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Citizen journalism in Asia

Live from Kuala Lumpur, Guardian blogs editor is blogging about workshops with editors and journalists from across Asia about the citizen media revolution.

Hello from Kuala Lumpur and three days of citizen journalism workshops, organised by IFRA Asia, with editors and journalists from across Asia including Malaysia, Singapore, India and Thailand.

Digital pioneer Steve Yelvington and multimedia guru Robb Montgomery are helping with the workshops, and I'm adding my own part about using blogs, social networks and digital tools like Skype to improve and expand journalism.

Steve said that he is: "Basically rethinking of what we use the internet for." We originally just created newspapers online, but now, he and his colleagues are thinking about what the internet is best suited for in terms of news.

If you want to know about what is going on in citizen media (or media in general), send me some questions, and I'll put them to the participants.

Robb Montgomery recorded a video on his way to Kuala Lumpur. He also talked about the new pages in passport. A lot of the participants were working on merging their print and online operations as well as adding multimedia. Of the 20 or so participants, four or five worked primarily on their print editions.

A couple of the participants work for STOMP - the mobile user-generated content network for the Straits Times. They are taking tips and multimedia contributions from the public. I love this feature: English as it is Broken. It is both a light-hearted look at how English gets lost in translation and also shares tips on how to improve English. (It's a kinder version of Engrish.)

I'll be writing over the next three days. If you have any questions or things that you'd like to know, let me know. I'll get answers.

What is citizen journalism?

Steve has stopped using the term because he didn't like the separation between being a citizen and being a journalist. He also didn't like the baggage with the term journalism. Editors think that citizens will adhere to all of the standards the professional journalists. It also leaves out a lot of passions and interests that people have that may fall outside of the traditional news agenda.

He also got a lot of calls from editors after launching Bluffton Today because they wanted to lay off the well paid journalists. That's not the point.

Robb liked the term 'participatory journalism'. We don't care if mobile phone, YouTube, Apple TV, blogs or other forms of feedback.

One of the Malaysian participants said that citizen media was slow to take off because of the history of government control in the region. Two weeks ago, the government assigned a task force to look at bloggers and their impact. The New Straits Times launched a lawsuit against bloggers for defamation earlier this year.

Another Malaysian participant said that the ruling party was in the process of setting up a 500-strong cyberwriters group to counter the allegations of bloggers. He'd rather the ministers simply learn how to blog.

Steve had a really good point:

Our role (journalists' role) in society is changing. We used to be the source of information, but now there is information flowing around us. Some of it is bad.

How do journalists respond to it? How do we help people navigate this flood information?

Steve later said that because news has been episodic and periodic that we have failed to understand the 'permanent value' of some of the information that. "Thinking about 'olds' as well as 'news'".

Over the next few days, I'll be writing a bit about the sessions but also interviewing the participants to talk to them about media in Asia.

Publishing 2.0

Robb started off talking about some of the changes in media. People now expect up-to-date information, on demand, free and disposable. "Young media creatures are multitaskers and learned HTML in grade school."

He talked about mash-up projects such as the transit strike mash-up created by the New York Times. He also high-lighted a video aggregation project in Virginia, Hampton (I think that is the URL, but the ISP is having a bit of trouble resolving it here. Things that make you, hmmmm...)


One journalist from India talked about how he was working with nine editions in print and online. They have only started the transition, and right now, they have a limited staff dealing with 'converged coverage'. They have three converged reporters. They send them out with the Nokia N93 multimedia phones to collect material. In the future, they will combine the online and print staff. There is a lot of apprehension in the print newsroom, he said. Some of the younger reporters are excited.

In Malaysia, the National Union of Journalists is protesting, one of the editors said. If they take pictures and produce extra content, they believe they should get paid more. Management has responded that either they adapt to the new reality or they get another job. This week they are trying to change the thinking and communicate that "print is just another channel". They identify stories the day before that will need audio or video. Many younger reporters have cellphone cameras and are excited to go out. Some of the older reporters still place more emphasis on print. They still think the prestige is there and the the new media focus is just a whim driven by management.

They also send SMS alerts to their readers. Their most talked about SMS alerts are Metro based, he said. The most relevant SMS alerts are very local, very tiny.

A Thai journalist with the Nation said they are fortunate because they also have a TV station so that they can get video. Some of the print reporters have resisted saying that they haven't been trained, and The Nation is now providing them training. The online section sits directly in the newsroom to work directly.

Another Malaysian journalist said that due to lack of a business model or lack of revenue from online that online hasn't been a focus. And newspaper readership is still growing, 5% in the last year.

Steve Yelvington said that one of his groups newspapers in the United States now makes 21% of its revenue online. However, he added that many of the journalists at the paper don't know that because they don't talk about the business enough.

Five years ago, Clark Gilbert in the United States did a study showing that the most successful online operations were separate. They felt liberated, and they had a clearly defined profit and loss state, creating a sink or swim mentality. (You can find a list of Clark Gilbert's papers here.)

How mainstream media can interoperate with citizen media

Steve Yelvington is leading one of the last sessions of the day. He started off with a couple of quotes, one from Wikipedia about journalism, and this one:




Both quotes were from Thomas Jefferson, holding up seemingly contradictory points of view. He then rattled off one quote after another of the mainstream media in the United States condemning bloggers. He wanted to start a conversation about the point of view of journalists on citizen media.

The criticisms of the web,like the criticisms of the free press are generally valid. At the same time, out of this relatively messy medium, we stand to gain some real benefits.

One member of the audience quoted Sturgeon's Law that said that "90% of everything is crud".

Steve showed a picture of a gate with tire tracks going around the gate, which he compared to the way that information was flowing around the former gatekeepers, the journalists. Now, the internet enables a conversation on a global scale. Journalists need to use the web as a listening post, what people are thinking about, talking about, what their priorities are.

Professional journalists are not normal human beings. We have more education than is the norm is in society. We often come from outside of the community. We often don't relate to the day-to-day concerns of people in our communities. What we cover is often driven by our own process and beat structure rather than what are the concerns of people in our communities. Our work makes the conversation better, and listening to and participating in the conversation makes our work better.

Journalists can listen to the community for leads and report about rumour. Rumor is sometimes true, but it is also sometimes false. We need to go in and correct rumour if necessary. We need to step in, online, in real-time, not wait for the next edition of the paper. We served as truth watch, Steve says, which was different than what was done before.

Dan Gillmor's developed a conversational method. After some initial reporting, he would write a blog post letting people what he knew and what he thought about it, but he also asked his readers what he should do to take the story further. Who should he interview? What questions should he ask? He might have to repeat that cycle, but by the end, he would be ready to write the piece for the Sunday newspaper. In the end, the piece would be much richer and better reported than before the process.

It doesn't apply to every possible story, but he said that journalists should look for opportunities to apply this method. He suggested that media companies can work with citizen media by facilitating, convening and hosting. Media can host wikis, blogs, photo and video galleries as well as social networks. Media can also aggregate, publicise and highlight citizen media through links and indexing them.

In Singapore, one of the participants said that the media needed to end the perception that it was blogs versus the media. She said that in Singapore, the media was seen as the voice of the government, whereas blogs were seen more as the voice of the people, or the voice of dissent.

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