Interactive Environmental Journalism

Awkward but full of awesome power

2006-10-23T22:50:00.000-07:00

I turned 30 earlier this year and I'm already old enough to feel digitally disabled. Compared, that is, to these up and coming humanoids that appear at the University as freshmen already packaged into local power collectives. Their bodies braille their way across campus while they engage the social information world through their cell phones. In our program, it can feel as though we are clumsily cleaning the house before an important guest arrives. Or rather, trying to hastily finish a bathroom remodel before we sell the house. The next occupant is the teenage civilization of today's digital society. They're the ones who can actually use this stuff, and in just a few years they'll be able to vote and dance all night long too.

This was on the xpresso blog at http://xpresso.blogsome.com/2006/10/23/21st-century-media-kids/. It is an excerpt from an article entitled Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture. It is by Henry Jenkins.

According to a recent study from the Pew Internet & American Life project (Lenhardt &
Madden, 2005), more than one-half of all teens have created media content, and roughly onethird
of teens who use the Internet have shared content they produced. In many cases, these
teens are actively involved in what we are calling participatory cultures.

So these gangly awkward bands of roving teens already assemble into participatory cultures, eh? Well, good for us for trying to build architectures of deliberative participation (phrase donated by deliberative democracy bullshit generator 2.0) into environmental politics at Lake Tahoe. I think the folks whom would be the most likely to use our website and add meaningfully to it may be MySpacers and weird metro climbers who show up at the crag and play Dave Matthews from their collapsible ipod/speaker combination. They can use buttons and text, they can cut records and make movies and still look dim and lazy. We might want to talk to some young undergraduates to get some pragmatic digital networking advice, and some guidelines for how to engage the youth who will be coming online to vote in the near future. They come as a network and they will probably turn into a lint trap. But maybe not. Let's be ready for the best in case things don't go rather poorly.

I had more, but then I started staring off at some undefined point in space for what seemed like forever.

Designing our Web site

2006-10-14T11:53:00.001-07:00

Gerry McGovern is an Irish Web consultant who writes a weekly column, among other things. His most recent column is about what makes a Web site successful. His point is that sites that win design awards are often the opposite of what makes a site successful for a customer:

"The Web is a functional, practical place. A great website drives the customer to act. It uses clear, substantial language, rather than clever, meaningless words. To quote David Ogilvy again: "When Aeschines spoke, they said, 'How well he speaks.' But when Demosthenes spoke, they said, 'Let us march against Philip.' I'm with Demosthenes."

The shiny surface wins awards. Real substance wins customers."

Besides our primary projects, what else do we need to include in our new Web site to make it useful to citizens at Tahoe? What combination of activities will be so compelling they will want to visit it again and again? Or, what do the projects need to include to stand on their own as compelling action?

Improve Your Newspaper!

2006-10-12T20:43:00.000-07:00

Jason Kottke writes a fantastic blog that all of us should be reading. I found this article through him and feel like if I didn't pass it along, I'd be doing the cohort a disservice. So read it. And be sure that you steer clear of Frank if you decide to talk about it.

The Long Zoom

2006-10-08T22:36:00.000-07:00

A good story in The New York Times Sunday magazine today called "The Long Zoom" described a new game that Will Wright (creator of Sims, among other games) is working on called Spore. It allows users to create an entire universe, building through six different spatial scales: cell, creature, tribe, city, civilization, and space.

The game allows users to understand how dynamics change depending on the scale of the system they are creating. As we work to conceive of journalism as something created at the tribe or city level (to use Spore scale) rather than solely on the scale of creatures, this different perspective may enable us to see new ways to combine and change old practices.

The author of the story (Steven Johnson) begins by describing how each age has distinct "ways of seeing." He writes:

Most eras have distinct “ways of seeing” that end up defining the period in retrospect: the fixed perspective of Renaissance art, the scattered collages of Cubism, the rapid-fire cuts introduced by MTV and the channel-surfing of the 80’s. Our own defining view is what you might call the long zoom: the satellites tracking in on license-plate numbers in the spy movies; the Google maps in which a few clicks take you from a view of an entire region to the roof of your house; the opening shot in “Fight Club” that pulls out from Edward Norton’s synapses all the way to his quivering face as he stares into the muzzle of a revolver; the fractal geometry of chaos theory in which each new scale reveals endless complexity. And this is not just a way of seeing but also a way of thinking: moving conceptually from the scale of DNA to the scale of personality all the way up to social movements and politics — and back again.

We're trying to figure out what "the long zoom" looks like for journalism, for Lake Tahoe, for our own projects. I think it's a powerful "way of seeing" that has great potential for innovation...and in the meantime, we can experience what it means to live in "endless complexity."

