Corporate media learns collaboration
Rob Paterson's blog has a fascinating post about a St Louis public TV station apparently getting to grips with the role of old media in the world of new media. KETC’s H1N1 Blog - FluPortal.org
When the mortgage crisis began, KETC experimented with blogging as “a way to get information out to the community” during critical situations, Berenc said. The station’s mortgage-crisis blog (which is still up and running) “proved highly successful,” she told me. It generated lots of audience comments and drove traffic to KETC’s site.
So when swine flu emerged, Berenc said it was a no-brainer to create another blog “as part of an overall strategy to connect people to information on-air, online, and in the community.” To get started, KETC “convened a group of community organizations that have a stake in H1N1,” she explained, to solicit advice on “how to connect people to trusted resources.” The group included people from the city and county health departments, regional school districts, the United Way of Greater St. Louis, and the American Red Cross, St. Louis Area Chapter. Using their input, the station created a Wordpress site and started a group blog. KETC’s web coordinator vets posts written by staff, interns, and the Red Cross.
Although KETC doesn’t have stats yet on the success of the H1N1 blog, Berenc assured me that the station will continue it until H1N1 is no longer an issue. She believes the H1N1 page as a whole is “a prime example of what happens when public media organizations collaborate with trusted partners — the community wins.”
At the EYC conference in Wellington last month we had a couple of questions about how expert or authentic organisations working in specific social areas could be sure that the community is getting good information rather that being hijacked through Twitter or Facebook into donating to either outright scams or well-meaning, but inappropriate or ineffective actions.
This might be the answer. Of course, it will mean that your local media people wake up to their role online, which may take a while yet.
How effective are your local media in
- using online technologies to improve the quality of information they publish and
- using your expoert and informed resources to do that?
Comments open.
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December 16, 2009 No Comments
The meaning and practise of citizen journalism
Every time a major story breaks outside the ability of the corporate media to cover it, the quality of the coverage seems to change by orders of magnitude both in quality and quantity. Its first glimemrs occurred during the attack on the World Trade centre in 2001, but it didn't really hit its stridfe until about 2007 with the London underground attacks where journalists were outside the cordon but people with cellphones, and their cameras, were inside the cordon and rpeorting, flickr-ing, blogging, txting reports from the front lines. Since then we have been inside the Mumbai attack and now we also have twitter as a tool of civil disobedience.
The events of the last 10 days in Iran are a perfect example of how this new media thing works and the issues that arise from mass journalism, especially those of credibility and merging of duplicate reports.
One of the best thinkers on the future of journalism and the media is Jeff Jarvis at Buzzmachine who offers this take on Adding value in the new news ecosystem [Read more →]
June 24, 2009 No Comments
Farmers making their own way online
TVNZ's closeup the other night had the perfect answer to my exhortation a while back on putting the broadband development money where it will do the most good. via Farmers making their own way online [Read more →]
May 13, 2009 No Comments
This is why the internet is so important
A criticisms of the Internet by traditional and corporate media is that the net is full of inaccuracies and cannot be trusted. The implication, and often the stated position, is that corporate media are "professionals" and provide a much more reliable service than mere amateurs.
The reality is different as anyone knows who has ever been reported in corporate media, or found an article about something in which they are well informed. The media always get something wrong, perhaps a detail that annoys, often a misunderstanding of the issue, editing that distorts the facts or just plain misquotation that makes a nonsense of what you have said or done.
Yet we tend to believe that all the rest of the paper, news bulletin etc is wholly accurate and a moment's thought will show that is not justified. Now Dublin university student Shane Fitzgerald has provided a lens into how the media gets it so wrong, so often.
They don't follow their own advice. via Student hoaxes world's media with fake Wiki quote - web - Technology.
May 13, 2009 No Comments
Free Community websites plus
There's another entrant in the race to provide online resources for the Voluntary and Non-profit sector, The People's Times is a project of the Open Polytechnic of New Zealand and e-learning specialists Flexible Learning Network. The initiative is supported by seed funding from the 2007-8 round of the New Zealand government's Community Partnership Fund.
Disclaimer, The PeoplesTimes republishes webguide news.
Their pitch is that there are thousands of active clubs, societies, associations and community groups up and down the country but the majority of our small groups are yet to make the leap online, usually because of a lack of money or expertise.
The site tries to fulfil into three overlapping objectives, the first being Communities with free homepages for groups with some networking tools and online storage and the NoticeBoard – searchable, community-oriented free listings.
Where it differs from others is its stated aim of being a ‘citizen journalism’ platform: anyone can submit original articles and pictures or link to stories elsewhere. [Read more →]
April 22, 2009 No Comments
