by Julie Posetti, May 27, 2009

Twitter became big news once journalists realized its power as a tool for breaking stories during the Mumbai Massacre in 2008. In the aftermath of the micro-blogging platform hitting the headlines, there was an explosion of professional journalists in the Twittersphere. This growth has been fueled by increasing mainstream awareness of the importance of social media to the future of a crisis-ridden industry and the elevation of Twitter as a platform for news dissemination, citizen journalism and audience interaction.

So, how are journalists using Twitter? How is the service changing traditional reporting practices and what (if any) are the rules of engagement with the platform for professional journalists? I interviewed 25 of the journalists I follow on Twitter (most of them Australian with a smattering of South African and U.S. respondents) to find out first-hand.

This is the first installment in a two-part MediaShift series on the theme of journalists and Twitter.

Twitter-mania

Black Saturday (Pic. courtesy News Ltd)

In Australia, where journalists are literally in a Twittering frenzy, the platform was incorporated into mainstream news coverage of the Black Saturday bushfires which devastated the southern state of Victoria in February. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), where I used to work, pioneered the use of the technology during the disaster with impressive results.

And last week, during violent storms and flooding in the states of Queensland and New South Wales (NSW), it was evident how embedded Twitter had become as a component of ABC radio’s breaking news coverage. Reporters from remote regions through to network stars and even the corporation’s Managing Director are Tweeting their way into unprecedented public engagement. As Leigh Sales, anchor of the respected nightly news program Lateline, told me: “I’m giving Twitter a red hot go.”

But as I watched my Twitter-feed flood with news of the deadly storms, I saw something else racing up the trending topics chart: the London industry gathering #media140 called to discuss the role of Twitter in breaking news. Inevitably, the debate canvassed the views of resistors and detractors who argued “Twitter isn’t journalism.” Sound familiar to veterans of the great blogging vs. journalism debate? Of course Twitter isn’t journalism, it’s a platform like radio or TV but with unfettered interactivity. However, the act of tweeting can be as journalistic as the act of headline writing. Similarly, the platform can be used for real-time reporting by professional journalists in a manner as kosher as a broadcast news live report.

Evidence of resistance was also broadcast in Australia this month on the national ABC radio program Life Matters. In an episode devoted to the impact of social media, host Richard Aedy declared himself a skeptic and said he didn’t see the point of platforms like Twitter. He found some support within his audience — an older, educated, affluent crowd (disclaimer: I’m a regular listener!). But many called the program to describe how social media such as Twitter could be useful social connectors and information sources. While one of his guests plugged the virtues of Twitter, another, respected veteran science broadcaster Robin Williams ridiculed the platform, proudly telling listeners he was very connected and yet didn’t even have a mobile phone.

However, the producers invited lillsteners to participate in the discussion via Twitter and the experiment was a success. Twitter users — some of whom had never previously heard the program — tweeted their way through it, posting hundreds of comments and making an impression on the skeptical host. I was invited to appear on the next edition of the program to discuss the Twitter political reporting experiment I conducted last September with my students and the emerging role of Twitter in journalism. By that stage, there was less “But isn’t it just inane public belly-gazing” and more “It strikes me this is a little like citizen journalism,” which was good to hear as the program’s weekly talkback sessions are a natural bridge to social media enhancement and potentially a younger, expanded audience.

Nevertheless, Twitter (in conjunction with other social media platforms) is changing journalism and these changes need to be carefully scrutinized with open minds.

How do journalists identify themselves on Twitter?

Most of the journalists I interviewed tweet openly, acknowledging their professional identity and real name in their personal Twitter page biographies, even if they use an online nickname. Only one locked his account, meaning he had to approve potential followers before they would be able to view his tweets. However, several deliberately withheld the name of their employer to avoid perceived conflicts of interest.

But the themes of trust and credibility, honesty and transparency came up constantly as significant features of successful social media engagement and most of the journalists I interviewed had connected the dots.

“Because I use Twitter to source content (and) find news tips, I think it’s best to be open about where I’m coming from,” said Gary Kemble, the ABC’s Online Opinion Editor. He’s also responsible for the broadcaster’s @abcnews and @articulate Twitter feeds.

The ABC’s national youth affairs correspondent, Michael Turtle agreed.

“I think the very nature of Twitter lends itself towards having an open profile and being honest about who you are,” he said. “The power of the site is the ability to connect directly with people and engage in conversations. It wouldn’t be nearly as effective if you chose to do that anonymously.”

