The [earthquake] relief efforts quickly became a living laboratory for new applications such as SMS (short message service) texting, interactive online maps and radio-cell phone hybrids. These tools were applied to urgent tasks such as guiding search-and-rescue teams, locating missing persons and delivering food and water to the populations that needed them the most.

It adds:

This report captures three important observations:

1. Traditional humanitarian organizations were often open to the new technologies, but remain nervous about the implications of information and powersharing through crowdsourcing and other new media platforms.

2. Joint humanitarian communities demonstrated that there were many beneficial ways to use digital media in the crisis setting, particularly texting functions.

3. Although much of the attention has been paid to new media technologies, radio was the most effective
tool for serving the needs of the public. The first media priority in Haiti was to restore radio service (as it was in the tsunami and other recent crises).

Read the full report here and the Knight press release here.

Next before the heavy duty research is Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives by Nicholas A. Christakis and James H. Fowler. It was reviewed in New York Times Book Review. Here are the authors making a pitch for their book:

I anticipated that maybe a couple of dozen people might show up. So I was a bit nonplussed when I came on stage — really an altar — and saw at least 200 people seated in the church’s pews to hear our panel.

My message was that if the public doesn’t step up and start to support journalism, it was going to disappear and our democracy was in trouble. I repeated a line I have given before: If you the public don’t find enough value in what we do, then why should we do it?

I pay for my haircut and every other service, so why not pay for journalism? The days of advertisers paying for your journalism is waning, if not over.

So who in the audience, I asked, will step forward and help save journalism? The answer was the 25 citizens who filled out forms saying they were ready to help. We at the Center for Sustainable Journalism at Kennesaw State University will meet with these 25 citizens and anyone else interested in advancing the cause of sound journalism. Maybe this is the beginning of a national citizens’ movement to advance high quality, ethically sound journalism. We will see.

I must tell you, I have seen indications of this coming. In casual conversations I have had with people, a fair number of them realize that journalism is in deep trouble and they are afraid, as am I, of a world without journalism.

Remember the proverd: Mighty oaks from little acorn grow. If you want to be part of our pioneering effort, get in touch. Be part of our charter meeting which I will be call in early October.

By the way, I shared the panel with Leon Levitt, Vice President of Digital Media at Cox Newspapers, which owns the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and Hank Klibanoff, coauthor of The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle and the Awakening of a Nation, who until recently was the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s managing editor.

Welcome to J-startup news, a place for news people to discuss, rate and share news and commentary about journalism startups, new business models for news, hacker journalism and anything else that falls along these lines.

Here is its widget:

Its founder adds:

I hope this becomes a place where startups announce their projects, ask for help and post job openings.

Another handy thing that J-Startup News will do is create a central place for the best news from all the folks covering the industry on blogs and pro sites. For the last few months I’d been wishing for a site like this to give me all the best links right now in one place. I am morally opposed to RSS readers so social news sites are how I find stuff I want to read. There wasn’t one for news people who want to read about “the new news.” So now we’ve got one.

American Public Media announced Monday it has received a three-year, $2.95 million grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

The grant will support St. Paul-based American Public Media’s Public Insight Journalism, a system that encourages radio listeners and Web site users to become “citizen sources,” providing news tips and information for use in news gathering. More than 70,000 people already have signed up to participate.

Here is more:

The Knight Foundation grant will help American Public Media:

• Seek as many as 15 additional media partners nationwide;

• Evaluate the composition of the Public Insight Network to enhance the quality of the database;

• Strengthen the technical infrastructure of the Public Insight Network to better serve partners by assuring the network’s reliability and viability;

• Produce a working version of the Audience Insight Repository system — the software used for the Public Insight Network — under an open-source license;

• Assess the impact of Public Insight Journalism on media partners and audiences;

• Connect with journalism schools to promote Public Insight Journalism as a new model for news gathering; and

• Form a national advisory board by recruiting diverse professionals from journalism, media technology, civic engagement and academia.

