The Internet, trends in content containment and relevance

April 2009: Media Conference MIT6 (transcription)

Jessica Clark

• Time based media - durable stable
• Space based - ephemeral
• How can old media participate?
• Allow publics to form without corporate interference
• Paradigm shifts
• Broadcast to network
• Consumption to conversation
• Situated to ubiquitous
• Library to Cloud
• Citizen is the platform
• Choice, 24/7, curating media, creating media, collaboration with each other and traditional media
• Hyperprojects for profit and not for profit
• Each project has multiple outlets - network of producers
• Futureofpublicmedia.net

Ellen Hume

• Old media is dying, the old media didn’t ask for action, new media gives phone number, website, facebook group
• Writing was done for a few officials, and journos crossed their fingers that those officials would be embarrassed enough to do something
• Publics decide to take up issues, SeeClickFix, the public finds out here and takes it up as an issue. Citizen engagement tool for establishing priorities for gov.
• See something, Say something in New York (creates a toxic culture), report crime, litter – instead HeroReports.org and found that the people who reported were from the lower classes (worth researching)
• Shift from literate elite, agency has shifted, and onus has shifted to the public.
• Holding accountable through crowd sourcing but they have been partnered through old media
• Watchdogging by public more difficult if they are wanting to have your article digged
• Cultural support needs to be found for journalism

Persephone Miel

• Citizen media, or blogging, where is all that democracy we were supposed to get
• Where is participatory media now?
• 2005 Rebecca MacKinnon – blogging versus journalism is over, there’s a place for both
• 2007 realised it was still aspirational
• Wikipedia non-profit vs CNN for-profit
• Build something where people come and create content that will attract others and you can sell ads to make money - YouTube
• Hybrid organisations where old media and new media help each other to create a pubic space
• Typology of news orgs: Publisher (New York Times), News Agency (Reuters), Aggregators (Google News), Author-driven (Drudge Report), Audience-driven (YouTube) community is the primary editor – the most interesting are the orgs that can’t fit in just one
• Spot.us is community-funded reporting and you can add your words to an article, some members of the audience want to contribute
• Advertising supported reporting is a strange once-off phenomenon and probably won’t continue as a model, the business model is over and because of this watchdog journalism is over
• Volunteer energy of blogosphere cannot replace it in on a one to one basis, i.e. the blogs are not replacing the watchdogs one to one – blogs focus on tech mostly
• The watchdogs could have responded by saying “OK we’ll do the watchdogging”, instead the watchdogs start tech blogs
• Celebrity, Parenting, Politics and Tech grow, but we need to look at the things that aren’t being done, the less popular, the necessary
• We want to save Editorial Intelligence and this should be our focus
• Mediarepublic.org

Dean Jansen

• Participatory culture foundation
• Open technology for tv online, modelled on Firefox, Miro opensource player is an HD aggregator
• Portals and Gateways unnecessary, get the media from the authors
• By using opensource you act as a supporter for Opensource
• Developers are not just creating for IE anymore
• Opensource keeps people honest, the playingfield level
• People’s attitude if it’s not on YouTube it’s not online and that’s problematic, because then YouTube becomes editorial
• Google is not editorial because you are the searcher, you are searching directly for authors
• Video is subject to proprietary apps like SWF and QT, you have to ask permission from Adobe to put Reader on your phone
• Important to get momentum behind the opensource tools

Jake Shapiro

• Public Radio Exchange is an aggregator, anyone can upload, not censored
• Local station downloads and that is how it is editorialised, they decide what is relevant
• Important work won’t only be found through broadcast
• Producers earn royalties as their work is used
• Self-regulating community formed around it, natural competition on site raises quality

Questions and Answers and Comments

• Radio has become an innovator in terms of rights, processes and technology because technology has been inhibiting when things come out – Beta to BlueRay has been fast, radio is less subject to this, costs are lower. Strength of local stations trying new things, less commitment to technologies when making experiments. Energy goes into repurposing old content for old media.
• IF Stone has accomplished a lot without institutionalised support in terms of investigative journalism, could this place we’re at produce another journalist about him. Citizen journalists do become investigative journalists. There’s a bigger audience, more peers.
• Student journalists will do low cost reporting, radio and newspaper were cheap, but iPhone and computer more expensive, what is the effect in low-income areas. Readers are demanding that digital content is published on newspaper. Likely to be free paper. Printing presses are making tech strides, becoming cheaper. Computer notebooks are 300 dollars, cheaper and cheaper. Freepress.net campaigns for internet for anyone. Mobiles pick up radio, so platform is relevant.
• We expect a lot from the publics, political theorists showed publics are also guilty of exclusions, there’s an imagined populism, inclusions and how can we include the excluded. Using ‘publics’ and not ‘public’ to include, but it has become a definition of ‘good citizenship’, becomes closely related to issues you can organise about. Issues are about exclusions and that is what publics will organise around. You become a public around that issue.
• National archive for citizen media, what strategies for archiving have you thought about. The Internet Archive is a model, find an institutional partner, collaborate to make sure materials are given value. Archive.org for public archiving. YouTube and others are not archives. YouTomb tracks video that have been taken down from YouTube. Creators want to preserve their media, American Archive is starting to archive civil rights era radio material.

Source: MIT