Tag: citizen journalism

👓 The power to publish as an individual | DaveNet

Read The power to publish as an individual by Dave Winer (scripting.com via DaveNet)
Weblogs: A new source of News
An awesome “old” and prescient post about blogging and journalism. It’s interesting to look at this through the modern lens of social media and IndieWeb. Of course this article was written at a time when IndieWeb was the only thing that existed.

Highlights, Quotes, Annotations, & Marginalia

media organizations would do well to incorporate them [blogs] into their Web sites as an important new addition to the journalistic toolkit.  ❧

December 21, 2018 at 08:09PM

Regular readers of Gillmor’s eJournal will recognize his commitment to user participation. “One of the things I’m sure about in journalism right now is that my readers know more than I do,” he says. “To the extent that I can take advantage of that in a way that does something for everyone involved ó that strikes me as pretty cool.”
One fascinating aspect of Gillmor’s Weblog is how he lifts the veil from the workings of the journalism profession. “There have been occasions where I put up a note saying, ‘I’m working on the following and here’s what I think I know,’ and the invitation is for the reader to either tell me I’m on the right track, I’m wrong, or at the very least help me find the missing pieces,” he says. “That’s a pretty interesting thing. Many thousands more people read my column in the newspaper than online, but I do hear back from a fair number of people from the Weblog.”  ❧

Awesomely, this sounds almost exactly like something that David Fahrenthold would tell Jay Rosen about Twitter nearly 16 years later in an interview in The Correspondent.
My listen post

December 21, 2018 at 08:20PM

Anyone who’s dealt with networks knows that the network knows more than the individual.”  ❧

December 22, 2018 at 09:15AM

Man, this is a beast that’s hungry all the time.”  ❧

Mind you he’s saying this in 2001 before the creation of more wide spread social networks.

December 22, 2018 at 09:18AM

While many blogs get dozens or hundreds of visitors, Searls’ site attracts thousands. “I partly don’t want to care what the number is,” he says. “I used to work in broadcasting, where everyone was obsessed by that. I don’t want an audience. I feel I’m writing stuff that’s part of a conversation. Conversations don’t have audiences.”  ❧

Social media has completely ignored this sort of sentiment and gamified and psychoanalyzed its way into the polar opposite direction all for the sake of “engagement”, clicks, data gathering, and advertising.

December 22, 2018 at 09:22AM

“The blog serves as a kind of steam valve for me,” he says. “I put stuff out there that I’m forming an opinion about, and another blogger starts arguing with me and giving me feedback, and I haven’t even finished what I was posting!”  ❧

An early written incarnation of the idea of blogs as “thought spaces”.

December 22, 2018 at 09:24AM

The Weblog community is basically a whole bunch of expert witnesses who increase their expertise constantly through a sort of reputation engine.”  ❧

The trouble is how is this “reputation engine” built? What metrics does it include? Can it be gamed? Social media has gotten lots of this wrong and it has caused problems.

December 22, 2018 at 09:28AM

His dream is to put a live Web server with easy-to-edit pages on every person’s desktop, then connect them all in a robust network that feeds off itself and informs other media.  ❧

An early statement of what would eventually become all of social media.

December 22, 2018 at 09:31AM

He suggests that struggling sites like Salon begin broadening their content offerings by hosting user-created Weblogs, creating a sort of farm system for essayists. “Salon could highlight the best ones on page one and invest time and effort in the ones that are inspiring and exceptional.”  ❧

This is a rough sketch of something I’ve been thinking that newspapers and media outlets should have been doing all along. If they “owned” social media, we might all be in a better place socially and journalistic-ally than if advertising driven social media owned it all.

December 22, 2018 at 09:35AM

Indeed, Winer says his most gratifying moments come when he posts an entry without running the idea by his colleagues first. “It can be a very scary moment when you take a stand on something and you don’t know if your argument holds together and you hit the send button and it’s out there and you can’t take it back. That’s a moment that professional journalists may never experience in their careers, the feeling that it’s just me, exposed to the world. That’s a pretty powerful rush, the power to publish as an individual.”  ❧

December 22, 2018 at 09:36AM

👓 Opinion: Silicon Valley Can’t Be Trusted With Our History | Buzz Feed

Read Opinion: Silicon Valley Can't Be Trusted With Our History by Evan HillEvan Hill (BuzzFeed)

We create almost everything on the internet, but we control almost none of it.

As time passes, I fear that more and more of what happened in those days will live only in memory. The internet has slowly unraveled since 2011: Image-hosting sites went out of business, link shorteners shut down, tweets got deleted, and YouTube accounts were shuttered. One broken link at a time, one of the most heavily documented historical events of the social media era could fade away before our eyes.

