Michael Silberman, EchoDitto

“Political campaigns have been having a ot of trouble figuring out how to empower their volunteers to do actual field work.”

Amy Schatz, Wall Street Journal

“This cycle, news organizations are experimenting…  trying Facebook, etc.  We’re not sure how much this is helping anybody.”

Ellen Miller, Sunlight Foundation

“It has been remarkable to see what has happened on Facebook in the campaigns.”

John Della VOlpe, SocialSphere & Harvard University

“Our main interest is in the Millenial Generation… A big part of the story this year is the impact of this generation.”  The role of technology is one of 3 factors of the impact of this generation, also the post-9/11 generational mentality, and campaigns giving away authority to its grassroots.

Catherine Geanuracos, Live Earth

“I think the Obama campaign’s use of text messaging is impressive… That’s where I see innovation, more and more distributed events.”

Carolyn Washburn, Des Moines Register

“I was deep in the Iowa caucus coverage… the biggest thing that happened for us this year is that, we, our community, and the candidates started being more robust…” in technological innovation, including mapping.

Anthony Wojtkowiak, MTV Street Team

“We’re reporting on political news and… social advocacy… What’s innovative about it… is the way the communication that is coming the people…” who are involved and knowledgeable in their community.”

First question: “There are notable examples of innovation, but the campaigns and nonprofit organizations remain the same.  For example Obama campaign spent most of the money raised on traditional political advertising.  Are we going to see true change in the way politics are waged?”

Amy: “We’ve got a lot more reporters out there, ” professional, bloggers MTV street teams.  “It’s very hard for candidates to ever switch off.”

Catherine: “This tension between wanting to control the message and wanting genuine voices to reach laterally to each other… ”

Ellen: fedspending.org.  Fedspending has already had 7 million searches.  “Our challenge is now to make the [wealth of] information easy to digest.”

Brian: “Are campaigns and organizations tone deaf?” Not seeing the desire for detailed information.

Anthony:  “There’s still some fear for these candidate… The way the information can be controlled is different than how it can be controlled through television… Unfortunately… these candidates aren’t [yet] really talking to us,” when they are asking in depth, interesting questions.

Brian: “Is the fear grounded, or should they change tack and respond for the desire for information.”

John: Campaigns are “always running the last best model… We are still a cycle or two away from when the new generation, Web 2.0, really taking over… We know that young people.. are involved in their community.  What’s the next step in terms of government participation.”

Audience question: “Obama’s been criticized for lack of specifics.  Is that true or is that he is so charismatic that the press is following that story rather than substance and detail from the Obama campaign while they cover the substance of the Clinton campaign?”

Carolyn: They are playing positions that work for them (charisma vs substance).

Anthony: “They’re all putting out detailed policy plans.”

Audience: “Where is the innovation in politics?”  Bush campaigns created an amway model of volunteer outreach.  What about non-electornic organizaing?

John: check out the openness of voter files. Need to connect the online with the offline.

Catherine: Working on mobilizing engaged youth to inspire their parents.

Brian: Are there organizing efforts that resolve “little politics” issues?  Is it being covered.

Michael: They should be opening up, but they are in an unfamiliar media landscape.  Positive example: Obama donor matching program.  A lo of what is happening is happening outside of the format of formal organizations.  Examples: Genocide Intervention Network, Step it Up climate campaign.

Audience: How do you reconcile the click and play “e-activists” and hyper active “web 2.0″ activists with a rank and file, command and control field, GOTV strategy or should you even do that?

Catherine: Ideally, you have a robust enough online-offline strategy, you give people as many doors in to enagage at their level of interest.

Final thoughts:

Anthony: “Something has started.. opportunities to open dialogue about issues.”

Carolyn: “How do we take from what we learn this year, including non-national races… to create a story line and intimacy that makes people want to get involved?”

Catherine: “Stop thinking of peopleas a voter where the interaction ends after the election.”

