Viral Video: Careful, This Stuff's Powerful

For the past four years, the Sunshine Press, which operates the non-profit website WikiLeaks, has caused quite a stir among governments—both U.S. and international—by posting documents and information provided or “leaked” to it by anonymous sources close to those governments. As an example of just how seriously governments take WikiLeaks, a March 2008 U.S. cyber counterintelligence report posted on the site on March 15, 2010 details U.S. Intelligence’s plans to destroy WikiLeaks, citing that there is no way to determine whether sensitive or classified information is shared that might damage national security. WikiLeaks has persevered, although not without its share of censure (it’s been blocked by the governments of China, Zimbabwe, Russia, North Korea, Vietnam and Israel, for example).

But on April 5, it posted what is probably the most sensational material in its tenure: a classified 18-minute video leaked by an anonymous Pentagon source that allegedly shows the Apache helicopter killing of two Reuters employees and their rescuers outside of Baghdad in 2007, which it posted under the URL “CollateralMurder.com.” For the past three years, Reuters had unsuccessfully attempted to obtain this video and related materials from the Pentagon through the Freedom of Information Act.

WikiLeaks sent two reporters to Baghdad to research the story and interview the families of the victims and, according to founder Julian Assange, broke the code that encrypted the video. Within 24 hours of its posting, it had garnered over 1.3 million hits on YouTube. Critics of the video, including a helicopter pilot involved in the mission, state that the video is misleading in its portrayal of a malicious act rather than the result of confusion on the ground. But the mushroom effect of this video points up the immediacy of digital media and its powerful reach.

WikiLeaks is currently in the process of soliciting funds to cover the costs of releasing another video showing civilian killings in Afghanistan. The organization has operated on a budget of about $600,000 per year, and states that it has currently raised just over half of that for 2010. It claims to have thousands of pages of documents that it cannot share with the world due to limited capacity, but its method of digital sharing appears to be a cost-effective one: even $10 can cover the cost of releasing a document to 10,000 people.

As Assange puts it, “In terms of journalism efficiency, I think we discovered a lot with a small amount of resources.”

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Cash Cows for Online News?

Profit generation is one of the most challenging aspects of the digital news revolution. Digital media expert Rishad Tobaccowala offers some fundraising suggestions, from the conventional to the offbeat (at least for news outlets), in the May/June issue of the Columbia Journalism Review (link courtesy of IJNet.org).

Among Tobaccowala's ideas:

* Charging for select archived material (many online papers do this already)

* Selling merchandise

* Targeting Web advertising towards individual readers

Read more of Tobaccowala's suggestions (and add some of your own!) here.

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'Be Bolder'... What Teens Want From Online News

The Newspaper Association of America Foundation and the Media Management Center have teamed up to explore the online news preferences of teens. Based on findings from previous studies of youth media patterns, researchers developed a series of prototypes of home pages and story-level pages, then tested them with 96 teens in focus groups in six cities. The result is a new report and upcoming one-hour Webinar, to take place April 23.

In a nutshell, the report recommends a bolder approach in packaging news for teens. “Given that teen responses were very similar to those of adults who are light readers, researchers recommend creating a new type of site - not just for teens, but for all people who lack experience with news and have a limited amount of time to get engaged with it.”

For more on this research, click here:
http://www.mediamanagementcenter.org/blogs/mike/2009/04/what-teens-want-from-online-news.html

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Washington State Hosts Specialized Reporting Institute on Second Life

Word was that the questions from the Avatars were tougher than those that came from the real world audience.

WSU’s Edward R. Murrow College of Communication has just wrapped up a two-day, MF-funded conference for reporters on covering virtual reality, with real-life and 2nd Life speakers Helen Thomas and Bob Schieffer converging on stage at the same time. There was, as you’d expect, a good amount of new media coverage of this one as it unfolded.

To follow some of this fascinating event, visit links below.

Some great coverage can be found at:
http://nwn.blogs.com
http://eurekadejavu.blogspot.com/2009/04/launch-of-journalistic-experiment.html

Live photo stream at:
http://www.koinup.com/sim/WSU+II

Twitter round up at:
http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%22virtual+journalism+summit%22

A humorous read at:
http://foo.secondlifeherald.com/slh/2009/04/virtual-journalism-heavyweights-gather-in-virtual-journalism-summit.html

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Taking It Right to the People

President Barack Obama has chosen the path less traveled to get out his message: bypassing the traditional guard of the often-jaded White House Press Corps to reach out directly to his desired (mostly liberal) media, including bloggers and radio hosts.

