Citizen Journalism, Day 1: Being heard
| | Ethan: 
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| | I usually get brougnt in to internationalize things. Not today. Today i'll have to talk about that a bit. This will be a conversation about hyperlocal journalism.
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| | Global Voices is the main project I work on. It's a big aggregator. (Great blogfodder, btw - ds) Team of editors go out there to find stuff from Belarus to Kenya. Any given day, longer stories on the left column; shorter stories on the right.
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| | We (me and Rebecca MacKinnon) are most interested in what people are paying attention to.
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| | Map of google news attention. Red are North America,k India, france, South Africa, Australia. Blue are african places. (blue subaverage, red superaverage)
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| | One reason we took this on was to bring more attention to places where there wasn't a lot.
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| | Even in all these weird blue parts of the world, there are bloggers. Not a lot. but there are some. Lots of issues about how to listen and pay attention. Came up with ways of doing that.
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| | One is contextualizing. Example bishop bloggers of the phillipines. the only catholic dominated nation in asia. Our author, a philipino blogger, is trying to give a sense for why this might be important.
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| | Next is translation. blogosphere two years ago had many bloggers in english. Now it's not even the highest plurality. Chinese ahead. Maybe japanese. it's really useful to have somebody who can translate large passages of blogs from chinese. We actually do have global voices in chinese. Under a CC attribution license. occaionally beautiful things happen. A guy named Portnoy Zang translates large parts into chinese, on his own.
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| | Next is amplify. One of our regular bloggers, our israel correspondent, has been writing extensively on the current conflict. She is in very close touch with palestinian and lebanese bloggers, sitting in her roof listening to her corresopondents hearing air raid sirens while she does the same. This has made her a source for the WSJ.
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| | the point here is to start a conversation about a topic.
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| | We're all playing in this new medium. We are all competing for attention in a world with more and more and more people demanding attention (and supplying fodder). We are all engaged in this interesting problem: more signal added into a noisy space.
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| | Need to take head-on the challenge of making signals heard above noise that other people call signal. One of the ways to deal with that is to amplify it. Yelling louder. Works up to a point in radio, where spectrum is allocated. Not here.
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| | Some of the things we're doing are analogs to what's happening at the local level with CJs.
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| | Translation, for example, may become an important thing to do. In boston, translating to Haitian creole or Somali.
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| | John Bachir, worked at iBiblio, made Lyceum there.
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| | why mention success with the WSJ? Is the goal to be quoted by the big media?
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Dan: thanks to the Berkman folks. How about a song?
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