Artisan Journalism & Marketing Project Link Blog

Authors of Our Own Experience

I love what Johnnie Moore wrote about authority. It also ties in with why perhaps the "phototherapy" was so powerfully effective for the kids in Peraliya, Sri Lanka a month after the tsunami and why I'm still blogging today (I'm too restless to stick with most things for this long ;-)):

I talked about an alternative view of authority to that of the external expert or dictator. This is the authority of people who acknowledge that they are the authors of their own experience. This is the transition that the crowd makes in this video - they decide to make their own meaning instead of being given one.

The desire for this kind of authority may account for why, in our allegedly time-starved times, millions of people find the time to write blogs that most of them expect few people to read: they write not because they expect to change the world, but because it's satisfying simply to acknowledge their own experience.

Rolling Stones Participatory Journalism Experiment in 70s

From Ron Miller (via  Renee Blodgett):

When I was in Montreal over Memorial Day Weekend, I found a book called Rolling Stone Reader  in a used bookstore on Rue St. Dennis. The book has a 1974 copyright.

One story that caught my eye immediately was called An Experiment in Participatory Journalism by Cindy Ehrlich and David Felton. The authors invited just plain folks to send in their autobiographies and they published as many of them as they could, which it turned out was only 17 of more than 1000 that were submitted. In the author's words:

"We though they might have some good stories to tell from their personal lives, stories normally bypassed by the practices of conventional, event-oriented journalism."

I thought it was fascinating that Rolling Stone had innovated with participatory journalism so early, and I would venture to guess it is probably one of the earliest uses of the term.

In comments to Renee's post, Ron follows up further. (And I agree with his meaning of participatory journalism too):

Citizen Journalism or Participatory Journalism (or whatever you want to call it) is when citizens (regular folks, not professional journalists), tell their stories, and this is exactly what the editors of the Rolling Stone story were trying to do in this piece.

They had regular people submit their stories, whatever they were, so they could tell them through a news/magazine channel, an idea that was certainly revolutionary at the time. Some are little anectodotes, some poems, some a short life story, but it is certainly in line with how we are defining the term today.

Unfortunately, Rolling Stone does not have an archive of stories this old on their Web site (although I was told after phoning them that they are working on it), so it is not possible to link the story so you could see for yourself rather than relying on my intepretation.

BONUS: Ron Miller's EContent magazine article, "Journalism Returns to its (Grass) Roots", June 2005. He explains: "Community Journalism provides an outlet for regular folks to share information about their lives, information that most local publications don't cover any more as large media entitites buy local media and produce homogenized material, often far removed from the community."

AND: This ties in with what I wrote earlier this week on my regular blog: Saved From Freezing.

International Cohesion and Compassion: Benefits of the Information Age

From Meredith Danton, editor, Miami Magazine (I'm an alum of University of Miami), Spring 2005:

When the amateur videos of the 30-foot wall of water that engulfed Phuket, Thailand, began flooding the airwaves, much of the world outside of Southeast Asia gained a tangible sense of what it would be like to be caught at the threshold of a tsunami. In the age of omnipresent camcorders and fits-in-your-pocket digital cameras, the documentation of random events in human history seems unfailing and remarkably detailed.

The breadth of destruction, the inconceivable loss of more than 160,000 lives, the stories of missing children and of remarkable acts of heroism - all of this becomes more real and provokes a greater call to action when witnessed in raw footage. Americans have donated hundreds of millions of dollars in  disaster relief since the December 26 tragedy, a nod to the strength of the connection we have with our brethen half a world away. In this issue you'll read about David Douglas Duncan, a University of Miami alumnus who dedicated his career to building photographic archives of rare moments and landmarks in 20th-century life. [They also call Duncan a 'photo nomad']. His work evokes the kind of emotional response that transports the viewer in time and place. This perspective encourages us to learn from  global events and take ownership of our roles in the human experience.

Similarly,  School of Communication Associate Professor Sanjeev Chatterejee is helping to deepen our understanding of the global scarcity of clean water and the need for greater conservation and restoration endeavors. As part of The Water Project, he traveled to India a few weeks after the tsunami to investigate efforts to restore potable water and stop the spread of waterborne diseases. His firsthand account is published online at www.onewater.org.

