Media et enjeux des TIC en Afrique de l'Ouest - Media and ICT issues in West Africa

Going Beyond SMS for Cheaper Cell Phone Journalism in Africa

Judith — 2009-04-21T13:20:46Z

But does the input method matter when it comes to encouraging cell phone journalism, and particularly journalism for a 'formal' publication, like a community newspaper?

Does slow bandwidth dampen amateur reporters' enthusiasm, and if cell phones are going to become significant input devices, what input medium — short message service (SMS), multimedia short message, instant messaging or social networking generated messages — is best suited to citizen journalism?

There are of course big differences in costs and carrying capacity of the different mediums on a cell phone. SMS is especially expensive, working out at about 11 US cents per message, as a world average. Some countries have an average charge that is above this, obviously, and some are very dramatically below it. In South Africa, the cost of an SMS approaches about 7 US cents.

South Africa has the biggest gap between rich and poor (as measured by income) in the world. So while many people use SMS extensively, for the half of the population that earn less then R600 per month (less than US $2 per day), 75 cents is seriously expensive. At current pricing levels, just sending 1 SMS a day would consume something like 4% of the income of this portion of the population, never mind the additional costs of making the occasional phone call!

But SMS is very useful and is more widely used than household economics in many country might predict, including in South Africa. Worldwide, SMS use generated about US $100 billion of income for network providers in 2008, and with profit margins a stratospheric 90%, there seems to be a lot room for price reductions — or for finding alternative ways of communicating text and photos on cell phones.

This is part of the reason why Mxit, an instant messaging/chat room type application is so popular in South Africa, and elsewhere on the continent. Any instant messaging system, or email-based medium uses data connections and not voice/SMS transmission routes. Costs are a tiny fraction, per message, of the cost of SMS.

That's also why, in Grahamstown, as part of the Iindaba Ziyafika citizen journalism project, in addition to using SMS to send and receive citizen-generated news/photos and information, we are also exploring the use of social networking sites, including Mxit and Facebook, to get stories and photos to the local community newspaper, Grocott's Mail, and Grocott's Mail online.

This month we've started to explore using Facebook in particular, as an easy means for 'friends' of the New Media Editor (a post we've just filled and who will be starting work on June 1st) - to send in short stories, or longer stories via the Facebook mailbox function, and even instant messages (when the editor is online) from cell phones.

The Facebook Option

Photos are also easy to upload to Facebook on a computer, although a bit more tricky to do directly from cell phones, although a variety of third party applications address this. We're looking at what works best and we'll adapt these applications to our African conditions if needs be.

We're also exploring ways of integrating the citizen journalists' input directly into the editors' 'in-box' in the open-source community newspaper content management system NIKA, that we've built for Grocott's Mail (and which we'll be releasing to the world, free, later this year). Until we get that translation from phone to CMS right (which we've already done with SMS), we'll use manual copy and paste.

Again, photos present a particular side project to get right.

We are getting clearer that it is important to offer potential and actual citizen journalists a variety of input mediums, including walk-in opportunities. For hyper-local journalism to take off in resource poor areas like Grahamstown, people need to be able to post easily and cheaply, and choice is going to be critical. SMS has the advantage of great ease of use, but Facebook on cell phones is not rocket science, as millions are proving daily.

To ensure we focus on closing the citizen journalist loop, we're also exploring getting the news OUT via social networking sites like Facebook. Friends of the Editor, for example, would obviously also be able to receive news and URL links back from the editor: again the question is how to automate these transmissions.

We are also trying to work out how you could send such messages to individual in-boxes, say in Facebook, and then have Facebook automatically alert you by email to your cell phone.

We're looking at things such as how many people have cell phones that can make a noise or vibrate when you get an email as opposed to an SMS, and how many makes of phone can be programmed so that you are alerted only when you get emails from a particular source?

As we find out just how popular social network sites are, and how many people use them mainly or exclusively from their cell phones, we're starting to get excited about developing this new chapter of cheaper supplements to what has, up to now, been our singular focus on SMS.

Author: Harry Dugmore

Source: Mediashift Idea Lab

Posting date: April 14th, 2009

Analyze a Top Blog in Your Niche

Judith — 2009-04-10T15:15:19Z

1. Identify a successful blog in your niche

You might already know of these sorts of blogs or you might need to do a little research.

If you're not sure which one to choose head to Technorati's top 100 blogs or Google Blog search and attempt to find a blog that is doing well on your topic. If you can't find one that is exactly on your topic don't stress too much - choosing a blog on a related topic will work too.

2. Take 15 minutes to do some analysis of the blog in some of the following areas

Content:

What topics are they covering?
What topics are they ignoring?
What voice/style do they post in?
How often are they posting?
What level are they pitching their posts at (beginners, advanced etc)

Reader Engagement:

What topics generate most conversation?
What styles of posts seem to connect with readers best?
What questions are readers asking in comments?
What complaints do you see readers making in comments?
What tools/mediums is the site using (eg: are they using Twitter, forums etc)

Design:

What first impression does their design give?
What have they done well? What have they done poorly?
What Options do they give readers to subscribe?

