RTNDA: Citizen journalism and embracing your audience

Steve Safran October 25th, 2006

Well, panelist Jeff Jarvis (pictured) would take issue with calling it “your” audience, but that’s the title of the panel. Here, Desiree Hill VP of News Development, Pappas Telecasting, Dallas, kicks things off by showing KDBC’s “Community Correspondent” program. People can go directly to the site and put up their own news without being filtered. The station monitors it, but does not edit it before it goes online. “We have not had one inappropriate thing posted yet from among our eight stations. I thought we would.” Mitch Gelman SVP and EP, CNN.com talked about iReport: “We’re expanding the way we define and incorporate different points of view on the news.” Showing examples from the iReports in America Votes 2006, Gelman said “It’s a great way to get out of the beltway.” Douglas Warshaw, Chief Marketing Officer & Co-founder of, Motionbox showed off his chops: The Motionbox product is fantastic. It is used on conventional media sites like NBC10.com in Philadelphia. Think of it as the interface between citizen video and TV stations that want to filter. Stations can decide which of the uploaded Motionbox video they want to feature. People can edit online, share with embeddable player… it’s a YouTube with editing.

On to Jarvis, who pointed to my fave, WKRN in Nashville, as an example of inviting bloggers into the conversation. The station even reached out to bloggers in the region to show them how to shoot better video and created an ad market for the blogs. Characteristically, Jeff got to the heart of the matter: “What’s your strength? You’re local? Are you local enough? No way. The way to make it into an opportunity is to create a relationship with the people who used to be known as your viewers.” Jeff pointed to the ease of production of video, but how expensive the stations’ production budgets still are. “How do you use those tools to be more local than the news papers and build respect with the people who will help you survive?”

Transcript from Chip Mahaney, KDFW Dallas, chip@smartbusy.tv

Merrill Brown, Editorial Director, News21, New York
Desiree Hill, VP/News Development, Pappas Telecasting, Dallas
Jeff Jarvis, Buzzmachine.com and City University of New York
Douglas Warshaw, chief marketing officer and co-founder Motionbox
Mitch Gelman, Sr VP/EP, CNN.com, Atlanta
Robert Cox, President, Media Bloggers Association, New Rochelle NY

Desiree Hill, Pappas Broadcasting: We’re a small station group, but we’re front-line with Community Correspondents contributing to their websites. We’re doing citizen journalism sites for their station, including El Paso (KDBC, kdbc.com) and from their tiny station in Kearney NE (KHGI, nebraska.tv). We don’t get a lot of breaking news, but perhaps a good news story once a week. We do get a lot of kid photos. So far, we haven’t had one improper posting from our viewers. We’re allowing unfiltered content, using a little bit of monitoring.

Mitch Gelman, CNN: (the most tenured executive at a news website, by the way)

The first thing I want to point out is CNN’s commitment to citizen journalism. Several CNN people are here today – we’re committed to this.

Douglas Warshaw, Motionbox:
In the late 1970s, I started as a producer for ABC News, then Sports, then NBC Olympics, then part of the founding team of Classic Sports Network. In July 2005, I was watching the coverage of the London bombings and saw where the video was going (from users to the web). A year later, we put Motionbox on the web. Most of this video is raw unproduced content, so how do people manage that content? We’re currently on the NBC O&O stations, as well as a number of other companies. We have the ability to embed our site into other media companies sites.

A viewer could upload content to an NBC site. It shows up right away on MotionBox, and then the NBC station can decide whether to allow it on their site. But the contributor gets the immediate gratification of seeing their video online through Motionbox without the NBC branding, and without NBC taking the risk for this unfiltered content.

You know your communities and you get local. But who knows when the news will happen?

The majority of the video out there is raw and unedited. People want to publish, but not edit, so we’re designed to get the video to the site quickly.

Jeff Jarvis, buzzmachine.com and head of the new J-program at the City University of New York:

We should see this not as a threat, but as an incredible opportunity. I point to WKRN, and the work that Terry Heaton (consultant) and Mike Sechrist (GM) have done. They brought the bloggers in. They shared content with bloggers. They came up with a shared blog, and hired someone to manage it, with automated content with all the local blogs. They taught the bloggers how to shoot video. They created an ad-network for the local bloggers.

