Citizen media

Have you been watching the Honolulu Civil Beat news experiment? That’s the Hawaii news website edited by John Temple (former editor of the defunct Rocky Mountain News) and financed by Pierre Omidyar (founder of eBay).

While I have doubts that its business model (asking $19.99 a month for full access to the news site’s content and discussions) will work, I do think that it’s heading in the right direction with its user commenting policies:

• Commenters must be paying subscribers; free visitors to the site can’t leave comments on articles or join discussions. (A cheaper option is to pay 99 cents a month for a “Discussion Membership.”)
• Commenters and discussion participants use their real names; anonymous comments are not allowed.
• Civil Beat reporters serve as hosts for discussions and regularly interact; they don’t sit on the sidelines but rather mix it up with readers, and keep things “civil.”

As the site’s name implies, the goal is to create valuable, intelligent, civil online discussions on local and state issues where there are divergent views. While the paid-subscription model limits the size of its audience for full content and for participating in discussions (anyone can still read discussions for free), the tenor of the public conversation on the site is far better than the typical local news website where user comments are a free-for-all.

An unusual option: Honolulu Civil Beat’s “Discussion Membership” for 99 cents per month

Here in Boulder, we have the opposite of civil with the user comments on DailyCamera.com, website of the dominant daily newspaper. A recent major story demonstrates the problem with the Daily Camera allowing commenters to hide their identity.

A few weeks ago, an employee of a stove and floor store killed the couple who owned the business, then killed himself. The married couple left behind a young teen daughter and were beloved by many people. The employee-shooter was a 50-year-old ex-computer programmer described as socially awkward, oddly compulsive, never married and no children, who lived alone with his cat, and apparently was disgruntled about a change to his commission structure.

The best media outlet to follow the tragedy has been the Daily Camera and its website, which examined the lives of those involved and (controversially) covered the store owners’ emotional funeral. But what was awful about the Camera’s online coverage was the user comments that piled up under any article published about this sensational tragedy.

DailyCamera.com uses IntenseDebate for its web comment hosting, and while to comment on a story you do need to register, there’s no requirement to publicly identify yourself. You can use a nickname (like “SwitzTrail,” a frequent commenter) and hide in anonymity. IntenseDebate hosts an archive of SwitzTrail’s comments posted on DailyCamera.com and other ID-using sites where he/she has posted, but there’s no profile information on that person. You don’t have to identify yourself publicly if you don’t wish to in order to post a comment.

This stove store shooting story confirms my strengthening opposition to commenter anonymity when it comes to local general-news sites. Many of the user comments I read online during the height of the coverage were truly abhorrent, with wild speculation that maybe the business owners were too greedy and that’s why this happened, and suggestions that current government policies may result in more stressed-out people going whack-o. (I could point you to many other recent examples of Boulder stories with comment threads filled with anonymous, abusive, and downright stupid posts. It’s the same at too many news websites.)

This is the stuff that sane people would not publish if their real names were attached. I hope the orphaned daughter was not exposed to this anonymous drivel.

DailyCamera.com’s editors removed some of the worst comments. To get an idea of what got nixed, and some of what remained online, here’s one of the more rational commenters:

“It’s sickening the way some of you are rationalizing the murderer’s actions. Who cares whether or not the compensation package was fair or not, he could have quit at any time. This guy was a murderer and a psychopath, and I hope he is rotting in hell! Scary to see how many people sympathize with this guy!”

I’m not trying to be anti-free speech, and I believe that anonymity can have its place. But here’s what I’d suggest for DailyCamera.com and other news sites where divergent views are the norm:

1. Require registration for anyone who wishes to comment, including entering their real name.
2. Use real names as user IDs — no self-chosen nicknames allowed — so that real people are standing behind their words; that will cut out most of the abusive and garbage comments. (Yes, of course, some people will easily get around that with a fake “real name.” But if the majority comply, you’ll have less incivility entering the comment stream, and people who don’t comment now because of the ugly tone of the discussion threads may return.)
3. Allow a registered user to create a comment that is listed as “anonymous,” but such comments must go through a moderator for approval; no instant posts.