Monetization: if you're attempting to make money from your blog this will be relevant as it will give you hints as to how you might make money:

what advertisers are targeting this blog?
what type of affiliate programs are they promoting?

Traffic:

You might also like to head to a site like Alexa or Compete to do some analysis of the blogs traffic levels. Is it growing, plateuing or shrinking. Alexa also gives some stats (not always accurate) on page views, time on site, sites linking in, bounce rate, where the audience is from (geographically), where people go on the site etc.

SEO:

If you have some competence in SEO you might like to check out how they're doing in some of these areas:

Who is linking to this blog? (use the link:www.blogurl.com command in Google to find out)
What does their source code reveal about how they've set up their site
if they have an open or unlocked stats package what can you learn from their stats? What pages are popular? Where does their incoming traffic come from?

Really the numbers of questions you could be asking is limitless but what you're attempting to do with this exercise is to identify what is working well on the other site and what opportunities there might be to position your blog in ‘gaps' that the blog is leaving.

When you do this type of analysis with a number of blogs in your niche you should begin to see some patterns emerging. Things that consistently work on blogs in your niche and things that perhaps you could do that nobody else is doing.

Two quick words of warning:

1.Don't become Obsessed with what other Bloggers are Doing

A trap some bloggers fall into is spending so much time watching their ‘competitors' that they spend less time actually building something of value of their own. This analysis is useful to do every now and again - but don't let it become something that you do at the expense of other core activities on your own blog.

2. Don't Copy - Be Unique

Another trap I see some bloggers doing is virtually replicating every aspect of another blog. While there's a lot we can learn from others and lessons we can take from what others are doing - if you simply copy everything another blog does you don't differentiate yourself and give potential readers no real reason to read you instead of others.

Author: Darren Rowse

Source: Problogger.net

Release date: April 9th, 2009

Associated Press offers multimedia archive access

Judith — 2009-03-12T11:50:46Z

The AP Archive collection is one of the world's largest news archives, dating from 1896. "Many of our customers no longer think in terms of just footage or just photos because media convergence has meant that they generally need both," said AP Director of International Archives Alwyn Lindsey. "This approach is a direct response to the new market needs and it allows us to provide customers with the diversity of materials they require."

Lindsey said AP is seeing a trend in that more and more producers are no longer thinking purely in terms of TV, but are also looking at wider outlets for productions, including online vehicles, books and interactive media. "AP also believes that it can provide better financial value with this approach, which it sees as being essential in light of the present economic situation," he said.

About AP Archive

AP Archive is the footage sales business of The Associated Press, the world's oldest and largest news agency. It is extremely rich in its coverage of events, war and conflict, politics, disasters, environment, culture, social history, human interest, science, entertainment and sport. The collection is updated daily with the global news coverage of AP Television News and contains footage from many major content partners including ABC News, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Sky News and China State Television. In recognition of its outstanding service levels, AP Archive was voted Footage Library of the Year by footage customers at the 2008 FOCAL International Awards.

About AP Images

AP Images, a division of The Associated Press, is one of the world's largest collections of historical and contemporary imagery. As an essential source of photographs and graphics for professional image buyers, AP Images strives to meet the needs of today's global customer through superior image quality, selection and service. For more than a century, AP photographers have captured the greatest moments in history, news, sports and entertainment, receiving 30 Pulitzers and numerous other awards in honor of their contribution to the images that shape our world.

About The AP

The Associated Press is the essential global news network, delivering fast, unbiased news from every corner of the world to all media platforms and formats. Founded in 1846, AP today is the largest and most trusted source of independent news and information. On any given day, more than half the world's population sees news from AP.

Source: Associated Press

Release date: February 2nd, 2009

WAXAL Blogging Africa Awards: and the winners are...

Judith — 2009-02-27T10:43:25Z

At the end of adjudications by the pan-African jury, four prizes were awarded: three prizes corresponding to the three categories announced, and a special award of encouragement.

The jury has rewarded blogs that illustrate good editorial line, quality of expression, interaction with internet users, originality, regular posts, a variety of format for content, blog developed by African journalists working in African media.

10 other blogs (all categories) have also attracted the attention of jury members and received their congratulations.

All best blogs will be properly promoted.

- Media / Blog

Can African reporters equipped with smart phones help improve accountability and transparency in development aid?

Judith — 2009-02-27T10:35:34Z

Why did this work?

Because people could see what the project was about! They could see with their own eyes that these projects needed support. People need to know that the money they donate goes to the project that needs it and not to the production of another brochure or overhead of some international organization.

At the same time how did this project fail?

Because theses videos were not used to engage local communities and media in the process. We were successful in getting the funds needed for the projects but we did not get local government, organizations, communities and individuals involved in the process.

