Andy Carvin's Waste of Bandwidth

April 4, 2008

Mobile Phones, Human Rights and Anonymity

I've been playing around with my new Nokia N95 for the last couple of weeks and quite amazed with its ability to stream live video from the phone to the Internet. Like last weekend when I streamed from the Smithsonian Kite Festival; for around 30 minutes I gave a tour of the festivities and took questions from users as they watched the stream over the Internet.

I've also spent some time talking it up with colleagues at NPR, brainstorming the possibilities of what would happen if reporters used these phones - or if their sources did. The example that keeps coming to mind regarding the latter scenario is the rioting in Tibet. While some video has leaked out, it's been limited and often delayed. Imagine if the protestors were able to webcast their protests - and the ensuing crackdowns - live over their phones using China's GSM network? The video would stream live and get crossposted via tools like YouTube, Seesmic and Twitter, spreading the content around so it can't be snuffed.

But that raises an obvious question - how long could protestors or dissidents get away with such activities before getting caught? If you were running software on your phone to send live video over a 3G network, like I've been doing on my N95, you'd think it wouldn't take too much effort on the part of the mobile provider and/or government to figure out which phone was sending the signal and its precise location.

So that got me wondering: is there a mobile equivalent of Tor?

For those of you who aren't familiar with it, TOR is a software project that helps Internet users remain anonymous. Running the TOR software on your computer causes your online communications to bounce through a random series of relay servers around the world. That way, there's no easy way for authorities to track you or observe who's visiting banned websites. For example, let's say you're in Beijing and you publish a blog the authorities don't like. If you just used your PC as usual and logged into your publishing platform directly, they could follow your activities and track you down. With Tor, you hop-scotch around: your PC might connect to a server in Oslo, then Buenos Aires, then Miami, then Tokyo, then Greece before it finally connects to your blogging platform. Each time you did this, it would be a different series of servers. That way, it's really difficult for authorities to trace your steps.

As dissidents and protestors embrace mobile devices for conducting civil disobedience or recording human rights violations, it would make sense for Tor and projects like it to adapt to their needs. That way, if that hypothetical protestor in Lhasa tried to stream live video over Qik, post a photo to Flickr or record a mobcast via over Utterz, they'd lessen the chance of getting caught so easily.

Does anyone know if there's a mobile equivalent of Tor, relaying voice connections or data from one network to another, anonymizing the user of the phone? If not, is it technically feasible? How might one go about creating one?

Tags: anonymity | human rights | mobcasting | mobile activism | mobile phones | Nokia N95 | protests | Tor

Posted by acarvin at 3:37 PM

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October 10, 2007

"The Newspaper Became Ours"

Steve Garfield got the last word in the opening session of the networked journalism summit, which focused on local initiatives. John Wilpers had been talking about BostonNow, the Boston-based newspaper that focuses on citizen journalism content. Wilpers said that BostonNow is managing to crack the walls of old media slowly, but they're making progress; for example, they now have a blogger and photographer credentialed to cover the Red Sox.

As the session wrapped up, Steve got the microphone and said that prior to BostonNow coming to town, "the newspapers were theirs" - incumbent media outlets called all the shots and didn't take citizen journalists seriously. With the advent of BostonNow, Steve said, "the newspaper became ours." Local bloggers now feel they have a larger stake in the media, and hundreds of them are taking advantage of it. -andy

Tags: Boston | BostonNow | citizen journalism | netj | news | Steve Garfield

Posted by acarvin at 9:42 AM

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August 2, 2007

Journalist Shield Legislation Amended to Cover Only Commercial Bloggers

The U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Committee yesterday approved an amended version of HR 2102, also known as the Free Flow of Information Act. The purpose of the legislation is to create a federal shield for journalists so they could not be compelled to reveal their sources except in extreme cases, such as emergent national security situations and the like. Advocates of bloggers had fought hard to extend the bill's coverage to the blogosphere, but the amendment passed yesterday might not please everyone who might feel they should be covered.

The bill defines journalism as "gathering, preparing, collecting, photographing, recording, writing, editing, reporting or publishing of news or information that concerns local, national or international events or other matters of public interest for dissemination to the public." By this definition, many bloggers could easily argue that they, too, would be covered if the bill were signed into law. The intention of this language was to get away from the notion that journalism is solely an occupation in which one works for a media entity of some sort, has an editor, etc. Instead, it defines journalism in terms of actions rather than as an occupational status.

Yesterday's voice vote, though, complicates matters a bit for some bloggers. The Bush administration, as well as some members of Congress, expressed concerns that the bill's original language could be used to create an enormous loophole for people engaging in criminal behavior. For example, someone who participated in a crime or assisted a criminal could point to a hastily crafted blog and claim that they were researching a story to obfuscate the fact they were engaging in a criminal enterprise or obstructing the law.

As a compromise, members of Congress decided to refine the definition of who would be covered as a journalist. To be covered, you would have to derive "financial gain or livelihood" from your journalistic activities. In other words, if you could prove that you use your blog to generate income, you would qualify as practicing journalism and thus fall under the shield law. But if you published a blog without any financial benefit, you wouldn't be covered by the law.

I'm not surprised that Congress would offer this up as a compromise. But I also won't be surprised if some advocates of citizen journalism take this compromise as exclusionary, since it favors those bloggers who are in a position - or make the decision - to blog commercially. I would surmise that the vast majority of bloggers make no income from their activities. Granted, many of these same folks would never consider themselves as engaging in acts of journalism, but where does that leave those who do? I know many bloggers who choose to keep their blogs advertising-free so they don't appear to have any conflicts of interest. Does this make their acts of journalism less deserving of protection than those who decide to make money off their blogging activities?

I keep wondering how this provision would apply to me, for example. I wear a variety of blogging hats. I get paid by PBS for my contributions to learning.now, for example, but I don't derive any income from my personal blog. And while not all of my writings on my personal blog qualify as journalism, other posts certainly do. Would I not be covered by this legislation regarding any acts of journalism I conduct for my personal blog?

More generally, will this bill lead to a wave of bloggers adding advertising to their blogs just to be covered? And if all it takes is for a person to derive some income from their blog, even if it's paltry, won't that mean the loophole hasn't really been closed?

This is definitely gonna be an interesting debate. -andy

Tags: bloggers | Congress | HR 2102 | journalism | loopholes | shield law

Posted by acarvin at 7:29 AM

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July 18, 2007

Presenting at the JFK Presidential Library

Tomorrow morning I'll be heading to the airport at the crack of dawn for a quick daytrip to Boston. I'll be giving a speech at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library on the impact of Web 2.0 and social media on journalism, particularly coverage of election 2008. Here's a draft of the powerpoint presentation I plan to share with the audience. I wish I could stay longer, particularly because the Open Society Institute is convening a forum on youth media in Cambridge, with some of my favorite people and thinkers, including Ethan Zuckerman, Dina Mehta, Jennifer Corriero and Danah Boyd. Unfortunately, as soon as my speech is done, I need to bury my head in proposal writing and related meetings. Such is life.... -andy

Posted by acarvin at 7:43 PM

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April 20, 2007

Virginia Tech Video Tributes as Mashups

This moving video of the candlelight vigil at Virginia Tech was posted on Planet Blacksburg by Tim Leaton. Along with being a moving tribute to the lives lost this week, it's also a demonstration of the power of online video editing tools. The video was edited using Jumpcut, a website that works like video editing software. You can upload your own clips or find other clips on the Internet, and use their tool to edit it together, and invite other people to edit it as well. For example, this particular video is open to editing, so anyone could use the footage to craft their own tribute. It will be interesting to see if more people use tools like Jumpcut to collect and edit their own memorial mashups based on other people's footage. -andy

Posted by acarvin at 12:49 PM

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March 27, 2007

Lithuanian Parliament: Bloggers Aren't Journalists

The Lithuanian parliament has denied a Lithuanian blogger's request for accreditation. The reason? Bloggers aren't journalists, as far as they're concerned. The blogger, Liutauras Ulevicius, had applied for accreditation so he could cover the parliament more effectively. They rejected his request. "The Media Law describes a journalist as a person who collects, disseminates and provides information to the media, based on a contract with the media, or who is a member of a journalists' union," stated the parliamentary committee handling his request. Ulevicius vows to appeal.

More about the story on Yahoo News. -adny

Posted by acarvin at 4:31 PM

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March 12, 2007

What Should I Ask Dan Rather?

Later this afternoon I'll be interviewing former CBS anchor Dan Rather, and I'd like your thoughts on what I should ask him. When the interview was booked, I told his assistant that I'd want to talk about the changing media landscape, including citizen journalism. Among the topics I'm hoping to discuss with him:

• The jailing of video blogger Josh Wolf for contempt of court;
  
• The new law in France that would ban citizen journalists from recording or transmitting acts of violence;
  
• The role of Fire Dog Lake in the coverage of the Scooter Libby trial;
  
• The role of YouTube and other video-sharing sites in Election 2006 and 2008;
  
• The role of bloggers questioning his coverage of the Killian documents;
  
• The decline of evening news;
  
• The decline in foreign news bureaus in contrast to the rise of blogging worldwide;
  
• The evolving relationship between bloggers and mainstream media;
  
• The effects of media concentration on local and national news coverage
  

Are there any other topics you think I should address? (Apart from asking him, "Kenneth, what is the frequency?") If so, please post a comment on the blog or twitter me, and I'll try to include them in the interview. -andy

Posted by acarvin at 10:27 AM

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March 11, 2007

Blogging Where Speech Isn't Free

Jon Lebkowsky, moderator
Shava Nerad, TOR
Ethan Zuckerman, Global Voices
Rob Faris, Harvard Berkman Center
Shahed Amanullah, HalalFire Media
Yasmina Tesanovic, Serbian filmmaker

Faris:

The OpenNet Initiative. There was a time when we hoped the net would be a frontier place not subject to natl sovereignty. That idea is pretty much dead. And many countries use that sovereignty to censor or filter the Net. We've looked at 40 countries so far, and more than two dozen of them are using filtering. Half are filtering social issues or political content, primarily blogs. Filtering is a messy, incomplete process. It targets certain content, but it's basically impossible to actually block everything you want to without knocking out stuff that's not on your hit list. So when Pakistan tried to block certain yahoo hosts, they knocked out 52,000 other websites.

