John Bracken

Today’s most blogged about story, at least by Techmeme standards, will undoubtedly be Jonathan Dee’s NYT magazine article looking at Wikipedia’s role in breaking news. “Given the chaotic way in which it works, the truly remarkable thing about Wikipedia as a news site is that it works as well as it does,” Dee writes. He notes that Wikipedi’s prominence has overshadowed the (flailing) Wikinews experiment:

So indistinct has the line between past and present become that Wikipedia has inadvertently all but strangled one of its sister projects, the three-year-old Wikinews…There’s just no point in competing with the ruthless purview of the encyclopedia, which now accounts for a staggering one out of every 200 page views on the entire Internet.

Dee focussues on the

relatively small group of hard-core devotees who will, the moment big news breaks, drop whatever they’re doing to take custody of the project and ensure its, for lack of a better term, quality control.”

One of these is 23-year-old librarian and Antioch College student Natalie Martin.

She thought at one point in her life that she wanted to be a journalist, she said, “but then I decided that my only real interest in newspapers is fixing all the comma mistakes.”

Appropriate to an article that appears on Day Three of the iPhone era, Dee quotes Jimmy Wales on how Wikipedia might transcend text:

“The classic question I get at conferences,” Wales said, “is, ‘Do you think Wikipedia will remain text, or will it be more and more video in the future?’ I think it’s pretty hard to beat written words. Especially for collaboration, because words are the most fluid medium for shaping and reshaping and collaboratively negotiating something. It’s kind of hard to do with video, and I don’t think that’s just a technical barrier.”…

In his conclusion, Dee asserts that Dee concludes:

Wikipedia may not exactly be a font of truth, but it does go against the current of what has happened to the notion of truth. The easy global dissemination of, well, everything has generated a D.I.Y. culture of proud subjectivity, a culture that has spread even to relatively traditional forms like television — as in the ascent of advocates like Lou Dobbs or Bill O’Reilly, whose appeal lies precisely in their subjectivity even as they name-check “neutrality” to cover all sorts of journalistic sins. But the Wikipedians, most of them born in the information age, have tasked themselves with weeding that subjectivity not just out of one another’s discourse but also out of their own. They may not be able to do any actual reporting from their bedrooms or dorm rooms or hotel rooms, but they can police bias, and they do it with a passion that’s no less impressive for its occasional excess of piety. Who taught them this? It’s a mystery; but they are teaching it to one another.

That leaves the question that is the title of this post: is policing bias– and accuracy– p the killer app of citizen journalism?  If so, might we need another name for it?

(There is no Wikipedia entry for Jonathan Dee as of Sunday morning.)

The LA Times’ Don Lee takes a look at OhMyNews and where it stands today:

The headline on OhmyNews’ story could be “Business Is Depressed, Readership Is Down and Backers Are Worried.”

Lee talks to OhMy reporter Kim Hye-won:

Kim had no training in journalism, nor had she worked outside her home. …”Rather than say I’m a reporter, I prefer to just listen to the concerns of friends as if I were talking with neighbors,” says Kim, whose writings have included stories about neighbors helping disabled children ride sleds and street vendors struggling to make ends meet.

When I read a news story, I’ve begun to ask, how is it reported and presented differently than it would have been  in 1993? How are the new approaches enabled by the web integrated into the story? This weekend, the Sun Times published a story on dirty restaurants, There’s Dirty and Then There’s Disgusting. Written by MARK J. KONKOL and ART GOLAB, it’s a summary of “Chicago’s Dirty Dozen– a collection of troubled eateries shut down by inspectors after posting the most critical health code violations in the city….A[n] analysis of 12,000 city health inspection reports found minor cleanliness trouble can strike just about any kitchen.” Nothing new here– a fairly standard list of gross health violations, such as this report on

Joe’s Bar-B-Q at 4900 W. Madison, which was closed down for having 10 critical violations… During five different inspections, officials found 30 pounds of spoiled beef, 50 pounds of cooked pork stored at 58.4 degrees and 120 pounds of chicken and perch thawing uncovered in a sink…and wastewater from a condenser line was dripping on food, according to reports.

This story is reported in the same way it would have been 1n 1996, 1986, or 1905, for that matter. The only difference is the fact that we can read, quote from and criticize it online. KONKOL AND GOLAB don’t tell us, for instance, that the food inspection reports maintained by the City’s Department of Health are available and searchable by the web. Happily, three of my favorite local Edgewater eateries passed inspections this year. The reports don’t share much, however. Why shouldn’t the city share the full inspection report online, along with summaries of each inspector’s reports? Such public transparency would be a check not only on the restaurants, but the on the inspectors as well. Better yet, what if the Sun Times took a page from local innovator Adrian Holovaty and overlaid the health department data over Google Maps, a la ChicagoCrime.org? If the Sun Times doesn’t do it, someone else will do it; if newspapers want to remain germane, they best leave 1993 behind and integrate the web and mobile devices into their reporting.

In a companion piece, Fran Spielman explores how the Health Department conducts its investigations. Alderman Tom Tunney, owner of the Ann Sather restaurants, opens the door to citizen food inspectors, “I find the consumer is as good of an inspector as anybody. At least in my community, they’re very educated and very on top of it.” How about it, Alderman? Why not create and publicize a way for us to grade restaurant cleanliness from our cell phones, for instance?