We want to change this.

Last fall we were lucky to find a partner in the IRC International Water and Sanitation Centre, a leading advocate for sustainable WASH services, and their Ghanaian counterpart, Resource Centre Network Ghana, a unique source of knowledge for Water and Sanitation issues in Ghana.

We joined together with the idea that we could do better.

By joining forces we have the power to train local African reporters in key issues related to sustainability, socio-economic and health impacts, corruption prevention and monitoring and evaluation basics.

Not only to establish an independent monitoring and evaluation program for the 500 sector organizations (including local and foreign Government and NGO organizations) active in the country, but in the interest to engage local communities and media in the process.

1) It is a fact that diarrhea, a disease largely attributable to unsafe water and poor hygiene, contributes to the high child mortality rate in Ghana.

2) It is a fact that an estimated 3.4 million school days of 5 to 14 year olds are lost to diarrhea.

3) It is a fact that one in 5 Ghanaians has to defecate in the open because they have no access to a toilet.

4) For every dollar we invest in Water and Sanitation in Sub Sahara Africa you get a rate of return of six dollars. (Based on the number of days adults or their children get sick – purely a result of the loss in man hours, cost of medicine and loss of income. Not to mention the time and energy people spend securing safe water supply)

Local reporters are an important agent in bringing about change. They have the power to tell local stories from a local perspective and in a way that no one else can. They have the power to improve the living standards in their own communities. They have the power to engage their citizens, media and government in this important debate.

Author: Ben White

Source: Master of MEdia, university of Amstredam

Posting date: February 25th, 2009

How to Save Journalism? Get Rid of the Newspapers

Judith — 2009-02-25T11:20:25Z

This discussion surfaced recently when I and my family went to my parent's house for a visit. As its about a six hour trek, we don't do this nearly often enough, and as a consequence it becomes a time to discuss and debate the state of the world, and increasingly my observations of that world in my own blogs.

One morning while there we were perusing the papers while eating breakfast, and the topics of digital archiving, the Kindle, and newspaper readership came around. My mother asked whether people will read the Kindle over breakfast in the same way, especially with the possibility of orange juice getting spilled on it. A plaintive cry from my eight year old, who was having trouble getting dressed, tabled the conversation before we could take it much further, but I've thought about this heavily on the trip back home to Victoria.

As an editor, journalist and blogger, a significant portion of my day is spent reading and digesting both the news of the day and how it fits into the broader pictures of my own work, so my schedule of spending a couple of hours in the morning reading and making notes is probably not all that typical. However, I suspect that for a significant number of professionals in particular, that morning reading has become critical.

Very little of that reading, however, comes from newspapers, at least directly. Typically, I'll first go through my email, which is increasingly filled with newsletters and news alerts, then I use directed RSS feeds that I filter through the Google News reader to browse immediate topics that occurred overnight. Once past that, its on to Twitter, which I'll usually keep open and follow through much of the day for news or links that appear relevant, either from my TwitterFox plugin or via TweetFeed.

The issue here is that my working news, the information that I use in order to do my job, understand what is happening in the world or acting as catalysts for new areas of exploration is not coming from that morning read of the paper. McLellan raises an interesting point - newspaper subscriptions do not in general subsidize the journalistic production costs. Instead, they subsidize the distribution costs of the paper to the subscribers - news in the morning as you eat your breakfast. If your working news is coming via the Internet, the motivation to plunk down $100+ a year for a subscription diminishes pretty dramatically.

Newspapers built their revenue base almost exclusively from advertising. However, most newspapers failed to recognize that such advertising is both highly dependent upon prevalent business conditions and the degree to which other media can compete in providing those advertising services. Online job sites such as Monster.com or Craigslist have cratered their job listings revenues. MLS services were giving papers a run for their money in the real estate markets, even before plummeting housing prices caused the market to all but evaporate. Classified sales in general have disappeared, and with it, most of the money to pay for news production.

Yet this begs the question of whether in fact such quality journalism is solely the province of the newspapers. While most news publishers would have you believe otherwise, in practice everything but local news production was usually purchased from a syndicate.

The local news, on the other hand, fell into a few distinct areas - reporting of sensational crimes or disasters, coverage of local government and business actions and human interest stories. What's fascinating here is that online social media is beginning to take over the first of these - Flickr and Youtube feeds of Hurricane Ike provided a much faster response to fast breaking events than a journalist could, typically with links providing multiple viewpoints from the perspective of the people who were actually there witnessing (or even participating in) the events.

Governmental and governmental watchdog groups are now proliferating at all levels, an emergent level of transparency that in many cases also filters up to organizations at the national and international level as well. These organizations are typically funded by members or donors interested in assuring the continued operation of democracy. There may (indeed likely will) be some bias there, but given the often heavily biased stance that many newspapers and other organizations took in the last decade, the watchdog sites are at a minimum no worse than, and in many cases far better than, the news that they are replacing.