When asked why he tweeted openly, John Grey, online editor of the Murdoch-owned Brisbane Courier Mail, said: “Call me wacky, call me weird, but I think people are more likely to have an interactive relationship with a human rather than a bot.”

Freelance journalist Rachel Hills acknowledged her upfront tweeting as being consistent with the need for interactivity between the reporter and the audience in the digital age.

“I have adopted this relatively open approach because I view the future of media (or at least the kind of ideas and issues based work that I do as a freelancer) as being about hosting and facilitating conversations — interacting with the people who care about the work that you do is vital,” she said.

However, ABC Adelaide news reader and producer, Jacqui Munn reflected the caution that some journalists feel about the merger of the private and the public that occurs in social media spaces like the Twittersphere. She switched from tweeting openly to anonymously once her journalistic identity was revealed.

“I wasn’t looking to use it to communicate as a journalist and didn’t feel comfortable being judged professionally for just shooting the breeze with friends and other somewhat anonymous acquaintances,” Munn said.

How are journalists using Twitter?

Professional journalists are using Twitter to enhance and augment traditional reporting practices. It’s another tool in their kit and many journalists, like ABC radio producer Andrew Davies, are now logged onto Twitter throughout their working day.

“I try and start my day by looking at what people are saying (and) talking about on Twitter,” he said, “I love being able to read all the fantastic links to interesting websites, ideas (and) news that people have sent out.”

Reporters I interviewed are using the platform to “broadcast” links to content they or their news outlet have produced in an effort to build a new audience. Some also contribute to or manage organizational Twitter accounts on behalf of their employers. A few use it as a live reporting platform and some employ applications to share images, audio and links to other online content they find interesting. Many are using it to crowdsource contacts, story angles, background and case studies. In fact, when I began researching this story, my first move was to tweet a request for journalists to respond to questions about why they were on Twitter and how they used the platform. I received useful feedback and uncovered a number of new contacts via this method before conducting more extensive online interviews.

The ABC’s Michael Turtle uses Twitter regularly to monitor public debate which he acknowledges influences his storytelling.

“It sometimes helps to use Twitter to gauge opinion on an issue,” Turtle said. “You would certainly never claim the views online are representative, or seek to pass off a collection of tweets as an accurate poll. But it can point you in the direction of certain views, which can help guide some of the questions you might ask or angles you might follow-up.”

Most journalists I interviewed monitor the feeds of sources on their beats as an adjunct to website and email accounts. They check their competition and try to keep up to date with hot industry issues. For some, it’s replaced their RSS news feeds and for others it’s a way of networking with peers and developing mentors. It’s the end-of-day bar debriefing and a reporting tool rolled into one.

Journalists Marketing Themselves

As journalism and entertainment continue to merge, and reporters increasingly become media personalities, image conscious journalists are gaining awareness of Twitter’s power as a branding and marketing tool. This is paramount in the mind of the ABC’s Leigh Sales who has developed an Australian Twittersphere cult-following with a unique blend of news and wit. She says the jury is still out on the real value of Twitter to her.

“It’s hard to see the application for me, given that I only have 1,000 or so followers, yet my program rates around 300k.” But she pointed to the potential value of such a following in marketing her books.

@leighsales ABC Lateline host

However, journalists are also beginning to see the value in using Twitter to interact with their audiences, recognizing the inevitable breakdown of old media strictures that separated news producers and receivers and reinforced a top-down approach to media consumption.

“Like other broadcasters and newspapers, we use Twitter to alert others to new stories and to invite feedback — but we don’t believe it should stop there,” observed Sky News) Australia deputy director of digital news John Bergin). “Our strategy doesn’t think of the viewer ‘out there’ spatially and conceptually. One of the most interesting things about Twitter is that there is no strictly defined audience. Every participant has the same tools to articulate his or her point, to frame an issue, to set an agenda. The space between news producer and news consumer has collapsed. We try to use Twitter as a means of inviting them into the newsroom, asking them what they think, what questions they would like us to ask our guests, and so forth.”

Subverting PR and Getting Jobs

Some journalists also reported using Twitter as a means of subverting the increasingly dominant modern PR machine. They said it allowed them to quickly go beyond press releases and official sources, like lobby groups and politicians, by interacting with followers who provided alternative perspectives, useful background and sometimes crucial facts in a story.

