some notes from dan gillmor's presentation at the bbc

  Tuesday 12:55 pm 6/12/07 
  Originally uploaded by robinhamman

Disruption never greater than in web 2.0 era, cost of experimenting never lower - and innovation can be done by everyone.

Dan's been talking about democratized media for the past few years - not in the sense of voting, but in participation: both in terms of production and access.

RSS feeds help people who take those feeds to create a "daily me".

So what's changing in journalism? Where are the opportunities?

We're going from lecture to conversation. The first rule of conversation? Listen. Dan says, "We listen pretty well to our contacts, but we're not so good at listening to our audience."

Web 2.0 gives us opportunities for database journalism, like LA Times loan defaults database or the Washington Post database of US Soldiers killed in Iraq. Also mashups like the Bakersfield California pot-hole map and rich media mashups like the Tony Blair "Should I Stay or Should I Go" video.

Creating portals to the best to others work (he uses Bladet's Blog portal from Sweden - link soon

Asking for help from the audience (networked journalism) as well as asking people to send us stuff, but, Dan cautions, "we shouldn't be sending amateurs into harmsway". But, if we don't do it, people will put their own content online - eg. Jakarta bomb photos on flickr.

What's different between Zapruder's film of Kennedy's assassination and today? "Think ahead, five or ten years at the latest... there would be a thousand people with high definition cameras [camera phones]... connected to digital networks... what if the people who were on the planes on September 11th, who were making voice calls, were sending us video of what was going on inside the planes?"

One of Dan's current projects is Dopplr, which they started as a bit of fun but people like and now they've got some investment. They're now up to 5 employees, There are 5 founders for the project, which isn't related to Dan's work in citizen journalism but which, he says, is "really intresting. Two of those founders are in the UK, two in Finland and one is in the US. Only one of those is working on it part-time full time (the rest are doing so part time alongside other projects), so costs are low.

After talking for a while about some other ideas and projects, which went from various mashups to barcoding wine, Gillmor says his philosphy is: open, don't reinvent wheels, collaborate and take risks.

But... to take risks, we need to think about media literacy. What is and isn't an act of journalism? How do we find "the truth" when it's so easy to make fakes? And then there is the problem of too much information, too much data coming in. So how do we achieve these things? Moving from the "daily me to the daily us", using sites like newsvine, might be one way. But popularity isn't enough, reputation... well, we haven't got it right yet. Dan feels audiences need to remain skeptical, adjust the trust quotient for each site, keep reporting, learn media techniques. Gillmor highlights NewsTrust, an experiment in "collective media literacy".

Basic Principles for Journalists today? They've always been, Dan says: thoroughness, accuracy, fairness, independence and - the new one - transparency.

Update: Some information about dopplr updated/corrected since original publish.