New Kindle promises to kindle new cravings

Today in New York Amazon CEO Jeffrey P. Bezos launched the 9.7-inch-screen Kindle DX (for "deluxe"), the latest of the portable, personalizable content readers.

College students are clearly a target market.

Other than the increased size, the biggest improvement in the Kindle ecosystem is the deal with textbook publishers. The textbook market will be key for the DX to succeed. Amazon has already signed up three of the top five textbook publishers (Cengage Learning, Pearson, and Wiley) as well as 27 University Press Publishers. The Kindle DX will be used in trials with at least five universities this fall.

So are digital newspaper aficionados. The New York Times reports:

Amazon also said that three newspapers, The New York Times, The Boston Globe and The Washington Post, would offer a reduced price on the Kindle in exchange for a long-term subscription, but only for people who live in areas where their paper editions are not available. Amazon and the newspapers described it as a pilot program.

Meanwhile, Mark Glaser is at a symposium at the University of Missouri where "a group of newspapers and tech folks . . . are looking at how newspaper content might work on various e-readers like the Amazon Kindle."

Economics of delivering a newspaper on Kindle:

> Avg. file size = 1.2MB
> Bandwidth cost = .12 cents MB
> Selling price = $13.99 month
> Monthly bandwidth cost = $4.32

That eats into monthly cost of serving content into Kindle. So Amazon is probably losing money on some of the lower cost publications it sells. This cost doesn't even include advertising in the mix.

Mr. Glaser has a blog post about "the next generation of e-readers." Check it out. It's good stuff.

Also see: Could Kindle 2 save the newspapers?
And: Huffington counsels old media: Monetize links, don't try to sell exclusive content
And: What will the future newspaper look like?

A sustainable model emerges: Use collective intelligence but fact-check with journalists

My quick note on sustainable journalism originally published in CCJIG's Spring 2009 newsletter:

A clichéd refrain of critics is that citizen journalists have little incentive to check for facts or fairness, or to even write well.

So is fact-checking on life support?

Consider the evidence. More and more citizen sites are hiring a professional journalist (or two or three) to edit members’ contributions. As citizen journalism matures, it seems to be increasingly turning into a method to investigate a story rather than a replacement for professional journalism.

Is that a challenge to the very premise of citizen journalism? Quite the contrary, it would seem. Take Julien Pain, founder-editor of the French cit-journalism site “Observers.” In recent media interviews, Mr. Pain says Web traffic has zoomed with the increase in perceived credibility. He says his site “takes advantage of the best aspects of a blog, but maintains professional direction.” Clearly, the site has realized enhanced value through edits by a professional.

Another example is Cynthia Farrar’s citizen journalism forum, whose tag line boasts, “People powered, professionally produced.” The site, “Purple States,” was described by one blogger as a “new media company that gathers content from citizen journalists like you, edits their videos and interviews, and delivers those packages to major media outlets.” Its teams comprise “citizen journalists. . . who travel together to report on news from the frontlines. Their journey is professionally. . . edited, and aired on a variety of major media platforms.” Purple States’ documentaries have been streamed on nyt.com, washingtonpost.com, Verizon v-cast as well as on local television.

That seems to be the emerging model: Employ a collective intelligence but fact-check using a professional. I predict it will emerge as the definition of “sustainable journalism,” a meme to explore which Leonard Witt recently got a $1.5 million gift. The model potentially enhances citizen journalism’s credibility but also creates avenues for laid-off journalists.

A citizen site that has bucked the trend is CNN’s “iReport,” which continues to declare that “the stories submitted by users are not edited, fact-checked or screened before they post.” iReport, which turned one year old February 15, has more than 25,000 reporter-members. Its virtual branch in Second Life – “our bigger, better space” as one iReporter gushed – is called iReport Island, the rapidly growing “network of 3-D citizen journalists.” iReports are also broadcast in CNN Radio feeds to “more than 1,500 affiliates in the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand Aruba and Newfoundland.”

