Defiant Imagination

Media literacy in the digital age

As a journalist, I often get asked whether the proliferation of news sources online (newspapers’ websites, blogs, aggregators…)  is indeed harming journalism. It will certainly take a while for news organizations to figure out a new business model and for other structures to be put in place to create a balance between traditional reporting, citizen journalism and commentary, and the economic crisis hasn’t helped. Over the next couple of years there will be less reporting done, fewer articles written, fewer important issues covered, but in the long term, I’m convinced that journalism, however different it might become, will thrive again.

What has to change, however, is our attitude toward the different sources that feed us information. In the old age of broadcast and print journalism, it was easy to remain passive and take for granted what we heard or read, because these institutions built their credibility on a history of highly-regulated and structured reporting. But now that we are overwhelmed by the amount of information we’re receiving, we’re going to have to be much smarter at sorting this information out and take from it what we need.

“In 2009 literacy isn’t about finishing a book or slogging through 12 web pages to get to the end of an article. It is about knowing what to do with information, how to find the good stuff, how to assess sources. What matters is not that we are readers, but that we are critical readers,” writes Utne Reader’s librarian Danielle Maestretti in the magazine’s July-August 2009 issue.

Whereas the journalism industry will probably regulate itself naturally, media literacy cannot be achieved without effort and education.

Informapping

Check out Informapping, a very nice effort to look at the news globally and sort out the huge amount of information that’s offered to us. Informapping is the project of Francois Patry, Art Director at the Lemieux Bédard ad agency.

RiP: A Remix Manifesto

RiP: A Remix Manifesto is a new documentary by Brett Gaylor that explores the issues of copyright in pop culture. The film investigates “the complexities of intellectual property in the digital era” by following mash-up artist Girl Talk and other personalities such as Creative Commons founder Lawrence Lessig.

Gaylor has also been experimenting with the open source movement with his own movie by launching OpenSourceCinema.org, a website where anyone can remix his footage. The website, which seeks to improve online collaboration, will continue to be used for other projects after the film is released. Gaylor also invites the public to help create the soundtrack of the film by creating music using Creative Commons licensed samples at http://ccmixter.org/rip.

RiP: A Remix Manifesto will be screened in Canadian theatres starting March 6.

Two business models for newspapers

The traditional newspaper is dying, and two recent opinion articles in the Guardian call for new business models to be implemented.

Bruce Ackerman‘s choice is for national endowments, that would be mainly targeted at investigative journalism, since  “Each national endowment would subsidise investigations on a strict mathematical formula based on the number of citizens who actually read their reports on news sites,” Ackerman writes.

Dan Kennedy advocates a change of the law that governs non-profit institutions. According to that law, non-profit institutions can only benefit from a tax-exempt status if they don’t “influence legislation” or “participate in any campaign activity for or against political candidates”. Kennedy writes that the law was enacted by a biased Lyndon Johnson and is not compatible with the first amendment. If that part of the law is suppressed, newspapers will be able to apply for non-profit status.

Toward an online, local and non-profit journalism

Information is now a public service as much as it’s a commodity. It should be thought of the same way as education, health care. It’s one of the things you need to operate a civil society, and the market isn’t doing it very well.

This quote from Buzz Woolley, president of VoiceofSanDiego, can be found at the very end of a recent New York Times article about next-gen online newspapers. Yet it perfectly summarizes the recent transformation of the newspaper industry, toward a local and publicly-funded reporting. VoiceofSanDiego is an online, non-profit and local newspaper. It is funded by individuals, foundations and businesses and has a readership of about 18,000. Like Spot Us, it’s experimenting a new kind of business model, which has since been taken up by many others.

I’ve always thought that journalism should be a non-profit activity. It is indeed a public service, even if it must stay independent from the government. Making profits off the news just doesn’t seem quite right…

Hire a community reporter through crowdfunding

Citizens of the San Francisco Bay area can now hire journalists to investigate issues relevant to their community. Spot Us, a new nonprofit initiative, uses the principle of crowdfunding by allowing people to vote for and finance story ideas that they judge interesting. The articles are then posted on the website and given or sold to local newspapers that want to publish them.

In order to limit the influence of financial contributors who might be driven by personal interests, donations are limited to 20% of the cost of the story.

Spot Us was founded by Dave Cohn, a 26-year-old journalist, with the help of a $340,000 grant from the Knight Foundation. It might very well be the future of reporting!

spot.us

The NYT: “A different way to pay for the news you want,” August 23, 2008

The BPP is cancelled. What went wrong here?

NPR cancelled the Bryant Park Project after only nine months of existence. The announcement was made last week and the last show will be aired tomorrow morning. The BPP was launched as an attempt to draw a younger audience. Its tone is light and conversational and its news stories deal with various subjects such as politics, culture and sports. It also relies on a strong web presence: its website features a blog, sound clips, videos and articles. The show also makes an original use of social networking services such as Facebook and Twitter.

The BPP was actually picked by very few NPR member stations. Most users listen to the show online or through podcasting, but that was enough to draw an audience of about one million unique listeners in April and May, according to the New York Times. In spite of this success, NPR decided to cancel the show because of its cost (it had a first-year budget of $2 millions.)

The show’s cancellation drew reactions from hundreds of angry listeners on its website as well as elsewhere in the web community. Many feel that it could be continued as an entirely web-based program, and that opinion is shared by the BPP’s staff. In my opinion, this is how it should have been created in the first place. Most NPR member stations and listeners were obviously not ready to give up on the Morning Edition, NPR’s traditional morning program. Traditional news media seem so scared to explore the possibilities that the web has to offer, they seem unable to give up on their usual format and to realize that there is an audience out there that is receptive to new ideas and concepts. It is a scary and difficult task to accomplish, I know, but as long as they don’t understand that the way they’ve been working for decades is not suitable for new technologies, the only online news sources that will be successful will be blogs and social networking services (and I want something better than that.)

Climate change for journalists 101

Have you ever felt confused by all the differing information about climate change presented in the news? That’s totally normal, since journalists themselves don’t always know how to tackle the problem. Which expert do you listen to? How do you know that an information is credible and can be published? How do you stay away from companies and think tanks that try to foist their agenda on you? And how do you separate objective reporting from advocacy when it’s so easy to talk and write all the time about climate change? Journalists try to do their best as usual, but few of them are equipped with the tools necessary to cover such a crucial and pressing issue.

An article published in the summer issue of the Columbia Journalism Review intends on leading journalists in the right direction and in the same time can be used by the public to learn how to be critical of what they read, see and hear.