Social Media Now: Teaching Citizen Journalists, Social Nets Underrated?

Who Knows What’s Best for Citizen Journalists? ….I was fortunate yesterday to help lead a fascinating discussion about trust, journalism and pro am media at the New York Social Media Club meeting. NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen provided the jumping off point by presenting and discussing his mini-empire of experimental, participatory journalism. That empire includes his own NewAssignment.Net and it’s two recently announced joint ventures–AssignmentZero, an experiment in crowdsourced journalism conducted with Wired; and a participatory journalism joint venture with HuffingtonPost designed to organize semi-pro coverage of everyone running for president.

I remain skeptical about the value of attempting to harness citizen journalism by encouraging professional editors to saddle it up and ride it in one particular direction or another. Just as it can replace the traditional reporters’ functions, the community can replace the editors’ functions setting the agenda, calling attention to stories, copyediting and correcting. The fact that the Internet community does this organically, applying tools like blogging, tagging and aggregating, is part of what makes citizen journalism different.

Still it’s interesting to see the pros wrestling with a DIY future, even if much of that wrestling is taking place in the academic realm. Yesterday the Knight Foundation and The Institute for Interactive Journalism (itself a venture of the University of Maryland and the Pew Center for Civic Journalism) took the wraps off The Knight Citizen News Network.

The Network isn’t the ambitious attempt to practice new journalism that AssignmentZero is, instead it is intended as a resource for citizen journalists including a searchable database of US citizen journalism sites, a best-practices feature called “Things We Like,” a multimedia primer in what the Institute sees as “the principles of citizen journalism,” as well as links to the Institute’s case studies and other research.

The site was designed with input from some of the big boys in the formalizing citizen journalism JD Lascia, Dan Gillmor’s Center for Citizen Media and I, Reporter.

There’s something presumptuous and out of whack about professionals and academics telling citizen journalists how to do amateur journalism better,  particularly in an era when pro journalism has been so damaged by a credibility crisis (just this week The New York Times owned up to running a false rape allegation from a former US service woman and to one of it’s reporters cutting a $2000 check to a source). But as we watch big media wrestle with the changing DIY media landscape, efforts like KCNN are worth watching.

It’s Twitter’s World, We Just Live in It….Word out yesterday from Steve Poland at Techcrunch that changes to Twitter’s API may help turn the messaging service into a Web services platform, or more accurately a SMS-services platform. We love the idea of Twitter, or any kind of cross platform anywhere messaging service, becoming something other than a party line for the digerati but let’s not get crazy. To Nik Cubrilovic who writes that there will be a business in Twitter IDs akin to the mid 1990s business in domain squatting I suggest a reality check of the sort Fred Wilson writes about here.

Social Networking Under-hyped? …According to Pali Research’s Richard Greenfield (as reported at Barron’s Online by Eric Savitz)

MySpace is now generating “in excess of $30 million” a month in revenue, with about $24 million in domestic revenue and $6 million internationally. He adds that monthly revenues should more than double over the next 12 months, and “at very high incremental revenue margins.” So in 12 months, he’s saying, MySpace should be doing more than $60 million a month in revenue, for an annual run rate in the neighborhood of $750 million a year.

Quoth Valleywag:

…as one News Corporation exec says: “You know, it may turn out that social networks have been, not overhyped, but underhyped.”

Link Love:

Thomas Hawk’s Digital Connection: TiVo Home Movie SharingJamendo Goes Platinum! 1.5 Million Albums Downloaded
Zoolit Launches Social Network Profile Link Aggregator

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