Finally, the journalists I interviewed mentioned the role of Twitter as a sort of media job agency. The Sydney Star Observer’s Harley Dennett highlighted the value of networking with senior journalists and editors at major Australian publications on Twitter.

“I comment on news of the day hoping potential future employers will notice how witty and informed I am,” he said.

This strategy worked for one U.S. college graduate. After initially failing to make an impression via email, Ashley Reynolds direct-messaged via Twitter the News Director at WYMT TV (http://www.wkyt.com/wymtnews) in Hazard, Kentucky. It worked. He replied via Twitter, set up an interview and she’s about to start work as a reporter on his news team.

“As far as I know, I’m the only one who contacted him through Twitter, so I really stood out,” she said. “With direct message you have to sell yourself in 140 characters. So in order to sell myself I had to be short, sharp, and simple.”

Breaking news in Twitter

Harley Dennett responds to an interview request via Twitter

In addition to using Twitter to monitor breaking news — like a mini wire service with public participation — and for the dissemination of breaking news, the ABC has also assigned reporters to live-tweet events, such as the Queensland state election this March.

Other reporters interviewed pointed to the value of Twitter search — a function which allows users to search on specific terms or phrases which are often grouped by relevant hashtags — to easily monitor community reporting of major breaking news. They also pointed to recent moves by public officials to release news via Twitter ahead of issuing press releases or staging media conferences. This means Twitter is being used not only as a place to cover and monitor breaking news, but also a place for sources to break news.

But the public is less likely to trust news broken on Twitter than that which is delivered via traditional news outlets according to Harley Dennett, who says audiences still attach credibility to detail as he discovered when he broke a story on Twitter recently about the closure of the Federal Magistrate’s Court in Sydney.

“Sometimes people don’t believe me when I reveal something on Twitter before the full story, with supporting quotes and documentation, comes out in print or online,” he said. “It’s hard to prove something in 140 characters when there’s nothing to link.”

Journalists would be wise to exercise similar caution, as two stories from Sydney this past fortnight demonstrate. In the first instance, a journalist writing for the online publication Crikey attacked Sydney Morning Herald technology reporter, Asher Moses (who did not respond to a request for an interview) for inappropriate tweeting. Crikey was later forced to apologize when it was revealed that some of the offending tweets actually came from a fake Twitter account.

In the second incident, it was revealed that a marketing company had been tweeting under the guise of the NSW Police Service about policies and crime in a social media experiment inspired by Barack Obama’s use of Twitter in his 2008 U.S. presidential campaign. The @nswpolice Twitter account had attracted 2,000 followers and forced a disgruntled police media unit to tweet under another handle before Twitter shut down the imposter site.

In the next installment of this two part series on journalists’ engagement with Twitter, I’ll look at the implications of the clash between the personal and the public in the Twittersphere along with the regulation of reporters’ tweeting by their employers and the ways in which Twitter is altering traditional practice. I’ll also provide a list of tips for journalists starting out on Twitter, crowdsourced from those already active in the space.

Julie Posetti is an award winning journalist and journalism academic who lectures in radio and television reporting at the University of Canberra, Australia. She’s been a national political correspondent, a regional news editor, a TV documentary reporter and presenter on radio and television with the Australian national broadcaster, the ABC. Her academic research centers on talk radio, public broadcasting, political reporting and broadcast coverage of Muslims post-9/11. She blogs at J-Scribe and you can follow her on Twitter

by Mark Hannah, February 5, 2009

In times of crisis, communications professionals have an important — and increasingly complicated — role to play. We used to be the first to offer public responses to catastrophes, able to develop elucidating messages before much of the news media was on the scene. Nowadays, the type of media that will report on a crisis is often as unforeseen as the crisis itself. When Chesley Sullenberger, the captain of US Airways Flight 1549, executed a near-miraculous water landing in the Hudson River last month, initial news reports came from the unlikeliest of sources — and beat the official corporate response by a long shot.

Accidental Journalism

One of the most iconic images of Flight 1549′s bobbing hull came not from a fast-acting photojournalist, but from Janis Krums, a regular guy on a nearby ferry who snapped a picture with his iPhone and uploaded it to his Twitter stream. Before US Airways was able to issue even a preliminary statement confirming the incident, MSNBC had already broadcast the photo and interviewed Krums.

