SXSW roundup

by Steve Earley

No, I did not go to South by Southwest Interactive. Grad school made that logistically and financially difficult. Maybe next year. Next best thing, I read about the March 12-16 conference online. I even watched some videos about it, in fact. Add some food from a cart and it's almost like I was there. Here's a roundup of SXSW items I found instructive for those studying and practicing citizen and participatory news.

The power of groups: Testify!

Clay Shirky's still gung-ho about groups. His SXSW address centered on civic sharing, or "taking what the whole group knows tacitly and turning it into a public document." The social technology theorist said governments serve groups, not individuals, and advocated motivating people to share in order to grow the amount of collective information and leverage the power of groups.

An example of civic sharing Shirky, um, shared, is Ushahidi, the Kenyan-developed map wiki in the news recently for its life-saving role following the Haitian and Chilean earthquakes. Ushahidi — Swahili for testimony — aggregates mobile messages and plots them in virtual real time on an interactive online map.

The open source tool was created to track violence in the wake of Kenya's disputed 2007 election and has since been used to track unrest and medicine stockouts elsewhere in Africa and to monitor elections in India, Mexico, Lebanon and Afghanistan, among other uses.

Ushahidi could revolutionize humanitarian and military efforts. The world saw what it can do after a natural disaster. A New York Times piece last week hypothesized about using Ushahidi to find Osama bin Laden.

Ushahidi's journalistic applications are innumerable. (Citizen journalists invented the tool, in fact.) The Washington Post, for one, used it to map snow-removal. It's easy to see how it could be used to cover crime, the environment, large festivals like SXSW and a host of other topics.

Breaking: Wikipedia
great spot news source

Journalists are hesitant to use Wikipedia as a breaking news source because it can be edited by anyone. They can't trust that what's posted there is accurate, they say. The WikiMedia Foundation's Moka Pantages (pictured right) told a SXSW audience that news professionals are thinking about it all wrong.

Because its content can be edited by everyone, and is edited by hundreds to thousands of individuals, Pantages argued, Wikipedia is a more trustworthy starting point for breaking news information than traditional reports, which are typically reviewed by only a handful of editors.

When Wikipedia is compared with traditional sources, she added, the online encyclopedia faces a double standard.

"Traditional media get bits of breaking news wrong all the time, but we accept that as part of the game," she said, according to ReadWriteWeb. "To vilify Wikipedia for the same errors sets unequal standards and besides, you'll likely never see the same level of transparency in traditional media about where it went wrong."

A Seed is planted. What will grow?

This year's festival was supposed to be a big coming out party for AOL's three-month-old Seed, a beta site that turns anyone with a Web connection into a potential contributor to the company's 80-some sites.

Seed, numerous press accounts reported, was to get interviews with all 2,000 bands playing at SXSW's music portion, providing contributors with suggested questions and paying them $50 a pop. (As MediaBistro put it: "Not a great rate for full-time freelancers" but "workable" for amateurs "looking to have fun while amassing some clips.")

As the music festival winded down, Saul Hansell, the former New York Times reporter running Seed, told Business Insider that AOL had published interviews with 80 percent of "the bands that are still playing." Hansell characterized the experiment as a success, saying he had been "a little sloppy" in how he talked about the project and never expected to run interviews from all 2,000 bands.

Whatever the final tally ends up being, it's nothing any newsroom could muster with staff or traditional freelancers. On quantity, I'll give AOL a passing grade. But what about quality?

The interviews I browsed clearly had gone through at least some editing and most were entertaining. But on balance they kinda left me thinking "You get what you pay for." A lot of interviews lacked a clear news peg or hook. There were also style mistakes (not hyphenating hip-hop) and uninspired writing (using the word "unique" twice in the same sentence).

What concerned me most was the verbatim Q&A format most of the pieces employed. Even with recorders, quoting people word-for-word is difficult for full-time journalists. What degree of precision can Seed reasonably expect from its stringers?