Sports coverage is typically done by the sports organizations themselves (or through an agreement with one or more news services), while even at the microlevel, from college to the pee-wee leagues there are usually websites that the organizations overall run, and in many cases people who are willing to do (for free) the process of collating or updating this content. As Web 2.0 content management systems continue to become increasingly underlying infrastructure, the process of updating this information can also be somewhat automated and componentized.

The discovery process for this information is also emerging - an ad hoc soup of tagging, categorization and semantic web processing. One advantage that a newspaper provides is the ability to bring all of this information together in one packet, though that packet may contain a great deal of information that is not relevant to you as the reader. Tagging services, content enrichment, and syndication are now tipping the balance even there - they can serve to provide an aggregation mechanism that is much more closely aligned with a given reader's interests, organized according to a set of internal filters, and increasingly hyperlinked for more information about given topics, people or services.

Many newspapers (and other news organizations) have turned to bloggers as a "novel" form of news producers, lured originally be the fact that such bloggers would typically write for free. Here, however, is a situation where free has masked a significantly new set of expectations that are fundamentally different from what news organizations were expecting. Most serious bloggers write in order to either promote an idea or to promote themselves and their business. They are not journalists in the traditional sense. They are usually not objective, they are not interested in reporting the news unless the news is significant and important for them.

Moreover, most bloggers are not willing to work for free, or even for a nominal fee, if what they are asked to write is not consistent with their own objectives. This is very much at odds with the editorial model that has emerged over the last century, where typically an editor assigned a story to a writer, the writer wrote it, and the writer got paid if the editor accepted the story. While many "professional" journalists might decry the lack of journalistic integrity of bloggers, in reality most such journalists failed to understand that there are very different motivations at work for bloggers (and indeed that many bloggers might actually have a higher standard of personal integrity than the journalists who claim objective neutrality even when they're working under a very non-neutral editorial policy).

Consequently, perhaps the real question that should be asked is not "How do we save journalism?" but "Why should we save the existing forms of journalism if they fail our needs?" It should be noted that this is precisely the same question that should be applied to finance and automobile production.

For instance, services like Kachingle are turning the micropayments model on its head: people "donate" money to the site to support blogs that they want to help. Kachingle then distributes this money to those sites that are visited, based upon usage. This model opens up some interesting possibilities, not least of which because it does the hard work of tracking and disbursing micropayments rather than placing the onus on either reader or author. Payment is given in proportion to usage, so that the reader feels that his money is being spent specifically on content that he finds useful or entertaining, in essence providing many of the benefits of the subscription model by applying it not to distribution but to content creation.

A similar "donation" model could help with communities of interest - people subscribe to the community, with the proceeds in turn being redistributed to community members ... possibly including the subscriber. As long as the disbursement mechanism was transparent, such a model opens up the possibility of sites being supported by patrons in much the same way that many community visual and performance arts are supported by a patronage system in many cities. Indeed, this also opens up an interesting vehicle for advertising - the PBS sponsorship model applied to the web. Granted, the downside may be really bad webathons, but we'll cross that bridge when we come to it.

Models such as Kachingle may provide a form of economic stimulus in a way that doesn't come down to giving away free money. If an organization such as the National Endowment for the Arts was to provide matching funds, this type of solution might fund journalists and authors who are insightful, entertaining or provocative, giving them the means to continue doing the research or writing free of the distraction of having to find increasingly rare vehicles for publishing in the "established" media. At the same time, it rewards those with talent, skill and perseverance, as the best (at least as defined by reader popularity) of such writers would be the ones to gain the largest number of hits.

The advantage to this model? Advertisers no longer dominate culture. Advertising money has had a particularly pernicious and chilling effect upon the expression of free ideas, has established role models and expectations of behavior that are often unhealthy and in many cases downright destructive, and has all too often been the catalyst for disruptive bubbles in certain sectors of business and entertainment. Advertising won't (and shouldn't) disappear completely, but its possible that the emerging crowd-sourcing of payment systems may very at least provide some balance to the economy.

It's also very possible that getting rid of the newspapers may even spur the creation of new newspapers. Local newspapers, supported by a community subscription base, may be the best mechanism for the funding and distribution of local news, especially if such newspapers could be distributed as a PDF or similar format to high speed printers in the places where people most congregate - coffee shops, grocery stores, libraries and so forth. Add a netbook and you can select the particular articles (from headlines or tags) that you want to populate the content in the "paper", and members of the community can in turn contribute their own content as they deem desirable to the underlying database of stories.

The most important point to remember in all of this is that when a previously thriving industry seems to be dying, it is most likely because the services that it initially provided are becoming obsolete. It is better in this situation to rethink what such services should provide, then build a niche for it. Otherwise, you're just wasting money.

Author: Kurt Cagle

Source: O'Reilly Media

Posting date: February 24th, 2009

Can Feminist Groups and Bloggers Bridge the Digital Divide?

