Obama 2.0

A lot of analysis on the exemplary Obama campaign is out -- I particularly thought this NY Times article informative, as well as this piece looking at aspirations for the new U.S. presidency from the foreign perspective.

Most Indian press is examining Obama's take on foreign policy issues and whether he will take a tougher stance on U.S. firms outsourcing to Asia (a good survey of experts downplaying those fears can be found here).

The Hindustan Times also tries to paint an optimistic scenario in this article , including such nuggets as

The 47-year-old, elected as the first black President of the US, is said to have a close affinity with things Indian. He carries a miniature figure of Lord Hanuman for luck and had a picture of Mahatma Gandhi placed in his Senate office.

One article from The Economic Times drew some interesting numbers about Obama's massive leveraging of the Internet:

In total, more than 3 million people donated for Obama, twice as many as any other presidential candidate in history. The Democrat has 2.5 million supporters on his page on a social networking site, and more than 1.5 million people signed up at another site created just for the campaign.

As I've said so many times, it's about connecting with your community, establishing trust. From the same article:

“I think the campaign did a great job of making us feel like we were part of a group,” said C J Fonzi, 28, a US consultant living in Hyderabad. Fonzi donated $100 once, and $25 three times.

Here's whats most interesting to me -- how will he use this immense social networking base during his term as President? How will he capitalize on and extend the connective power he's established? The potential and possibilities are enormous as he transitions from a Facebook campaign to the first Facebook Presidency.

What will Obama 2.0 be like?

On The Relevance Of Main Stream Media News Sites

(been sitting on this post for along time, but here it is. Its good to get back in the swing of things!)

Well, by and large, they're just not.

Most MSM news sites across the board in current practice are simply less and less relevant. There seems to be a lack of understanding industry wide of what information people want (and more importantly what people want to *do* with that information), and how they get that information.

The type of content MSM offers and how we offer it (repurposed broadcast material, lack of web 2.0 and reader engagement) matters less and less to an audience that seems to have rediscovered an appetite for news (at least for now) -- but whose pattern of information use is very different than what current MSM is tooled for, both editorially and technologically.

An interesting article that made some new media journalism rounds in the spring was this from the NYT:

Some highlights (bolds mine):

According to interviews and recent surveys, younger voters tend to be not just consumers of news and current events but conduits as well - sending out e-mailed links and videos to friends and their social networks. And in turn, they rely on friends and online connections for news to come to them. In essence, they are replacing the professional filter - reading The Washington Post, clicking on CNN.com - with a social one.

Lauren Wolfe, 25, the president of College Democrats of America: "I'd rather read an e-mail from a friend with an attached story than search through a newspaper to find the story."

Pew Research Center survey: half of respondents over the age of 50 and 39 percent of 30- to 49-year-olds reported watching local television news regularly for campaign news, while only 25 percent of people under 30 said they did.

Fully two-thirds of Web users under 30 say they use social networking sites, while fewer than 20 percent of older users do.

On The New York Times's Web site, the transcript of Obama's speech on race ranked consistently higher on the most e-mailed list than the articles written about the speech.

That last one's very interesting to me, as it echoes earlier experiences of user behavior I capitalized on -- go through the archives on this site to see material on the "fire blog."

I'm speculating that the dip in MSM web traffic may correspond to a spike in news interest by a demographic that uses the web differently. I.E., the total number of web users looking for news has increased - but by a group that doesn't find us useful, so we're a much smaller piece of the pie.

If true, then that's a change from just a few years ago, when studies and a book or two was out touting that no one under 40 was interested in *any* kind of news from any source, web or not.

What's needed is to address a MSM site's potential audience as *every* web user -- we need to have THAT degree of vitality, of usefulness. Look at the bolded NYT bullet points above; I don't think we can afford to ignore that.

Some months ago, Mindy McAdams posed a question about the NYT article on her blog : Where do the journalists fit in?, she asked.

My response was:

By understanding we provide a service of connectivity and engagement and not a product of static content, by understanding our community that we purport to serve (but are so disconnected from) is one of users and not readers, by operating more as a hub and less of a destination, by helping users in their exchange of information.


That's where I'd start, at least.