John: “There are more people who want to be involved than are.  There are still barriers to overcome.”

Ellen: “If I could wave a magic wand… I would say more openness and transparecny [to] dispel notions of corruption…”

Amy: We’ll see “some of these things happening at the national level taken to the local level.”

Michael: “Immediately move from treating folks like fans… and come up with ways to make voters have… valuable roles in campaigns.”

Brian: “I would like to see that in policy development as well.”

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For class, I had my students watch the wonderful documentary, Revolution OS. It features a cast of characters that could people a graphic novel — Richard Stallman the GNUman, Gandolf to Linus Torvalds’ Aragorn. Eric Raymond, a sort of Bilbo Baggins, moving between the Cathedral and Bazaar, Bruce Perens, appearing as an Elrond figure–anyway, the idea is to make the student journalists think about Open Source both as a support system for how they get work done and as a philosophical approach to their work.

As *content creators,* students might sell their work to a publisher, as journalists typically did in the 20th century. Or they might now consider Open Source publishing options and alternatives to traditional copyright. What alternative methods exist for making money as reporter, beyond the present system of working for a corporate news organization?

The synchronicity of Microsoft’s announcement that it would provide some transparency about its code was interesting. Instead of wondering why the heck the teacher was talking about Open Source, Linux, kernels, sharing, responsibility, and democracy, they could see my assignment as newsworthy.

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How ‘bout we invite the CEOs and CFOs of media companies to compete against the varsity from business schools at CNBC’s MBA Challenge. You can play on your own or against the likes of venture capitalist Paul Kedrosky.

For more accomplished financial athletes, there’s the Copenhagen Business School MBA Challenge where you can test your executive capabilities in an immersive MBA simulation game.

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If the Next Newsroom sounds familiar, it is. It borrows language from Newspaper Next (request the report; don’t republish), the “transformation project” financed by newspaper publishers. Both projects owe to Harvard business professor Clayton Christensen’s broadly applicable, 1997 book The Innovator’s Dilemma. The difference: the American Press Institute paid Christensen’s consulting company $2.5 million to repurpose his case studies; JTM organizer Chris Peck bought the book. ($12.21 for the paperback at Amazon). Never mind that Christensen famously forecast the demise of the newspaper industry. His company, Innosight, happily competes for consulting engagements to help fix the industry.

The situation reminds me of the fertilizer problem at my golf course. We hire an enterprising service called Birds-B-Gone to chase away the flock of geese that summers by the lake on the 16th Hole. Trained dogs cause the geese to fly off to a nearby course. That course then hires the same service to chase them back to ours. Birds-B-Gone gets good both ways.

Though they share terminology, the two Next projects come from different parts of the goose: JTM from the heart, Newspaper Next from the, ah, wallet. The competing initiatives, both aimed in some way at saving newspapers, exacerbate the rift among journalists and publishers about solving a common problem. Only the goose-chasers make out.

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Noted: The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation was a major supporter of this year’s We Media conference, and they’ve featured it in their 2006 annual report. Check out the online experience, and the accompanying video. To produce the multimedia experience, the foundation hired tumultimedia, a small firm from Chicago run by photographer Alex Fledderjohn and producer Sarahmaria Gomez. They are both former journalists now applying their traditional photo, video and audio engineering skills to create highly polished multimedia stories for foundations and other clients.

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Thanks to the members of the iFOCOS Search Working Group who gathered for a kickoff meeting last week (April 24, 2007) in Santa Clara, California (and thanks to Neil Budde and crew at Yahoo! for hosting the meeting). Thanks, as well, to Dabble founder Mary Hodder, who couldn’t make it to the meeting but will be participating and contributing to its next steps.

What are the next steps? We’ll see. The working group is compiling notes for a situation brief and recommendations. The discussion seemed to be leading toward some research topics and an appetite to build something - a proof-of-concept to demonstrate content management best practices essential for “webby” search-friendly publishing - including native integration of web standards, links, search protocols, social bookmarking and ping services.

