Nothing will work, but everything might

The Bloggers and Journos group of Social Media Charlotte held a mini-camp on the future of journalism Sunday at Amelie’s Bakery.

Meanwhile, Twitter and Youtube and Flickr were documenting the aftermath of the Iranian elections.

With that buzz in the background, journalists David Boraks and Dave Cohn spoke to the group about how they’re experimenting with new ways to report and pay for news. David Boraks runs DavidsonNews.net, a for-profit hyperlocal news site for the college town of Davidson, and Dave Cohn runs nonprofit Spot.Us, funded by a Knight Foundation News Challenge grant, which enables community-funded journalism one story at a time. David B. has used his many years of experience to bring traditional journalism values to his own community reporting via WordPress; Dave Cohn has been advocating for an end to the bloggers vs. journalists divide for several years.

Representative of those in the room at Amelie’s: Glenn Burkins of QCityMetro, a news site for African Americans in Charlotte, with many years of traditional newspaper experience, and contributors and founders of CLTBlog, a visual blogging and news collaboration site. Many of those with CLTBlog are new to journalism yet passionate about sharing information.

The strength of the meeting: The exchange of ideas and encouragement among people trying a variety of funding methods to share information with their communities. Dave Cohn was dialing in via Skype from the San Francisco area, but excluding his participation, everyone was local.

Charlotte has not been a media or startup hub like Seattle, San Francisco or New York, but somehow this meeting felt like a tipping point in local experiments in journalism. On a national level, the funding of journalism has been the focus of numerous discussions, blog posts and conferences, so much so that the phrase “future of journalism” has become a bit of an inside joke. What was remarkable about Suite 101 at Amelie’s on Sunday was that it was filled with local people working every day to figure out not the future of journalism, but the present of journalism, as David Boraks pointed out.

If it’s happening in Charlotte, I’ll bet it’s happening in similar communities across the country.

Like Matt Waite so elegantly said awhile back: “Build something or STFU.”

These folks listened.

And as Clay Shirky said about journalism back in March, “Nothing will work. But everything might.”

Further reading:
Paying for News.
J-Lab advice, worth repeating.
A New Deal for journalism.
Should we tax to pay for journalism?
How to keep eating and doing journalism

Free speech in a small, small world

Hondurans work on installing a sewer piper in Villa Soleada. Volunteers with Students Helping Honduras work on the project along with the Hondurans in a model similar to Habitat for Humanity.

My, how times have changed.

This site started in the fall of 2007 for a class at the University of North Carolina, “Global Implications of New Technologies,” taught by Deb Aikat. Many of the online tools we have now were available then.

But a recent personal experience brought home to me how quickly the world is adopting the new online tools, and how quickly the world is shrinking. And the experience reminded me how far we have to go in making sure everyone has freedom of speech and the information they need for informed decisions.

My daughter, studying international relations at the University of North Carolina, recently took a weeklong trip to Honduras with the nonprofit organization Students Helping Honduras. To keep up with that country’s news while she traveled, I used Twitter, Twitter search, and Google Language Tools (with a background in high-school French) to read real-time reports of Central American news.

I read of Andrés Rodríguez Torres, a 72-year-old Honduran journalist who was kidnapped, and who is yet to be found. I took great fascination in the use of a Twitter tag, #escandalogt, as nearby Guatemalans organized protests after the country’s president was accused of the murder of a lawyer, and then an IT worker was jailed for sending out tweets that appeared to protest the killing. I kept up with posts by Xeni Jardin, a co-editor of the website Boing Boing, as she traveled in Guatemala and followed the political unrest, and I found new people to follow with interests in Central America, from Peace Corps alumni to supporters of non-governmental organizations working to improve the lives of Hondurans.

My daughter returned to the United States before the recent 7.3 earthquake in Honduras. At least one friend of hers remained, and I continued to follow and share earthquake news on Twitter with others who still had interests in the area. The new Twitter aggregator, Breaking Tweets, covered the earthquake quickly. And Twitter search turned up raw video just hours after the quake.

