Global Neighbourhoods

James Karl Buck Twitters his way out of Egypt Jailhouse

While I was posting a video clip yesterday about Twitter & some of the neat things people & businesses can do with it, James Karl Buck found a new one. He was tossed into an Egyptian jail cell. Apparently, in Egypt where abuse of prisoners is common, they let  him keep his phone. So, he Twittered a single word: "ARRESTED."

That put many wheels in motion and for him, it led to the US Embassy getting him out of both jail and back to his Oakland. But, Buck was told by police that his interpreter, Mohammed Maree was arrested and "he is a dead man." Since arriving here today. Buck has been doing his best to raise Hell on behalf of Mohammed. On his Twitter account he asks that anyone who cares contact Egyptian Press Consul Attiya A Shakran, (415) 346-3427 attiyashakran@hotmail.com (415) 548-0556

You can learn more about Mohammed at James' blog, linked to above.

James is a journalism grad student at UC Berkeley. He was in Egypt to cover blogger involvement in the current demonstrations against food shortages. ABC News is saying those demonstrations turned turned into riots.

In any case, Egypt is no place to get thrown into the slammer. Earlier this year, I interviewed Wael Abbas, who posts videos on YouTube showing abundant evidence of police abuse. A couple of weeks ago Wael told me he would be blogging about the strike. I hope that he is okay.

More thoughts on Blogger/Citizen Journalism

A couple of weeks back I wrote a piece on something I called "blogger journalism." It was a response to people asking me to submit interview questions in advance, something I maintained companies would never do if I worked for the NY Times. Last week at DEMO, I was chatting with Dan Farber as we filed into a room. I said, "Journalism is really changing these days," and he responded immediately, "No it isn't. It hasn't changed a bit."

We both got funneled into the room and did not sit together so we never continued the chat.  I have a hunch that we are both right. To Dan, the rules of journalism have not much changed. His delivery and distribution may now be online rather than on paper. His frequency may niow be several times daily, rather than weekly. But he still listens to people, asks questions and writes balanced copy. Dan is mild mannered and friendly and helpful to other journalists. But when he goes after a story he's like a dog with a bone. It's his story and he wants to get it first and right.

That would have been true of Dan 20 years ago as well. I think bloggers, aspiring to be journalists can be well served to emulate Dan's standards.

But still I would argue, journalism is changing. It is changing in a great many ways. Here are a few:

• We are amateurs. We don't get paid. No bloggers were airlifted by corporations to cover Iraq or Katrina as far as I know.  Most blogger don't get into the room where the big stories are introduced by large organizations. But those stories are still pretty well covered by traditional media.

So we bloggers  write about the stories we do get to see in our neighborhoods; at our meetups; in our classrooms. We interview the people we see. We serve as our own camera/sound crews.

The result is that a great many more events of the world are being covered today than has ever been the case in newspapers who determined news quantity as the page space between ads. Social media people are delivering news faster than ever before and more people have the chance to be heard than ever before.

Is it journalism? Of course it is.  The quality is uneven, but the same is probably true of your local traditional news sources. Whether the content is served up by a traditional organization or a blogger does not define whether or not it is journalism. There are newspaper reporters who get paid to cover alien abductions complete with doctored photos. There are bloggers who are not journalists for similar reasons. But there are a surprising number of bloggers who are respected citizen journalists.

• The guise of objectivity has changed. When I was a paid journalist in the late 1960s, I interviewed George C. Wallace, the segregationist Alabama governor who would go on to take 43% of Massachusetts Democratic votes in a primary election.

After, he sent me a thank you note, telling me he felt my article had helped him and his cause--a cause which I absolutely detested. But I had done my job. I had accurately reported what he said. I asked the sort of open-ended questions I still ask in interviews, ones that lets the speaker go where he/she wants to go. But helping George Wallace do well in a liberal Yankess state was something that did not please me in any way.

Since I returned to journalism, I've developed a style that Scoble and I used in the book. I tell you why I'm speaking to someone, then I left someone have his say. Then I tell you what i think of it., making very clear that you are getting a personal opinion. I wish I had the freedom to have done that 40 years ago as a reporter with Wallace.

Other bloggers seem to have picked up this approach and it pleases me immensely. It gets rid of a charade of objectivity that was never really there. It lets the reader know who the speaker is, and the reader will also have some sense of where the reporter is coming from. It is different from the old rules of engagement.