Within 90 minutes of the water landing, an entire Wikipedia page had been created, complete with over 170 edits or additions. Hill & Knowlton’s Brendan Hodgson offers a great chronicle of the page’s evolution. As of this writing, that Wikipedia page trumps the NY Times’ coverage as the first Google result when searching for Flight 1549.

The chain of corporate communications simply can’t keep up with this vast non-linear web of information, so it’s no surprise that media strategists often find themselves in the frustrating position of being alerted to a crisis from precisely the media they’re supposed to be informing about it. Instead of idly waiting for a PR person to develop talking points, the good journalist will abide by her congenital need for speed, and source any information she can unearth among user-generated content…and ask the company official to merely fill in the blanks later.

By the time US Airways was able to issue its initial statement — over an hour after the landing took place — social and traditional media were abuzz with information about the incident. The company seemed to acknowledge the power of the Internet to quickly spread information when its statement read, “US Airways will continue to release information as it becomes available. Please monitor usairways.com for the latest information.” While its intention was good, it was a bit naïve or self-important to suggest that the company website would be the source of “the latest information” when ordinary people using social media have proven able to disseminate news so much faster.

Responding to Responses

When faced with a crisis, we PR professionals no longer have time to strategize about how to break the news to the media and, thus, the public. Instead, we have to strategically repair the news once the public (and, thus, the media) has already broken it. We used to work on explaining events in a way that was prompt, transparent, intelligible and interesting (i.e., “media-genic”). In short, we used to provide information and context in crisis situations. Now, the contextualizing is being wrested from us by a media culture that is responding before we can.

This isn’t just the result of user-generated content. Cable news programs race each other with abandon for new information. By reporting facts stripped of insight or analysis, these shows can sometimes unintentionally and inaccurately frame issues. Some of these frames are benign, but others can be as misinforming as they are misinformed — or under-informed. In this new media climate, Mark Twain’s old adage is especially applicable: “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes.”

Vinukumar Ranganathan’s Flickr photos of Mumbai attacks

User-generated media is often criticized for not doing original reporting, but instead simply regurgitating, interpreting, and/or bloviating about news originally reported by large conventional news-gathering outlets. To a large extent, the criticism is warranted. I’ll be the first to admit that a large portion of blog content comprises very little original information or opinion. However, in the case of crises, user-generated media is just as likely to inform traditional media as vice versa. This is true of the November terrorist attacks in Mumbai and the May earthquakes in China. In times of crisis, journalists scramble to read blogs and bloggers scramble to read mainstream media accounts.

As previously suggested, this can yield harmful rumors when sources aren’t carefully vetted. However, this cycle can also be symbiotic, where each medium advances the story in its own unique way. More importantly, social media gives communicators the tools to be part of this equation. When his company was criticized last year for a nine-hour tarmac delay, JetBlue CEO David Neeleman offered a candid apology directly to his customers — and outlined corrective steps his company was taking — over YouTube. While the video could have been uploaded sooner, it received media traction, disarmed critics and helped save the company’s reputation.

Tactical responses for crisis communications are changing. Communicators need to be diligent about gathering information and reading all online reports, while still responding expeditiously. As a profession, we’re doing better at the former than the latter. While we’re busy deciding on an appropriate spokesperson, cable news channels and newspapers’ websites are crowdsourcing social media and calling citizen journalists to get their take. The reality is, we’re losing some message control as a result of these new media. If we don’t adapt by making our communications nimbler and more responsive, we’re bound to lose even more. But, if we can be smart about this new medium — the liabilities and opportunities it presents — and rework our strategic approach to crisis communications, we may just stay afloat.

By BRIAN STELTER and NOAM COHEN
Published: November 29, 2008

From his terrace on Colaba Causeway in south Mumbai, Arun Shanbhag saw the Taj Mahal Palace & Tower Hotel burn. He saw ambulances leave the Nariman House. And he recorded every move on the Internet.

Mr. Shanbhag, who lives in Boston but happened to be in Mumbai when the attacks began on Wednesday, described the gunfire on his Twitter feed – the “thud, thud, thud” of shotguns and the short bursts of automatic weapons – and uploaded photos to his personal blog.

Mr. Shanbhag, an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School, said he had not heard the term citizen journalism until Thursday, but now he knows that is exactly what he was doing. “I felt I had a responsibility to share my view with the outside world,” Mr. Shanbhag said in an e-mail message on Saturday morning.

