Braided Journalism

Long ago, before we had a worldwide web and people communicated in a groundbreaking, but difficult format called Usenet, someone came up with an idea called "freeware." People soon determined that they preferred to get pretty good stuff over the Internet for free rather than more professional and polished stuff for money and that has caused a great deal of disruption as the Internet evolved to become a dominant force of content delivery.

Among the most obvious victims of freeware have been news-gathering organizations. Print publishers and broadcasters seemed well-suited to make the change at first. A print edition cost little more than pocket change and broadcast was almost totally free. In both cases, their real money came from advertisers who wanted access to those masses who followed that media.

Had media companies been willing to meet the challenges for change as they evolved  in the middle 90s, perhaps they would have been able to cross the chasm into current times; but they did not. They remained loyal to their subscription models for far too long. They underestimate the small damages like classified ads moving to Craig's List, until those little changes made big differences; many just thought that their professionalism; their access to prominent people and events would allow their old ways to endure new times and new forms of competition.

That brings us to Google, which in my view, has been the most disruptive of all forces on traditional news organizations. Google gives us all free access to content that historically was produced by professionals as a way to earn a living. The advertising that supported media has migrated to the Internet where Google has become the largest beneficiary.

And when media companies say that revenue derived from advertising that supports content they produced, Google has shrugged it's mighty do-no-evil shoulders, telling media companies they are free to not make their content available on Google anymore.

I am no great fan of the public companies that own news-based organizations. neither are the editors and reporters who have worked for them. But that loss of revenue has been the driving force in the brutal reduction in paid news professionals.

Now there are two factors that have entered center stage. The first is Bing, a very nice search engine developed by Microsoft that many users find to be just as good as Google, but not really better in most cases.

Then there's the decision by Rupert Murdoch. mean-spirited billionaire owner of NewsCorp, which is perhaps the world's leading producer of news content, including the Wall Street Journal, Fox News and myriad and diverse other brands.

Murdoch has been persistent in arguing that Google and other search engines should pay professional news organizations for their content inthe form of sharing ad revenues. Google has declined, saying Murdoch is free to withhold his content from Google Search results.

The online community of course sides with Google, which is generally regarded as an ultimately cool company. It's billionaire leadership is younger and far more charming than Murdoch, wh has been called "old school" and clueless in recent days.

Maybe it's a personal thing, but I believe when someone prospers from someone else's work, the original producer should share in that wealth. I think fair beats cool every day.

For those who think social media practitioners can replace all professionals, I'd ask you to think again.  A loss of professional news will not make the world safer, freer or better informed place.

For those of you who feel Google shareholders should be the overwhelming profit recipients of reporters hard work, I would ask you to rethink just what is fair and what is not.

In fact, now that I think about it, when Google and the search engines serve up my content-the content you are reading right now--and put an ad next to it, why should I not benefit from the revenue--or you--or anyone else?

Now, News Corp is forging an exclusive deal with Bing that would provide Microsoft's challenging search engine with content not available to people who just use Google. This complicates matters for users, but getting the News Corp content will still cost users nothing.

For those who argue that no news source has value because so many sources now produce news. This is partly true. Likewise, as we recently saw in Iran, on the Hudson River, in Gaza and Mumbai, citizens are very often producing the most valuable news content.

All true. But the world will not be a better or freer place without traditional news organizations. We are not close to the day when bloggers will be invited t attend White House news conferences. Nor will we very often be airdropped to cover wars or national disasters. Some citizen journalists may be digging into investigative efforts, but so far, nothing on the scale of Watergate has emerged.

Most people, myself I know, myself included, and some employed by the man, do not hold Rupert Murdock in a very high regard.

But let's not have that cloud the merits of his case for being compensated fairly for the reuse of NewsCorp content. And because others just happen to think Google is the coolest of Internet companies, one avowed to do no evil, should get away with prospering with intellectual property that others labored to produce.

I was in Seville, in a major city square where I saw the two, uniformed, armed policemen on little mopeds. I smiled at them & they smiled back until  took out my little pocket camera. Then there's hands went up and they moved toward me gesturing to put the camera away. I complied.

I had a similar experience at the Rome Airport when I tried to photograph a heavily armed soldier smoking a cigarette outside security.

I would later find out that both countries had passed laws against taking pictures of law of officers and the military after very serious acts of terrorism had occurred. The thought of censorship in democracies had crossed my mind, but terrorism has certainly caused my own country to pass disturbing laws in the name of democracy that restricted some people's freedom.

Perhaps the laws are necessary. I have personal doubts. But those who know more about the tools that lead to machine gun fire in Italian Airports and bombs in Spanish planes and jets smashing into high-rise buildings are supposed to know more abut what is required than I do.

But then, the cases of over response in the name of freedom are long and well document. And the use of the camera is an instrument in revealing those abuses are even longer, as we have seen during Mumbai and the Iran election; in the record excessive use of force in a BART station on New Years Day this year and in the clubbing of Rodney King in LA back in 1991.

The camera has shown the truth when authorities entrusted to protect the public were in fact deceiving the public.

I write all this because the British have passed and are attempting to defend one of the most abusive and discriminatory laws I have heard of since maybe the Stamp Act in the time of the American Revolution.