In North Korea, suppression of opposing viewpoints basically shuts down the Net, while China wants to maintain a vibrant internet but still try to block things they find unacceptable. The rules of censorship have changed and continue to evolve. It's very fluid and ill-defined. That creates both opportunities and dangers.

Zuckerman:

I tend to work on citizen media - blogging, podcasting and the like - particularly in the developing world. We often talk about it in the context of press freedoms. There's high repression in places like North Korea, Burma, Turkmenistan. In medium oppression stakes like China, Iran and Zimbabwe, citizen media tools are embraced more actively. In places with freer press, like South Africa, they use these tools less because they have other platforms for sharing their ideas. Iran is an amazing case study. In 2004, suddenly you had 60,000 blogs start. The independent press had shut down and many of them moved into the blogosphere. So even the vice president started a blog to have better communication with his constituents.

My org, globalvoicesonline.org, looks at citizens media in the world. Some of it focuses on just cultural activities, but a lot focuses on freedom and politics. In Bahrain, there's a pdf from google maps showing how much land is controlled by the monarchy, and the size of their palaces compared to where everyone else lives. They blocked Google Maps because of. The Tunisian Prison Map used google maps to show where the secret prisons are, and which dissidents were there. Alaa abd el Fatah blogged on paper while they were in prison, and his wife posted it at www. manalaa.net. We even see video being smuggled out, like Zimbabwe protestors being broken up violently in Harare.

This is all user-generated media, and it's making states very, very upset. They react in four ways. They block the sites, the tools; register bloggers, even threaten their safety. In Ethiopia, you can't see a site like nazret.com, the leading opposition site. In Pakistan, blogger.com is blocked, just so they can censor six sites. This lead to dontblocktheblog.com to get around this. (A guy from Blogger in the audience says the block ended last week.)

FreeKareem.com - Egyptian blogger sentenced to four years in prison, and now there's an active campaign to have him released.

How do we fight back? We can mirror sites, like isaacmao.com and notisaacmao.com. Isaac redirects people to the second site when he's blocked. There are also anonymous blogs, like sleeplessinsudan.blogspot.com, which was run by a relief worker in Darfur. I maintain a guide on anonymous blogging, and Reporters Without Borders has one as well.

What's most important is bringing attention to the fact that governments are blocking sites and denying access. The Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt is blogging, and that'll probably lead to a crackdown. And we need to fight for the rights of these voices and others, even if we disagree with their politics.

Shava Nerad: TOR allows people to circumvent firewalls and go online anonymously. We have around 1,000 proxy servers around the world. When you connect, you get randomly routed through a trail of these servers, making it impossible for authorities to see where you came from. So you can blog without authorities knowing which cybercafe your at, for example. When you blog, you normally leave a trail that shows your physical location. If you're saying risky things, that makes you vulnerable. So you need to wipe the footprints off of that trail to keep you safe.

We talk a lot about free speech as if it were an absolute good we need immediately. It's a good idea, but a lot of my family comes from parts of the world where free speech isn't a reality. There are ways to protect yourself - they're safety valves. Medium suppression countries realize that free speech is inevitable in a Darwinian sort of way, but they want to control the pace of change. China doesn't shut down all free speech but they try to throttle it so they control the message. So it's not as monolithic as it seems. It's process. When I see people in the US blogging about it, they don't always see it as a live action roleplaying game involving internet diplomacy. It's an ongoing story of cultural tensions. People need the tools to do this, but here in the US, we need to understand that there's a process going on, and in our activism, we should recognize that rather than just vilifying the other side.

Amanullah:

I run altmuslim.com and HalalFire Media, trying to cultivate the Islamic blogosphere. A lot of online repression happens in Muslim countries. Why is that the case? You have political instability, undemocratic regimes and the rise of extremism, because Islam is in flux. Why should we care about that? The Muslim world deserves political and press freedoms just like everybody else; they shouldn't be written off as backwards and hopeless. There's a need for free expression to create an Islam that's in sync with modernity. We all have a stake in that battle. Sept 11 reminds us that we just can't "contain" them. We need to support Islamic bloggers who are trying to help countries go through this change.

Even when governments aren't legitimate, they wrap themselves in a clock of religious responsibility. There are also extremists trying to drive a political or moral agenda. It's tough to run a bookstore that's open without getting flak for it, literally or figuratively. Despite getting it from both ends, Muslim bloggers are coming out, wanting to join the modern world and get out of the crossfire of regimes vs. extremists.

It starts with simple questions. When a Saudi girl asks why she can't driver herself. It has big ramifications in places where people aren't used to asking simple questions. The bloggers are the vanguard of that, asking questions that are never asked. It also breaks the govt monopoly on information, including govt-controlled press. The bottom line is that the freer the discourse is on Islam, the more modern and moderate the practices are. Muslims in America are a prime example of that. You're free to say what you want and develop in harmony with your non-Muslim neighbords. It's almost a linear correlation. That's why I side of the free speech side of things, even while Muslim countries are grappling with the issue.

How can we help? We can use technology to pry the doors open from the outside. I'm hoping for the day when govts give up on filtering and battle ideas with other ideas rather than jackbooted thugs. We need to read and publicize the work of bloggers, advocating good ones and shaming bad ones. We need to reduce anarchy in the Muslim world. There's been a rise of extremism, and it plays a role in what's going on right now. That's something the Muslim world needs to deal with internally. We need to advocate for persecuted bloggers and freedom in general. Not necessarily specific bloggers, since we don't want them to seem like US puppets. But we should push for general press freedoms while leaving specific advocacy to us - the blogosphere.

Tesanovic:

I come from Serbia. In the early 90s, I was a feminist and activist for Women in Black. When the war was going on, people would ask me what was going on, so I decided to write a letter for everyone. It wasn't journalism but more than a diary. It was a blog before they were called that, sent over mailing lists. When Serbia was bombed in '99, I was sitting in my flat watching the international news channels, and I was seeing myself bombed on TV. But it was still information - Milosovic was lying and you couldn't trust local news. When a southern town was bombed, I called my relatives and they saw people killed by cluster bombs. Milosovic denied it but NATO called it collateral damage and acted like it didn't exist. So we were invisible victims. So I started writing about it online anonymously.

This went on for a couple of months, then a friend asked me if I was the one doing it. Eventually the media started asking me if it's me. They wanted to talk with me but not identify me, since they didn't want me to get killed by Milosovic or looters or NATO or anyone else. But I outed myself in a letter and said the public is my only protection, then told the governments, this is where I live - come and get me. I didn't want to hide.

Posted by acarvin at 1:16 PM

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March 7, 2007

France: Says "Non" to Citizen Journalists

Perhaps shaken by the long jail stint of Josh Wolf or rattled by the effect that the export of America's Funniest Home Videos has had on Francophonie, France has decided to ban citizen journalists from recording acts of violence. As reported by MacWorld and elsewhere, the French Constitutional Council has approved a law that would criminalize the recording or broadcasting any type of violence by non-professional journalists. Take those riots that happened in France not so long ago. Whipping out your phone and recording footage of someone setting a car on fire - or getting pummelled by police for that matter - could subject you to a five-year prison term and nearly $100,000 in fines. Taking it a step further, the French government has proposed a system to regulate websites, blogs, mobile phone operators and other purveyors of content in order to offer certification that they are or aren't government approved.

Reporters Without Borders is none too pleased with the new policy:

[A]ll Internet users are now in a position to participate in the creation and dissemination of information. They are often the "recorders" of an event, especially thanks to mobile phones with photo and video capability, and can disseminate their own content online.

These "citizen journalists" can play a role in monitoring the activities of the authorities throughout the world. In Egypt, for example, bloggers recently revealed a series of scandals involving the security services and showed, by means of video recordings made clandestinely in detention centres, that torture is still regularly practised in Egypt.

In the field of human rights, it is them and not professional journalists who have been responsible for the most reliable reports and information - the information that has most upset the government. Reporters Without Borders thinks it would be shocking if this kind of activity, which constitutes a safeguard against abuses of authority, were to be criminalized in a democratic country.

In an ironic twist, the decision was announced on the 16th anniversary of a certain George Holliday using his videocamera to tape a group of policeman beating down an African American man named Rodney King. If the incident had instead taken place today in France, I wonder if Monsieur Holliday would have hesitated grabbing that camera knowing that he could get stuck in jail until 2012. -andy

Hat tip: Farivar, Doctorow

Tags: BoingBoing | censorship | citizen journalism | Cyrus Farivar | France | George Holliday | law | policy | Reporters Without Borders | Rodney King

Posted by acarvin at 9:34 AM

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March 1, 2007

Josh Wolf, Wikipedia and the Debate Over Who's a Journalist

Josh Wolf, as photographed by Amanda Congdon

Earlier this week I was perusing the Wikipedia entry for Josh Wolf, the video blogger who recently set the record for being the journalist with the longest time spent in jail for contempt of court. As I first blogged last August, Josh has been sitting in jail for refusing to turn over footage he shot at a protest in California. A police cruiser was allegedly set on fire by protestors, and the feds demanded that Josh turn over his source materials so they could review his footage. Josh refused, arguing that a journalist shouldn't be force to turn over such materials, and he's sat in jail ever since.

