I think about the evolution of blogs as serious news sources probably way more than I should, but as an educator and journalism junkie, I can’t help but try to figure out what effect bloggers are going to have in terms of media literacy and consumption. I’m in the camp that says traditional journalism has some serious problems ahead, that more and more, forms of participatory journalism are going to cover the news that people consume. I think by and large that people who do any thinking at all about their sources of news have lost faith in the accuracy and trustworthiness of what’s being reported. It’s just becoming way too hard to separate fact from opinion and story from advertising. Trouble is, of course, is that there are too many people who don’t give what they read or hear a second thought.

William Safire opines about the usefulness of bloggers in a journalistic sense today at the New York Times. He suggests that as advertising grows, bloggers will come in from the “meanstream to the mainstream” to eventually deliver “serious analysis and fresh information.” But then he says this:

On national or global events, however, the news consumer needs trained reporters on the scene to transmit facts and trustworthy editors to judge significance. In crises, large media gathering-places are needed to respond to a need for national community.

That just strikes me as so typical of what we expect from Americans as citizens of the world. Study after study shows that we have no real pulse on the rest of the world to begin with. Ask what Gaza is and most people will probably tell you it’s a big band aid. We can’t keep track of what happens in Kansas much less in Kiev. So, Safire says that yes, we can use our brains to sift through American news, but on that oh so foreign international front, we should just sit back and get the regular spoon feed of ideas and information.

Bunk, I say.

Look, we have an opportunity here to really teach ourselves and our kids to be active consumers of news, and in doing so, to be better informed and better prepared for the troubles that certainly lie ahead. And there is a new formula evolving for doing just that. It’s built on the idea that lots of amateur reader/editors can do just as good if not better job than a few professional ones who are beholden to some company or some stock. It says that this isn’t just an American thing, that it works the same way around the world. And it says that the “The Daily Me” really is now the responsibility of all of us; we need to find and construct our own newspapers, aggregated from RSS feeds and the like.

I know that it’s much, much more complicated than that. And I also know that most people aren’t going to want to put in the time. But I’m also hoping that we can use the vast amounts of information and news that we now have at our fingertips to show students how interesting the world really is.

This New York Times piece says that blogs were “hard to beat” when it came to detailed on scene coverage of the awful tsunami disaster, and I have to agree. I spent an hour following links to first hand accounts and all sorts of images and video this morning. It’s amazing to me how little I even think about newspaper or television news any more…scary in fact. And this Tsunami Help Weblog that was cobbled together to keep track of the coverage is a pretty amazing thing all by itself.

But here is the powerful part…I can follow this story through my aggregator just by creating a Google News feed for it. And I can use that to create a separate page just for that. And if I want a summary of what’s known so far, I just need to go to the Wikipedia entry on the disaster. In fact, if you haven’t yet figured out the power of Wikipedia, GO THERE NOW! I mean it. More than you could ever imagine being put together in one place in this short a time span.

We are witness to the future of news. Amazing.
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Greensboro 101 seems to be the on everyone’s blog radar these days as it’s turning into an effective model for community journalism a la Weblogs. They have about 50 or so bloggers, but even more importantly, they’ve got t-shirts. I say this not in jest as the t-shirts, snappy as they are, tell me at least that someone has decided to actively market the meme. (This may be something to think about for edubloggers as well…)

The site is basically an aggregator of local blogs, and it’s easy to add your own. A quick scan of the aggregated posts from the last few days shows a heavy emphasis on local events with a bit of world news and links sprinkled in. At this time, they don’t allow comments, though the talk is they will and they do have a discussion board built in.

Jay Rosen calls this “Open Source Journalism” which, when you take out the allusion to software means the journalism is really getting back to what it’s supposed to be doing which is using open sources of information. Add to that Online Journalism Review’s Citizen Media piece and it paints a pretty clear picture, I think of what 2005 will hold for journalism. I know I’ve said this before, but I just feel very lucky to be aware of this and watching it firsthand as it happens. My journalism teachers, who have subscribed to my Furls about journalism, are slowly but surely getting their brains around this as well. We are becoming more active consumers of news, becoming more engaged with the content and the process as we actively create that content as well. As more and more people understand the power of this, the more it will become a model for staying current.

Now it’s not a short leap to argue that our kids have to become more active consumers of the curriculum too…

I’d been looking for a list like this for quite a while…here are over 150 local, state and national U.S. newspapers with RSS feeds. And that doesn’t include international papers. I just think that’s pretty amazing, and there is no doubt that number is going to grow.

Right now, every student in my school could have a free subscription to the New York Times, Washington Post, Dallas Morning News and a whole bunch of other really respected, well-written newspapers. If they wanted to get a little ambitious, they could go to Blogdigger and “roll their own” feeds from the various newspapers of interest, say The Week in Review from the Times, national news from the Post, the learning news from the Christian Science Monitor, the local news from the Philly Inquirer, and the weather from USA Today. And it would all come to them, as it happens, whenever they want to read it. That does not, of course, guarantee that they would read it, but still. It’s not hard to set them up with a Bloglines account, create a feed for them, have them add it, and then give them a few minutes every other day or so to check out what’s new. Or have them add interesting stories to a class blog. Or have them find their own feeds. Or…
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I’m sorry to say that I’ve kind of dropped the ball on our local
journalism project. In all honesty, I’ve just got too many things going
on to give it the time it needs, and I was hoping that someone would
kind of pick up the idea and run with it. I think Jeff has been way too busy too.

