Tag: citizen journalism

A threat to local access

Robert Weisman reports in today’s Globe that two legislators are filing a bill to transfer authority over cable-television franchises from local officials to the state. The bill was filed by state Sen. Steven Panagiotakos, D-Lowell, and state Rep. James Vallee, D-Franklin.

Weisman casts his story as one of more competition for the monolithic cable companies (make that company), but that’s only part of what’s going on. What’s in the crosshairs here is local-access cable programming — city council meetings, school plays, foreign-language programs, local talk shows and the like. The media-reform group Free Press has a wealth of background material on its Web site.

From the time that cable as we know it popped into existence in the 1970s, it has, with few exceptions, been a monopoly, with licenses granted by local regulators. The monopoly was a technological necessity: practically speaking, only one company could be allowed to string wires all over town.

In return for this monopoly, local officials would extract concessions such as special rates for senior citizens, upgraded communications for public safety and funding for local programming. It was a system that worked for everyone, and if local access doesn’t draw huge audiences, it nevertheless fills a real need.

But technology is changing by the day. Satellite TV is already an alternative, and satellite providers obviously don’t have to pay franchise fees. (You can’t get local-access programming, either — or even New England Cable News.)

Now comes Verizon, which wants to offer television programming over its phone lines to compete with cable, dominated by Comcast. Verizon wants to speed the process up by having the state, rather than local officials, sign off on its plans; Comcast, not surprisingly, likes things the way they are, since it wants to keep its local monopolies as long as possible.

If the bill to transfer regulatory authority from local communities to the state were to become law, there’s no reason to think that funding for local access would be eliminated — it would simply be administered at the state level. But we can see where this is going. With Verizon and Comcast competing, it’s easy to foresee the companies telling state regulators that they could charge less if only they didn’t have to pay those archaic local-access fees.

And, inevitably, television programming is moving to the Internet. Instead of 50 or 500 channels from which to choose, the number will theoretically be infinite — at least if we can preserve net neutrality. Local-access-type programming will move to the Internet, too, to be downloaded and viewed whenever you like.

In such a media environment, though, it’s not clear who, if anyone, should pay for local programming. Yes, you could sell advertising, and I imagine some entrepreneurial types will try. Or you could line up underwriting and pledges, following the public broadcasting model. But to carry the important but less-than-scintillating stuff that is the lifeblood of local access, you need some sort of guaranteed revenue stream to replace the local franchising fees.

You could accomplish this with a tax on Internet service or on Internet-capable TV sets, perhaps. But we have to start thinking about this now. If such ideas fall in the face of a no-new-taxes mentality, then public-interest media localism will suffer a heavy blow.

To follow this issue, keep an eye on MassAccess, the Massachusetts Chapter of the Alliance for Community Media, a national organization of local-access producers.

The “Romenesko of citizen journalism”

One of the more interesting experiments in citizen journalism had its official unveiling this week. Placeblogger, a site put together by Watertown blogger Lisa Williams, is an attempt to link to every local blog in the world, and to make some sense of this growing phenomenon.

What’s a placeblog? It’s a term coined by Williams to describe a Web site that covers a community. A leading example would be her own site, H2otown, which is devoted to all things Watertown. (I profiled Williams and H2otown for CommonWealth Magazine a year ago.)

Placeblogger, a joint project of Dan Gillmor’s Center for Citizen Media and Jay Rosen’s PressThink, is a site that offers a directory of every placeblog Williams can find (she thinks there may be as many as 1,000), as well as her own efforts to make order out of chaos. Williams has said her goal is to establish Placeblogger as the “Romenesko of citizen journalism.”

In addition to being able to search for a placeblog near you, you can check out her top 10. New Jersey’s Baristanet, logically enough, leads the list; but anyone other than Williams would have included H2otown somewhere. The left rail is given over to “Placeblogger Journal” — currently a roundup of placeblogs in the New Orleans area — and “Placeblogger Headlines,” an automated feed of the good, the bad and the ridiculous.

The middle of the screen features a blog by Williams, which right now is fronting a commentary on Kearny on the Web, a placeblog in Kearny, N.J., that posted a video of a local teacher caught denying evolution and damning his non-Christian students to hell. The right rail has tools that let you find — or add — a placeblog.

“There are really way more of these than anyone knows,” Williams said at the Center for Citizen Media’s “unconference” at Harvard last August, where the Placeblogger project was first announced.

Are placebloggers journalists? Well, yes and no. And, of course, it depends on the blog. Williams defines a placeblog as being “about the lived experience of a place.” The blog may “commit random acts of jouranlism,” she adds, but it’s not a newspaper — not even an electronic version of a newspaper.

In November, at the unveiling of the beta site at Harvard Law’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, Williams described Placeblogger as “one-stop shopping for what citizen journalism really looks like — kiss stale arguments and useless theorizing goodbye.”

Among her more intriguing ideas is to develop a standard method of “geotagging” so that it will be easier to find placeblogs. There could be a placeblog right in your city or town, but if you don’t already know about it, you could have a hard time finding it. Geotagging, in Williams’ view, could help placebloggers sell advertising as well.

Williams’ take on placeblogs sometimes seems overly modest — she is a self-described newspaper junkie, and she’s always careful to point out that she doesn’t want to see placeblogs replace newspapers.

Yet occasionally her larger hopes shine through. Last semester she spoke to my Journalism of the Web students, and talked about placeblogging as an entrepreneurial opportunity for young journalists. Why not? When I was a recent J-school graduate, friends and I talked about several ideas for launching community papers. We didn’t do so mainly because it was too expensive.

By contrast, you can launch a placeblog virtually for free, with the hope that, eventually, you can sell enough advertising to make a living. I would think that an aggressive young journalist who knows how to write, and can post photos, video and sound, could give her chain-owned community weekly fits. And there’s no need to settle for just “random acts of journalism,” either.

Placeblogger is a fascinating project, and well worth keeping a close eye on.

Photo: Lisa Williams announces the Placeblogger project at the Center for Citizen Media “unconference” last August. Photo by Steve Garfield; reproduced under a Creative Commons license.