4MR is sponsored by Carnegie-Knight News21, an alliance of 12 journalism schools in which top students tell complex stories in inventive ways. See tips for spurring innovation and digital learning at Learn.News21.com.

In this week's 4MR podcast I look at the recently launched free phone service from Google through Gmail. Undercutting Skype and other VoIP services (not to mention landlines), Google is letting people call from their computer to anywhere in the U.S. or Canada for free, and charging low international rates. What's in it for Google? I spoke to tech pundit and Computerworld contributor Mitch Wagner to learn more.

Check it out:

bareaudio82710.mp3

>>> Subscribe to 4MR <<<

>>> Subscribe to 4MR via iTunes <<<

Listen to my entire interview with Mitch Wagner:

wagner full.mp3

Background music is "What the World Needs" by the The Ukelele Hipster Kings via PodSafe Music Network.

Here are some links to related sites and stories mentioned in the podcast:

Call Phones from Gmail at Google

Six Things Google's Free Phone Service Can't Do at NY Times

Gmail call feature a ringing success, a million times over at Christian Science Monitor

How to make calls using Gmail at CNET

Google reportedly adding voice calling to Gmail at Computerworld

Gmail Voice Is About Future Search, Not Free Calls at Gizmodo

Gmail's now in the phone biz. Trouble for carriers down the road? at Sprint Connection blog

Google continues the assault on the price of a phone call at Washington Post

Google adds free phone calls to Gmail, wow at Seattle Times

Google Voice phone booths Dr. Who might love at News.com

Google introduces Gmail-linked phone service at SF Chronicle

Also, be sure to vote in our poll about what you think the future of the landline will be:

What's the future of the landline telephone?Market Research

Mark Glaser is executive editor of MediaShift and Idea Lab. He also writes the bi-weekly OPA Intelligence Report email newsletter for the Online Publishers Association. He lives in San Francisco with his son Julian. You can follow him on Twitter @mediatwit.

4MR is sponsored by Carnegie-Knight News21, an alliance of 12 journalism schools in which top students tell complex stories in inventive ways. See tips for spurring innovation and digital learning at Learn.News21.com.

This is a summary. Visit our site for the full post ».

Next week will be decisive for BlackBerry corporate users. BlackBerry maker Research In Motion (RIM) could provide a solution to help security agencies in India access corporate email by obtaining encrypted data in readable formats. If RIM does not offer a solution before the end of the month, India has warned that it will block BlackBerry Messenger service in the country for corporate users.

BlackBerry phones encrypt their services better than most smartphones do, and this has been one of the selling points for BlackBerry as a device for corporate users. RIM has to this point refused to provide access codes that would allow governments to monitor the content of encrypted messages. Should RIM provide the Indian government with access to the data, it would not only hurt freedom of expression -- it would likely also hurt the BlackBerry's reputation as the business device of choice.

About More Than The BlackBerry

The Indian government isn't the only seeking access to BlackBerry data. The United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia claim that BlackBerry's services break their laws and threaten national security. The UAE's Telecommunication Regulatory Authority announced that it will suspend BlackBerry's instant messaging, email, web browsing and roaming services starting October 11. Saudi Arabia, meanwhile, is still allowing BlackBerry's instant messaging service to operate. Saudi authorities had planned to suspend it on August 6, but they only ended up blocking the service for a few hours. The company and government continue to work toward a compromise.

Reporters Without Borders is worried about the BlackBerry issue because the "national security" argument is just a pretext for these countries to take steps to restrict access to new technology and to tools that help with freedom of expression. In the UAE, some BlackBerry users were arrested for using BlackBerry Messenger to try to organize a protest against increased gas prices.

What really bothers these countries is their inability to monitor the communication flowing via BlackBerry's services. Indonesia, Egypt, Lebanon, Algeria and Kuwait have also voiced concern about BlackBerry's encrypted services, and it's no coincidence that some of these countries are home to a wide range of censorship measures. In Indonesia, for example, the government requires ISPs to filter out porn -- without providing them a specific list of offending sites. The inevitable result is that the ISPs cause collateral damage by blocking other websites with no direct link to pornography. This is also the case in Saudi Arabia. Filtering also slows down connection speeds throughout the country. Aside from censorship, these countries are also known for monitoring the communications and web usage of citizens.

It's therefore natural to question whether the requests for BlackBerry to offer access to its services are truly meant to fight terrorism, or if it's about finding another way to monitor the communications of citizens?

U.S. Perspective

These countries would do well to learn from an example in the United States. In 2003, the Department of Justice drafted legislation that would have lengthened prison sentences for people who used encryption in the commission of a crime. Defenders of encryption said it would do little to help catch terrorists, and would instead hamper the work of activists. The legislation never passed -- even though the fight against terrorism was a top priority of the government.

RIM's BlackBerry encryption isn't alone in being targeted. India plans on asking Google and Skype for similar access, which means this issue is about more than just one company's device. It's about the future of private communications in countries prone to censorship and other abuses.

Clothilde Le Coz has been working for Reporters Without Borders in Paris since 2007. She is now the Washington director for this organization, helping to promote press freedom and free speech around the world. In Paris, she was in charge of the Internet Freedom desk and worked especially on China, Iran, Egypt and Thailand. During the time she spent in Paris, she was also updating the "Handbook for Bloggers and Cyberdissidents," published in 2005. Her role is now to get the message out for readers and politicians to be aware of the constant threat journalists are submitted to in many countries.

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Last month, KQED News in San Francisco dramatically expanded the scope of its news coverage with a new website, an increase from six to 16 local radio newscasts and the addition of eight news staffers, including six producers/reporters, a developer and a social media specialist. Its expansion will continue over the next several months (look for a new news blog in the next couple of months).

The changes at KQED reflect a system-wide emphasis on experimentation and news expansion by public media outlets. Since the release of the Knight Commission's report, Informing Communities - Sustaining Democracy in the Digital Age, last October, station-based news projects have grown substantially. Large, cross-platform projects are becoming more prevalent, especially among public media organizations with the resources to produce them. See, for example, some of the innovative work being done by outlets like WYNC and WBUR.

Cross-Platform Coverage + Collaboration

KQED's news site combines coverage from KQED Public Radio, KQED Public Television, and KQEDnews.org. In addition to cross-platform news coverage within KQED, the site aims to provide seamless integration of local, national, and international coverage (thanks to extensive integration of NPR's API); in-depth news and commentary (including investigative reporting); and real-time weather and traffic updates. Eventually, the site will incorporate additional interactive features to make news stories more dynamic and relevant to Northern California residents.

According to Tim Olson, KQED's vice president of digital media and education, the expanded site is part of an overall increased push in news coverage. This shift is not the result of a new dedicated source of funding. Rather, said Olson, "It was something [KQED president and CEO] John Boland wanted to do for a long time. We restructured the budget to accommodate these changes."

The new site builds on KQED's history of successful collaborative initiatives. For example, KQED Quest is a "multimedia series exploring Northern California science, environment and nature." Quest integrates radio, television, and online coverage in a site that features maps, a community blog, and hands-on explorations.

KQED News also already has a wealth of in-depth news reports that integrate social media and Web 2.0 technologies. Take, for example, Climate Watch, which provides continuous coverage of climate-related news and incorporates mapping projects such as Reservoir Watch, which tracks the state's water reservoir levels. There's also California's Water Bond - Where Would the Money Go?, which explores the distribution of funds in recent California water-related legislation.

Another special feature, Governing California, invites users to learn about California government. This feature includes a California Budget Challenge game that allows users to submit their thoughts on spending decisions, and an interactive timeline of reform history in the state.

Additionally, "Health Dialogues," an exploration of health and health care in the state, includes an interactive map of health issues in rural California and Healthy Ideas, an eight-week special project that invited health care professionals to share their ideas on health care reform.

KQED News also incorporates maps, Twitter feeds, blogs, podcasts, video and user commenting on its news stories. KQED radio dedicates a portion of airtime to listener feedback, and the integrated site includes Perspectives, a section that provides two-minute audio commentaries from listeners each day.

Listen to this recent Perspective audio report from a KQED listener:

Traffic Increase & Challenges

Since the launch of the expanded site, KQED News has seen a 10-fold increase in the number of users, an impressive feat considering that, according to this article in the San Francisco Chronicle, "Measured by audience size and budget, KQED is the largest public station in the country with TV and radio under one roof." KQED is growing in terms of partnerships as well: The organization currently has ongoing partnerships with upwards of 25 other news outlets, including organizations like the Center for Investigative Reporting, Youth Radio, and ProPublica, and this number is growing.

