A few notable examples of citizen journalism

Cell phone photo of London terrorist attacks in 2005

Trent Lott resigns as Senate majority leader in 2002

Rathergate

Talking Points Memo and the US Attorney Firings and TPM Muckraker

Digital tech as challenging official narratives of public events?

Thought-provoking story from the NYT: When Official Truth Collides With Cheap Digital Technology. Dwyer, J. July 30, 2008

The availability of cheap digital technology — video cameras, digital cameras, cellphone cameras — has ended a monopoly on the history of public gatherings that was limited to the official narratives, like the sworn documents created by police officers and prosecutors. The digital age has brought in free-range history.

[[[Could possibly use this for 391 on Oct 15, new media, new journalism.

Blogging during the streaming of the democratic debate

I’m currently typing this as I’m staring at the nbc peacock-turned-loading wheel symbol that tells me to “wait for a few minutes and if we’re not back, just wait longer.”

I don’t have cable. It’s expensive and Comcast, the only provider, clearly mistreats their subscribers. Plus TV would be a serious distraction. Instead I get wireless “broadband” from a different anti-consumer company, ATT (my only other choice). So I planned to watch the debate on MSNBC’s website. At first it was all good. I had to sit through one ad at the start, but I can handle that. After the ad, for 5 minutes the debate streamed beautifully, so then I got a little adventurous and clicked the full-screen button. Then, as if by some miracle, the picture got bigger, the resolution was decent, and the stream didn’t degrade.

I watched full-screen, live, streaming video for about 10 minutes. Clinton and Obama were even talking back and forth about specific issues regarding health care policy and not about Brian Williams’ empty horse race fluff.

It felt like I was peering into some glorious future. I was timid, but I dare not look away.

Then the video started to break up and the audio began to stutter. Quick as a flash I minimized, but to no avail. The audio began chirping. So I closed out and went back again. Watched another ad and got back to the debate. 5 minutes went by, and it started to break up again. I closed out, went back, watched ad. This ritual repeated every 5 to 10 minutes, but each time, somehow the ad managed to come through no problem.

Now I’m just watching the peacock twirl. In the middle of an Obama rebuttal, the stream just dried up, his movements slowed to crawl, and then … nothing. Ridiculous. There is no good reason why we shouldn’t be able to get decent broadband in this country. Is this the ISPs fault? Most likely. Is it the FCCs fault? Right again. Is it MSNBC’s fault? Not sure. Is it the consumers’ fault, as firms like Comcast and ATT would suggest, for “hogging bandwidth?” No it is not.

We need to get this problem fixed, because if we let the regulators and the providers continue to hold hands all the way to the bank, our service will never improve.

Wow, now its back. But the aspect ratio is off, the picture is stretched. The candidates heads look a little wide; Tim Russert’s takes up the entire window. : )

Recent Project – NYT home page

I fell off the blog for a while this spring. I blame the emergence of nice weather, cross-Atlantic excursions, and finishing coursework for my degree! Granted, I do still have a ton of independent work to do this summer (including getting my video web logging study ready to submit for publication! more on that later), but I don’t have to physically sit in any classrooms. This makes me happy.

One of my projects for this quarter was a rhetorical design analysis of the New York Times home page. Overall, I’m glad I took the class that this project came out of, but I’ve found rhetorical analysis of design a little empty. I will completely own up to the fact that mine is no landmark study, but I did spend a fair amount of time looking at the NYT from the analytical lenses we were given by the prof and I came up wanting. I can definitely see the usefulness in a straight-up functional analysis of design as in human computer interaction and usability testing. I can also see the value of a cultural/rhetorical study of the NYT home page as a “text” having all sorts of layers of political meanings, inclusions and exclusions, frames of discourse, etc. Separate the rhetorical examination and the design analysis and it’s easier to digest.

But we were supposed to look at the rhetoric of the design and I ended up sort of lightly treading through various authors’ semiotic frameworks (the icon is a sign, a picture, a symbol, etc.) and talking about Gestalt, which is de-bunked at this point…

I guess I didn’t come up with anything particularly constructive using the analytical tools we were directed to use. But this isn’t really my area of research and we get out what we put in… Anyway, I’d be more interested in looking closely at the relationship between the print and online versions of the paper or alternative methods for presenting information such as the interactive map I talk about in the project (in the Verbal Codings, Visual Codings section). This is a great example of leveraging the web to present information in a useful way and in a manner that could never happen in print.

Presidential Debates on the Web

In an interesting collaboration among new (and old) media, Yahoo, Slate magazine (owned by Washington Post), and blogger/citizen journalism supersite The Huffington Post are comming together to host the first ever presidential debates on the web. Sometime after Memorial Day, Democrats and Republicans will take to the web in separate debates in what seems to be something like last night’s Democratic event on MSNBC. Read the Press release from Yahoo.

Validation of the politcal viability of the net? Maybe.
Opportunity for branding coverage of politics on the web? Definitely.

Belgian Court Rules Against Google

A Belgian court ruled that Google News violates copyright laws by linking to articles without owners’ consent.

A Brussels court has ruled in favour of a group of Belgian newspapers which argued that the site, which lists links to news stories from around the world, used material without their consent, and ordered that the articles be taken down.

The case, which was brought by Copiepresse, a group representing 17 French and German language newspapers, including La Libre Belgique and Le Soir, may set a precedent for other newspapers in Europe, lawyers said.

Google News at most displays the headlines, a few words, and a thumbnail photograph, so if user want to continue reading they must click the links that take them to original content owner’s site. My first assumption is that news providers would welcome the clickthroughs that result from Google’s aggregator, or at least accept that this is the nature of information on the web. This case is certainly a challenge to that line of thinking. Perhaps the Belgian news providers argue that in an age when people may be more likely to just glance at headlines (guilty as charged) Google hurts their business in the long run. Google archives over 4500 sources for its news service, so I can’t imagine this really affects their business all that much, but it could set a precedent for future litigation.

Read the full Article

Web Video Important for 2008 Campaign

This article from the Washington Post, On the Electric Campaign Trail, gives examples of the way some politicians are using the video capabilities of the Internet to reach potential voters. Mitt Romney used a video message to defend attacks from opponenets. John Edwards, Hilary Clinton, and Barack Obama, have all used the web to, dare I say it, outline their positions on issues. Issues! (See my previous post of Sen. Dorgan’s video re: net neutrality.)

I haven’t heard of any yet, but there must also be plenty of political attack ads on the way, in all their abrasive, low-budget glory.

Cell-phone Videos and Citizen News

As video capabilities on cell-phones become more ubiquitous, the essense of the news is changing. Quality is going up, price is going down. What does is mean once anyone can record high-quality video essentially undercover? Joe Blow meets James Bond and we’ll never see Seinfeld the same again.

Michael Richards in a West Hollywood comedy club and the authorities in Iraq who executed
Saddam Hussein painfully learned that the prying eyes of television news can belong to anyone who carries a cell phone.

Saddam’s execution and Richards’ flameout illustrate the growing power of cell-phone video as a news tool, not only to supplement stories but to change them.

“It brought to a fore the sense that wow, this is a ubiquitous technology,” said Mark Lukasiewicz, NBC News vice president for digital media. “Cameras are now in places where cameras never used to be. That’s transformational.”

From AP on Yahoo News