Tag: citizen journalism

Boston.com unveils Needham site

Boston.com’s hyperlocal site for Needham has debuted. And there are a ton of links to GateHouse’s Needham Times as well as the Hometown Weekly — but not much Boston Globe content. “Wicked Evil Needham” is how a GateHouse source describes it, a play on GateHouse’s “Wicked Local” sites.

Which brings me back to the video I linked to yesterday, in which Boston.com’s Bob Kempf talks about eventually offering 120 hyperlocal sites. I’m kind of scratching my head over that. In a community where Boston.com can put together a page featuring a decent amount of Globe content and links to local, independent bloggers, a few links to other papers’ Web sites strike me as fine. That’s why I think the Newton site is promising.

But what do Kempf and company plan to do in a community like, say, Danvers, worldwide headquarters for Media Nation? We have two papers covering our town: GateHouse’s Danvers Herald and CNHI’s Salem News. Both do quite a nice job. But there are no local bloggers in Danvers whom I’m aware of. And it’s not very often that Globe North does a Danvers-specific story.

Would Boston.com really put together a hyperlocal page consisting of almost nothing but links to the Danvers Herald and the Salem News?

I realize I’m being ridiculously speculative. So let’s wait and see.

Update: Waltham is up, too (via Elana Zak).

120 Boston.com hyperlocal sites?

Someone just called this to my attention. It’s a three-minute promotional video made by the Boston Globe to promote its Boston.com Newton hyperlocal site. In it, you will see Boston.com’s Bob Kempf explain that the plan is eventually to expand the Newton idea to 120 cities and towns.

When it comes to news you can use, though, it looks like Boston.com still has some bugs to work out. (Via Adam Reilly.)

Setting the record straight

My friend Adam Reilly of the Boston Phoenix is having a reading-comprehension problem today.

I have never remotely suggested, as Adam seems to think, that it doesn’t matter how much content the Boston Globe takes from GateHouse’s Newton Tab on its hyperlocal page for Newton. Nor have I said that it’s all right if the majority of Boston.com Newton‘s links come from the Tab.

What I have said is that GateHouse has little to complain about as long as the Globe is taking so little that you have to click through to the Tab’s Wicked Local Newton page in order to get the gist of the story. Which is what the Globe has been doing.

I also agree with Adam that the Globe is going to look silly if its Newton page doesn’t feature a good mix of Globe content, local bloggers and, yes, some links to the Tab.

Although I’m not privy to the details, I do know that Globe and GateHouse executives have been wrangling behind the scenes. For about a week, there was no Tab content at all at Boston.com Newton. Now there is again.

I don’t pretend to know exactly what the right mix is, but it does strike me that Globe editors tried to go about this the right way — and that the folks at GateHouse have, nevertheless, been appropriately prickly about the Globe using their content to boost its own local coverage.

Thoughts on the Globe’s Newton project

The battle between the Boston Globe and GateHouse Media over the Globe’s hyperlocal Newton site isn’t really about the possibility that the Globe will grab more content from the Newton Tab than fair use — or fair play — should allow.

Rather, it’s over a more fundamental issue that will likely be a key to survival as struggling news organizations seek to reinvent themselves: Who will control the virtual front door to Newton, as well as to other cities and towns?

At first glance, Boston.com Newton strikes me as attractive, well-organized and generous. By generous, I mean the blog-like feature that fills the center well is a nice mix of content from the Globe, the Tab and local blogs. Just as important, the items give you just a bare taste of the story — if you have any interest at all, you’ll click through. So it seems likely that Boston.com will drive some traffic to the Tab, not to mention the blogs.

By combining content from different sources so seamlessly, Boston.com, at least for the moment, has leapfrogged ahead of the Tab’s Wicked Local Newton site. GateHouse’s Wicked Local sites, which debuted in Plymouth a few years ago, before there even was a GateHouse, were supposed to combine content from the local GateHouse paper with blogs and citizen journalism in order to be a one-stop community guide. That never quite panned out, although Wicked Local is stronger in some towns than in others.

Probably the least generous item on Boston.com Newton right now involves my friends at the Boston Phoenix. There’s a big photo of a plate of food, along with a headline that says, “Foodies: Phoenix reviews Hotel Indigo.” Follow the link, though, and you find a Globe blog item that summarizes the Phoenix review. You have to click again to get to the actual Phoenix review.

There’s a lot more to Boston.com Newton than the news blog. Readers can contribute to a wiki, discuss issues and send in photos. There’s a calendar of events, real-estate listings and local school data.

At the moment, at least, there is no RSS feed. That may change, though the site strikes me as ill-suited to reading via RSS, as it consists of many little items that require you to go off-site if you want to learn more. (Boston.com’s director of community publishing, Teresa Hanafin, makes exactly that point in a comment to the Garden City blog. And don’t miss GateHouse editor Greg Reibman’s hilarious retort.)

The Globe and GateHouse face different challenges.