Additionally, a local news site like DailyCamera.com could institute a “Discussion Membership” fee, a la Honolulu Civil Beat. That might cut user participation so much that it’s not a wise move; then again, it might be successful enough to add a needed extra revenue stream while also moving the needle on user comments from Dumb and Dumber to Quasi-Intelligent and above.

So the solution is quite simple for those news sites needing to improve their public online discourse. Just say no to anonymity, except in exceptional circumstances.

Earlier today Howard Weaver tweeted the following, which I can’t answer in 140 characters (!) so I’ll respond here. …

“Why do people (@steveouting et al) keep saying ‘block level’ info is best premium opportunity? Seems *most* likely to be citizen generated.” –@howardweaver

I don’t recall saying it’s the “best” premium online content opportunity, though I think it’s important. Why? Because I don’t know what’s going on with my neighbors, other than the ones I know or who are friends. No business, media, or service has yet been able to inform me what’s going on in my little neighborhood (about 120 houses, in my case).

Sure, if a neighbor two streets over murders his family and sets his house on fire, the local media will tell me the details of that. But if that neighbor is not a loony but comes in first place in the Boulder Marathon, I’d like to be alerted that that person lives near me. If a county paving crew is coming to resurface a street in the neighborhood, I’d like to learn about that. If another neighbor’s car got scraped by a vandal last night, I want to know about that.

A lot of the pieces are waiting to be put together; they exist already. Everyblock.com can find data from my neighborhood (well, not actually MY neighborhood, but those in other cities it’s reached so far), by parsing it from public databases and mapping it; it can tell me when a house in the neighborhood is sold and the selling price; it can identify streets in my neighborhood where crimes occurred, and give me the details. I could find photos taken within my neighborhood on Flickr, for those photos that are geo-tagged (a growing number are). I could use Twitter search filters to find tweets posted from within my neighborhood (again, those that are geo-tagged, such as those posted from a GPS-enabled phone).

So to find out as much as I can about what’s happening in my little neighborhood, it’s now more possible than ever before; in time there will be even more news and data about my neighborhood or my block. It’s just not convenient or easy to find it all now.

So where there may be opportunity is in bringing all this together into a by-block or by-neighborhood information service that I might find worth paying for. It would know my address and alert me to new data (neighborhood home sales, crime reports, fires, divorces, marriages, deaths, etc.) automatically. It would identify Twitter posts that came from my neighbors and give me a list of them. It would know who my Facebook friends are (because I permitted the service to look into my account), and pull out status updates and other Facebook submissions from those in my neighborhood. It would identify bloggers who live nearby and show me their latest posts.

Of course, Google might get to this level of information granularity at some point and offer such a service for free. But it doesn’t yet. If a local media entity offered such a service for a modest price, I might pay for it. The value worth paying for is in the service of making all that micro-local and micro-personal news and data come to me in a simple personal digital information stream.

Is that a big business opportunity? I don’t know. I know I’d like to have that information available.

This popped up in my ego filter: Colorado State University adjunct professor of journalism Jeff Browne assigned my old “11 Layers of Citizen Journalism” essay to students in his Online Writing and Journalism class. (It’s been a popular article over the years; I often see it on reading lists.)

I wrote that piece in 2005 when I was working for the Poynter Institute. While it’s held up somewhat well, it’s nevertheless dated. One of these days when I have some free time (yeah, right), I’ll try to do an updated version.

To Browne’s students: Please keep in mind that it was written several years ago, some of the facts are outdated, and the warranty on my words is long past!

There’s been plenty of fretting in journalism circles this week about comment threads on news stories. My position: Don’t publish without them, but figure out ways to keep the conversation civil and ban the trolls.

The website of my local newspaper, the Boulder Daily Camera, has pretty active comment threads, and, predictably, the more bizarre the story, the longer the list of commenters. A story today generated a ton of comments: about a woman athlete cycling with her young son in a child seat who had another cyclist come up to her and grab one of her breasts. She chased the guy down while calling 911 on her cell phone, and police caught the weirdo. Yeah, you know that one is going to generate a lot of discussion.