That’s the search engine optimization and social marketing optimization goodness built in to sites like Wikipedia and into millions of blogs - and yet is somehow missing or more difficult to implement in many “enterprise” web sites that would benefit most from them. Can anyone say: Wordpress? Typepad?

Stay tuned.

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Photos by Alex Fledderjohn (THANKS, Alex)

Music by Van Morrison

Video Mix by Dale Peskin

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I’ve been reflecting on our experiences at We Media Miami and digesting a great deal of reporting and analysis about what happened. It’s ALL been helpful. The diversity of viewpoints again underscores the eclectic and complex nature of “We” - and the promise of invention and innovation driven by the We Media community.A number of exciting ideas and outcomes emerged from our conversations in Miami, including a variety of projects and collaborations we’ll be talking more about in weeks to come.

Meanwhile, here are some We Media links:

• You can find a still-growing archive from the forum - now with audio and some lovely photos: here.
• Robin Miller of Slashdot produced a nice montage video - just ignore my babbling about cheese and skip ahead to the palm trees and sunshine.
• The We Media blog includes a compilation of the “ahas” suggested throughout the forum.
• Steve Rosenbaum, a film-maker-story-teller and newly funded CEO of Magnify.net, has been hanging and talking with us for several years. He sees how our conversation and the work of iFOCOS has moved forward. “Since my last visit with the WeMedia team, things are different. In an important way. It’s changed. the WE in WeMEDIA got bigger, the ‘MEDIA’, got smaller. Or more intimate, more more focused. Not sure which.” Steve, yes - and thanks for noticing.
• Jemima Kiss must have typed her fingers to the bone with all of her live blogging and follow-up reporting for The Guardian, starting with our opening-round fire alarm and continuing this week with an item about Craig Newmark, who spent some of his time in Miami doing virtual battle with Wikipedians over the content of his own biography.
• Rebecca Weeks, the director of business development for Real Girls Media (which just launched Divine Caroline) captured the frenetic flavor of a real-life forum with lots of people and ideas swirling around everywhere - sometimes you’re not sure who’s saying what. Kinda like when you say, “I saw it on the internet. Somewhere.” In Rebecca’s case, the Miami story incorporates the insights of “a panelist” and “an audience member.” Yes, I heard them too.
• Rich Oppel, editor of the Austin American-Statesman, wrote for his newspaper that Miami seemed less rancourous than the previous two We Media forums - and I agree, “but a few grenades were tossed between the new and the old.” Rich wrote:
  

  The media are an unsettled lot today, with new media drawing audiences but rarely making money. Some rather ceremoniously swear off the almighty dollar.But not all. The angst rose when a panel of venture capitalists said they would insist on financial returns, traditional as that may be, and when foundation executives spoke of “investments” in new media based on performance instead of merely handing over money.

• More on the angst and ennui of making money in Rich Skrenta’s follow-up thoughts. Rich, CEO of Topix, must have had a bleak flight back home. Citing the failure of Dan Gillmor’s Bayosphere, and many other citizen journalism projects that have “largely failed,” Rich wrote:
  

  By implicit definition, participatory media is non-commercial. If it’s commercial, someone owns it, and it’s not “we” anymore.

  That’s got to be especially bad news for the failed projects on his list that are new or still breathing - such as NewsTrust; but good news too, since NewsTrust is non-profit (Discosure: I’m an advisor). Is Rich right? I don’t think so, and I’ll elaborate on this down the road. To begin with, most new businesses fail. Period. Meanwhile, the definitions of success and failure have changed for media (though I’ll stipulate that going out of business counts as failure). Modest success - and profitability - is not failure. It’s the long tail, which leads to …

• Wired Magazine editor/Long Tail author Chris Anderson was not in Miami, but like many others who weren’t there, he contributed to the conversation. He responded to Rich: “We Media is alive and well. It’s just the would-be We Media institutions that are not. A phenomenon is not necessarily a business. That doesn’t make it any less of a phenomenon.”