Last week, Kenyatta Cheese shared some thoughts on the murder of Indymedia journalist Brad Wills. He asked some questions about the place of activist-journalists in this new world of citizen’s media. He called the shooting

probably the first death of a citizen journalist during the era of citizen journalism, though I doubt it will be blogged as such. Indymedia reporters tend to be thought of as independent journalists and not citizens for some reason. While both are unpaid and non-professional, Indymedia wears their politics on their sleeve. While this is polarizing to some, their passion and faith also keeps them sustainable (at least more so than the prospects of a free t-shirt) — something we need to learn from. Meanwhile, citizen-J efforts remain mostly incidental journalism, more ready to fulfill the promise of urban sensing systems than the tenets of civic journalism.

We participatory media heads need to think about Brad Will and what his story means for our own immediate communities. While our peers are more likely to face a Apple vs. Bloggers lawsuit than the threat of physical harm, it doesn’t absolve us from at least thinking about the social (and dare I say moral?) responsibility we have to prepare our users within reason.

Kenyatta identifies something that oft goes unmentioned: indymedia makers and other activist journalists are often seen as the obnoxious uncle that no one wants to get to close to during the holidays.

In that light, initially I didn’t note much “mainstream citizen-journalism” coverage of Will’s death. Looking around, I found mentions by Romenesko, boing boing, and media bistro, but most of the blogging about the murder was done by ideological fellow travelers, including Al Giordano at Narco News. Jeff Jarvis mentioned Will’s death; in the comments, Andy Carvin points to the memorial blog Brad Will: Presente. But Zulma Aguiar has been covering Will’s death as thoroughly as anyone; she points to Will’s final video work, which apparently (I have not watched it) ends with his shooting. NYC Indymedia just posted a statement from Will’s family.

In recent years, the only times I recall looking at indymedia.org have been to find protest news; even then I often don’t learn much. Indymedia was the first Internet-driven citizen journalism movement that I found. Its volunteer reporters were an important source of news during the era of “anti-globalization” protests in the halcyon late-90s before September 11th. “Don’t hate the media, become the media,” a phrase popularized, if not coined, by Indymedia in Seattle c. 19989 [thanks, dee dee, for the correction] is still germane, if not fully embraced by media ownership critics. Indymedia’s experiment in de-centralized journalism and collective editing were important, if ultimately failed, experiments in that set the stage for later projects.

I just finished William Langewiesche’s amazing ‘Rules of Engagement’ piece in Vanity Fair. He uses the Haditha massacre as a window onto “the observable realities of an expanding guerrilla war—about mistakes that have been made and, regrettably, about the inability to fix what is wrong.” Most moving are his portrayals of the Marines in Kilo Company:

You cannot see much out of an armored Humvee, and even if you could, you have no chance of identify the enemy until first you come under attack. You’ve got all these weapons, and you’ve been told that you’re a mighty warrior, a Spartan, but what are you going to shoot—the dogs? You’re a Marine without a beach…Reduced to giving candy to children, and cut off by language and ignorance from the culture around them, they work in such isolation that the potentially positive effects of their presence usually amount to nil…Many had joined the Corps in response to the September 11 attacks, now four years past, but the emotions that once had motivated them had been reduced by their participation in an enormously bureaucratic enterprise, and by the tedium of war. Fine—they were probably better soldiers for it. These were not the taut warriors portrayed in action movies. As they shed their helmets and body armor, they emerged as ordinary five-foot-nine-inch, 150-pound middle-class Americans, sometimes pimple-faced, and often sort of scrawny. Some of them were mentally agile, and some quite obviously were not.

The story led me to ponder the state of the solider as citizen journalist. A recent post by BlackFive refers to “the Army’s new unit watching for OPSEC (Operational Security) violations on soldiers’ blogs and web sites” and conludes:

Warning bloggers of possible violations is a good thing. But mindlessly cracking down on them without considering the consequences to the positive information flow will only create a cadre of negative military bloggers flying under the radar that will become the anti-military poster children for the New York Times and CNN.

Langewiesche addresses the power of citizensmedia when he writes about the US military’s attempt to contain the street distribution of a (by his account chilling) video of Haditha’s aftermath:

 

The Marine Corps was wrong to dismiss the video as propaganda and fiction. It is an authentic Iraqi artifact. It should be shown to the grunts in training. It should be shown to the generals in command. The scenes it depicts are raw.

Who, besides the Pentagon, is considering the role of the soldier-journalist? What can be learned from the media of the insurgents?

The time I’ve spent with the New York Times has probably trebeled since I began using NYTimesRiver on my blackberry. (Thanks, Dave Winer, “media hacker.”) (An ancillary benefit: reading news on my bb in the morning in bed bothers my wife less than did crinkly, bulky, dirty newsprint.)

Two internet-related stories jumped out to me this morning. First is HASSAN M. FATTAH’s creepy story on Al Qaeda citizen journalists. “Al Qaeda has been turning itself from an active organization into a propaganda organization,” said [Chris] Heffelfinger, a specialist in jihadi ideology at the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point. Fattah focusses on 28 year old Abu Omar, who is

part of a growing army of young men who may not seek to take violent action, but who help spread jihadist philosophy, shape its message and hope to inspire others to their cause…“We are typically observers, but when we see something on the Net, our job is to share it,” Abu Omar said. He no longer trusts news reports on television, he said… “We become like journalists ourselves.”

Second was this story on the difficulties facing independent filmmakers. A telling quote from American Splendor direcor Ted Hope: “If I were starting out now, I would be a producer for the Internet.”