Trusted Space - Media

WRKN - TV Nashville

Here Terry Heaton shows us that aggregation is working in the existing 'sphere but that VC backed citizen sites are struggling. Is the issue Trusted Space or Not?

I am really not a “told you so” kind of person, but the news that Backfence is having difficulty comes as no surprise. For the unenlightened, Backfence is a series of 13 “citizen journalism” sites in three metropolitan areas: Washington, Chicago and the San Francisco Bay area. Funded by VC money, the model was touted by some observers as the way of the future.

Its downfall — if that’s what’s happening — should not be an indictment of hyperlocal citizens media, because there are plenty of other sites that are doing well (Baristanet, SunValleyOnline, Buffalo Rising, H2Otown, and one of my favorites, PegasusNews here in Dallas). It’s a tricky proposition, to say the least, but I think efforts that don’t do well have difficulty, because they’re trying too hard to build something that’s already there. Aggregation is the key, not content creation.

This is why we built Nashville is Talking for WRKN-TV. It is an aggregator of the existing blogosphere and doesn’t try to be anything other than that. The community that has built up around it is pretty amazing, a little society that runs itself quite nicely and brings loads of benefits to the TV station along-the-way. WKRN’s plans go beyond what currently exists, and I think a lot of people are going to be surprised when all is said and done.

The existing blogosphere in any community has energy and life that can’t be duplicated by efforts from without. Bloggers write, because they have something to say. And people who have something to say will find a way to say it. What I don’t like about some citizen media sites is how hard they try to create a forum for people via their own model, reasoning that once the forum is in place, talented people will flock to it. People who have something to say already have their own forums, so efforts to duplicate this, I believe, come off as dry and lifeless.

Fred Wilson has a good summary of the “placeblogging” (this is the new term) phenomenon in his blog this week.

Like other observers, I’ve supported Backfence and the people who were trying to make it work. Nobody has a lock on where all this is going, and we’ve got to accept that some things will work and others won’t. Part of that, I think, is deciding what we mean by “works” and then building accordingly.

Media 2.0 is not Media 1.0, and the more we try to make it so, the quicker we’ll go down in flames.

A Newsroom of Thousands - MPR

MPR are pioneering another method of bringing the Citizen inside - they call it Public Insight Journalism.

Here is Michael Skoler's article in the Current - Snip:-

Ever since entering journalism, I have delighted in finding the hidden story or fact or source that no other reporter had. So I cultivated sources, did endless research and took every opportunity to talk with strangers. That’s how I got my very best stories. At Minnesota Public Radio, we’ve found a way to have those sources and stories come to us.

Seventeen thousand people, at last count, have volunteered to share what they know about their communities, their work and their lives to help us find and tell important stories. Many have given us leads we might never have found. Our network of public sources continues to grow (by roughly 1,000 a month) and so does its contribution to our coverage.

In the past few weeks, reporters here and at our American Public Media programs in Los Angeles have used these sources for stories on crime in Minneapolis, obstacles faced by women entrepreneurs, advances in green architecture, rising middle-class insecurity, and religion at the office. We also met with 70 people, many of them undocumented workers, for our continuing coverage of immigration issues.

We call our approach Public Insight Journalism®, or PIJ, because we seek to tap the knowledge and insight of those in the public to make our coverage stronger and more relevant.

This approach appears to fit the rule of the emerging natural alternative:-

Inexpensive tools (In any field) plus web support (Marketing, sales, Logistics etc) aggregated inside a Trusted Space with millions of participants acting as both consumers and suppliers = a much better system for all.

       

BBC Manchester - Robin Hamma

An aspect of what I call the Holy Grail for the new media is how to bring in the voice of the citizen without ending up with Babel.

Here is how Robin Hammam is doing this at the BBC:-

Snip:-

The BBC was early in asking for citizen support and input.

So after the Tube bombing there were 7,000 emails and pictures coming over the transom into the news room at the BBC. After the Fuel Depot explosion there were 25,000 by noon! There was a staff of 7 who were overwhelmed by this.

The infinite scale and the infinite Noise created by having an open door was becoming apparent to the Innocents who then asked - how much will this cost to keep this type of interaction going? Can we in reality sift through all the noise to find the diamonds? Is this really participation? How could we find the quality as the noise builds?

These were the questions that Robin's team asked when they asked for permission to try a different track. By asking this type of question - they got the green light. They had exposed the unsustainable nature of and open door and no filters in a world where content was going to reach for infinite.

So what are they doing? They are creating a Space where they will have a Host.