The experience reminded me of the great volume of information as well as the great freedom of speech that journalists and citizens have in many places. And it reminded me of the great challenges to freedom of speech that journalists and citizens in other places still face.

But the desire to be heard is difficult to suppress, and new social-media tools are giving more citizens in other countries the means to broadcast their messages across the world, quickly.

We live in a time of momentous change, along with a shrinking of the globe. May it lead to safer, more open societies.

Photo credit: Sarah Acuff.

Want to help Honduras? Visit Students Helping Honduras.

Three women in technology for Ada Lovelace Day

Ada Lovelace Day is an international day of blogging to draw attention to women who are successful in technology.

Ada Lovelace was one of the world’s first computer programmers. She wrote programs for Charles Babbage’s analytical engine, a general-purpose computing machine. She also wrote the very first description of a computer and of software.

I’m lucky to have worked in a place where women in technology are not rare, though their contributions were perhaps little seen by the wider world. My Ada Lovelace Day pledge was to write about one woman who excels in technology. I found at least three who serve as role models for me, and now you.

So today, to acknowledge the great contributions women are making in technology, especially in traditional media, here’s a Q&A with three women I admire and hold as role models.

Jytte Nielsen

The three are Jytte Stavnsgaard Nielsen, a product manager with CCI Europe, a company that provides pagination and content management systems to newspapers; Salem Macknee, an IT worker at the Southeastern group of IT for McClatchy newspapers, based in Charlotte; and Jackie Gruber, regional infrastructure manager for the Southeastern IT group of McClatchy, also based in Charlotte. I used Facebook to share questions with them, and I’m publishing their answers mostly unedited.

How exactly did you get into this technology thing anyway?
Jytte: In the beginning of the 80’s I finalized my Master of Arts in Danish and French from The University of Århus. The normal next step would have been teaching at a college. But helas, not only were there no jobs to get, I was also a bit scared about getting into that career after trying it out for a couple of months at a college at the westcoast in Jutland. The people there were so buttoned up and seemed to lack any enthusiasm about their work.
But as I was not the only one in Denmark with a long education and no job I was lucky enough to get into a special course targeting exactly that group of people. This was an 8 month course at RECAU (The regional IT center of the University of Århus). We were 18 students: psychologists, social workers, research librarians, architects you name it… The course was a big success. We all had jobs and I have been working in IT ever since. My first jobs were in programming, but I quickly moved into supporting, installing, training, documenting, selling, doing proposals etc. In many years I did most of these at the same time. Currently my main function is product management.

Salem Macknee

Salem: I drifted into it at several jobs because I was one of those people who could figure out computer problems. People get used to asking you (in the help desk industry this is called peer-to-peer and is considered a wasteful and expensive way to provide computer help) and when the time comes for someone to be an official computer geek, your name comes up.
Jackie: I was in accounting for years and just had an aptitude for geek stuff. I like gadgets.

How big is (are) your monitors?
Jytte: I have one and it is not very big.
Salem: Um, 19 inches I think? I have two on my main machine at work and I always feel crippled with just one.
Jackie: Home 24 inch flat panel…Work 19 inch flat panel.

Do you know who Ada Lovelace is? Have you ever heard of her before?
Jytte: Wasn’t she the Worlds first programmer? I think she did a program for a weaving machine or something like that. She also had a programming language named after her: ADA. As far as I remember she also did a not-very-successful program that would predict race results.
Salem: nope!
Jackie: No…I should know but I do not.

Hardware or software?
Jytte: Software.
Salem: Software, definitely.
Jackie: Hardware.

Do you have to do tech. support for all your friends and relatives?
Jytte: No, they finally found out that I am hopeless. This doesn’t bother me at all as I read a very sensible article years ago about how women actually get the most out of technology because we let men deal with all the bothering technicalities and just use technology to help us do our ‘core’ work and pursue our main goals. Kind of having the use of a car but not needing to repair it.
Salem: Only my husband. My children and my parents are at least as tech-savvy as I am.
Jackie: YES!