The attacks in India served as another case study in how technology is transforming people into potential reporters, adding a new dimension to the news media.

At the peak of the violence, more than one message per second with the word “Mumbai” in it was being posted onto Twitter, a short-message service that has evolved from an oddity to a full-fledged news platform in just two years.

Those descriptions and others on Web sites and photo-sharing sites served as a chaotic but critically important link among people across the world – whether they be Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn tracking the fate of a rabbi held hostage at the Nariman House or students in Britain with loved ones back in India or people hanging on every twist and turn in the standoff while visiting relatives for Thanksgiving dinner.

“When you look at TV, you see one channel at a time, then you go to another channel,” said Dina Mehta, an ethnographer and social media consultant in Mumbai. “On Twitter, you get feeds from many different people at the same time.”Citizen journalists avoided some of the bureaucratic headaches faced by media organizations. At the end of the day on Friday, CNN’s license to transmit live video in India expired, forcing the network’s correspondents to report via telephone. CNN and other channels in the United States relied on live coverage and taped reports from Indian networks.

The cameras and phones carried by people swept up in the attacks were not subject to any such rules. Mr. Shanbhag photographed one of the fires at the Taj hotel and the wreckage outside a popular cafe that was attacked on Wednesday and posted them on his Flickr stream. Some people transmitted video from inside the Taj hotel to news networks via cellphones. And reporters used cellphones to send text messages to hotel guests who had set up barricades in their rooms.

Much of this activity flourished early in the crisis, while there was a vacuum of official information either from government sources or from mainstream media outlets still struggling to understand the extent of the attacks.

Sreenath Sreenivasan, the dean of student affairs and a professor at the Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, said, “A little bit of information is better than no information at all.”

For a small segment of the Lubavitch Hasidic community in the United States, Twitter became a way to follow the fate of their rabbi, Gavriel Holtzberg, his wife, Rivka, and their son, who were being held hostage in Mumbai.

“I relied on Twitter heavily,” said Mordechai Lightstone, 24, a freelance journalist and Lubavitcher with a Twitter account. “As a person interested in what is going on over there, it gets frustrating when the news cycles on itself.”

Mr. Lightstone said that only a week or so ago he persuaded the leaders of his community to use Twitter as a publishing tool. He has been running that Twitter account, as well as his own.

Reading Mr. Lightstone’s posts, as well as those of another Lubavitcher, Reuven Fischer, gave a glimpse into a community fearing for one of its own but wanting to remain hopeful about its mission.

Mr. Lightstone wrote, “This is pure hearsay, but I was told that the shlucha was rescued – again this unsubstantiated #chabad #mumbai,” using the Yiddish word for the rabbi’s wife and marking keywords with pound signs so that the post would be easier to find in a search of Twitter.

As the news that the rabbi and his wife had been killed emerged, and the Sabbath approached, Mr. Lightstone and Mr. Fischer took pains to temper their sadness with the joy of the day of rest.

Mr. Fischer wrote, “We should Honor Shabbos with joy this week. We can mourn after Shabbos doing Mitzvot in honor of ALL effected by this tragedy.”

Though traditional in dress and beliefs, Lubavitchers pride themselves on harnessing all of the available tools to spread their teachings.

“We are not afraid of using the world to further our goal and tasks,” Mr. Lightstone said. “It’s really amazing, sitting in a basement in Brooklyn, we are all sharing a common goal, looking for good news, staying in touch.”

British regulators rejected a plan on Friday to add locally focused video news to BBC Web sites in Britain, dealing a setback to the digital ambitions of the BBC, which has expanded aggressively on the Internet.

The BBC Trust, which oversees the public broadcaster, and Ofcom, the British media regulator, said the proposal would have hurt rivals in the private sector, including the Web sites of newspapers. Under the plan, the BBC wanted to spend £68 million, or $100 million, and hire 400 people to provide news, sports and weather for dozens of local BBC Web sites.

Commercial rivals said the £3 billion in public financing that the BBC receives each year gave it an unfair advantage. The BBC Trust, which was created last year, previously approved other contested BBC Internet initiatives, including the addition of advertising to the BBC News Web site outside Britain.

The decision on Friday was “the first major example of the trust showing its muscles,” Roy Greenslade, a British media commentator, said in a blog entry on the Web site of the newspaper The Guardian. “In that sense, it is a landmark moment in broadcasting history.”

