Father's Day, Humbug!

Interested in Citizen Journalism? If you reside in the San Francisco Bay Area, or will be in the area Sunday night, try to visit the Hillside Club in Berkeley, for what promises to be an interesting panel, including Dan Gillmor, Becky Malley, Peter Merholz, and possibly Craig Newmark. (Note of apology: for the second straight day, Blogger refuses to accept embedded links. Normally I write in Word, then paste the finished piece into Blogger. Wednesday it started stripping out links. I cannot even insert links when I write directly in the Blogger draft mode! In an effort to serve me better, Blogger Support urged me to RTFM. That didn’t work. So I continue, as best I can in vanilla text mode.) Dan is author of We Media, the manifesto and guide to citizen journalism. Becky is editor of the Berkeley Daily Planet (which I know has a print edition; I wonder about its online presence?) Peter, I learned from the Wikipedia entry on him, apparently coined the term blog. And the Craig of Craigslist needs no further introduction. The program runs from 6 pm to 8 pm, at the Hillside Club, 2286 Cedar Street, in Berkeley. Citizen journalism has been a recurring interest with me and I will attend with the same question that animates this blog (if indeed it has any life!) – how can we make this stuff pay for itself and create jobs. I continue to collect and read material in this realm, and toward that end Mark Graham of iVillage recently pointed me to an eContent Magazine article on the topic. (I don’t think the text is online so in this case my link-lessness matters not.) One tidbit in the article was novel. In a reference to the Northwest Voice,a citizen journalism project serving residents near Bakersfield, California, eContent says the Voice “uses iUpload blogging software, which provides a simple form for participants and back-end editorial control for the editorial staff.” This latter point is important because public discussions can draw a nasty element that drives away the more temperate folks. Now I must run. I had to cut short my alleged vacation. Duty called. Of course, bless duty for paying the bills! Tom Abate MiniMediaGuy Cause if you ain’t Mass Media, you’re Mini Media