He healed our sick hospitals and anemic health care system and all but rose the lame, struck down by diabetes, from their wheelchairs  — and he did it with narratives, stories, examples and explanations that had just enough common sense logic to make them seem doable.

And for all of that, he deserved page three on the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s Metro page, with the headline that reads:

Former president skips Obama jabs in speeches 

Ah, if only he had taken even a tiny jab, certainly that would have pushed him to the front page of the Metro section and a nice round-house swing would have elevated him to 1A status. But no, he offered nothing more than a rousing speech for which hundreds of people, the Marietta Daily Journal said thousands, stood in line for more than an hour to hear. The wimp, the palooka. Thus not even a photo.

Okay, I get it, the hardcopy part of the newspaper only has so much room, the website will reflect the feeling of celebration. After all, this is Cobb County, Georgia, home of Newt Gingrich and Bob Barr, certainly one must ask: Where the hell did all these Democrats come from? I know that was a question people were asking in the line itself. 

The Marietta Daily Journal, the real hometown newspaper, did, in fact, run the story with big photos on Page 1A, and with a massive headline that reflected the mood of the crowd, and not the disappointment of the AJC reporter, with a line from Clinton’s speech:

Rebuild the Dream

The difference is that the AJC plays for a mass audience and apparently does not have a clue how to connect in new ways with small fragmented communities. Hence, they wait for the punch in the face or at least the hope of a head butt. A former President — for whom people waited not just an hour, but really for years to see in person — connecting with his tribe was a thing of beauty, which the AJC with its old ways of covering the news, basically ignored. But that ignoring, built out of ignorance of social media, is done at its own peril.  

Rather than wasting everyone’s time by burying a story on page three that no one will read, why not direct that energy to engage the hundreds of people who came to this event. Let them share photos, stories, which you play up for anyone who is interested. Do the same with the other candidates, with rock concerts, with demonstrations, but don’t just write about who is on the stage; instead be the indispensable catalyst for community building, bring your tribes back home just as Bill Clinton did last night at Kennesaw State University. Give yourself a punch in the face, wake up; find yourself the 100-mile-a-gallon news operation, raise up from your wheelchair, rebuilt your anemic ways…and tomorrow you will feel good about yourself just as Bill Clinton’s crowd feels good about themselves this fine Saturday. 

So rather having an immigrant lift your aging mother from a bed directly, you have a robotic arm controlled via computer by a someone in a far away land do it. Robots are not smart enough to do a lot tasks by themselves, but if they are remotely controlled by a human, they can do thousands of tasks, even delicate ones.

So now that brings us to our citizen journalists as robots controlled by professional journalists or better yet professional journalists controlled by citizens or the true panacea for higher quality journalism is to have it both ways.

Here is the experiment at work. Robert Scoble, whom the BBC calls the blogger and videoblogger extraordinaire, was at the World Economic Forum in Davos interviewing folks for his website, and BBC blogger Tim Weber watched as Scoble interviewed Marc Benioff, a Davos participant:

…not with a big video camera but a small Nokia mobile phone, that sent a live video stream of the interview to his website. So far, so ambitious. Now comes the stunner. While he was doing the interview, Robert saw live on his phone screen the comments and questions posted by his viewers.

Just to illustrate how it works: When Marc pulled me into the conversation, within half a minute Robert had live on his screen a reader’s query about the BBC’s video-on-demand policy. Robert asked me the question straight away, and as we continued talking about the mobile phone industry and video on the web, more BBC-related queries piled up.

Since a citizen journalist shouldn’t be expected to do the delicate task of doing a professional interview and since a professional journalist shouldn’t be expected to do the complicated task of getting citizens involved on the scene when he or she is out on a interview, we now can bring in help from afar via technology, just as we would if we were really talking about robots.

Now this is extremely big — a stunner really — because it can change the equation of how news is gathered and reported, especially for smaller scale equations like with my Representative Journalism idea where groups of a thousand or smaller can hire their own journalists.

Just as Scoble did, if I am a reporter, I would use Twitter to tell my audience that I am on my way to interview Mr. Big. In five minutes, I will be live streaming the interview back to my website or to your iPhone, please jump in with your questions.

Or if you are a citizen journalist reporting on Mr. Big, you Twitter whichever newsrooms might be interested in the interview. The professional editors log on to your livestream at your website or on their cell phones and can do two things: 1) quickly verify that you are in fact interviewing Mr. Big, and 2) can feed you questions.  The mainstream then has a verified, professionally enhanced interview that it can use in its stories. Even when things happen spontaneously.