If Edward McCain (t) hasn’t come across this article yet, it might make an interesting case study for this year’s Dodging the Memory Hole conference. Definitely an interesting case of people archiving their online content.

cc: Journalism Digital News Archive (t); Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute (t)

Henninger Trailhead / Eaton Canyon Wild Fire Coverage in Altadena, CA

A helicopter buzzing a palm tree

At roughly 4:09pm I noticed an incredibly low flying Los Angeles County Sherrif’s Office water drop helicopter buzz our neighborhood nearly missing the neighbors’ 50ft palm tree. There had been helicopter noise for about 10 minutes prior, so this got my immediate attention. I went outside to see a copious amounts of white smoke coming from the neighborhood just about 2 blocks north of the house.

I put on my shoes to see where the fire was originating and walked up the street.

View North from Harding Avenue and Berendo as I walked toward the fire

A satellite map of the exact location of the blaze.

Arrival at the Scene

I walked up to the rough scene (or as close as I could get given the situation and the smoke) at about 6:22. Traffic is being stopped on Altadena Drive from roughly Canyon Close Dr. up past Roosevelt Ave.

Firefighters are connecting hoses at Canyon Close Drive and running them up the street. I suspect this is to potentially defend the homes on the top side of the street because the fire and certainly the smoke are close enough to warrant it.

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Batallion Chief arriving at the scene just a few minutes after I do.
Batallion Chief arriving at the scene just a few minutes after I do.
Smoke is getting thicker as I get closer to the scene of the fire.
Smoke is getting thicker as I get closer to the scene of the fire.
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Firefighter connecting hose at the closest hydrant, potentially to protect nearby homes.
Firefighter connecting hose at the closest hydrant, potentially to protect nearby homes.
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The fire is apparently down in Eaton Canyon
The fire is apparently down in Eaton Canyon
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View walking up Altadena Drive toward Roosevelt
View walking up Altadena Drive toward Roosevelt
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Water drops in progress

As I was walking up to the scene until about ten minutes later there were about 4 or 5 water drops by LA County Sheriff’s Helicopters.

Scene on the street

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Ground Troops Arrive

Water drops seem to have stopped for the moment and groups of firefighters are arriving to descend down into Eaton Canyon to finish off the blaze. By rough count there were about 50-60 firefighters down in the canyon and roughly another 30 or so additional firefighters and other first responders up on the street providing support.

Group of ground firefighters arrive to battle the blaze on the ground.
Group of ground firefighters arrive to battle the blaze on the ground.
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They're heading half a block up to the Henninger Trail Head to descend down to the scene of the fire.
They’re heading half a block up to the Henninger Trail Head to descend down to the scene of the fire.
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Clean up time

It’s now 4:43 pm and water drops have stopped for the past 10 minutes or so. It’s now roughly 45 minutes after the firefight started. Here are some pictures from the vantage point just above the location of the fire just a few feet away from the canyon edge. Based on my guestimate the fire took up approximately 2-4 acres of space which was primarily dry scrubbrush and several trees in the middle of the arroyo.

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on the North side of Altadena Drive, to get a better view of the scene.
on the North side of Altadena Drive, to get a better view of the scene.
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Chainsaws, shovels, and picks in use to knock down the last of the fire.
Chainsaws, shovels, and picks in use to knock down the last of the fire.
Firefighters putting out the last of the blaze.
Firefighters putting out the last of the blaze.
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View down into the canyon
View down into the canyon

Reporting live from the scene

With things beginning to look like they’re winding down, and with a clearer view of the scene now that the smoke has abated significantly I take a moment to do a quick video recap for the viewers at home.

Heading home

Things appear to be under control by about 5pm, so I headed home. Stopping to ask local police how long the street is likely to be closed through rush hour.

I arrive at the house and toss in the coordinates of the fire into Google Maps to discover the center of the fire was 2,426 feet from the house (roughly 2 blocks away.) It was easy to get exact coordinates given the size of the trees in the fire zone and the specificity of the images in Google’s satellite view. We definitely dodged one today, particularly given the dryness of the last year and the high winds we’ve seen all afternoon.

It also dawns on me that I took a hike through this exact portion of Eaton Canyon yesterday morning. My checkin at the time captures a photo across the canyon almost 30 hours before the incident. I’ll try to get another sometime this week to provide a direct comparison.

🎧 Pull Up A Chair #1 – Jay Rosen & David Fahrenthold | The Correspondent

Listened to Pull Up A Chair #1 - David Fahrenthold meets Jay Rosen by Jay Rosen from The Correspondent on SoundCloud
David Fahrenthold of the Washington Post won a Pulitzer for his Trump coverage, but he couldn’t have done it without help from his readers. In the first episode of our new podcast, Pull up a Chair, David talks with NYU’s Jay Rosen about the power of putting readers at the heart of journalism.



An awesome little start of a podcast. I’d definitely come back to this.