Whether captured by vacationers or professional journalists, the images emblazoned on our television screens, magazines, and computer monitors serve both to inform us and strengthen our international compassion and cohesiveness. It may well be one of the greatest benefits of the information age.

[My two cents: Some of the most important stories happen after a tragedy. How do people continue on and rebuild and grow? And why stop at storytelling  from vacationers and professional journalists - I'd love to hear from locals themselves.]

Diversity Is About Voices Outside Being Heard

From Jeff Jarvis:

Laura Washington writes in the Sun-Times that journalism's mirror is cracked:

When the journalism profession looks in the mirror, it doesn't like what it sees.

It sees a public turned off by the news -- news of a never-ending succession of our journalistic crimes from plagiarism to fabrication; squabbles over anonymous sources; half-hearted mea culpas, and just-plain-old screw-ups. It sees a profession in crisis....

When readers and viewers look into the mirror that is our media, they don't see themselves. A recent report by Columbia's own Project for Excellence in Journalism found that in the last 17 years, Americans have "come to see the press as less professional, less moral, more inaccurate, and less caring about the interests of the country." Surveys taken between 1985 and 2002 reveal the proportion of Americans who view news organizations as "highly professional" declined from 72 percent to 49 percent. Those who considered news organizations "moral" fell from 54 percent to 39 percent. And news consumers who "thought the press got the facts straight" fell from 55 percent to 35 percent.

Joe Six-Pack doesn't read the newspaper over his morning eggs and coffee anymore. The couch potatoes are furiously clicking off the nightly news. Readers and viewers see the media as an elitist bunch that neither live nor reflect their reality. The news honchos who have the most sway over writing and producing the news are mostly white men over 50....

Whoa about there. I was fine until she turned this into a quota thing... and that's not just because I am a white man over 50 (not that there's anything wrong with that, right?). She falls into newsroom-think: that diversity is about the colors of the people you see inside the newsroom. No, diversity is about the voices and views outside and whether they are heard. They are beginning to be heard online, because they can be, so why do they need to go inside the newsroom? No, it's up to the newsroom to listen to what is happening outside its walls.

Human Desire to Tell Stories

But money is not the major push behind citizen journalism. It is the entirely human desire to tell each other our stories, to help each other navigate through this complex and often insane world. - from Dan Gillmor's  keynote speech at the World Editors Forum in Seoul

Ohmygod, What If Everyone Had a Blog?

"Blog creation has, if anything, outstripped the growth of readership" - "The Business of Blogging", eMarketer, May 13, 2005

Precisely, everyone has their own story to tell. Anyone can be an artist, an ordinary journalist, or an artisan journalist if they so chose.

Head for the Personal Truth

Wish I'd seen this insightful comment from Brian Moffatt (at gapingvoid) before I posted, "We're All Journalists in the Age of Ordinary Art".

[References this Clay Shirky piece and this particular quote: "So forget about blogs and bloggers and blogging and focus on this -- the cost and difficulty of publishing absolutely anything, by anyone, into a global medium, just got a whole lot lower. And the effects of that increased pool of potential producers is going to be vast."]

The man can write. (Anybody can, if they just let themselves get out of the way.) Strip the control and compromise from the publishing, head for the personal truth, and you end up with some very engaging writing - Clay's cultural mashup, the Midwestern American in the NYC Iranian Bud Bodega, implies some greater insights - both personal and universal - more than the mere and routine 'Gee isn't NYC great.' I now have some notion of him beyond his ideas, which also puts his ideas into a more shapely context. This is the type of writing that will become 'regular' - running to the vast sea of producers idea. This is a threat to the old school. It undermines, as shirky implies, cynicism, snarkiness, sentimentalism, censorship, and aggregation. People aren't watching when they're creating. Big Media and their mini-media Gawkers will be left holding onto to nothing but Fred Dirst's penis.

Ah, yes, it's all in the getting out of the way.

The Gawker Model

New York Times interviews Nick Denton and the Gawker folks for "A Blog Revolution? Get a Grip", May 8, 2005.

On Gawker's "nice little business" model:

But a published interview with Mr. [Lockhart] Steele earlier this year provides some insight. Bloggers are paid a set rate of $2,500 a month, he told a digital journalism class at New York University taught by Patrick Phillips, the editor and founder of I Want Media, a Web site focusing on media news.