Skimming through the dozens of comments, I was intrigued to see that the victim joined in the discussion, thanking other commenters for their support. (Many called her brave; a few said she was foolish to put her son at risk by giving chase.) Her participation in the after-publication public commenting added nicely to the story. Sure, some of the other comments were dumb, as always. But this was an example of user comments adding value to the coverage.

Here’s my latest Editor & Publisher Online column: “Web Integration on a Grander Scale.”

I present a model for moving beyond reader comments, and activating community-member contributions and participation at the article level.

My recent Editor & Publisher Online column about hyper-local news websites contained a call for a new model, one that relies on professional journalists working closer with “citizen” (non-journalist) experts more so than being just open to submissions from non-paid community members (aka, “citizen journalists”). I followed that up with a blog item here suggesting that to succeed, a hyper-local strategy needs to have a way to target specialized news and information to people who care about it (since it’s “boring” to everyone else) and good personalization technology.

Mark Potts, one of the founders of Backfence.com, a defunct network of citizen-journalism websites, objected to my reasoning, and suggested that the quality of content on Backfence sites had nothing to do with the company’s demise. You can read his response in a guest column on E&P Online.

Here’s my response to Potts. I’ll start with a few excerpts from his critique of my column:

“On a hyperlocal site, the end result may be something that really can’t be defined as ‘journalism,’ but that is intensely interesting and important to the people who visit and contribute to the site.” …

“It’s also unfair to suggest that hyperlocal content is ‘of low quality and boring,’ as Steve does in his column. Low quality? To a professional editor, maybe, but the fact is that most participants in user-generated sites can communicate very well. It may not be ‘journalism,’ but it’s still quite readable and interesting.”

“And ‘boring’ is in the eye of the beholder. To an outsider, any hyperlocal information is probably boring. It may be to a transient resident, too. But to someone with a stake in the community, kids in the schools, paying taxes, dealing with community services, patronizing local merchants, etc., those arcane town council meetings, zoning disputes, tips on finding good pizza and kids’ sports scores are incredibly important — more so than just about anything a lot of us think of as journalism.”

“Let’s not go making flat statements about what doesn’t work, or what’s ‘boring’ about hyperlocal sites. It’s way too early in the game to even begin to know what the successful formula will be. Let’s celebrate those of us who are working hard, inside and outside newspapers, to crack the code.”

Let’s address the “boring” issue. What I wrote and believe is that hyper-local content, most often written by community members, is often “boring” to people who don’t care about the topic. BUT, when targeted to the right person (and this is where personalization technology comes in), it’s incredibly powerful and important. Ergo, sites that present a citizen-powered collection of news items (which inevitably include lots of press releases from community groups and others) need an overhaul.

For example, here’s a list of the “Featured” stories on July 2, 2008, from the Boulder, Colorado, section of Yourhub.com, a citizen journalism site operated by E.W. Scripps and the Rocky Mountain News in Denver. (Boulder is where I live, and I do care about local news and information. I’ve lived in Boulder for about 13 years, and I lived here once before in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Ergo, I’m pretty well rooted in this community.) Presumably, since these are included in the Featured block on the home page, these are the best submitted stories covering Boulder. By Potts’ reasoning, I should be interested in these stories.

1. Hop on the biodiesel bus, don’t forget your bike. A 1-paragraph press release report about how Bike to Work day was a success; published 2 weeks ago.
2. Annual festival ‘a circus’. 1-paragraph press release about a Boulder juggling festival, including a bunch of photos of the jugglers; published 16 days ago.
3. A Little Light Music. An event description (press release) for a musical theater production at the University of Colorado; published 9 days ago.
4. Boulder Creek Festival Kick-Off Concert! Press release about the Boulder Creek Festival, which was held over Memorial Day; published over a month ago.
5. Congratulations to Boulder-area graduates. Yourhub.com staff put this together; it’s a compilation of links to lists of Boulder County high school graduates. Published over a month ago.