The move drew interest across Europe because regulators in several countries, including Germany, are scrutinizing public broadcasters’ digital plans. The European Commission, in a proposal published this month, suggests that governments impose stricter conditions on financing for public broadcasters.

“In as far as commercial broadcasters, and indeed publishers and other media owners, were looking for greater certainty that this kind of scrutiny can work, this is a very positive step,” Ross Biggam, the director general of ACT, a lobbying group for commercial broadcasters that is based in Brussels, said of the British decision.

Ofcom said that if the BBC’s local video plans had gone ahead, newspapers and other commercial providers of local news would have lost readers and advertisers. They would have also been discouraged from starting new services on the Web, the regulator said.

Underlining the challenges facing British newspapers, Enders Analysis, a research firm, said Friday that their advertising revenue would fall 21 percent next year. Newspapers have been hit particularly hard because of the migration of classified advertising to the Internet.

The BBC’s local video plans “would have been a disproportionate step into a market where the private sector was already active,” said Angela Mills Wade, executive director of the European Publishers Council. “Now local publishers can innovate in this area without the fear of getting squashed by a giant elephant.”

The BBC Trust urged the BBC to focus on improving the quality of existing news services aimed at local audiences in Britain, including television and radio broadcasts.

The BBC said it would pursue that challenge “with vigor.” In a statement, it added, “We will consider a range of options for how we can best achieve this and will return to the trust in due course.”

The quality of other BBC programming had prompted a separate inquiry by the BBC Trust, which was also resolved Friday.

It focused on a radio program in October in which Jonathan Ross, the BBC’s highest paid performer, and a fellow comedian, Russell Brand, left lewd messages on an aging actor’s telephone answering machine. Mr. Brand used coarse language to describe a purported sexual encounter with a granddaughter of the actor, Andrew Sachs.

The BBC Trust on Friday described the material as “so grossly offensive that there was no justification for its broadcast.” But it said Mr. Ross, who was suspended by the BBC for three months, would face no further disciplinary action.

Mr. Brand had already resigned after an outcry in Britain fed by tabloids.

The Examiner.com is not what it appears to be. It is not the online outlet for the Examiner newspapers (the San Francisco Examiner,Baltimore Examiner, and Washington, D.C. Examiner) owned by billionaire Philip Anschutz. It is, however, owned by the same Anschutz-backed company that owns those newspapers, the Clarity Media Group in Denver. That’s how it got the URL.

But the Examiner.com has no use for professional journalists. It is instead an experiment in pure citizen journalism. Right now Examiner sites have officially launched in beta for five cities—San Francisco, Chicago, Baltimore, Denver, and Seattle. Although other cities like New York are coming along. The sites have been live for a couple months without any promotion, and collectively are already attracting 1.3 million visitors a month in the U.S., according to comScore (which is nearly double from July). CEO Michael Sherrod says the internal numbers show 3 million monthly uniques.

Each site offers up hyper-local news written by contributors called “examiners.” Sherrod, who used to run worldwide communities for AOL and was with Digital Cities in the mid-1990s, has already recruited 800 examiners and wants to get to 1,000 by the end of the year. These examiners might have their own blogs, but the Examiner offers them a bigger platform to get their voice heard. The point, though, is not to write about themselves, but rather about what is happening in their communities.

“We are not looking for people who are inwardly focused,” says Sherrod. Rather, he wants people who are experts in their field, whether that is real estate, restaurants, parenting, sports, technology, or business.

These writers are vetted and paid based on how many pageviews and advertising clicks their articles can produce. The pay is not a lot. It starts at a $2.50 for every thousand pageviews. The median amount each examiner s making right now is $25 a month, although Sherrod has written a check for as high as $1,700. Anschutz is bank-rolling the whole project. He is the only investor (the amount is not being disclosed).

The approach reminds me of what Helium is doing with general-reference topics, but focused on local news instead. In theory, it makes sense. Newspapers don’t have the staffs to cover local news as much as they used to, and arguably the people who care the most about what is happening in a given community are those who live there. So why not let them tell everyone else what is going on?

In practice, I can’t say any of the articles I’ve skimmed so far would make me come back for more. The writing isn’t horrible, but it is amateurish in a way that is not endearing. Maybe that is because the site is designed to look like an authoritative news site. And you end up reading an article that would never have been linked to if it were on a solitary blog. (I won’t pick on any of the writers with a link, but you can check out the site and judge for yourself). Maybe once it launches officially, it will attract a bigger audience and better examiners, and make a splash in local news.