The expansion is not without its challenges, however. KQED's clear strength is in radio news, but, as Olson noted, "text and images are required for a robust online news presence." Improving the text on the site is a major priority, and as the site continues to expand, this emphasis will grow as well. Olson noted that NPR has gone through a similar transition over the past few years, which was addressed by gradually training reporting staff, and adding photo editors and copy editors.


Another challenge is balancing the "one-stop shopping mall" all-news aggregator approach with the "hyper-targeted topic verticals" approach. It's sometimes difficult for sites to combine both of these elements, and KQED is currently testing both approaches, in addition to some of the more targeted projects listed above.

Olson said the expanded site is "very much just the first step" in overall growth. In addition to a news blog, "News Fix," launching shortly, a mobile version of the site is currently in production, and will be released in the fall. "We're in it for the long haul," said Olson. "We're just getting started."

Katie Donnelly is Associate Research Director at the Center for Social Media at American University where she blogs about the future of public media. With a background in media literacy education, Katie previously worked as a Research Associate at Temple University's Media Education Lab in Philadelphia. When she's not researching media, Katie spends her time working in the environmental field and blogging about food.

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I've written for MediaShift several times about journalistic collaboration between news organizations, such as the Climate Desk project, for example, or Public Media's EconomyStory. But there's another kind of collaboration that's critical to the future of journalism: Collaboration between a news organization and the community it serves.

This kind of collaboration is critical for a few reasons. First, as anyone who reads MediaShift surely knows, the line between consumers of news and producers of news continues to blur. Community blogger expertise may match that of a newspaper's Metro columnist, and the people watching the evening news post their own video of news events to YouTube. Just as formerly competitive newsrooms are beginning to work together, as limited resources encourage the setting aside of differences in pursuit of a superior news product, news organizations need to rethink their relationships with the communities they serve.

In addition, finding efficient ways to harness and apply community expertise is increasingly critical to a news organization's ability to compete. Projects like Minnesota Public Radio's Public Insight Network have emerged to leverage the power of networks to source stories and collect quotes.

KCET Departures

One example of community/news provider collaboration that really captures my imagination is Departures, an online documentary series from KCET Los Angeles. What sets Departures apart, for me, is the passion and dedication of its producer, Juan Devis. Devis is not just passionate about community collaboration in the abstract, or obedient to the trendy importance of listening to community members; rather, he is passionate about Los Angeles, about the people of Los Angeles, and about bringing the neighborhoods of the city to life in an authentic and compelling way online.

"No one knows Los Angeles as well as the organizations and individuals working and living in the area," Devis wrote to me via email. "By bringing them in and engaging them in every step of the content development process, Departures provides an authentic, accurate and fresh take on the issues and stories most affecting the city."

For example, Devis and his team produced a recent installment on Chinatown in partnership with the Chinese American Museum and the Chinatown Service Center Youth Council, providing multimedia production training to student reporters, who in turn contributed stories to the series.

There is also a concerted effort to capture stories from a diverse array of citizens in order to paint a multi-layered portrait of a neighborhood, rather than extrapolating truths about a place based on scarce citizen interaction. For the Chinatown installment, for example, Devis and crew spoke to hundreds of people from the neighborhood, ranging from community activists Munson Kwok and Irvin Lai, to Congresswoman Judy Chu, to journalists Ann Summa and Jeff Spurrier, who covered the Chinatown Punk Scene in the 1980s.

The name "Departures" is meant to evoke the idea of traveling within your own city -- discovering new neighborhoods and cultures with fresh eyes, from Chinatown to Compton Creek to Venice Beach's Abbot Kinney Boulevard. Devis calls the series a love letter to the city. The content of Departures, then, is more evocative than provocative; it's meant to conjure a sense of place, and replicate the experience of talking to the people in a neighborhood -- Mr. Rogers would be proud -- rather than analyze issues or draw conclusions.

Non-Linear Storytelling and Falling Short

In fact, by design, Departures encourages users to form their own opinions of the city and its people.

"When you're tied to a linear narrative, you're tied to a point of view," Devis said in a video about the project. Departures is decidedly non-linear, with a series of interactive maps and murals serving as gateways to a collection of audio, video, and text stories. This approach to navigation encourages users to explore each installment the way they might explore a physical neighborhood, wandering down a series of streets and alleyways.

I admire this concept, though in practice, navigating the Departures site is not quite immersive. (I should confess that I used to write a column about intersections between documentary storytelling and the web, and have strong opinions about multimedia storytelling.) The series home page features individual stories from the latest installment in the manner of a traditional news website; I'd rather begin at a visually evocative map of the city that lets me "travel" to and from individual neighborhoods. While there is a central Departures map, it's a traditional map interface with pin points that correspond to the locations of individual stories, rather than a visual interface that evokes a sense of place.

The stories in Departures "should not be the ends unto themselves," Devis said, "but seeds: A context for engagement."

But while his team's real-world, behind-the-scenes engagement with communities is clear, online engagement with Departures seems surprisingly low. The series home page features a "From the Community" box, a design decision that seems at odds with the series' core dedication to stories from the community. The Community box features few comments, and I did not see comments integrated with the stories throughout the site. Given the series ethos, shouldn't community members' responses to the stories -- in other words, the dialogue around the stories -- be an equal part of the storytelling experience?

Expanding Departures

When I asked Devis about the interplay of Departures with KCET's more traditional news programming, he noted that now that the series has matured, "it offers a concise template that the station itself can follow, so KCET has started to incorporate some Departures elements in its more traditional media spaces." Devis also shared that beginning in 2011, his team will begin creating a series of daily TV interstitials tied to Departures. "We anticipate that, by that time, the media production teams (at KCET) will overlap in ways that we have not seen before," he said.

Devis talks about wanting to expand Departures beyond Los Angeles, and I hope he can do it. I'd love to see this kind of artistic representation of local culture depicting communities nationwide. Sure, the site itself could be improved -- but what site couldn't be? We need more rich, textured representation of local community culture, and I'd take a flawed but passionate, visionary approach over a more tepid effort any day. I worry, though, that replication will require reliance on templates, which will inhibit the site's ability to be more immersive.

"Journalism and news organizations need to become context providers," Devis said. "That is, they need to create and provide spaces -- structures -- into which users and community members are invited as full participants, and from which meaningful stories can emerge."

I agree, and I hope other news organizations will be inspired by Devis' example.

******

What examples have you seen of collaboration between news organizations and local communities? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

Image of Chinatown sign courtesy of Flickr user 7-how-7

The former editorial director of PBS.org, Amanda Hirsch is a digital media consultant who recently managed the EconomyStory collaboration, a journalistic partnership between 12 public media organizations. Learn more about Amanda's background at amandahirsch.com and follow her on Twitter at @publicmediagirl.

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The digital media revolution promises to improve the quality of our lives though an expanded capacity to communicate, collaborate, learn and make informed decisions. Yet our seemingly insatiable demand for digital media is driving a proliferation of consumer electronic devices and IT infrastructure, which are significantly contributing to a tsunami of toxic electronic waste.

This week U.S. Environmental Protection Agency administrator Lisa Jackson announced that promoting citizen engagement and increasing government accountability on enforcement to improve the design, production, handling, reuse, recycling, exporting and disposal of electronics is of the EPA's top six international priorities. In light of this, publishers, device manufacturers, bandwidth providers and other players in the digital media supply chain should rethink their marketing narratives and redouble their efforts to identify, quantify, disclose and manage the toxic e-waste impacts associated with digital media -- before regulation or catastrophe require them to do so.

The issues and dilemmas related to digital media and e-waste can be complex and confusing, but if they are ignored or only paid lip service to they will be sure to wash up on the shores of our lives... and in our politics, in short order. If you want a quick take on some of the key issues associated with e-waste, take a few minutes to watch this short animated Public Service Announcement co-produced for Good Magazine by Ian Lynam and Morgan Currie:

To learn more, read on. In the weeks ahead we look forward to your questions, comments and suggestions about how issues associated with the environmental impacts of the digital media revolution's e-waste detritus can best be addressed. Here are some thought starters to get the conversation rolling.

FAQ

How much toxic e-waste is being created and what are some of its environmental and social impacts?

According to market analyst firm ABI Research, approximately 53 million tons of electronic waste were generated worldwide in 2009, and only about 13% of it was recycled. The Electronics Take Back Coalition (ETBC) estimates that 14 to 20 million PCs are thrown out every year in the U.S. alone. There has been a recent surge in e-waste created by aggressive marketing encouraging consumers to "upgrade" basic voice-only mobile devices to 3G and 4G smartphones and mobile game consoles. There has also been an enormous surge in CRT monitors and TV sets set into motion by the switch to large flat screen displays and DVRs.