So those are the Featured stories for Boulder on Yourhub.com on July 2, the day I’m writing this. I also clicked on the list of all stories submitted to Yourhub under the Boulder category. For July 2, there are 7 stories in the list:

1. Poorly written essay by Boulder guy about he and his buddies skiing all 28 California resorts.
2. Press release for community theater of nearby town (Louisville).
3. Press release about traveling presidential memorabilia visiting Denver. (No Boulder connection.)
4. Story about the second anniversary of the Colorado Clean Indoor Air Act. (I think this is a press release from the Smoke Free Colorado organization; no Boulder connection.)
5. Story (or maybe it’s a press release; I can’t really tell) about teens raising money for Alzheimer’s Disease research. (No Boulder connection that I could discern.)
6. An Arvada resident reminisces about an old Denver-area restaurant chain, The Drumstick. (No Boulder connection.)
7. Girl Scout press release about a promotion with Dairy Queen. (No Boulder connection.)

OK, I dare anyone to convince me that that collection of content is “interesting.” I’m a devoted, long-time Boulderite, and the only thing I found remotely of interest is the Yourhub staff compilation of high school graduates; I can look to see if any of my friends’ kids graduated. I sure have no desire to come back to check out the Boulder stuff on Yourhub after this exercise.

I chose to examine Yourhub Boulder, of course, to see if Potts is right that if you’re committed to a community, you do care about the kind of stuff that goes on sites like Yourhub, and that was carried by Backfence.com sites when they were still running. I can’t begin to describe how dull this collection of content is to me.

Now, I again will emphasize that I am not a critic of the concept of “citizen journalism.” To the contrary, I’m a believer in hyper-local! I just don’t think we’re doing it right yet.

Here’s what I’d suggest for a remodel of Yourhub, and what I think (in hindsight) that Backfence should have done. The user interface would look like this:

A user should be able to select from a list of topics, interests, organizations, etc. that he is interested in. This would generate a local-focused content stream of stuff over time that matches his interests. For example, I might select as my interests: mountain biking; cycling; running; “green”/environmental news; Boulder Open Space Department; trails news; Summit Middle School; University of Colorado School of Journalism; mosquito control; dogs; traffic delays/road construction; the Internet scene; venture capital community/investors; Boulder media; and news about my small neighborhood.

How would a hyper-local site serve up all that stuff? It would comb through various sources of news, events, and information that match those choices: newspaper staff; citizen contributors; local blogs (mostly external, but perhaps newspaper bloggers, too); websites and newsletters of community groups, schools, and government agencies; discussion lists (aka, listservs) and forums devoted to various topics (e.g., local mountain biking group) and run by various local organizations; local databases (police department, health department, Realtors’ groups). It would intelligently parse through a growing list of news, data, and information sources and deliver to me what I care most about. The hyper-local site ideally would become the place I look first for what I care about or need to know locally; Google serves that purpose now.

This gets close to what the American Press Institute’s Newspaper Next 2.0 report suggests: the newspaper as “local information and connection utility.”

I’m standing by my criticism of much (NOT ALL!) hyper-local content as “boring.” I’ll stop saying that Yourhub Boulder’s content is boring when it starts including content from the school my daughter goes to, and when it also brings me news about my nearby neighbors, and so on.

What about other local news? Am I suggesting that I don’t care about that? Not at all. That’s what my traditional local newspaper website is for. Here in Boulder we have lots of fascinating stuff going on, from adverse possession controversies to naked bicyclists getting a pass while a naked jogging priest gets arrested. The newspaper site is great for that, and I’m devoted to reading it day-in and day-out. It’s the hyper-local sites covering Boulder with their dull content about minor local events and happenings that don’t interest me that I can live without (please).

Just give me the good hyper-local stuff! Then I’ll be happy, and the hyper-local publishers (be they newspapers or independents) will have a business.

This is a complex subject, and I’m glossing over some other possible solutions. For example, I think that having a strong and attractive personality at the center of a hyper-local website can be tremendously effective in gaining an audience and creating a strong community of users. And I think that some of the weaknesses of non-professional content can be dealt with by some professional editorial oversight or help (a pro-am approach). I also think it makes sense for newspapers playing in the hyper-local space to integrate that into the main news website, instead of putting it “over there” in a silo for the “non-professional” stuff. But this has gone on too long already, so I’ll leave those discussions for other days.

I write this with all due respect for my friend Mark Potts, who I’ve known for many years. I’m having a hard time remembering when we last disagreed on an issue. But we’ll have to disagree on this one.

