Lessons learned
Dan Gillmor, author of "We the Media" and one of the principals behind the Bayosphere citizen-journalism initiative, is pulling out of Bayosphere. He talks about his reasons in a lengthy post, and he also talks about lessons he learned, some of which are relevant to what we're doing. His list, summarized:
- Making people take responsibility for their words, although it cut the pool of potential contributors somewhat, was the right thing to do, and the contributors who were left generally contributed better content.
- Citizen journalists need and want help and guidance, including clear direction on what they're supposed to be doing. What they're doing, however, should not be limited to, say, filling in the blanks.
- There must be incentives for people to participate (beyond the thrill of seeing your byline in print).
- Participants are essential, but the audience matters most; most people who come to the site will never contribute to it.
One of the things we hope to do this year is increase the amount of citizen journalism on our site, so the advice about people needing help, guidance and clear expectations is particularly apt. But to the extent that I'm involved in that initiative, I'll try to keep all these lessons in mind.
Comments (8)
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I would draw different/additional conclusions as to why Bayosphere didn't work.
1. No center.
2. No transparency. It was never clear who was running the show, we just had Dan onstage.
3. No responsiveness to feedback. I made several constructive suggestions for how to make the site more usable, and never got an acknowledgement. (Did anyone ever receive my suggestions? I don't know, and don't know whether I should have assumed that silence meant non-receipt; AFAIK they never explained what their commitment to users was.)
A citizen journalism site should have an explicit Commitment to Users, just as the journalist should have a Commitment to Readers - "say what you do and do what you say".
4. Resistance to criticism. I posted a "things aren't going right, Bayosphere's on the wrong track" comment one night last spring, and the next morning it was nowhere to be found.
(apparently it reappeared a few weeks later, after our attention had moved on)
5. No guidance. I asked questions, didn't get answers, didn't know why not.
As for "Making people take responsibility for their words, although it cut the pool of potential contributors somewhat, was the right thing to do" - sez who? IMHO Dan's Typepad blog had a great comments community, and his Bayosphere blog didn't. The extra hurdle of logging in discouraged spontaneous participation. The splatting of trackbacks amidst the comments is like having half the party be autistic - it interrupts the flow and interactivity of community discourse.
And while I really hope that the new Center for Citizen Media endeavor works better, I don't see a difference so far. Where is the blog about what Citmedia is doing? (I see a blog, but it's a standard Dan Gillmor blog)
There's a ton of people on the Citmedia board of directors; how many of those people are citizen journalists? zero?
(It's called the Center for Citizen Media; without practitioners, it's like a white-run NAACP)
How many of the board members are even practicing journalists?
Where are "give us your ideas as to what we should be doing" requests for feedback from the proven citizen journalists - Frankonis, Williams, Galant - and the interested blogospheric community?
(It's good, though.)
Posted on January 26, 2006 3:46 AM
sorry. after a few seconds' reflection, it is clear that most of the above rant is not relevant to a local newspaper cit-j endeavor like what you guys have in mind. perhaps next time I will think before hitting the "Post" button.
Posted on January 26, 2006 3:53 AM
I disagree, Anna: I think a good chunk is relevant, and I'm sure readers would agree.
Posted on January 26, 2006 9:27 AM
(Addendum to critique above - a link to my "Bayosphere's on the wrong track" comment that had gone missing.)
> "a good chunk is relevant"
Yes but a good chunk isn't; for ex. I do think you (as a local paper site) need to (effectively) encourage accountability via names, whether real or pseudonymous-to-the-public-but-real-to-you (it's pretty clear that those at your paper have the good judgment not to divulge them); otherwise the articles' "comments" area will likely devolve into the (pretty much valueless except to the participants) turf of a horde? herd? of anonymice, as seems to be happening at the local paper in my area.
Posted on January 26, 2006 2:58 PM
Hello Lex,
This was just v1 and Dan's lessons learned were valuable.
These aren't thoughts specific to anything you have written, but just some general observations about the citizen journalism issue.
Don't know how it is for your area, but I see little evidence of "citizen journalism" in DC Metro.
When I started my blog, citizen journalism was exactly what I was searching for. I expected to find blogs about neighborhood issues, local politics, school board, etc. There are a handful of blogs that do write about those issues, but of the 800 or so blogs that I track, most write about issues of importance to their daily lives.
It's not citizen journalism, but the subject matter is nonetheless important. People write about child rearing, work at home vs work parenting, utility cost, job conflicts, relationship issues, religious and spiritual issues, stories about encounters in daily life. Wonderful material, much of it. Its also about communication -- bloggers interact, they share, they support, the meet. They are building community.
That's what it's about. It's important. It's not "news" it's not "citizen journalism" but its about stuff that matters nontheless. It seems to me that many in the news business are looking for a model that doesn't really exist. I have no doubt that online newspapers, built off blog concepts, will challenge established newspapers in many communities. But that's not citizen journalism either. It's semi-pro, at least.
We need to throw out the concept of citizen journalism. It doesn't exist. Not really. If it did it would be in DC. I would see it. I don't. Not really.
My alternative model for a newspaper is this: Just embrace the blogging, self-publishing community. Recognize it, support it, go so far as enter into joint advertising ventures with it. But don't label it.
Perhaps newspapers can enlist some bloggers to engage in some form of journalism and call it "citizen journalism." But I think the concept is flawed. I think the heartening thing here is that news organizations play a very fundamental role and that role isn't going away. What worries me, however, is that newspapers will loose eyeballs nonetheless because they aren't coming to terms with how their community interacts. Blogs aren't competing with newspapers except for a reader's time. What they are offering instead is an entirely new way to understand our lives and our communities on a very personal and local level. That community isn't hostile to their local newspapers despite what national blog pundits say. If you want to win that community, gain its trust, and build a solid foundation for your newspaper, all you really need to do is recognize its existence and acknowledge that its content, while not "news," is nonetheless as important as anything you publish.
Posted on January 27, 2006 4:09 PM
Anna: We're not yet at pseudonymous-to-the-public-but-real-to-us, but we're working toward that. (And frankly, the sooner the better.) There are (sigh) technical issues to be overcome on both the Web-publishing end and the hosting end, I'm told.
Posted on January 27, 2006 4:15 PM
kob: We're not trying to do what Bayosphere was trying to do, obviously. Right now, we're providing a venue for people to post their words and photos on our Web site, and we're encouraging them to do so. As is traditional in this bidness, we're not spending a ton of money to promote this, but we're talking it up in venues such as this.
We've encouraged local bloggers, and we've been generally well received in return. But we haven't really done a lot more than that other than co-sponsoring ConvergeSouth.
What I hope we will do is take the partnership between paper and community that we've talked about out into the real world: teaming our writers up with non-N&R employees (or "citizen journalists" or "readers who want to help out"; I'm not sure what the right term really is) to report and produce stories for the paper and Web site that 1) the non-employees choose and 2) would be of interest to the larger community the paper serves.
Everyone seems to think that's rather ambitious. But inasmuch as our main barriers these days are financial and technical, it might be more feasible than many other things we'd like to do. In any event, we won't know 'til we try.
Posted on January 27, 2006 4:29 PM
Just for the record (and Lex, I apologize for hijacking your comment space for my record) I also made some critique-of-cit-j-sites comments in the discussion to this PressThink post, but their...uh...intensity was not about Bayosphere.
(the problem with not naming names is that readers can fill in the wrong ones)
(and of course it's a whole lot easier to criticize than to do, and some of us seem to be overly skilled at the former and to run screaming like banshees at the prospect of the latter; which was the point of the "it's good, though" link above)
Posted on February 2, 2006 9:08 PM