Josh's case has fueled an ongoing debate among some folks over who is a journalist and who isn't, trying to drive yet another wedge between mainstream media on the one hand, and bloggers and vloggers on the other. Jay Rosen famously wrote two years ago that this particular war is over. Yet the debate continues to flair up in some circles, most recently on PBS Frontline, as Jeff Jarvis lamented this week. It's flaired up on Wikipedia, too - and part of it appears to be my fault.

The day Josh was sent to jail last summer, there wasn't a Wikipedia entry about his predicament. At that moment in time, there was only what's called a "disambiguation page" - a Wikipedia page that links out to entries sharing similar names. So when you searched for Josh Wolf you got a page listing three different Joshes. One of the three - Josh Wolff the soccer player - had an entry already, while two of them - Josh the vlogger and a comic with the same name - did not. To clarify which one was which, Josh the vlogger was labeled like this:

Josh Wolf (journalist) — Independent Journalist Charged With Civil Contempt in RE: Federal grand jury.

"Josh Wolf (journalist)" was a dead link - no one had created the entry for him yet. So I clicked away and started writing, creating a new entry based on the way it had been worded already: Josh Wolf (journalist). That first entry I wrote about Josh was brief:

Josh Wolf is video blogger and freelance journalist who was jailed by a U.S. district court on August 1, 2006 for refusing to turn over a collection of videos he recorded during a July 2005 anarchist protest in San Francisco, California. During that event, anarchists allegedly set a police cruiser on fire. The district court empaneled a grand jury to determine whether arson charges should be brought against some of the protesters.

Because Wolf shot video footage during the protest, he was subpoenaed by the court, which demanded that he turn over the footage to the grand jury. To date, Wolf has refused to comply with the subpoena, arguing that taking such action would serve as a chilling effect to other journalists trying to cover future protests. U.S. District Judge William Alsup disagreed with this argument and found Wolf in contempt of court, sending him to jail. Judge Alsup also denied bail while Wolf makes his contempt appeal to the Ninth U.S
Circuit Court of Appeals.

Since then, the article has been edited around 120 times, with Wikipedians adding more detail, just as the media began covering the case more seriously. Behind the scenes, though, it's opened a fierce debate among Wikipedians as to whether Josh is a journalist, even questioning whether the entry should be titled "Josh Wolf (journalist)." The battle broke out on February 8, the day after Josh set the record for journalistic contempt of court, when a Wikipedian charged that the article was biased because Josh "isn't a journalist."

The entry describes Wolf as a "journalist", when his claim on that professional title is tenuous at best. Wolf is primarily an activist, not a journalist. He has no professional credentials as a journalist (his college degree is in psychology), and his journalistic experience -- such as it is -- is mostly limited to school papers, a 6-month unpaid internship with an independent weekly, and contributions to the "Haight-Ashbury Beat", a sporadically-printed neighborhood rag. Otherwise, he's really just an activist vlogger, and one with outspoken anarchist ideology, at that. Vloggers are not necessarily journalists.

It appears that the attention and support that Wolf has received thus far in the media far exceeds his merits as a journalist, much less any validity of his defense, and is primarily an expression of the contempt that many in the media and politicians on the Left have for the Bush Administration (a contempt that I happen to share) and due to their umbrage at any perceived threats to the freedom of the press. The media has made Wolf its cause celebre for its own reasons, not because of the merits of his case. I would like to see the entry reflect this view, rather than merely perpetuating the misconception that Wolf is a journalist.

Another Wikipedian, going by the name Cowicide, fought back:

that's the same insult the govt. gave Josh as well... but the Society of Professional Journalists awarded Josh with a Journalist of the Year award "for upholding the principles of a free and independent press." Also, I think it was the New York Times that referred to him as a journalist as well. Unless you have superior credentials to The Society of Professional Journalists... Wikipedia should go with them on this and not you... and certainly not the govt... I mean, if the govt. now determines who are journalists or not... maybe we should just give up on this whole "America" thing and go with straight up communism? Welp, that's not going to happen... not over my dead body anyway. Whether you like what he's investigating or not... he's still a journalist according to the experts on the subject.

To this, Wikipedian Wowaconia added:

PBS Frontline spoke to him and asked the question if a blogger is a journalist here. On a separate page they themselves called him "a freelance journalist and video blogger." at This is another example of respected journalists calling him a journalist, these people are experts at journalism and their definition of "journalist" is an expert opinion. If one wants to say that he is not a journalist they should provide references from different experts arguing that he is not or be in violation of Wikipedia:No original research.

Anson2995 wasn't impressed:

Oh come on, that's ridiculous. I'm trying to assume good faith here, but it's getting more dificult. You folks are arguing that the issue of whether Wolf is a journalist isn't in dispute. But it's *the central issue* of his case. Arguing over which "expert opinions" carry weight is pedantic, and its a disservice to both this article and the wikipedia process to present a one-sided view of the subject. It's veering towards blatant advocacy.

For what it's worth, I personally believe that Wolf is a journalist, but it doeesn't matter what I think or what the folks at PBS think, and it doesn't matter how "experts at journalism" define it. What matters for Josh is the legal definition. In the 9th Circuit's ruling, they spell this out pretty clearly: "The California Shield Law protects a 'publisher, editor, reporter, or other person connected with or employed upon a newspaper, magazine, or other periodical publication, or by a press association or wire service.' ... Wolf produced no evidence this videotape was made while he was so connected or employed." (You can read the court's ruling in full if you scroll down from this column [1] at the Huffington Post).

So in repsonse to Wowaconia, Cowicide, and others, I submit that the Court's ruling meets your request to provide a reputable source on the subject. Let's add a paragraph to the article which explains that a) there is controversy over whether or not Wolf (and people like him) are covered by laws protecting reporters and b) that many journalists have come out in support of him. But let's not simply pretend that the issue is indisputable. Even if you're the strongest supporter of Wolf, I can't believe you'd favor an article that omit discussion of the central issues of his case

Meanwhile, this particular thread spun off into another debate, entitled "What does this guy do?" One anonymous Wikipedian sniffed:

I've been hearing about this guy [Josh] being a journalist, blah blah blah, and I come to his wiki and see nothing of his work.

If his only journalistic quality is that he runs around with a camera and films stuff, then a whole lot of teenagers can be considered journalists...

...to which Cowicide shot back:

What does he do? Apparently, journalism. As I've mentioned above to Bricology, the Society of Professional Journalists awarded Josh with a Journalist of the Year award "for upholding the principles of a free and independent press." Also, I think it was the New York Times that referred to him as a journalist as well. Unless you or Bric have superior credentials to The Society of Professional Journalists... Wikipedia should go with them on this and not your baseless opinion that his "only journalistic quality" is that he "runs around with a camera", etc. BTW, I hope to God we do end up with a bunch of teenagers acting as journalists... America desperately needs them. [emphasis mine, not his]

I could go on and on with these replies, but I won't - you can read them yourself. All of this boils down to a debate among Wikipedians over who gets to decide who is a journalist: a court or the journalistic community. What they can't seem to embrace is that the answer includes both. Courts clearly have jurisdiction to decide who is a journalist when it comes to legal proceedings. We may not like their conclusions, but that's what courts do - make legal decisions based on precedence and evidence. But because press shield laws vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, the legal definition of who is a journalist varies with them, often contradicting each other. Does that mean Wikipedia should consider one person a journalist and another person not a journalist simply because of their home jurisdiction? Of course not.

Meanwhile, you have communities of professional journalists determining their own norms, based on their day-to-day practices. While their definitions may not hold up in court, they do dictate whom they consider to be their peers or not. And more and more traditional journalists are embracing increasing numbers of bloggers and vloggers as peers. Granted, the majority of bloggers/vloggers may not produce journalism all the time, nor define themselves as journalists, but that doesn't deny the fact that within those communities, journalism happens. (Three words for you: Fire Dog Lake.)

Many bloggers and vloggers see themselves as journalists, even if it's not in the full-time, professional, disinterested sense of the term. These are folks like you and me - well, maybe you, depending on who you are. We blog, we vlog, we participate in online communities, and sometimes, we craft journalism. It's not necessarily a matter of getting paid - some people crank out amazing journalism just because they're passionate about an issue or a community, and they earn nary a penny from it. Nor is it a matter of how much of your time you commit to doing journalism. I would surmise that less than five percent of my blog entries or videos count as journalism. Does that make me a journalist? When I'm producing journalism, yes. When I'm not, I'm something else - perhaps just a guy who posts too many videos about his daughter and his cats. Even if Josh isn't a journalist full-time, shouldn't his random acts of journalism give him that status - and legal protections - while he's engaged in those acts? Meanwhile, alternative news outlets like Oneworld.net and indymedia.org certainly produce journalism, even if they're engaged in activism in the process. So being an activist doesn't necessarily rule you out as a journalist, either.

It boils down to this: blogging, vlogging and other forms of participatory media defy the categorizations that the law - and some people within Wikipedia - use when deciding who is a journalist. It shouldn't matter if Josh is an activist, if he's engaged in the activity full-time, or if he managed to sell his video to a "real" media outlet. Vlogging is journalism by other means - and at that moment in time, he was doing a service that cannot be separated from journalism. Vloggers may not always strive to be journalists or meet the standards that professional journalists would demand of them, but that doesn't mean that you can dismiss them as being beyond the realm of journalism. The law - and some Wikipedians - just have some catching up to do. -andy

Tags: Frontline | Jay Rosen | Jeff Jarvis | Josh Wolf | journalism | law | media | PBS | vlogging | Wikipedia

Posted by acarvin at 3:15 PM

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February 23, 2007

No News is Good News in Watertown

"So, you're in Watertown - is there any news there?"

