.....a live, uncut and subjective take on the session

participants: Dan Gillmor, Hong Eun-tael, Ethan Zuckerman

immoderator: Michael Rogers

Dan Gillmor:

Who's doing a better job of reporting most significant issues?

Democratized Media - production, distribution, access available to everyone in the developed world that wants them [not quite everyone!]

Cable wants to take this away - see Net Neutrality debate

Dan's defining the key terms - convergence, anyone can be a publisher, empowers both former audiences and journalists

Cluetrain Manifesto - markets are conversations, so is journalism

First Rule of Conversation: Listen

Secrets emerge - ability to get things out that shouldn't be secret is improving, even as privacy issues become a greater concern

What is True?

Whether we ask them or not, people will do it themselves -  he shows iconic, citizen-captured images of bombings of Australian Embassy in Jakarta, London Underground

The citizen witness with a camera isn't a new phenomenon (pic of JFK assasination) - but what's different is the networked media - and we have to understand how different

Read-Write Web, Community writing, Mashups (e.g. Googlemaps and Chicago crime stats), Mixing media, Communities of Geographies and Interest

check out the " Read My Lips" video Dan just played: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8845429906560840314

Citizen media leads to citizen activism - Dan's continuing the themes of Angela Glover Blackwell and Howard Rheingold in the earlier sessions - seques to:

Hong Eun-tael:

a significant majority of people in the room have heard of OhmyNews

Founder's statement: "Every citizen is a reporter.  Journalists aren't some exotic species, they're everyon who seeks to take new developments, put thim into writing, and share them with others."  The driving force for social change.

[taking me back to the everyone's a storyteller - everyone needs/wants to tell their stories - and hear other people's stories.   It is

OhMyNews has expended its users and impact and at the same time its revenue has expanded, mostly from ads, but also from volunteer subscriptions (about 10% of its income).  It seems to be successful in both its activist/citizen media mission and its profitability

about 1000 registered citizen reporters in 86 countries

There's both a Korean language site  ohmynews.com and an International/English language site.

english.ohmynews.com

 they pay $20 for main page story and $10 for section pages stories

the goal is to have 100,000 citizen reporters and function like the major news services (AP, Reuters)

If OhmyNews has been so successful - where are the

Ethan Zuckerman:

Hao Wu - imprisoned journalist (33-year-old)

freehaowu.org

Nina Wu - his sister - started blogging about him when she realized her government was lying to her.

Writing about her brother - making him a person - who he really was, showing the lotus plant in his apartment that hadn't been watered since his detention

[a personal, family-driven story/portrait - again, the theem of

lesson - don't speak - point

people's ability to make their own voices heard (yes!)

as advocates we've historically put ourselves in the situation of speaking on behalf of - and that's no longer our job

Bob Geldoff as the antithesis of this point don't speak model - but even as LiveAid was really

the blog community created a serious conversation - african bloggers challenging them

the advocates saying "we wanted to help"  and the african bloggers saying we didn't ask for this site

technorati divided the liveaid conversation into music and africa

people all over the world have access to these toos - and they can/will tell you what they think - they often want you to shut the hell up

0 to 1 billion users in 36 years

from 1 billion to 2 billion in the next 6 years

2005 - 36% of users in Asia, 23% in North America

The next billion users?  China, India, Brazil, Africa, MENA

1995 new users read email

2000 new users read content

2005 new users create content

so the next billion aren't users - they're authors

as the web spreads, we need to assume that people will speak for themselves

focus on access to publishing tools

knowledge to use them

translation

context

amplification

Global Voices launched 18 months ago

brought together "bridge" bloggers from around the world - trying to paint a picture of what's going on in their communities/countries

viewed by 600,000 people per month

access to tools isn't as much as a problem as you think - case in point for many global vision bloggers

(it depends on who - again - there are tiers of privilege in every community)

main issue is protecting people from government/censorship/arrest  - ensuring that it's possibile to blog honestly

cross-pollination of international causes, advocacy

try to make the authors famous - get press

goal is to get more voices into the media sphere - but not to put mainstream media out of business.

using the mainstream media to spread the word on a larger scale

i don't want to sound like a one-note band - but the throughline here is storytelling. 

When everyone has a phone with a video camera, the word can get out, but it becomes about context and translation

Human Rights Watch doesn't blog - but it asks others to do it - I blog for Human Rights campaign - put a badge on your site

Children's drawings of Darfur (hrw.org/photos/2005/darfur/drawings) - perhaps the most powerful documentation of what's happening.  This brings up the link between artmaking/personal expression/situational interpretation and the potential for more powerful awareness that actually facilitates change.  The responses from and to an emotional perspective that can inspire passion/commitment, with the framing of intellectual understanding the and a pragmatic approach/process of social action.

Ethan has been live blogging from this session (http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/?p=819).

One of the meta themes in this session, and the entire morning, is the primacy of people on the ground - bottom-up approaches to telling the stories, editing and aggregating them, facilitating the change and framing the policy and infrastructure needs according to local perspectives.   And with the context encouraged by Ethan, Howard Rheingold and others, the local perspectives will, in many cases, converge.  These new tools seem to enable a real convergence of the cliche "the personal is political."

Ethan - commenting on the non-automated, personal

Panelist comments from audience Q&A:

There is a real distinction between blogging and journalism.

There is no such thing as objective reporting

This reiterates the need for more reports to flesh out a full picture - but this is also contradicted by the reality that most people choose to read blog sources/news portals/etc that reflect what they already know and believe.  A questions that hasn't come up this morning is how to get people to  actually listen to the multiplicity of voices and perspectives.