For starters, he introduced the massive stimulus spending plan by connecting White House budget director Peter Orsazg on a conference call to mostly left-leaning writers . Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel followed suit and perhaps heralded the increased importance of ethnic media in Obama’s communication plan by a direct briefing with black and Hispanic media.

Jonathan Martin of Politico reports that as revolutionary as this plan seems, it’s the fulfillment of every President’s dream to bypass the inner sanctum of seasoned beltway writers in order to present their unfiltered messages to very friendly audiences. But Martin points out that it’s not quite so easy to completely dodge the scrutiny of the White House Press Corps.

Read Martin’s article here.

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Newspapers and the Unthinkable

Check out a fascinating piece by Clay Shirky (a media consultant and adjunct professor at NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program) on newspapers and the Internet at http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and-thinking-the-unthinkable/.

Coming out a week after the infamous "10 Major Papers That May Fold or Go Digital Next" piece on Wall St. 24/7, this thoughtful item harkens back to the mid-‘90s warnings of New Directions for News head Jean Gaddy Wilson and provides some much-needed context on what’s happened since. It manages to connect the enormous societal transformation that took place with the advent of printing (“we’re collectively living through 1500”) to the approaches that newspapers took to the Internet throughout the 1990s (“they were, at base, all the same plan: ‘Here’s how we’re going to preserve the old forms of organization in a world of cheap perfect copies!’”). It concludes:

“For the next few decades, journalism will be made up of overlapping special cases. Many of these models will rely on amateurs as researchers and writers. Many of these models will rely on sponsorship or grants or endowments instead of revenues. Many of these models will rely on excitable 14 year olds distributing the results. Many of these models will fail. No one experiment is going to replace what we are now losing with the demise of news on paper, but over time, the collection of new experiments that do work might give us the journalism we need.”

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We Media Hits Miami

The same day that staffers at the Rocky Mountain News learned that their paper was to be shuttered last week, a conference was taking place in Miami celebrating bright new innovations in the online media world.

We Media, which occurred February 24-26, brought together some 200 digital media executives, experts and entrepreneurs for panels, speeches, awards and networking. Highlights included a talk by expert pollster John Zogby; an interview of Rev. Lennox Yearwood, President and CEO of the Hip Hop Caucusl; and University of Miami President Donna Shalala by U of Miami School of Communications Dean Sam Grogg and a talk on the future of media by Knight Foundation CEO Alberto Ibarguen.

Awards included the Pitch It awards - where new media innovators 'pitched' their concepts to a panel of judges to vie for start-up funding and the MF-sponsored Game Changes awards to innovators whose work inspires involvement and action through media.

For a roundup of coverage on the We Media conference, click here:
http://wemedia.com/2009/02/27/roundup-of-we-media-coverage

To see a Poynter item on Alberto Ibarguen's comments on the future of news as well as broader messages from We Media, click here:
http://poynter.org/column.asp?id=131&aid=159170

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Knight Foundation Co-Sponsors 'Twitter' Awards

KF + Sawhorse honor 26 leading Twitterers. For more:
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003941037

Note to self: Story has 142 characters, including URL. Need to rewrite!

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Newspapers of the Future

Check out this entertaining clip, produced in 1981 by KRON, about how newspapers might be available by computer. At $5 a pop, shouldn't be much competition for the 20 cent street edition, the anchor notes.

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Knight Foundation Announces Top News Challenge Proposals

The Knight Foundation has just released a list of the finalists' proposals for the second year of the Knight News Challenge. These projects aim at – in Knight words - informing, empowering and engaging citizens and helping them in the decision-making process of their neighborhoods, communities and countries. The 17 projects chosen for funding, not named in the list, will be released May 14, 2008 at the E&P Interactive Media Conference in Las Vegas. To see the other top proposals click here: Top Proposals 2008.

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WeMedia 2008: It's Live Now

Trying to get a handle on social and digital media? You don't have to be one of the lucky ones in Miami to reap the benefits of WeMedia 2008: They're streaming video and blogging live on their Web site. http://ifocos.org/we-media-miami-2008

Organized by MTF grantee iFOCOS, WeMedia brings together a couple hundred bloggers, journalists, academics, investors and techies annually to brainstorm and discuss the digital landscape.