The citizen journalist gets to do a fun, exciting or interesting interview, maybe with monetary compensation, without worrying about the more complicated stuff that is necessary to finish a full-blown story. The mainstream media expand their reporting resources.  

Of course, the real panacea is that pro and amateur journalists Twitter their editors and citizen bases at the same time. So during an interview  the reporter, the editors and the citizenery all are weighing into the interview. It is putting Jay Rosen’s Beatblogging into real time, any time. It is citizen, civic and public journalism Nirvana.

Here is more from Shirky about the distinct between audience and community:

Most user-generated material is actually personal communication in a public forum. Because of this personal address , it makes no more sense to label this content than it would to call a phone call with your mother “family-generated content.” A good deal of user-generated content isn’t actually “content” at all, at least not in the sense of material designed for an audience. Instead, a lot of it is just part of a conversation.

Mainstream media has often missed this, because they are used to thinking of any group of people as an audience. Audience, though, is just one pattern a group can exist in; another is community. Most amateur media unfolds in a community setting, and a community isn’t just a small audience; it has a social density, a pattern of users talking to one another, that audiences lack. An audience isn’t just a big community either; it’s more anonymous, with many fewer ties between users. Now, though, the technological distinction between media made for an audience and media made for a community is evaporating; instead of having one kind of media come in through the TV and another kind come in through the phone, it all comes in over the internet….

This is new. We have never before had a single platform which could scale from conversation to broadcast and all points between, but social media gives us that — it’s like your telephone could turn into a radio, depending on how you configured it.

However, if you are one of the many serious thinkers who believe citizen journalism has merit,  you would be left with the impression that Weinstein himself is so wedded to old-school journalism that he is either a ”crackpot” or if not that, then one of its “sly marketers.”

Here is the tip off. He writes: 

If you could convince me that crowdsourcing and mojos and information centers weren’t about cost cutting or lazy journalism, I’d be all for them.

In the old-school journalism world, there would be no way for the passive audience to show how cracked his argument is, but in this new citizen journalism world there are plenty of people who can counter and expose Weinstein’s own lazy journalism and sly marketing for the past.

 However, you can see for yourself. First read Weinstein and then read this counter article in the Publishing 2.0 blog by Scott Karp. Were you better off just reading Weinstein’s professionally edited piece or did you need both to really get a sense of what citizen journalism is and where its potential lies?

There’s the Canon SD1000 for stills (the same model I already carry everywhere); a nice Panasonic 3-chip camcorder (consumer, not pro-sumer…we need to remain portable, you know); shotgun mic; an external hard drive the size of a Bible for footage; and a laptop the size of a boogie board (Dell, not MBP, but hey), all jammed into a spiffy and very comfortable backpack with our Choose or Lose Street Team ‘08 logos embroidered thereupon.

As they were filling his backpack, they were also filling his head with legal advice:

Yes, to appear in my videos — even if it’s because you stepped up to a microphone to ask John Edwards a question, in front of all those people and cameras — you need to sign my Guest Release. Otherwise, it’s the cutting room floor for you. I’m also going to need someone who is authorized to represent the Atlanta IBEW to sign my Location Agreement, saying I have permission to film there. Oh and I have to slap up Cablecast signs at the door, warning the rest of you that you’re wandering into the line of fire. Meanwhile, my MSM rivals will be pointing and laughing at me, who is now neither as credentialed as a “real” journalist, nor as free from restriction as a “citizen” journalist.

And who are those MTV citizen journalists:

The rest of the Street Team seems pretty cool — even the small handful of Republicans! Well, what do you want, it isMTV after all, so our conservative caucus definitely has the look of a token minority; but I’m sure Vermont, Rhode Island, Indiana, and I believe even Alaska (she’s hard to call) will do you right-wingers proud. The group is split right down the middle in gender, and, as an ever-so-slightly snarky article about our orientation in the Boston Globe says, we even have enough diversity to appeal to “Hispanics, African-Americans, and lesbians.”

She neglected to mention that we are also really, really, incredibly good looking, and do other stuff good, too.

By the way, Shelby will be at our SoCon08 conference on Feb. 8-9, 2008 at Kennesaw State University. We just broke the 146 registrant mark, so are on our way to 200 people at the conference. Having Shelby there will be like having your very own American Idol star sharing dinner with you. Who will you be dining with Friday night Feb. 8? Sign up now.

Yo, Shelby bring your gear. We want our MTV. I’m looking forward to meeting you.