• My fact checkers are you. You change my story. Last week I covered DEMO 08 presentations on Twitter. One company, NotchUp claimed, in their presentation, that word-of-mouth among enthusiastic alpha users had taken it's new service viral; that there were 50,000 grassroots users gathered in a few weeks. Within minutes, i received a significant handful of Twitter responses, from readers on three continents, saying these guys were spammers and their claim was highly misleading.

In days of old, my editor would have challenged the NotchUp claim, asking me to get a second source. If I could not, the paper would probably have run the claim, emphasizing that it was the company's assertion. Some readers would have known the assertion was misleading, but probably would not have told us, because it was much haerder than just hitting a Twitter "Upload button."  In fact, a great journalist wiud have gone back to NotchUp to respond to the accusations, I did not because my readers got me to lose interest in them as a company.

I do not have the considerable benefit of an editor anymore, as those who ping me my frequent typos will attest--but I have a whole bevy of fact-checkers out there, as do other blogger journalists. They heloed Robert and I write a better book and they help me write more accurate reports now. Blog readers vet the facts, and the blog writer adjusts accordingly and quickly.

These are just three thoughts on the subject. There are many more. With all due respect to Dan, social media is changing most institutions and that includes journalism. Personally, it is a good thing. Most of America's "free press, " is in the hands of interests more concerned with corporate profits than journalism and for better or worse, social media is the only force emerging to offset that concentration of information control.

Utterz offers space for Election Day Citizen Journalists

Utterz, is inviting people to report on what is happening in their local voting districts on this election day. This is a good idea and the diversity of comments going up there already makes for an interesting read.

Just one thought for you undecided out there. Vote for the candidate you believe will make the best president, not the one you think is going to win for some reason or other. That's how we'll get the two most deserving finalists.

But whatever you do, if this is your primary day, do not forget to vote. Events in the world should tell you what a sacred & powerful freedom it is.

New thoughts on blogger journalism

The same thing has happened twice in a week and it tends to piss me off. I request interviews for the SAP Global Survey and someone asks if I would be willing to submit my questions in advance.

The answer is no, resoundingly so. You would not ask the NY Times or ABC or your hometown newspaper to do that? Why would you ask me?

The implicit answer is that I blog my interviews, and therefore, I must be less than a full journalist. I want the interview to increase my readership and therefore I should conduct them with an implicit wink and a nod. I'll get back to that in just a second.

In the interest of transparency, let me state a few things that regular readers of the survey probably already know. I conduct most of my interviews by email. So the recipient gets to see and consider the questions for a week or so before answering them. The recipient can easily fool me, and get help from internal people. I will never know.But I insist on naked conversations. If an interviewee sends me back Corpspeak or standard talking points,I will not publish it. This has happened only once. I have had respondents decline to answers a question, and the only way it shows, is that there are fewer questions to the interview. This is also fine with me.

Finally, the likelihood of getting burned is small. Why? Because SAP my sponsors and I are looking for insights and information that will add to the body of knowledge on social media's impact on culture and business. I ask people for interviews because I think they have something to contribute.

So far there have been 58 interviews. I have posted a few broken links and in one case, I posted the wrong middle name of an interviewee (my worst mistake so far). No one has contacted me to claim I misrepresented them.

I am educated and experienced as a journalist. I have worked for newspapers, email newsletters and briefly as a radio commentator. I am now practicing journalism as a blogger. The rules have changed slightly. I get to stick my opinion in when reporting. I am obliged to make clear when it is opinion and when it is reporting.

Bloggers as journalists are just evolving. We bloggers have brought much of this on ourselves.  When I am interviewed by other bloggers, they often ask me to promote that I am on their sites. I rarely do this and when I do, it is because I feel new ground was covered, that contributes something to the body of knowledge. I did it twice recently and felt uncomfortable, so it will probably be a while before I do it again.

As a reporter, I never asked an interviewee to promote what I wrote. If she or he liked it, then they might cut and copy a newspaper clip, or forward my email newsletter or in blogs, link to it. But to collaborate in the promotion of those materials, to me is as unjournalistic as asking me for questions in advance.

I also have the issue of interviewing friends on my blog. I will always be transparent. This is not new to blogging. I had friends who were part of my state house beat as a yong reporter. I once dated a young woman whose father served on the local Council for the Elderly  When that council came under scrutiny for questionable practices, I had to recuse myself and that is the way it should be.

Blogging is breaking new ground in so many days.  For me, it is difficult to keep straight, that one day I am a speaker, another I am a blogging reporter and very recently I was a consulting blogger who sometimes wrote about clients. New ground is often shaky and it requires a few hops and occasional stumbles.