The good news is that local community journalism seems to be gaining in
momentum. Cyberjournalist.net asks “A Local Media Revolution?” and goes
on to link to a number of sites where the latest media model is to
collect news and views from residents and then publish them in a
variety of forms. Pegasus News is one of the latest entrants, along with Backfence.com. According to one of the developers of Backfence,

Our vision is to create sites that offer extremely local coverage,
written almost entirely by the readers, using blogs, wikis, and other
formats to allow people to share community news and information with
their neighbors in a friendly, ad-supported environment distributed via
the Web, RSS, and other online media.

More meme spreading, and more people “getting” the potential of the read/write Web.
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   The Tyee newspaper out of British Columbia has an interesting article about Wikipedia and it’s coverage of the Russian school hostage story a couple of months ago.

On the morning of September 1, 2004, a small armed force
captured a school in western Russian town of Beslan, taking hundreds of
students hostage.

One day later, a small article describing the event appeared on Wikipedia.org,
an open-source encyclopedia. Over the next 24 hours, Wikipedia users
compiled the information from other news reports together into one
article, revising and expanding it 46 times.

People coming to the article from Wikipedia’s “Current Events” page
could read a concise summary of the event, with links to the history of
the region and the ongoing war. This was old school, just-the-facts
reporting.

It reminds me a lot of what I wrote last March after the bombings in Spain. I was, and still am, in awe of the coverage.
I’m sure there are probably even more comprehensive sites out there for
research on that event, but I just found it so fascinating that dozens
if not hundreds of people were by their own volition adding to the
story as new information came out, tweaking it as they went. And that’s
still happening; I wish the current events page had an RSS feed.

But it would just be so neat to do this with students. And Ken Smith (who I wish would get back to blogging) had a great idea about just this over a year ago:

But it also makes me think about creating something like it — why not
ask the students in a class to create a current events page, updated
daily or weekly or monthly as the field requires, for the course topic
and the conversations that are going on in the field? At the end of one
semester the task might be picked up by students who enroll for the
next semester’s course.

We start a new quarter on Tuesday, and I’m going to see if we can’t make something like that happen.
Seedwiki allows me to create an account for each kid, so we can track
who adds what. I’ve been working with the Media Lit teacher to set this
up, and I think we’re ready to go. Stay tuned…

I think the larger point, however, is that Wikipedia is a metaphor for
the editor’s role we all need to accept when we enter the read/write
Web. This is a skill and a literacy that kids (and teachers) need to
learn. And I think wikis, moreso even than Weblogs, are a tool to teach
that. I like the way the article ends:

Using Wikipedia requires a major shift in the
way we view our sources of news and reference. Wikipedia shows that
information should be tested, as a way of getting better information,
but also that it should be shared. If you have knowledge, offer it to
the world. If you see something wrong with Wikipedia, fix it.

Nice.
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The Tyee newspaper out of British Columbia has an interesting article about Wikipedia and it’s coverage of the Russian school hostage story a couple of months ago.

On the morning of September 1, 2004, a small armed force captured a school in western Russian town of Beslan, taking hundreds of students hostage.

One day later, a small article describing the event appeared on Wikipedia.org, an open-source encyclopedia. Over the next 24 hours, Wikipedia users compiled the information from other news reports together into one article, revising and expanding it 46 times.

People coming to the article from Wikipedia’s “Current Events” page could read a concise summary of the event, with links to the history of the region and the ongoing war. This was old school, just-the-facts reporting.

It reminds me a lot of what I wrote last March after the bombings in Spain.
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I know I come back to this a lot, but I just find the whole reader as editor phenomenon to be so powerful and so important for the way we think about the Internet. I mean look at what’s happened over the last week with the “60 Minutes” controversy over documents they used in a report about the president’s military service. The amount of critical thinking and writing skills that bloggers have exhibited over the last week on this story alone is pretty impressive. Now I know it’s not all wonderful, and I know that it’s tough to translate all of this down to the classroom. But as far as I’m concerned, it’s proof of concept. CBS didn’t realize they had a whole Internet stable of editors out there who, as the Grand Forks Herald put it,

…worked the thing, with a stubbornness and tenacity that would have done credit to a pack of bulldogs or a turn of snapping turtles – or, yes, an army of investigative reporters.

These bloggers are obviously highly motivated by the current political climate. But the point is that whatever their motivation, they have become engaged in the debate. And I firmly believe that students have a lot to say about the various topics that they find engaging…they’ve just never had the opportunity to do it in a meaningful, public way.