Have you ever been in a tech. meeting and looked around and realized you were the only woman?
Jytte: Many times. I still am almost every day. I enjoy working with men so it does not bother me. I am also sometimes in meetings where we are only women. These are strangely different from mixed meetings. We often start with jokes and laughter, then quickly get down to business and then we are much more focused and efficient and agree easily on decisions and plans. This keeps surprising me. Another thing that is nice about women is that they most of the time actually carry out the tasks that they take on. Maybe I am being sexist now?
Salem: I may have been the only woman in some meetings, but I’m not sure I ever noticed. I’ve also been the only woman in other kinds of meetings, like a dinner of circulation directors, which was probably the most offensive crowd I ever had to endure.
Jackie: Often.

Mac or PC?
Jytte: PC
Salem: PC! Macs are SO visual. I’m a word person.
Jackie: PC

What new tech. thing are you learning?
Jytte: I want to learn more about photo manipulation. Mostly for private needs. I do art work in my spare time and I love to integrate old and new photos in my work.
Salem: I have handed off direct user support to a very talented team of people who do the floor support I used to do and understand our new editorial system much better than I do. My new role calls for deeper server skills, and as someone who has spent her whole tech career operating intuitively instead of taking classes to get certifications, I’m definitely feeling brain strain. So far I have managed to do most of what’s asked of me, but I’m breaking a sweat for sure, because my unix skills are all learned on the job and pretty superficial. Also, with the layoffs and cutbacks I find that when people are desperate for help, they still tend to turn to me because they know I’ll find them the help they need if I can’t provide it myself. And troubleshooting is still what I’m best at, so I do tend to let myself get sidetracked just for the joy of flexing those muscles again.
Jackie: Citrix

Would you suggest to your daughter(s) that they go into technology?
Jytte: Definitely. They are both very talented in this respect.
Salem: I’m glad my kids all grew up with technology and understand how to use it. I wouldn’t suggest they go into it as a profession because it changes so fast you need to really love it to keep up. But I know being tech-savvy will help them do whatever job they end up in. I’m just glad none of them inherited their father’s total bewilderment about computers.
Jackie: Yes.

What’s the hardest challenge you’ve faced in technical work?
Jytte: The hardest challenge is to get credibility.
Salem: It changes so fast and I’m not a live-breathe-eat-sleep geek; I am never just studying the newest scripting language for fun; I don’t track tech trends, I manage to keep up with my own little apps, but then I go home and have a life outside technology. So I had to accept a while back that the true geeks will always just be tolerating me as a necessary evil. (That is, someone who can bridge the gap between them and regular people.) Getting the help I need from them and not minding if they think I’m a moron is probably my biggest challenge. And being able to admit what I don’t know.
Jackie: People. (with a smiley emoticon).

To what do you credit your success? (I know for you, Salem: a magnetic field.)
Jytte: As I am working mostly with workflows I think it is a natural interest. When I started learning housecraft in school in my teens I found most of it extremely boring, as my mother already taught me how to cook, bake, clean, do laundry etc. But then we had a new teacher and she taught us how important it is to plan house work, menus, kitchen layout etc carefully not only to save time and raw material but also to save resources. We even calculated all meals in respect to nutrition and cost. Finally something that I could relate to.
Salem: 1. Being able to listen to a regular person and translate what they’re saying into tech language has been one of my top skills. Both sides get so frustrated over these language gaps.
2. Intuition plays a big part, and you need an analytical approach when troubleshooting; change one thing and try again, so you know which thing ends up working.
3. Having the kind of mind that enjoys puzzles. Computer programming is very much like solving a puzzle.
4. Defining success so that it matches my current circumstances!
Jackie: Dumb luck…seriously, I can geek speak in non-threatening terms.

What didn’t I ask that I should have?
Salem: I think it’s important to have a focus besides tech; the folks I work with all have a comfort zone — newsroom, production, circulation. Knowing how the newsroom works is a huge part of my being able to help them do their jobs. So don’t be a computer expert; have another profession on top of which your computer knowledge sits.