The way I try to keep it straight is to remember my customer is my reader and that is where my loyalty rests when I blog.

40% of world prefer social harmony to free press

The BBC reports that it conducted a survey in which only 56% of those polled though a free press was important to society.  A full 40% thought restricting press for the sake of social harmony was preferable.  I wonder how they would vote on incarcerating social dissenters or perhaps waterboarding activists.

Rick Smolan's new project

Rick Smolan (Against All Odds); Jessie Smolan, originally uploaded by GBD.

This may be the only time I ever post a traditional press release on this site, but the amazing photographer and collaborative photo book producer Rick Smolan is behind this project, and before we social media maniacs stole the term "Citizen Journalist,  Rick was organizing citizen photo journalists on a global basis.

Please note the date.  I wish I had known sooner, but there is still time to click in:

Beginning Sept. 17, in the course of a single week, 100 of the world’s top photojournalists – and millions of amateur shutterbugs – will fan out around the United States to shoot digital photos of the most important place in their lives: Home.

With America at Home, Rick Smolan and the team that produced A Day in the Life of America: America 24/7, 24 Hours in Cyberspace, and One Digital Day, will be taking on their biggest challenge to date. The result, which is expected to include several million photographs, will be the most extensive record of American home life ever attempted.

“The idea of ‘home’ is as universal and deeply ingrained as that of ‘mother’ or ‘father,’” says Smolan. “Ask people to describe what the word ‘home’ means to them and their answers tap into a deep pool of emotions and memories. We’re inviting millions of Americans to collaborate in the creation of a digital time capsule that may prove to be an invaluable resource for our descendants to understand the fabric of home life in 2007.”

Editorially, America at Home aims to capture the emotions of home: the distinctive rituals, intimate moments and all the myriad ways in which we work, play, learn, conduct our lives and interact with friends, family members (and pets!) as we transform our dwellings into our homes. From McMansions to mobile homes, from tree houses to tenement slums, from ranches to old age homes, the public is invited to help document the harmonies and paradoxes of home life across America over a single seven-day period.

Snapshots Heard ‘round the Nation

Through massive grassroots online outreach, millions of Americans are being invited to simultaneously contribute their own images via a series of daily snapshots taken at the same time of day across the nation each day throughout the week. Participants will receive daily emails with assignment instructions and can also take general photos of what makes their home special.

The public is invited to sign up and upload their images at www.MyAmericaAtHome.com.

An international team of leading magazine and newspaper photo editors will edit all of the images, shot by both professionals and amateurs. The best images will be woven together with essays from leading writers in a unique and evocative coffee table book, a website, a TV show, and an exhibit.

The images shot by the 100 professional photojournalists and millions of amateurs will reflect the extraordinary diversity that makes up American family life and will represent a broad range of economic, geographic, racial, political, and socially diverse lifestyles. Topics covered will include:
-- A mother showcases the chaos and glory of her teen-tycoon son’s bedroom,
-- Multi-generational families living under the same roof,
-- A mom snaps her 10-year-old daughter snuggling with ‘flat daddy’, a life-sized cut-out of Army dad, away in his second tour of duty in Iraq,
-- A ‘Grand Central’ abode which welcomes a never-ending stream of friends,
-- A single family house shared by two families, who occupy it in shifts,
-- A pro shooter documents a 5-year-old child of divorce bouncing between her two Manhattan bedrooms,
-- An eco-hermit snaps his ‘living’ desert hideaway complete with breathable walls,
-- A professional photographer tours a million dollar mobile home that follows its movie star owner from film location to film location,
-- A Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer shoots a family in the last home standing in a condemned neighborhood,
-- Another photographer explores the secret rooms hidden behind book-shelves and under stairs commissioned by an army of adult Peter Pans.
*
A unique element of America at Home is that it encourages participation by cell phone camera users. More than a billion people around the world have an Internet-connected camera in their pocket all day long: their phone. This project will be the first time the full combined power of these millions of phones in the U.S. has been activated for a common purpose. "Humanity has a deep need to tell stories,” says Smolan. “That’s why photographs are so important to people. The ability to shoot and then instantly share images is going to dramatically change the way humanity sees itself and how each of us tells our own stories."
The America at Home book will be published by Running Press in March 2008 and will offer the public the ability to personalize their books with customized covers. The custom cover feature was largely responsible for the success of Smolan's last project, America 24/7, when more than 21% of all book buyers customized their copies. This was the first time in publishing history that a New York Times best-seller was mass customized by its readers.