Judith — 2009-02-13T10:12:28Z

At the least, leaders of national women's rights groups and the founders of fast-growing feminist blog sites gathered in the same room. That in itself was a first. And a major accomplishment, says Shireen Mitchell of Digital Sisters, one of the organizers of the Fem2.0 conference held in early February in Washington, DC.

"Normally, they'd not been in the same space together. It was one of the biggest challenges," she said. The goal was first to introduce the two sides - then to aim for a lot more interaction in the long term.

"The prospect of coalition building was an outcome worth fighting for," said Mitchell, who, as founder of a tech nonprofit and vice chair of the National Congress of Women's Groups, is both digitally aware and used to working with the traditional feminist groups. The forging of a coalition, she said, "is really happening. The conference had a huge impact."

The mainstream feminist membership groups and the bloggers not only rarely talked, they really did represent a digital divide in the women's movement, well beyond the technology itself.

The mainstream membership groups, for the most part, don't blog or are only beginning to use that tool. They're beset by financial problems, like most nonprofits, at the very time they've won a seat at the policy table with the Obama Administration after eight years in the wilderness.

The bloggers, for the most part, are far less affected by the economic meltdown. They don't have payroll or office rent costs. And where the mainstream groups compete to attract and keep members today, the bloggers don't have "members" and are not formal "groups." Yet with relatively minimal costs, they may reach hundreds of thousands of people and offer a voice on their sites to many hundreds of feminist bloggers.

The mainstream women's groups, aided by feminist policy groups and think-tanks, have a huge role in shaping legislation that affects women's rights; the bloggers have far less of a direct role. Many of those at the Fem2.0 conference hadn't realized that some of the women's rights proposals they were backing had been drafted by the feminist women's groups. That was one of the eye-openers at the conference, and bloggers sent in hundreds of requests for the list of top priority legislative initiatives that the mainstream groups had been working on.

The techno-competence issue divides to some extent on generational and geographic lines - with the West Coast blog sites far out front. But another conference eye-opener was the realization that there is not an ideological divide. The old-line groups and the new feminist bloggers agree on most policy initiatives - and might not even have known it.

Researcher Stanislas Magniant said in any inventory of bloggers, feminist blogs show up as very dense and cohesive - and very connected to the huge progressive movement. He raised the question as to whether there could be an "echo chamber" danger but said, for the most part, they have a good base from which to build.

At the opening plenary, Eleanor Smeal, who founded the Feminist Majority Foundation 22 years ago, joked about the digital divide between generations of feminists, young and old: "some of us in this room are connectors between 1.0 and 2.0." Her group, however, had been one of the first with a website, dating from the Beijing women's conference in 1995, and its younger staffers keep them technologically current today. But she said the women's movement hasn't figured out ways to use the web to get buy-in from grass roots people in the way that donors, large and small, bought into the Obama campaign. She recently talked to a female taxi driver who was ebullient about President Obama. When Smeal asked if she had supported him financially, the woman said, yes, she had sent in $5. And with a small donation, that woman felt totally invested in Obama's campaign and his success.

The techno divide also was illustrated by the bloggers' reaction to Kim Gandy, president of the 43-year-old National Organization for Women, when she talked about the movement's success working with Obama's architects of the economic stimulus-package to include funds for jobs that would go to women, not just shovel-ready road jobs that go mostly to men. Gandy said she had little money to spread the word about their achievement.

"We don't have the money to start a blog," she said, noting that NOW gets no money from corporations or from government, only from members, and many of them are hurting today.

As she spoke, a giant screen behind the heads of speakers showed the ongoing chatter from bloggers in the room, Tweetering comments about Smeal and Gandy. Some of the comments: so why haven't you asked us to help? Why don't you reach out to us to help you start blogs?

Some West Coast-based bloggers appear to be making fast tracks to new audiences, and not always predictable ones. The Silicon Valley's BlogHer claims it reaches 10 million women each month through conferences, its web hub and its network of more than 2,700 targeted blog affiliates. BlogHer began in 2005, has venture capital financing and accepts partisan views on all sides. "We've aimed to be non or multi-ideological," said Elisa Camahort Page, one of three founders. "Most of our panels are politically diverse. We have conservatives, too. Women are not monolithic." And they want to avoid the danger of "getting into an echo chamber of women only as liberal progressives," she said.

MomsRising has more overt activist lobbying appeals on its website. It recently said it had generated more than 130,000 letters to Congress in support of S-chip legislation to expand federal health care for children, a bill that was signed into law last week. Kirstin Rowe-Finkbeiner of Seattle, executive director of MomsRising, said their goal is to tear down the "maternal wall" that keeps working mothers in economic peril. She said women with kids "are hired 79 percent less than women without kids. Most women don't even get to the glass ceiling."

