Dan Gillmor Launches Grassroots Journalism

kbahey writes " Most Slashdotters know Dan Gillmor from his San Jose Mercury days, with lots of article on technology over the years, from the dot-com era down to now. As has been rumored before, Dan has left the SJ Mercury to found a 'grassroots journalism' project. Well, it is here, and called the Bayosphere. The site is powered by Drupal, an open source Content Management System. Jay Campbell, Dan's Technologist, writes about why they chose Drupal. "

Comments

Osphere...

[mfh]

When are the 'osphere's going to die?

Re:Osphere...

[Timesprout]

just as soon as we get rid of this pesky planetary atmosphere.

Good luck, Dan

[Junior J. Junior III]

I hope the project enjoyes higher quality editing than the grassroots journalism project that is slashdot.

Re:Good luck, Dan

[Anonymous Coward]

You misunderstand. /. is not grassroots journalism. It's an online version of a pub. A bunch of drunken bastards bitching about the news of the day.

What a screwed up link..

[AkaXakA]

So in case you missed it, this is infact TFA: Why Drupal.

Worth noting is the update at the end of the article: Update: killes points out at Drupal.org, "Chris Messina (a.k.a factoryjoe) has spend long hours with Dan to convince him to use Drupal. Thanks Chris." Indeed.

Re:drupals ok, I prefer mambo

[Handbrewer]

I agree, drupal is ok, but i use mambo too, and i cant get enough of all those high quality themes, extensions and the ultra easy setup. I run it on several production sites, and ive never had a problem with it. And the default mambo install feels more complete than drupal, last time i checked it out, i was left with a handfull of configs, and a somewhat running site. Mambo is much easier to manage imo.

Corrected Text

[kbahey]

I am the submitter of the article and here is the correct text. It was fine when I submitted it.

kbahey writes " Most Slashdotters know Dan Gillmor from his San Jose Mercury days, with lots of article on technology over the years, from the dot-com era down to now. As has been rumored before, Dan has left the SJ Mercury to found a "grass roots journalism" project. Well, it is here, and called the Bayosphere. The site is powered by Drupal, an open source Content Management System. Jay Campbell, Dan's Technologist, writes about why they chose Drupal. "

Re:Corrected Text

[pHatidic]

Also, for those who don't know, this is his blog. It is a very good blog in fact, one of the few that I go out of my way to refresh several times a day.

Most read the SJMerc?

[Anonymous Coward]

from TFA: Most Slashdotters know Dan Gillmor from his San Jose Mercury days

I never realized that local california papers had such high readership in Bangalore or Boston or all the many other places /. readers read.

Re:Most read the SJMerc?

[alienmole]

I never realized that local california papers had such high readership in Bangalore or Boston or all the many other places /. readers read.

You don't know the San Jose Mercury, then. It was very widely read and influential during the dot-com boom in particular, and certainly would have been heavily read in Boston and probably Bangalore too (considering the software tech connection).

Can Net journalism be good journalism

[G4from128k]

Desirable journalistic properties:

1. Speed: the "new" in news.
2. Accuracy: avoids all those silly retractions, libel, etc.
3. Relevance: Information that is meaningful or interesting or useful to the reader.
4. Depth: not popular among the CNN/USAToday set, but much needed.

Does the net help?

1. Speed: yes! two words: global bandwidth
2. Accuracy: Maybe: Distributed information gathering and rapid feedback help jointly edit/discredit stories. But the process can also feed a "tyranny of the majority" group delusion.
3. Relevance: Yes: feedback scoring mechanisms (such as /. moderation system) help good stories bubble-up and bad stories drop to invisibility.
4. Depth: Yes: Wiki-like group editing can add depth, although it may be too slow for "news" stories (more appropriate for feature articles and thought pieces).

Overall, I'd say that grassroots journalism could be good journalism if the system can create the self-regulatory structures needed. Something like (but better than) /. moderation/metamoderation system would be needed to create distributed control over who posts stories and how they are edited or augmented over time.

To the naysayers:

[ShatteredDream]

It couldn't be any worse than what the big names in media do already. Newsweek played a major role in spreading a story about a soldier trying to flush part of the Koran down the toilet in gitmo. Just one little problem: Newsweek's "source" was an anonymous phone call from someone alleging to be a government official who paraphrased what they claimed was a report to be issued. They never even read an excerpt of the report to the Newsweek reporter and what did they do? They pounced on this "story" (as in a complete fiction) and now 9 people in Afghanistan are dead because the riot that Newsweek helped start got so out of control that the small fledgling Afghani government had to use a lot of force to stop huge crowds of rioting students and other civilians.

The news media can talk about blogging killing the media, but bloggers haven't contributed to people being killed yet. The mainstream media on the other hand, has. So much for the much vaunted "accountability" that is supposed to separate blogging from "journalism" these days. That's what's always cited by the media as the important difference. While I don't trust bloggers either for objective reporting of the facts, can anyone seriously say that the professional media cares about the truth any more than bloggers do?