You’re local, but are you local enough? No way. This is an incredible opportunity to make your former viewers into contributors.

No more “citizen journalists”. It’s a mistake to separate the act of journalism by the person who does it. What is our job? Our job is to enable them, to turn them into a moderator. What will happen? We’ll get more journalism, better journalism. I call this “networked journalism”.

My colleague and friend at NYU Jay Rosen has started newassignment.net. You in local TV have opportunity to grab space from newspapers, who are trying to protect their turf. Stop thinking the expensive ways, and start thinking these about new tools. Establish a relationship of respect with these people who can become your contributors, not just viewers.

VideoCue … incredible tool for your laptop, including teleprompter.

Robert Cox – Media Bloggers Association:
I agree with what all my panelists are doing. Media Bloggers Association is about 1,000 members or bloggers. A variety of other well-regarded thoughtful people. Most of my time is spent on legal defense issues. Bloggers are getting legal threats, more and more. We also get involved with promotion and education of bloggers. In the course of building this organization, I’ve met a lot of folks in the legal world, in journalism, and in television.

When I first came out of Notre Dame in the 1980s, I went to work on Wall Street. Big changes – the end of fixed commissions, the start of the internet. The brokers were mortified – how will we make money, all of our prices are being undercut? They saw it as doom and gloom, found it very frightening.

Flash-forward to today. Many of those startup companies (ETrade, AmeriTrade) ended up being acquired by the big firms.

In these discussions in the journalism world, that’s mostly how I think about these issues. It is changing business models. I hear a lot that bloggers don’t value news content, because they want everything free, and that’s not fair to us because of what we have to spend. The mass majority of bloggers today and in the future will be small and independent bloggers. But the vast majority of traffic will go to mass media-sponsored blogs, with a mix of professional content.

Professional Broadcasters: Cultural Change in the Newsroom?

Desiree: My observation in traveling to different newsrooms is resistance from the old guard. Really young entry-level people are excited. They’re coming from a university setting, and they’re creative. “When can we start?” I think it’s how you present it. Some of the veteran people have been some of the biggest embracers. We have an anchor-woman in Kearney who shoots cell phone video on her way to work and posts it to the site, and then writes about it.

I think some business people do think of it as a way to get more content for nothing, and maybe we can get rid of some jobs. But there will always be a need for someone’s job to be to gather news and report. We have to support people whose job it is to do this. We can’t replace reporting with citizen journalism. It’s better for the audience to have this additional content.

We’re putting this content on our air. In Kearney, we do a segment every day. Even if it’s a kids’ birthday party, we’ll put it on.

Mitch: A few weeks ago there was a coup in Thailand. I received an e-mail from an esteemed colleague who says “we can’t be everywhere, communications are down”. The best way to get information quickly is if we reach out to the people on the streets and solicit images and reports from Bangkok. All of a sudden, we started getting a flood of video and images flooding in. If there’s a resistance at CNN, I’m not aware of it. We can be in more places where things are happening.

Doug: I have a pet phrase, “you can’t just throw technology over a transom”. You have to help customers create initiatives to get this on the air. Part of the defensiveness of the blogger world is in defining who’s a journalist? Realizing “I’m not the only one who can gather video now”. But our role is to be the best at bringing it all together.

If you were in charge of a local station’s effort, what would you do?

Jeff: What you think is your main business is not your main business, but something new and better. But I have no money. How can I create a network that builds a whole new relationship with the market? I’m not sure that the majority of the traffic will come from the big sites, but from networks. Some people will want to keep ownership of their content, but share it. I would try to find ways to be generous with these new people (training).

Robert: I would look at the ways I can leverage this technology to lower cost and make money. I would do what WKRN is doing, developing a network of trusted providers who can deliver video via something like Motionbox. Technology allows a 1985-broker managing 25 accounts to be a 2006-broker managing 2000 accounts.

I have the news judgement, brand, ability to evaluate this content, who to trust. That same person may get and go through a hundred different videos. That lowers costs. If I can build a revenue model on top of that, interstitial advertising, more traffic, I can monetize that.

The companies that want to do it the old-fashioned way are out of business, and just a brand owned by somebody else. Instead of Smith-Barney (the old-fashioned way), be E-Trade or Ameritrade.