Are newspapers doomed?

2006-09-26T12:50:00.000-07:00

Michael Kinsley, the now infamous former editor for the LA Times offers this perspective on the future of newspapers. On the surface it sounds a bit like sour grapes, but he does have a few solid points in there. Like this one:

The "me to you" model of news gathering--a professional reporter, attuned to the fine distinctions between "off the record" and "deep background," prizing factual accuracy in the narrowest sense--may well give way to some kind of "us to us" communitarian arrangement of the sort that thrives on the Internet.

He also makes the same typical mistakes that big media-types tend to make: that all bloggers are the same - navel gazing morons who talk about their own personal hygiene and whatever else suits them. Good bloggers may not be smacking him in the face, but shouldn't a seasoned vet like him be able to distinguish?

Does reading news online narrow the perspective of users?

2006-09-25T23:45:00.000-07:00

At Langdon Winner's talk this evening, Frank asked whether the Internet might not be a narrowing, undemocratic influence because it enables people to encounter only the ideas that they already support. He and Langdon discussed the use of personalized, "mynews" type sites that Langdon says prevent the kind of serendiptious encounters with the local community that readers of newspapers regularly encounter.

It's an important question that we'll continue to grapple with in our program. Even our conversation about the mytahoe.com vs. ourtahoe.com is a variation of this concern.

The exchange reminded me of a debate crystallized in Cass Sunstein's book republic.com. James Fallows wrote a review of Sunstein's book in The New York Review of Books in 2002. I thought he made some important arguments when considering the evils of the "Daily Me" as Sunstein referred to it:

The filtering available on Internet sites is primitive compared to the filters, cushions, and blinders that surround us the rest of the time. The patterns Sunstein warns about—a lack of shared experience and the balkanization of Americans according to class, region, religion, and ethnicity—are real and worrisome enough. But the Internet is a trivial source of the problem— let's say one thousandth as important as the educational system, from school districts with their unequal funding to the faulty system of college admissions. Or residential patterns. Or who marries whom. Or tax policy. Or the existing broadcast media, which let you drive coast to coast listening to nothing but right-wing talk radio or NPR. Or cable TV, with one channel showing only bass fishermen and another showing only success-motivation seminars. Or patterns of commuting, which have evolved from buses to cars, and remove people from accidental contact with others. You could un-invent the Internet and still have every problem Sunstein fears.

Fallows goes on to talk about the nature of using the Internet -- how often one thing leads to another leads to another:

Compared with most other indoor activities, time with the Internet is less filtered, more open-ended, more likely to lead to surprises. If you read a book or magazine, you usually keep reading. If you watch a video, you watch. But if you start looking up information on Web sites, you almost never end up where you expected. There's a link to something you'd never heard of before, some news you hadn't known was interesting. It's not the same as walking to a new part of town, but it's a lot more surprising than listening to the radio. The feeling is similar to that of going through library stacks—if there were no dust and you could instantly zoom from floor to floor.

Perhaps we can think of ways to test this question in our own work...looking at traffic statistics on our Web projects and by talking to people about their on and offline patterns of conversation and information.

Awards for innovative journalism

2006-09-23T17:26:00.000-07:00

The Institute for Interactive Journalism announced the 2006 Knight-Batten Awards for Innovations in Journalism this week. A site called Global Voices Online won $10,000. It's a "a non-profit global citizens’ media project, sponsored by and launched from the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at the Harvard Law School." The Twin Cities Daily Planet won a $1,000 Wild Card award for helping many fragmented city groups connect. Six other projects won awards, and a number of other interesting projects were nominated (scroll to the bottom of this page for links to various categories of entries.)

The winners and losers of Web 2.0

2006-09-20T16:48:00.000-07:00

Wired News has released a short article about the Web 2.0 winners and losers. It's kind of funny. They gave us a similar listing that I posted a few weeks ago, and now they've decided to write up a little on some of the companies. One lesson to take away from all of it is to not try to do too much. The winners on here had an idea, they implemented it, and that's all. The losers, as I see it, tried to make more out of the web than is possible. A social networking site that, instead of letting you meet people and networking from there, forces you to meet someone new? Weird. Of course, there's the obligatory MySpace-as-a-loser reference. Again, I hardly think so.

Also, Writely is really cool.