Via Media Shift

by Mike Rosen-Molina, September 25, 2008

Tagged: contests, journalism, videocameras, videos, youtube

Whenever news breaks, the first people on the ground, before reporters arrive, are ordinary folks with cameras. Citizen journalists have played an important role in getting us the first glimpses of developing news, from the London transit bombings to the Southeast Asian tsunami to the Virginia Tech massacre. With the advent of YouTube as a hub for video-sharing, there’s finally a venue outside the mainstream media where amateur journalists can distribute their videos to a wide audience.

While professional journalists have used the service to distribute documentaries, the nature of citizen reporting on YouTube still remains very time-and-location specific, more a matter of catching an event, something fleeting and out of context, than of telling the story behind it. Last week, YouTube announced Project: Report, a journalism contest that aims to change that.

Pulitzer Center calls for citizen journalists to cover forgotten stories for Project: Report

It’s an unmistakable sign that the site is growing up, struggling to become something more than a repository of funny videos of cats falling off of things while still maintaining the community vibe that’s made it so popular. Project: Report aims to motivate people outside the established news media — the ordinary people that make up the bulk of YouTube viewers — to take up reporting. The contest is open only to non-professional journalists; even frequent freelancers are excluded under the rules, although journalism students are encouraged to compete. The idea of using a payment incentive to encourage quality reporting may mean that YouTube soon won’t just have an army of citizen journalists but an army of quality citizen journalists (or semi-pro journalists), interested in telling stories rather than just passing along comic moments.

The Rules

Project: Report is a three-round contest for aspiring journalists to dip into video reporting. For the first round, contestants are asked to create a short video profile of someone in their community. YouTube partnered with the Pulitzer Center, a non-profit that supports international independent journalism and uncovering underreported stories. The Center’s journalists will judge the entries and choose 10 semi-finalists.

In the second round, those 10 will compete to tell local stories with global impact. Five second-round winners will go on to tell the story of an under-represented community — with an added twist. According to the YouTube press release, “Each of the finalists will be provided with two additional Sony videocameras to give to members of the group they are reporting on, so that they can participate in the telling of their own stories. The reporter will then use this footage and integrate it into the telling of the story of five minutes or less.” Rounds two and three won’t be judged by professional journalists, but rather put to a popular vote by the YouTube community.

Winners in each round receive video technology prizes from Sony. First round winners also get to participate in a journalism conference hosted by the Pulitzer Center, while second round winners will get one-on-one mentorships with a professional journalist as they head into round three. Finally, the grand prize winner also gets a $10,000 grant to travel abroad and will get to work the Pulitzer Center on an important global story.

Jon Sawyer

Pulitzer Center executive director Jon Sawyer sees the contest as the first step toward fulfilling YouTube’s potential to showcase “serious” reporting.

“The Pulitzer Center works to raise the quality of American journalism, and part of that is to keep attention on important news stories,” Sawyer told me, “To that end, we created a channel on YouTube, where we now have about 50 or 60 videos up. They’re getting good traffic; we put one video about Iraq on YouTube, an 8-minute serious piece, and it’s got more than 300,000 views. It demonstrates that, even without any advertising, people are interested in serious journalism on YouTube.”

More Than Accidental Reporters

Project: Report is the brainchild of YouTube news & politics manager Olivia Ma and political director Steve Grove, who have long touted the site’s potential for more substantial reporting. Through Project: Report, they hope YouTube can become a home for a form of journalism rarely seen in the online video world: longer form story-telling. Until now, YouTube reporting has largely been confined to the “citizen with cameraphone at the right place at the right time” variety. That’s largely the brand of amateur journalism that traditional media has tried to tap into with its various overtures to the cameraphone set — including CNN’s iReport and Fox News’ U-Report.

YouTube’s earlier journalism projects likewise focused on the accidental journalist. YouTube launched one of its first such projects in 2007 with a video asking Iowans who brought cameras to their state caucuses to send in coverage of the event.

“That wasn’t really a focus project, more of a ‘If you’re out there and happen to be shooting video, then send it to us,’” Grove told me. “This is more robust and focused, something targeting an audience that wants to delve deeper and really tell a story in much more the way that a journalist would.”