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 is a simple kind of journalism that any citizen can do and because they are straight-on interviews, they are very verifiable. Of course, Q&As are limited by their very nature, because they are one-sided conversations, but it is relatively easy to shoot, requires just a little editing and then an upload. Plus for most citizens getting to talk to experts, especially in their areas of interest, is a very inviting prospect. Here is an interesting interview with Esther Dyson:

Here are a few excerpts:

Steve Yelvington, strategist for Morris DigitalWorks, talking of citizen participation says:

The key to meshing the bubbling social media elements of the site with the print product…is ensuring that the newspaper staff keeps tabs on—and participates in—online conversations. “When it works, the newsroom staff is engaged and comes back with a lot of impressions and leads they didn’t have before,” he says. “To me, that’s the way it fits with journalism. Trying to get people to go out and cover stories like a cub reporter doesn’t work very well.”

Kate Marymont, executive editor of the Fort Myers’ News Press, is quote in this passage:

Both the paper’s crowdsourcing and teamsourcing experiments have one thing in common: “A level of civic engagement I haven’t seen for a while…which is just fabulous.” While that’s a goal shared by many in the citizen journalism movement, it’s one particularly important for newspapers’ long-term survival as well.

And talking about our Locally Grown project in Northfield, Minnesota, in which we will provide the online community a fulltime reporter, I say:

“It’s not just an online newspaper that’s thrown on the online doorstep and the reporter walks away. The reporter is one voice in the bigger community—an informed voice, but one voice. Everyone else can jump in and add a bit of information, providing a higher-quality conversation.”

As I said read the whole white paper, it is an excellent overview of what’s happening.

Mention that cit. journalists in Atlanta are creating a “virtual” newsroom… I’m getting in reports from people on ground and redirecting them to MSM at the moment. Can’t head to field right now as I have to be home with kid, but soccer moms such as moi can surely pass info along like nobody’s business!

Also, CNN newsroom just took on water; they’ve moved ‘em to another part of bldg. Another huge storm getting ready to come through, which will send wind and rain into all the now-exposed, blown out windows/roofs of all the many damaged office buildings downtown, not to mention the homes. It’s like Hurricane Andrew… whereas the scope of the damage is just now starting to trickle in and be comprehended. It’s vast. Wish you were here!

From an earlier Daughters email:

Citizen Journalism “network” is working this Atlanta downtown tornado hard. With cells and Twitter. For instance, I just heard from pal with still cam on scene that Vine City area just behind CNN, poor and black, was hit hard, lots of damage, yet no MSM press had shown up there yet. The people were wondering why no one cares about their area. So I called AP and CNN, and a few v-loggers of course!

I was on-scene last night. Vid getting good play on YouTube and iReport.

Grayson directs me to:

Last night I turned on CNN and I heard lots of their commentators, their talking heads about the damage and the same footage over and over, but no real reporting like Daughters provided here. Am I missing something –certainly CNN did some real reporting — or has the mainstream media really given up on honest to god reporting, even when it is literally in their own house.

Last time I looked at Flickr there were about 300 photos posted about the event. Look through them closely. As you do, be sure to watch the slide show of the black and white photos by Tikigod, who is, in fact, Nik Wilets. Wilets, whose self portrait is on this post, now specializes in interactive media and design at Morris DigitalWorks™ ; however, he has a degree in photojournalism and worked as photojournalist in the past.

Over all the years I was a magzine editor, I found that meeting photos were often boring, except probably to the people attending the meeting. However, that might have been because the photojournalists shooting them were bored or weren’t much better than the amateurs, at least, on an artistic level.

Now that takes us back to SoCon08. Look at Wilets photos are they better than the others? Is black and white a lost art that should be revived? If you were a photo editor and Wilets was on your staff, would you send him to the meeting or just let the conference attendees fire away and you take the best of what they shoot?

Is there be much of a future for photojournalists? Should newspaper or web editors be hiring more photojournalists or fewer?  Or should they be hiring fewer photojournalists, but better ones? Or should they use their money to hire people who write, shoot photos and do video, even if there might be a trade off in quality in one of those areas? Would there be a trade off in quality?

Our SoCon08 has been fortunate because we are, in part, about citizen media. So we are getting some of the best of the amateurs to shoot for us. Still would that be enough if you were a news site? If you were starting a web news organization today, what role would photos and great photographers have in it?

I know my answers. I would try to hire as many great shooters like Wilets as I could and knock the socks of my viewers each morning, no matter if I was in print or online. The more amateur stuff out there, the more appealing will be the stuff by the pros because it will continue to stand out.