It seems that in the name of freedom countries sometimes do the lamest things, as the US has so recently done in the case of Guantanamo. The British law is being explained by authorities as not being applicable to innocent tourists but will applied to people who appear as though they might be terrorist.

I assume that means white people in Western clothing can take pictures. Darker people in Eastern--or mid-Eastern-garb may be subject to arrest, interrogation or the mere confiscation of their cameras.

I really shouldn't have to tell you what's wrong with that. British citizen of all hues and clothing tastes shouldn't have to fight against such appalling, subjective discrimination. 

And in the name of fighting for freedom, freedom itself should not be so easily tromped upon by any government claiming to be a democracy.

[NOTE: I am running late to make a plane and I have not added quite a few pictures and links that may be useful when I get a chance. I assume it is still legal for me to post the pictures.]

I first heard about the the incidents two days after they started. William Herring,  tweeted me a link to the first of four videos I would see. Each gave the impression that police were using overwhelming force against an apparently small and nonviolent group of protesters in a park  near the University of Pittsburgh.

After I retweeted that, I would discover the protests were against the G20 assembly of top level leaders the world's 20 largest industrial and developing nations, a gathering that I overwhelmingly support, in the US city that has made the best comeback over the past half century.

Video such as this one disturbed me. It was sandwiched between slabs of street-protest rhetoric and was clearly edited. Yet it displayed pretty good evidence that police had been more than a little zealous in their disbursement tactics. It was also the first indication that police had been "federalized." Why had that not been reported in traditional media. When had they been federalized and what was the reason?

As a tweeter-blogger, I didn't know; nor did I feel free to call the US attorney general's office and say I was a blogging citizen journalist whose readers wanted answers.

So I stayed with the videos and I found them ugly. When I tweeted that there had not been anything like this in the US since the 1960, I was almost immediately corrected. The G20 meeting in Seattle in 1999 had caused havoc on the streets where avowed anarchists clashed with police, causing personal injury, property damage, and disruption to that city for almost a full week. Not much got accomplished inside the World Trade Organization summit of financial ministers.

At about that point, Perry Caldwell, a new Tweeter sent me a clip from KDKA, Pittsburgh's Channel 2 news site reporting many windows being broken and other minor damage. He condemned violence on both sides, but seemed to me to think police had acted properly.

I felt the KDKA story was  one-sided and did not explain the massive police action involving  tear gas, smoke grenade and new ultrasonic "sound cannons" that evoke a head-splitting noise that seemed suited for an Orwellian novel.

I have my own one-sided view as well. I was a protester against war and for civil rights in the 60s. I tasted tear gas and came very close to feel a policeman's club on my head. My attitudes have changed, but I'm generally skeptical of unlawful assembly charges because they fly in the face of American rights to assembly.

Then Ed Shah jumped in. Ed and I frequently talk in Twitterville. He impresses me as passionate as I am about human rights and police states. Ed pointed out that the US had an obligation to protect world leaders when the are assembled on American soil. He also speculated that the street noise could be a distraction for a more dangerous act of terrorism against the G20 and of course he is right.

1. I quieted down and stepped back. There were lots of issues intertwining here. I really didn't know much about what was going on. Nor did I know much about the events building up to the confrontation on the streets.

I realized that I am not a news organization. The people with whom I connect to "report" on an issue are not a news network. We were stepping in to fill a void created by a media industry in atrophy but we really still lack the organization, leadership, legs and budget that the old dynasties had provided.

Had I been an editor, with budget and staff and Pittsburgh or the G20 had been part of our beat, here are a few things I would have done:

• I would have assigned and coordinated a handful of reporters, correspondents and stringers. I would have assigned one to interview the police chief, mayor, Pitt officials to get their side of the story. I would have a political correspondent speak with officials at Justice, State and maybe FBI. I would have that reporter write about the government thinking and decisions as well as what they knew that helped them reach the decisions.

• I would have assigned anther reporter to attach her or himself to the protesters, writing human interest pieces about them, where they were from, how they got to Pittsburgh and why as well as what they hoped to accomplish. I would have insisted the leaders be interviewed and their backgrounds checked out. I would have investigated where their money had come from.
• I would have had someone research both the protest movement against globalization as well as a brief history of US street protests and what they did or did not achieve.
• I would have had my art department draw maps showing the proximity or distance between protesters and the G20 Summit. I would have investigated the possible vulnerabilities caused by the protests.
• I would have spoken to local citizens and non participating eyewitnesses who could shed light on what they had seen.

And so on. But I am in no position to do any of those things. Unfortunately, it appears that neither is the press whose coverage of this protest has been thin at best and apparently written without having been there or seen anything firsthand.

This why I have become a proponent of what I call braided journalism, the coming together of tweeters like me with professional organizations like the New York Times. We have seen samples of this in the last 18 months; the Szechuan Earthquake, Mumbai, Gaza, Iran Elections, Station Fire and many other incidents.

When citizen and traditional journalism braid together the pubic is better served. We come closer to getting the whole story. The information provided tends to be more balanced. Our right to know allows us to form opinions on sufficient information.

G20 is now over. All parties will go home and share their thoughts with friends. Maybe some reflective commentary will appear online. But overall most people won't know what happened there because of a failure of braiding the information together and reporting on it.

Twitterville had a chapter called "Braided Journalism." It talks about the convergence of citizen and traditional journalism in a social media space.