The web by its nature is a task oriented experience: people want to go to the web to *do* something,as I've posted here before. Its in the doing. As Odza put it on a NAA thread:

My current understanding of what people want: solutions. Try solving a problem for your readers. A big problem. Corrosive politics. Ineffective government. Water scarcity. Over-development. Education. What to buy and what not to. (Your ad sales people will love that one.) Of course, you should solve small problems too, because that’s how you build trust and credibility, but I believe people really will be motivated to participate and stay involved if they can see signs of progress and true caring on your part. The big problems don’t get solved easily. You’ll have plenty of opportunity to build a conversation among your audience members, and the bigger the problem, the more people affected by it — addressing the scale issue.

So we should help them find *solutions* that we can help them *do*, whether its on a host of large scale issues or simply a more basic problem: directions, to alleveiate boredom, to find information they need to do something else, to share, etc.


The dilemma is twofold:

1) Content MSM Content is less relevant. I'm not convinced that a content diet that's currently so rich in rewritten broadcast scripts and 90 second vid packages straight from broadcasts meets the full scope of digital information behavior patterns. Some of it might -- if it's a resonant subject -- but the mix of this kind of content is far too high, and we're not bringing other modes of information into the picture.

2) Platform Even if we broadened and sharpened the content mix, most MSMs don't have an adequate platform for the user to *do* much with it, to engage with it, to morph it, to share it, to find users of the article with common interest, to create groups around interests or stories, etc.

1) Is more of an editorial and news gathering problem, itself in two parts:

a) the current model of TV news gathering as it applies to web is IMO completely broke; see the post below and the lost remote.com discussion it points to).

b) As I've often posted here, it's also about what matters to whom and why, and MSM doesn't provide enough of that -- or a way for them to make it matter more -- for users to stay repeatedly engaged with. Bobble heads and pet photos are popular and entertaining and certainly have their place (alleviating boredom, fulfilling diversion) but what's popular to people and what's important to people are not the same thing, and we need to provide both. They'll come back again for a game, but are they part of your community? I want to be the indispensable, vital hub.

MSM web editors/content managers need to be thinking along these lines:

What do people want to galvanize and converse around? What raw data can we provide to help them do that? What's their passion, their concern?

What *matters* to them? Given current behaviors as spelled out in the NYT article, then what can we offer worthy enough for them to pass on through their social networks?

Once we've carefully identified what solutions users are looking for, what they're trying to *do*, only then can we devise the right content and social networking technologies to help them do it.

I.E., quit trying to make the user do something useful for our traffic, and instead give the user something they want to do for themselves and their networks.

Newspapers are quick to extinction and the newspaper websites that are surviving are doing so because they're adapting, somewhat, out of desperation. Those that aren't didn't make a sufficient leap to the fundamentally different type of content that is more coherent and useful for a digital user.

TV needs to make its own leap to that fundamentally different mode of content. We need to rely less on the TV operation for web content and develop other independent arenas of discussion, information, utility, sources, and engagement. We should be thinking of the web sites more and more as an independent affiliated information and news source that should stand on its own as a fully functional web presence with its own vitality, with access to TV reporting and video as a partnered source -- and less as the afterthought or pixelated extension of the TV operation.

That's a radical shift, I know. But IMO, anything less than a fundamental paradigm shift is a blueprint for extinction, much like the current "adapt or die" crisis in newspapers.

Lost Remote on TVs and papers

I initially missed this great post on Lost Remote.com comparing TV and newspaper web sites. Having been in both fields, its spot on, and the comments that follow are a great discussion and certainly echo my experiences past and present.

Sotuth Asian PJ and SMS update

In my survey/update on Indian PJ last month, I made mention of the seemingly vanished citzenxpress.com. I did hear back from Dr. Dinesh Sawat Singh in comment to that post:

I am dr. Dinesh Singh Rawat a leader of an Indian Young researchers who had started Citizenxpress.com in 2006.
We had off line our dream venture in july 2007 for economical crisis because in India we could not able to get successful business model for CJ Venture.
As all other Citizen media ventures
subsidiaries of traditional media groups thus majority depend money from others resources.where we were lacking.
So we have deiced to generate money by knowledge as researchers(Citizen Research Foundation)
along with building Citizens' media strong in India.
We are in this month coming with our citizen media venture under
domain name www.citizensxpress.com
This our fully self sustain business model based Citizen Media initiative.