The EPA estimates that over 99 million TV sets, each containing four to eight pounds of lead, cadmium, beryllium and other toxic metals, were stockpiled or stored in the U.S. in 2007, and 26.9 million TVs were disposed of in 2007 -- either by trashing or recycling them. While it's not a large part of the waste stream, e-waste shows a higher growth rate than any other category of municipal waste.

Overall, between 2005 and 2006, total volumes of municipal waste increased by only 1.2 percent, compared to 8.6 percent for e-waste. Particularly troubling are the mountains of hazardous waste from electronic products growing exponentially in developing countries. The United Nations report Recycling - from E-Waste to Resources predicts that e-waste from old computers will jump by 500 percent from 2007 levels in India by 2020 and by 200 percent to 400 percent in South Africa and China. E-waste from old mobile phones is expected to be seven times higher in China and 18 times higher in India. China already produces about 2.3 million ton of e-waste domestically, second only to the United States, which produces about 3 million tons each year.

According to the Electronics Take Back Coalition, e-waste contains over 1,000 toxic materials harmful to humans and our environment, including chlorinated solvents, brominated flame retardants, plasticizers, PVC, heavy metals, persistent organic pollutants, plastics and gases used to make electronic products and their components such as semiconductor chips, batteries, capacitors, circuit boards, and disk drives. E-waste can also contain tin, tantalum, tungsten and gold, of which Section 1502 of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act requires reporting if they originated in Congo or a neighboring country.

Not all e-waste is exported to China, India or Africa. The Electronics Take Back Coalition reports that some recyclers and many federal agencies in the U.S. send their e-waste to recycling plants operating in federal prisons operated by UNICOR, a wholly owned subsidiary of the federal Department of Justice. One criticism of UNICOR is that by paying prison workers as little as 23 cents per hour, they undercut private commercial recyclers. Another criticism is that reliance on high tech chain gangs may frustrate development of the free market infrastructure necessary to safely manage the tsunami of e-waste that the digital revolution is intensifying.

How much e-waste does the consumption and production of digital media generate?

Digital media doesn't grow on trees. Its creation, distribution and use requires massive quantities of energy, minerals, metals, petrochemicals and labor. Rather than relying on proprietary estimates of product lifecycles or limited forensic evidence we need reliable standards-based lifecycle inventories of the energy and material flows that make our broadband connectivity and digital media experiences possible. Proponents of digital media often tout the benefits of the digital media shift in terms of the number of trees that will be saved, but shifting to digital media has an environmental footprint and toxic impacts that bear greater scrutiny.

The digital media industry has a long way to go before it can declare itself sustainable, or justify its environmental footprint based on cherry-picked data, anecdotal evidence and unfilled promises. Companies like Apple and HP that tout their commitments to sustainability fail to make a even a "greenish" grade in the most recent Greenpeace Greener Electronics Scorecard..

Until media companies, device manufacturers and service providers are inspired to make standards-based environmental product declarations through market pressure or regulation, it will be impossible for consumers to make informed decisions or compare the climate change or e-waste impacts associated with specific products or services. A look at the overall growth trends in a few key categories is enough to justify more serious attention to the issues at hand and to the toxic tragedies that loom over the horizon.

A shift in preference from traditional media to digital media is one key trend. According to the PriceWaterhouseCoopers report, Global Media and Entertainment 2010-2014, digital media's share of consumer spending is growing at double digit rates and is expected to reach 33 percent of their entertainment and media spending by 2014.

Growth in the number of broadband mobile connections and wireless devices is also a determining factor. Smartphone manufacturer Ericsson estimates that the world will reach 50 billion mobile connections within this decade with 80 percent of all people accessing the Internet using their mobile devices. Ericsson estimates there are over 500 million 3G subscriptions worldwide with more than 2 million mobile subscriptions being added per day.

At current rates of growth some pundits believe we may soon face a zettaflood of data, and the number of broadband wireless connections, smartphones, e-books, tablets, game consoles and "wireless devices with IP addresses will outnumber humans on our planet by an order of magnitude. The World Wireless Research Forum predicts 7 trillion devices for 7 billion people by 2017 - a thousand devices for every man, woman and child on the planet.

In short we are rapidly becoming a world of digital media hyper-consumers that need to develop a better understanding of the connections between our rabid digital media appetites and their lifecycle environmental impacts before they become our undoing.

Unfortunately, at present there is no reliable way to determine and compare the greenhouse gas emission or e-waste impacts associated with digital media consumption. While the impact of an individual decision or transaction may be negligible, the aggregate impact of billions of connections and trillions of transactions cannot be left unexamined and unmanaged.

What laws and sources of international, federal, state and local government support for e-waste management are in place and on the horizon?

The U.S. lags behind the EU, which has recently created two new policies on ways to deal with e-waste: the Restriction on the Use of Hazardous Substances (RoHS) and the Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment. At present the U.S. is also the only member of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development that has not ratified the Basel Convention, which is intended to regulate the movement of hazardous waste across international borders.

In addition the U.S. does not have a comprehensive national approach for the reuse and recycling of used electronics, despite efforts to introduce federal legislation such as Senate Bill 1397 - Electronic Device Recycling Research and Development Act. However, electronics manufacturer take-back laws have gained traction at the state level.

An important report on e-waste recently issued by the Government Accounting Office (GAO) titled Electronic Waste: Considerations for Promoting Environmentally Sound Reuse and Recycling states that 23 states have passed legislation mandating statewide e-waste recycling, including several states that introduced legislation in 2010 (in yellow below).

All of these laws except California use the Producer Responsibility approach, where the manufacturers must pay for recycling. A guide to current and pending e-waste legislation is available on the Electronics Take Back Coalition website.

The Udall Center for Studies in Public Policy at the University of Arizona recently published an award-winning paper titled E-wasted Time: The Hazardous Lag in

Comprehensive Regulation of the Electronics Recycling Industry in the United States that addresses the status of electronics recycling regulation in the U.S., as well as how the regulatory climate influences industry practice.

How can consumers and manufacturers of digital electronic devices, providers of broadband connectivity and data center services address digital media/e-waste dilemmas through voluntary initiatives and coalitions?

The EPA provides a guide to locations where electronics can be donated for reuse or recycling through the Plug-In To eCycling Partnership, Responsible Recycling and Recycling Industry Operating Standard RIOS certification initiatives. The Electronics Take Back Coalition and the Basel Action Network (BAN) have developed a competing voluntary program called e-Stewards that identifies recyclers they deem to be environmentally and socially responsible.

Both the Electronics Take Back Coalition and Greenpeace have developed scorecards that rate companies on their policies and the actions they are taking to address e-waste issues. Such sites are far from perfect, but can help can you sort through the confusing combination of apathy, indifference, marketing spin and unfulfilled green promises that predominate in today's consumer electronics marketplace. Before you buy or dispose of a cell phone, e-reader, tablet, PC, display, DVR, set-top box, game console, charger, plug strip, batteries, printers, or other electronic devices ask the manufacturer if there is a standards-based Environmental Product Declaration or Lifecycle Analysis for the product and check if the brand and the product is rated by Greenpeace and EPEAT.

Over the next five years our challenge is to stem the tide of e-waste being exported from the U.S. to the developing world, and develop a legal framework that will support mining and managing the mountains of toxic e-waste in the U.S. and in the developed world. According to Interpol the illegal trafficking of electronic waste (e-waste) is a serious crime and a growing international problem, posing an unacceptable environmental and health risk, in particular in developing countries in Africa and Asia. According to EPA administrator Lisa Jackson: "It's time for us to stop making our trash someone else's problem, start taking responsibility and setting a good example."

Going forward our greater challenge will be to change the prevailing business models and digital media marketing narratives that ignore the toxic tide and rethink the design of next generation digital media devices, media products, data networks and data centers so that they are greener by design, eliminate conflict minerals, use less energy, last longer and can be disassembled, upgraded and recycled responsibly.

*****

Please use the comments area below to share your questions and suggestions. More importantly, use your social networks to engage the marketing and product development executives of digital media companies, device manufacturers, carriers and other key stakeholders -- including elected officials and EPA regulators. Engage them in an informed dialogue on how we can communicate sustainably and decouple the production and consumption of digital media from the scourge of e-waste in a timely and effective manner.

MediaShift environmental correspondent Don Carli is senior research fellow with the non-profit Institute for Sustainable Communication (ISC) where he is director of The Sustainable Advertising Partnership and other corporate responsibility and sustainability programs addressing the economic, environmental and social impacts of advertising, marketing, publishing and enterprise communication supply chains. Don is an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Industry Studies Program affiliate scholar and is also sustainability editor of Aktuell Grafisk Information Magazine based in Sweden. You can also follow him on Twitter.

