Congrats to Jeff Jarvis on leaving Advance.net and pursuing his passion – news and citizen’s media.

I’ve been meaning to dig into the Eclipse Rich Client Platform for a while and Martin Perez’s Weblog provides a nice set of links to get started.

Citizen journalism, also known as “participatory journalism,” is the act of citizens “playing an active role in the process of collecting, reporting, analyzing and disseminating news and information,” according to the seminal report We Media: How Audiences are Shaping the Future of News and Information, by Shayne Bowman and Chris Willis. They say, “The intent of this participation is to provide independent, reliable, accurate, wide-ranging and relevant information that a democracy requires.” [1] (http://www.hypergene.net/wemedia/weblog.php?id=P36)

“Public journalism” can refer to this journalism work by ordinary people, or it can mean certain work or aspects of work by professional journalists. The latter meaning is also often called “civic journalism”.

Citizen journalism usually involves empowering ordinary citizens — including traditionally marginalized members of society — to engage in activities that were previously the domain of professional reporters. “Doing citizen journalism right means crafting a crew of correspondents who are typically excluded from or misrepresented by local television news: low-income women, minorities and youth — the very demographic and lifestyle groups who have little access to the media and that advertisers don’t want,” says Robert Huesca, an associate professor of communication at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas.

Citizen journalists may be activists within the communities they write about. This has drawn some criticism from traditional media institutions such as The New York Times, which have accused proponents of public journalism of abandoning the traditional goal of objectivity.

Civic journalism refocuses the mission of the news media. According to Edward M. Fouhy of the Pew Center for Civic Journalism, “It is an effort to reconnect with the real concerns that viewers and readers have about the things in their lives they care most about — not in a way that panders to them, but in a way that treats them as citizens with the responsibilities of self-government, rather than as consumers to whom goods and services are sold. It takes the traditional five w’s of journalism — who, what, when, where, why — and expands them — to ask why is this story important to me and to the community in which I live?”

Wikipedia: Citizen journalism

Business2blog: Newsgator Buying Bradbury. Newsgator’s well known online service coupled with one of the leading desktop readers. Lots of possibilities here.

Related:

Chris Pirillo interview with Nick Bradbury (FeedDemon) and Greg Reinacker (FeedDemon).
Year of making money off of blogs and RSS continues

Om Malik’s Broadband Blog: Tuning into MediaTuner. MediaTuner is a Flash based RSS reader that attempts to break new ground for ease of use using multimedia – video, podcasts, torrents – in RSS feeds.

Its a forgone conclusion that this experiment will be watched very closely by those who are hoping to capitilize on emergent journalism. I’m still not entirely convinced that citizen journalism will ever be able to operate on a for-profit model. Nevertheless, if anyone can succeed at this, its Gillmor. Its not that Dan has any special powers, or secret knowledge; rather, Dan simply has the rare skill of knowning how to listen. Unlike most of these startups, Dan is not creating an organization, and inviting people to participate. Rather, Dan appears to be inviting people to create an organization, and is offering resources to help make it happen.

Dan Gillmor & Grassroots Media Launch 1st Project | Nick Lewis: The Blog

Nick quotes Dan on saying he’s a Host and not an Editor. We’ve been using broken terminology at PF. I need to change that. That’s closer to the role our volunteers take. Never is an editor to edit a participant’s post – and I guess that’s implied by the title “Editor” isn’t it?

October 18th, 2004 is the day TV died. That evening, British satellite broadcaster SkyOne – part of NEWS Corp’s BSkyB satellite broadcasting service – ran the premiere episode of the re-visioned 70s camp classic Battlestar Galactica. (That episode, “33,” is one of the best hours of drama ever written for television.)

…SciFi Channel programers had decided to wait until January 2005 (a slow month for American television) to begin airing the series, so three months would elapse between the airing of “33” in the UK, and its airing in the US. Or so it was thought.

The average viewer of the SciFi network is young and decidedly geeky. They are masters of media; they can find ways to get things they shouldn’t have. Thus, a few hours after airing on SkyOne, “33” was available for Internet download. No news there.

…as the Chinese proverb goes, “Many hands make light work.” BitTorrent transforms the creaky and unreliable technology of audiovisual distribution, making it fast and hyper-efficient. BitTorrent creates the conditions for something I’ve termed “hyperdistribution” – a distribution channel which is even more efficient than broadcasting.

That has certainly been the case with Battlestar Galactica. The British aficionados of the series provided torrents for each episode within a few hours of each broadcast. Many fans in the US picked them up and watched them; so did many people in Australia.

While you might assume the SciFi Channel saw a significant drop-off in viewership as a result of this piracy, it appears to have had the reverse effect: the series is so good that the few tens of thousands of people who watched downloaded versions told their friends to tune in on January 14th, and see for themselves. From its premiere, Battlestar Galactica has been the most popular program ever to air on the SciFi Channel, and its audiences have only grown throughout the first series. Piracy made it possible for “word-of-mouth” to spread about Battlestar Galactica.

Mindjack – Piracy is Good?

…The News & Record is closely watching Craigslist and developing plans to defend its market share, said Classified Advertising Manager Catherine Kernels.

“We currently dominate the market and they’re the threat,” she said. “We have a plan that will certainly address it. There are a million different websites that are threatening the market. There’s eBay and Monster, and Craigslist is certainly the biggest monster.”

Similar to its editorial side, which has added editor and reporter blogs to adapt to the demands of the internet age, the News & Record’s classified advertising department now posts all its content online. The newspaper has a dedicated employment classified website called TriadCareers, which is by far the largest listing of job ads in the region, currently listing 821 jobs.

Weekly publications that serve Greensboro boast much smaller classified sections.

Yes! Weekly: National online bulletin board threatens to steal ad revenue.

The article leaves to the end the most salient point: the communities that form on Craigslist sites draw traffic to classifieds. Community is key. Anybody can put up a want ads board. Not anybody can attract a community.