Re:To the naysayers:

[0WaitState]

Newsweek's "source" was an anonymous phone call from someone alleging to be a government official who paraphrased what they claimed was a report to be issued.

Newsweek's story was multiply sourced. The retraction by one source is about whether or not the Koran-flushing would appear in a particular government report, not whether the flushing of Koran pages occurred. Some released inmates from Gitmo have in the past (2004) said that their Korans were tossed in the toilet.

Miami Herald, March 9 2005:
Yet recently declassified court documents allege that, as far back as 2002, some of Guantanamo's staff cursed Allah, threw Korans into toilets, mocked prisoners during prayers and deliberately took away prisoners' pants knowing that Muslims can't pray unless covered.

Maybe you should think and research a little before repeating white house talking points? At least try to learn from how this one was spun: a minor backing detail was changed, so they seized on that to try to destroy the messenger and never have to respond to the message. Sorry guys, there are too many other sources describing Koran desecration, and stories from US intelligence officers participating in mock prison camps (as inmates), where the bible was desecrated. Seems to be SOP when trying to break down religious inmates.

The news media can talk about blogging killing the media, but bloggers haven't contributed to people being killed yet.

How many bloggers such as Instapundit fed the lie machine that convinced the US populace to back an unneeded invasion of Iraq, which has resulted in 1600 dead US troops, 50 to 100 thousand Iraqis, and crippled our ability to control the Taliban in Afghanistan?

Re:drupals ok, I prefer mambo

[bkessels]

Drupal might be harder to set up, but is better, when used as development platform. The way Drupal is set up is much more interesting for developers, then Mambo is. But it is indeed less friendly to newbies. And if perfomance is an issue, Drupal is most likely the CMS of your choice.

Wikinews needs you

[Eloquence]

For the last 6 months, the community over at Wikinews has been building up a citizen journalism project that does not narrow its focus on a single region, or a single to topic. We have written over 1500 stories in English alone, including more than 60 that are based on original reporting by Wikinews writers from various regions (see this report for some examples). Unlike Bayosphere, Wikinews does not have a big fat copyright notice at the bottom -- our content is in the public domain, and free for anyone to use for any purpose.

If you want to contribute, you can submit a story right away, or you can learn more about writing news stories the wiki way.

Wikinews is run by a non-profit organization, the Wikimedia Foundation, which also runs Wikipedia, Wikibooks, Wikisource, Wiktionary, Wikiquote, and the Wikimedia Commons, a media repository with almost 100,000 free content images, videos and sounds.

Slashdot isn't journalism, it's shared links.

[FrothyBitter]

Slashdot 'editors' aren't really editors in the traditional sense of journalism editors, not even close really. They are just story approvers, who approve a story if they feel it is of interest to the general Slashdot crowd.

The stories are just headlines and blurbs that link to an actual journalistic piece located on some other site.

Slashdot's motto should be, We don't make the news, we don't report the news, we collect the news.

Is Wikinews misguided?

[alienmole]

For the last 6 months, the community over at Wikinews has been building up a citizen journalism project that does not narrow its focus on a single region, or a single to topic.

Focus can be a good thing. When I look at the Wikinews home page right now, I see an eclectic mix of headlines that look as though they might have been ripped from a combination of Reuters and Slashdot, but really not much of interest to me.

This is intended as a constructive question: what is it that's going to bring readers back to Wikinews day after day? What can they expect to see? If the answer is a fairly random collection of stories on any possible topic, why do you think that's better than sites which do focus more closely on particular regions or topics?

Most of the best real-life examples of journalism are either topic-focused or region focused. It's difficult to be the best at everything.

Re:Is Wikinews misguided?

[Eloquence]

At 5-25 stories a day, we can afford to put all of them on the frontpage. However, our mid term plan is to have topic portals, such as Science and technology, or region portals, such as South America, where you get all the news from that particular category. We already have some automation in use to do this, but it's a bit flaky, and we are in the process of putting in place an extension for MediaWiki that will do a better job at it, and allow you to subscribe to individual categories via RSS.

So, just like Wikipedia, Wikinews will have areas where people interested in certain topics will work on these topics only, while at the same time benefitting from the potential for massive collaboration, i.e. the entire community can quickly get involved in an individual dispute, or try to refine a problem article until it meets our standards of quality and neutrality.

NowPublic.com

[DNSjunkie]

NowPublic.com, a technology platform enabling citizen reporting is also based on drupal. The site has been live for about six or seven weeks now, and while they consider it a beta, I'd say it's has tons of promise.

Outside of the single most established Korean based OhMyNews most, if not all of the citizen reporting web sites I've looked at, including WikiNews, have had a hard time gaining traction. I'm not sure why they're having such trouble, particularly given the popularity of WikiPedia, but it is clear however that the movement is beginning to take off, and here to stay. News will never be the same - and imho that is a VERY good thing!