This is a summary. Visit our site for the full post ».

4MR is sponsored by Carnegie-Knight News21, an alliance of 12 journalism schools in which top students tell complex stories in inventive ways. See tips for spurring innovation and digital learning at Learn.News21.com.

In this week's 4MR podcast I look at the recently launched Facebook Places location feature. While the social network touts it as a great way to tell your friends where you are in the physical world, others worry about the privacy implications. In fact, the most popular stories on the subject are telling people how to turn it off. I talked with Gawker staff writer Adrian Chen about his take on how Facebook could have made it easier to turn Places off.

Check it out:

4mrbareaudio82010.mp3

>>> Subscribe to 4MR <<<

>>> Subscribe to 4MR via iTunes <<<

Listen to my entire interview with Adrian Chen:

chen final.mp3

Background music is "What the World Needs" by the The Ukelele Hipster Kings via PodSafe Music Network.

Here are some links to related sites and stories mentioned in the podcast:

Facebook Places

Who, What, When, and Now...Where at the Facebook blog

The First Thing You Should Do With Facebook Places - Don't Let Other People Tag You at Gawker

Facebook Places Privacy Controls Get EFF Approval at eWeek

Why I'm Not Using Facebook Places at Jolie O'Dell's blog

How to Disable Facebook Places at Huffington Post

How To Disable Facebook Places at ReadWriteWeb

Facebook Adds Location Check-Ins Through Foursquare, Gowalla, and Yelp at LifeHacker

How to Disable Facebook Places at LifeHacker

Facebook gets its hands on check-in startup Hot Potato at SocialBeat

Also, be sure to vote in our poll about what you think about Facebook Places:

What do you think about Facebook Places?survey software

Mark Glaser is executive editor of MediaShift and Idea Lab. He also writes the bi-weekly OPA Intelligence Report email newsletter for the Online Publishers Association. He lives in San Francisco with his son Julian. You can follow him on Twitter @mediatwit.

4MR is sponsored by Carnegie-Knight News21, an alliance of 12 journalism schools in which top students tell complex stories in inventive ways. See tips for spurring innovation and digital learning at Learn.News21.com.

This is a summary. Visit our site for the full post ».

If you run any kind of business, large or small, you're always looking for ways to get quality work done at a low cost. And when it comes to contract jobs like web and logo design, or copywriting, you're caught balancing between quality and cost. A couple years ago, CrowdSpring launched as a way for small and medium-sized businesses to get those projects done at a set price from multiple people around the world. Each project is a contest, and the buyer gets to pick the winning creative work -- meaning everyone else just created something for nothing.

After talking to the co-founders of CrowdSpring, I put the site to the test by telling two friends about it. One is a vice president at a mid-sized tech startup, whose wife does graphic design. His first reaction was that yes, this could hurt his wife's business and the designs must not be very good. His next reaction was to think seriously about whether his business should use CrowdSpring. Another friend needed a simple website design, and he decided against CrowdSpring and found someone local whom he could meet in person and brainstorm with.

My takeaway was that services like CrowdSpring are not for every designer, nor are they for every business looking for design or writing contract help. But they can work for the right type of work at the right time. Barilla pasta had people design a new type of pasta using a CrowdSpring contest, and Guy Kawasaki designed his new book cover using CrowdSpring. Here's how the service works:

1. You post your project needs at CrowdSpring, and set a price. (Minimum price for a logo design is $200 but they vary by category.) You pay CrowdSpring up front for the project price, plus a $39 fee and 15 percent commission.
2. Creatives then have a specific time frame to submit their designs to the project page. You can provide feedback on their designs.
3. The time frame ends, and you pick a winning design. You get the material and CrowdSpring pays the winner, usually via PayPal.
4. If you're not satisfied with any of the design choices, you can get your money back from CrowdSpring, minus the $39 fee. They still pay one creative a winning fee up to $250. $100.*

While CrowdSpring said they are nearly profitable, and have more than 68,000 creative people in their community, more established professional designers hate the idea of people doing work "on spec" -- without any promise of payment. An entire No!Spec campaign sprung up, with people like Andrew Hyde explaining why he hates CrowdSpring. His major worry was that the end game for crowdsourcing, if it becomes the standard, is there won't be "more happy designers, or clients. Design as a whole will be lesser if this model is used, and that will be a real shame."

But Mike Sampson, a co-founder of CrowdSpring, told me that opposition to them has changed.

"When we first started, it was a pretty steady drumbeat from many of the incumbent designers," he said. "As it's gone on, I think it's tapered off and we only get pushback when a high-profile project is posted ... But I think the numbers speak for themselves. We have about 68,000 registered users, creatives working on our site. It is by many multiples larger than the AIGA, which is the leading professional organization for the design industry [and has spoken out against CrowdSpring]. It does speak volumes in terms of acceptance and the pool of talent out there, and the people who are out there who want an outlet for their creativity."

The following is an edited transcript of my phone chat with Sampson and the other co-founder of CrowdSpring, Ross Kimbarovsky. They told me why they started the company, its challenges, and how they've started a Pro version where companies can pre-screen creative workers.

Q&A

What was your motivation for starting CrowdSpring? What problem were you trying to solve?

Ross Kimbarovsky: We came at it from two complementary perspectives. I was an attorney at the time leading the redesign of my law firm's website, dealing with traditional vendors. I had a very bad experience with those vendors. I picked a top candidate after a lengthy RFP [request for proposal] process, and when the vendor finally delivered, I was disappointed in the designs they offered us. At the same time, Mike [Sampson] and I had been talking because he ... wanted to outsource video work, and I was running into the same problem with getting contract design work done.

I was so frustrated that I started to look online to see if there were better ways to buy creative services. I stumbled on some examples of groups around the world who had design contests, with students competing against each other for fun to see who could design the best print ad, for example. I called Mike and suggested we get together because we both were trying to solve slightly different issues, but it seemed like it presented a broader opportunity to change the way that people like us -- small or mid-size businesses -- buy creative services.

Mike Sampson: We identified a gap in the market. Small and mid-size businesses had limited access to the traditional design market. The pricing structure is prohibitive for many small businesses, and ... there were geographical supply-and-demand deficiencies. If they were in a small town, they might not have access to talented creative.

Since you launched it about two years ago, how have things changed? Startups often have to change focus. Has that happened at all?

Kimbarovsky: There are two external changes that happened, though we didn't have to change our whole business. One was that large companies and even agencies were interested in working with us and our creative community. We hadn't considered that because we thought the problem only existed for small businesses and entrepreneurs. We created a more sophisticated version of our product that we call CrowdSpring Pro, which included more privacy, non-disclosure, user control. The other thing that changed in the marketplace was the acceptance of crowdsourcing more broadly across industries and government.

When you launched, there were some designers who said no one should join the CrowdSpring community and do work on spec. Are you still dealing with an anti-spec feedback from people in the creative community?

Sampson: We do. It's interesting. When we first started, it was a pretty steady drumbeat from many of the incumbent designers. As it's gone on, I think it's tapered off and we only get pushback when a high-profile project is posted. For instance, we have a project on the site with Guy Kawasaki of Alltop [who] has a new book coming out. He's sourcing the cover of the book design with us. We haven't heard from the 'no spec' folks for some time, but as soon as Guy posted his project there's been a bit of an uproar on Twitter and on social media because a lot of Guy's followers are designers who work in the traditional model. And they aren't thrilled that he's using this different model.

Kimbarovsky explains that established designers who have plenty of work don't need to use CrowdSpring's speculative model:

designspring.mp3

Tell me more about CrowdSpring Pro. How does it work and what does it cost?

Kimbarovsky: It differs in a few ways from our regular product. First, minimums in Pro start at $1,000 for most categories, and higher in some. For a typical design project, the minimum is $200. We always let the buyer set their own price, but we do have higher minimums in Pro. As a buyer in Pro, you can decide if the designers can see each other's designs or not -- you control who can see what. In Pro projects, you also decide who can participate in the project. Anyone who wants to work on one has to sign a non-disclosure agreement and can provide references, and the Pro buyer can check those out or their portfolio, and then decides who can participate.

We created this because we had agencies and companies who wanted to try different things like product design and didn't want their competitors to see them. Or there were campaigns they wanted to launch but didn't want competitors to know about them or what the collateral would be. Pro projects give buyers more granular control, so they've brought in more high profile clients. We've worked with LG [with the Design the Future Competition], Barilla pasta, and numerous others including agencies.

