Multimedia

One journalist from India talked about how he was working with nine editions in print and online. They have only started the transition, and right now, they have a limited staff dealing with 'converged coverage'. They have three converged reporters. They send them out with the Nokia N93 multimedia phones to collect material. In the future, they will combine the online and print staff. There is a lot of apprehension in the print newsroom, he said. Some of the younger reporters are excited.
In Malaysia, the National Union of Journalists is protesting, one of the editors said. If they take pictures and produce extra content, they believe they should get paid more. Management has responded that either they adapt to the new reality or they get another job. This week they are trying to change the thinking and communicate that "print is just another channel". They identify stories the day before that will need audio or video. Many younger reporters have cellphone cameras and are excited to go out. Some of the older reporters still place more emphasis on print. They still think the prestige is there and the the new media focus is just a whim driven by management.
They also send SMS alerts to their readers. Their most talked about SMS alerts are Metro based, he said. The most relevant SMS alerts are very local, very tiny.
A Thai journalist with the Nation said they are fortunate because they also have a TV station so that they can get video. Some of the print reporters have resisted saying that they haven't been trained, and The Nation is now providing them training. The online section sits directly in the newsroom to work directly.
Another Malaysian journalist said that due to lack of a business model or lack of revenue from online that online hasn't been a focus. And newspaper readership is still growing, 5% in the last year.
Steve Yelvington said that one of his groups newspapers in the United States now makes 21% of its revenue online. However, he added that many of the journalists at the paper don't know that because they don't talk about the business enough.
Five years ago, Clark Gilbert in the United States did a study showing that the most successful online operations were separate. They felt liberated, and they had a clearly defined profit and loss state, creating a sink or swim mentality. (You can find a list of Clark Gilbert's papers here.)
How mainstream media can interoperate with citizen media
Steve Yelvington is leading one of the last sessions of the day. He started off with a couple of quotes, one from Wikipedia about journalism, and this one:

Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. The real extent of this state of misinformation is known only to those who are in situations to confront facts within their knowledge with the lies of the day.

And:

Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.

Both quotes were from Thomas Jefferson, holding up seemingly contradictory points of view. He then rattled off one quote after another of the mainstream media in the United States condemning bloggers. He wanted to start a conversation about the point of view of journalists on citizen media.

The criticisms of the web,like the criticisms of the free press are generally valid. At the same time, out of this relatively messy medium, we stand to gain some real benefits.

One member of the audience quoted Sturgeon's Law that said that "90% of everything is crud".
Steve showed a picture of a gate with tire tracks going around the gate, which he compared to the way that information was flowing around the former gatekeepers, the journalists. Now, the internet enables a conversation on a global scale. Journalists need to use the web as a listening post, what people are thinking about, talking about, what their priorities are.
Professional journalists are not normal human beings. We have more education than is the norm is in society. We often come from outside of the community. We often don't relate to the day-to-day concerns of people in our communities. What we cover is often driven by our own process and beat structure rather than what are the concerns of people in our communities. Our work makes the conversation better, and listening to and participating in the conversation makes our work better.
Journalists can listen to the community for leads and report about rumour. Rumor is sometimes true, but it is also sometimes false. We need to go in and correct rumour if necessary. We need to step in, online, in real-time, not wait for the next edition of the paper. We served as truth watch, Steve says, which was different than what was done before.
Dan Gillmor's developed a conversational method. After some initial reporting, he would write a blog post letting people what he knew and what he thought about it, but he also asked his readers what he should do to take the story further. Who should he interview? What questions should he ask? He might have to repeat that cycle, but by the end, he would be ready to write the piece for the Sunday newspaper. In the end, the piece would be much richer and better reported than before the process.
It doesn't apply to every possible story, but he said that journalists should look for opportunities to apply this method. He suggested that media companies can work with citizen media by facilitating, convening and hosting. Media can host wikis, blogs, photo and video galleries as well as social networks. Media can also aggregate, publicise and highlight citizen media through links and indexing them.
In Singapore, one of the participants said that the media needed to end the perception that it was blogs versus the media. She said that in Singapore, the media was seen as the voice of the government, whereas blogs were seen more as the voice of the people, or the voice of dissent