What I really like about NowPublic, and what imho differentiates it from the other sites, is that the site is NOT trying to be the hub of citizen reporting itself - it's trying to create a toolset to facilitate citizen reporting. Through creative commons licensing and their really nifty 'SmartMedia' technology their goal is to facilitate the spread of newsworthy information created by people like you and I (though admittedly they need to do a MUCH better job of communicating this). Anyone (you don't need to be a member) can use the content posted on NowPublic. So if you have a blog and are writing a story and you need/want pictures or video you can use existing or request new photos/audio/video from NP members.

Being a photographer, I like the fact that through their SmartMedia my photos always show my name, and provide a way to contact me directly (actually had one person offer me a gig through this already!!) - this is all done through the image itself ensuring that anyone who uses my photos attributes it back to me (anyone who has posted a good pic to the web has most likely had it ripped off and should really apperciate this new idea). Additionally, anyone who sees the photo on any site can in turn copy it and put it on their site... it's really a great promotional vehicle for photographers. But my favorite bit is that every story is implicitly a request for citizen coverage - if you want to see a local perspective on a story, simply post it to the site. In effect every story is actually an assignment - you now have an army of people, soon to be larger than any major media organization willing to go out and get coverage of the story for you! As a photog, I'll never be at a loss for photos ideas again!

They are currently running a contest, awarding cash prizes to encourage people to go out and take photographs of newsworthy events. Their Citizen Photojournalism Awards were created to encourage people to go out and cover news stories. Any newsworthy photo uploaded to NowPublic is eligible for weekly $100 cash awards and there is a $500 grand prize. I'm hoping I win something so I can get that fish eye lens I've been drooling over.

nineteen eighty-what?

[glamslam]

Every time I ponder the implications of internet journalism I can't help but think of 1984. In George Orwell's classic dystopian tale, people are employed to change the newspapers to reflect the "truth" of the day. (ie. Iraq is our ally (1984), to Iraq has always been our enemy (2004)

Fast-forward to 2004 (or 2005 I guess), and we have an internet news/media that does not have to remain persistant (like paper). Despite the valiant efforts of the Wayback Machine, Google Cache, etc., the vision in Orwell's book can actually happen!

Although slightly off-topic, it is food for thought.....

Other sites running Drupal

[afinn]

The Drupal website has a list of sites running Drupal. The list is dynamically generated by one of the Drupal modules. Any site that enables this module appears almost immediately. Pretty good for improving your search engine ranking.

Re:but Wikis suck when it comes to accuracy

[Eloquence]

I'm curious, have you ever tried reviewing a traditional encyclopedia in the same manner you have reviewed Wikipedia? What was the result? Personally, whenever I compare Wikipedia with, say, Britannica or Encarta on a controversial topic, I find that Wikipedia tends to have a history of edit wars on that topic, a discussion going into the hundreds of kilobytes -- but an article that is vastly more neutral and informative.

For example, the Britannica article on circumcision is heavily biased in favor of the practice and the "hygienic" argument and does not mention with one word that the practice was historically rooted in attempts to combat masturbation; the Wikipedia article has this information, as well as a detailed (and NPOV-tagged, and messy) article about the medical opinion on the matter. If I wanted to learn about the practice, I'd much rather try to get an overall picture by reading the presentation on Wikipedia, following links, and trying to check claims for plausibility, than by taking whatever Britannica says (which, in this case, is very biased and, in my opinion, wrong) as divine truth.

In other words, Wikipedia tends to give you a very good overview of the different opinions on any given subject. It doesn't give you the truth; I believe that, since everyone has different standards of truth, the only way to do this would be to fork the project into subprojects that use specific methodology to determine truth. For example, you could create a Wikipedia fork that is written from a skeptical/scientific/progressive point of view, and which excludes or dismisses most religious and pseudoscientific statements and beliefs. Or you could create a "Catholic Wikipedia" that follows Church doctrine. The free license makes this possible, and such forks are only a question of time -- the free license makes this possible. Some already exist: SourceWatch, dKosopedia, Memory Alpha, Wikinfo, Wikicities all take Wikipedia articles and develop them according to different editorial policies (or include stuff that Wikipedia doesn't).

Because Wikipedia is maximally inclusive of different opinion, as long as the article meets the general criteria for inclusion, it is both a good starting point for your own research, and a good basis to build forks following certain standards of truth. Wikipedia is not, and never will be, the truth; that is not its goal. It is not an encyclopedia following traditional enlightenment views, but rather one taking a more constructivist or libertarian outlook on the concept of truth. I'm personally convinced that this is needed, but that forks are also needed.

Re:Why they choose Drupal?

[factoryjoe]

I worked with Dan early on in the design process for this project. At the time, I pushed Drupal (and CivicSpace -- since I work for them) for its modularity, ease of hacking, community-centered design and superior architecture (taxonomy, etc) and for the experience I had using it on Spread Firefox, but I can't take credit for "convincing him". In fact, I didn't realize that the project had moved forward so much until it came up on the Drupal-dev list. But now the site has launched and I've talked with Dan, it looks like I'll yet again have the chance to contribute to this project!

Funny how disinformation flows though...!