In those cases, they can pre-screen people before they do the work?

Kimbarovsky: Yes, they can pre-screen or let anyone who signs a non-disclosure sign up. We've had companies use our community for help, or some companies have only used their own internal community because Pro allows you to invite anyone you want for a project. So we've had companies who crowdsourced internally within their own organization and didn't let anyone outside participate.

What's the advantage of using CrowdSpring if they're doing it their own community? Why not do it on their own?

Sampson: Basically they're coming to us for the convenience of the platform, they're leveraging what we've got. And they're experimenting with the tools we have to see if it will work.

Each project has its own individual page and gallery with all the entries and submissions. It has entry detail pages, with larger thumbnails, more info on the creator of the entry, and a comment thread so the buyer can comment on the entry, it has feedback tools, and an 'activity' tab, which is a closed forum for participants in a project. And a wrap-up phase at the end of the project, with upload and download capabilities, file-handling, feedback, approval capability.

You talked about getting outsourced work from India. Do you get a sense that there are still a lot of people coming from India and China?

Sampson: About 50 percent of our creatives are U.S.-based, and the other people come from 175 countries around the world. We are truly a global company in that sense. Buyers are about 65 percent to 70 percent in the U.S.

Do you handle the monetary transaction between buyer and creator?

Sampson: Yes. When a buyer posts a project, we require them to escrow with us the full cost of the project at the start. We do that to protect the community [of creatives]. One of the things we learned early on from the creatives was that they were willing to participate in a model like this as long as they knew the buyer wasn't window shopping, that they were serious about awarding their project. We hold the money while the project is in process, and only when the project is finalized and approved do we release money to the creative. We handle money coming in and the escrow of the funds and final payment to the winning creative.

How do you handle payments, especially with so many people in various countries?

Sampson: It's a challenge, because we have made payments to dozens and dozens of businesses. PayPal is a great business, and more than 90 percent of our payments go out via PayPal. Buyers can pay with either a credit card or PayPal account, and the rest we can pay by direct international bank wires.

What about with media companies themselves? Have they used you for designs? When you talk about "agencies" do you mean ad agencies?

Kimbarovsky: We've had projects from advertising agencies, design agencies, media buying, PR agencies. We have had projects from media companies, we've had projects from Forbes, from publishers like DoubleDay. In the Pro category, we've seen a handful of different kinds of buyers, but because of the private nature of them we can't talk about them.

We've seen some interesting buyers in our writing category. We started with graphic and web design, and moved into industrial design. Earlier this year we launched copywriting projects, anything from domain names and company names and taglines to entire books. We've had people source entire books on CrowdSpring using our community of writers. We currently have a project from Air New Zealand looking for a new script for their safety video. They have a pretty irreverent attitude with customers, and their current video is six or seven years old, so they wanted something fresh for that video.

Kimbarovsky describes how a book publisher used CrowdSpring to write an entire book, chapter by chapter:

bookspring.mp3

When you added the copywriting category, did it bring any new challenges?

Sampson: The biggest challenge was similar to what we had when we launched the site: How do you build a community of skilled, talented people with experience to act as providers? We have a chicken-and-egg problem, which we had from the start. If you attract the buyers, will the providers follow? Or does it take a large base of providers to attract the buyers? Our approach has always been to market to buyers. Our thinking has always been that if there is enough work and money on the table, then the providers will follow.

How do you market to the buyers? What's your best strategy?

Kimbarovsky: We've tried many approaches, as this is our main challenge. We leveraged social media very heavily, we are big users of Facebook, Twitter and have been from the moment we launched. As a startup outside Silicon Valley with a new business model, we had a lot of different challenges to climb. We write a small business newsletter that we send out to 65,000 people, our users, and PR is very important for us, helping introduce us to a wider audience. It all boils down to word of mouth, which is the single biggest driver of business to us.

What's been one of the things that's been a major complaint among your users?

Sampson: The biggest thing we hear is that the quality of the work isn't high enough. But when we ask about quality in surveys, the perception of quality is very high. But occasionally someone comes along, maybe 1 out of 20, and says the quality isn't up to what they're looking for. And that's a difficult thing. The perception of quality is very subjective. It's very difficult for me to say what you will like. We might look at the same thing and I'll think it's high quality and you'll think it's low quality.

Kimbarovsky: Let me add one thing. One thing we're seeing in our data is that quality perceptions are different in different countries. When we look at European countries such as France, they tend to be more sensitive about quality than people in other countries and a bit more critical.

So how can you address those quality issues?

Sampson: One of the things we track is buyer engagement, by checking their feedback. A highly engaged buyer leaves lots of comments, gives lots of feedback, scores every entry. And a buyer with low engagement does the opposite, leaves no comments, scores few entries. There's a high correlation between low engagement and high dissatisfaction. Our approach is to try to engage buyers, because we believe the engagement itself will shift their perception. So we've added tools that don't quite force buyers to get engaged, but strongly encourage them.

Kimbarovsky talks about how CrowdSpring has weathered the economic storm because it can save money for small businesses on contract work:

econospring.mp3

Are there other areas you are considering expanding into?

Kimbarovsky: We are considering moving into video and audio as natural fits. Video is both a natural fit and something we know about. Mike was a director and producer working for just about every major Hollywood studio and TV network. So these are both markets that are challenging for small businesses because they are expensive and sophisticated, and these companies have trouble trying to source video content, whether for their blog or their website or for promotional materials.

*****

What do you think about CrowdSpring? Have you used the site as a buyer or creative designer? Or do you think people should avoid it? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

*Correction: An original version of this story said CrowdSpring paid a kill fee of $250 on refunded projects. Thanks to a commenter, we've corrected that to $100, a change that CrowdSpring made last June.

Mark Glaser is executive editor of MediaShift and Idea Lab. He also writes the bi-weekly OPA Intelligence Report email newsletter for the Online Publishers Association. He lives in San Francisco with his son Julian. You can follow him on Twitter @mediatwit.

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Education content on MediaShift is sponsored by Carnegie-Knight News21, an alliance of 12 journalism schools in which top students tell complex stories in inventive ways. See tips for spurring innovation and digital learning at Learn.News21.com.

The problem with five jam-packed days of panels and events is that you can't do it all. Presentations and business meetings for the 93rd annual conference of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC), which was held in Denver earlier this month, ran concurrently from 7 a.m. until, for some, after midnight. I hustled from my booth in the exhibit hall to sit in on sessions across the different groups, but especially to eavesdrop on discussions among attendees and peek over their shoulders as they tapped silently on their iPhones. Below are five key messages I overheard in Denver.

1. Boots on the Ground

"I have to be on the ground, witnessing events with my own eyes ... [War reporting] is not just a cocktail party -- you can't just drop in." - Anne Garrels, former foreign correspondent for NPR

Garrels commanded the room during a keynote address that saw her recount harrowing experiences during her six years as an embedded journalist during the Iraq War -- including false accusations made on her Wikipedia page that she believes could have gotten her killed.

In the face of "raw information" quickly disseminated through new social mediums, Garrels emphasized committed, responsible, on-the-ground reporting. "Having knowledge to put events into context is really key," she said. "Otherwise, information is pretty hollow."

2. Editing Skills to Pay the Bills

"We need to get our students to think of themselves not just as reporters, but as editors." - Eileen Gilligan, assistant professor, SUNY Oswego

Gilligan said the above during a session about teaching convergence in the midst of a climate of ambiguity surrounding priorities in journalism education. Her session, "Teaching through Transition," presented data from several research studies conducted by AEJMC members that revealed an alarming disparity between the skills needed in convergent newsrooms and the core curricular priorities in U.S. journalism schools.

The data underscored the importance of superior storytelling skills. But interpersonal skills (such as the ability to develop sources), news judgment (the right story, the right way), and multi-tasking (the hardest of the three) were cited by news directors as necessary traits to succeed in converged newsrooms. Gilligan said the most meaningful feedback was that editing is a core skill for current students and future journalists.

3. Social Media Everywhere

"Social media showed me that people don't just care about the news, they care about the people who write it." - Arizona State University student Sebastien Bauge, as quoted by Serena Carpenter in her presentation in the AEJMC social media competition

Social media was popular during the conference, both in panels and in practice. One session, "Social Media in the Classroom", shared how instructors incorporate these tools in their courses. Examining Twitter updates during current events -- like the earthquake in Haiti earlier this year -- and hashtagging course names for classroom conversations were among the suggestions discussed. One course at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill invited Pizza Hut's public relations coordinator-turned-"Twitterologist" as a guest speaker to discuss corporate social media strategies. Mich Sineath, who tweeted for @AEJMC during the conference, called it the "hands-down BEST panel of #AEJMC10."