For more on Ada Lovelace Day, follow @findingada on Twitter.

Note: Images are provided by Jytte, Salem and Jackie. I might change or update them later.

How to keep eating and doing journalism

“When the going gets weird, the weird get going.turn pro.”
–Hunter S. Thompson

Rick Edmonds of Poynter has revisited the idea of government subsidies for journalism, concluding that he’d hate for the possibility “to get throttled with a dismissive, ‘There’s a reason we can’t do that.’”
In these weird times, funding alternatives aren’t so far-fetched. Ralph Whitehead of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst said in January that the market may be failing journalism:

“What may be emerging today, however, is a serious case of market failure that can’t be – and must not be – fixed by government intervention: the failure of the private sector to provide broadly inclusive journalism that is both comprehensive and reliable enough to meet the needs of a democracy.”

Now, four months later as classified revenue vanishes into thin air daily, it’s past time to broaden the debate. Not only are journalists losing their jobs in a wholesale way that can’t be ignored even as we try to focus on the positive; whole communities are losing their voices. Volunteer blogs can’t fill all the gaps.
Ed Wasserman, Knight professor of journalism ethics at Washington and Lee University, awhile back wrote about alternative funding ideas in The Miami Herald. His plan, micropayments for journalism, has some big holes. Read more about it here. And Leonard Witt down in Georgia has his own interesting, and perhaps more sustainable, ideas about how to pay for journalism, through community networks.
And then keep thinking broadly about solutions, for yourself, your colleagues and the industry, about other ways to eat while still providing information to others. Hope and work for A New Deal.

Mark up stuff for the thing

Matt Waite at Wired Journalists relayed a memorable quote from the recent Atlanta 3G conference, from Mitch Gelman, senior vice president and executive producer at CNN.com:

“We put stuff on the thing.”

In other words, it doesn’t matter what stuff, and it doesn’t matter what thing.
For the web, CSS enables that work with standards-based markup.
What if we did that for print media as well? Many news organizations have moved that way, with standard tags or markup to be shared eventually among different publications. Those tags are defined by function, not typography.
What if we took it to another level, with markup that said, “I want to do something here. I’m just not sure what, or I want it to be different in different places. I’ll use another tool or script to define that later.”
That’s what CSS can do, at places like CSS Zen Garden. Surely we can figure out a way to do that for print.

Of networks, soccer parents and representative journalism

“Network weaving is not just ‘networking’, nor schmoozing. Weaving brings people together for projects, initially small, so they can learn to collaborate. Through that collaboration they strengthen the community and increase the knowledge available in it.”
Valdis Krebs and June Holley

Leonard Witt down in Georgia has some interesting ideas about representative journalism. He’s worked out the money ideas of hiring professional journalists for small interest groups of 1,000 or so. The quote above is from a PDF paper linked at his site, explaining the role of a “network weaver.” He advances the idea that a weaver, or marketer, or community builder, is necessary to make connections among groups interested in particular information. He says that job enables the funding of high-quality journalism.

One example he uses: the long-established carpet-making community in Dalton, Ga. I can imagine another similar one: the BMW community of Upstate South Carolina. I searched around quickly to see if anyone was already there, and found a post on a national blog that validated what any soccer parent knows: The best news comes from the soccer sidelines. Confirming it, spreading it, reporting it in the online community facilitated by a weaver is the next step.

Should we tax to pay for journalism?

Ed Wasserman, Knight professor of journalism at Washington and Lee, wrote a column in The Miami Herald examining the ideas bubbling up on how to pay for journalism. He suggests one solution: A pay-as-you-go system with tiny fees for what you read online.
Problem is, information online these days has a tendency to escape from its original source, and new ways of reading and aggregating surface every week. Protecting one’s content from others online could require huge overhead (lawyers and money).