"It is profitable," Mr. Steele said. "We're very small, have no overhead, no office space. Everybody works from home. And you heard what we pay our writers. Nick founded Gawker very specifically with the idea of starting a whole bunch of blogs in very niche topic areas, hire freelance writers to write each of them, hopefully draw a lot of eyeballs and then sell advertising around it. He had the idea that no one site would probably ever make a fortune. But if you have 10 sites each making $75,000 a year, then, O.K., maybe it's not like Condé Nast money, but it's a nice little business."

On blogs as a advertising medium:

On the Gawker sites, C.P.M. rates - the cost for every 1,000 times an ad is presumably seen by visitors - can run anywhere from $4 for a small, button-sized ad to $50 for exclusive-sponsorship ads, in which an advertiser helps underwrite the debut of a new Gawker site. ( Sony did this for Gawker's blog Lifehacker.)

Mr. Denton says that a clear line is drawn between news and advertising, and that so far none of the companies buying space on the sites - including the Times auto section, which advertised on the car blog Jalopnik - have ever tried to influence content. The editors are expected to write a "thank-you to our sponsors" at the end of each week, although this is typically done sarcastically - for example, thanking advertisers for keeping the staff well-stocked in crack cocaine.

"It goes beyond any kind of question of church and state or journalistic ethics that the whole editorial tone of the Gawker sites is absolutely wrapped up in the notion of take no prisoners," Mr. Denton said. "It owes nothing to anybody, and if one ever started compromising that, it would be grim."

So do bloggers blog for the same reason painters paint?

But others have begun to wonder if the brand itself is a form of compromise. Stowe Boyd, president of Corante, a daily online news digest on the technology sector, suggests that there may be something lost when networks like Gawker Media and Weblogs turn blogs into commodities, churned out for a fee, owned by an overlord and underwritten by advertisers. [Stowe had more to say on bloggers as artists...]

"They're pursuing a very clear agenda and they've done very well with that," Mr. Boyd said of Gawker. "But they're just an old media company in new media clothes, and I still maintain that they are missing part of the point."

The point, Mr. Boyd said, is that blogging is unique because of its spontaneity and individualism, and that bloggers, like dancers and sculptors, are most interesting because they are "pursuing their muse."

The editors on Gawker are talented, entertaining and informative, Mr. Boyd said, but also indistinguishable from any freelance writer, with no ownership of what they produce. "These people are hirelings," he said. "What they are cranking out are the 700 words they signed on to produce."

Remember when Internet media was all the rage?

Other critics of the blog movement wonder whether the hoopla over the commercial viability of blogs - particularly as publishing ventures - is overstated. "Blogs primarily excel at marketing and promotion for companies or individuals," Mr. Phillips of I Want Media said. "I think blogging can catapult unknown writers, and it can give them a platform if they're talented. But as a stand-alone business, I think the jury is still out on that."

Warning, Do not drink the Kool-Aid:

"There are too many people looking at blogs as being some magic bullet for every company's marketing problem, and they're not," he added. "It's Internet media. It's just the latest iteration of Internet media."

New York Times on Blog Ethics

Snippets from New York Times piece by Adam Cohen, May 8, 2005, "The Latest Rumblings in the Blogosphere: Questions about Ethics" (will repost again as link generator for blogs is down):

Blogs helped to shape, in some cases in major ways, some of the biggest stories of the last year - the presidential election, tsunami relief, Dan Rather.

The thing about influence is that, as bloggers well know, it is only a matter of time before people start trying to hold you accountable. Bloggers are so used to thinking of themselves as outsiders, and watchdogs of the LSM (that's Lame Stream Media), that many have given little thought to what ethical rules should apply in their online world. Some insist that they do not need journalistic ethics because they are not journalists, but rather activists, or humorists, or something else entirely...

Every mainstream news organization has its own sets of ethics rules, but all of them agree broadly on what constitutes ethical journalism. Information should be verified before it is printed, and people who are involved in a story should be given a chance to air their viewpoints, especially if they are under attack. Reporters should avoid conflicts of interest, even significant appearances of conflicts, and disclose any significant ones. Often, a conflict means being disqualified to cover a story or a subject. When errors are discovered or pointed out by internal or external sources, they must be corrected. And there should be a clear wall between editorial content and advertising...