"No. If there were, I'd move."

This is Lisa Williams recounting a conversation she had with someone during her talk about placeblogging. Lisa runs H2Otown, the successful community blog for Watertown, MA. Lisa is talking about local news and their reticence to work with local bloggers to cover what's going on in a community. Media outlets get nervous with terms like "citizen journalism," but they don't realized there are groups of bloggers in communities who aren't trying to be journalists, per se, but are still trying to create an online place where residents can come together and talk about their community: things that need to be fixed, road conditions, events and the like. Unless there's breaking news in these communities, the media ignores them, but that doesn't mean there isn't lots of important things to talk about it. As Lisa puts it, "Why is it possible to know more about what's going on in Indonesia than the East End?" As soon as you step out of the metro area of a given city, media coverage just evaporates. -andy

Posted by acarvin at 11:37 AM

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February 16, 2007

Morning Social Media Discussion at NPR

Right now I'm in the NPR board room with an amazing group of bloggers, social media gurus and NPR staff talking about the potential impact of social media on public radio. Here are my notes from the opening session, with Jeff Jarvis summarizing some of the brainstorms we had yesterday. Please note these are summaries, not direct quotes. -andy

Jarvis: We don't want to preach to the choir here. NPR is already doing podcasting and other great things, so we needed to see where we should obnoxiously push things.

Phase 1 of interactivity: React.
Phase 2: contribute. Please give us your stuff.
Phase 3: Create. We can all create our own stuff, and that's a social act.

So the question is what is NPR's relationship with that world of creators?

Doc:

When Tim Berners Lee invented the Web, there were two metaphorical systems. When we build a website, it's often static. We borrow the language of construction and real estate to describe this stuff. But there's another system. When you're on the Net, you're no further away than anyone in the world than the distance to your screen. We now syndicate, publish, update, aggregate dynamic content on the live web. Technorati's search engine indexes blogs and other sites that are too new for Google, which essentially searches the static web. The live web changes all the time - it's actually more like radio. Technorati gets pinged whenever a blog is updated, and it's immediately updated. It's a whole other world of live, dynamic content driven by RSS. (Reminds me of Mal Watlington's quote: "If you don't have an rss feed, you're dead to me." -ac)

Jeff:

The other day, Howard Stern announced his engagement. It was instantly all over blogs and even on Wikipedia before People magazine or news sites could do anything about it. This liveness. These people out there own their own stuff, and it's going on all the time. And they're all linked to each other, networked. So what is NPR's relationship to that world?

I would argue that part of the relationship is a new kind of network. You're already a kind of network, of complicated relationships with stations and other producers. What's the essential job of a network? To find the good stuff. In the past, you had to make it yourself within the network. But now everyone's creating it, NPR's network should expand to include that good stuff as well - good content, good talent, good people.

When we hear the term user generated content, we need to stipulate a lot of it is crap. No one is gonna say to you to change your standards and wallow in the crap - you should find the good stuff and help make it better, help teach people how to do it. Teach them to file FOIA requests or avoid getting sued, for example.

David Weinberger: Jay wrote the seminal piece that knocks down the straw man that any of us would make the argument that the media is crap, we're great and we'll replace you. We're all npr listeners and love it. But in defense of crap, it's multidimensional. Lots of people don't like putting out their first drafts online, but that's what bloggers do. Some stuff taken out of context can seem like crap, even though it's valuable in context. A tiny percentage of stuff is high quality, but a greater amount of stuff isn't perfect, but is still valuable and worthy of being shared. Just because people are recording content with poor equipment doesn't mean you ignore it. People can differential between what NPR creates and what the public creates.

Jeff:

What does creating mean? You're making stuff from scratch but you're also remixing things. People pick up the stuff that hits the cutting room floor and remixes it into something new. The public can help organize all of this stuff in really incredible ways.

It's about enabling the public. Helping them do good stuff, based on NPR's definition of good stuff.

Zadi: It's about authenticity. I'm not a teen anymore, but I still remember what it's like. So enabling teens to tell their own stories, I'm offering a way for them to have an authentic voice. I give them a platform to speak to me, each other and the public about what's going on in young adult life.

It's like NPR's a theme park - you create the rides, the games, the feeling of the place, and the public will come and participate in a way that makes sense for that space.

Weinberger: There are three types of filtering. NPR creates something and says it's good. There's stuff that NPR people link to, which carries some of NPR's weight, and there's what the public is doing in relation to all of this stuff, on NPR's site and on their own sites.

Jarvis:

Journalism back and forth: there's journalism, plus there's the ability to interact with this world by the public adding journalism of their own.

Jay Rosen: When Berners Lee invited the web, he saw it as a collaborative medium, not a broadcasting medium. When he did that, the Net was very disorganized. But it was built for that purpose. The audience we usually have in our minds is the mass audience of the broadcast age. They're connected to us as listeners, but they're not connected to each other. They're an atomized audience. In the age of the Web, they're still connected to you, but they're connected horizontally to each other. So now they can inform each other horizontally without going to NPR at all. My new project. Newassignment.net, is trying to explore this. The cost of likeminded people to find each other and collaborate is plunging rapidly. We're trying to figure out how to take all of this and get lots of people working on one story, so the knowledge they have can come together. The people always know more than journalists do. And they can do it on their own, or with journalists. It's really hard to do, but we think it can be done. It's also developing a donation model in the process. People ought to donate money, but we really want them to donate their knowledge, time, sources, energy and enthusiasm.... If we can find a way to measure those types of in-kind donations, that social capital.

Tom Regan: Readers help give us the pieces that end up being the newsiest stuff of the day, but we'd never find it ourselves because we don't have the resources to find everything. So the public helps fill in the blanks.

Jeff: So it's about bringing in the public to do stuff we couldn't do on our own.

Jay: Public Insight Journalism did an amazing job of inviting 25,000 people who want to help APM do their stories. That's just incredible. But what they haven't done is connected those people to one other. It's an expert database, not a community. They haven't overcome the atomization of the audience yet. It's a radical idea, but it's been used conservatively so far. Meanwhile, OhMyNews! In Korea is trying to create a citizen newspaper, where the labor is divvied story by story, while NewAssignment.net will have groups of people divvied up working on the same story. I want to figure out how to help a single beat reporter by connecting them with a social network that would help them get to the heart of a story.

David: Rolodex vs. social is a key point. You don't just request ideas and thank people for sending them. You give them an opportunity to talk about it. Digg.com and Reddit.com lets people rate news stories and discuss them; the readers create their own front page. In the case of NPR, having part of the site that's digg-like, where readers get to decide what's important. It doesn't have to be all of npr's stuff, but sections of it. And you create a social network around it, creating new relationships with you and the public.

Jeff: Yesterday I turned to Zadi and asked what she wanted from NPR in relation to jet set show.

Zadi: NPR has expertise in the field. Young people want to improve their skills, their expertise, connect with correspondents. They could gain so much from having an actual relationship with NPR. They want to be listened to, be recognized their thoughts are relevant. They may not be old, but they do have their own wisdom. It can be a two-way street, even with a younger audience, since they're the ones creating so much of the stuff out there.

Andy: And Zadi got me thinking about a vlog version of globalvoicesonline.org, with social networking like TakingITGlobal.org.

Zadi: NPR is a bastion of storytelling knowledge, and those skills can be passed on to networks of young people to craft their own stories. Jetset set up a wiki for a kid named Brendan, so he could have the public pitch story ideas for an online fiction project he wanted to create. They came together and crafted the plot, the story, the characters, even the costumes. Even young people have expertise, and Brendan was able to tap into this expertise for his project.

Jeff: It's a three-way situation. You've got NPR, the audience and the member stations. NPR has a b2b relationship with stations, b2c with the audience - as do stations. There's one npr, hundreds of member stations, countless thousands of audience members - and they're creating content now. Things are changing for stations. ABC skipped the stations and put shows on iTunes. The heck with them. The stations created NPR, rescued it, so now maybe NPR can use social media to help the stations. And it's all about what goes on internally at NPR too.

Euan Semple: At the BBC, we had employees blogging publicly because we didn't give them an internal outlet. When you give them a social platform to ask dumb question and surface good ideas, they embrace it. It's incongruous to do this stuff publicly without embracing it internally.

Jay: All of these things pose challenges to professional news. One obstacle is visible with Public Insight Journalism. They're tapping about five percent of its potential because of how they think of themselves as professionals. So it's harder to do these things. Technology is the easiest part; changing the culture is hardest.

Jarvis: Think in terms of pilot projects. Don't change everything at once.

Euan: It's like trojan mice.

Tags: Andy Carvin | David Weinberger | Doc Searls | Euan Semple | Jay Rosen | Jeff Jarvis | NPR | nprsocialmedia | public broadcasting | public radio | Rob Paterson | social media | Zadi Diaz

Posted by acarvin at 9:48 AM

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February 9, 2007

JD Lasica and the Story of OurMedia.org

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Tags: JD Lasica | ourmedia.org | podcasting | video | vlogging | wemedia

Posted by acarvin at 10:07 AM

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February 8, 2007

We Media and "Soft Power"

The late afternoon session at We Media today focused on "soft power" - how the Internet and online tools have empowered people in ways that weren't possible when traditional forms of power - money, infrastructure, etc - are scarce and concentrated. The panel, moderated by Chris Nolan, including Jay Rosen of PressThink, David Sasaki of Global Voices, and Val Prieto of BabaluBlog, among others. I took notes for most of the panel; again, please note that these aren't verbatim quotes. -andy

Jay Rosen of PressThink: Traditionally, power is seen as a scarce resource. Governments have power, big companies have power, because they have amassed a scarce resource. When we talk about soft power, it's not necessarily scarce, because it happens when people are arranged in a certain way. United We Stand, Divided We Fall notes the difference between what happens when we form a community or when we don't. If we don't, we lack the power, we feel powerless. Soft power is people power, but it's also the social structures that connect people together and give them something in common.