A good example is the story of Janis Krums, who tweeted the photo of US Air Flight #1549 landing on the Hudson River. The guy just wanted to get to New Jersey, but by coincidence he became perhaps the most famous citizen journalist in modern times.

A sidebar is that Janis's jaw-dropping photo was used with abandon and without permission by traditional news outlets. The process slowed and got complicated when he started asking for royalty payments.

It seems to me that he braid of journalism I discussed in Twitterville was missing an important element--the monetization strand. We who provide content on blogs and at Flickr; we who have become passionate or have stumbled upon the power and potential of organizing citizen journalistic efforts need to eat.

Like traditional journalists through history, the passion put into reporting far exceeds the tangible rewards most of us have realized.

We have now entered into a massively transformational era, one in which most institutions are either being restructured or replaced. Evidence is pretty compelling that the era of mass marketing is being redirected into highly niched and/or localized marketing efforts, something I like to call mass micro marketing.

Nike, for example, has started a series of ads targeted at specific niches that range from Native Americans to swimmers to young adults in a specific urban neighborhood.  Niche marketing is far from new, but what is new is a refocus on its value as a core strategy for global merchants.

which also are nothing new. This of course coincides with the acceleration of hyperlocal journalistic efforts. As my friend Ryan Kuder, who has played in hyperlocal, recently tweeted, "hyperlocal has been just around the corner for the past 15 years."

But now there's compelling evidence that the corner is being turned. Big media is getting smaller and grassroots new media organizations are starting to fill the huge voids caused by the old guard's contractions. Veteran journalists who have lost their jobs are finding new homes in it. J-school students who may find the jobs they are being trained for do not exist, are gravitating to it. Not only that, but people like Janis Krums, just happen to be on the scene when news pops up unexpectedly.

There is a natural opportunity for big branders to start looking more closely at hyperlocal organizations. There is also a huge opportunity for a large, fragmented and usually overlooked advertiser in the local merchant.

You local restaurant, dry cleaner or retailer has been filtered out of most marketing systems for years, drowned out by louder voices with bigger budgets who often enjoy lower ad rates by buying volume.

Your local dry cleaner, or plumber has limited options in social media, even from the perspective of a social media zealot like me. She or he used to put ads in local Yellow Pages, but they have gone; hometown radio stations lost in consolidations; bus panel advertising until much of society stopped using public transit. They used to have the hometown weekly newspapers but they too have dried up.

But now there's hyperlocal and the opportunity for the local merchant to sponsor coverage of a local street fair or soccer game, or clean up campaign or sponsoring a safe streets campaign.

In the past few months I have become less frightened by the large writing on cyberwalls that declares traditional media is dead and more heartened by the fact that something new, monetizable is emerging that will fulfill many aspects of the public's need to know what is happening in their neighborhoods and on their planet.

I see many pieces floating around, occasionally bumping against each other and sometimes converging. It will take time. For the past 60 years or so, nearly all marketing, branding, communications and advertising professionals have been trained to think big, to send one message or image that impacts masses of people.

Now there is a need to reverse the strategy, to think small, to get personal, to relate to either a physical or global neighborhood. This will take time, some successful practitioners in both media and marketing will not make the change successfully.

But in the end, I see a braid of journalism and marketing that will thrive. It will look very differently than the products that prevailed in the Broadcast Era. There will be much greater audience participation. News services will be more fragmented and decentralized than they have been in perhaps a hundred years.

But the braiding of new marketing with new journalism will occur there is a need on the parts of all parties concerned, particularly the public. The people who provide the content will begin o see the rewards. The merchants who have been shut out will be allowed back in. And the smartest mass marketers will discover the value of thinking local.

[Roland Bryan, Director of Strategy, Associated Northcliffe Digital.Photo by Shel]

Richard Titus, a serial entrepreneur, was a co-founder of Razorfish, the legendary ad agency that introduced, for better or worse, interactive advertising to the internet. It got sold to Microsoft and Richard walked away quite comfortably.

A couple of years back he and I served on the board of directors for YourTrumanShow, a video blogging startup that didn't survive the current recession. Richard, a Californian living in London has been an executive at BBC for the past few years, until he recently got recruited away to become CEO of Associated Northcliffe Digital (AND), the online component of A&N Media, the UK's second largest media company in the UK.

A&N is best known as publisher of the Mail and Metro, but in all it has about 120 British tabloids, a significant number of radio stations and other holdings.

Richard has been in the US with Roland Bryan, AND's director of strategy and John Harmsworth [Lord Rothermere], who heads A&N. They were in the States so that Titus could introduce them to people they knew in the technology community, particularly where it could be useful to building online community platforms.

At dinner, I found myself sitting next to John who shared with me that he understands the dubious future of newspapers moving forward. He really needs not look much further than down the hall of his own home where neither of his two sons looks at newspapers. Instead, they spend their time on Facebook and MySpace. He said he doubted that these two possible heirs to this media empire would ever turn away from online spaces and onto newspaper pages.

Most of my conversation was with Roland who started LocalPeople a couple of months ago. It sounded to me to be a most promising implementation of hyperlocal journalism when we talked last night.

I just spent an hour with it and it seems to me even more promising now. When you look at it, you'll recognize the functionality from platforms you've probably seen such as Twitter, Yelp,Flickr and maybe a shade of Facebook. Video is coming soon and will have similarities, of course, with YouTube.