Social media happened to me, too. When inside the large, glass-walled room for Poynter's News University presentation (and announcement of its new syllabus exchange program), I tweeted from @CQPJournalism that it was one of the most well-attended sessions I had seen. Within minutes, professor Jake Batsell of Southern Methodist University responded that he had at least "40+" attendees for his panel on creating and running multi-platform student news websites. Turns out, Batsell was sitting two seats away from me.

4. Entrepreneurship the Answer?

"I'm not even slightly interested in saving the industry." - Dan Gillmor, director of the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship at Arizona State University

The lack of viable business models that can sustain an increasingly complicated news marketplace was still the elephant in the room this year, especially in light of the fact that the conference showed that traditional news jobs continue to disappear. In fact, panelists for the "New Media Economics" panel admittedly had little to offer in terms of successful strategies. Gillmor, author of "We the Media" and a forthcoming book called Mediactive, went on to say, "I've given up the idea that the industry wants to be saved. We've moved on."

By that Gillmor meant that the news industry should look toward new types of social and media entrepreneurship. He explained that journalists and entrepreneurs must have an appreciation of risk and be attuned to the current media culture.

"Innovation," he said, "is doing something better than how somebody else is doing it."

5. Enrollment Changing Along With the Industry

"Everything is changing, not dying" - Guy J. Golan, chair of the new Political Communication interest group

During the conference, I frequented the Starbucks on 16th street, just across from the Sheraton Downtown Denver Hotel. It was a place to refuel, charge my laptop, and access free wireless, which was not available in the conference rooms nor in hotel rooms. When I reached over to unplug my laptop, Golan handed me my cord and we chatted about the conference. He corrected my assertion that the common perception is that the news industry is "dying" and yet enrollment rates are rising in journalism schools.

It's the PR and advertising programs that are gaining students, he said, along with niche beats like sportswriting and political coverage. That was an interesting distinction to note. It was also borne out by some of the association business that was taken care of during the conference: political communication and sports communication became newly-minted interest groups this year, and the Communicating Science, Health, Environment and Risk Interest Group (ComSHER) was raised to division status at the conference.

Golan, currently a "free agent" professor, interviewed for work during the conference job fair, along with the many grad students I ran into at a school-sponsored evening social. He said there are "lots of jobs, and lots of candidates" in the world of journalism and communications education.

Christina Mueller is an Assistant Editor in the College Division of CQ Press, a division of SAGE Publications. She comments at @CQPJournalism and blogs for the journalism and mass communication line of books. The opinions of this post are that of the individual author and may not reflect the opinions of SAGE Publications.

Education content on MediaShift is sponsored by Carnegie-Knight News21, an alliance of 12 journalism schools in which top students tell complex stories in inventive ways. See tips for spurring innovation and digital learning at Learn.News21.com.

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You have to admire his chutzpah. Rupert Murdoch, the so-called nemesis of public interest news, is now being hailed by some as its potential savior. Sick and tired of people reading his news outlets for free online, Murdoch has erected pay walls around his sites (or some of them at least).

Anyone who wants to see what is published on thetimes.co.uk will have to pay at least £1. That includes search engines who are not even allowed to index the Times' online content. Now we have to wait and see if the subscription revenues start rolling in.

Yet even those who hope the pay wall succeeds have reservations. Pay walls represent both a practical and philosophical shift in the provision of news on the net. They represent a shift from the openness that has defined the early history of the web, to a closed world much more reminiscent of the 20th century's constrained media environment. Erect a pay wall and you immediately cut yourself off from much of the web community. You disable the vast majority of people from recommending, linking, commenting, quoting, and discussing.

It is for this reason that any forward thinking journalist cannot help but be disheartened by the pay wall. It cuts you off from a much bigger potential audience. It suffocates networked journalism, whereby you engage with your readers to source, expand, deepen, and extend your story. It limits your opportunity to enhance your own brand, as opposed to that of the publication. But worst of all, it turns its back on the reason for the net's success -- the flowering of millions of conversations. As the lawyer who stopped writing for the Times after it put up its pay wall said, "inside the paywall no-one can even hear you scream."

Fortunately, there is an alternative. A way in which news can remain distributed, open, even re-usable. A way in which journalism can work with the grain of the web, and continue to grow, extend, and integrate. And it is a way -- crucially -- that journalism can still make money.

But first, a story.

Library of Alexandria

In the fourth century BC, a student of Aristotle, Demetrius of Phaleron set up a library in Alexandria. It was a little different from the libraries we're now familiar with. It had lecture halls, a dining room, meeting rooms, and a "walk." It also had a reading room and lots of books (or scrolls as then were). Within a few decades it had acquired almost half a million scrolls, many containing multiple works. Such an abundance of scrolls would quickly have become unmanageable had it not been for Callimachus of Cyrene. Callimachus started "the first subject catalogue in the world, the Pinakes," according to Roy Macleod in "The Library of Alexandria." This was made up of six sections and catalogued some 120,000 scrolls of classical poetry and prose. His methods were then adopted and extended by other librarians.

Thanks in no small part to the cataloguing, people were able to build on each other's knowledge. Scholars began to compare the texts and try to understand the reasons why they differed. Hence cross-textual analysis was born. People were able to contrast and evaluate various scientific methods. Archimedes (of "Eureka" fame) worked out methods for calculating areas and volumes while at the library that later formed the basis for calculus.

The library at Alexandria became the most famous of the ancient world, and spawned many further libraries and even whole university towns such as Bologna and Oxford. Yet had its books not been catalogued none of this might have happened. Had the books not had metadata giving basic details about who wrote them, when they were written, what they should be classified as, then there would not have been the foundations on which scholars could build.

Metadata is just a fancy word for information about information. A library catalogue is metadata because it categorizes the books and describes where you can find them. You find metadata on the side of every food packet, only we don't call it metadata, we call it ingredients. The equivalent metadata about a news article would capture information about where it was written, who wrote it, when it was first published, when it was updated. All pretty basic stuff, but critical to properly identifying it and helping its distribution.

Importance of Metadata

Metadata did not matter so much when news was all tidily packaged together in a newspaper. You knew when something was published because it was inside that day's paper. You knew who had published it because it was on the masthead and at the top of every page. There was -- is -- lots of metadata about news in newspapers, we just tend to take it all for granted.

The Internet, and the search engines and social networks that power the web, have broken the newspaper package down into discrete pieces of content. These atomized chunks -- individual news articles, photographs, video clips, audio clips -- are what we consume online. We do not read an online paper cover to cover, as we would a print paper. That would be exhausting. The BBC news website publishes about 150,000 words each day. To skim every individual article would take upwards of 17 hours. Instead we pick and choose, we unbundle.

Rather than seeing unbundling as a problem, news outlets should see it as an opportunity. An opportunity to distribute news all around the web. An opportunity to get readers to help sell their news - by recommending pieces to their colleagues and friends, and by linking to stories from their networks and blogs. The only thing news producers need to do before publishing a news article, is make sure it has metadata integrated to it. This way whenever people -- or machines (i.e. search engines) -- see it, they can also see its provenance, recognize what category of information it is, and give credit to its creator.

Having basic information about who produced something is to the mutual advantage of the person who wrote the article (or took the photograph or shot the film footage), and of the public who is reading it. The producer gets proper credit for what they created, and the public gets to see who created it -- giving the news greater transparency and a measure of accountability.

When you think about it, it seems remarkable that so much content does not have this sort of metadata already. It is like houses not having house numbers or zip codes. Or like movies not having opening or closing credits. Or like a can of food without an ingredients label. As Jeff Jarvis wrote recently, "When it comes to products, we want to know: where it was made, by whom, in what conditions, using what materials, causing what damage, traveling what distance, with whose assurances of quality, with whose assurances of safety." Why should news be any different?

hNews

hNews is just one of a number of methods of adding metadata. It is a simple, open standard that is free and that anyone can implement. We at the Media Standards Trust Britain developed it in partnership with Sir Tim Berners-Lee's Web Science Trust, and in the latter stages by working with the Associated Press. (This was made possible thanks to two foundation grants, one from the MacArthur Foundation and one from the Knight Foundation. You can read my blog posts about the development of hNews over at Idea Lab, a Knight-funded sister site of PBS MediaShift.)

There are other ways to add metadata to news, for example using RDF or linked data. hNews is an easy entry point since it is built on existing standards (microformats), fits easily within any CMS (there is a WordPress and a blogger plugin), and is entirely reversible. Almost 500 news sites in the US have already implemented hNews, including the Associated Press and AOL. But you choose whichever one suits you best. (Some sample implementations are available here.)