Now, the cost of locating each other, sharing, collaborating, making stuff, etc, is plunging rapidly. A social Moore's law. Now we can do all sorts of things together we couldn't do before. You can't just go to a place and find it; it exists in the space between people.

David Sasaki, Global Voices: Soft power is the power to be heard. Until recently, those people with that power were columnists, journalists; now it's anyone with access to the Net. With Global Voices, we're aggregating the best blogging from around the world, but things like censorship prevent other voices from being heard. So you can't say that _everyone_ has access to power now.

Val Prieto, BabaluBlog: I wanted to blog and tell the story of the Cuban diaspora experience. We're publishing stories from people in Cuba who can't publish there.

Chuck DeFeo: It's the power of grassroots voices being heard. In the 80s and 90s, conservative talk shows help lead the way of giving people a voice through the media. It was a powerful thing. More recently, blogs took off, and it's an extension of what goes on in talk radio. Our website has several thousand radio listeners who are now bloggers, creating contest in conjunction with our radio programming.

Val: We get to participate, have our opinions heard.

Chris Nolan: What about the echo chamber problem?

Sasaki: That's where Global Voices come in. Go to a site like Digg and you find the same stuff over and over. People begin to miss editors who help guide you. GV gets editors who are experts in their region, and curate the best of what's going on there.

Jay: The reason blogs attracted so much attention was because they came first. But it's the content generating tools that are the real change agents. The people out there who used to be called the audience, are still an audience in the sense that they consume media, but they are also connected across to each other. That fact has big implications. All the stuff the audience knows can now be brought to bear. NewAssignment.net is attempting to figure out how to do real reporting given this horizontal dimension of the Net. Imagine how thousands of people could contribute to the creation of one news story. That's the challenge we're tackling. So blogging just opened the door to the world of self publishing.

Chris Nolan: Blogging filled a vacuum in readers' lives.

Chuck DeFeo: I spent a long time in campaign politics before getting into media. Voter participation was a big part of it. Those of us who have been doing this for a while may remember when the question was, when are we gonna have the 1960 moment, when broadcast TV became the dominant medium over radio. I don't think that was a healthy thing, because it eroded grassroots politics, where voters actually participated in the process.

Val Prieto: Cuban Americans are primarily conservative, so you get a certain amount of the echo chamber. But there are always dissenting opinions. It may only be one or two out of 10 comments, but it's there. As long as you foster debate, what's the harm?

Sasaki: I'm really against the echo chamber. Partisanship may be a step up from apathy, but what you want is dialogue and participation.

Audience member: on a day when yet another helicopter gets shot down in Iraq, the news is dominated by the death of Anna Nicole Smith. Media tells us that's the number one story.

Val: But that's because it makes money.

Chris Nolan: With digg.com, people would say it would replace your front page. Digg is a tool; but why isn't it being seen as a tool among newspapers?

DeFeo: Politics is a reflection of the electorate. We're more partisan because the electorate is more partisan. Meanwhile, editors post stories knowing what the audience wants, so yeah, you'll get Anna Nicole Smith.

Gaby Bruna: I was born in the 1980s. I can do anything from what I want from my computer, and my generation was the first one raised during this revolution. Now you can go to social networking sites and find or do anything you'd want to do.

Chris Nolan: but some say social networking is just the best tool ever to direct spam.

Sanjeev Chatterjee: These tools can help bring important social topics to the front, but news hasn't always covered what's important. So we need to find ways of differentiating what we're trying to do.

Jay Rosen: I was talking recently with Jimbo Wales at Wikipedia. I asked him how it all really works. He said the only reason it works is because the wikipedia community come there already knowing what an encyclopedia is. It's already in their head. The commonality of that vision makes the creation of Wikipedia practical. If they didn't have a shared vision, it wouldn't ever work. A successful social media site has tools, people, a community, yeah, but they also have a shared vision.

Sanjeev: Either there's a cultural monolith that informs that vision, or there's a universal idea that defines it.

Jay: It could be a universal human need, but it's more likely a product of our culture. We use the term community very loosely. Most of the things we call communities aren't communities; they're a shared space, a public. A real community has shared values and beliefs that creates the community even before the website even exists. Lots of communities that didn't know they had large numbers now can discover themselves and collaborate online.

Audience member: Sometimes people need to be told what's important. Otherwise we'd all just focus on junk celebrity news. We don't want to hear bad news, even though it's important.

Nolan: It's true because newspapers have abrogated their responsibilities. Popularity determining the news works in some places, but not others.

Georgia Popplewell: I want to tell a story from Global Voices. One of our authors in Tunisia created a Google Map that shows all the prisons in Tunisia. You can click on prisons and get info on jailed dissidents. He got a lot of news coverage, but someone on our discussion asked if it was a bit too sexy for human rights campaigners, and others replied and said that's what we need: better packaging for important stuff that isn't inherently sexy.

Gaby: The greatest democratic value of the Net happens when nonprofits can use the Net to guide people to take positive action. And it requires the right packaging to attract an audience.

Val: All you have is your integrity. Without it, no one will believe what you're writing. You might as well just write about cats rather than something important. I won't accept funds from anyone because I don't want to seem like someone's lackey. Because I'm concerned that if I take money, they'll question my integrity.

Jay: There are new dynamics loose in the world. It doesn't mean the old dynamics disappear. Just because there's new power doesn't mean old power is gone. So what you have instead is a new transparency laid on top of a new transparency. We're trying to figure out the rules, but that doesn't mean you can throw out old rules like editing, judgment, etc. We need to live in a world where both of these systems happen at the same time. Formulas won't work anymore. Market it in a traditional way, you might lose your credibility.

DeFeo: We're trying to figure this out, but like Jay said, we need to have a shared vision for it to work. I think we should double underline this. Successful communities have a shared vision, and now we have the tools to create it ourselves.

Alan Rosenblatt: As someone who teaches people how to use the Net for political change, I think a lot about how the Net gives people power to take action. And shared values are crucial. Informing people is just the most basic part of the Net. It's making connections, internalizing what's at stake for a community, then influencing people in power to make actual changes in society. If it's just talk, talk, talk, then we'll never really have any power.

Sasaki: If you think about it, it's really hard to change someone's mind. If we just go to blogs with the same point of view, no one changes their opinion. Isn't it important to engage in changing minds rather than preaching to the choir? Meanwhile, censorship keeps getting in the way of people using the Internet for social change. A lot of us take for granted we can say what we want, but it's not the enabling tool for a lot of people.

Val: Most Cubans don't have Internet access, so they're pretty much censored completely.

Sanjeev: Think of when those UCLA police tasered a student. You see all these other students shooting footage on their camera phone, but they're not trying to stop it. (Actually, is that true? I thought they were yelling at the police to stop. -andy) We need to do more than get information out there; we need to act as well.

Okay, I'm gonna wrap this up - I'm starting to get hand cramps. -andy

Tags: Alan Rosenblatt | Chris Nolan | Chuck DeFeo | conference | David Sasaki | Georgia Popplewell | Global Voices | Jay Rosen | Val Prieto | wemedia

Posted by acarvin at 4:51 PM

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We Media Community Forum

The open session of We Media was a forum on the role of community. They organized the session with five panelists and five "go-to people" in the audience, with others jumping in when they could. Here are my notes from the session; it's more of a summary than collections of verbatim quotes. -andy

Jan Schaffer, J-Lab: J-Lab is looking at citizen journalism projects that are community-based. They've just published a big report this week. A lot of hyperlocal citizen journalism projects are acts of community building rather than acts of journalism. They care a lot about community with a lot of "naked passion," which causes some traditional journalists to be nervous.

These sites define success as impacting their community, serving as local govt watchdogs, creating community dialogue, encouraging voter turnout. Some report that people in the community who normally wouldn't engage each other are coming together. They're creating a fusion of news and shmooze - much more observational than traditional journalism.

Lisa Stone, BlogHer: Women are the majority of web users, the power users of Web 2.0. BlogHer started as a conference for women bloggers, asking the question, "Where are the women bloggers?" Now we're a network with hundreds of blogs and dozens of editors reporting about what they care about.

Jennifer Carroll, Gannett: Gannett is starting to look beyond geography and focus on connecting people, to say that we care a lot about what's going on in their communities: the small acts that add up to something powerful. The impact has been immediate and way beyond anyone's expectations. All of this is right under the service, waiting to explode, and now we just need to help people make those connections.

Farai Chideya of NPR: Half of my family is in Zimbabwe, and I just got back. We live in a blessed bubble, where we have free range to do what we want online. I was shooting a documentary over there about my father, who was a blacklisted journalist. Now, everyone has cellphones, but the networks don't work well. Same thing with the cybercafes. In Zimbabwe, the consensus that providing online infrastructure would increase good governance and free speech, but the govt is deliberately preventing this from happening. So there's a link between open access and open government. People want to connect but their policymakers won't let them.

Dorian Benkoil, MediaBistro: Mediabistro.com is both an online and offline community with a 15-year history. Our membership is collectively smarter than any of us who run the site, so if we need help answering a question, the community fills in the blanks.

Shel Israel, Naked Conversations: There are 123 million newspapers printed and delivered every day. I doubt that there are 123 mil people reading them, and those that do, what percentage of the paper do they read?