Recently, both House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid blogged on the MomsRising site. They've gotten their bloggers on such sites as Huffington Post. They get more than 3,000 media messages a day. "We're trying to ride the waves of change versus waving at it," she said.

Veronica Arreola, a Chicago-based blogger with Viva la Feminista, embraces the new technology, including training tools she uses to help women "prepare Roe rallies and to get their voices on CNN." In helping women launch their own blogs, and appear on others' sites as well, "we are sustaining a movement and really growing the movement." Blogs aren't enough, however. Face-to-face meetings still are valuable. Anyone who Twitters will realize, she said, that a lot of the women bloggers and Twitterers "want to get together. We still need in-person meetings."

And that's where the Fem2.0 conference comes in. The face-to-face encounters suggested many next-step challenges. "Now we're looking to see how to put [feminist legislative] agendas on blogs, on formal ways that information can flow," said Mitchell.

Today, telephone calls and even emails can be too slow in raising an alarm when there is a crisis. Case in point: when Republicans took aim at an expansion of family planning funds under Medicaid, which was a miniscule part of the stimulus package. The GOP attacks were launched on a weekend, the feminist lobby never matched the Republican sound bites against it and the money was deleted from the bill.

It's a sobering lesson for both the feminist legislative lobby and the bloggers - and a wakeup call that new systems may be needed. "My dream is that we'd be at a place where the connection between bloggers and traditional women's rights groups is a seamless flow of information," said Mitchell.

It's not there yet. Some traditional membership groups still don't see the value of the blogger-media networks - or maybe are fearful that they'll give up control if they work with bloggers to put their messages out there. "There is a lot of misunderstanding about what the [blogger] media can do for them," said Mitchell. "It makes them nervous." That's part of the next conversation, she said.

But if a connection can be forged, if those feminist legislative "bullet points" can be worked into the bloggers' sites, the feminist and progressive community "will take on a whole life of its own that people can't even imagine today," Mitchell said.

Author: Peggy Simpson

Source: Woments Media Center

Release date: February 11th, 2009

How to Save Your Newspaper

Judith — 2009-02-09T10:59:16Z

There is, however, a striking and somewhat odd fact about this crisis. Newspapers have more readers than ever. Their content, as well as that of newsmagazines and other producers of traditional journalism, is more popular than ever — even (in fact, especially) among young people.

The problem is that fewer of these consumers are paying. Instead, news organizations are merrily giving away their news. According to a Pew Research Center study, a tipping point occurred last year: more people in the U.S. got their news online for free than paid for it by buying newspapers and magazines. Who can blame them? Even an old print junkie like me has quit subscribing to the New York Times, because if it doesn't see fit to charge for its content, I'd feel like a fool paying for it.

This is not a business model that makes sense. Perhaps it appeared to when Web advertising was booming and every half-sentient publisher could pretend to be among the clan who "got it" by chanting the mantra that the ad-supported Web was "the future." But when Web advertising declined in the fourth quarter of 2008, free felt like the future of journalism only in the sense that a steep cliff is the future for a herd of lemmings.

Newspapers and magazines traditionally have had three revenue sources: newsstand sales, subscriptions and advertising. The new business model relies only on the last of these. That makes for a wobbly stool even when the one leg is strong. When it weakens — as countless publishers have seen happen as a result of the recession — the stool can't possibly stand.

Henry Luce, a co-founder of TIME, disdained the notion of giveaway publications that relied solely on ad revenue. He called that formula "morally abhorrent" and also "economically self-defeating." That was because he believed that good journalism required that a publication's primary duty be to its readers, not to its advertisers. In an advertising-only revenue model, the incentive is perverse. It is also self-defeating, because eventually you will weaken your bond with your readers if you do not feel directly dependent on them for your revenue. When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, Dr. Johnson said, it concentrates his mind wonderfully. Journalism's fortnight is upon us, and I suspect that 2009 will be remembered as the year news organizations realized that further rounds of cost-cutting would not stave off the hangman.

One option for survival being tried by some publications, such as the Christian Science Monitor and the Detroit Free Press, is to eliminate or drastically cut their print editions and focus on their free websites. Others may try to ride out the long winter, hope that their competitors die and pray that they will grab a large enough share of advertising to make a profitable go of it as free sites. That's fine. We need a variety of competing strategies.

These approaches, however, still make a publication completely beholden to its advertisers. So I am hoping that this year will see the dawn of a bold, old idea that will provide yet another option that some news organizations might choose: getting paid by users for the services they provide and the journalism they produce.

This notion of charging for content is an old idea not simply because newspapers and magazines have been doing it for more than four centuries. It's also something they used to do at the dawn of the online era, in the early 1990s. Back then there were a passel of online service companies, such as Prodigy, CompuServe, Delphi and AOL. They used to charge users for the minutes people spent online, and it was naturally in their interest to keep the users online for as long as possible. As a result, good content was valued. When I was in charge of TIME's nascent online-media department back then, every year or so we would play off AOL and CompuServe; one year the bidding for our magazine and bulletin boards reached $1 million.