...But the real reason for an ethical upgrade is that it is the right way to do journalism, online or offline.

Winer Sells Ad Space During Speech; Reviewers Pimping Products

Dave Winer openly seeks sponsors for his upcoming Syndicate speech:

Act now -- sponsor a pundit!

Anyway, since one of the hot topics is advertising and sponsorship, and since the conference isn't paying me a fee, or even covering my expenses, I thought I'd offer sponsorship opportunities to people or companies who would like to be talked about, briefly, from my speaking space. I can't guarantee what I'll say about you or your company, but I do promise to mention you, and will thank you for picking up my travel expenses for the New York trip.

I also do this to demonstrate that I am not a utopian, that I can be a crass commercial whore with the best of them. However, because of who I am, I must be open about it. Which will prove even more lucrative for my sponsor because they'll be out in the open too.

Frank  Barnako notes:

Winer's self sell-promotion comes on the heels of news stories over the last few weeks in the Wall Street Journal (owned by my employer, Dow Jones) that various consumer electronics gadget reviewers have taken fees for promoting products and some of the nation's best-known chefs are also in business with food suppliers, kitchen equipment manufacturers, and wineries.

Microsoft Seeks External Bloggers to Promote Longhorn

Via Frank Barnako's Marketwatch Internet Daily:

Microsoft wants to hire Web loggers to promote its next big thing, the release of the Longhorn operating system. Earlier this week, Vespa announced it wants to hire bloggers to create a buzz about scooters in general, and its products in particular. Microsoft (MSFT) wants to do the same thing for software.

Team 99, as it will be known, will get a look at pre-release copies of the new OS, after pledging not to reveal details which could be useful to competitors or hackers. Software developers and "super users" are likely to be asked to join the group, according to Robert Scoble, Microsoft's most visible Web logger. He's organizing the group and is soliciting participants at channel9.msdn.com. Nominees should be "trusted by the community ... visible ... (and able to) give good feedback on your behalf to Microsoft," he said.

Grassroots Journalism at BBC

Excellent interview with the director of BBC Global News division, Richard Sambrook, over at Hypergene Media Blog. The whole thing is a MUST READ for this project. I've only pulled and highlighted two questions below:

2. At "Whose News?", a symposium by The Media Center at the American Press Institute and The Nieman Foundation at Harvard in March, you mentioned that the BBC's role is shifting from a broadcaster and mediator to a facilitator, enabler and teacher. Can you elaborate on this further? What do you hope to facilitate, enable and teach?
The BBC's mission, when it was established in the 1920's was to "Inform, Educate and Entertain." In most respects that still holds good. However we also have to "connect" — both with our audiences and to facilitate our audiences "connecting" with each other. Interactive media, and the changes it is leading in media consumption and culture, means facilitation and "enabling"" of the audience to take part in programmes, to express a view and to contribute are increasingly important. Those are also characteristics entirely aligned with the BBC's public service role.

The value the British public get from the BBC should go beyond what we broadcast. Teaching media literacy as well as supporting other forms of adult education, and facilitiating what our audiences want to do is going to become increasingly important as the conventional passive relationship between broadcaster and audience breaks down. We believe the BBC, as a strong global broadcaster reaching some 180 million people each week, is uniquely placed to facilitate connection and interaction in a trusted way between different audiences, cultures and countries.

4. Briefly explain what types of user-generated content (UGC) tools you have on the BBC sites (submit photos, forums, etc). How successful have they been?
We are very keen to encourage users to submit content to our websites, and in particular encourage users to contribute photos and messages when they are at the centre of breaking news stories. At times we also actively solicit images from users on particular topics, such as Islam in the 21st century

We have a number of examples of how we are actively using UGC from across our news sites:

[I'VE LIMITED ANSWER BELOW TO ONLY A FEW, MUCH MORE IN ORIGINAL....]

• Asian Tsunamis: The BBC News Have Your Say website received 25,000 emails within the first week of the tsunamis. These included reactions from those affected by the tsunamis and those concerned at the well-being of people known to them. Some users also sent in photos and videos of tsunami-affected areas. Here are some links to user-generated content: Asia quake disaster: Gallery 1, Gallery 2, Eyewitness: Survivor's tale in Thailand.

