Background Information
http://mymissourian.com
Contact: Clyde H. Bentley, Ph.D.
3 Neff Hall, University of Missouri
(573) 884-9688
WHAT IS IT?
MyMissourian is a “citizen journalism“ publication using both a Web site and a print newspaper to allow members of the public to define “news” and “valuable information” in their own terms. It is part of the journalism product umbrella of the Columbia Missourian and published in conjunction with the Missouri School of Journalism. It was started in 2004 by online journalism professor Clyde Bentley and a team of students.
Access to MyMissourian is easy and free. Anyone can read the core Web site at http://mymissourian.com. The print edition – The Saturday Missourian Weekly — is delivered free to 23,000 households in Columbia, MO. Although the focus of the content is local, anyone my contribute information to both the Web and Print editions by registering with a verifiable name and e-mail address through a link on the Web site.
MyMissourian is an attempt to give a voice to the people of Mid-Missouri. Using the power of the Internet, it allows residents to publish their own stories about life in their community. Students from the Missouri School of Journalism are editors – guiding the writers, suggesting topics and tuning the grammar. The site, however, relies on those generally considered to be “readers” to become “reporters.”
While MyMissourian.com is Web site, it is in fact the Web half of a hybrid publication. The primary function of MyMissourian.com is “writership” rather than readership. It is a content-generation device that attracts citizen journalists and allows them to publish their stories and photos. Most of that material is then published in print via a “TMC” (total market circulation) edition of the Columbia Missourian newspaper. This allows the organization to sell traditional print advertising based on online content. It also dramatically increases participation by citizen authors.
MyMissourian is organized into several content sections, each section having a team of student journalists to oversee it. Although more topics are added and deleted as their popularity changes, the primary topics are :
· Voices (general essays)
· Civic life (items regarding politics and government)
· Spiritual Life (religious essays and information)
· Culture (Arts and entertainment information)
· Health and Science (Primarily health information)
· Schools (Items from local schools)
· Business (Commerce-oriented information)
· My Photos (Free standing photos and photo galleries)
Seasonal and special interest sections – such as “Fall Photos” or “Hurricane Katrina” are added when appropriate.
While new material is constantly added to MyMissourian, the general content of the site is “refreshed” every Wednesday by 5 p.m. This allows editors to move copy from the online files to the traditional typesetting files of the Columbia Missourian for use in the free Saturday edition
MyMissourian offers a new source of information for Mid Missouri, but it does not replace traditional media such as the Columbia Missourian newspaper. It is a “complementary medium” rather than a “competitive medium.” Because the Internet has unlimited capacity, MyMissourian can publish material the media has previously found inconsequential – but that someone finds of great interest. No story is too small. In that sense, it acts both as a safety valve that gives voice to media critics and as surveillance tool that allows journalists to see what is on the minds of the reading public. In this way, it acts as both an instrument to monitor community news interest and a safety valve for the Columbia Missourian.
WHERE DID IT COME FROM?
Letters from readers
Newspapers, especially those in smaller communities, have a long history of soliciting news and commentary from readers. Many rural weekly community newspapers have columnists who write, diary-like, about the activities of their neighbors. A more traditional source of this type of material is letters to the editor.
Korea and beyond
The current wave of citizen (a.k.a. participatory or open source) journalism can be traced to a journalistic phenomenon in Korea and the global popularity of blogging software.
In 2000, Oh Yeon-Ho and three colleagues started a politically motivated online daily newspaper, OhMyNews. Oh said he and other South Korean liberals were dissatisfied with the mainstream Korean press, but had too little financial backing to start a conventional newspaper. Oh resorted to what he called “guerilla methods” – using volunteer reporters and posting the material on the Internet instead of printing it.
Oh recruited 727 “citizen reporters” to write the news, which was edited and processed by four journalists. Those numbers have grown dramatically – to 53 professional journalists and 27,000 citizen journalists. OhMyNews is also now profitable and unique visitors have jumped from 600 at launch to a high of 3 million. It also has an English-language version popular in the United States.