Once hNews is added there are some immediate benefits. Every news article has consistent information about who wrote it, who published it, when it was published etc. built into it. Every article also has an embedded link to the license associated with its reuse (so ignorance is no excuse). And, every article has a link to the principles to which it adheres. These principles should not only help to distinguish the article as journalism, but should make the principles that define journalism -- that are right now opaque and little understood by the public -- transparent. Moreover, all this information is made 'machine-readable' by hNews. In other words a machine (like a search engine) can understand it.
Making this information machine-readable opens up the less immediate, but more exciting aspects of metadata. It creates an ecology of structured data that makes search more intelligent, enables innovation, and opens up new revenue opportunities.

It is a little known truth that much of the evolution of the web has already been driven by open standards. And that many of the uses of open standards are not at first apparent to those who create them. Who could have known that RSS (Really Simple Syndication) a simple standard for syndicating web content, would now be the way millions of people consume audio podcasts? Or that OAuth and OpenID would so simplify the sharing of private information across websites?

The openness and re-usability of hNews enables people to build stuff with it and on top of it. It allows you, for example, to add a "news ingredients" label to the bottom of each article. This is what Open Democracy are doing. Under each article that has hNews embedded they will automatically add an hNews icon. Scroll over this icon and you will get a pop-up box with all the basic details of the article (author, publish data/time, principles etc.). Rather like the ingredients on a food packet. Some of this information is hyperlinked so that you can click directly through to more information -- like the license associated with re-use of the article. Imagine labels like these on all news articles. At a stroke you would have transformed their transparency and accountability.

Embedding metadata like hNews has countless other potential uses. As a simple illustration of the type of thing it enables, we built a browser plugin - itchanged.org - that allows you to track changes in news articles. Another application might be more intelligent recommendations (e.g. see readness.com). But most importantly, structuring data creates an environment in which invention becomes possible -- in the same way, for example, that library catalogues do.

AP News Registry

It can also help news organizations work out ways to make money. For example, the Associated Press has built its News Registry on top of hNews. The news registry is AP's way of tracking its news around the web so that it has much better metrics that it can use to charge more accurately for its content, and work out revenue sharing opportunities for advertising associated with its content.

How it does this is pretty straightforward. In addition to hNews the AP embeds an image file, probably a transparent pixel, to each news article. This file is equivalent to a photograph in a web page, except that it is not intended to be seen. But like a photograph in a web page, this image file has to be served up from a separate server -- in this case AP's servers. So whenever the article is viewed on a computer, the browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox etc.) notices the image file and asks AP's server to deliver it. That way the AP knows who is reading the article. It's a little like a carrier pigeon. The pigeon can fly wherever it likes but always knows where its home is.

Pay walls will rise and pay walls will fall. But in the world of information abundance in which we now live pay walls are a step backwards. If news wants to benefit from the remarkable openness and dynamism that the internet has unleashed then it should embrace the distributed network and take advantage of it, not turn its back.

Martin Moore is the director of the Media Standards Trust, a nonprofit organization that aims to foster high quality journalism. He has been working in news and media for more than a decade, including for the BBC, Channel 4, NTL, IPC Media, Trinity Mirror and others. Moore studied history at Cambridge and holds a doctorate from the London School of Economics, where he was teaching and researching until summer 2006.

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I love my iPad. One of the reasons I love it is that it's a great device for watching video. Some mainstream media integrate video very nicely into their iPad applications. However, it seems that all this slickness comes at a price: The conversation with the people formerly known as the audience is often non-existent. It seems that the potentially-messy-but-genuine conversation with
the community is being shifted to Facebook and Twitter.

The iPad (and similar products) is potentially a disruptive device, empowering people to publish not just blog posts or status updates but also their own books and magazines, as the example of Flipboard (left) demonstrates. There is a danger, however, that traditional media won't understand this and will revert to its old ways by producing slick end products that broadcast without actually engaging in a conversation.

You can see this tendency at work online in the videos produced by newspapers. Yes, you can (often) embed their videos, share them on Twitter and Facebook and via email. But often you can't participate in a discussion about the video. Sometimes you can't even leave a comment. Too little effort is being made to evaluate and integrate interactive and community aspects into video.

For example, have a look at the impressive video production on WSJ.com. The videos are well done, but the integration of community interactivity is underwhelming. We're struggling with this at my own newspaper as well, but we're in the process of applying some of the solutions I suggest below.

10 Suggestions

In order to help media organizations do a better job of making video interactive, here are 10 suggestions for integrating video into a wider discussion with the community.

1. Enable people to leave comments on a video. What I often see on YouTube, however, is that the producer or uploader of the videos do not participate in the discussion. The same rules apply here as for text articles: If you don't respond to comments, there is a risk that people will consider the comments to be akin to graffiti on a blank wall, and not participate.
2. When interviewing colleagues or experts in a video, provide a back-channel so the audience can chat along and add to the discussion. For example, Livestream.com and Ustream.tv offer a chat and social stream next to the live video. Ustream also does this rather well in its iPhone App.
3. It's also possible to integrate video into a text-chat module, such as the previously discussed CoverItLive. A word of caution: Most people are not good at being a talking head on video while simultaneously chatting -- it tends to give clumsy and boring results. So let the live video host focus on her job.
4. The same rules apply as for a regular chat session: It helps to have a fixed schedule for conversational sessions, and to provide an introductory article or post to provide context and discussion material, thus enabling people to ask questions in advance and to prepare for the discussion.
5. You can invite community members to have a video conversation by using their webcams to appear directly on camera. I've done some experiments with Seesmic video and will note that some psychological and technical barriers stand in the way of doing this well. Which means we need more experimentation.
6. Especially when it comes to local news coverage, it could be interesting to invite your community members to contribute their own videos. In my previous post about immersive journalism, I mentioned Stroome as an interesting platform for collaborative video editing.
7. You can easily build a virtual studio in Second Life and invite guests to participate in a live discussion with an audience of avatars/community members. Second Life enables you to combine audio (for host and guests) and chat (for the audience/community members), and a video stream all in one. You can do this for guests who would be hard to convince to come in person to your newsroom for a live discussion. To see this in action, have a look at the Metanomics show. You can find other related practices in the aforementioned immersive journalism post and the comments on that post.
8. Do not underestimate the importance of text. It could be interesting to have three live streams: 1) The live video stream of an interview; 2) the chat channel; and 3) a live blog. The live blog enables people who missed the live event to quickly find out what the chat was about. During the event it helps those who are hearing impaired, or who are in office settings and can't watch the video.
9. A very simple but effective technique is to announce a video interview in advance and to ask the community for input in terms of questions or topics for discussion. This seems very straightforward, but it's mindboggling how reluctant journalists are to ask the community for input.
10. Along the same lines, there are many ways to ask for help when preparing for a video interview: You could use a wiki, a collaborative mindmap, or let people vote for the best questions. But in my opinion the good old blog post does a great job because it's conversational and not technologically intimidating. Just explain what your intentions are for the interview, what the context is (as you would do for your newsroom colleagues), and ask people to react. A follow-up in the video or in a separate blog post would be nice. Be sure to mention which community questions made it into the interview -- and make sure you tell your guest when a question comes directly from the community.

Those are my ideas. Please share your own suggestions for turning video into a community experience below in the comments.

Roland Legrand is in charge of Internet and new media at Mediafin, the publisher of leading Belgian business newspapers De Tijd and L'Echo. He studied applied economics and philosophy. After a brief teaching experience, he became a financial journalist working for the Belgian wire service Belga and subsequently for Mediafin. He works in Brussels, and lives in Antwerp with his wife Liesbeth.

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OurBlook.com has been conducting an ongoing interview series on the current and future role of journalism and social media. In previous posts for PBS MediaShift, I shared some of the insights we've gathered about the future of journalism, and the skills that will be required of future journalists.

In this installment, experts weigh on the impact social media has had on the media industry, and the way that journalists relate to their audiences. Overall, experts agreed that social media helps journalists:

• Have more frequent two-way communication with news consumers, and thus develop stronger relationships with their readership.
• Promote themselves by creating their own personal brand.
• Find an array of news sources and information in real-time, and stay updated on new developments.
• Easily promote content across multiple platforms, while at the same time reaching a wider audience.
• Do on-the-spot reporting by making video and photography more accessible and inexpensive.