Then along came tools that made it easier for publications and users to venture onto the open Internet rather than remain in the walled gardens created by the online services. I remember talking to Louis Rossetto, then the editor of Wired, about ways to put our magazines directly online, and we decided that the best strategy was to use the hypertext markup language and transfer protocols that defined the World Wide Web. Wired and TIME made the plunge the same week in 1994, and within a year most other publications had done so as well. We invented things like banner ads that brought in a rising tide of revenue, but the upshot was that we abandoned getting paid for content.

One of history's ironies is that hypertext — an embedded Web link that refers you to another page or site — had been invented by Ted Nelson in the early 1960s with the goal of enabling micropayments for content. He wanted to make sure that the people who created good stuff got rewarded for it. In his vision, all links on a page would facilitate the accrual of small, automatic payments for whatever content was accessed. Instead, the Web got caught up in the ethos that information wants to be free. Others smarter than we were had avoided that trap. For example, when Bill Gates noticed in 1976 that hobbyists were freely sharing Altair BASIC, a code he and his colleagues had written, he sent an open letter to members of the Homebrew Computer Club telling them to stop. "One thing you do is prevent good software from being written," he railed. "Who can afford to do professional work for nothing?"

The easy Internet ad dollars of the late 1990s enticed newspapers and magazines to put all of their content, plus a whole lot of blogs and whistles, onto their websites for free. But the bulk of the ad dollars has ended up flowing to groups that did not actually create much content but instead piggybacked on it: search engines, portals and some aggregators.

Another group that benefits from free journalism is Internet service providers. They get to charge customers $20 to $30 a month for access to the Web's trove of free content and services. As a result, it is not in their interest to facilitate easy ways for media creators to charge for their content. Thus we have a world in which phone companies have accustomed kids to paying up to 20 cents when they send a text message but it seems technologically and psychologically impossible to get people to pay 10 cents for a magazine, newspaper or newscast.

Currently a few newspapers, most notably the Wall Street Journal, charge for their online editions by requiring a monthly subscription. When Rupert Murdoch acquired the Journal, he ruminated publicly about dropping the fee. But Murdoch is, above all, a smart businessman. He took a look at the economics and decided it was lunacy to forgo the revenue — and that was even before the online ad market began contracting. Now his move looks really smart. Paid subscriptions for the Journal's website were up more than 7% in a very gloomy 2008. Plus, he spooked the New York Times into dropping its own halfhearted attempts to get subscription revenue, which were based on the (I think flawed) premise that it should charge for the paper's punditry rather than for its great reporting. (Author's note: After publication the New York Times vehemently denied that their thinking was influenced by outside considerations; I accept their explanation.)

But I don't think that subscriptions will solve everything — nor should they be the only way to charge for content. A person who wants one day's edition of a newspaper or is enticed by a link to an interesting article is rarely going to go through the cost and hassle of signing up for a subscription under today's clunky payment systems. The key to attracting online revenue, I think, is to come up with an iTunes-easy method of micropayment. We need something like digital coins or an E-ZPass digital wallet — a one-click system with a really simple interface that will permit impulse purchases of a newspaper, magazine, article, blog or video for a penny, nickel, dime or whatever the creator chooses to charge.

Admittedly, the Internet is littered with failed micropayment companies. If you remember Flooz, Beenz, CyberCash, Bitpass, Peppercoin and DigiCash, it's probably because you lost money investing in them. Many tracts and blog entries have been written about how the concept can't work because of bad tech or mental transaction costs.

But things have changed. "With newspapers entering bankruptcy even as their audience grows, the threat is not just to the companies that own them, but also to the news itself," wrote the savvy New York Times columnist David Carr last month in a column endorsing the idea of paid content. This creates a necessity that ought to be the mother of invention. In addition, our two most creative digital innovators have shown that a pay-per-drink model can work when it's made easy enough: Steve Jobs got music consumers (of all people) comfortable with the concept of paying 99 cents for a tune instead of Napsterizing an entire industry, and Jeff Bezos with his Kindle showed that consumers would buy electronic versions of books, magazines and newspapers if purchases could be done simply.

What Internet payment options are there today? PayPal is the most famous, but it has transaction costs too high for impulse buys of less than a dollar. The denizens of Facebook are embracing systems like Spare Change, which allows them to charge their PayPal accounts or credit cards to get digital currency they can spend in small amounts. Similar services include Bee-Tokens and Tipjoy. Twitter users have Twitpay, which is a micropayment service for the micromessaging set. Gamers have their own digital currencies that can be used for impulse buys during online role-playing games. And real-world commuters are used to gizmos like E-ZPass, which deducts automatically from their prepaid account as they glide through a highway tollbooth.

Under a micropayment system, a newspaper might decide to charge a nickel for an article or a dime for that day's full edition or $2 for a month's worth of Web access. Some surfers would balk, but I suspect most would merrily click through if it were cheap and easy enough.

