The Modern Journalist

Citizen Journalism and Video

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I’m a novice when it comes to video.

Everything I’ve learned, I’ve learned from either watching videos online — Rocketboom, for instance — and reading research reports done by smart folks. It’s the kind of knowledge that normally drives me crazy because I really need to get my hands on something, play around with it and tinker before I feel like I’ve got a solid enough understanding of how it works to comment on it.

But that seems very un-Web 2.0 of me. We’ve started discussing how citizen videos can be used at news organizations at the NING social network. Mostly, I’m looking for ideas.

For the past few years, I’ve been relatively enamored with idea of the Independent Media Center, an organization that aggregates news from regular folks around the world.

But that’s not really sustainable at a local news operation.

I’m working with CinDaily, a local start-up trying to do news in a different way, and we’ve been discussing how to involve citizens — particularly through video — in a meaningful way. For us, that means setting up enticements for participation, creating an easy outlet for delivery (YouTube) and engaging the community to determine what videos go where.

YouTube has a great set up for that through its Citizen News Channel.

But that’s hardly the end-all, beat-all of systems because you can use simple tags to create a “channel” of sorts. What I do like — and why I am convinced that technology companies will eventually wipe out a large segment of what news organizations do — is that they have a community manager, and I assume they will at some point have several layers of managers who are seeding and following up on the community.

The organization gets that you spend money on people who are one part community voice, one part manager and one part evangelist.

Another service that caught my interest — I hung out with some of their management team at South by Southwest Interactive — is Viddler, which allows for in-video comments from other people and enables in-content search.

Not being big on video, I’m not sure that I care so much — but I keep reminding myself that what I would do is irrelevant to what happens on the Web. If only 10 percent of your readership is stoked by this technology, it’s worthwhile to give them that technology because likely they will take it and run with it in ways you can’t imagine.

It’s like a little kid on Christmas.

With CinDaily, we’ve put together a few tests to see how — and what — type of response we’ll get from the community once we launch the video operation. I think, if we manage it properly, there is a good chance we’ll have some cool videos that do a couple things:

1. allow us to engage and hear what the community thinks
2. get usable content from the readers
3. build stories around those videos
4. put together a pattern — wisdom of crowds like — that will give us insight that a poll can’t

Will it work? I honestly don’t know. But I think that’s the way newspapers should handle video for the most part.

The thesis of the book is that each medium does what it does best: radio, television, print, Web. I think that goes for news organizations as well. Don’t produce video. Shoot video. If people want packages, they’ll go to television — but I would argue that you can’t find many people who believe the local television news is worth a shit.

So don’t replicate what went wrong. Don’t try to do it better. I know loads of local television folks and I promise they don’t wake up and try to do a poor job. They are hamstrung by hierarchy.

Instead, do something completely different that uses the Web and Internet the way it was meant to be used.

I’d love to hear your ideas about what they may — or should — look like.