Keywords: blogs, podcasts, vlogs, bitTorrents, RSS feeds, SMIL, cellphones, citizen reporters, interactive television, free speech, New York Times,

Date: April 2005

PARTICIPATORY MEDIA

Participatory Media and Me

I have mixed feelings about the explosion of alternative media and personal journalism. That’s how I started my first podcast. I have a degree in Journalism and some experience in the field, and I didn’t feel that I was exercising my original métier when I did it.

First of all, the two concepts I used up here don’t necessarily go together for me. On the one hand, the media refers to the platform or the vehicle used to communicate and journalism has to do with the use of this platform. Using the media to deliver content doesn’t imply that it is journalistic content.

During the last couple of years I have witnessed an outburst of affordable and easy to obtain technologies that allow for the generation and delivery of content to a broad audience through the internet in different formats and ways. Blogs, moblogs, podcasts, vlogs, RSS feeds, torrents are some of the terms and tools that I have become familiar with. But their use presents many differences according to their level of maturity.

New tools are first embraced by technologically savvy people and/or ‘people who want attention’, and I don’t mean any offence here. They are the people who experiment with them, explore their possibilities and make them popular, but the content they generate is far from being journalistic, not even informative, sometimes. Just as paparazzi are not journalists for me, or I don’t take reality shows as journalistic products. I think that they are basically developing entertainment content. That is specially the case of vlogs and partially podcasts these days.

But the potential and power of these tools is apparent, and as they become mature and widely used they make things change. Actually things are changing in the world of journalism, even to the eyes of the skeptics, as facts prove. A blogger sponsored by his readers to report on Iraq from the spot [1], another blogger quitting his job and hoping to make a living out of the contributions of his readers [2], the Wall Street Journal becoming irrelevant because it has subscription-only based access [3], blogs creating online press conferences in parallel to the actual offline press conference, as Dan Gillmor mentions in ‘We The Media’, are just a few facts that show that the production of the information, its distribution and the places where people look for information are changing.

This is setting a delicate situation for the media where they have to face the adaptation to a new environment. Not only they have to compete with multiple independent sources of information whose reliability (one of the main issues when looking for information) is increasing, rethink their business model and re-strategize their presence online, but also they have to face the fact that their reporters are embracing the new media to get free of the bindings of corporate media and exercise their profession independently, which makes clear more than ever the bias of corporate media and the way they produce the news.

I don’t really think their business is in danger, they’ll remain there, but corporate media are huge machines, conservative and reluctant to change their beliefs or give in to the fact that they don’t have the control over information any more, and so, to adapt to this new situation. Mainstream media move slowly and taking small steps, and it will probably take a generational change for them to see things in a different way. So far, they have adopted the new distribution models (RSS feeds, podcasts, online movie archives), but they haven’t really changed their production routines, and there’s a growing audience for new stories or ways to tell them. There are pioneers, though, who understand that they can take new technologies and the contribution of their audience to their own advantage, rather than perceiving them as a threat. That is the case of the Californian journal The Northwest Voice, a free journal whose content comes mostly from community members [4]. Hopefully, a generational change and realizing the obvious will bring fresh air to the corporate media scene.

Despite of my initial little rant about non-journalists playing the role of journalists, I am excited about the possibilities that new technologies provide to grassroots journalism. I believe that we need new perspectives on topics and access to independent and varied sources of information to help us make informed decisions and opinions, because media are in a great deal responsible of how we perceive our reality and other realities beyond ours.

There are already different voices aside from the mainstream media. People as Indymedia, DemocracyNow or Clamor are working along these lines, and they are somehow professionalized, but there are initiatives of a definitely true grassroots journalist movement that are engaging people and turning them into responsible ‘netizens’.

OhMyNews is a very interesting project, based on the idea that every citizen is a reporter, but importantly enough, tutored by professional editors. I think this model is valid, especially if, as the editorial staff asks for, they tell about things they know well and they take responsibility for what they explain.

Wikinews is also very engaging but again, it establishes a set of rules to make the contents journalistic, which I think is necessary to infuse some ethics and sense of social responsibility to the task. It’s really significant how wiki systems are self corrective. Wikipedia, a massive source of knowledge doesn’t need major surveillance because the same users rectify incorrect information and restore it when it is vandalized.

An organization as Witness is putting video cameras in the hands of the unheard to let them tell their stories in the impoverished countries, and Outloud, a Danish TV is letting the audience determine the content of their broadcast via the internet.

New technology is definitely changing the ways information is produced and disseminated. Email and cell phones are key to spread out bits of information that mobilize people [5], trigger actions and help organize alternative media, as it did for Indymedia during the Republican National Convention last year in New York [6].

I think audience, distribution, expansion of the technological infrastructure and financial sustainability are key issues in the development of this new movement. There is a lot of content being produced that has in the Internet the opportunity that conventional media don’t want to or can’t offer. In terms of the audience, I think we are a bit blinded by our own environment here. In the Western world the vast majority of people content themselves with the information they get from traditional media and are very little motivated to put effort in the generation of information, nor they have heard about the whole blogging movement. But as younger generations grow up, we may see a shift in this trend, particularly because they are more comfortable with technology than their older relatives. In non-developed countries, mostly forgotten by mainstream media, and often subject to media controlled by the state, they could really take advantage of the opportunities of these new platforms, but most of the times they lack the technological infrastructure. This is where affordable technology such as cell phones could play out a key role.

As far as the business model goes, I wonder how this is going to be sustained when it becomes a professional or quality content platform (and again, I don’t mean any offence to the pioneers). I think bloggers paid by their readers is a very appealing idea, but I don’t know how many they’ll get there. Also, I don’t see advertising as a source of revenue, because that implies new bindings, and it’s opposed to the philosophy and nature of the movement. I guess that there will be a natural selection within the movement, audience will have to pay eventually for the content and the service and alliances will be created.

So, all said, I am torn about participatory media. I still have a romantic image of what journalists’ job is, and making media participatory is diminishing the profession in a way, but the prevalent model is not right. I think some of the latest events in the world prove that people are ready to speak aloud and not let their rulers or corporate media speak for them. They are rebels out there willing to bring down the fourth power.

Notes

[1] Quit Your Job to Blog, Blog, Blog
http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,66679,00.html?tw=wn_10culthead

[2] Heartaches of Journalists Bloggers
http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,66251,00.html

[3] Whither The Wall Street Journal?
http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,66697,00.html

[4] Open Arms for Open-Source News
http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,64285,00.html

[5] The Internet and Cellphones as Platforms for Grassroots Movements and Democracy Online
http://onthespot.info/scen/grass.html

[6] The New York Model: IndyMedia and the Text Message Jihad
http://www.democracynow.org/static/ny_model.shtml