I expect that if citizen sites won’t fact-check, then others will do it for them – that is a fundamental reason why collective intelligence is a utility. For instance, check out Public-Press.org, Spot.us and Newsdesk.org. Clearly, this idea that others will do the fact-checking, has its own pitfalls given that Web users tend to frequent content which reinforces – not challenges – their attitudes. Mark Glaser of MediaShift once observed that Web traffic to non-partisan fact-check sites -- such as PolitiFact, FactCheck, and the Washington Post’s Fact Checker blog -- is always less than the Web traffic to partisan fact-check sites -- such as Newsbusters (conservative) and Media Matters (liberal).

Besides, consider what Walter Isaacson of the Aspen Institute writes in a recent Time. He calls for Web users to make a “micropayment” via some sort of EZPass system which he claims would, besides saving the newspaper industry, “nourish and encourage all sorts of citizen journalism and blogging.” A consensus seems to be developing that if citizen journalism is to have monetary value, fact-checking will be inevitable.

All of it leads me to offer that we don’t have to be particularly intrepid to appreciate the emerging model – “employ a collective intelligence but fact-check using a professional” – as worthy of our group’s careful attention.

Also see: Can selling news via the Web save newspapers?
And see: Some thoughts on citizen journalism and Mumbai
And: How to add value to amateur content

CCJIG invites non-members: Come say hello in Boston!

To acquaint non-members with our group I am reproducing below a brief profile which appears in AEJMC News (pdf 1.21 mb) of March 2009. We'd love to see new faces at the Boston convention August 4-8.

Civic & Citizen Journalism Interest Group
Head: Nikhil Moro, Central Michigan

Our interest group has emerged as AEJMC’s largest in 2008-09. We host scholars devoted to either public or participatory journalism. Of our 116 registered members 57 are female. Six of our members identify themselves as African-American, two as Asian-American, and twelve as International.

We are happy to report that thanks to our growing membership our budget is healthier than ever before. We are an active, welcoming group with a relatively young membership. We love new members!

Some of our members – those with an interest in civic journalism – explore the trend of professional reporters acting as participant observers (who might advance specific social agendas) rather than as dispassionate spectators. Such reporters recognize that “journalism has an obligation to public life – an obligation that goes beyond just telling the news or unloading lots of facts” (Pew Center). Academic interest in civic journalism was catalyzed by David Perry’s 2003 book titled The Roots of Civic Journalism and by other work by advocates such as Davis “Buzz”Merritt.

Other members of our group have an interest in “citizen journalism,” which is practiced by non-professionals who use a digital camera and a sharing spirit to observe events and record them on personal blogs, or on Twitter, iReport, CitizenSide and other such online forums. Unlike civic reporters, who are professionals, citizen journalists are not on the payroll of any legacy media organization. Typically, they are not even trained in jschool. Academic interest in citizen journalism pivots on the expositions of, among others, Mark Glaser, Jay Rosen, Dan Gillmor and Leonard Witt.

Many of our members are excited about technology-driven trends in journalism practice. In the last two years our group’s scholarship has addressed topics in civic engagement, pedagogical modeling, sources, transparency, perceptions of credibility, citizen journalism models, and political efficacy.

At the 2009 convention in Boston, we plan to build on that edifice as well as investigate new trends, such as topics in citizen/civic journalism in the 2008 presidential campaign season, newsroom projects, legal/ethical issues, the contrasts between crowdsourcing and “gatekeeping,” changes in the newspaper economy, media convergence, and use of polls and focus groups in civic reporting.

In Boston we plan to give away two “best paper” prizes of $151 each to a faculty member and a graduate student. Send us a paper! We also have slated two pre-convention workshops and about a dozen discussion panels. Details of our convention program and current discussions may be found at our blog http://ccjig.blogspot.com.

http://www.has.vcu.edu/civic-journalism