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journalists.org
This week the Online News Association conference is happening in Toronto |
The
Online News Association is meeting in Toronto, Canada this week. The conference is sold out. The sessions are in place. Student reporters are live-blogging sessions on the
conference blog, guided by volunteer mentors. (Here's the
RSS feed.) Some folks, like
MacDivaONA, are Twittering from ONA. I'm also liveblogging the conference at
CurrentBuzz.
One highlight last night was a panel, The Future of the Future of News: Citizen Journalism Gets Asked the Tough Questions. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation streamed video of the event live, and also allowed online viewers to post questions and comments. You can watch the complete archived video here, under the "on demand video" link.
The panelists represented divergent views of the value of "citizen media". On the panel were Andrew Keen (blogger and author of "Cult of the Amateur"), NowPublic founder Len Brody, and Wikinomics research coordinator Rahaf Harfoursh. They discussed user-generated content from diverse perspectives.
Here's a wrap-up video interview with Harfoush:
In the interest of transparency, I blog for NowPublic. I was working on a Tidbits post about how easy they make it to post to the site, prior to the announcement that the panel would include NowPublic founder Len Brody. NowPublic provides a Firefox add-on that makes it simple to publish a NowPublic post about any Web page, with automatic linking and tagging. You can publish your post to NowPublic alone, or to NowPublic and your own blog(s) with just a click. The add-on includes a quotation grab function that saves time in posting.
NowPublic offers reader ratings of posts. It also encourages readers to crowdsource news by adding audio and video that expands upon any post. So far, the story I posted about cats that do not watch regular TV but that do watch HDTV brought in a torrent of photo, audio, and video link contributions. Another story about how the strange fiction world of "Spider" Jerusalem in Transmetropolitan, a graphic novel by Warren Ellis, brought in lots of image links as well.
At another session yesterday, AP's Lou Ferrara discussed how AP is partnering with NowPublic as a pre-screening agent for images for AP. They are in constant contact -- AP and NowPublic talk each day about where news is, where there might be an "image hive" that will bring AP fresh news images. So far they are getting images from NowPublic, but not much of other kinds of content.
And yesterday I liveblogged the pre-conference workshop on citizen Media, where Gannett new media VP Jennifer Carroll discussed gaming as a community builder and "community conversation." I'd say that whether you get connected via NowPublic, Digg, or Facebook, connecting is certainly the focus of what is going on at this ONA event. Oh -- and it looks like "mommy blogs" and sites that foster discussion between the moms are another big item this year.
What some of us were experimenting with and calling citizen journalism or networked journalism a couple years ago looks like Gannett's new business. What a difference a year or so can make! How is your news organizations incorporating social networking and building connections these days? Please comment below.
(See more ONA coverage by Poynter's Joe Grimm.)
