p2pnet - rss feed: Old Media and the New
p2p news feature / p2pnet: It was a bit like closing the gate after the horse has bolted, the Media Center’s We Media forum.
Hosted by the BBC and Reuters, and staged (word used advisedly) in London, England, by the Media Center, the idea was for the mainstream and new media, aka Citizen Journalists, to find common ground.
The Media Center, a division of the American Press Institute, itself sponsored by an awesome number of print publications in the US and Canada, was established in 1997 to, “help the news industry devise strategies and tactics for digital media,” says its web site. “In September 2003 it merged with New Directions for News, an independent media futures think tank. The merger created a global, multi-disciplinary network of researchers and leading thinkers focused on the future of media and the behaviors of consumers in a media-centric world.”
Put “behaviors of consumers in a media-centric world” with “citizen” and “journalism,” and you have the spark which fired up the convention.
“Citizen journalism” is a major destabilising force which represents a fundamental change in communications and news and information dissemination,” we posted on Day One. “And, like p2p, it isn’t going away.”
People to people
P2p networking and file sharing are correctly perceived by the movie, movie and software cartels as dire threats to the status quo, to the old, out-dated and out-moded ways of doing things, and the same applies to the purveyors of old-style news.
P2p is short for peer-to-peer, but it also means people-to-people, person-to-person, ‘puter-to-’puter and if a blog isn’t one person talking to another person, with anyone who wants to looking in, what is it? And yet p2p wasn’t mentioned once during the proceedings.
We Media was ostensibly a way for bloggers - citizen reporters - to interact with the so-called professionals, the mainstream journalists, presumably to the ultimate benefit of the ‘consumer,’ as we’re still called by the traditional print and electronic media outlets.
Excellent idea. Except for the fact there was no way on earth 99.999999% of citizen journalists could hope to be part of the ‘We,’ not with a registration fee of $800. Eight. Hundred. Dollars.
How many ordinary bloggers could afford that kind of money? Certainly not p2pnet. Our air-fare from Canada, and expenses, are being met by four people who thought we should be there (we’ll tell you more about them in a later post). So that took care of travel to and from the UK. We were able to escape the $800 entry fee by promising stories on the event, something we would have done anyway.
Beyond that, who really knew the event was even happening? It wasn’t widely splashed and had it not been a post from Guillaume Champeau, we wouldn’t have been aware of it either. But we’re sure the organizers will say everyone who should have known, did know, ie, the heavies at Reuters, the BBC and other mainstream news organizations, plus other vested interest associates such as:
Tom Glocer, ceo, Reuters; Chris Ahearn, President, Reuters Media; Mark Thompson, director-general, BBC; Nitin Desai, special assistant to the secretary-general of the United Nations; Wadah Khanfar, director-general, Al Jazeera Network Channel; Carolyn McCall, ceo, Guardian Newspapers; Richard Sambrook, director of global news, BBC; Andrew Hawken, general manager, MSN Portal Experience/ editor-in-chief, MSN.com; Jean Marie Colombani, chairman and publisher, Le Monde; Nikesh Arora, Google vice president of European operations; Bertrand Pecquerie, director of the World Editors Forum and formlery in charge of World Media Live, a subsidiary of Vivendi Universal in charge of international websites; Bill Gannon, Yahoo editorial director; Timothy Balding, ceo, World Association of Newspapers; Rudy Chan, ex-ceo, China.com (”During his six year tenure at China.com Inc. Mr. Chan was credited with the transformation of a dotcom concept company to one of the leading Mobile Value Added Services (MVAS), Online Games, and Internet Services company in the Greater China region.”); Jeff Jarvis, “Blogger,” Buzzmachine.com; Helen Boaden, director of news and current affairs, BBC; George Brock, Saturday editor, The Times of London; and so on, backed by a number of advertising interests.
And there were more. Many more
Representing you and I were Dave Sifry, ceo, Technorati, Suw Charman, Open Rights Group executive director; Angela Beesley, board member, the Wikimedia Foundation; Scott Heiferman, co-founder and ceo, Meetup.com; Adam Curry; Graham Holiday of noodlepie.com; Avon lady Birdie Jaworksi; Michael Tippet of Canada’s Now Public; video blogger David Dunkley Gyimah; Dan Gilmour; Juliette Powell of The Gathering; and a handful, relatively speaking, of other indies.
But only a few more. With an $800 admission fee, pocket change to the biggies but unaffordable to anyone else, that was hardly surprising, though.
We’re It And That’s The Way It’s Going To Stay!
Day One was in a vast studio at the BBC’s television headquarters in White City and one of the ushers told p2pnet the studio was usually reserved for such extravaganzas as Come Dancing, re-launched in 2004 as Strictly Come Dancing.