The CRF page has a couple of recent posts and feels like its ready to launch with some more detailed news; the new domain Dr. Singh mentions isn't loading in as of March 30, but I'll keep checking. Very much looking forward to seeing what comes of this new version of the citizenxpress efforts.

Meanwhile, calcuttacentral.com now gives a page saying the domain has been suspended.

I do see a fair amount of initiatives come and go, and the viability for these ventures to remain afloat -- what particular difficulties are encountered in sustaining or creating an Indian business model for PJ -- is something to explore in detail.

The SMS dialogue continues over at the ICT4Peace site with Sanjana's very nice response to some thoughts I posted here.


Miscellany: still thinking on what will constitute good SMS journalism, organizing bookmarks and updating/restructuring my RSS reader feeds to blog more efficiently and frequently.

on EveryBlock

Kudos to EveryBlock, the initiative from Holovaty and his team using geocoded civic data, news info and other information to give very localized information.

I like this. While theres not a UGC component, Holovaty has an interesting answer to this in an interview on Fimoculous:

In time, Rex. In time. :-)

If we'd launched with awesome reader-contributed content features, that's all that people would be talking about. "EveryBlock: a user-generated news site!" People are very quick to make judgments about a Web site, pigeonholing it into some generic "user-generated" or "Web 2.0" bucket. I wanted to send the message that our focus is on providing a newspaper for your block. The tone was set. Any subsequent features that we add -- whether they involve local voices or not -- are in support of that core goal.

I understand and respect the idea of keeping it focused - it is what it is - but at least I'd like to see more of a commitment in collecting and inviting user-supplied data. There is a link offering to submit info:

Have you found any news nearby that we don't know about? Please submit it.

But this doesn't appear on every page (I had to go back several pages to find it again when trolling through New York neighborhoods, for example.

Not every type of Everyblock information is the kind of data Id want a cell phone alert for, but theres some that I would, so SMS alerts might be something they could look into.

I think its greatest innovation is geocoding all kinds of data and information, specifically getting geocoding on unstructured data ( regular news articles). Seems that some interesting relationships and partnerships are developing with Everyblock as more news organizations add that kind of info to their stories.

Everyblock might not need to add a UGC component itself, as other media outlets and social networks can use this info to build their own conversations and dialogues around the data, letting Everyblock continue to develop in its own trajectory. On the other hand, there's no theoretical reason why they can't develop that dialogue themselves.

Wondering why there is no public school data. Almost every single school has its own web site, sometimes rudimentary, sometimes updated or not, but they are there -- often with calendars of events, etc. Surprised thats not an element, and am curious on the reason for its exclusion.

More on SMS and Sri Lankan news

I got a couple of nice comments on the post about JNW's SMS service for Sri Lankan news.

Sanjana Hattotuwa launched a citizen journalism intitative in SriLanka thats doing well at http://www.groundviews.org/. I'll explore this effort fully in a post of its own soon.

Sanjana also keeps a blog at ICT for Peacebuilding (ICT4Peace), where he offered this more detailed overview of JNW. Its a great, accurate read, Im inclined to agree with his assessment re some lack of clarity surrounding JNW's web presentation. He also tipped me to Rasasa, an app that will send your favorite RSS feeds to your IM messenger, email, or cell.

As Sanjana put it, "JNW's great, but is still just scratching the surface of what's really possible using SMS and the web." Sanjana has written several articles on JNW's effort throughout his blog ( links to other posts are at the end of his article I linked to).

The editor of JNW himself, Chamath Ariyadasa, chimed in on my earlier post:

Yes, its an interesting exploration, and after 23 months of dire financial issues, I am happy to say that we are now lifting our heads out of the water.

With agreements with five telecom operators and a possible sixth, we may pass 100,000 subscriber mark fairly quickly.

I am keen to get outside perspective on what we are doing, and would appreciate your opinion on the following:

I think a key benefit of SMS is empowerment, and I don't see any downside to SMS except varying degrees of choice that can be offered to the public.

What I mean is that, if I wasn't a journalist and I had a reuters terminal at home I would feel fairly confident that I was in on the news, and that the news came to me rather than the other way around. Ofcourse I would be paying $1,000 per month for the dish version.

We are offering a similar service for Rs30 per month ($0.30). I am sure our subscriber base is now islandwide, which means almost anyone with a phone can now afford it.