The key difference between LocalPeople and most hyperlocal efforts I've come across such as the New York Times special section covering the innards of two Brooklyn neighborhoods, is that the AND effort looks and sounds like local people talking to each other in a cafe or over a backyard fence. The Times looks and feels like, well, the Times.

LocalPeople reads and feels more like Twitter than it does a newspaper, but unlike Twitter it is organized into geographic, rather than global neighborhoods. Roland emphasized there is no news in LocalPeople. If real news broke in one of these communities, the media company would dispatch a tabloid reporter. But now, the color and nuance of the local story can be greatly enhanced by LocalPeople.

This of course gets me jumping up and down gleefully. This is a form a braided journalism, one of my personal passion spots. Braided Journalism is about traditional and citizen journalism coming together, intertwining and emerging into something new, superior and enduring from what we have today.

The "enduring" part has been elusive as I have looked around at various new media news activities. Roland understands that if you want to attract local merchants the language and complexities of CPMs and Clickthroughs needs to be abandoned.

Local ad deals are quite simple. AND asks merchants what measurable results they want to achieve over the next year, and then calculates what LocalPeople would have to do to achieve it. Then they charge it and the merchant can very simply measure results.

"All we really have to do is be more valuable than the Yellow Pages," he said.

I see enormous promise in LocalPeople. The platform allows a great deal of self management and self organization. I think local merchants will immediately "get" the desirability of moving into venues where their customers have already migrated.

I'm going to keep my eye on this one.

About a week ago, traditional publishing giant McGraw Hill announced it wanted to sell or spin BusinessWeek, one of the most venerable of all American business publications. The news, I am told, stunned most of the editors and reporters still there.

So far, almost no one has pointed to a possible acquirer and almost everyone close to the matter believes BusinessWeek is going to have to change business models if it is to survive. So far, at least two well-known BusinessWeek writers have suggested possible solutions. Design writer Bruce Nussbaum suggested two new models; the first being sort of an ongoing forum on selected business topics and the second by Stephen Baker, who covers social media suggests converting a portion of the publication into a wiki.

In 2005, while I was writing Naked Conversations, Baker really irked me by implying that somehow journalistic standards for blogging were inferior to those required to write for BusinessWeek. For a while I nursed an idea of taking him on in my book, until on the third or fourth revision of the book, I realized that Baker had a valid point.

As a blogger, I often post content on one draft. As readers remind me, I often miss obvious and blatant typos. I have no editor questioning and filtering what I have to say. I have no colleagues sharing an anecdote or insight that will make my story better. When writing books, I undergo much more editorial scrutiny, but even there, it is not the hard-nosed, Devil's Advocate style of a quality news editor who has general authority over the content provider.

This is true, not just for me. It is true for most social media writers who provide original content. Few of us are parts of a team and only a tiny handful of online social publications have our copy scrutinized and challenged by editors.

Yet, in recent years, we are the ones who are finding--and telling--an increasing portion of the world's stories. A 19-year-old, Dutch kid named Casper Oppenhuis de Jong, tweeted the first news of the Szechuan Earthquake to the west, where traditional media picked it up; Janis Krums was just trying to get to New Jersey, when a plane landed on the Hudson River when he took a TwitPic of a plane landing. The increasing role of people with cameras and connected devices in Mumbai, Gaza and Tehran have driven the point home with drama and flair in the last year. Traditional media have turned to people on the streets of the world to get the information of the world and share it with subscribers.

And yet there is an ambivalence about it, I imagine at places like BusinessWeek. We on the streets are unknown factors. We do not always report with accuracy. Sometimes, as is the case currently in Iran, we won't even reveal who we are or what sources we have. Many, like Casper or Janis, had no plans to contribute to citizen journalism. Casper was in a bookstore so he could Skype home to his folks in Amsterdam. Janis parked in New Jersey because it was cheaper than driving into Manhattan. And yet they both changed the information the world needed--and wanted.

Stephen Baker, talks about the "last 5%," that extra effort many elite publications take with pride to get the precise words that make a story more accurate and polished. He's right. Very few social media writers have time, desire or talent to do that.

The world will not be a better place, however, if the salvation of BusinessWeek is in snipping off that last 5% of quality. And the world will not be a better place if the extremely talented team that is BusinessWeek succumbs to the extreme challenges that traditional media organizations face today.

It seems to me that most people see the value of both the disciplines of old media and the speed and breadth of new media. It seems to me that the news organization of the future will need to braid these two camps of traditional and citizen journalists into something that emerges into something new and different; something that does not yet exist but needs to; something that can cut the costs of printing inefficiencies while increasing the speed in which information is distributed.

This new, "braided" BusinessWeek, would of course move to online only. It would abandon the antiquated concept of news being released once weekly. It would do almost everything that the organization is already doing at BusinessWeek.com, but it would become a much more social platform, incorporating functionality from independent blogs, tweets, YouTube and podcasts.

In my [undetailed] vision for an braided BusinessWeek, the organization would use content submitted by social media people. It would not be instantly published. Editors would revise, challenge and polish. The news would be posted as quickly as possible.

There would also be some form of revenue sharing. Instead of just giving a blogger a stringer's pittance, the social media person and the publication would revenue share any advertising. BusinessWeek would cover local business news and offer advertising to local and regional advertisers.