The setting couldn’t have been more appropriate. Cut away the glitz and high-flown verbiage, and the event was two days of fancy footwork with mainstream media reps and their supporters trying to convince themselves and each other that they’re still relevant and still in charge of deciding what’s news, and getting it to the masses.
And that’s the way it’s going to stay, by God!
“No ordinary conference, We Media is about how we create a better-informed society by collaborating with one another,” said the promo site. “Arrange meetings in advance or during scheduled meet-ups at the conference.”
Meetings with whom, and with what objective in mind?
Reuters ceo Tom explained how Reuters had, in effect, founded journalism as we know it back in the 1800s, using carrier pigeons to get stories from A to Z.
According to Glocer, the “burden” of getting the news to readers is still carried by highly trained, professional journalists (Reuters pro journalists, of course), although these days, untrained citizen journalists are adding to the news milieu. But Reuters isn’t worried. It’s always been in top of the technology of the time, as exemplified by pigeons, and the 21st century isn’t going to be any different. This challenge will be met and overcome and absorbed, where appropiate, as have similar challenges throughout its history.
Other mainstream luminaries said much the same, all of them completely ignoring the fact the two-day event was made necessary because they’re seeing their formerly exclusive preserves and domains being overtaken by the new media, run by all those untrained, unwashed citizen journalists whose only brief is to tell it like it is.
As we suggested to several professionals, people writing for the new media - ie, blogs - are often better informed than their counterparts in the mainstream media, and are frequently better writers as well. But not to worry, we were told. Many, if no most, of the quality bloggers will in one way or another end up working for the ‘new’ old mainstream outlets, once the likes of Reuters get themselves organized.
This isn’t, however, to say the conference was a complete waste of time and in the next few weeks, we hope to be running items from some of the people who were there, including a lecture from actor/activist Richard Drefuss, who turned out to be one of the few bright lights at the We Media event.
NINLOW is where it’s at
Meanwhile, if nothing else, the conference served to emphasize just how important blogging has become.
And this is the only beginning. Before very much longer, the traditional press is going to have to do more than offer a token acknowledgement of the new kids on blocks all around the world because bottom line, NINLOW is where it’s at: News Is No Longer One Way. And for the first time in history, John Doe in American can talk to Jane Doe anywhere else in the world, exchanging unspun news and information while the old-style providers look on.
We Media was more Them Media than anything else. But that’s changing fast, thanks to Citizen Journalists and bloggers.
Technorati says it currently tracks 27.2 million weblogs, “and the blogosphere we track continues to double about every 5.5 months”.
And new blog creation continues to grow, it says.
“We currently track over 75,000 new weblogs created every day, which means that on average, a new weblog is created every second of every day - and 13.7 million bloggers are still posting 3 months after their blogs are created. In other words, even though there’s a reasonable amount of tire-kicking going on, blogging is growing as a habitual activity.
“In October of 2005, when Technorati was only tracking 19 million blogs, about 10.4 million bloggers were still posting 3 months after the creation of their blogs.
“In addition to that, about 2.7 million bloggers update their blogs at least weekly.”
And that’s just the West. “The number of Chinese bloggers is expected to hit 60 million by the end of this year, Xinhua said, quoting a report on China’s media industry by the prestigious Tsinghua University,” says CNET News.
So the mainstream media need to stay tuned and start recognizing the new media competition in a less cursory, less patronizing manner. Or they’ll be left choking in the dust.
The real We Media - that’s you and I - are more than content to work with, and alongside, the old mainstream media. It’ll now be interesting to see if the same applies to Reuters, the BBC and the others.
Jon Newton, p2pnet
Also See:
Day One - Of corporate fear, May 3, 2006
Guillaume Champeau - AgoraVox - citizen reporting, April 25, 2006
currently tracks - State of the Blogosphere, February 2006 Part 1: On Blogosphere Growth, February 6, 2006
CNET News - China sees 60 million bloggers by year’s end, May 6, 2006
May 8th, 2006 at 11:17 pm
Here is a news story that has not yet been very widely covered. This is the war between spammers and Blue Security. Despite the fact that a spammer has manage to take down a major website, Tucows as well as several blog sites, I have not seen anything in the tech or Internet section of any lamescream news site.
This is a major story. I believe that the reason it has been buried is because the LameScream media clients - i.e. those who buy advertisements. People actually punching back and costing spammers money really works, and those companies which continue to sell filtering or spam reporting software may have found themselves outdone by the competition.
It could also be the fact that this recent battle in the spam war is costing some companies big money as well. Whatever it is, this story is big and should be reported.