Meanwhile, the online world is facing a tidal wave in the form of “blog” software. Weblogs, or blogs, are simple sites that are hosted on a central server and published in a simple template. The template takes care of all design issues. Content is added to the site in date order, with the newest content on top. Blogs are akin to diaries, journals or bulletin boards but are very easy to set up and maintain. Many blogs can be updated via e-mail or even cell-phone messages.
Estimates of the number of blogs vary widely, but a study of just eight blog services by Perseus estimated there are 4.18 million blogs on the Web. The Pew Center estimated 2 percent of U.S. Internet users blog, which calculates to approximately 2.5 American bloggers. The NAA reports there are approximately 1,800 daily newspapers in the U.S., so we have more than 1,300 blogs for each daily newspaper in the United States.
The Bakersfield Compromise
Blogs are seen as uncontrolled, unprofessional and uninspiring by many journalists. A newspaper in Bakersfield, CA, attempted to create a publication more appealing to journalists by using blog-style software supervised by professional journalists.
However, the real key to success of the Northwest Voice, a subsidiary of the Bakersfield Californian, was its convergence of online and print. Voice Publisher Mary Lou Fulton established the site in response to the company’s need to start a suburban shopper in an attractive neighborhood. Rather than create a free publication with no editorial content or with recycled content from the mother paper, Fulton used the OhMyNews format to gather content from citizen reporters. The material is edited by professionals, posted on the Web and once a week “swept” into a print publication. The TMC print publication is a very successful advertising medium.
I’m from Missouri, show me
The trade press ran several glowing articles about the Northwest Voice that were discussed at length by the faculty of the Missouri School of Journalism. Since the school is in the process of establishing both a futuristic journalism institute and a curriculum for convergence journalism, interest in open source journalism was high.
Bentley suggested that instead of waiting for a formal definition of open source journalism to evolve, the Missouri School of Journalism should use its current resources to experiment. He proposed that the school modify its existing online journalism class to produce a Web open source publication. If it worked, our print colleagues could use it to provide copy for one of the two TMC products now published by the daily the Columbia Missourian. The high circulation numbers of TMC editions make them very lucrative for many newspaper companies. However, the “pickup” rate of these driveway-delivered free publications drops when content becomes routine or old.
HOW DO WE DO IT?
Curt Wohleber, the editor of the online edition of the Columbia Missourian, made an important technical discovery when he found a piece of free software that could be modified for our needs. He became our resident expert on Mambo while Bentley and his graduate students focused on the content logistics.
The time frame for implementation was short: With a presidential election coming in early November, MyMissourian.com had to be up by Oct. 1 to take part in the national dialog.
A key to the school’s ability to quickly establish an citizen journalism publication was enlisting a corps of highly motivated graduate students. Graduate students who responded to an e-mail query seeking volunteers during the 2004 summer break became both the researchers and supervisors of a site.
The graduate students first took on two important tasks – identifying content categories and drafting basic operational procedures. The initial content areas came from both the interests of the available students and a review of the Northwest Voice. When the class convened in September, each graduate student was given a content area to oversee and a team of undergraduates to help publish it.
Content teams are not only editors of submitted copy, but are advocates who solicit information. They are charged with using all their journalistic skills to identify potential stories and then to find people in the community who will write about them.
The discussion on policy quickly became an exercise in minimalism. Editors found that the fewer policies made, the less MyMissourian appeared to be a “traditional” medium and the easier it became to interest the public. The policy discussion focused on four areas:
· “Decency” (use of language, content topics, etc.)
o Policy: No profanity, no nudity, use normal newspaper standards of propriety
· “Commercialism” (promotion of a business, organization, religion, etc.)
o Don’t ban businesses that self-promote, but work with them to produce copy of general interest. In the future, we may have a paid “commercial announcement” site.
· “Literacy” (How much editing and rewriting should we do?)
o Keep editing to a minimum, focusing on readability rather than style. Avoid jargon and cultural slang that can be misinterpreted.