Incidentally, Sri Lanka reached 8 million mobile subscribers out of a population of 19 million recently.

A big constraint though is user friendly vernacular fonts for mobiles, but I hope that changes soon.

If I'm reading the remarks correctly, I think the issue of varying degrees of choice can easily be met, and has Sanjana has pointed out throughout his various pieces, JNW could offer specific feeds based on interest:

JNW, in trying to be all things to everyone (which may have worked as a new startup) will soon begin to frustrate its subscribers with an overload of information that is mass produced and sent to everyone, with no real emphasis on the sectors they each work in.

While the quote was in relation to a podcast app from JNW, the principal is the same.

While location isn't always a factor in news relevance as Ive posted before, it can be, especially in a breaking news /alerts environment -- so feeds by region may be a feature to add. Question is if there are enough journalists for adequate geographical coverage, which is where teaming up with an initiative like Groundviews could be fruitful.

Question for techno developers ( I am not one):Can GPS data be encoded in SMS? As cell phones become more and more capable, I can envision a service where if Im driving through the countryside or across regions i can be alerted to news or info relevant to whatever location Im in at the moment. I know this is possible via other web data, - i.e., you can set up a similar service on your Blackberry or on web access from your phone -- but for phones or areas without mobile web - i.e., just SMS technology - can this be done?

JNW faces some competition from Ada Derana and Reuters arrangements with other mobile service operators as evidenced by reading through this thread , which to me opens up a whole new world of 2.0 journalism: what factors define quality in this mode? What makes good SMS journalism? what do people want to do with news received on their mobile?

Its a whole new question worth thinking about.

Newspapers, community, relevance

Interesting discussion on journo prof's Mindy McAdams' blog about audience and community.

Mindy posts the following after reading a Clay Shirky post:

Newspapers used to be centered in communities. Now they are mostly not. People in much of North America don’t even live in communities.

Is this why newspapers are dying? Because there are no communities?

I heard about someone asking a speaker how we could get young people to read newspapers. Reportedly, the speaker took rather a long pause before replying. When she did speak, her answer was essentially, "We can’t."

This makes a lot of people feel sad. Others feel angry.

But this is not about newspapers.

It's about what Shirky said: Audiences are not the same as communities, and communities are made up of people talking to one another.

What does a community need? How should journalists supply what communities need?

A lot of responses to her question echoed a consensus that communities haven't gone, but they've changed -- and newspapers aren't catching up.

In one of my first ever blog posts here I was examining why newspapers were unaware of the very own disconnect with their geographic community.

In that post I defined news simply as events that matter. Part of the function for journalism and bloggers alike, then, is to answer: what is it that matters, to whom does it matter, how much does it matter, and why.

Note that nowhere in that equation is "location" a factor: relevance is not geographically dependent. (this is why Im also very passionate about including international news on your local site and making it relevant).

As others have posted , communities increasingly gather around issues or interests. Even your neighborhood association or city council district is driven by issues and problems for that location, rather than some perceived inherent birthright magically bestowed by virtue of its GPS coordinates alone.

So the what and where are a lot less important now than the why and to whom and how much. Newspapers dont -- and wont -- get that.

Again, traditional journalism utterly fails in an evolving social structure, and Im not sure if J schools are correcting it.

The traditional 5Ws and H of journalism - who, what, where, when, why, and how - always focus on the event: who did something, what happened, where and when did it happen, why and how did it happen etc. It doesn't fully take into account the relevance, the degree of shared interest.

Sure the regular 5W and H is necessary, but its nuts and bolts,its surface. In this day and age, thats your start point, not the end game.

Do it again, but for each of those Ws and H, make a substitution of relevance for occurrence, and see how your view of it changes:

What matters in this story? why does it matter? and to whom does it matter? ( and why does it matter to them, which is different than why it may be relevant in a larger sense). Once you identify that "whom", then ask how is it relevant to them, which in turn poses the questions of a) what else may be important to that group and/or b) what other groups may find that issue important. i.e., what diversity surrounds the identified community or the identified issue?

Always ask who else, what else, look for the connective tissues.

Who's The Expert?

Gary Kromer of the Ft Worth Star Telegram posted to a trades list serv these two article links:
One, a NYT article about a Philadelphia community journalism initiative; the other as counterpoint is the recent piece in Newsweek proclaiming the community journalism movement to be on the wane.