Not all news media are dumbing it down

2006-09-11T22:35:00.000-07:00

Here's an interesting opinion piece from the Christian Science Monitor about the rise of an elite media and the potential dumbing down of other sources. This way of framing the changes seems to reinforce the expertism model we've been discussing. In this analysis, it makes sense for experts and elites to demand deeper journalism because they have a need to be informed and learn about what each other are doing. Under this scenario, everyone else can talk about Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes's baby, since they have no real role to play in the public sphere. Journalists don't have to deliver much to people who aren't asked to do much.

"There would be definite advantages to a flourishing "elite" media. Those interested in more complex news coverage would have a broader list of places to go and, overall, the quality of the news available to consumers might increase. But there is a twofold problem as well: 1) "serious coverage" might be considered an "elite media" trait only, and 2) the growth of these outlets might lead to a dumbing down (OK, maybe a further dumbing down) among other mainstream news sources.

As wealthier, more news-focused audiences leave mainstream outlets, those outlets will be forced to reach out to different groups to fill the holes in their audience - groups that probably have lighter definitions of news. In other words, a small group of coverage-rich news media will get richer while the rest get poorer in their content.

Is that good or bad? Both, probably. But good or bad, if we drift down that road, it will mean a different kind of democracy and a different society."

If we "drift down that road" it will only be because no one questioned where we are headed or suggested a better alternative. I suppose another term we can add to our "About us" page is "The Questioners."

Web 2.0 Examples

2006-09-06T21:42:00.000-07:00

I caught this post today and checked out the sites I was not familiar with. I found a couple of pretty cool new ones. I urge all of you to take a look at some of the things that we'll implement. Tagging, social networking, and online applications are all represented here pretty well.

I also find it funny that the most popular site on the web, MySpace, is voted by Wired users as the worst Web 2.0 site there is. Like they're not all on it.

Wikis for Profit?

2006-09-04T14:53:00.000-07:00

From reading the technology section of the New York Times today comes this article that talks about how wikis are starting to adopt a business plan to make some money.

The comparison is made to Craigslist in that they're small businesses that won't ever make a ton of money, but can certainly be profitable.

One problem raised in the article is that the wiki's contributors might begin to resent their free contributions to a site that flips those into a profit. I think Wikipedia is very successful and has grown to such a viable resource because the contributors appreciate that it is a non-profit site. I agree that posting for free to a site that looks to use my contributions for money is going to make me less likely to ever use it.

Evacuation plan for Incline Village

2006-09-03T15:04:00.000-07:00

From Sunday's Reno Gazette-Journal:

Evacuation plans for downtown Reno as well as an escape plan for Incline Village residents from a potential horrific forest fire will soon be under way with the help of a $500,000 homeland security grant by state officials....

State homeland security officials approved the grant last week for Washoe County, putting the region ahead of the rest of the state in evacuation planning, Kenneston said. The money will be used to hire consultants with the expertise to do the detailed work.

Something for us to follow-up on...what public policy questions are embedded in drafting such a plan?

Climate change will limit wildfire management

2006-09-03T00:48:00.000-07:00

Fire ecologists think that global climate change is going to make fire in the West much more difficult to manage than it has been in the past, according to this article from the Missourian. The Association of Fire Ecologists has issued a declaration describing how global climate change is lengthening the fire season in the West and increasing the threat of hotter, more frequent fires.

You can read the San Diego Declaration on Climate Change and Fire Management online: http://emmps.wsu.edu/firecongress (click on the declaration's link.)

While citizens at Lake Tahoe may feel that they can't do much to affect global climate change, they will have to deal with the effects of it, according to a variety of scientists (including the new head of the American Association for the Advancement of Science who told the BBC that the climate was changing much faster than predicted).

How should we factor in this global trend to our work in a very localized area? Do we treat it as a given and factor it into fire management plans? Consider it still a hypothesis to deal with when it's more noticeable? Or take it as a challenge to more proactively address as a community?

A few recent scholarly articles of note

2006-09-02T13:30:00.000-07:00

Citizenship in the Age of the Internet
Hermes, Joke
European Journal Of Communication, vol. 21, no. 3, pp. 295-309, September 2006
Hermes explores the impact of communication technology on the practice of citizenship. Two sentences that caught my eye: "...the Net sits more easily with incidental than with structural citizen practices. The transition from audience member to belonging to a public is not a permanent elevation but a temporary one."

Ethnic media, community media and participatory culture
Deuze, Mark
Journalism, vol. 7, no. 3, pp. 262-280, August 2006
An excerpt: "the success of local, minority, community or alternative media in reconnecting ‘media’ with ‘audiences’ in terms of some kind of collaborative civic engagement is not the exclusive domain of not-for-profit companies. Balnaves et al.
(2004) consider the shift towards a more engaged, emancipatory and participatory
relationship between media professionals and their publics as an example of a ‘new humanism’ in the domains of public relations, journalism and advertising, constituting ‘an antidote to narrow corporate-centric ways of
representing interests in modern society’ (p.192)."