I know, I know. The vast majority of students won’t end up being bloggers. But blogging starts with reading, something they all need to do. And blogging asks them to think about what they read, something they all need to do as well. If through the use of blogs we can teach them to do the important work it takes to be an editor, then maybe they’ll continue to use those skills even if they don’t continue blogging.
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Just finished a great Meet-up here in beautiful downtown Flemington with about 25 or 30 interested community members who seem to be leaving pretty excited about the prospects of starting a group of Weblogs via nj.com. For those who attended, here is the promised handout that we ran out of. Thanks to Jeff Jarvis for doing a great sales job in an overheated room.
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The companion blog to Dan Gilmor’s most excellent We the Media book is up and running. When you think about it, it’s a very cool way of keeping the content current and interesting. Maybe we should make this required reading for our community bloggers…
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Not directly Weblog related, but personal publishing related nonetheless:

The Bakersfield Californian has embarked on one of the most ambitious participatory journalism efforts to date in the United States, launching a community newspaper and Web site in which nearly all the articles and pictures are contributed for free by people in the community.

Since the first print edition of The Northwest Voice was launched May 13, more than 200 individuals have contributed articles, pictures and events, and revenue has grown 33 percent. In all, about 90 percent of the content on the Web site and in the newspaper is contributed by the community.

I just think this is very cool, and it’s hopefully what will happen here once we get our project set up.

And I love this quote as it relates to education as well…

“In a world in which a growing number of readers are becoming publishers, we ignore this trend at our own peril…”

If we don’t start tapping into the potential of the read/write Web for our students, I think we do them a great disservice. A lot of us have been writing about the literacy requirements of a Web infused culture that is changing at a very fast pace. How long will it be before students expect to be contributors of information and not just consumers of it? How long will it be before producing products for the teacher just won’t be enough? How long will it take before competitive jobs require an ability not only to read and write but to edit unedited texts, to collaborate with others to create content, to publish that content in ways that are accessible, and to manage all of the information out there in an efficient, organized, sensible way?

I’m going to miss teaching journalism this year, I know it. Especially considering the burgeoning list of reporters who are blogging. It’s too much fun to watch how blogs are changing things in the journalism world.
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Micah Sifry extends the BloggerCon-verstation about journalism with this post at his Iraq War Reader site. It’s a great essay that articulates a lot of what I believe in terms of information and the need for media and info literacy…and how blogs can contribute to that. While he makes some great points on his own, I particularly liked this quote from his editor:

Newspapers have abdicated their duties in getting to the “truth” of a story. [I'd add TV even more so.] Instead, in the name of objectivity, they simply report the he-said, she said on how much some new initiative will cost, as if there were no way to empirically determine the answer. Bloggers rarely link to this kind of story. The most widely-read ones seek out some piece of writing on the web where a person has actually determined the real answer, or gotten an on the record quote, or put forth an question no else has asked, and then they link to it, saying, in effect, ‘If you believe me, then you can believe this.’

It’s an interesting aspect of writing that we rarely ask of students, that gaining the trust of your reader part. Have we ever asked students to do sustained writing over time about a consistent topic for an audience? Should we?
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Hey, why can’t we have our students contribute what they learn/know to Wikipedia and put it up for scrutiny?

Wikipedia has also served a valuable teaching tool at the University of Hong Kong’s Journalism and Media Studies Centre. We have used it in undergraduate and graduate journalism classes to teach the skill of writing dispassionately for an international audience. By collaborating online with others, students not only interact with each other when writing, but get advice and corrections from complete strangers around the world within minutes of making contributions to the Wikipedia.

This is a great primer for the wiki uninitiated and one that I’m going to think about sharing with my faculty.
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(Via PJNet) “Blogging in the Inland NW” is a list of links to local bloggers by Ken Sands of the Spokesman-Review in Spokane. He got 40 of ‘em listed, and as usual, some are more interesting than others. In interviews with PJNet, he said:

“Journalism traditionally has been reporters and editors performing the gatekeeping function. We decide what the news is. But with the Web, now everybody has the ability to become published…Rather than be afraid of it or work against it, we should be going with the flow. If this is where our communication is going as a society, we should try to figure out how to facilitate it…I don’t know of anyone else opening up their pages to community bloggers in this fashion. (One blogger, for example, is a profane 21-year-old goth devotee.)”

And PJNet is sponsoring an August conference in Toronto: “Exploring the Fusion Power of Public and Participatory Journalism”

Participatory journalism tools in the form of weblogs and other electronic communications are changing the face of mass media, but are complementary to public journalism. These are powerful tools as Howard Dean’s campaign proved by using weblogs and MeetUp to get 170,000 people nationwide to sign up for face-to-face meetings. The Daily Kos, a citizen run weblog, has 1.5 million unique visitors a month. These are just two of many impressive examples. Learn how we can borrow from or incorporate these tools to improve the state of journalism.

And I can’t remember if I mentioned it before, but Jeff Jarvis is setting up quite a network of local bloggers across the country. There are so many great ideas flying around that we could implement at my school…if only we had the time.
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