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We would like to thank Alex Fledderjohn for his photography during WeMedia. We put some of our favorites into a SlideshowPro gallery.

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“Are blogs really that important?” asks Jemima Kiss in this post. That’s the question renowened pollster John Zogby addressed during his presentation on the results of the We Media-Zogby poll.

During his presentation, he indicated that:
- “Only 27% of the public said they were satisfied with the news but 76% of people inside it are satisfied.
- Only 12% of the public read newspapers but 26% of the industry reads them.
- 32% of the public get their news from Tv but only 5% of the media does.
- 40% of the public gets their news form the internet but 60% of the media industry does.
- Just over half the public said blogs are important but 86% of the media said they are.”
(excerpted from Jemima Kiss’s detailed notes)

We caught up with John Zogby afterwards to ask him a few more questions (Click here to view the interview):

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During the panel discussion about “The Power of Us”, Craig -aka Craig of Craigslist- mentioned his support for a brand new initiative recently launched by the Sunlight Foundation. Out of curiosity, I buttonholed Craig after the conference to find out more about this initiative, how it illustrates “the power of us” to improve democracy, and his forecast on other similar initiatives in the run-up to the 2008 election:

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Online survey finds general public, media conference attendees agree that traditional news outlets could do a better job

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

February 15, 2007

A majority of Americans (55%) in an online survey said bloggers are important to the future of American journalism and 74% said citizen journalism will play a vital role, a new We Media - Zogby Interactive poll shows.

Most respondents (53%) also said the rise of free Internet-based media pose the greatest opportunity to the future of professional journalism and three in four (76%) said the Internet has had a positive impact on the overall quality of journalism.

The We Media survey results were released by iFOCOS and pollster John Zogby as part of an iFOCOS conference on media innovation hosted by the School of Communication at the University of Miami, with major support from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

In the national survey of adults, 72% said they were dissatisfied with the quality of American journalism today. A majority of conference–goers who were polled on the subject agreed – 55% said they were dissatisfied, and 61% said they believed traditional journalism is out of touch with what Americans want from their news.

Nearly nine out of 10 media insiders (86%) said they believe bloggers will play an important part in journalism’s future.

“We are now seeing mainstream acceptance of what we call the Power of Us - the value, credibility, and vital expression of citizen and collaborative media,” said Dale Peskin, a managing director of iFOCOS, the organization that conducts the annual We Media conference. “We’ve arrived at a tipping point. A new definition of democratic media is emerging in our society.”

Peskin said that, until recently, many traditional news enterprises have been skeptical about We Media. “They were either fearful or dismissive of our 2003 research forecasting and documenting the change in the media ecosystem,” he said. “Now the Zogby poll provides additional evidence that “We Media” is an essential component – perhaps THE essential component – for the agenda for news and information into the future.”

“The research documents the widespread recognition that control and influence on how we know what we know is shifting to a vastly more distributed network of empowered individuals and organizations,” said Andrew Nachison, co-founder of iFOCOS. “This obviously will have a big impact on how media organizations evolve and conduct business, but it’s really about how we all discover, create, share and apply information, and that’s important to all industries, to entrepreneurs, to non-profits, to governments, to individuals and to society as a whole. We are all part of the ecosystem.”

We Media Miami was conducted Feb. 7-9 with major support from Knight Foundation. The conference brought together more than 250 leaders engaged in media innovation. Participants represented a range of sectors impacting media, including new and traditional media organizations, investors and analysts, information technologists, educators and researchers, as well as bloggers, citizen journalists, and news-and-information entrepreneurs.

The Zogby Interactive survey of 5,384 adults nationwide was conducted Jan. 30-Feb. 1, 2007, and carries a margin of error of +/- 1.4 percentage points. The Zogby Interactive survey of 77 members of the media who attended the Miami conference carries a margin of error of +/- 11.4 percentage points. While periodic audits show the results from Zogby telephone and Internet surveys closely track each other, a companion telephone survey of this topic was not conducted.