· “Banalism” (Is anything just too stupid to appear on the site? If so, how dumb is dumb?)
o Journalists are poor judges of the banal. Rather than say anything is too low-brow or too silly, we will just find an appropriate category for it and let the public judge it.
But will citizen journalism land news organizations in court? Probably not any more often than any other publication, if journalists maintain their professionalism and remember their training. MyMissourian, for instance, has four unbending rules enforced by its editors:
1. No nudity
2. No profanity
3. No personal attacks
4. No attacks on race, creed, sexual orientation or national origin
Beyond that are the normal concerns for libel and errors. In addition to the same editing precautions all newspaper editors take for libel, MyMissourian has the advantage of being self-correcting. Any reader who spots an error or who takes issue with an opinion can very quickly tell “the rest of the story.” Readers provide thousands of extra eyes for the editors and quickly notify them of errors. Due to the nature of the Web, those errors can quickly be corrected.The use of free software, existing technology and volunteer authors has kept costs extremely low. The project generated less then $1,000 in costs above what the university and newspaper were already spending for existing operations.
What publications like MyMissourian provide to the journalism profession is a chance to regain the personality, the human interest and the love of life that was more evident in the many smaller newspapers of a century ago. It eliminates the “them and us” culture that often defines metro journalism. In open source journalism, “we” are all in it together.
What is the role of the journalist?
One of the primary reasons the Missouri School of Journalism chose to experiment with open source journalism early is the implication that “people” media -- from CB radios to public access TV to blogs – will eliminate the need for professional journalists. MyMissourian and citizen journalism neither eliminates journalists nor replaces traditional newspaper, television and radio. It is simply a new source of information by which the public can supplement its other sources of information.
A review of earlier efforts showed that most media efforts based on volunteers eventually lose audience due to low quality, uninteresting content and the strain of production.
The trained journalists who work with MyMissourian are quite “hands on.” They do not wait for copy to simply appear on the Web. Instead, they constantly scan the news in their content areas, looking for names and story ideas that they can put together. They contact sources by telephone and e-mail to encourage them to write or submit photographs.
At times, they also write the stories themselves. There is no writing prohibition on the journalists – only an admonition that they write to encourage response in others. The infrequent stories and photos produced by the staff “seed” the publication for citizen participation.
The journalists also work very hard to maintain quality while retaining the “folksy” value of open source journalism. They have found editing stories for style on a “per case” basis actually harder than just following a style book.
Perhaps the greatest job of the professional journalist on a citizen journalism site is to provide continuity. Some of the students wishfully thought the site would be self-perpetuating after the first edition went on the Web. However, the work of tweaking software, collecting stories, processing photos and re-contacting contributors to clarify content is never-ending.
There is also great journalistic value in simply monitoring MyMissourian and similar sites. MyMissourian is in many ways a semi-automated interviewing machine. Members of the public constantly tell the world what they think about everything from foreign travel to state politics to the World Series. The opportunities to use this information for follow-up, traditional journalism are endless. Many stories in the daily Columbia Missourian have started with citizen-generated stories and photos in MyMissourian.
INTO THE FUTURE
MyMissourian made an important leap forward on its first anniversary Oct. 1, 2005. That Saturday, the Columbia Missourian began using stories and photos submitted by citizens to the MyMissourian site. Material was moved from the online files to a traditional typesetting section to fill pages of “Saturday Weekly,” a free “total market circulation” edition of the Columbia Missourian. This newspaper goes to all non-subscribers in Columbia and is a popular vehicle for advertisers. However, that popularity was in danger when research found that the recycled stories from earlier editions of the daily Missourian and “canned” material from syndicates was not enticing readers.
The use of Web-generated citizen journalism to provide new and compelling copy for a print edition provides a viable economic model for online journalism. Newspapers can now use the advantages of the Web to stimulate community discussion while still employing the advertising power of a traditional print product. Since the introduction of the print edition, both readership and story submissions for the online site have increased dramatically.