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:

Through Friday, of 270 news articles published in The Times about the election since the national tickets were formed in late August, only 29, or a little over 10 percent, were primarily about policy substance. And that is a generous tally that includes some very brief items.

That count by my assistant, Michael McElroy, is similar to figures compiled by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, which has been closely monitoring election coverage in a wide range of media. The group found that only 8 percent of front-page articles in The Times from late August through last Sunday were about policy. Nearly three-quarters were about the horse race, political tactics, polls and the like. The Times numbers are about the same as for the news media in general, including cable television and blogs — not a standard to aspire to.

Apparently, that does not make the public happy; Hoyt writes:

Early this year, roughly three-quarters of voters of all political persuasions surveyed by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press said they wanted more coverage of the candidates’ stands on issues. For the most part, they were disappointed, and their satisfaction with the news media has declined, according to Pew. In February, 55 percent said the election coverage was good or excellent. By June, 54 percent said it was fair or poor.

Those interested in civic and public journalism have been taking on this issue since the public journalism reform movement began  after the 1988 presidential election. Jay Rosen has been one of the most informed critics. Here is what he said back in January, 2008. Here is what I wrote in October 2007 and if you want to keep going back, here is Rosen again in 2004 with his PressThink piece Horse Race Now! Horse Race Tomorrow! Horse Race. Forever!

If I were surveyed, I would answer that I want more issue oriented stories. However, here is a confession: I can’t help myself, apparently like a lot of political junkies, each day I visit places like FiveThirtyEight.com which provides fantastic horse race coverage, just like inside baseball. It is addictive. Here is what FiveThirtyEight posted last week about the site’s audience growth:

Seven months ago today this site … went live, with 80 visits. Yesterday we reached 693,216 … Glancing at the daily circulation figures for US newspapers, it looks like we’re at or about the top ten and rising with a bullet.

So for me I want my polls and my substantial reporting too. Right now we are obviously getting more of the former and too little of the latter and that is the big problem now, has been the problem in the past and will probably be the problem forever.

If you just keep clicking on the video advance button on the video, it will take to that 26-minute place.

The lead panel discussion is entitled: Civic/Public Journalism 2.0, and the panelits, Rosen, Lambeth, Mark Deuze of Indiana University; and Burton St. John of Old Dominion University aim try to answer these questions:

Where do principles and practices from the public journalism movement now inform the press? How does the past inform us about where Civic/ Public Journalism may influence future avenues toward press re-engagement with citizens?

Another panel Meet the Press: Hyperlocal, Community and Citizen Media in Chicago will feature Adrian Holovaty of www.everyblock.com and mastermind behind the Chicagocrime.org ”one of the original map mashups, combining crime data from the Chicago Police Department with Google Maps.”

I also will be on a panel entitled: They Blog for Journalism Change – And It Pays Off with Rosen and Mindy McAdams.

It should be a fun afternoon, please drop by, you are welcome.

The conference entitled “The Past, Present and Future of Civic/Citizen Journalism,”  will be held on Tuesday, 5 August 2008 between 2 pm and 6 pm at the journalism convergence lab, at Columbia College, Chicago. Here are full details.

1. “Newspaper” no longer accurately describes the full range of products that traditional print journalism outlets are producing.

2. “Newspaper” no longer accurately describes the full range of journalistic work that our division members study. At the Chicago convention, we will hear research presentations on newspaper online interactivity, copy editors’ roles in the “digital revolution,” online citizen journalism and reporters’
blogs.

3. Giving the division a name that accurately reflects the breadth of our interests might help us stem a decline in membership. Although the Newspaper Division remains the largest in AEJMC (by just 20 members), membership has fallen 13.3 percent since 2004, from 684 to 593. It’s impossible to say for sure what caused the decline, but it’s possible that some AEJMC members are not joining our division or renewing membership in it because they think all we are concerned with is what some view as a dying medium. (I don’t share that view, but it is out there.)

4. Giving the division a name that accurately reflects the breadth of our interests might help us stem a decline over the past few years in paper submissions. Again, it’s impossible to say for sure why our submissions have been down, but it may be that scholars studying such topics as online news sites, for example, have perceived our division as being focused only on news printed on paper.