I hope it's not too late for BusinessWeek. If it is, I hope some other publication will look at this concept of braiding traditional and citizen journalism in a social media venue as an enduring solution to an chronic problem.

[ Flight 1549 lands on the Hudson, a fine Braided Journalism moment. Photo by Janis Krums]

As I've mentioned, my favorite Twitterville chapter is called "Braided Journalism." The chapter covers Twitter's role in Mumbai, Gaza, the Szechwan Earthquake, the landing of US Air Flight 1549 on the Hudson, the video recorded New Year's Day BART shooting and a good many other instances where citizen and traditional journalism have converged in social media spaces.

The book was locked up on June 12, the day of the Iran Elections, an incident which showed how fast new events eclipse the old in this category. The concluding point of the chapter is that traditional and citizen journalism are converging. "We have become the feet on the streets of the world when news breaks," I wrote.

Yet, most reasonable people realize the world will not be a better place, if the discipline, ethics and professionalism of traditional media disappears. I may no longer see a purpose for a daily newspaper delivered to my door by a fossil burning vehicle, but I most certainly see a value for the New York Times and its long-established standards for excellence. I look at the former Christian Science Monitor, whose slow death as a tangible newspaper was followed by the welcomed excellence of the CSMonitor.com which has risen like a phoenix from the newspaper's ashes.

This thing that I call braided journalism seems to be emerging everywhere in a variety of forms styles and focuses.

One of my favorites has little to do with events of the scope and importance of say Iran or Mumbai. Take for example, girl's basketball. A former NBA sports reporter grew passionate about his sport finding it less tainted than even boys sports. So he started a blog site called Hoopgurlz as a citizen journalism project. He got some sponsorship and then ESPN acquired it where it is now flourishing as is he, I assume.

Some laid off Baltimore Sun reporters regrouped and started BaltimoreBrew, a sponsored blog dedicated to "stirring up news and views," and has started getting sponsorship to allow them to do work the Baltimore Sun apparently can no longer afford to do. On a global level, ProPublica, established in part by ex-LA Times reporters is a volunteer network of investigative reporters who were concerned that the kind of digging that made journalism different and superior to the fluff that fills so many surviving news columns, was becoming a luxury during tough economic times. There news is often the stuff the Pulitzers should be made of such as their recent look at nurses whose criminal records go undetected.

The NY Times, has taken a different route and weaves the locals on the street with pro journalists with something called "The Local." It is breaking new ground with a braided journalism experiment covering two largely ignored Brooklyn neighborhoods, giving the type of hometown, dig-under-the-fingernails coverage he every community deserves.

I could not go very far in any direction related to braided journalism, without stumbling across the Miami-based Knight Foundation, a non-profit dedicated to the betterment of journalism, started in 1950 with some of the considerable profits gleaned by the formerly venerable Knight-Ridder newspaper empire.

Since 1950, the Knight Foundation, "dedicated to excellence in journalism," has helped in the education of over 100,000 journalists and has contributed north of $1 billion toward the betterment of information quality at the community level.

In recent years more and more of Knight's efforts have gone toward projects that are based online. There's little doubt their efforts will change. They seem to be in a catbird position for the emergence of a new generation of Web-based media that will incorporate new media with time-established ethics and practices.

This is an area of emerging interest to me, and I think importance to how people will get their information in the coming decades. I will revisit some of the organizations mentioned here and I would love to hear from you if you can point to evidence of convergence between traditional and citizen journalism in social media venues.

I am always on the outlook for a next book possibility and Braided Journalism is among those that captures my personal passion. Bt whether it becomes a book or not, depends on what I find and to an almost equal degree, what people tell me here and on Twitter.

While I was posting a video clip yesterday about Twitter & some of the neat things people & businesses can do with it, James Karl Buck found a new one. He was tossed into an Egyptian jail cell. Apparently, in Egypt where abuse of prisoners is common, they let  him keep his phone. So, he Twittered a single word: "ARRESTED."

That put many wheels in motion and for him, it led to the US Embassy getting him out of both jail and back to his Oakland. But, Buck was told by police that his interpreter, Mohammed Maree was arrested and "he is a dead man." Since arriving here today. Buck has been doing his best to raise Hell on behalf of Mohammed. On his Twitter account he asks that anyone who cares contact Egyptian Press Consul Attiya A Shakran, (415) 346-3427 attiyashakran@hotmail.com (415) 548-0556

You can learn more about Mohammed at James' blog, linked to above.

James is a journalism grad student at UC Berkeley. He was in Egypt to cover blogger involvement in the current demonstrations against food shortages. ABC News is saying those demonstrations turned turned into riots.

In any case, Egypt is no place to get thrown into the slammer. Earlier this year, I interviewed Wael Abbas, who posts videos on YouTube showing abundant evidence of police abuse. A couple of weeks ago Wael told me he would be blogging about the strike. I hope that he is okay.

A couple of weeks back I wrote a piece on something I called "blogger journalism." It was a response to people asking me to submit interview questions in advance, something I maintained companies would never do if I worked for the NY Times. Last week at DEMO, I was chatting with Dan Farber as we filed into a room. I said, "Journalism is really changing these days," and he responded immediately, "No it isn't. It hasn't changed a bit."

