Interview: An online media pioneer talks about his new citizen journalism start-up, The Enthusiast Group, and the state of citizen journalism.Steve Outing's been in the new media business since 1992, when, as a graphics editor for the San Francisco Chronicle, he helped the paper launch The Gate, SFGate.com's BBS predecessor.
Outing's been involved with online media and journalism ever since. He writes Stop the Presses, an interactive media column for Editor and Publisher. And, from 2001 until last month, he was a senior editor at the Poynter Institute.
Yesterday was Outing's first day at his new citizen journalism start-up, the Enthusiast Group, which aims to bring citizen media to the niche sports enthusiast market.
It's a heady time in citizen media. The user-generated content phenomenon is gathering steam with the help of popular sites such as digg.com.
Yet, as with all relatively new phenomena, there is still some confusion about the definition of "news 2.0." Is it citizen media? News aggregation? Blogging? All of the above?
I caught up with Steve and asked him a few questions about his new job, and about the state of citizen media.
1. Bayosphere, kaput. Backfence, struggling. How will the Enthusiast
Group learn from the mistakes of its predecessors? What's your business model?
OK, well, first let me reject your apparent premise that "citizen media" is in trouble. I think it's way too early to say that the Bayosphere thing means much. Dan Gillmor was pretty forthright in publicly suggesting that it was in part his fault that Bayosphere didn't get on track—that he learned he's more a dot-org than a dot-com guy and went off to found a citizen-media nonprofit organization. He clearly doesn't think the citizen-media concept is without promise or we'd have seen him go back to writing a tech column. (Disclosure: Dan is one of the angel investors in our new company.) Backfence: still seems too early to give them a fair assessment.
You can look at some of the smaller "citJ" initiatives that are covering hyper-local news, and some of them are doing well as still-tiny but successful media outlets. The ones that seem to be doing best—Baristanet and Westportnow, to cite a couple that I think are getting somewhere—have strong personalities driving the things.
They're getting traction locally because there's a highly visible "star" of the site creating content and reporting and interviewing people, and encouraging community members to contribute content and coaching them.
I like that model a lot more than just creating tools to allow "citizens" to submit content without a driving personality greasing the wheels.
So, the Enthusiast Group is publisher of a network of participatory Web sites about sports and activities that people are passionate about. Our model is similar to what I just described.
An enthusiast-in-chief will guide our site on mountain biking, for example, not only writing about what he loves, but reaching out to the biking community and encouraging them to share their stories.
I won't call what we're doing "citizen journalism"; that's not a term we plan to use in getting sports enthusiasts to participate on our sites. (I think using it would intimidate many people.) We're really about creating a community of people who are passionate about the same thing and get joy out of sharing their adventures. There's more to it, but we're still in stealth mode for a little bit longer (hey, I've only been full time on this one day!), so it seems silly to say more.
2. There's been a lot of blowback against the term "citizen journalism." Most recently, your former Poynter associate Kelly McBride mentioned how the term was misused by Web properties. How do you, personally, define citizen journalism? Is the term even necessary when you're inviting sports enthusiasts to share their experiences?
In my own writing, I've used the term "citizen journalism," because I think people in the industry understand what it means (and I'm usually writing for a media industry audience). But I don't really like the term. I'm actually OK with "citizen media" or "participatory media"; I think as an umbrella term, those are appropriate for what we're doing with Enthusiast Group.
But I'm not going to play up those phrases when I'm encouraging sports enthusiasts to share their experiences. Sharing, telling their stories ... those are better descriptions of what we're trying to do.
I'll reserve "citizen media" mostly for the corporate site that explains the company's mission.
There are several things wrong with the term "citizen journalism." One of the worst is that when you invite people to write and submit whatever they want, you get people publishing press releases, commercial messages, etc. Clearly not everything you get is anything remotely resembling "journalism"—though some of it is.
3. A company called Pluck recently unveiled its BlogBurst syndication network, which will cull blog content and push it via RSS to newspaper sites like the Washington Post and the San Francisco Chronicle. What does this mean, if anything, for the relationship of blogs to MSM?
A continuation of the trend of newspapers opening up to content from "the outside." That's been an awfully slow process, but we're starting to see some newspapers open the door at least a crack.
WashingtonPost.com, clearly an industry leader, now puts Technorati links to blogs on its articles, so readers of its Web site can see what bloggers are writing about Post stories (and some of it will be extremely critical).
To the Internet community, that's no big deal, but for newspapers it's a major change. You can argue that it's taken newspapers way to long to get this far, but at least it's happening with some of them. Sites like the Post's will, I hope, get more newspapers to follow suit.
I guess it also demonstrates that mainstream media takes independent blogs (at least the good ones) seriously now.
4. Digg.com: the power of citizen-driven media or tyranny of the masses?
Ummm, both? Overall, I like the concept of "citizen editors"—of the readers deciding what deserves to be up front. I think there'll be a place for this form of news selection as well as traditional editor-driven news selection.
Maybe a certain segment of the public will prefer to trust such group news selection; another will prefer traditional editors. And sometimes we'll flip back and forth, depending on our moods.
It might be interesting to see how the public's choices for today's top news compare with that of the front-page editor of the New York Times. I don't think there's any danger of the army of citizen editors putting page-one editors out of work, just as algorithm-selected news a la Google News won't.
5. Jay Rosen recently released his list of top blogging newspapers. I was disheartened, but not surprised, to see that the NYTimes wasn't on that list. The Washington Post, on the other hand, seems to be leaping into the online era with Technorati and del.icio.us links, and over 30 blogs. What's holding the New York Times back?
I wonder if the Timesfolk would say this, but it seems obvious to me. The Times, perhaps more so than any other newspaper in the U.S., has a "voice" that it wants badly to protect. By weakening the editing process in allowing staff blogging, that's a tough thing for a paper like the Times to swallow. If you've got a Times correspondent blogging live from Baghdad and not going through the normal editing process, that's a significant change. (I think the Times should loosen up; they've got great people and they ought to be able to trust them. Plus, they have the resources to do fast back-editing to catch problems.)
That's the staff blogs. When you get to opening it up to hosting community members' blogs, that's even harder for an organization like NYT to accept. Rosen's survey noted that the Houston Chronicle was tops in part because of a great community blogging initiative. I just can't imagine the Times loosening up to that degree!
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