Dan Gillmor

-- recovering journalist from the mass media
-- best reporting being done on Guanatanamo is being done by the ACLU -- mainstream media used to do
-- mass media is trying to co-opt, but can't suppress, because the barrier to entry is zero.

Democratized media that we can all participate in

• Production
• Distribution
• Access

We now have a Read and Write web

Everybody can be a media producer
Pentagon is now doing podcasts

Convergence of media

Journalism has been a lecture, is turning into a conversation.

• People are now producing media all the time.
• Shows citizen produced slides and video clips Mashing up media (shows Blair / Bush love clip)

Daily We starting (shows Newsvine)

Citizen Media could be turned into Citizen Activism
-- example of BBC -- collectively the people in your organization will know more than you do about subjects of interest.

Plugs www.citimedia.org

Hong Eun-taek of OhMyNews

(my notes aren't very good, it was hard to understand from the back of the room)

• Features correspondent from Easter Island
• Everybody can be a reporter, because we have redifined news.
• Quotes OhMyNews founder "Journalists take new developments, put them into writing, and share them with others"
• Number of citizen reporters explodes with every national election.
• Audiences can make changes in direction of news.
• 2004 Korean Presidential Election example.

OhMyNews able to fufill potential of Web as new media

• 42,000 citizen reporters
• 200? stories a day submitted
• Now doing international OhMyNews
• Japan + 86 countries
• Pay $20 for a main page story, $10 for a section page story.

International Herald Tribune linking to them.

Ethan Zuckerman 

(unfortunately missed the Ethan Zukerman intro)

Don't Speak, Point....

Don't speak on behalf of people, point to the people speaking.

Ethan Zukerman trashes Bob Geldorf's Live AID.

• An event about Africa without Africans. Amazing arrogance.
• Technorati LiveAid tag, ended up mixing people who were talking about LiveAid the concert with LiveAid the African issues.
• There is a thriving activist, political African blogosphere, and they were ignored. 

The demographics of the net have changed radically in the last decade.

• 2005 36% of net users in Asia, 23% in North America.
• 36 years for first billion.
• 6 years for next billion, most not in North America / Europe.

New net users will be publishers, and authors, not just "consumers".

If we assume that people can speak for themselves, then what we need to provide is an amplifier.

Global Voices really has an exponential curve in audience (funny aside - "nice thing about being an NGO, don't have to lie as much.")

Global voices is

• Working on how to enable bloggers to work in repressive societies. How to blog to anonymously.
• Work on trying to get posts translated. There are huge chunks of the blogosphere that English-only speakers don't currently have access to.
• Try to contextualize.
• Work hard on getting their bloggers famous, on BBC.

NGO's in repressive countries are finding that blogging is the only way to get the news out, and to get it to the international mass media.

Example of Belarussian video blogger, and how adding context

Human Rights Watch has decided not to blog, because the want their reports to be verified -- so instead they get their stories out via blogs. Go to blogs before mass media. See http://hrw.org/photos/2005/darfur/drawings/

Q & A