We both got funneled into the room and did not sit together so we never continued the chat.  I have a hunch that we are both right. To Dan, the rules of journalism have not much changed. His delivery and distribution may now be online rather than on paper. His frequency may niow be several times daily, rather than weekly. But he still listens to people, asks questions and writes balanced copy. Dan is mild mannered and friendly and helpful to other journalists. But when he goes after a story he's like a dog with a bone. It's his story and he wants to get it first and right.

That would have been true of Dan 20 years ago as well. I think bloggers, aspiring to be journalists can be well served to emulate Dan's standards.

But still I would argue, journalism is changing. It is changing in a great many ways. Here are a few:

• We are amateurs. We don't get paid. No bloggers were airlifted by corporations to cover Iraq or Katrina as far as I know.  Most blogger don't get into the room where the big stories are introduced by large organizations. But those stories are still pretty well covered by traditional media.

So we bloggers  write about the stories we do get to see in our neighborhoods; at our meetups; in our classrooms. We interview the people we see. We serve as our own camera/sound crews.

The result is that a great many more events of the world are being covered today than has ever been the case in newspapers who determined news quantity as the page space between ads. Social media people are delivering news faster than ever before and more people have the chance to be heard than ever before.

Is it journalism? Of course it is.  The quality is uneven, but the same is probably true of your local traditional news sources. Whether the content is served up by a traditional organization or a blogger does not define whether or not it is journalism. There are newspaper reporters who get paid to cover alien abductions complete with doctored photos. There are bloggers who are not journalists for similar reasons. But there are a surprising number of bloggers who are respected citizen journalists.

• The guise of objectivity has changed. When I was a paid journalist in the late 1960s, I interviewed George C. Wallace, the segregationist Alabama governor who would go on to take 43% of Massachusetts Democratic votes in a primary election.

After, he sent me a thank you note, telling me he felt my article had helped him and his cause--a cause which I absolutely detested. But I had done my job. I had accurately reported what he said. I asked the sort of open-ended questions I still ask in interviews, ones that lets the speaker go where he/she wants to go. But helping George Wallace do well in a liberal Yankess state was something that did not please me in any way.

Since I returned to journalism, I've developed a style that Scoble and I used in the book. I tell you why I'm speaking to someone, then I left someone have his say. Then I tell you what i think of it., making very clear that you are getting a personal opinion. I wish I had the freedom to have done that 40 years ago as a reporter with Wallace.

Other bloggers seem to have picked up this approach and it pleases me immensely. It gets rid of a charade of objectivity that was never really there. It lets the reader know who the speaker is, and the reader will also have some sense of where the reporter is coming from. It is different from the old rules of engagement.

• My fact checkers are you. You change my story. Last week I covered DEMO 08 presentations on Twitter. One company, NotchUp claimed, in their presentation, that word-of-mouth among enthusiastic alpha users had taken it's new service viral; that there were 50,000 grassroots users gathered in a few weeks. Within minutes, i received a significant handful of Twitter responses, from readers on three continents, saying these guys were spammers and their claim was highly misleading.

In days of old, my editor would have challenged the NotchUp claim, asking me to get a second source. If I could not, the paper would probably have run the claim, emphasizing that it was the company's assertion. Some readers would have known the assertion was misleading, but probably would not have told us, because it was much haerder than just hitting a Twitter "Upload button."  In fact, a great journalist wiud have gone back to NotchUp to respond to the accusations, I did not because my readers got me to lose interest in them as a company.

I do not have the considerable benefit of an editor anymore, as those who ping me my frequent typos will attest--but I have a whole bevy of fact-checkers out there, as do other blogger journalists. They heloed Robert and I write a better book and they help me write more accurate reports now. Blog readers vet the facts, and the blog writer adjusts accordingly and quickly.

These are just three thoughts on the subject. There are many more. With all due respect to Dan, social media is changing most institutions and that includes journalism. Personally, it is a good thing. Most of America's "free press, " is in the hands of interests more concerned with corporate profits than journalism and for better or worse, social media is the only force emerging to offset that concentration of information control.

Utterz, is inviting people to report on what is happening in their local voting districts on this election day. This is a good idea and the diversity of comments going up there already makes for an interesting read.

Just one thought for you undecided out there. Vote for the candidate you believe will make the best president, not the one you think is going to win for some reason or other. That's how we'll get the two most deserving finalists.

But whatever you do, if this is your primary day, do not forget to vote. Events in the world should tell you what a sacred & powerful freedom it is.

The same thing has happened twice in a week and it tends to piss me off. I request interviews for the SAP Global Survey and someone asks if I would be willing to submit my questions in advance.

The answer is no, resoundingly so. You would not ask the NY Times or ABC or your hometown newspaper to do that? Why would you ask me?

The implicit answer is that I blog my interviews, and therefore, I must be less than a full journalist. I want the interview to increase my readership and therefore I should conduct them with an implicit wink and a nod. I'll get back to that in just a second.

In the interest of transparency, let me state a few things that regular readers of the survey probably already know. I conduct most of my interviews by email. So the recipient gets to see and consider the questions for a week or so before answering them. The recipient can easily fool me, and get help from internal people. I will never know.But I insist on naked conversations. If an interviewee sends me back Corpspeak or standard talking points,I will not publish it. This has happened only once. I have had respondents decline to answers a question, and the only way it shows, is that there are fewer questions to the interview. This is also fine with me.

