Leonard Witt at Universidad Santo Tomás, Bogotá, Colombia

The conference was impressive with a nice line-up of topics and speakers. If you speak Spanish, you can find out more here about the presentations. Here is a little Flickr slideshow I put together.

For Spanish speakers here is a video below:

Here is the link to it all.

McGill’s students have been posting an impressive series of local journalism stories and posting them at Locally Grown. Their work is worth watching, hearing and reading.

Here is a description of McGill’s class:

272. Truth vs. Power: A Journey in Journalism

Journalism is in turmoil today. Bold experimentation is needed to meet such dramatic new challenges to journalism as the Internet, the decline of newspapers, multilingual readerships, and global crises requiring activism more than “objectivity.” The class will move between a theoretical focus — exploring journalism’s basic theories and often-contradictory methods, purposes and aims –and a practical focus inviting students to strive towards their highest journalistic ideals. Students will be challenged to blend journalism’s indispensable norms of factual accuracy, fairness and quality writing with new technologies such as blogging, podcasting, videocasting, social networking and RSS feeds. 6 credits, AL.
Fall — D. McGill

It reminded me that maybe, just maybe, I want to give it a try. Maybe starting January 1, 2009. My earlier January post was inspired by Stephanie Roberts, who still seems to be taking a photograph a day. That’s her with the camera. I did a random Project 365 search and also found Dred242 in the ethernet, and he too has been dutifully shooting every day. That’s him on election day November 4, 2008. Alas looking at their camerassays  they are real photographers, where as for me, well, I am just a citizen media kind of guy.

• First point to remember. Blogs are simply a blank piece of paper. They can be used any way the blog publisher wants to use his or her blog. They can strive for truth, for example, PolitiFact, a project of the St. Petersburg Times and Congressional Quarterly, which parses ads for how truthful they are and how false they are.

In the past, a campaign would put out a lie. The news media aiming to be balanced would restate the lie and then get both sides to comment on it. Even a blatant lie got repeated so often, that it had traction within voters’ consciousnesses. It’s a lot harder to do so with PolitiFact fact-checking ads and talking points and then rating them with the worst offenders getting a Pants-on-Fire lie rating with a graphic to emphasize the point.

• Blogs can be blatantly partisan for example Drudge and Powerline on the right and Atrios and the Daily Kos on the left.

• Blogs can be a powerful force for justice, even if they are leaning in one direction or the other. For example, TalkingPointsMemo exposed the US Attorneys firings, which eventually meant the downfall of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and has had ramifications directly into the more recent claims of voter registration fraud. Here are self reported facts from TalkingPointsMemo for October 2008:

Absolute Unique Visitors: 3.12 million
Visits: 15.29 million
Page Views: 30.99 million.

• Blogs can be amazing tools for mobilizing forces. For example, obscure Minnesota US Congresswoman Michelle Bachmann called Barack Obama unpatriotic on Hardball with Chris Matthews and said he that he should be investigated. Within hours the left-leaning blogosphere started a campaign to fund her fully unknown opponent Elwyn Tinklenberg. In days he receives $1.4 million dollars from independent contributors via the blogosphere. The influx of money for advertising almost immediately begins to diminish a Bachmann advantage and puts her seat in play.

• Blog sites like Pollster.com and Fiverthirtyeight.com have running commentaries on every poll and parse every number. They are all about the horse race and nothing about the issues, but they are addictive.

• Blogs allow individuals like me to be a player in a way that would have been impossible five years ago. At my blog PJNet.org, which talks about citizen media, I try to practice what I preach so occasionally I do a citizen journalism post. Here are two examples:

During the primary Rudy Giuliani came to Marietta, Ga where I live. I took out my still camera with video capabilities and went to the town square. Giuliani got met by a large Ron Paul counter-demonstration. I got it all on video and uploaded it to my site and to my blog. It received 6,700 views. I did another one last week of people waiting in an early vote presidential election line; it got 230 views. Combined those are about 7,000 sets of eyeballs diverted from other mainstream media, and I am just one guy with a little still camera with video capabilities. Multiple that times that other tens of thousands people doing similar posting and you have a real movement on your hands. How big?

• The New York Times reports :

• YouTube videos mentioning either Mr. Obama or Mr. McCain have been viewed 2.3 billion times, according to the measurement firm TubeMogul.

• “SNL” videos proved to be particularly popular online; Tina Fey’s impressions were viewed more than 50 million times.

• With 5 million views since March, Mr. Obama’s 37-minute speech about race is the most popular video on his YouTube channel. (New York Times, Nov. 2, 2008)

• A Pew Research Center survey conducted in October found that 39 percent of registered voters had watched campaign videos online.

• Four years ago in the 2004 election there was no YouTube.

So what about the overflow of information,  how can we tell the good from the bad, misinformation from good information? Part of our challenge as a university is to advance media literacy, but which is more democratic a few brand-name monopolistic media organizations dominating the news or a cacophony of voices?

Right now people are voting with their eyeballs for a cacophony of voices. Plus they are coming out to the polls in record numbers and they have a wealth of information unavailable to them in the past.

We do have some some problems looming. Much of the stimulus for the conversation comes from mainstream news sites, producing hard-to-gather journalism. The free blogosphere is undermining  the old business models that have supported quality journalism. How will solid journalism be supported in the future? We don’t know, but remember just four years ago there was no YouTube so anything is possible.

So were people miffed about the long line? I thought they would be, but you listen to what this random sample of folks had to say, you might be surprised. I was.

Starting today, registered United States voters can share their voting experiences via the Video Your Vote YouTube Channel. Some of the best videos will be showcased on PBS television, as part of The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer’s Election Day broadcast.

I love this sentence fragment: “In the first presidential election since YouTube’s inception…” Can you believe that YouTube has been around less than four years? Any how, the press release continues:

In the first presidential election since YouTube’s inception, this program aims to gather massive amounts of polling place video, with the Channel serving as an online library for Election Day footage.

Go here to learn more about the project and the legalities of shooting video at polling places in your state. Here is a Judy Woodruff video:

It’s clear African Americans are sharing content in large numbers.

In fact, African Americans are producing more content proportionally than white groups. Wojdynski and Smith made their presentation entitled: The participatory Web: Demographic predictors of online content creation at the Convergence and Society:The Participatory Web conference at the University of South Carolina. Remember their sample is small, but a good first step in launching more research in this area.

My personal observation at my SoCon conferences at Kennesaw State University, indicate that the African American community at least in the Atlanta metro area is deeply involved in the digital world and in citizen media. However, this is just a personal observation.

Of course, if the Wojdynski and Smith study is a first step in confirming this trend, then we might have great opportunities to reach out to African American youth — especially African American boys — to get them more deeply involved in education by leveraging their interest in producing online content.