I want to see hyper-local succeed. Who knows if I’m right in my thinking on this; we’ll see as hyper-local plays out. Lots of people are trying to make it work and “crack the code.” What I presented in my E&P column and in my earlier blog item is my attempt at that, and nothing more.

OK, I think I get it now. I feel like I understand what newspapers need to do. I wrote up some of this in my latest Editor & Publisher Online column, but subsequent to that I also ran across a significant blog entry from Dudernet: “Newspapers and why I’ve tired of reading (most of) them.” That blog is by “tball”; I have no idea who that is, but he/she works at a Tribune Co. newspaper and appears to blog anonymously.

The blog item discusses something that’s been bugging me for a while. Most newspapers are focusing on local news, since national and international coverage is a commodity online and they need to focus on what they can do best, and that’s local coverage. But the trouble is, for many people, local news is boring and not relevant to them. And hyper-local (aka, local-local) is even more so.

This is especially so for people who don’t have strong ties to the community in which they live. The U.S., especially, is a transitory society; people move around a lot for jobs, school, and other reasons, and they don’t always feel strongly attached to where they live. Lots of folks are more interested in niche topics and national events than local politics and local news headlines, or they want local news from where they’re from originally. These people are especially unimpressed by coverage of city council meetings and other mundane local happenings in the town or city where they live. It’s the people who don’t move around — who still live in the town where they grew up — that are appreciative of good local coverage.

Here’s a great excerpt from someone (“mccxxiii”) who commented on tball’s post. (This is good stuff.)

“I am fairly young, single, no kids, and no extended family in the large city where I live. I rent because I could never afford to buy here, and I’ll leave in the next couple of years because of it.

“I am concerned with exactly two items of ‘local news’ … when is the dog park in my neighborhood opening, and are there any train delays this morning. I get both of those things more quickly and efficiently from a source other than my local paper. (Dog park project listserv and text message alerts from the train people.)

“It pains me to say that, because I was a newspaper reporter for nearly a decade, and I like nothing more than to settle in for a good read with a bagel and juice in the morning. But pages upon pages of city council minutiae and youth baseball coverage say nothing to me except goodbye. Everything I read about ‘how to save newspapers’ includes the idea of hyper-local, but I can’t think of a better way to turn me OFF.”

Brilliant! This person is pointing you to the way to make hyper-local relevant.

If it’s not obvious to you, the local newspaper serving this individual should be the one serving up the information from the dog park listserv. And the train delays. That it’s not doing that, and is leaving it to others, is major oversight.

To see what newspapers must do to do hyper-local right, look to Adrian Holovaty’s Everyblock.com, which digs out and filters real estate listings, crime, government data, news articles, blog entries, and a bunch of other stuff down to the city-block level. That’s stuff that reaches people at a personal level: the crime that happened 2 blocks from my house; the house that sold down the street, and for how much; the bus route change that affects the bus stop I use; etc.

Local newspapers need to figure out how to find the data and information like train delays and dog-park news, then deliver it to the people who care about it. That is the “hyper-local news” that will allow newspapers to renew themselves as important in people’s lives. Right now if you want to find out about train delays, you probably go directly to the train operator’s website; if you don’t know about that site, you go to Google and Google points you to the train schedule page. Local newspapers need to become known as the place to go for the hyper-local information and news that YOU want.

I think this will require several components to pull off:

1. Technology to automate some of the process of combing through public databases and information sources to find all the relevant hyper-local data and news that people within your community might care about. Every newspaper will want to be able to do what Everyblock.com is doing. (Holovaty will release the open-source code to Everyblock when his 2-year Knight Foundation grant period is over.)
2. Staffing at the newspaper that is constantly finding new sources of information, news, and data to feed into the system. These editorial workers should be not only looking for every local source of information to tap, but also finding out from readers and users what they want. “mccxxiii” said he/she wants dog-park news and train-delay schedules. What else do people want and need? Can you get it for them?
3. Personalization features for your website that allow users to specify what they want to know and how to receive it. The default may be news and other stuff that happens within a user-defined radius of a users’ home and/or office address. But the user also should be able to specify custom stuff that they want, such as news alerts about the new dog park. And of course they should be able to choose to receive news and information about topics of interest (e.g., stuff about the local rock climbing scene) that is not tied to a mapped area around their location.
4. Facebook-like features that let a newspaper’s readers what’s going on with their friends, a la Facebook’s Newsfeed. Reinventing Newsfeed-like functionality for a newspaper site may not make much sense, while tapping into Facebook on behalf of your users might.

