On Wednesday, Columbia University professor and co-founder of the South Asian Journalists Association Sree Sreenivasan was conducting a "feel good" interview on the SAJA online TalkRadio channel when the Mumbai terrorism story broke.
"There are two Indian born baseball players who just got signed by the Pittsburgh Pirates to play baseball," Sreenivasan told me by phone. "I was doing a live Webcast with Rinku Singh and Dinesh Kumar Patel and in the middle of the conversation, somebody gave me a gmail message that there had been bombings and attacks in Mumbai. We were doing a very light baseball story but I decided to interject the news into the conversation and asked these two young baseball players about their reaction and their memories of Mumbai." (
Listen to the interview here.)
At that moment, SAJA, a 15-year-old journalism organization with just 700 members, started its large-scale coverage of the Mumbai story that includes now includes
forums,
SAJA's BlogTalkRadio channel,
resource pages,
a Twitter page,
a Facebook page and
media critique. All of this coverage without spending a dime on Web site development or Web hosting. Everything they are using to tell the story is free.
SAJA, a group too small to even be part of the UNITY journalism coalition, is showing itself once again to be the "little organization that could."
It is a tradition that SAJA started years ago when it could not afford postage so it moved most of its communication online, where members could talk free by e-mail. Ever since, SAJA has been breaking ground in its coverage of major stories with South Asian links after 9/11, the Indonesian Tsunami and the Space Shuttle explosion.
"Wednesday night had 1,500 live listeners," Sreenivasan said. "Thousands of other listeners have come to the radioblogs that were recorded and archived. It is important to record these conversations and post them because often the recorded versions will, over time, touch more listeners than the live events." Sreenivasan calls it the "long-tail effect." SAJA has a philosophy that everything the organization produces should be linkable, clickable, shareable and embedable.
Since the story broke, SAJA's BlogTalkRadio has included journalists working in India and South Asia experts who add history and context to the story. Everyday citizens who have heard about the SAJA site have also joined in the discussions, sometimes offering critiques of media coverage. Other callers pass along news from their families living in Mumbai.
Sreenivasan said he has been talking about
BlogTalkRadio for more than a year as an ideal way for journalists to reach the public in a new way. "You just need a computer and an Internet connection. People call a phone number that you give them and you can put them on your Web channel. The caller does not need to be near a computer. They are calling a phone number and the phone is a Web-based number. You don't have to have an engineer or a producer to host a show."
"Somebody told me they were watching a football game and was listening to the program on a bluetooth headset on his cell phone," Sreenivasan said.
"Journalists are reluctant to try new things. When blogs came along, Facebook came along, Twitter came along, journalists have been slow to find new journalistic ways to use these technologies," Sreenivasan said. "A crisis can clarify that. Journalists wake up in the middle of the story and try to figure it all out. In this case they are trying to figure out how to cover a region that does not get much coverage and also try new technology. Figuring all of this out on deadline is nearly impossible. That is why we must constantly experiment with new technology."
More:
To learn more about BlogTalkRadio I interviewed Alan Levy, the CEO, via e-mail.
Tompkins: Explain what hardware journalists need to make BlogTalkRadio (BTR) work for them.Alan Levy: All anyone needs to host a show on BTR is any type of phone and Internet connection. The platform is browser-based so there are no downloads required to host or listen to a show.
How do they import the phone call audio as people call in? Levy: BTR technology integrates the phone and the Web. We have built a browser-based switchboard that manages the broadcast. There can be up to six people on the line at any given time. The live shows can have unlimited listeners, live chat, etc. Within 30 minutes after the broadcast is over, the show is automatically archived as a podcast complete with RSS feeds, into Itunes, etc.
What kind of content seems to generate the most traffic? Levy: We broadcast more than 600 live shows a day and have produced more than 170k since we launched in 9/06. We have had many notable actors, authors, etc., on our shows, including Brad Pitt, Yoko Ono, Salman Rushdie. The Best of BTR can be found here
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/bestofbtr.aspx. Sree's shows this week have recorded close to 7,000 listeners both live and archived.
Are you placing ads on pages? Do you have a premium service that would strip the ads off the page?
Levy: BTR is free to both hosts and listeners. On the main network, BTR has joint ownership of the content and as such can syndicate the content, run ads, etc. We have a revenue sharing program with our hosts. In early '09 we will roll out a non-ad-based program, whereby hosts can elect to not have ads run in their shows. We also license our technology to major companies, organizations, etc. The DoD, Sun Microsystems, Harper Collins,
Woman's Day Magazine and others are using our tools to create conversations. Our clients and partners have the ability to live stream off their Web site as well as simulcast on our Web site. Our platform would work well with online news gathering organizations seeking innovative ways to engage their audience, which can be monetized via audio ads, video ads and other media.