When I started college, I walked into the commons and picked up a copy of the New York Times. I'd never seen it before, so I sat down with some coffee and hoped that girls would think I looked smart. By the time I graduated, the girls were still ignoring me, so I got engaged to the Times instead. I read it every day, but it's kinda funny. I'm reading about restaurants in Chelsea that I'll never visit. Meanwhile, my granddaughter, who is seven, has never picked up a paper, but she'll be influenced by the people she meets online and the news she consumes there. Media companies will be distribution points for people collecting what interests them. Newspapers - dead trees smeared with dead berries - will go away.

My mother hates Google and loves libraries. She's appalled I wrote about without going to a library, doing the research online. (mic goes dead, power goes out.) We choose what's interesting and assemble it. The Internet makes it easier to assemble, disseminate, digest, respond and create.

Ian Rowe, MTV: Media is no longer only determined by a bunch of people behind closed doors dictating that the rest of the world must watch a program at a specific date and time. MTV is excited about the explosion of self-publishing, but we also want to ensure there's still top-down packaging of information. We still have the power to get information to large audiences of young people. So it's a matter of figuring out a business model that supports both top-down and bottom-up.

Audience member: I'm a college professor, and my students ask if we're talking about community or communities, plural. Once the barriers to entry becomes so low, we get involved in multiple communities, we need to think about the implications of that on political personhood, if you will.

Rich Skrenta, Topix.net: We've had more than 200,000 discussion posts on Denmark's publishing of the pictures of Muhammad. There was a lot of racism, but a lot of thoughtful discussion, too. During this, we started geotagging comments by IP address, and we realized that people from Europe, the Mideast, the US were all jumping in. This made us wonder about the implication of an editor in Palo Alto editing something written by a person in Iran. We've got people talking and trying to come to agreement, shedding light on the issue.

Jan Schaffer, J-Lab: Conversation is an act of information but not necessarily journalism. People consume media to get a job done. Maybe that job is finding movie listings, sales ads, community news. You consume it because it helps you get somewhere. So we're going to see more and more niche models of media. And the ones that help people get the info they need will be the ones that succeed.

Lisa Stone, BlogHer: News about Zimbabwe just doesn't get covered on the front page of the paper, yet lots of people still want to talk about it. If you look at attorney blogs, they cover what they're doing in court, and that's expertise you don't see among legal journalists. They're blogging about it and talking about it, because they're not finding the info they need in mainstream media. They're filling in the blanks. So people develop an area of extreme expertise, so you can attract those people who care about that expertise.

Audience member: how do you define the term "journalist"? Lewis and Clark were journalists - at least they called themselves that. They walked through the woods and wrote dispatched for home newspapers. Can anyone be a journalist now, because they have some kind of expertise?

Jan: Journalism is gathering data, verifying it. Some of it is useful, sometimes not. Mainstream media journalism doesn't validate consensus. Ordinary people don't frame whether the Democrats are up and down. They don't think like that.

Ian: There's a big difference between investigative journalism and widespread opinion that's consumed as fact. The blogosphere is amazing because oppressed people - the average American - didn't have a voice before. Now they have a platform. That's incredible from a democracy point of view. My postings can be skewed or wrong, but if it becomes a meme, it becomes a "fact," and that's not journalism. Journalists need to preserve and cherish the role of investigators, fact-checkers.

Shel: Murrow said news is what's interesting or useful. I'd say it's that, but what's interesting or useful to me personally. Not all bloggers are journalists, just as tabloids aren't always journalists. Someone in London shot the Tube bombing video online, getting the word out before the BBC knew what was really going on. No one is going to pay me to go to an event and "cover " it. Journalists still get to do that. I wish bloggers could do that. (NewAssignment.net, anyone?) The future journalism is somewhere between the professionals and the millions of folks with their feet on the ground in the real world.

Lisa Stone: SaveDarfur.org is helping make up for the lack of serious media coverage on Darfur. BlogHer has two editors who cover what women are doing in philanthropy and advocacy. For example, a women in Canada has a sick relative, so two bloggers started an online auction after being moved by her story, to raise money for the disease. It really caught fire, and they raised $9,000.

Audience member: conversation contains the seeds of journalism, but not everyone wants to be a journalist. Big media speaks, but we converse. Our local blog (in Dallas) has had stories picked up by the local papers. Every story came about because a user comment said there's a topic that someone needs to look into it. It's the conversation that leads to news.

Mark Glaser, MediaShift: The stuff that goes on in my local community isn't covered by big media. They've failed in their job, because they don't cover local issues any more. That's why hyperlocal sites can come out of nowhere and have an impact. So how can mainstream media sources remain relevant to their communities? And how do they make a business out of it?

Ian Rowe: We help curate the stories of our audience and help others get exposed to it. We create a 360 view of journalism that honors real stories from young people who previously lacked a large platform.

Shel Israel: Decisionmaking and power is moving from organizations to communities. It's leaving the board rooms to neighborhoods. The most influential people no longer have long titles; they're influential because of what they give back to the community.

Farai: We at News&Notes are trying to organize a way so we get input from the public at the beginning of the editorial process. You have to have a system that rewards good behavior. Rather than focusing on clamping down on disruptors, you reward those who help build the community. You give them status in the community, like Slashdot does.

Audience member; Muhammad Yunus one the Nobel Prize because of the Grameen bank and GrameenPhone, helping connect people in Bangladesh and Brazil with mobile phones. There's a subtle revolution of thousands of NGOs working with technology to revolutionize the world - and no one is talking about that here.

Rich Skrenta: The elephant in the room is economics. This is a room full of successful influencers. We want the new-found power of the Net to invite people into this process, but without it becoming an anarchic free-for-all. So how we organize it so people can become the best they can be?

Georgia Popplewell of Global Voices: GV aggregates bloggers from around the world. We're about to hire an advocacy director and an outreach director. We're in a situation where anyone here risks being endangered physically from what we blog. GV members around the world face that threat.

John Bracken, MacArthur Foundation: I wonder whether media is right word. If we're talking about community conversations, it's very different than traditional media. Do we need a new language for all of this stuff?

Lisa Stone: I think we should ask. Ask, don't tell. We need to go out and have a dialogue about this.

Jan Schaffer: The term citizen journalism is falling out of vogue, and now it's citizen's media. And that will probably change as well.

Shel Israel: We don't organize the media anymore. The community self-organizes it. So we need to join the conversation. There's an enormous human social revolution that's begun, but hasn't culminated. We need to look forward to 20 years when today's young power users are running things.

Ian Rowe: By 2012, we'll have a very different relationship with the audience. Who will be programming our timeslots? Will that even be the process anymore? Will we have long-form programs anymore? We're gonna have a lot more input from young people in the creative process. But it'll have obstacles: we don't want to reward people who become famous on youtube because they uploaded videos of them beating up homeless people.

Rick Skrenta: The only way we see being able to get into your community is by opening the doors to the individual. Most zip codes don't get news coverage on a daily basis, and we know that's just not true. It's just not being covered. There needs to be a means for this stuff to be seen online, and shared in a safe space, where people can bond with their neighbors and create positive social change.

Jan Schaffer: What's rising to the top now are new missed opportunities that people are turning into something and creating added value. It pains me to see an enterprising citizen media entity get superceded by the local media outlet. It'd be better to support the citizen journalist.

Lisa Stone: If you economically empower women, you improve the lives of their families and communities. We should be able to support their blogging habits and raise the profile of the news they want to create in their communities.

Posted by acarvin at 10:58 AM

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Media Literacy as a Family Value

Last night I attended a blogger dinner at the We Media conference and sat at a table featuring Tish Grier, Jay Rosen and Robin Miller, among others. Tish and I talked about our childhoods and what we remembered about learning how to read, recounting our earliest experiences with newspapers. Both of us were taught to read news with a critical eye, something that has impacted us for the rest of our lives. This got us wondering about other bloggers, and whether media literacy was a "family value" during their formative years.

Tish blogged about our chat and offered some thoughts on the matter:

Andy and I thought that perhaps the best media literacy education actually begins in the home. Media habits, like many other habits, might come from our parents. It's the way both Andy and I were taught as children to consume media with the intention to understand, not re-enforce a preconceived notion-that has made us savvy media participants, not passive media consumers. Inquisitive minds, a passion for perspective and and a desire to participate in what we had been engaged with since childhood is what motivated us to become a part of media culture-writing and communicating with others through our blogs-not stand apart from it.

What about you? What are your earliest memories of becoming media literate? Is it something that was encouraged by your family? Was it a "family value" for you as it was for us? -andy

Posted by acarvin at 9:43 AM

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October 3, 2006

A Colonial Experiment in Citizen Journalism

The September issue of Delta Sky magazine included a fascinating article on America's first newspaper. Published almost exactly 316 years ago by Benjamin Harris in Boston, the four-page paper was known as Publick Occurrences: both Forreign and Domestick. Full of stories lifted from English broadsides and overheard on the streets of Boston, Publick Occurrences was hardly quality journalism by modern standards. Harris, meanwhile, was a bigot and an anti-Catholic, leading journalism historian John Tebbel, to quip, "[I]t is safe to say, no major American institution has been launched by so unworthy a pioneer."

In the inaugural issue, Harris stated that he would publish the paper once a month, though would consider doing so more often "if any Glut of Occurrences happen." (I simply love that phrase.) According to the article,

It contained no news less than a month old, and its intentions, at least as Harris explained them, were honorable. His paper, the publisher told his readers in a front-page notice, would print "Memorable Occurrents of Divine Providence" as well as "Circumstances of Publique Affairs . . . which may not only direct their thoughts at all times, but at some times also to assist their Businesses and Negotiations." Further, Harris wrote, Publick Occurrences was being offered to the residents of Boston "[t]hat some thing may be done toward Curing, or at least the Charming, of that Spirit of Lying which prevails among us; wherefore, nothing shall be entered but what we have reason to believe is true, repairing to the best foundations for our information." If someone came to Harris with information that was not true, some "malicious Raiser of a false Report," the publisher would expose the person's dishonesty in the very next issue. "It is Suppos'd that none will dislike this Proposal, but such as intend to be guilty of so villainous a Crime."