Former boss Michael Odza pointed out the great response to the Newsweek piece at alwayson , succinctly summarizing that rebuttal:

Basically, the author is confusing brands with experts. Newsweek is a brand, but an individual is an expert, and experts are able to share their expertise online without the need for the superstructure of the traditional news organization.

(BTW, you should check out Odza's blog. Erudite, lean, full of good tips and ideas, and doesnt mine the usual territory. No hes not paying me).

Here was my response to the list (after some slight edits for better continuity with previous posts):

Im surprised that in 2008 this kind of "us vs. them" argument is *still* floating around: its quite 2004.

Even the most mainstream media outlets have snapped to sharing the stage with the public in one form or the other, with such initiatives as CNN's I-report and IBN's CJ Page , both detailed in previous posts, being some of the better examples of mainstream operations doing their take on the professional/nonprofessional symbiosis.

Looking at the CNN effort again is very interesting in light of the branding points brought out in the alwayson piece. While CNN is careful to invite the public, they're equally careful to establish their own brand at the same time by offering the clearly labelled "vetted by CNN" version -- for those who want to suck at the comforting teat of Big Brand -- and the unvetted version.

As a true news partnership, then, it rings a little hollow (kind of like setting your least favorite cousin or in-law at the far end of the dining table at Thanksgiving) but at least they're invited, and thats a start. Its hardly collaborative, though.

Whether its brand preservation, caution, or contempt, I think the degree of respect (or lack thereof) with which mainstream media will treat its particpatory journalism experiments is something to watch for and study (here's an example of why some exposure to semiotics would come in handy).

The extremely cynical view would be that most big mainstream media is so empty in its usefulness that it can only offer the one thing it clings to -- its brand -- but I don't think MSM is quite there -- yet.


Both Newsweek and the alwayson piece talk about the role of experts, but neither mention perhaps the best use of public expertise by a traditionally-organized media operation: MPR's Public Insight Journalism,a project that uses pools of collective public expertise to help inform and support traditional journalism practices. It's a much more working partnership between the public and the news organization that I don't see developed much elsewhere. It has made great strides in transparency, which was my one minor criticism of it when I first came across it. The public experts and the entire process have a lot more public presence than before.

I had a chance to see their work on an interview couple of years back, and I stay in occasional touch. I think they're developing a really cutting edge practice in a quiet way right now.

The concept is now buzzword-friendly and sometimes called "crowdsourcing", but they were the first to do it to my knowledge, and I don't see either their work discussed much nor adopted. Anyone else out there working with this model at all?

Does American TV news engage the user?

Thought I'd look at how major media on this side of the pond stacked up, starting with the main TV network news operations .

CNN's iReport.com is probably the strongest contender for a full fledged American based mainstream participatory model, featuring raw material by users with a layer of social networking features on top such as ranking, profiles, comments etc. Best American intiative so far. I also like their "Impact Your World" page, where you can interact with various charitable initiatives vetted by CNN. However, India's IBN goes a step further by directly showcasing viewer impact in their Citizen Journalism Impact video piece, rather than simply facilitating a passive connection to good works ( see previous post). Thats great, no doubt, but IBN really closes the gap between news , people, and platform.

http://ugv.abcnews.go.com/ ABC's I-Caught is reasonably robust for an American news site,featuring user content in several channels such as news, weather, "out of control", "red-handed", politics, etc., adding a little more depth of purpose than the usual pet and vacation viewer photos.


Fox has uAsk/uReport , again a rather standard-issue application of viewer photos and videos, but not well promoted or capitalized.

MSNBC has these as well, but the Newsvine feature is an interesting user application, where people can "seed" links to other stories they find of interest.

I didn't see any opportunity for user engagement at CBS, but perhaps I missed it.

Anything else I missed or should know about? Give a comment, share your favorites. I'll peruse what other network and print operations are up to in a later post.

SMS focal point for Sri Lankan news site

Deserving its own post, the most intriguing site I found in this latest round of South Asian web news developments is Jasmine News Wire Sri Lanka, a news operation primarily written for SMS -- i.e., the internet comes second in their priority:

JNW provides timely, well-sourced news headlines via text messages to reach you on your mobile phone wherever you may be.

