"The People Formerly Known as Audience"

Using Social Media for Community Engagement

Andy Garvin - NPR
http://www.pbs.org/learningnow -blog on internet education tools
http:://andygarvin.com/complibraries.ppt

Andy Garvin created his first blog in 1994 - he now directs NPR's web strategy for using social networks to enhance viewer/listener experience.

Brief recent history of the news media:

Traditional media - to be a player you had to be a stakeholder - a publisher or broadcaster, or you had to rely on a stakeholder's media to get your message out.

Web 1.0 - to produce content you needed to have or hire skills like html authoring and promotion

Web 2.0 - offers tools for anyone to organize and create media and publish content
"Read-Write Web" and "We Media" are other terms for web 2.0 - the mass democratization of content - examples include http://blip.tv/, http://epnweb.org/ , http://youtube.com/ - all online communities where people are encouraged to use and share each other's ideas.

Eric Ginsberg was ahead of me on this one - he shared http://creativecommons.org/ - http://flickr.com/ is a similar site popular in libraryland.

Internet tools can have a powerful effect

How powerful is this new democratized news media?

• Did the "macaca" youtube clip cause George Allen's election loss? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r90z0PMnKwI
• Blogs influencing policy http://e-democracy.org/ - Minnesota e-debate
• VoteGuide - Center for Citizen Media - volunteers filmed every candidate appearance in a district, tagged and modularized the discussion and broadcast by topic. http://citmedia.org/
  

Democratization

Data from Pew Internet and American .Life Project - 48 million Americans post online, 1 in 12 blog, 1 in 4 share original content - young people are more likely to post content - Latinos and African Americans are a little more likely than whites to share content. Educated well-to-do young white males no longer predominate - it's a big shift of power to a more real-world demographic http://www.pewinternet.org/report_display.asp?r=184

A brief history of blogs

• From early 1990s to present, the progression has been from linear to interactive format, and from bland to interesting presentation.
• Pew estimates 60-100 million blogs online, Garvin suggests there are probably an additional 60 - 80 million Chinese blogs, or more Chinese blogs than there are English speaking people.
• Bloggers have been critical of the media for bias, pandering, etc.; the traditional media has in the past criticized the credibility and trustworthiness of bloggers.
• But Garvin says no - war is over - media/blog collaboration and "networked journalism" is becoming the norm - see Jeff Jarvis (http://www.buzzmachine.com/ or Jay Rosen (http://journalism.nyu.edu/pubzone/weblogs/pressthink/ on"ways for the media to work with "The people formerly known as the audience."
• Mainstream media is embracing web 2.0 to improve transparency, create public dialogue , tapping into public knowledge and creativity, increase profit - but "people are not always willing to share how they make their sausage"

Some examples of media/blogger cooperation:
"Every citizen is a reporter"

• NPR now does open piloting - invite the public to help create new broadcast programming, or comment on proposed programming, like a focus group open to the pubic - examples Rough Cuts and Bryant Park - "opening the kimono" - http://www.npr.org/blogs/roughcuts/
• Open Source:
  Opens editorial process to the public, and invites users to submit and comment on programming ideas - public radio show "blog" with community members pitching an idea, supporting and debating it, eventually seeing it produced. http://www.radioopensource.org/
• Talk of the Nation has a similar concept - http://www.npr.org/templates/rundowns/rundown.php?prgId=5
  
• BBC Have Your Say is an uncensored bulletin board - comments can be rated by other users, allowing BBC to see what resonate most with the community - the actual news stories on the site incorporate quotes from the public. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/talking_point/default.stm
• CNN Ireport citizen journalism report with Blip.tv - the best news clips are aired.
  http://www.cnn.com/exchange/ireports/topics/forms/breaking.news.html
• USA today embeds social networking across the site syndicating blogs from around the internet - http://www.usatoday.com/blog-index.htm
• DC World Have Your Say - helps create a community of people who feel like they have a vested interest in the news site. http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/worldhaveyoursay/
• OhMyNews - Korean online news service that dedicates 20% of site to citizen journalism - invites public content from volunteers, who if they do well, will be paid as stringers and correspondents. http://english.ohmynews.com/

Examples of networking news sites

• Harvard global voices - now being acquired by Reuters - uses volunteers and paid bloggers all over the world who summarize a local blogosphere on a daily bases - http://www.globalvoicesonline.com/

The last word, from Dan Gillmor: I take it for granted, for example, that my readers know more than I do—and this is a liberating, not threatening, fact of journalistic life.