Three of its four pages were jammed with dense type. There were no headlines between stories, so one story would blend into another without a pause or segue. The fourth page, amazingly, was totally blank, the idea being that readers of the paper would jot down comments or contribute their own news, then pass it along to another reader. More than three centuries before Jeff Jarvis, Jay Rosen and Dan Gillmor began writing about networked journalism, citizen journalism and citizen's media, Publick Occurences was paving the way for The People Formally Known As the Audience to participate in the creation of news.

Unfortunately, Harris' innovative, but ethically flawed journal was doomed from the start. The colonial British authorities did not look kindly upon his newspaper. They were upset with him publishing what they considered diplomatically provocative hearsay; even worse, he never bothered paying for a publishing license. Soon after the first issue was published, they published their own document banning the newspaper:

The Governour and Council having had the perusal of the said Pamphlet, and finding that therein is contained Reflections of a very high nature: As also sundry doubtful and uncertain Reports, do hereby manifest and declare their high Resentment and Disallowance of said Pamphlet, and Order that the same be Suppressed and called in.

With that, Publick Occurences came to an ignominious end. Embittered by the experience, Harris left the colonies and returned to England. But the stage had been set for a flowering of homegrown, independent newspapers across the colonies, even if they didn't embrace his bold, yet simple experiment in citizen journalism.

Today, only one copy of the newspaper is still known to exist, and the Massachusetts Historical Society has published a digital version of it. Unfortunately, they only published the three typeset pages; the citizen journalism that might have been scribbled on the fourth blank page remains a mystery. I wonder if it's because the page was blank - and thus uninteresting to archivists - or if it wasn't deemed historical enough for public consumption. Either way, I wish they had included it. -andy

Posted by acarvin at 8:39 PM

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Jon Stewart Reports for CNN

Given everything that's been going on over the last few days, I almost forgot to mention Jon Stewart's hilarious take on CNN's I-Report service. I-Report is CNN's way of allowing members of the public to submit their own photos and video to CNN; the most newsworthy clips are aired on CNN and their website.

Jon says:

Yes, CNN wants you to spare them what is currently the most arduous part of what they do - reporting! And not just anywhere - apparently they want you to get as close as possible to an exploding building during a hurricane. 'Gee, this assignment looks dangerous. You know who'd be good for that story? John Q. Schmuck.'

Perhaps the best part of this story is that CNN had enough of a sense of humor to run Stewart's piece - yes, as an I-Report. -andy

Posted by acarvin at 2:08 PM

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August 22, 2006

My New Job at NPR

Some of you have commented to me that my blog has been unusually quiet the last couple of weeks. I suppose this shouldn't come as too much of a surprise, as it's the middle of August, not to mention the fact that I've been thoroughly enjoying my time with Kayleigh watching her learn how to smile.

But the main reason I haven't been posting is because I've just accepted a new job. Starting in just a few weeks, I'll be working at National Public Radio in Washington DC, serving as senior product manager for online communities. In this role, I'll essentially act as a Web 2.0 strategist for NPR, helping them develop new initiatives that encourage greater public involvement in NPR's online activities. These activities could take a variety of forms: online social networks, wikis, blogs, mobcasting, citizen journalism, original content sharing. The NPR digital media team is very excited about the possibilities, and I'm honored that they've turned to me to work with them on this endeavor.

Now some of you may find it a bit odd that I've gone from digital divide work to NPR, but it seems quite natural for me. For many years now, I've argued that one of the main reasons we should bridge the digital divide is to provide the public with new outlets for civic participation, encouraging them to become producers of knowledge rather than mere consumers of it. Just giving people Internet access isn't very profound unless they also have platforms for dialogue and debate - platforms where they can have a voice in the public sphere. This new job at NPR will give me the chance to help develop platforms that I hope will do just that. Additionally, I'll continue to serve as one of PBS Online's three bloggers, focusing on education technology at PBS learning.now. So it seems like I'll be spending my waking hours covering the entire public broadcasting spectrum in one way or another. :-)

In the coming weeks I'll try to write more about the new job. For starters, I'll be spending a lot of time analyzing the Web 2.0 universe, with particular interest towards things like online social networks, citizen journalism and networked journalism. I can't predict where all of this will lead, but I'm very excited that NPR has asked me to help them blaze new trails with them.

Meanwhile, I'll also have to focus on the move itself. We're planning to head to the DC area during the first week of September, living in Silver Spring, MD. I'm really looking forward to being back in the DC area, too. While Boston has been good to us (read: Kayleigh), I feel like we're now getting ready to go back home.

See you soon, Washington. -andy

Posted by acarvin at 12:05 PM

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August 7, 2006

A Lesson Learned the Hard Way

"Before I got sued I thought you had to do something wrong to get sued."

- MaineWebReport blogger Lance Dutson at the Citizen Media unconference, talking about how he was sued unsuccessfully for posting a copy of a Maine tourism ad that accidentally contained a adult-oriented phone service as its phone number. The advertiser filed the suit because he was publicizing their typo and mocking their mistake, and was one of the first bloggers to experience the wrath of corporate lawsuits.

Posted by acarvin at 2:55 PM

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What's the Ideal Toolset for Citizen Journalism?

At Dan Gillmor's citizen media unconference here at Harvard, Hong Kong University professor Andrew Lih led a discussion about the ideal toolset for fostering, editing and distributing citizen journalism. I recorded a podcast of the session; it's just under an hour and 45 megabytes. Sorry about the static during the first 10 seconds - I promise it gets better.... -andy

Tags: Andrew Lih | citizen journalism | citizen media | Harvard | speeches. Berkman | unconference

Posted by acarvin at 1:42 PM

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Lisa Williams Discusses Placeblogging

Here's a podcast of Lisa Williams of H2Otown talking about "placeblogging" - blogs focused on hyperlocal community journalism. -andy

Posted by acarvin at 11:36 AM

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August 4, 2006

Notes From Jimmy Wales' Wikimania Talk

Jimmy Wales notes from the Wikimania conference:

Shows a Stephen Colbert clip: "Any website that has a longer entry on truthiness than Lutheranism has got its priorities straight." Colbert then logged in, saying "Idaho is Oregon's Portugal."

Wikiality. "I'm a fan of reality, and I'm no fan of encyclopedias."

Wales: Talking about the Wikipedia movement, past present and future.

This is the one talk I give each year where the audience knows everything I know plus more.

Wikipedia's radical idea: "Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing."

2005 Milestones: Swedish site passed 100,000 entries, English surpass one million, German 400,000 etc, etc.

Lots of news this year, including the Siegenthaler controversy. "Apparently, there was an error in Wikipedia. Who knew?" "I will say that it was a really bad error and a terrible thing." He then showed a chart of site traffic - traffic tripled because of the controversy.

When this was going on, Nature magazine showed him the article they were working on, but it was under embargo, so he couldn't talk about it on CNN and other outlets. The article showed that Wikipedia had four errors per page compared to Britannica's three errors, when comparing a select group of science articles. Wikipedia "isn't complete rubbish; it's pretty good. We as Wikipedians working day to do know how hard it is to get things right...."

"We actually, in my opinion, got pretty lucky... because we're stronger in science than other areas... If we'd done a similar study in an area like poets... we probably wouldn't have done as well.... We know we have systemic biases - the articles in humanities aren't as good as they ought to be."

The Nature study focused on error, not style. In some cases, Wikipedia articles "are a complete wreck of style... That is something that also gets better over time." After we achieve consensus, someone who's a good writer can come in and smooth things out."

"We have huge articles on things like Truthiness, like things that Britannica hasn't even heard of - but I'm just teasing there."

"We're not there yet. We're not as good as Britannica - yet.... So in the coming years we're going to see a turn towards quality."

"We also need to be very interested to focusing our attention on the quality of the core topics" and working to make these things better.

Wikimedia projects are always far ahead of the foundation's organizational capacity. But the foundation is maturing as an org, and this'll be important to its future success. "We're becoming a better run organization... and we're finally getting to the point where we can actually apply for grants... and undertake new projects."

Met Jimmy Carter last week, talked about African aid. Many African countries only get 20 percent of the aid they're eligible for because the process is so confusing. Sounds like the Wikimedia Foundation.

Sept 2005 - got an email from Brad Patrick. He's now Wikimedia's legal consul. "We were at a point where we were getting overwhelmed with legal complaints" and we needed to take them seriously. He's also serving as the interim CEO.

Wikia, Inc has also received funding for building for-profit wiki communities. We managed to raise venture capital. They're hiring full-time engineers to work on the MediaWiki software. Wikia has "a total commitment to free knowledge and respect for communities."

Unlike any other medium, wiki seem to people to build a consensus view.

Campaigns Wikia: project to improve political discourse.

Some announcements (the news for today):

We're announcing that the One Laptop Per Child Project is including Wikipedia as the first element in their content repository. (ac: though they've been talking about this for at least a year.)

Wikiversity: A center for the creation and use of free learning materials and activities. It will create and host a range of free content materials, multilingual materials, for all ages in all languages. It'll host scholarly projects and communities to support these materials, and foster research baed in part on existing resources in Wikiversity and other wikimedia projects. Launching in three languages, in a six-month beta, within a month.