5. Expanding our division’s name to something like “Newspaper and Online Journalism Division” or “Newspaper and Newer Media Division” — or some better name members suggest — would let us offer a division home to the scholars who study online and newer media journalism. Some of those people are now affiliated with AEJMC’s Communication Technology Division. But foroth ers, whose work is focused more on *journalism* than *technology,* that division may not seem like the perfect fit.

6. Expanding our division’s name might help us better weather any internal reorganization that grows out of adopting the AEJMC Strategic Plan, which members will be asked to vote on in Chicago. (You can read more about it, from my perspective, here.

One idea that seems popular is the name “News Media” Division. Well, I guess that works if you want to be ALL encompassing.

I will watch the discussion and post some responses to her proposal in the next couple of days. Here is one from Buck Ryan, School of Journalism and Telecommunications at the University of Kentucky:

On a good day in 1690 you could read a newspaper, Publick Occurrences: Both Forreign and Domestick, and this morning my newspaper, the Lexington Herald-Leader, was on my doorstep at 6 a.m.

Having attended a World Association of Newspapers convention and having purchased newspapers at newsstands in South America, Europe and Asia, I think the death of “newspaper” has been greatly exaggerated.

When the people formerly known as the audience employ the press tools they have in their possession to inform one another, that’s citizen journalism.

As you probably know Rosen was one of the founders of the Public Journalism movement. I just finished writing a book review of The Pursuit of Public Journalism: Theory, Practice, Criticism by Tanni Haas. The review will be published eventually in the International Journal of Press/Politics.

Haas writes that public journalism’s:

…founding scholarly and journalistic advocates — Rosen included — have arguably failed to clearly articulate public journalism as a journalistic philosophy in its own right.

So Jay, is this definition the first step in clearly articulating citizen journalism as a journalistic philosophy in its own right? It would be nice.

By the way as I pointed out in a comment at Rosen’s site: Type in the URL citizenjournalism.org and see who owns it. Go ahead type it in now, I will see you back here in a couple of seconds.

Also in an earlier response to Jeff Jarvis, who was promoting “networked journalism” and wanting to kill off the phrase “citizen journalism,” I wrote:

I like the networked journalism concept, but to me the phrase networked journalism is a cop out, a phrase used to offend no one…

When we founded the Public Journalism Network, I did not want us to give up the name public journalism, even though, it was a hot button issue and had lots of baggage….

I also pushed for the former AEJMC Civic Journalism Interest Group to become the Civic and Citizen Journalism Interest Group.

If we remove the words citizen, public, civic from the equation, it will be too easy to forget that this is about public, civic, citizen participation. This is not just about helping news operations to get a free staff or even developing better coverage, it’s a way of getting an engaged public to help build a bigger, better and stronger democracy.

If the ABC News Presidential Primary debate debacle had happened back then, people like David Brooks and George Stephanopoulos with their now totally neanderthal view of quality news and information, would have had the megaphone and totally trumped any criticism and put the Public Journalism people on the defensive. The movement had the right ideas, but lacked the DNA to make them heard and happen. In a figurative sense public journalism lacked the equivalent of thumbs. But alas it has the thumbs now.

In 2004 I wrote:

The new weblog-infused DNA makes public journalism more nimble and provides it with figurative set of thumbs. It allows public journalism to grasp and do things impossible in the old public journalism… We want to ensure that the … spin doctors do not control our elections..

I do believe if there are any spin doctors out there today thinking like Brooks did in his New York Times column, they are in big trouble. Brooks wrote:

We may not like it, but issues like Jeremiah Wright, flag lapels and the Tuzla airport will be important in the fall. Remember how George H.W. Bush toured flag factories to expose Michael Dukakis. It’s legitimate to see how the candidates will respond to these sorts of symbolic issues. 

This week, some 20 years after the first protests about this inane, neanderthal type of journalism, the spin doctors, Stephanopoulos and Brooks have learned that the people have their own megaphones and that the once struggling public journalism has evolved into the public’s journalism and its new thumbs cannot only grasp, but when push comes to shove, they can gouge.

Here are two articles that got the citizen journalism buzz going: Steve Outing’s thoughtful piece and a Washington Post story by Jose Antonio Vargas. Here are reactions by Faye Anderson, by Tim McGuire,  and by Billy Dennis.

Below is a little video by Amani Channel which will help you understand why I am the collector of  the public journalism and citizen journalism urls and why I will continue to fight for more citizen say, no matter what the name you give it.