The Globe, like all big regional papers, is caught in a squeeze. People who are interested mainly in national and international news are now getting it elsewhere, online. And though it’s often said that local is the future, it’s difficult for a big paper that covers all of Eastern Massachusetts to become local enough. Boston.com Newton, which is clearly intended as a prototype (note the “yourtown” in the URL), is an interesting way of overcoming the disadvantage of being a regional paper — and of attracting local advertisers who could never afford to buy space in the paper.

GateHouse, which publishes about 100 papers in Eastern Massachusetts, is all about local, so it doesn’t have to reorient its mission. But its natural advantage in print doesn’t necessarily hold up online, because players as large as the Globe and as small as a few passionate activists can play on the same turf.

What’s going on in Newton will tell us a lot about the future of the newspaper business over the next few years. I hope both sides find a way to win.

Election Day in Danvers

For a Flickr slideshow, click here or on photo

Mrs. Media Nation and I timed our voting perfectly. I’m working at home today, so we walked to Danvers High School a little after 10 a.m. With the morning rush over and the evening a long way off, we figured we wouldn’t have to wait too long.

Although there were longish lines of cars heading up and down Cabot Road, and though the parking lot was nearly full, we were right — once we were inside the gym, we breezed right through.

A poll worker told me that more than 500 people had voted in our precinct, way more than the typical number. I would imagine the explosion will come after work.

I also posted a few photos to the Polling Place Photo Project. Please have a look.

Kennedy versus Rosen

I’m debating Jay Rosen on the controversy over Mayhill Fowler, the citizen journalist who quoted Barack Obama on “bitter” white people who “cling” to religion and guns and, more recently, who prodded Bill Clinton into going off on Vanity Fair writer Todd Purdum.

The question: Are citizen journalists bound by the same ethical rules as mainstream reporters? Read the set-up, then see the comments. Feel free to weigh in.

Citizen journalism in Tibet

Global Voices Online is tracking the protests in Tibet, which, according to the New York Times, comprise “the most serious and prolonged demonstrations in Tibet since the late 1980s, when it suppressed a rebellion there with lethal force that left scores, and possibly hundreds, of ethnic Tibetans dead.” (Note: Photo depicts a 2006 demonstration in Oxford, London, England.)

Interestingly, what’s coming in via Global Voices — an international blog-aggregation project begun at Harvard Law’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society — is not all pro-independence by any means. Example:

When those insane dalais gathered in the street today and surrounded and viciously beat those Han Chinese, while they used lighters to light fire to shop after shop, while they threw molotovs at cars parked on the sides of the road, I really felt afraid, and that this is inconceivable. What you are destroying is the very place that you live in. Aren’t you followers of the Living Buddha? You think this is something your Living Buddha instructed you to do, to destroy the very place that you live in? I think that most of these people haven’t thought about this, and that most of them have been deceived by the words of certain people who would see the motherland split! But if you just think about it, just who was it that made Tibet the developed place it is today? Who set up the bridge between Tibet and the whole world? And who is it that sends qualified people each year from every sector to educate the children of Tibet with knowledge and culture? AND who is it that sends aid from every developed city in the motherland each year to assist Tibet? I think you seem to have forgotten all this……

It could be legitimate, it could be propaganda. But there’s no doubt that many ethnic Chinese live in Tibet, as the Chinese government has encouraged internal migration in order to keep the Tibetan independence movement in check. By this estimate, about 100,000 of the 2.2 million people living in Tibet are Chinese, not counting soldiers and police officers. So despite the Dalai Lama‘s message of peace, reports that Tibetans are attacking Chinese seem credible.

The Times is putting out a call for citizen journalists.

If this keeps building, we’re going to see whether the Age of the Internet is more powerful than the Age of Fax. In 1989, the Chinese democracy movement — fueled in part by mass-circulated faxes — came to a horrifying end in Tiananmen Square. The Internet, though, is a significantly more powerful organizational tool.

The Chinese government can try to shut it down, and it may succeed. That’s what the Burmese government did last year. But now, even more than in 1989, the whole world is watching. And Chinese behavior would seem to be constricted given that it’s hosting the Olympics this summer.

Photo (cc) by nic0, and is republished here under a Creative Commons license. Some rights reserved.

Citizen journalism (?) and Spitzer

The ever-classy New York Post is letting its readers write headlines for the Eliot Spitzer story. A sampling:

  • HYPO-QUIT!!!!
  • The “Emperor” Has No Clothes!
  • ELIOT MESS!
  • Love Potion for Client #9

Those last two aren’t bad. But I’ll bet the Post itself comes up with something better for tomorrow’s edition.

Josh Marshall 101

Noam Cohen profiles Josh Marshall in the New York Times following Marshall’s winning a Polk Award for his coverage of the U.S. attorneys scandal. Cohen kindly quotes me at some length.

As I noted last week in a blog post for my students, Marshall’s Talking Points Memo and related sites have pioneered a new kind of investigative reporting that combines the journalistic expertise of Marshall and his crew with the decentralized knowledge of their readers.

As citizen-journalism pioneer Dan Gillmor has memorably put it, “my readers know more than I do.” Marshall has figured out how to tap into that knowledge and make sense of it.