Finally, the likelihood of getting burned is small. Why? Because SAP my sponsors and I are looking for insights and information that will add to the body of knowledge on social media's impact on culture and business. I ask people for interviews because I think they have something to contribute.

So far there have been 58 interviews. I have posted a few broken links and in one case, I posted the wrong middle name of an interviewee (my worst mistake so far). No one has contacted me to claim I misrepresented them.

I am educated and experienced as a journalist. I have worked for newspapers, email newsletters and briefly as a radio commentator. I am now practicing journalism as a blogger. The rules have changed slightly. I get to stick my opinion in when reporting. I am obliged to make clear when it is opinion and when it is reporting.

Bloggers as journalists are just evolving. We bloggers have brought much of this on ourselves.  When I am interviewed by other bloggers, they often ask me to promote that I am on their sites. I rarely do this and when I do, it is because I feel new ground was covered, that contributes something to the body of knowledge. I did it twice recently and felt uncomfortable, so it will probably be a while before I do it again.

As a reporter, I never asked an interviewee to promote what I wrote. If she or he liked it, then they might cut and copy a newspaper clip, or forward my email newsletter or in blogs, link to it. But to collaborate in the promotion of those materials, to me is as unjournalistic as asking me for questions in advance.

I also have the issue of interviewing friends on my blog. I will always be transparent. This is not new to blogging. I had friends who were part of my state house beat as a yong reporter. I once dated a young woman whose father served on the local Council for the Elderly  When that council came under scrutiny for questionable practices, I had to recuse myself and that is the way it should be.

Blogging is breaking new ground in so many days.  For me, it is difficult to keep straight, that one day I am a speaker, another I am a blogging reporter and very recently I was a consulting blogger who sometimes wrote about clients. New ground is often shaky and it requires a few hops and occasional stumbles.

The way I try to keep it straight is to remember my customer is my reader and that is where my loyalty rests when I blog.

The BBC reports that it conducted a survey in which only 56% of those polled though a free press was important to society.  A full 40% thought restricting press for the sake of social harmony was preferable.  I wonder how they would vote on incarcerating social dissenters or perhaps waterboarding activists.

Rick Smolan (Against All Odds); Jessie Smolan, originally uploaded by GBD.

This may be the only time I ever post a traditional press release on this site, but the amazing photographer and collaborative photo book producer Rick Smolan is behind this project, and before we social media maniacs stole the term "Citizen Journalist,  Rick was organizing citizen photo journalists on a global basis.

Please note the date.  I wish I had known sooner, but there is still time to click in:

Beginning Sept. 17, in the course of a single week, 100 of the world’s top photojournalists – and millions of amateur shutterbugs – will fan out around the United States to shoot digital photos of the most important place in their lives: Home.

With America at Home, Rick Smolan and the team that produced A Day in the Life of America: America 24/7, 24 Hours in Cyberspace, and One Digital Day, will be taking on their biggest challenge to date. The result, which is expected to include several million photographs, will be the most extensive record of American home life ever attempted.

“The idea of ‘home’ is as universal and deeply ingrained as that of ‘mother’ or ‘father,’” says Smolan. “Ask people to describe what the word ‘home’ means to them and their answers tap into a deep pool of emotions and memories. We’re inviting millions of Americans to collaborate in the creation of a digital time capsule that may prove to be an invaluable resource for our descendants to understand the fabric of home life in 2007.”

Editorially, America at Home aims to capture the emotions of home: the distinctive rituals, intimate moments and all the myriad ways in which we work, play, learn, conduct our lives and interact with friends, family members (and pets!) as we transform our dwellings into our homes. From McMansions to mobile homes, from tree houses to tenement slums, from ranches to old age homes, the public is invited to help document the harmonies and paradoxes of home life across America over a single seven-day period.

Snapshots Heard ‘round the Nation

Through massive grassroots online outreach, millions of Americans are being invited to simultaneously contribute their own images via a series of daily snapshots taken at the same time of day across the nation each day throughout the week. Participants will receive daily emails with assignment instructions and can also take general photos of what makes their home special.

The public is invited to sign up and upload their images at www.MyAmericaAtHome.com.

An international team of leading magazine and newspaper photo editors will edit all of the images, shot by both professionals and amateurs. The best images will be woven together with essays from leading writers in a unique and evocative coffee table book, a website, a TV show, and an exhibit.