Capitulation to capital? OhmyNews as alternative media
Kim, Eun-gyoo; Hamilton, James W.
Media, Culture & Society, vol. 28, no. 4, pp. 541-560, July 2006
[Abstact] This article confronts a foundational problematic in Western-inflected scholarship on media and democracy by investigating the emergence, structure, and operation of OhmyNews, a Korean primarily online publication that hybridizes features of both commercial and ostensibly ‘alternative’ media. After an analysis informed by the social and historical context of Korean politics, economics, and society of the past 40 years, the article concludes that OhmyNews is a unique response to unique enabling conditions, and that its commercial features are inextricably a part of its progressive nature.

Entrepreneurial journalism

2006-09-02T00:03:00.000-07:00

Jeff Jarvis at Buzzmachine writes that CUNY's Interactive Journalism program will be starting a lab in Entrepreneurial journalism in fall semester 2007.

"We need ... innovation and daring in the industry — and it’s not coming from the industry" write Jarvis.

He continues, "This is why I added a course/lab in entrepreneurial interactive journalism into the CUNY curriculum; I’ll be teaching it next fall. The idea is that students will come up with and flesh out ideas for new businesses or products."

At the RSJ, we need to be thinking about what entrepreneurial role we'd like our students to take. See the full post here

Web 2.0 Newspapers

2006-09-01T23:29:00.000-07:00

The Bivings Report recently came up with a list of nine things newspapers could do to improve their websites. Other writers have added to the list (Web 2.0 newspapers and Jeff Jarvis at Buzzmachine for example).

Mark Glaser at MediaShift then shows an example of "open source reporting" on the original Bivings Report, with researchers in New Zealand, Italy and other countries doing similar studies of their own newspaper Web sites.

Thoughts about social networking

2006-09-01T22:59:00.000-07:00

Cole points to an interesting (old -- 2005) conversation about social networking sites and whether these types of networks need a "shared object" or interest or activity (like Facebook or Flickr) to be successful. It's a compelling argument.

SeeNoahBrier.com and Zengestrom.com

A quote to ponder...

2006-09-01T22:07:00.000-07:00

"There is only transformation. Information as something which will be carried through space and time, without deformation, is a complete myth. People who deal with the technology will actually use the practical notion of transformation. From the same bytes, in terms of 'abstract encoding', the output you get is entirely different, depending on the medium you use. Down with information."

From an Interview with Bruno Latour

Hike the John Muir Trail with journalists

2006-09-01T21:56:00.000-07:00

Four staffers from the Fresno Bee are blogging and interacting with readers as they hike the John Muir Trail. Today they hiked Forester Pass, probably the most treacherous stretch of the entire Pacific Crest Trail, according to my brother.

Newsday uses Google Earth

2006-09-01T21:39:00.000-07:00

Jon Christensen sent us a link to an interesting Newsday special report on Long Island's volunteer fire department. Click on the "satellite maps" to get a file that allows you to map fire houses across Long Island.

Cyberjournalist.net has another list of interesting journalistic applications of Google Earth.

Wired News tries wiki experiment

2006-09-01T21:29:00.000-07:00

[From SPJ PressNotes] "Wired News has launched an experiment with wikis, the technology that allows anybody to edit and contribute to an online text. The tech-focused magazine has posted an article about the wiki phenomenon in wiki format, to be scrutinized and modified by readers. If all turns out well, the collaborative article will be published in the Sept. 7 print version of the weekly.

"In the past, wikis have not worked so well with traditional publications. The Los Angeles Times attempted a "Wikitorial," an editorial that anyone could edit. The fledgling project quickly turned to disaster as the article was spammed with pornography. It cost Michael Kinsley, the man with the idea, his job at the paper.

"Another paper in South Dakota began a wikitorial feature of its own, but opted for the safer route of reviewing reader edits before posting them.

"On the other hand, a similar experiment to that of Wired, done by Joi Ito of Six Apart, worked well. Ito, asked to write an op-ed for the New York Times, posted his first draft on a social editing website, where friends made suggestions before Ito sent it on to the Times."

Source: Frank Barnako's Media Blog via Editor's Weblog via SPJ Pressnotes

Initiative on the future of journalism

2006-09-01T19:37:00.000-07:00

Check out some of Medill's work on datamining, as part of the Initiative on the Future of Journalism, funded by the Carnegie-Knight Foundations.