Concisely written text news reach you faster and more conveniently than news delivered via other media such as internet, radio or television. As JNW news is delivered to your mobile, you won’t miss key news headlines and events when they happen.

At all times, JNW aims to be a facilitator of sharing news, views and experiences by citizens. i.e. JNW aims to be driven by public news priorities and needs.

Started by a group of journalists, JNW reports Sri Lankan news for Sri Lankans and those who want to be informed of happenings in the island.

You can text comments and feedback to a general SMS blog (visible on the main page or you can click here for its details) as well as make regular internet-based comments to their short headlines. You can also see all the comments together; clicking on the comment text takes you to the headline article. They also have a citizen journalism website with longer articles at http://www.groundviews.org/ .

This is full tilt Twittering in a way ( how many news operations are Twittering breaking news? I know I am), and I think more and more news organizations will develop platforms like this. This is Web 2.5... Ive been saying for a while that standard web sites for news -- as we now think currently think and wring our hands over -- in 2 to 5 years will be less and less important in favor of more mobile applications like this.

New changes in India's participatory journalism landscape

A few new faces -- and some disappearing ones -- since I last looked at PJ developments in India.

Merinews is thriving wonderfully, with a lot of content and contributions. A purely participatory site, Merinews has finally gotten some well-deserved traction and shows some great commitment to social change, as in their special initiative Citizen's Manifesto 2067.

In the page outlining the project, Merinews CEO and Editor-in-Chief Vipul Kant Upadhyay identifies still-outstanding major social and economic issues in India even has the country booms ahead in progress. Upadhyay states:

"It's time that citizens of India came forward to identify the challenges ahead, line up solutions to tackle them and then charge forward towards making that very critical difference by creating the blueprint for the next 60 years of India’s growth."

Towards this goal, Team merinews has taken up the challenge to create the 'Citizens' Manifesto - a people defined roadmap of India till 2067.'

We call upon every Indian to come forward and join this initiative. Your fire of patriotism and the passion to realise a dream for yourself, your society and in turn your country is what is needed to make this happen. You can submit your suggestions, thoughts, views, ideas, issues and their solutions."

He imparts some focus:

"We are putting together a team of concerned Indians hailing from various walks of life to steer this campaign and invite you to join this campaign.

You can contribute by writing about issues that go unnoticed. In case you are finding it difficult, let us know. We will write it together.

Identify the challenges the country faces today and write to us about them. Share your thoughts about the probable solutions or let us find it out together with fellow citizens.

Your suggestions are valuable. Please write your views and thoughts to make this campaign more meaningful click here to send your suggestions."

Merinews will have to not lose grip on this focus and steer the discussions to be very solutions - oriented, as we learned from our DWI project.



Citizenxpress.com seems to have vanished, and its founding organization, Citizen Research Foundation, still has a web presence but on a very unstable platform ( most links to other articles within the site don't work) and a last update of Nov. 25, 2007. Ive emailed the proprietor for an update.


One project that's new to me -- but that also needs a bit of updating -- is by Sweta Singh, Program Coordinator at Apeejay Institute of Mass Communication. Her post at the newassignment.net site details an initiative empowering women village council leaders in Bihar to do a video blog:

"Citizen Journalism is new to India and professionals are still grappling with its theoretical and practical framework. But if it is anything ‘for, by and of’ the people’, then it is sure to bring about a sea change if not a revolution in the Indian mediascape.

There are quite a few initiatives that are being experimented to listen to citizens and talk to them about them so that it helps them better their lives. I have also undertaken one such initiatives, ‘MYOWN’ to train women panchayat leaders in Bihar, one of the most backward states of India to talk about their issues and assist them in publishing a video blog so that their concerns are highlighted.

This project is experimental and as of now self-funded. The project is of tremendous importance and holds promises for the citizens, the people of Bihar who live in villages."

While the assignment.net post is quite recent, the link to the project itself isn't as current. I'd love an update and to see some of the video results of this very important work.

MyNews.in is also a strong presence, and has a Hindi language counterpart at http://www.merikhabar.com/ . The platforms remind me somewhat of citzenxpress, but I can't confirm if its the same organization or not at this time. They have a full compliment of citizen reports, blogs, live chat, forums, and contributor profiles. I was particularly impressed by their detailed guidelines on their faq page, which includes a Reporter's Code of Ethics and Citizen Reporter's Agreement. Not many PJ initiatives set forth expectations or standards, so it's nice to see.