YouTube’s Steve Grove and Olivia Ma announce the start of Project: Report

Grove prefers to avoid the term “citizen journalist,” noting that the contest is aimed at people whose interest in reporting news goes beyond just showing up with a camera but extends into telling a compelling story. He prefers to refer to entrants as “aspiring journalists,” noting that the contest targets journalism schools.

Finalists receive support from Pulitzer Center journalists with the goal of creating winning entries that could pass muster both with YouTube viewers and any traditional media outlet — and narrowing the gap between professional and citizen journalists.

Most online journalism contests aimed at non-professionals have generally focused more on content than technique, promoted by advocacy groups asking for works about a certain issue or arguing a particular point of view — like Sunshine Week’s Monthly Essay Awards through Helium. In contrast, Project: Report is more about learning the tools of journalism.

Not the Nine O’Clock News

It isn’t the first time that YouTube has been used for journalism, but it does seem to be the first time that the Internet video site has moved to get into the game itself. It follows similar moves by YouTube’s parent company, Google, to dip toes into journalism with its extensive election coverage page and the addition of comments on Google News stories.

Although YouTube is fostering and encouraging journalism, Grove doesn’t see the site as competing with traditional journalism outlets.

“This isn’t a case of YouTube getting into the journalism business,” he said. “We don’t have editorial control over the content. It’s not like we’re setting up the YouTube news bureau. It’s more about empowering people to use technology. It’s our responsibility to highlight and serve users by connecting them.”

Although Project: Report is an independent endeavor originating from YouTube, Google spokesperson Kate Hurowitz pointed to it as an example of how Google products are becoming a platform for citizen journalism.

“Our focus [at Google] is on organizing information and making it accessible and useful,” she said. “We’ve created a number of easy-to-use tools, including the voter information page and My Maps, that are making it easier for users to find news and information. Rather that thinking of these tools as journalism per se, it might be more accurate to think of them as helpful tools for citizen journalists.”

Others agreed that, while journalism is a booming trade on YouTube, key differences exist between it and traditional news outlets.

“This shows that YouTube can engage in a network-type function, but instead of the old ‘pushing out’ function, it can empower people to create their own programming,” said David Perlmutter, a journalism professor at the University of Kansas.

Perlmutter is encouraging students in his new media and politics class to enter the contest.

“YouTube allows that expression because it contains interactivity,” he said. “TV networks are declining in terms of viewership. When I was a kid, there was just ABC, CBS, PBS and some Japanese monster movies on UHF. Everyone watched the same things, but today it’s fractured. There are only a few shows, like ‘American Idol,’ that everyone sees. People are recognizing that YouTube can be more than a repository of random bits of entertainment.”

But Why a Contest?

Focusing on the cash prize, it’s easy to be skeptical that a contest is the best format to encourage journalism. Mark Hopkins of Mashable predicted an outcome with “one moderately excited winner and a whole bunch of disenfranchised losers.” Hopkins suggested that the prize money could better be spent in seeding various smaller documentary projects. That’s something that Current TV has done well over the past few years.

While YouTube could sponsor more reporting through smaller, individual grants, there’s always the problem of getting people to watch them. Grove pointed out that it’s precisely the contest format that gets entrants more exposure.

“One of definitive things about YouTube and online communities is that the wisdom of crowds is a great signal for content,” he said. “Great videos rise to the top based on what viewers think, not what people behind the screens here at YouTube think. Not having a popular vote wouldn’t be true to the YouTube spirit. The popular vote helps get people inspired to view the videos. It will require journalists to use the web how it’s supposed to be used, using interactivity to promote their work.”

Whether YouTube will hold similar contests in the future depends in part on the response to Project: Report, but Sawyer and Grove are optimistic. So far, over 205,000 people have already viewed the contest’s call-out video posted on the Pulitzer Center’s website.

New Media Bytes blogger Shawn Smith wrote that the real value in Project: Report could be in connecting citizen reporters to their local media outlets. Those outlets, looking for their next star reporter, would do well to check out prospective journalists’ abilities on YouTube. That increased visibility could be a real boon to aspiring journalists in a tough job market.

What do you think about Project: Report? Do you think YouTube can become a home to more polished semi-pro journalism? How might local news outlets work more closely with YouTube to motivate people to produce stories for them as well? Share your thoughts in the comments below.