The it occurred to me that there must be hundreds of students blogging about their experiences this morning so shot over to Technorati to read the really raw stuff.  Bryce’s Journal really stood out for me, mainly due to the massive number of incoming links.

So this is a prime example of how the tricky relationship between the media and the citizens can work well.  Here’s what a reader/viewer should do:

1. If the traditional media knew an event was going to happen, go there first
2. If they didn’t, go to Technorati, then Youtube, then Flickr
3. After 3 hours of searching and browsing, go back to the traditional media because thy mostly likely have an analysis package put together, a few eye-witness accounts and some experts
4. After about the 2nd hour that will begin looping, so go back to the blogosphere and spend some time there
5. Repeat every 2 hours

What you will find, from this type of media consumption, is that you will gain a depth of perspective that allows you to understand which parts of both types of coverage to ignore, or analyse in terms of its intentions rather than its content.  I expect that the Virgina Tech story is going to be one of the most blogged about events this year and the Technorati tag is going to be the base for many many people keeping an eye on it.  Also watch the Google BlogSearch results.

MyVideo.co.za offers R1000 for the best vidizen journalism

MyVideo.co.za are putting up R1000 for the best piece of video citizen journalism, shot on a camcorder or cellphone. Their press page says, rather boldly:

The media has talked up the rise of the citizen journalist considerably over the last few months and social media is most certainly one of the favourite flavours of the month on communications and marketing sites and blogs.

But no one has put their money where their mouth is in terms of encouraging consumer journalism – until now.

Not to be critical but this isn’t really true – reporter.co.za has been paying citizen journalists for over a year now and, at R10 a story, I’m sure they have spent more than R1000 over that period.

The email press release, on the other hand, is titled “SA website first to pay public for news content“, which is also patently bullshit, but probably not to ordinary journalists who don’t follow the social media scene.

But that aside, I would like to encourage everyone not to panic about the odious-sounding legalese at the bottom of the press page:

2. The mere physical act or acts associated with sending by or on behalf of the assigner (including the author or agent) of a cinematograph film to MyVideo shall be deemed to represent an offer of assignment of copyright for a price of R1000 (one thousand rand), and a non-exclusive license to publish and use the cinematograph film in its discretion subject to the right of revocation on one calendar month’s written notice.

What this means, in plain English, is that by submitting your video you’re offering to sell it to them. If they choose to buy it for R1000 you win.

Think about it – R1000 for a cell-phone video that you would ordinarily have deleted is a good deal, let them have the copyright dammit.

A few things are unlear from both the site and the press release:

1. When does the competion close?
2. What happens to the submitted videos that aren’t chosen?

I’m sure these will all be answered in due course and I think its a great way to incentivise people to do journalism for money, even though that sort of takes away the citizen element.

Citizen journalism photo makes it onto front page of the M&G Online

Congrats to Miriam Mannak for her photos of the fires on Signal Hill this weekend. She submitted her photos in the reader pics section of the News In Photos and one of them was used on the Mail & Guardian home page this morning. Click here to see a screenshot of the home page with her photo on it.

Fidentia scandal sparks an excellent case study in social media on Moneyweb

Moneyweb, one of South Africa’s busiest financial news sites, has recently been redeveloped from the ground up and has also been the site of an amazing social media interaction between the journalists and the audience as the Fidentia scandal broke. I interviewed Hilton Tarrant, the Moneyweb production editor, this morning and it makes for some interesting reading.