The Red Square in Moscow, the city where I'll participate in a workshop about news media and the real time web.
This blogpost starts a series about real time web and news media. I participate as a trainer in a workshop in Moscow, Russia, about this subject, and I’ll try to eat my own dogfood by making an extensive use of social media for this project. In this first post I try to develop some of the main themes, I guess that next posts will deal with more concrete stuff.
I’ve been rather silent on this blog for the past few days, but that’s because I have an exciting project in Moscow: a workshop for journalists about the real time web. Blogs, podcasts, microblogging, re-blogging, streaming audio/video and live chat sessions represent just a few of the new ways of facilitating communication and collaboration in communities. I would not say these tools build communities, because I don’t really believe one can “build” a community, but it is possible to enhance interactions.
Enhancing interactions in a community is an imporant function, maybe the important function, of news media. Journalists and bloggers are not just story-tellers. They help the community to organize and structure itself.
Two Russian media NGOs, Eurasia-Media, the media training department of the New Eurasia Foundation, and the Foundation
for Independent Radio Broadcasting will run a workshop in Moscow (February 12-14) for journalists exploring the possibilities of the “real time web”. I feel very fortunate to be a trainer for this seminar. Here are some of the main topics for the seminar, which will be very much a hands-on event (feel free to suggest other takes of topics):
It’s about communities
MixedRealities is inspired by what happens in virtual worlds and – linked very closely to that – virtual communities. Such communities in virtual worlds such as Second Life develop and become compelling experiences because of the real time interaction of the participants in an immersive environment.
While Second Life has been an eye-opener for me, I would not claim that it is a necessary experience to understand virtual communities. After all, there was no such thing as Second Life in 1993, when Howard Rheingold wrote his book Virtual Community, probably the first time this term was used.
Virtual communities exist through interactions in the physical reality but mainly through blogs, forums, wikis, online social networks and discussion threads a bit everywhere. I’d like to elaborate on blogging as a way to enhance communities. Blogging is going through a transformation, we had (and still have) long form blogging, then microblogging (Twitter, Plurk…) but we also have hybrid forms, with new concepts like re-blogging, integration of streaming video and synchronous chat-sessions, services such as Tumblr and Posterous, and of course developments suchs as “re-tweeting” on Facebook, Twitter lists and the use of hashtags.
These developments often seem to excite only geeky communities, but in fact they are manifesting themselves in mainstream venues (such as Facebook) and they also can and must be used in newsrooms. Often it’s enough to embed a Twitter feed or a liveblog in a more traditional news setting to make those geeky tools more accessible for a larger audience.
Letting the conversation flow
One of the things all these “new media” seem to have in common, is the notion of “flow” of conversation. People want to participate in a discussion, and they want it now. They mostly prefer instantaneous reactions to the cumbersome process of sending a letter to the editor. Often they are not even interested in responding to what the journalist wrote in some article, but they want to respond to arguments used by other members of the people formerly called the audience – and they want this response to be as instantaneous as possible.
Hence the success of synchronous events – popular talk shows in Second Life leveraging the unique possibilities of a virtual world to let not only the panel members discuss (in audio) but also the audience engages in a discussion flow, using (text)backchat. Once again, while Second Life was an example for me, one is under no obligation to use a 3D immersive world to organize such a discussion – it’s perfectly possible to use a tool such as CoverItLive (basically a liveblogging-tool enabling backchat, integration of videostreams, polls, feeds such as Twitter and moderation).
Of course, one does not benefit from the immersive impact of a virtual environment, but on the bright side of things we should mention that tools such as CoverItLive are very easy to use by all those involved and have very little requirements in terms of hardware and bandwidth.
The streaming newsroom
I strongly believe that this notion of “flow” goes further then facilitating forums and regular chatsessions. Ultimately, it requires the newsroom to change fundamentally – meaning journalists have to acquire a new mindset (which of course is the hardest part). The days are gone that one produces a print newspaper for the next morning or an evening television news.
Or rather, we still produce those things, but we also organize chatsessions, update sites, help the community to publish their own stuff. How can we do this, while the publishers refrain from doubling the number of journalists? The answer is once again “respecting the flow” and reaching out to the community. We have to make the whole newsroom-process transparent. From the very outset of the development of a news item – news article, analysis, background – we should say what our intentions are and invite the community to come up with ideas – eventually ideas challenging the project.