Special pages on people missing in Indonesia, Thailand, Sri Lanka, India and Maldives were set up and were successful in reuniting several families.

• Iraq Logs: This ten-part log reflected the daily lives of eight Baghdad residents – including a U.S. army official and a UK citizen. The panel was put together by online and BBC Arabic teams and presented life beyond the statistics of the conflict.

• Chechen Anniversary: On the 10th anniversary of the Chechen campaign, BBC Russian organised an interesting Q&A on their website. The readers sent in their questions and these were responded to by people living in Grozny, the capital of Chechnya. The event was organised with the support of a local newspaper. Part of this effort was a discussion between the prominent politicians and public figures associated with the Chechen conflict.

• Universal Children's Day: On Universal Children's Day (Saturday 20 November 2004), BBC's language sites spoke to a number of homeless or underprivileged children. Part of this effort was a picture-gallery of an Afghan refugee boy in Pakistan, who had cataract in one eye. The picture-gallery prompted many offers of help from our users. Also see: In pictures: Tehran's street children

Vespa Grassroots Storytelling Blog Launches

On the intro to this linkblog, I wrote:

I'm enjoying reading Seth's new book, All Marketers Are Liars. It's about stories. Only problem is it's still all about the corporation's story. Where are the customers' stories? MSM is starting to glimpse the value in real people - the guys and gals on the other side of the newspaper print or television box - telling their own stories.

Steve Rubel at Micropersuasion announces what looks like an excellent example of what I'm talking about (see also Wall St Journal's "Corporate Marketers Try Out Blogs"):

At CooperKatz we believe one of the most effective forms of marketing is peer-to-peer/citizen marketing. What better way to evangelize the benefits of scootering than empowering existing customers to tell prospective scooterati why Vespa rocks?

Vespa is in the fortunate position of having thousands of very expressive online customer evangelists. Given this, CooperKatz and Piaggio USA decided to try something unique. In the spirit of Jackie Huba and Ben McConnell's breakthrough book, Creating Customer Evangelists, we're going to give four lucky Vespa owners a voice. Together we're launching two lifestyle blogs this summer that will be written by Vespa customers. One will focus on urban mobility, while the other will be on the journey we call life - how to get from point A to point B. More details are in the call for Vespa bloggers.

Congrats!

UPDATE: Hmmm up way too late and didn't catch this, but here's information on the WITFM (what's in it for me) angle for the Vespa bloggers from the FAQ. This isn't secret info - keeping up a blog is a bigtime time-consumer:

What will the bloggers receive in return for their service?

In return for their services, Vespa bloggers will get an early look at Vespa products and services, passes to Vespa events as well as Vespa accessory merchandise and online/media exposure. Vespa is not paying for any of the bloggers to blog, nor is it trying to influence them on content. These are simply perks for blogging for Vespa.

Good comment from Marion Page on Steve's post:

However, I think that seeking independent bloggers who won't be paid is a mistake. Personally, I think that an advertising firm giving away the actually task of blogging is equivalent to Yahoo giving away search to Google.

I think it is best to just get rid of this "independent blogger" concept "up front", from the "git go". No one is ever going to believe that someone officially blogging on behalf of a product or a company is independent. So, why waste time on this issue?

As far as seeking to become an official blogger for Vespa, I can make [more] money by just creating my own scooter blog and putting Adsense ads on it. Other than providing some blogger with the opportunity to make himself/herself so valuable to Vespa that Vespa doesn't need Micropersuasion, I don't see what appeal the "offical Vespa blogger" designation holds.

What's Grassroots Marketing? Round 1: BzzAgents & Creative Commons

Debate between Eric Rice (fellow marketer) & Suw Chairman on using WOM company BzzAgent for promoting a good cause, Creative Commons. (BTW, it's a pro bono campaign.) I'm mixed on BzzAgents. Ofttimes it's strategically in your favor to develop and have your own evangelists you can turn to again and again ala the Spread Firefox campaign.  (BTW, Shel reports Firefox is at 50M downloads.)