There are a few new PJ startups as well, mainly CPlash! , whitedrums.com and also calcuttacentral.com ; I'll be watching these as they develop.


Turning to mainstream news organizations, Times Of India keeps its hand in with its My Times, My Voice page, but currently doesnt have anything quite as robust as last year's India Poised initiative, detailed in a previous post below.

My favorite Indian mainstream site for PJ integration is IBN Live. IBN's greatest strength is in making PJ initiatives matter and relevant. As I often state, its in the doing -- and in the understanding of that doing -- that makes PJ work.

A quick glance throughout IBN's site shows how pervasive their focus on providing users with relevant interactivity is. As India prepares for its annual budget, IBN has a whole series of online pre Budget chats with leaders, budget blogs, and an online poll where you can "Tell us which tax the Finance Minister should do away with in this Union Budget. CNN-IBN will present your wishlist to the FM on your behalf."

They've also launched a new initiative for student blogs, starting in Pune with plans to expand.

Their true spotlight is on their CJ Page , where you can submit video, photo, or text, or fill out an information form in one of four categories:

What can you do?

Fight back
If you are fighting for a cause - corruption, bureaucratic delay or simple high-handedness - CNN-IBN will help you.

Campus CJ
Inviting the youth of the country to come forward and fight for their issues

Save your city
Potholed roads, liquor shop in your locality - are these troubling residents? CNN-IBN will help face the authorities.

Green CJ
A simple green initiative and you could be our Green CJ.

Thats the most direct, open -armed invitation to close the gap and be a public partner that Ive found.

Also check out their weekly video series Citizen Journalism Impact, where they showcase what other viewers have accomplished in their neighborhood.

Closing the gap indeed.

Its sobering and inspiring to look at how seriously people around the world are taking the opportunities provided by information, technology and social use, and making it their own to empower themselves and effect change. In some ways its embarassing that America is so complacent about whatever social ills we have that our profession gets excited by more innocuous forms of viewer engagement like pet photos. Are we lazy , fortunate, complacent, thankful? All of that?

There's a lot we could galvanize our communities around, with the proper application of the proper tools.

Albuquerque Trib R.I.P.

Albuquerque's afternoon daily newspaper, the Albuqerque Tribune, published its final edition Saturday.

The Tribs'website offered some heartfelt closing pieces and analyses (and to its credit, without being overly sentimental or bitter).

Ironically they had one of the better web publishing platforms around (Django/Ellington, developed at Lawrence Kansas under the watchful eye of newspaper internet guru Rob Curley during his tenure there) and were were the only other N.M. newspaper site (outside of the Santa Fe New Mexican) willing to open up to reader comments. While their site will still be active for a month, its a sad indicator that they cant allow commenting anymore.

I would have loved to see the Trib continue as a fully supported online only presence. But somehow, a decision was made not to "go there", and this town's the poorer for it. It was a committed paper with a lot of heart.

As Ive said before, papers will have to adapt or die. That previous post may sound harsh (and in general I stand by it), but here's a case in point for a paper that actually had more editorial acumen and web savvy than most to make that adaptation, which makes its fate particularly touching and frustrating. The operation didn't have to die , because Phil and his staff, it seemed to me, "got it" more than most and did the best with what they had. What they could have done online, had they been given more, is a haunting, unfufilled promise at this point.

Godspeed, good night and good luck to all of the Trib.

looking ahead and back

It has been an intense 3 quarters in the new job at the television station. There's been a lot of basic shoring up and learning the ropes, plus a bit of settling down into what exactly my new role should be. A very strong intake phase.

That said, we've corrected some basic issues, I've sussed out what the station's strengths are, and I have some proposals ready to float by the powers -that-be.

As to television itself, my initial assessment is holding up: broadcast is less desperate and therefore more complacent, but newspapers are still, in my opinion, a dying breed. Those papers who don't adapt will die -- and in a sense deserve to. That may seem harsh, but I have little sympathy for papers who in 2008 still don't snap to the full possibilities of digital information use.

My fear is that television won't be too far behind that curve. I'm determined to not let that happen, at least here.

Television is at least willing, but not nimble: trying to develop and implement innovation at a local level within corporate scale is challenging.

the adventure continues...

India press round-up in a couple of days, stay tuned.