Wikimedia Foundation will also now have an advisory board to help improve partnerships, public relations, financing, etc. Additionally, Wikia and SocialText is launching Wikiwyg. It will make it easier for more people to get involved in wiki editing.

The technological barrier to entry keeps out really smart people who are uncomfortable with the Wikipedia interface. "Wikiwyg, in some shape or form, will be the future of the Internet," because it will allow non-techies to become Wikipedians easily.

Final thoughts:

Wikipedia. More than 100 languages have 1000+ articles. But we need to do more for countries in the developing world. So the foundation will seek funding to hire coordinators to represent under-represented languages. "My view is we should be looking to hire some people... in order to be an advocate and a coach... to actually reach out to volunteers."

WiktionaryZ incorporates the ability for users to edit an entry in multiple languages using a single interface. It'll probably be functional later this year.

Wikiversity. They want to work with free universities like Cida City Campus in South Africa to learn what they need, try to help provide it.
tag: wikimania2006

Posted by acarvin at 10:11 AM

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Jimmy Wales Announces $100 Laptop Partnership, Wikiversity, Wikiwyg

A few minutes ago here at the Wikimania conference, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales announced that the One Laptop Per Child Project is including Wikipedia as one of the first elements in their content repository. (ac: though they've been talking about this for at least a year.)

He also announced a new project called Wikiversity. It will serve as an online center for the creation and use of free learning materials and activities. It will create and host a range of free content materials, multilingual learning materials, for all ages in all languages. It'll host scholarly projects and communities to support these materials, and foster research based in part on existing resources in Wikiversity and other wikimedia projects. Launching in three languages, in a six-month beta, within a month.

Wikimedia Foundation will also now have an advisory board to help improve partnerships, public relations, financing, etc. Additionally, Wikia and SocialText is launching Wikiwyg. It will make it easier for more people to get involved in wiki editing. The technological barrier to entry keeps out really smart people who are uncomfortable with the Wikipedia interface. "Wikiwyg, in some shape or form, will be the future of the Internet," because it will allow non-techies to become Wikipedians easily.

Digg it

UPDATE: My notes from Jimmy's talk can be found here; meanwhile, here is the podcast I recorded. -andy

tag: wikimania2006

Posted by acarvin at 9:46 AM

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At Wikimania this Weekend

Hi everyone,

I'm at the Wikimania conference in Boston right now - Jimmy Wales is getting ready to speak. Lots of other great speakers, too, so there should be a lot to blog about... -andy

tag: wikimania2006

Posted by acarvin at 9:24 AM

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August 2, 2006

Video Blogger Jailed for Contempt

Yesterday, video blogger Josh Wolf was jailed by a federal court for refusing to turn over video tapes he shot last summer during a San Francisco anarchist protest.

In July 2005, Wolf shot footage of the protest, which resulted in a police car being burned. Federal prosecutors convened a grand jury to see if arson charges were warranted, and issued a subpoena to Wolf this February to turn over all footage he shot during the incident. Wolf refused, arguing that turning over the footage would make it less likely for sources to cooperate with journalists. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, the judge didn't buy that argument:

The case is "a slam dunk for the government,'' the judge said at the end of a 2 1/2 - hour hearing. Noting that the events Wolf photographed took place in public and involved no confidential sources, Alsup said there was a "legitimate need for law enforcement to have direct images of who was doing what to that police car.''

"Every person, from the president of the United States down to you and me, has to give information to the grand jury if the grand jury wants it,'' Alsup said.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Jeffrey Finigan told the judge that Wolf was "placing himself above every other citizen in our society'' by defying the grand jury. Finigan said the subpoena had been approved by Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, as provided by Justice Department guidelines in cases against journalists.

Theoretically, Josh could remain in jail until next July, when the grand jury ends its term. Josh's mother, Liz Wolf-Spada, managed to post a note about the situation on his blog:

Although the July 20th hearing seemed promising, today the judge, Judge Alsop ruled against all motions including 5th amendment rights, rights coming under freedom of the press, against bail or a stay. Josh is in Dublin federal prison, in the East Bay area of the San Francisco Bay. I don't have any other information at this time, but his lawyer is planning to file an appeal to the federal 9th circuit court. That filing alone costs almost $500, so if you can donate any little bit helps with the expenses of legal counsel and money for Josh while in jail. If you believe in prayer or good thoughts please send them to Josh.

Having video blogged anarchist protests myself, I can sympathize with Josh's plight. I'm not sure if I'd be comfortable handing over footage of protestors either. Yet I can see the judge's point of view: Josh isn't protecting an anonymous source, nor was the footage shot in private. I wish I had a stronger legal perspective on the situation, but I have a feeling the judge may be right on this one, whether I like it or not. I just hope Josh doesn't have to spend the next year in jail. More power to him for standing up to defend his principles, though.... -andy

Posted by acarvin at 11:58 AM

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June 1, 2006

New Report Says US Broadband Access is Up - and Online Creativity is Way Up

The latest broadband report from the Pew Internet & American Life Project offers some tantalizing evidence that certain aspects of the digital divide are finally being bridged. For many years, high-speed Internet access was the realm of the elite - generally made up of white, well-off, well-educated suburban families. According to the Pew report, which surveyed respondents during the first quarter of 2006, broadband access is rising across the board. And who's using broadband for online publishing? You might be surprised. I certainly was.

As of March 2006, 42% of all American adults - 84 million people - had a high-speed Internet connection at home, up from 30% the previous year. Amazingly, the 24 million new broadband users surpass the total number of broadband users that were online a scant four years ago.

Home broadband access, 2000-2006. Source: Pew Home Broadband Adoption 2006.

Whites continue to surpass African Americans on broadband access, with 42% of white households having access, compared to 31% of African Americans. At 41%, English-speaking Latinos have reached parity with white households, but the report does not account for the non-English speaking Latinos, who presumably go online much less. Income and education continue to be major barriers, though. While 68% of families earning more than $75,000 a year are online, only 21% of households making $30,000 or less had access. Similarly, (Interestingly, the strongest broadband growth rate occurred in middle-income households making $30,000-$50,000 a year.) 62% of households with someone completing a college degree had broadband, compared to only 17% of households in which no one achieved a high school diploma. So while progress is being made in terms of the racial digital divide, income and education remain enormous roadblocks.

Home broadband demographics. Source: Pew Home Broadband Adoption 2006.

My first reaction to this data was that the jump in broadband access is a direct result of telephone companies lowering the cost of DSL. Many DSL companies have started to offer introductory rates of $15 a month, less than half the typical rate. Indeed, the average cost of DSL in December 2005 was $32, down from $38 in February 2004. (Cable Internet access remained steady at $41.) So it would seem that cost must have been a major factor in getting new customers to switch. But according to the Pew report, this isn't the case. A whopping 57% of respondents cited speed as their primary reason for getting broadband, while only three percent said their reason was the cost of broadband lowering to an affordable level. This suggests that more people are willing to pay for broadband because of the quality of the speed. Perhaps the reasoning behind this is that so many websites now require broadband to function properly, they're egging households into upgrading their Internet access.

The Pew report also takes a look at how broadband households are using the Internet to publish online content. Overall, 35% of Internet users - 48 million people - have posted content to the Internet. Broadband users are more likely to post online content than dialup users - 42% versus 27%. This is especially true of bloggers and people who manage their own websites. While an average of eight percent of Internet users publish their own blog, 11% of broadband users had blogs, compared to only four percent of dialup users. Similarly, while an average of 15% of Internet users published websites, 17% of broadband users did this compared to only 11% of dialup users. (I wonder, though, how many of the respondents said they published a website rather than a blog because they didn't know the term "blog," since some online journaling tools that are essentially blogs don't use that terminology.)

User generated online content. Source: Pew Home Broadband Adoption 2006.

Demographics of online publishers. Source: Pew Home Broadband Adoption 2006.

Perhaps the most interesting finding of the report suggests that user-generate content is being democratized. Historically, online publishing was the purview of the elite. "Demographically, the broadband elite fits a classic early adopter profile for technology users - heavily male, well educated, and comfortable financially," says the report. But even this is beginning to change. More women are posting content online. Among broadband users, 39% of women post online content, compared to 43% of men. And income is becoming less of a factor as well. Among users earning $50,000 or less, 46% of them had published some sort of content online, compared to only 46% of those making more than $50,000. Of course, this doesn't mean that most online content is being made by lower-income users. There are many higher-income users online than low-income users; it's just that there's a higher percentage of online publishers within the lower-income demographic.

Pew then asked respondents if they had ever done any of these specific activities: shared something they created themselves like a story or a video, created their own webpage, worked on others' webpages, or created a blog. Not surprisingly, young people were much more likely to say yes. While 43% of respondents ages 18-29 said they had done one of these online publishing activities, only 29% of 50- to 64-year olds said yes, while just 18% of those 65 and older said yes. Meanwhile, race appeared to be a small factor, but in a rather counter-intuitive way: while 32 percent of whites said they had done one of these online publishing activities, 39% of African Americans and 42% of English-speaking Latinos had done so as well. So while whites may continue to use broadband in higher numbers, a higher percentage of African American and Latino broadband users are taking advantage of their access as content publishers. Similarly, income and education gaps are relatively minimal in terms of content production: 32% of users without a high school diploma versus 38% of those with a college degree, and 32% of users earning less than $30,000 a year versus 41% of those making $75,000 or more.

Does the Pew report suggest that the digital divide has been bridged? Hardly. The vast majority of low-income and low-skilled households lag behind, and gaps exist among racial groups, albeit less than before. But as we continue to work to give more people the skills and opportunities to go online, it would seem that more people of different racial, economic and educational backgrounds are taking advantage of those skills and opportunities to contribute online content. To me, this valida