The images shot by the 100 professional photojournalists and millions of amateurs will reflect the extraordinary diversity that makes up American family life and will represent a broad range of economic, geographic, racial, political, and socially diverse lifestyles. Topics covered will include:
-- A mother showcases the chaos and glory of her teen-tycoon son’s bedroom,
-- Multi-generational families living under the same roof,
-- A mom snaps her 10-year-old daughter snuggling with ‘flat daddy’, a life-sized cut-out of Army dad, away in his second tour of duty in Iraq,
-- A ‘Grand Central’ abode which welcomes a never-ending stream of friends,
-- A single family house shared by two families, who occupy it in shifts,
-- A pro shooter documents a 5-year-old child of divorce bouncing between her two Manhattan bedrooms,
-- An eco-hermit snaps his ‘living’ desert hideaway complete with breathable walls,
-- A professional photographer tours a million dollar mobile home that follows its movie star owner from film location to film location,
-- A Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer shoots a family in the last home standing in a condemned neighborhood,
-- Another photographer explores the secret rooms hidden behind book-shelves and under stairs commissioned by an army of adult Peter Pans.
*
A unique element of America at Home is that it encourages participation by cell phone camera users. More than a billion people around the world have an Internet-connected camera in their pocket all day long: their phone. This project will be the first time the full combined power of these millions of phones in the U.S. has been activated for a common purpose. "Humanity has a deep need to tell stories,” says Smolan. “That’s why photographs are so important to people. The ability to shoot and then instantly share images is going to dramatically change the way humanity sees itself and how each of us tells our own stories."
The America at Home book will be published by Running Press in March 2008 and will offer the public the ability to personalize their books with customized covers. The custom cover feature was largely responsible for the success of Smolan's last project, America 24/7, when more than 21% of all book buyers customized their copies. This was the first time in publishing history that a New York Times best-seller was mass customized by its readers.

America at Home is made possible through a partnership with IKEA with additional support being provided by HP's Snapfish, Google, BabyCenter.com, Nikon, FotoNation.net and TravelMuse.

As the New York Times, followed by just about everyone else is reporting this morning, the Fake Steve Jobs is in fact Dan Lyons, who wrote a notorious cover article in Forbes Magazine likening bloggers to lynch mobs and placing a significant nail into the coffin of Forbes as a credible news magazine.

It turns out that Lyons is going to write a book on his experience. I imagine it will go down on the great annals of book-writing history with Jason Blair's "Burning down my Master's House," which explained how a reporter lied and plagiarized during his tenure at the New York Times, or maybe it should be likened to Clifford Irving's hoax biography of Howard Hughes.

Anyone who wants to write a best-seller knows that controversy sells and the more outrageous it is, the more it sells.  Throw in a famous person's name, like Steve Jobs, and it sells even more. Lyons will get his time on the talk shows for a while before he'll fall into the oblivion he so rightly deserves or so I would like to think.

Lyons, I am sure, will attempt to debunk blogging.  In fact, he is more likely to debunk himself by missing a key point to why blogging is working so well.  It is transparent. Lyons is not.

Like Blair and Irving, he does have a contrivance going.  I hope he enjoys his time strutting and fretting on the stage before he and his book become yesterday's news.

Terry Heaton, the Digital Journalist, has a wonderful, deep-thinking and lengthy column about traditional and new news coverage, about media and the divisions in society, about traditional media and their selections of topics as news,about callous celebrity interviewers who only stick to the script. It's also about why prominent people use social media to speak for themselves rather than through the jaded and selfish filters of traditional media.

For those of you suffering from Twitter-inseminated short attention span, tak a pill or something.  Shttp://digitaljournalist.org/issue0708/heaton0708.htmlpend 15 minutes reading the entire column. It's worth your time.

For those of you who cannot, here's a brief sample:

"And that's precisely the point for Mr. Wise and for all of us in the
world of news. It isn't about the story; it's about us and our careers
and our fame and our fortune. It's about furthering the establishment,
and this is precisely why people are taking things into their own
hands. The audience is dissatisfied, but we are unable to turn away
from fostering that dissatisfaction.

The personal media revolution and its inexpensive tools are enabling
people to cover what's important to them for themselves. Another
significant event the last week in June should give everybody in the
all-things-to-everybody crowd a severe case of the spine chills."

I don't know much about Terry, or about this online publication. You can't subscribe to it. There's a neat little (c) at the bottom of his column. But, as I've said before, it's not the medium that matters, it's the message, and his is both accurate and articulate in its delivery.

There is a simple reason why journalists should be protected from reveal their sources, even when those sources connect with criminal investigations. If they cannot protect their sources, then the public will only have access to official accounts of what has happened. People will be afraid to leak ugly and important truths to the press for fear of being outed or incarcerated.

If you do not see that this has everything to do with free speech, then I don't know how to say it better. This has to do with traditional v. citizen journalism.  Josh Wolf, a Bay Area video blogger recently set a record for being incarcerated longer than anyone else for not revealing sources.  But the number of regular journalists in this country who have been thrown in the slammer--or were threatened with it, has risen dramatically over the past six years.

It's not about the press.  It's not about criminal prosecution. It has to do with the protections of a free society and allowing the words of people in power to be challenged.

I say all this because the Free Flow of Information Act is being reintroduced to Congress Wednesday afternoon and it needs to be supported.  The last time around, Congress had a different mix and the public seemed not to care.

One of the organizations trying to inform people and rally support is the Society of Professional Journalists , which provides extensive information on shield laws and the current situation at its site. SPJ's federal shield law page has the executive summary.

If you are the type who writes your Congressperson, this would be a good time to do so.

Bruno Giussani has a fine essay that expands on some thoughts by Global Voices pioneer Ethan Zuckerman, one of my favorite thinkers who said "Don't speak. Point," meaning that the days of journalists and
editors speaking on behalf of people or speaking to people are
over.

Now, the objective is to point to people and get out of the way.

It's a great piece, offering some fresh insights and vision on an overworked subject. Go read it.

[NOTE: This piece has been reedited in response to Bruno's comment below. I had attributed his words and thoughts to Zuckerman.  Thanks for setting it straight, Bruno.]