Dissatisfaction with today’s news reportage is greater among those nationwide online respondents who identified themselves as conservative – 88% said they were unhappy with journalism, while 95% of “very conservative” respondents said the quality of journalism today is not what it should be.

Among those respondents identifying themselves as liberal, 51% said they are dissatisfied with the quality of journalism. Dissatisfaction levels were also highest among older respondents – 78% of those age 65 and older said they are dissatisfied. Most respondents (65%) also said they believe traditional journalism is out of touch with what Americans want from their news, with the highest levels of dissatisfaction with traditional journalism among those age 70 and older (74%), the very conservative (95%), and libertarians (89%).

Despite concerns about its quality, 72% of those in the national survey said journalism is important to their community. More respondents (81%) said Web sites are important as a source of news, although television ranked nearly as high (78%), followed by radio (73%). Newspapers and magazines trailed – 69% said newspapers and 38% said magazines were important. While blogs were rated as important sources of news by 30% of the online respondents, they were not considered as good a news source as the backyard fence – 39% said their friends and neighbors are an important source of information.

However, a majority of the nationwide online respondents said Internet social networking sites and blogging will play in important role in the future of journalism. But they added that trustworthiness will be important to the future of the industry – 90% said trust will be key.

Liberal and progressive respondents were more likely to say newspapers are their most trusted source than those with more conservative ideological mindsets. But radio is the most trusted source for 28% of those who describe themselves as “very conservative”, compared with just 9% of liberal respondents.

More online respondents nationwide said the Internet was their top source of news and information (40%), followed by television (32%), newspapers (12%) and radio (12%). The youngest adults in the poll, those age 18-24, were far more likely to say they mostly get news from Internet sites—58% said the Internet is their main destination for news, with television coming in second at 18%. Fewer than one in 10 in this age group said they get the majority of their news from newspapers.

For comment or reporting on We Media, contact dale AT ifocos DOT org or andrew AT ifocos DOT org.

For a detailed methodological statement on the survey, please visit:

http://www.zogby.com/methodology/readmeth.dbm?ID=1170
For more on the We Media conference, please visit:

http://ifocos.org/2006/09/01/we-media-miami-overview/

About iFOCOS

iFOCOS is an independent not-for-profit organization committed to enabling a better-informed society. It provides a variety of services, activities and training that help individuals and organizations worldwide understand and use expanding media and communications technologies to innovate as well as to create better-informed global citizens. More about at iFOCOS at: www.ifocos.org

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Joe Lewis wrote an interesting opinion piece, positing that Yahoo’s focusing on social search in an attempt to outflank Google.

But that’s actually a positive spin on a negative situation for Yahoo. While it’s true that Yahoo has been doing significant development in terms of buying or building content sites powered by social networks, I don’t think that Google is doing any worse.

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One phrase, one song from one of the projects featured stays with me as I consider all the videos that were shown at the Grove Stage on Thursday night. “We’re all in this together”. This phrase, this song, I felt best represented and signified the entire video festival. The art of video to convey strong images, strong stories, that stay with you long after the piece is complete is a significant challenge in new media environments. Screens are small, accessibility options complex, and distractions from a piece varied. Steve Rosenbaum met these challenges with his series of images and choice of music presented on the outside screen along with the national drink of Cuba, mojitos. The images were so diverse and methodically paced, it absolutely held my attention. The theme music chosen for the piece truly brings all of the other pieces together.

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Rarely do you attend a conference where the accumulated intellectual star power on one stage is as great as was the case in our final group panel discussion at the We Media conference Friday morning.  We had presidents and pollsters, intellectuals and editors, donors and corporate folks all gathered for one chat.  What we did get out of it?  Quite a bit it seems.

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