The Amateur,
the Audience,
the Crowd,
and other strange
forms of journalism.
Alek Tarkowski

The Amateur,
the Audience,
the Crowd,
and other strange
forms of journalism.
(And the Crisis too!)
Alek Tarkowski

This presentation is available under
Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Poland
license
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/pl/)
Some rights reserved by Alek Tarkowski.
Slides on CC licenses borrowed from Jon Phillips
(http://www.slideshare.net/rejon)

The Medium
The Audience
The Law
The Money
The Authors
(The Alternative)

The Crisis
The Medium
The Audience
The Law
The Money
The Authors
(The Alternative)

The issue

The issue
* end of press?
* end of journalism?
* end of public debate / public
sphere?

The issue
* end of press?
* end of journalism?
* end of public debate / public
sphere?
An alternative to endism?

The Medium

1981: online press

1981: online press

technological shift
* key trends: 1) global
connectivity; 2) speed increase;
3) democratization of production
/ distribution capacity
* creative destruction of the
media / press sector

* technology does not
determine – but ofers crucial
afordances
* key lines of division:
online / ofine; free / paid;
author / audience

“A lot of things are happening on
the Internet that never happened
before because the Internet is a
vehicle for everyone. The mass
media is no longer only for the
powerful, and that’s a huge change
for the entire newspaper and news
industry”
Craig Newmark

“The people formerly known as
the audience wish to inform
media people of our existence,
and of a shift in power that goes
with the platform shift you’ve all
heard about”.
Jay Rosen

The Audience

Pew Research Center for the
Internet and the Press
* 1st time more people rely on
internet than newspapers
* among under 30, internet as
important as television (60%)
(from 68% vs. 34%)

Poland, D-Link Technology
Trend: online communities
(2008)
What content do you fnd
interesting?
User generated 46%
Journalistic 19%
Corporate 4%

Traditional media remain an
important source online
NYTimes: 20 million readers
online / 1 million readers in print

The Law

„archaic press law does not take
account of digital technologies”
Leszek Szymczak, Gazeta
Bytowska

Media regulation
Old standards in the times of
convergent media
Press law
Copyright law
Telecom law (shape of
infrastructure)
Professional code of conduct

The Money

The problem with press
today: lack of good business
model, not of good news

Why we need a business
model? Because media
institutions are important of
the quality of news (and the
public sphere).

„Because newspapers are a
rusty industry. [...] They print
lists of readers every day on the
obituary page. Worse, as a class
they are resolutely clueless
about how to adapt to a world
that is increasingly networked
and self-informing”
Doc Searls

* Free
* Micropayments
* Voluntary payments (Vodo)
* Micropatronage
* Press piracy
* Example of Radiohead / NIN

The Alternative

Free software
Steven Weber: success of open
●
source - as a model
“open source is not necessarily
●
good or morally benefcial”
… but we tend to underestimate
●
value of openness (James Boyle)

Free culture
 Inspired by free software –
applied to cultural works and
knowledge
At its core, a legal project – to
regain a lost balance
About 10 years old

The inheritance
Commons based peer

production (Yochai Benkler)
(free) common good + new

models of production and
distribution

Elephants
Dream

Some rights reserved

Free culture
 From intellectual property to
intellectual generosity

Free licenses for every type of
creativity

Creative Commons
Some rights reserved – in
particular, „as little as possible
rights reserved”
Millions of works, millions of
people?
Marginal – but at the frontier of
change

The alternative
* successfully developed for
programming
* clear examples for art, culture,
education, science
* how about journalism?

The Authors

“Terrorism made Stacey a
victim; technology made him a
reporter”

Eliot Ward, CC BY

“The frst-day story no longer
belongs to newspapers - and
hasn't for a long time. It isn't
even the property of professional
journalists any longer”

“[...] we could be assured that
when a big news event
happened, witnesses would be
online with accounts of it in a
matter of minutes. News was
never like that”

Janis Krums

David Katz/Obama for
America, CC BY-NC-SA

* amateurs vs. professionals
* informal vs. formal
* when do you become a
journalist?
* crowdsourcing does not mean
full participation

Douglas Rushkof
„Most stations are looking at the
listener community as a bunch
of consumers to be segmented,
targeted, manipulated - the sort
of spreadsheet approach to radio
as opposed to the passionate
approach”

Douglas Rushkof
* involve listeners rather than
just corporations / labels
* invite not common
denominator, but highest quality
of listeners - „fans”
* answer their needs
* niche, not mass

* independent media are not
new!
* Indymedia
* media hacking
* (TV Solidarność)

Who are the new authors?

* one million penguins
1500 individuals
11,000 edits
‘not the most read, but possibly
the most written novel in
history‘
75000 visitors
280,000 page views

* Current TV
* users (called VC2 Producers)
contribute 3-7min “pods”
* content fltered by registered
users through voting
* pods are approved by Current's
on-air programming department
* “pods” are a portion of aired
material

BBC Creative Archive
* broadcaster's archives as free
culture
* ultimately just access (iPlayer) –
Audience, not Authors

Assignment Zero
* \"trend reporting gone pro-am\" –
on an open platform
* trend: spread of peer production /
wisdom-of-crowd eforts
* readers know more than
journalists
* goal: 80 features

Assignment Zero
* get division of labor right: right
size of chunks
* self-assignment rarely works
* sudden coordination costs of
success
* forming a whole out of pieces
crucial build-up of common
background knowledge

Assignment Zero
* successful – but in a completely
diferent manner than traditional
journalism
* depends on building a community
* long-term process

Blogging
* Rathergate: bloggers verify
CBS 60 minutes story on G.W.
Bush's army record
* Poland: Bloggers prove a
professional journalist is a
plagiarist

Blogging
* Kataryna: blogosphere has no
importance whatsoever […] let's
forget about replacing
traditional media with blogs –
these are two parallel words that
rarely interact and do not
compete”

Blogging
* Kataryna:
blogosphere is not efcient at
“looking at journalists' hands”;
not that it cannot do it – it's just
that nobody cares

Blogging
* not journalism, but
commentary?
* public debate / public sphere

Civic journalism
* hype?
* from civic journalism projects to a
feld for “new media tools
deployment for civic ends”
* Youtube, Flickr, SMS, Facebook...
* bloggers, eyewitnesses, pro-am
journalists, random persons...

Civic journalism
* diferent than „real” journalism
* crowdsourcing as „civic”
journalism
* diference between democracies
and totalitarian regimes?
* it's not the name that's important

Summing up...
* crowdsource
* open source
* civic journalism
* public sphere
* social media – horizontal
communication

The future

The future
What can I do?
* Keep an open mind
* Write Express
* Support favourite (small) title
* Make educational resources

The future
What can I do?
* Keep an open mind
* Write Express
* Support favourite (small) title
* Make educational resources
* Ride bikes! Grow plants!
Bake bread!

Thank you!
alek@creativecommons.pl
www.creativecommons.pl