None of this is meant to suggest that local news isn’t important. It is, and people really do care about significant news that happens in their communities. But when it comes to stuff that’s deeper into the community and of interest only to a small segment, there is a danger with hyper-local of boring your audience. Location, location, location is the Realtor’s mantra; I’m thinking that personalization, personalization, personalization should be local newspaper website editors’ mantra now.

I hope no one reads into this that I am not a believer in hyper-local. To the contrary, I’m a big fan, but I think that for it to gain an appreciative audience — and for it to turn into a business — we need to add the elements that I describe above.

JD Lasica interviewed NYU’s Jay Rosen in the video below, in which Rosen gives an excellent overview of the Mayhill Fowler dual controversies. Fowler was the “citizen journalist” working for Off The Bus who captured Barack Obama’s “bitter about guns and religion” comment and Bill Clinton cursing out an author.

Rosen echoes my own thoughts about how “real” journalists are (over)reacting: The traditional rules of engagement that journalists live by don’t really apply to citizens, who a) don’t care about the rules and b) probably don’t know about them. “Citizens” don’t care about access to public figures in the way that pro journalists do, so they have no motivation to hold back when they experience something worth sharing, as Fowler did on those two occasions.

Citizen reporting threatens the club from JD Lasica on Vimeo.

This is a great quote, by Dan Gillmor (via a Twitter post by Dan Pacheco):

OK, perhaps the second sentence is paraphrased, but I really like it. “‘Dog bites man’ is newsworthy if you know the man, or dog,” so nicely sums up what I’ve been thinking for some time about what many have termed “hyper-local” journalism.

Yes, dog bites man, or 5th-grader hits winning home run, or woman wins teacher of the year award at Smith Elementary are boring items to nearly everyone — but not to the people involved and the people who know them. For the latter group, it’s important stuff.

We now have the technology available online (and for mobile devices) to deliver that boring-to-everyone-but-me stuff to the right people. We don’t need to produce a weekly give-away print product filled with boring dog-bites-man stuff, because we can deliver it to the people for whom it’s important, interesting, and vital — and not bore everyone else.

To critics of hyper-local news or “citizen journalism,” I will argue that it can be powerful stuff when and only when it’s targeted well. I can envision a future — and I look forward to it — when services are available to send me news on my smartphone letting me know that the guy down the street got bit by a dog.

Fascinating story from NY Times today: “For New Journalists, All Bets, but Not Mikes, Are Off.” The short version is that a “citizen journalist” working for Huffington Post’s Off The Bus was talking to Bill Clinton at a campaign rally, and the ex-prez blurted out some unsavory words thinking that he was just talking to an ordinary person, and not expecting his comments to be recorded and broadcast out to the world.

The Times piece has much navel gazing, including journalists bemoaning the “bad form” of a non-professional journalist in “breaking the rules” that reporters have for so long operated under by recording Clinton with a digital recorder without his knowledge. (Though he was in a public place at a public event, so he should have known better.)

Get over it, journalists! In a world where any and everybody can publish what they hear or experience (or record with a camera phone), lots of people are not going to follow old “rules” that they don’t understand or even know about. Bemoaning bad behavior by ordinary folks suddenly thrust into the role of “citizen journalist” shows lack of understanding of what’s happening here.

Politicians, especially, have got to understand that in this new broadband world of ours, everything that they say to anyone is potentially on the record. They can’t know if the person they’re chatting with informally at a campaign event has a blog that will get used to share off-the-cuff remarks, or if they’ll post to Twitter and the politician’s remarks get amplified from there.

Traditionalists in politics and the media can bemoan this “unseemly” situation, but it does nothing to change the reality. Everyone in the public eye needs to be more careful about the words they utter all the time, now that everyone else in the room has a digital megaphone.