Wasserman also eyes longingly the idea of public subsidies or the BBC method of funding. He says:

“The knee-jerk notion that the First Amendment forbids public support rests on a misreading of our own history of media subsidies, from creation of the postal system to invention of the Internet. Mechanisms could be devised to make funding automatic — fees tacked onto Internet hookup charges, for instance, like the license fees on TV sets that British viewers pay to support their BBC — and insulate news producers from political meddling.”

That model has problems too, such as large BBC taxicab bills and a reluctance to open up the books to the public. Reminds me of the old stories about reporters who accumulated tons of parking tickets until the “bean counters” at work refused to pay for the tickets anymore.

Concerns about public funding don’t just include government meddling in the journalism, but rather the possibility that the journalism organizations could become more like parts of some governments: bloated, opaque and inefficient.

Update 1/12/08: Wasserman’s original column is no longer easily available online. So another quote from him, via Greg Lynch, to flesh out Wasserman’s idea:
“Maybe the solution isn’t to escape the market, but to empower it. Modern computing offers unparalleled capacities to track and calculate. Imagine a vast menu of news and commentary offered to you ad-free for pennies per item, the charges micro-billed, added up and presented like a utility bill at month’s end. The money that journalism providers got would depend on their audience.”

Filtering, networking and reverse publishing — in science

The 2008 N.C. Science Blogging Conference was last weekend. The conference highlighted amazing free information on the web, linked and shared through a variety of ways, including the conference’s wiki.

The conference has a heavy dose of participation from Science Blogs, supported in part by Seed magazine. The networked circle of science represents one new way of aggregating and filtering information beyond the traditional methods of big-company media sites. NYU media professor Jeff Jarvis has pointed to Glam for doing the same thing. I think Science Blogs serves as a better model for distributing, sifting and making findable strong content than sites like Glam. Ads play a supporting role, rather than being the goal.

And conference organizers are also demonstrating a new model of sharing strong content with “reverse publishing,” creating a downloadable or paperback book of the best science blog posts of 2007. You can read the background of how the idea came to be at Bora Zivkovic’s A Blog Around the Clock. The “publisher” of the compilation is Lulu, and the editors are Zivkovic and Reed Cartright, with input from the readers of Zivkovic’s blog.

More interesting links from the conference here.
A quick look at one of the science blogs for an earlier class assignment here.

Citizen reporting from Kenya

Ushahidi.com offers a simple, clean, visual map and gives people on the streets the ability to report from their cellphones on current conditions.
It’s a beautiful idea with broad applications for many kinds of geographically specific stories, from traffic updates in U.S. cities to election polling place information and crisis conditions in natural disasters. Ethan Zuckerman explains the project and gives background and broad thinking to how such technology can be used in other ways.

Zuckerman also links to a Jeff Jarvis blog posting from 2005 after Katrina, calling for people to convene, collaborate and use technology to share information and help those in need.
Jarvis said in September 2005: “This is about more than just technology and disasters. This is about technology and society, about empowering the people to run their lives and about how we in the web community can come together to help do that.”
H/T to Nancy White of Full Circle.

Making money and going local

Just a quick note flagging a new place for ideas on how to make money with journalism:
Journalism Enterprise, a spinoff of the Online Journalism Blog from the UK, has launched.
On its About page, it says it’s a shared blog that “reviews websites that are attempting to make money from journalism in the new media age. That may be a mainstream organisation launching a new media spin-off, an internet startup looking to make millions, a non-profit news venture, or an entrepreneur setting up a solo project. In short, if they’re trying to make money from journalism – or launching a journalism project – we’ll cover it.”
They do nonprofits too, and are seeking helpers. See details at the Online Journalism Blog from the UK.

So while I’m dumping links, check out a post by Mark Glaser at MediaShift updating local online news efforts. One of the most intriguing sites comes from the comments: RVA News, an aggregator of local blogs in the Richmond area.

One more order of business: The Center for Citizen Media has a comprehensive survey of online advertising tools, by Ryan McGrady. It almost serves as a how-to document.