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Lose 10 Pounds...and Blog

Hoping to start wrapping your arms around the digital revolution sweeping journalism in 2008, but have no idea how to do it? Online journalism guru and blogger Howard Owens offers a practical list with his recent blog post on "2008 objectives for today's non-wired journalist." His second most popular post this past year, Owens breaks down the daunting task for going digital in nearly a dozen steps. These include mandates like, "Become a blogger," "Start using RSS," and "Learn to Twitter." You can view the full list here, and perhaps make it a checklist for yourself: http://www.howardowens.com/2007/2008-objectives-for-todays-non-wired-journalist/

Along the way, you might find MTF grantee J-Lab's "Journalism 2.0: How to Survive and Thrive in the Digital Age" a helpful resource. This online primer breaks down all the new technology into manageable chunks and chapters. http://www.kcnn.org/resources/journalism_20/. Happy 2008 from the MTF Journalism Program.

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ICFJ Names International Journalism Award Winners

The International Center for Journalists (ICFJ) named its 2007 Knight International Journalism Award winners today. This year’s winners are Wael Abbas, an Egyptian blogger, and investigative reporter May Thingyan Hein of Burma.

Abbas’ win marks the first time a blogger has received the award. His blog, Misr Digital, has covered stories such as police brutality and corruption—topics that many mainstream media normally don’t—and has attracted so much attention that it’s encouraged the media to begin reporting these subjects. Despite beatings and arrests, Abbas says that bloggers are “the last independent voice,” and are “necessary” for protests to be heard in Egypt.

May Thingyan Hein, who is a freelance journalist, also tackles controversial topics in her investigative reporting. In Burma, stories must be submitted to officials before being released and her coverage of the spread of bird flu into the country was instrumental in forcing the government to take action against the epidemic.

ICFJ President Joyce Barnathan says that Abbas and Hein are “blazing the path in their countries with extremely bold coverage” and that others should follow their example.

The Knight International Journalism Awards are given by the Knight International Journalism Fellows, funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. The Fellows strive to lead the news media into making societies more accountable to citizens.

For more information, visit ICFJ online, or visit The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation online.

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The City That 'NETworks'

Community Media Workshop (www.newstips.org) recently hosted a lively – and timely - Community Media Summit at Columbia College in downtown Chicago. The forum featured speakers such as media consultant Richard Somerset-Ward, Julia Stasch of the MacArthur Foundation and Sandy Close of New America Media. The provocative issues discussed included:

 What role can local media play in community life?

 What is the role of collaboration in community media?

 How will access to broadband affect community life?

The event highlighted the work of a number of community media leaders from groups throughout the Midwest such as Radio Arte, Grand Rapids Community Media Center, the Twin Cities Media Alliance and We the People Media. To see video segments from the summit click here.

The event featured release of the long-awaited report from the Mayor’s Advisory Council on Closing the Digital Divide, “The City That Networks: Transforming Society and Economy Through Digital Excellence.” To see it click here.

The Benton Foundation, a key sponsor of the summit, recently released a report “What’s Going On In Community Media?” To see it click here.

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Check, please!

A hearty congratulations to three McCormick Tribune journalism grantees recently chosen for the inaugural round of digital journalism grants from the Knight Foundation News Challenge. Only 25 of the more than 1,500 groups and individuals that applied were selected to receive grants for cutting edge projects in digital journalism. According to the Knight Foundation, the winners proposed innovative strategies for leveraging digital news to build community. These range from individual blogging grants to building networks of citizen journalists to cover a large metropolitan city.

Among the winners, the MTF grantees included:

• School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Kansas State University: Will serve as an incubator as one of seven universities to explore solutions to digital news problems.
• Dori Maynard of the Robert C. Maynard Institute for Journalism Education: Received a $15,000 grant to blog on diversity issues in digital media.
• Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University: Rich Gordon was awarded $639,000 to found a scholarship program designed to train computer scientists in journalism to address the need for talented tech-people at media companies.

The Knight Foundation will award $25 million during a five-year span "to help lead journalism into its digital future." For more information on the News Challenge and a complete project and winners list, check out: http://www.newschallenge.org/winners/

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