The issues discussed above lessened my experience. But, I'm a former copy editor. How much are average music fans really going to care about or even notice these things? They're just going to be happy to see fresh, reasonably well-written profiles on so many of the artists from one of the nation's premier music festivals. As long as "army-ant journalism," as some detractors label projects like Seed, doesn't price out serious writing and reporting, it's a tune I can listen to.

A blog blurb about context (irony noted)

The news never sleeps. It never has. But now the organizations who cover it barely do either. In an insatiable "What's-happening-now" news ecosystem, context, it might be said, is an endangered species.

Nurturing contextual narratives on an increasingly episodic Web was the subject of SXSW's "Future of Context" panel.

"Faced with a flood of headlines on an ever-increasingly variety of topics, we shut off," panel organizer Matt Thompson said in remarks prepared for delivery. "We turn to the news that doesn't require much understanding — crime, traffic, weather — or we turn off the news altogether."

Using the health care debate as an example, Thompson said taking "maybe 10 minutes" to fill in the explanatory details usually left out of reports would make the issue "a lot easier to understand."

On his blog, panelist Jay Rosen (pictured left) compared the situation to a computer receiving continuous updates for software that was never installed.

Among the solutions offered on the panel's Web site is an idea that's come up before: Replacing the article or story as the building block of news. News consumers, the site suggests, should be able to follow topics like they follow Twitter users. Topic streams would summarize any updates since the user last checked in and include a "Wikipedia-like entry" summarizing the entire topic.

A more technical prescription is to develop a uniform context transfer protocol. The way I understand it, this basically means providing a standardized way for content to talk to other content on the Web, in turn revealing relationships.

Those are just two possibilities. There are plenty more to read about and comment on on the panel's site.

Think they've pre-written the obit?

Journalists are notoriously morbid. So, I suppose being on a panel forecasting the death of your own newspaper is all in a day's work.
That's exactly how New York Times business columnist David Carr spent his day Saturday when he joined mostly new media representatives in the session "Media Armageddon: What Happens When the New York Times Dies."

The discussion itself, which also included Markos Moulitsas of Daily Kos, Amy Langfield of NewYorkology.com, Greg Beato of Reason Magazine and moderator Henry Copeland of BlogAds, adopted a tone of if not when, according to online accounts, but by no means sugarcoated the Times' and other legacy outlets' predicament.

Most of the audience indicated it would miss the Times, but few indicated they'd pay for its online content.

There was plenty of talk about advertising revenue, reporting staffs, social media presences and other more or less tangible things. These things can help news organizations be successful but they are not unequivocally perquisites for their success. What old and new media organizations alike non-negotiability require is something wholly intangible: credibility. If audiences don't think a news organization is credible, it won't be a news organization for long.

Both Carr and Moulitsas, whose old-versus-new-media back-and-forth dominated the session, according to coverage, made thoughtful arguments challenging the credibility of the other's medium.

Carr, who characterized his role on the panel as "MSM piñata," allowed that the blogosphere's crowdsourced approach has helped surface under-covered stories but said the motivations behind this work can be difficult to assess.

"The problem with assembling bits from everywhere, you don't know what it's attached to and what interests are driving it," Carr (pictured right) said, according to a blog post by Research Triangle social media manager David B. Thomas. "One of the advantages of having a tent pole or several tent poles, you do know where they stand."

Moulitsas too offered qualified praise for his counterpart. He acknowledged that bloggers need the traditional media, especially the Times, which he said he uses as a barometer for which stories are important. But the blogger turned legacy media's institutional strength on its head, suggesting it creates a competitive disadvantage by promoting lazy journalism.

"Citizen journalists don't have that built in credibility so they have to prove themselves every day, do good sourcing, and link to the source materials," Moulitsas said, also according to Thomas's post. "Judith Miller was able to just say that her sources told her Iraq had weapons of mass destruction."

A final quote from Moulitsas addresses a crucial caveat, for both old and new media, raised in a question from an audience member: That audiences must possess enough media literacy to judge a news source's credibility.

"Previously, only certain people had the opportunity to try to convince the gullible," he said, "now everyone does."