America at Home is made possible through a partnership with IKEA with additional support being provided by HP's Snapfish, Google, BabyCenter.com, Nikon, FotoNation.net and TravelMuse.

Forbes' Fake Reporter is Fake Steve Jobs

As the New York Times, followed by just about everyone else is reporting this morning, the Fake Steve Jobs is in fact Dan Lyons, who wrote a notorious cover article in Forbes Magazine likening bloggers to lynch mobs and placing a significant nail into the coffin of Forbes as a credible news magazine.

It turns out that Lyons is going to write a book on his experience. I imagine it will go down on the great annals of book-writing history with Jason Blair's "Burning down my Master's House," which explained how a reporter lied and plagiarized during his tenure at the New York Times, or maybe it should be likened to Clifford Irving's hoax biography of Howard Hughes.

Anyone who wants to write a best-seller knows that controversy sells and the more outrageous it is, the more it sells.  Throw in a famous person's name, like Steve Jobs, and it sells even more. Lyons will get his time on the talk shows for a while before he'll fall into the oblivion he so rightly deserves or so I would like to think.

Lyons, I am sure, will attempt to debunk blogging.  In fact, he is more likely to debunk himself by missing a key point to why blogging is working so well.  It is transparent. Lyons is not.

Like Blair and Irving, he does have a contrivance going.  I hope he enjoys his time strutting and fretting on the stage before he and his book become yesterday's news.

Terry Heaton on the transformation of news & journalism

Terry Heaton, the Digital Journalist, has a wonderful, deep-thinking and lengthy column about traditional and new news coverage, about media and the divisions in society, about traditional media and their selections of topics as news,about callous celebrity interviewers who only stick to the script. It's also about why prominent people use social media to speak for themselves rather than through the jaded and selfish filters of traditional media.

For those of you suffering from Twitter-inseminated short attention span, tak a pill or something.  Shttp://digitaljournalist.org/issue0708/heaton0708.htmlpend 15 minutes reading the entire column. It's worth your time.

For those of you who cannot, here's a brief sample:

"And that's precisely the point for Mr. Wise and for all of us in the
world of news. It isn't about the story; it's about us and our careers
and our fame and our fortune. It's about furthering the establishment,
and this is precisely why people are taking things into their own
hands. The audience is dissatisfied, but we are unable to turn away
from fostering that dissatisfaction.

The personal media revolution and its inexpensive tools are enabling
people to cover what's important to them for themselves. Another
significant event the last week in June should give everybody in the
all-things-to-everybody crowd a severe case of the spine chills."

I don't know much about Terry, or about this online publication. You can't subscribe to it. There's a neat little (c) at the bottom of his column. But, as I've said before, it's not the medium that matters, it's the message, and his is both accurate and articulate in its delivery.

 

Federal Shield Law is being reintroduced

There is a simple reason why journalists should be protected from reveal their sources, even when those sources connect with criminal investigations. If they cannot protect their sources, then the public will only have access to official accounts of what has happened. People will be afraid to leak ugly and important truths to the press for fear of being outed or incarcerated.

If you do not see that this has everything to do with free speech, then I don't know how to say it better. This has to do with traditional v. citizen journalism.  Josh Wolf, a Bay Area video blogger recently set a record for being incarcerated longer than anyone else for not revealing sources.  But the number of regular journalists in this country who have been thrown in the slammer--or were threatened with it, has risen dramatically over the past six years.

It's not about the press.  It's not about criminal prosecution. It has to do with the protections of a free society and allowing the words of people in power to be challenged.

I say all this because the Free Flow of Information Act is being reintroduced to Congress Wednesday afternoon and it needs to be supported.  The last time around, Congress had a different mix and the public seemed not to care.

One of the organizations trying to inform people and rally support is the Society of Professional Journalists , which provides extensive information on shield laws and the current situation at its site. SPJ's federal shield law page has the executive summary.

If you are the type who writes your Congressperson, this would be a good time to do so.

Bruno Giussani's View of tomorrow's journalist

Bruno Giussani has a fine essay that expands on some thoughts by Global Voices pioneer Ethan Zuckerman, one of my favorite thinkers who said "Don't speak. Point," meaning that the days of journalists and editors speaking on behalf of people or speaking to people are over.

Now, the objective is to point to people and get out of the way.

It's a great piece, offering some fresh insights and vision on an overworked subject. Go read it.

[NOTE: This piece has been reedited in response to Bruno's comment below. I had attributed his words and thoughts to Zuckerman.  Thanks for setting it straight, Bruno.]