Yeah, yeah I know this is about tapping into a new audience of mainstream evangelists but you can do that yourself too (although judging by many comments on this 'controversy' it is as if marketing as a whole is distasteful).

Anyway, I'm musing on a completely different grassroots marketing approach myself, but if you're working in some capacity on this project - itself a good nonprofit cause - this is all very good backgrounder material.

See also: Larry Lessig's post, Creative Commons annoucement post. BzzAgent CEO Dave Balter comments on Larry's post. More commentary here and here.

Provocative quote from Suw: "Regardless of medium, this is still dressing up advertising as conversation."

And from Dave Balter: "The goal is to ensure that the future of marketing is about a two-way dialogue. About listening and engaging with the consumer, instead of targeting and capturing them."

Great comments from a BzzAgent: "I think the benefit of it is percisely that it will reach the people, as one previous commenter stated, who normally have conversations about sausages and shoes. These BzzAgents are going to be passing the word on to the teacher who lives down the street, to the small garage band their kid's a member of, the co-worker who's a hobbyist photographer, the lady selling watercolours at the crafts fair. The people who do watch shows like the OC and buy Audis and wear clothes from the GAP and buy the ipod because everyone else does. These are the people that the BzzAgents can reach, and reach quickly."

Good observation on two worldviews from BzzAgent employee, RobMango: "i dunno, but it seems that people are missing the fact that BzzAgent/CC-related online awareness and the public level awareness are different crowds. they barely at all overlap or interact. the blog crowd that's getting all into this are a small, almost metaphysically-grounded group of online self-prescribed critics and curious progressives. the crowd that comprises the BzzAgents is mostly the "real" world - people walking around and buying cakes and having birthday parties, singing the traditional happy birthday song that AOL owns the copyright for, who accept the terms of the world that they are given. that's the impression i get when i read BzzReports."

Snippet from Eric:

So here we are with something we believe in... something important. I've often mused about how the one thing blogging/decentralized media/and alllll this ideology we hold dear needs is a guerrilla campaign to get the word out.

To me, that's what BzzAgent is all about. It's a by-any-means-necessary-campaign-organization company. Some of the things they want to pimp, we'll believe in, and some we won't. This life is not black-and-white.

They can suggest I pimp coffeemakers, and I'll cheerfully tell them to sod off. But if they suggest I (and many many others) pimp Creative Commons? Hell yeah, sign me up and get me a flag and a badge.

Suw and I talked about this BzzAgent/Creative Commons thing for a long time over IM. One thing she said to me was, "I suppose what I dislike is the encroachment of orchestrated promotion on serendipitous discovery." I clearly see her point and I naturally disagree. She hails from a journalistic background, while I come from advertising and mass communications and design.

Suw sez (snippets only):

Blog like Ben Roethlisberger

Great example of a celebrity being 'real'. From Church of the Customer:

[Pittsburgh Steeler's quarterback Ben] Roethlisberger is wisely following the dictum of connecting with readers. Some believe that blog posts must be witty, grammar-perfect and professional. Eh. Roethlisberger proves that blogging works when it comes from the heart.

Voice and Personality Hallmarks of Participatory Media

I've republished this post to give credit to right folks (as per comments). The snippet below is from the paper, We Media: How audiences are shaping the future of news and information, was written by Shayne Bowman, and Chris Willis for The Media Center at API (American Press Institute):

Voice and personality are also key hallmarks of participatory media. Several observers have argued that the informal style found in many participatory forms free the writer from the "official voice" of the media company, and that makes for better storytelling. The official voice of journalism is usually formal, often drained of color and attitude, and written as an objective and balanced account. In contrast, weblogs and discussion groups thrive on their vivid writing, controversial points of view and personality-rich nature — traits that many readers find compelling.

Columnist J.D. Lasica goes so far as to argue that newspaper webloggers should not be subject to the newsroom's routine editing filter. On his weblog he called for a form of Editing Lite: "Perhaps the chief appeal and attraction of weblogs are their free-form, unfiltered nature. You get to hear people in their natural dialect, writing from their gut with a voice and tone that too often can be filtered into a homogenous blandness after passing through the typical newsroom's editing machine. A lightly edited, hands-off weblog would show journalists as human beings with opinions, emotions and personal lives."¹²