The system could be used for all forms of media: magazines and blogs, games and apps, TV newscasts and amateur videos, porn pictures and policy monographs, the reports of citizen journalists, recipes of great cooks and songs of garage bands. This would not only offer a lifeline to traditional media outlets but also nourish citizen journalists and bloggers. They have vastly enriched our realms of information and ideas, but most can't make much money at it. As a result, they tend to do it for the ego kick or as a civic contribution. A micropayment system would allow regular folks, the types who have to worry about feeding their families, to supplement their income by doing citizen journalism that is of value to their community.

When I used to go fishing in the bayous of Louisiana as a boy, my friend Thomas would sometimes steal ice from those machines outside gas stations. He had the theory that ice should be free. We didn't reflect much on who would make the ice if it were free, but fortunately we grew out of that phase. Likewise, those who believe that all content should be free should reflect on who will open bureaus in Baghdad or be able to fly off as freelancers to report in Rwanda under such a system.

I say this not because I am "evil," which is the description my daughter slings at those who want to charge for their Web content, music or apps. Instead, I say this because my daughter is very creative, and when she gets older, I want her to get paid for producing really neat stuff rather than come to me for money or decide that it makes more sense to be an investment banker.

I say this, too, because I love journalism. I think it is valuable and should be valued by its consumers. Charging for content forces discipline on journalists: they must produce things that people actually value. I suspect we will find that this necessity is actually liberating. The need to be valued by readers — serving them first and foremost rather than relying solely on advertising revenue — will allow the media once again to set their compass true to what journalism should always be about.

Author: Walter Isaac Son

Source: TIME

Release date; February 5th, 2009

Support KANERE for an independent refugee press

Judith — 2009-02-02T10:43:07Z

‘It will be a candlelight in this refugee camp,' says a refugee of the new free press in Kakuma Refugee Camp, Kenya. The Kakuma News Reflector, known as KANERE, is a refugee newspaper devoted to independent reporting on human rights and encampment. The refugees in Kakuma camp have been warehoused for almost two decades without a voice. Now, KANERE seeks to change that reality.

Kakuma Refugee Camp, like many others around the world, is administered by UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency. Although UNHCR publishes occasional reports on the camp, there is no regular media coverage of refugee encampment. KANERE represents one of the first refugee news outlets to reach an international audience from a refugee camp.

Although refugee camps are considered a form of humanitarian aid, conditions of life are miserable. The 50,000 refugees in Kakuma camp rely on UNHCR for food, water, shelter, education, movement passes, and legal protection. In turn, they have almost no say in the policies affecting their lives. There is little independent monitoring of human rights in the camp.

‘In exercising a refugee free press,' their vision states, ‘we speak in respect of human rights and the rule of law in order to create a more open society in refugee camps and to develop a forum for fair public debate on refugee affairs.'

This is not the first time refugees in Kakuma have spoken out. Since 1993, the Kakuma News Bulletin served as a means of refugee expression locally within the camp. It lost momentum by 2005, leaving a small group of journalists to keep the spirit of independent reporting alive. When a Fulbright researcher arrived in Kakuma in October 2008, these journalists suggested collaboration and the seeds of a refugee newspaper were born. By January 2009, KANERE is now 15 members strong with representatives from every major camp community.

The maiden issue of KANERE was published online on 22 December 2008. The print run, projected at 1,000 copies, has not yet begun due to a lack of funds. Few refugees are able to access the publication online. Currently, all journalists work on a voluntary basis without access to computers, internet, or basic office supplies. The group is petitioning international organisations and the US embassy for funding support.

KANERE will publish both a print and online version of the monthly paper. The online news blog, www.kakuma.wordpress.com, aims to raise awareness of refugee warehousing and to serve as a forum for public debate on refugee affairs. The print newspaper seeks to inform refugees, give them a voice, and raise awareness of human rights so refugees can more effectively monitor their own situation and seek redress of grievances.

For many refugees who feel imprisoned in Kakuma camp, KANERE represents a hope for change. As one refugee says, ‘Challenges are always there in my life, but no response is given by the Kenyan Government or UNHCR… Now we can start to address our life problems democratically when it comes to decision making.'

KANERE urgently seeks the support of international organizations and advocacy groups everywhere, as the group is facing pressure from local organizations that do not fully support an independent refugee press.

Authors: Bethany Ojalehto and Qaabata Boru

Source: Pambazuka news

Release date: January 22th, 2008

$15m blog sale shows importance of content

Judith — 2009-02-02T10:42:53Z

A “one-man-band” blog has just been sold for a total of $15m. That's right - a work-at-home blogger has been paid a whopping multimillion pound sum for his blog. Bankaholic - a blog about what banks are offering - has earned an up-front payment of $12.4m for the blog, with a further multimillion pound bonus possible over the coming year. - Media / Blog