What is citizen journalism?

Citizen journalism in Asia

Live from Kuala Lumpur, Guardian blogs editor is blogging about workshops with editors and journalists from across Asia about the citizen media revolution.

Hello from Kuala Lumpur and three days of citizen journalism workshops, organised by IFRA Asia, with editors and journalists from across Asia including Malaysia, Singapore, India and Thailand.
Digital pioneer Steve Yelvington and multimedia guru Robb Montgomery are helping with the workshops, and I'm adding my own part about using blogs, social networks and digital tools like Skype to improve and expand journalism.
Steve said that he is: "Basically rethinking of what we use the internet for." We originally just created newspapers online, but now, he and his colleagues are thinking about what the internet is best suited for in terms of news.
If you want to know about what is going on in citizen media (or media in general), send me some questions, and I'll put them to the participants.
Robb Montgomery recorded a video on his way to Kuala Lumpur. He also talked about the new pages in passport. A lot of the participants were working on merging their print and online operations as well as adding multimedia. Of the 20 or so participants, four or five worked primarily on their print editions.


Steve has stopped using the term because he didn't like the separation between being a citizen and being a journalist. He also didn't like the baggage with the term journalism. Editors think that citizens will adhere to all of the standards the professional journalists. It also leaves out a lot of passions and interests that people have that may fall outside of the traditional news agenda.
He also got a lot of calls from editors after launching Bluffton Today because they wanted to lay off the well paid journalists. That's not the point.
Robb liked the term 'participatory journalism'. We don't care if mobile phone, YouTube, Apple TV, blogs or other forms of feedback.
One of the Malaysian participants said that citizen media was slow to take off because of the history of government control in the region. Two weeks ago, the government assigned a task force to look at bloggers and their impact. The New Straits Times launched a lawsuit against bloggers for defamation earlier this year.
Another Malaysian participant said that the ruling party was in the process of setting up a 500-strong cyberwriters group to counter the allegations of bloggers. He'd rather the ministers simply learn how to blog.
Steve had a really good point:

Our role (journalists' role) in society is changing. We used to be the source of information, but now there is information flowing around us. Some of it is bad.

How do journalists respond to it? How do we help people navigate this flood information?
Steve later said that because news has been episodic and periodic that we have failed to understand the 'permanent value' of some of the information that. "Thinking about 'olds' as well as 'news'".
Over the next few days, I'll be writing a bit about the sessions but also interviewing the participants to talk to them about media in Asia.
Publishing 2.0
Robb started off talking about some of the changes in media. People now expect up-to-date information, on demand, free and disposable. "Young media creatures are multitaskers and learned HTML in grade school."
He talked about mash-up projects such as the transit strike mash-up created by the New York Times. He also high-lighted a video aggregation project in Virginia, Hampton Roads.tv. (I think that is the URL, but the ISP is having a bit of trouble resolving it here. Things that make you, hmm.