Doug: Creativity and collaboration. People will come to your sites. What you need to do is think of things people will want to do on your site. Less of the nuts-and-bolts of news-gathering, but thinking how you’re going to present it.

Our next step is forming groups, collaborative journalism by citizens. Flashmob: 9am Sunday morning, St. Marks Place, everyone bring bubble machines and cameras. Then they had a contest to make the best film by 6pm that night. One team worked collaboratively together. It’s a networked world, more than anything else.

Desiree: How do we get the younger audience? They don’t believe in marketing or advertising like our parents did? It’s that type of non-traditional message that will get a new viewer. This helps getting non-traditional viewers to you.

Steve Safran: Scenario: “I’ve got a book coming up in a couple of weeks, my boss doesn’t get this, we can’t make money at this – what do I tell them?”

Jeff Jarvis: We see a lot of kvetching at staffing at places like the LA Times. Newspapers have too much fat. Not as true for local news operations, because they didn’t have the newspaper monopoly mentality, but there’s still fat. The useless live shot, for instance.

Mitch: You need investment in these areas. You need to get started. Knight Foundation has put up $5 million to anyone in this room, not in this room. Anyone who has a cell phone and an idea, can get funding, to participate in this next generation.

Question: What is so special now about broadcasting?

Desiree: 68% of people surveyed get their news locally. We have to leverage it while we can. The specialness is still here. You don’t have to be a newspaper or tv station – you could be group of teachers. Now is the time.

Jeff: For TVs, we can do things the newspaper still hasn’t figured out. TVs are more nimble than newspapers. If you act really fast, you’ll get in front of it. People still have a more emotional connection with TVs than newspapers.

Verification:

Desiree: We allow people to upload without a filter. We do monitor content that has been uploaded, and in a few cases, we’ve pulled content down. But we feel because our name is on it, we have to follow some of the same rules we do on our newscast. The cases where we’ve pulled content down are “innocent cases” – people who just didn’t know any better. In one case, a person shared someone else’s home address and phone number, and we wouldn’t have shared that information on the air.

We had an urban legend published. Starbucks refusing to give people in the military free coffee. I went to Snopes checked out the truth. We pulled the content down, and contacted the poster. We always contact the submitter when we pull something down.

Robert: Just finished a Poynter ethics seminar, and there will soon be a white paper on this. Organizations don’t think they’ll get burned by this. Think about this first. If you haven’t been abused by this yet, you will be.

Changes and future sizes of newsroom staffs? Will it diminish professional journalism?

Doug: I think we’re living in the age of the “winnowing of narrative”. It’s all about getting information. It’s all about managing the information flow. Recognizing what is narrative, and what deserves to be narrative, and what is just information. Recognizing that is really key and allocating resources accordingly.

Jeff: Define journalism more broadly. Raise your own bar of quality. Just because it’s in a newsroom doesn’t mean it’s good. Some of it is just junk. Invest in that. Good journalism will pay off.

As a citizen journalist, I’m on equal footing? What is my incentive for turning content over to you?

Mitch: At CNN, what we would want to do is be a good citizen and link to your site and hope your server can handle the traffic.

Jeff: There’s a whole bunch of reasons to share. Generosity, sharing, money. Maybe I can extend your reach without extending your liability.

What about the connection between our last session, HD, and this one, with its focus on lower-quality video?

Jeff: Good journalism skills still matter. Writing headlines, nut-graphs. Amanda Congdon with Rocketboom came in with a 3-camera setup. It’s a lot easier to do that. It’s the story that counts. At school, the first two weeks I tried to scare them. One student saw I blog I showed her and said she wanted to do that. (barista.net was the blog.) Now there has to be a focus on business. The new journalists have to figure out how to make business work.

If you had a war chest of funds, what would you do?

Doug: Inside your own organizations, you have knowledge you’re not unleashing. The first thing I would do is create an online survey for everyone in your organization. What do you have, what do you do? Create a group that once a month gets together and find out what they’re doing.

Make sure your key executives get a hands-on feel for these new tools. Most people are too embarrassed to admit what they don’t know. I see people making million-dollar decisions who don’t know how to use a Tivo or turn on their cell phone.

Google has a 70-20-10 rule. 70% of time is on your core job. 20% is related to your core job. 10% is thinking about things outside your core job – outside thinking to find new technologies and solutions.