I will be moderating a panel on Friday afternoon Feb. 22 entitled Ubiquitous Journalism. What does that mean? As one of the journalists and not one of the computer folks, I am not 100 percent sure. But here is how it was described to me by Nicholas Diakopoulos, one of the conference organizers:

Ubiquitous Journalism is our invented term for how the data flowing from large networks of sensors and/or people can be applied to journalism. In the Ubiquitous Journalism Panel we’re exploring big news data flows, whether they’re coming from lots of digital sensors in confined geography, or from lots of human reporters globally. The discussion will point to how these streams and the systems that handle them lead to public knowledge and public impact.

Of course, journalists, at least this former one, might be a bit intimidated by that description, but that’s why we have to get together with the computational folks. I have some serious reading to get done before my moderation. Here is the whole panel:

• Jenny Preece, Dean of the College of Information Studies at the University of Maryland, developing 911.gov, a prototype Community Response Grid
• Mark Hansen, Co-PI of the Center for Embedded Networked Sensing , creator of sensorbase.org
• Amra Tareen, Founder and CEO, AllVoices.com
• Leah Culver,  Founder of Pownce, a San Francisco-based micro-blogging service

Here too is a new course Computation and Journalism at Ga. Tech being taught by the conference organizer Irfan Essa. I am having lunch with him next week and talking to this class about civic and citizen journalism 

Very cool stuff. I am excited by the possibilities.

“That rotten, traiterous [sic] piece of filth should be hung by the ankles from a lamp post and beaten by the mob rather than gaining a pulpit at ANY self-respecting news organization,” said one message. “You should be ashamed. Apparently you are only out for money and therefore an equally traiterous [sic] whore deserving the same treatment.”

Then Holt as if to brush off the citizen critics writes:

Kristol would not have been my choice to join David Brooks as a second conservative voice in the mix of Times columnists, but the reaction is beyond reason. Hiring Kristol the worst idea ever? I can think of many worse. Hanging someone from a lamppost to be beaten by a mob because of his ideas? And that is from a liberal, defined by Webster as “one who is open-minded.” What have we come to?

Then he gets down right patronizing when he adds:

This is a decision I would not have made. But it is not the end of the world. Everyone should take a deep breath and calm down.

Sitting in your position of power, Clark, you might not know it or feel it, but in this era of waterboarding etc. it is pretty damn tough to take a deep breath and calm down.

Here is what I would have done, insteading of retrieving probably one of the nuttiest letters to prove a point, I would have run all the letters they received. All 700 right here on the web, what does it cost? Almost nothing.

Instead Hoyt decides to treat 700 of The New York Times readers, dedicated enough to take a stand, as if they are little children, or worse nut cases, and worse still, apparently in his mind, liberal nut cases. 

Update: Marietta Daily Journal reports that Trooper Grant Rowe didn’t stop in time and caused this six car rear end crash chain reaction. He was just on general patrol.

Here are highligths, starting with Maier writing about one of his own initiatives:

When I founded Readers Edition, the term “citizen journalist” was not yet as confusingly common and widespread as it is today. Too many media organizations had hastily recruited readers as cheap contributors, promoting these “citizen journalists” as a great innovation, when in fact their goal was cost savings. With Readers Edition we saw the readers’ role differently; we really wanted to give them a voice. I was curious to learn what readers were really interested in, as opposed to what journalists think is important for their readers to know, or as opposed to what topics the marketing department pushes (I sometimes think that if the marketers had their way, papers would consist solely of car, cosmetic, and watch sections.). I had two different editions of the same paper in mind: one produced by journalists, the other by readers. What would be alike, what would differ? What rules should be established? Would it work at all? What if none of the readers was willing to write?

Of course, this allows me to make one more pitch for Representative Journalism my concept to reinvent journalism.

He adds:

Sometimes, when a very long, self-loving text about some bizarre topic arrived, I considered renaming the paper Writer’s Edition. People write what they like. They write about “things they care about, in their own voice and in the formats they think are best fit for them,” as German media-scientist Stefan Büffel puts it. Readers who write hardly think about other readers. They are driven by self-realization.  

Paraphrasing Bill Kovach, founder of the Committee of Concerned Journalists, Maier writes:

Engagement through interactive databases; interactive engagement in conceiving stories, providing expert input and advising on sources of data; and engaging in direct conversation with the audience in blogs as part of the reporting on a series of stories.

Here is how the blogging landscape has changed:

While a fellow at Harvard, Maier conducted a small survey of political bloggers which he says: