Anonymous Comments

Kentucky state representative Tom Couch recently proposed a unique bill. His bill would require all internet users to provide their real name, address, and email address before they could comment on any blog or public forum. Web administrators who did not comply with this regulation would be fined $500 for the first offense and $1000 for each subsequent offense. According to Couch, the bill is intended to stop online bullying.

Everyone agrees that flame wars are immature, and nobody likes a bully, but is this really necessary? Does this bill cross the line, preventing more potential positive anonymous tips and stories than bullies?

Couch’s bill can be found here in Word format.

Photo by Ben Bishop

New York Times Polling Place Photo Project

The American political process is fascinating. Every few years, thousands of people head to their local polling places to have their voices heard. These polling places can be anywhere—a school, a church, a retirement home, any relatively large space that agrees to host this most important democratic ritual. Most people only see a few polling places in their lifetime, one for everywhere they live as an adult.

The New York Times, in partnership with AIGA, the American professional organization for design, seeks to change this. With their Polling Place Photo Project, they are urging voters from across the country to submit photos and descriptions of their voting experience to create “a visual record of how voting happens in America: where it occurs, what the process looks like, how people act, and, ultimately, how the voting experience can be designed to be easier, less confusing and more rewarding”.

• As part of their submissions, voters describe everything about their experience, from personal voting habits, to lines at the polls to ballot type. How will all of this information help fulfill the Times‘ goal of making “the voting experience…easier, less confusing, and more rewarding”?

New York Times Polling Place Photo Project

Pakistan and The Internet Part 2: YouTube

For two hours on Sunday, February 24th, YouTube went offline. This wasn’t a deliberate attack or even internal maintenance gone wrong. The outage was an apparent accident, caused by a botched attempt at censorship by the Pakistani government.

News.com reports that Pakistan was attempting to block YouTube internally because of cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed hosted on the website. Officials feared these cartoons could cause political unrest in Pakistan. The Pakistani Telecommunications Authority attempted to block access to YouTube by routing all requests for the site to “erroneous protocols,” essentially sending all would-be YouTube visitors to blank pages. Whether or not they intended to do so, this censorship scheme effected the entire world, causing widespread confusion as YouTube vanished for two hours.

After learning of Pakistan’s objection, YouTube removed the offending video, and has since come back online in Pakistan and the rest of the world.

• Pakistan is not the first country to block access to YouTube and similar sites. How can citizen journalists tell their stories when their main outlets become inaccessible?
• Should sites like YouTube be held responsible for hosting potentially offensive material?
• Does the apparent ease with which Pakistan knocked out YouTube shine a light on the risk of cyberwar and cyberterrorism?

YouTube Blames Pakistan for 2-Hour Outage

How Pakistan Knocked YouTube Offline (and How to Make Sure It Never Happens Again)

Pakistan Welcomes Back YouTube

Pakistan and The Internet Part 1: The New York Times

Pakistan has been in the news quite a bit recently, and for those looking in the right places, a lot of this news has dealt with the internet and citizen journalism. I’m going to address two relevant stories in my next two posts: a New York Times effort to work with citizen journalists, and an attempt by the Pakistani government to silence the same critical individuals.

In November, the Times put out “a call for eyewitness photos, video, and text from Pakistan.” This request was intended to help the Times report on opposition protests being blocked by the Pakistani government. Users were encouraged to submit personal accounts as comments and to contact the Times with photo and video submissions. While there were a few videos linked in the comments, most responses seemed to come in text form, whether they were personal accounts or critiques of the Times’ coverage.

• Was this intended journalistic partnership successful for all parties involved?
• What does the most common response medium (text) say about the kinds of stories being told and the people telling them?

Come back soon for the Pakistan-YouTube debacle.

“A Call for Eyewitness Photos, Video and Text From Pakistan”

What Is Citizen Journalism?

Citizen journalism is an incredibly broad term. It covers concepts ranging from public comments on articles to user generated content to so called “WikiJournalism,” where editors disappear entirely. Steve Outing, writing for the Poynter Institute, describes what he calls “The 11 Layers of Citizen Journalism.” This list starts with the simplest implementations of reader participation and builds up to some radical views for the future of journalism. Here are Outing’s 11 Layers:

1. The first step: Opening up to public comment
2. Second step: The citizen add-on reporter
3. Now we’re getting serious: Open-source reporting
4. The citizen bloghouse
5. Newsroom citizen ‘transparency’ blogs
6. The stand-alone citizen-journalism site: Edited version
7. The stand-alone citizen-journalism site: Unedited version
8. Add a print edition
9. The hybrid: Pro + citizen journalism
10. Integrating citizen and pro journalism under one roof
11. Wiki journalism: Where the readers are editors

As you can see, these layers follow a very obvious progression. The first steps are relatively easy to implement, with professionals still doing most, if not all of the reporting. Eventually, citizen journalists take on larger and larger roles, moving from commenting, to assisting reporters, to writing their own content. By Layer 7, mainstream media is totally out of the picture.

Think about these questions:

• What strengths and weaknesses do you see in the layer metaphor for citizen journalism?
• Will these changes influence the effectiveness of journalism in conveying information?
• Will they affect the credibility and objectivity of journalism?
• Do you know of any interesting examples that match one or more of Outing’s layers?

As a reminder, please leave your age, profession, and contact information in your comment.

“The 11 Layers of Citizen Journalism”

Welcome

I’m Will Hirzy, a senior at School Without Walls in Washington, DC, and I’m completing my Senior Thesis Project on the role of citizen journalism in online media. So far, I’ve written a 15-page paper on the subject, drawing upon many primary sources, as well as the analysis of scholars.

This blog is the second phase of my project. Here, I will share with you several examples of citizen journalism and interactive multimedia packages, including a few I used in my paper. Each post will include one primary source and several discussion questions. This is where you, the readers, come in. I ask that you comment on the posts, addressing the discussion questions. I also ask that you give me your profession and age (if you feel comfortable) for demographic reasons and your email address for follow-up research. If you would rather not include this information in your comment, please email it, with some way of identifying your comment, to me at: whirzy [at] gmail [dot] com.

Thanks to everyone who reads and comments on my blog. By doing so, you are helping me a great deal with my paper. Most of all, thank you Ms. Schulz for teaching the Senior Project class and thank you Lindsay McCullough for being my project mentor and coming up with the idea for this blog.