That’s were Twitter, Facebook, blogs, sites and forums are so important: find out where the community hangs out, tell them about the project, publish raw material (using also social bookmarks), invite them to supply even more links, if the newsroom meeting is important why not video-stream it using one of several free or freemium webservices) or at least twitter the conversation, convert the meeting notes into a blogpost (better still, jolt the notes down immediately on your blog and publish it immediately).
Why do we want to takes notes on a piece of paper, tell nobody about it, then start the process of producing a “perfect” story with a perfect title, perfect caption and picture? Why not produce the “making of”, allowing the community to witness the hesitations, the sketches, the questions, the doubts of the newsroom, and allowing the community to intervene and give other takes, new answers and questions?
Don’t be afraid to be playful, media are a fun experience after all! Why not take pictures, make audio or video recordings during the meeting, and post those media? For so long now journalists have cherished secrecy – avoiding at all cost that the competition would realize what unbelievable scoop they were preparing. “At all cost” indeed – the cost being that the public started to distrust the journalists and newsrooms, the cost being an increasing alienation between newsroom and community. The benefits of secrecy are sometimes very real, for instance protecting the identity of sources, but very often it is not warranted – the “scoops” being of limited value or the “exclusive story” appears to be not that exclusive at all.
The streaming community
Publishing and organizing the raw material and documenting the “making of” can inspire the community to explore other things – chances are that they will explicitly ask the journalists to tackle certain themes. It constitutes an archive which can be useful for the community.
All this is about people, it are “social” media, and all media should be social. After all, the community is already (always has been) streaming and networked, the instantaneous exchange of information and gossip on the market places and in the pubs, now enhanced and accelerated by the Facebooks of this world. This acceleration makes it even more useful to have curators of all those streams, but journalists can make of this curator-function a collaborative effort. This implies that the collaborators should be taken seriously.
We document and archive discussions in order to facilitate interactions in a given community. People should be able to find out easily who in the community is particularly strong in discussing a certain topic.
Maybe that participant is only known by her or his nickname or avatar, but it should be easy to find out who is an expert in which issue or who is particularly motivated to tackle certain issues. Media are also facilitators of contacts, not only between journalists and community, but also in the community itself. It’s interesting that the whole technology of setting up social networks and forum discussion software has been developed by very young companies and young people, not by mainstream media, who prefer to focus on proprietary content management systems for their own staff, with often very limited publishing possibilities for the community.
Living stories
Finally I think mainstream media and in particular newspapers don’t realize the potential of the web. They very often make an online version of the print newspaper format. Even though that version is being constantly updated, more is possible.
There has to be a way to integrate the web of streams (long form blogs, micro blogs, in-between-blogs, video-blogs, chat-sessions…) into a “living page” where people can also find deep background, collaborative texts or video etc. Such pages would enable the producers of the story to use one URL for one major story, and keeping that URL while updating the story for as long as it runs (days, weeks, months… ), while organizing that page in such a way that a person consulting that URL sees immediately what is new for her or him (Google works with several media on this idea of living pages).
The challenge
I don’t know whether we’ll produce such a living page for my workshop – I doubt it and I’ll gladly use the solution Google Labs will eventually come up with. I do hope however that we’ll use various tools to make the whole experience as “flowing” as possible, for the community we’ve in mind for this event: in the first place for the Russian journalists who’ll do the effort to participate in the workshop, but also for all those interested in radical change of media practicies.
I’ll cover the event on Twitter, Tumblr, Posterous, I’ll try to do something with video on Ustream and YouTube, there will be a wiki (main venue for the participants) and I guess a Ning-community, and a social bookmarks group on Diigo. Here on MixedRealities I’ll give an overview of what happens on those different platforms. We’ll also explore some of the possibilities of the mobile web, using smartphones and very simple video cameras, and exploring the possibilities of location based social networks.
In Second Life I’ll participate as usual in the We Are The Network meeting on Tuesday, at Noon PDT (9 pm CET, 11 pm Moscow time), just contact Olando7 Decosta there for a meeting in Second Life (and of course I’ll try to find out what possible uses can be made of Second Life in the context of this project).
The use of many different platforms risks to confuse the participants – I think that up to a certain point this is unavoidable if one wants to experience a flowing, real time perspective versus a more static, product-oriented approach. By actually doing some newsroom work, I hope the participants will find their way in a more distributive form of journalism.
Roland Legrand
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