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?