Diary of a preditor - part 1
As well as our regular co-written posts, I thought this blog would be a useful space for some timely practice-based reflections on youdecide2007, and my role there.
Youdecide2007 is the project we’re running with some other folks to create a citizen-led coverage of the 2007 Australian Federal Election.
I’m keenly aware that there are scores of people, all over the world, trying to bring citizen journalism projects into being, and I hope that this might be one useful space for discussion around that. What we all find out sooner or later is that “build it and they will come” is just a cute line from a movie. You’ve got to actively bring the produsers to your project, and it can be tough. I’m hoping this will be a good place to reflect on that.
At youdecide2007, some of us have the unusual privilege of having one foot in the world of citizen journalism, and another in academe, which gives us the opportunity (and maybe even the responsibility) to offer up informed discussions on this very involved process to a broader public.
The title of this diary isn’t a misprint. It’s a neologism that I’m told Toby Miller coined recently to describe the unusual hybrid position that people like we at youdecide find ourselves in. The word combines “producer” and “editor”, to describe a role which isn’t quite the gatekeeping function of the editor of a traditional news source, isn’t quite the self-producing or self-publishing freedom of a blogger, and rather describes a new kind of work in new media environments. This is the work of sourcing material from a (prod)user base for a resource, ensuring that it meets the requirements of the environment in which its published, keeping the community enthusiatic, evangelising the project to the MSM and the digwerati, and doing whatever it takes to draw eyeballs and interaction.
Ths post will be longer than the remainder, because I feel like it needs to provide some backgorund for readers who aren’t familiar with the adventures of youdecide2007 up to this point. Its a bit of a potted history of the last three months (seems like much longer!) since I’ve been on the project, which can lead into closer discussion of the ins and outs of running a campaign-focussed citizen journalism site for the next six weeks or so.
We have successfully launched the site, and attracted a range of content, in time for the official start of Australia’s Federal Election campaign. By various means we’ve managed to make enough of a splash to attract users, readers and attention. Before I was hired as project manager, wiser heads than mine decided that an event-based focus was the way to go. We all know that news-media consumption, political interest and the constituency for online public affairs redlines around these great festivals of democracy. The US political blogosphere really got entrenched around the ‘03-’04 election season, and we’re hoping that the same will happen in Australia (with a slight lag) in campaign 07.
What’s got us in the position we are in at the moment is a hardworking team that’s cooperated well. If you take a look at the site, you’ll see it has been built on Joomla!, the open-source CMS. I’m proud that we went with an OS option, and Chris Maj from On Line Opinion has custom-coded a range of material to ensure that it would work as a UGC site. What follows is no idle plug: you should contact OLO if you are considering Joomla! for any major project. More generally, I think that we did well to listen to Chris and the developers, and went with the platform they were most familiar and comfortable with, which meant that we were able to get the project up and running off a very short lead-in time.
But lots of good, clear ideas were fed into the development by Graham Young from OLO, Terry Flew (one of the chief investigators), Axel, Barry and Kelly Hussey-Smith, a colleague on the project who is a trained photojournalist. A lot of my role was in keeping lines of communication open, making sure that people touched base regularly, and ensuring that the comments that started to filter in from our users (after our “soft launch”) were also taken into account.
I did have a lot of responsibility in generating PR ahead of the campaign, and in trying to make sure that we recruited as widely as possible. We were fortunate that there has been a real spike in interest in online public affairs and citizen journalism before and during this campaign. I very much doubt that we’ll be able to rely on such intense interest in the mere concept of a hyperlocal, citizen-led coverage of the election in 2010. I have done interviews with local ABC radio, Community radio and newspapers. What’s surpsrised me, given the supposed antagonism between the “MSM” and initiatives like ours, is that we have benefited from genuine enthusiasm and courtesy from working journalists.
In another piece of good fortune, we broke a story early on that was picked up in a question asked by the Leader of the Opposition in Federal Parliament, which was carried by some mainstream media outlets. It was a bit of a “gotcha” moment, where a pollie ever so briefly forgot the “message” and revealed his real opinions on an issue instead. We milked it a lot, but it played well for us because it countered the assumption that is so often made in this area - that citizen journalists “don’t break stories”.
The other incredible thing that we had on our side was that Online Opinion were able to bring across a good proportion of their loyal user base to give our site a go. This tells me that projects like this are always better off when they have the imprimatur of a trusted online brand name with an enthusiastic, technologically literate user base.
By the end of week one of the campaign, we’ve got somewhere near 1000 registered users, and over 150 unique content items, including written stories, video, photographs and audio interview. To keep in touch with our user-base, and to keep the flow of stories coming, I’ve been sending out regular newsletters using a function Chris built into the backend of Joomla.
We’re across a bunch of campaign issues, and we’re producing what is, so far, a unique view of the election. A lot of you would be aware of the competition we have on this front, but I think the goodwill a lot of the partners have built up, plus the fact that we’re a nonprofit, means that the user base are approaching us in a different way.
We’re also launching a community TV show in association with the project this week. I (or maybe Barry) will report back on how that goes next week.
Until then.
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