Experts Weigh In

"I can't understand why so many sectors are going kicking and screaming from the industrial age. News organizations have been reporting the change for decades, so what's the surprise? There is no shock that newspapers and magazines are failing; the model of printed news is being transformed into a new relationship model of information. Consumer markets, political conversations and everyday decision-making are being driven more and more by content in social media. Did news not get the memo that everyone wants to be a reporter?" -- Val Marmillion, president of Marmillion + Company Strategic Communications

"Social media are value neutral; their main virtue is the promise of democratic communication. This brings along with it all of the difficulties of democratic society...incivility, bullying, bias, prejudice, privatization, power struggles. These problems aren't a reason to dismiss or fear social media platforms; they're a challenge to each of us to fight for parity, transparency, access and openness." -- Jessica Clark, director for the Future of Public Media Project for the Center for Social Media at American University, and MediaShift contributor

"Twitter's brevity, its inherent capacity to reflect and create chaos, and to do so instantly and without verification, does not suggest that it has the power to create the kind of narrative that sustains real revolutionary action." -- Trevor Butterworth, editor of STATS.org

"Too much information bouncing around at the speed of thought leads to too much information erroneously being 'reported' or accepted as 'fact.' This has only accelerated the pressure to be 'first,' often at the expense of being 'right.' But perhaps even more dangerous is that the increasing proliferation of choices means that news consumers can choose to focus exclusively on 'infotainment,' and thus disengage from serious coverage of critical issues." -- Matt Hinckley, assistant dean for journalism and student media at Richland College

"At a joint National Press Club/Atlanta Press Club event a while back, I asked this question of the panel: In the future, how will people know what is a journalistic story and what is a paid, biased or fictitious post? I said I was concerned that young people may not know the difference. The panelists' answer was to encourage journalistic literacy programs, which is a good idea. But the most telling moment came when a journalism student approached me afterward and said young people can tell the difference; he's more worried about people in the older generation like his mother, who can't tell a scam email from the real thing." -- Terri Thornton, owner of Thornton Communications

"I strongly disagree that social media represent a dumbing down of America. It's the opposite...it's a way for us to become more informed, more connected and overall less ignorant. It's a way for us to experience different lives, different worlds and different points of view in a way that's never been possible, quite literally, in the history of the world. To call this tremendous capacity and facility to share information a 'dumbing down' is to miss the forest for the trees." -- Sasha Pasulka, blogger and founder of EvilBeetGossip.com

"People who approach political discourse from the perspective of reading blogs and engaging in online debates via social networks -- Twitter and so on -- tend to value authenticity in those interactions, and are less patient with the niceties of the one-to-many broadcast model of communication...Members of the millennial generation in particular find the pomposity and stuffiness of traditional media less engaging than the give-and-take of social channels" -- Rob Salkowitz, author of "Young World Rising: How Youth, Technology and Entrepreneurship are Changing Global Business."

"One particular advantage of social media is that they help a reporter see the intellectual and social network of a source. For example, in Twitter I can see whom you are following and who is following you. I can see what you have re-tweeted and what links you have selected. Therefore, I can understand more fully your social context." -- Jerry Zurek, professor of English and communication department chair at Cabrini College

"This is a new way, an emerging way, and now a pervasive way. So when you jump in this pool, you have to jump in all the way. And that means, you have to listen, you have to participate, you need to contribute value as part of those relationships. And the reason you have to do that is because if you are not, your competitor probably is." -- David Kissel, partner of the Zocalo Group

"Social media is a good tool for publishers to expand content reach, but it won't save the fundamental business model of journalism at its core." -- Mitch Joel, president of Twist Image, author, and social media expert.

"Social media isn't a fad; it's changed the way people share and consume content. The web has allowed people to create their own online neighborhoods and elect leaders to speak for them. That's something journalists are going to have to really take into consideration. It's a new audience." -- Lisa Barone, chief branding officer of Outspoken Media, Inc.

"To be sure, social media are a frightening phenomenon to incumbents in the press, in politics and in the media. To the incumbents, social media are profoundly disruptive because of how they obviate their ownership of the 'choke point' in the communication channel. Their power is based on control of scarcity: Scarce resources, capital, intellectual property, and modes of production and distribution." -- Larry Elin, associate professor, S.I. Newhouse School, Syracuse University

"An active democracy is a successful democracy. As social media platforms engage voters in the political system, our democracy thrives. The risk, however, is that special interest groups have a significant opportunity to skew the conversation in their favor. While regular users have the ability to contribute to the conversation, few are motivated enough to do so. That allows motivated subgroups to manipulate the conversation and portray an inaccurate picture of the most important issues." -- Patrick Schwerdtfeger, author of "Webify your Business: Internet Secrets for the Self-Employed."

This article was co-written by Kurt Schilligo, a University Partnership Program intern.

Sandra Ordonez calls herself a web astronaut who has been helping organizations navigate the internet since 1997. Currently, she helps run OurBlook.com, a collaborative online forum that gathers interviews from today's top leaders in the hopes of finding tomorrow's solutions. Since December 2008, the site has been conducting a Future of Journalism interview series. Sandra also heads up the Facebook page, "Bicultural and Multicultural People Rule." Previously, she was the Communications Manager for Wikipedia. She graduated from American University with a double degree in International Relations and Public Relations.

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Who owns your copy of "War and Peace"? If we're talking about a dog-eared paperback copy of "War and Peace" that you purchased in your college bookstore, then you own the copy for purposes of copyright law. But if we are talking about an e-book version of the latest translation that was bought online and downloaded to an e-reader or other mobile device, then the question of ownership of the copy is not so simply answered. Unlike works published in print, electronic works are typically sold subject to agreements, in transactions that look less like an outright sale and more like a limited license.

Owner Versus Licensee

Ownership of a copy is an important concept in copyright law. Ownership of a copy of a work is distinct from ownership of the copyright in a work, which is retained by the author or publisher of a book or other work. Ownership of a copy determines whether the copyright owner has the right under copyright law to control subsequent transfers of the copy by sale, gift, rental or lending. In the case of computer programs, ownership of a copy determines whether the program may be used for specified purposes without infringing the copyright owner's rights.

In the last several decades, questions concerning the ownership of copies of digital content have arisen with respect to various kinds of digital content. The federal courts are currently grappling with the issue in the context of audio CDs, videogames and software in a trio of cases that were recently argued before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. The resolution of these disputes may help predict how other federal courts will view the issue of ownership of copies of e-books and other electronic publications, such as the proliferating category of all digital magazines targeted at Apple's iPad and other tablet devices.

The Copyright First Sale Doctrine

The copyright first sale doctrine has its origins in a dispute that arose when the publisher of a copyrighted novel sought to preclude dealers who purchased copies of the book for resale from reselling it at a price lower than that stipulated by the publisher. The publisher relied on language that was printed on the inside cover of the book that established a specific retail price and stated that dealers were not licensed to sell it at a lower price, and that a sale at a lower price would be treated as an infringement of the publisher's copyright. In Bobbs-Merrill Co. v. Straus, the U.S. Supreme Court concluded that this notice did not give the publisher the right, under copyright law, to limit subsequent sales of the books by the initial purchaser.

The ruling in Bobbs-Merrill Co. v. Straus was subsequently codified in what is now Section 109(a) of the Copyright Act, which states that "the owner of a particular copy or phono record lawfully made under this title, or any person authorized by such owner, is entitled, without the authority of the copyright owner, to sell or otherwise dispose of the possession of that copy or phono record."

As evidenced by a nation that is thick with used bookstores and charity used book sales, under this section the purchaser of a printed book can sell, give away or even burn the copy without the permission of the copyright owner.

Section 109 does not, however, define the critical term "owner ... of a copy," leaving copyright officials and federal courts to interpret it on a case-by-case basis.

Owner of a Copy

It's easy to conclude that the purchaser of a printed book who pays the price and walks out of the store with it is the "owner" of that copy of the book, because the transaction has two significant incidents of a typical sale: Payment of a single price, and transfer of permanent possession of the item. But as an episode involving the remote deletion of e-books from Amazon's Kindle e-reader device demonstrates, some e-book ecosystems allow the seller to remotely delete content, a fact which makes the transfer of possession potentially less than permanent. E-books are also typically sold subject to an agreement containing a variety of provisions limiting purchasers' rights. For example, the Terms of Use available on the Barnes and Noble website contains provisions that restrict the right to transfer "digital content" to another device and limit the right to lend digital content to another user.

The Register of Copyrights recently studied the issue of ownership of digital content on mobile devices during the triennial rule-making proceeding under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The issue arose in the context of the Register's determination of whether the purchaser of a device such as an Apple iPhone is the owner of copies of the firmware installed on the device, and thus whether the purchaser has the right to modify the software in order to "jailbreak" it. The Register threw up her hands and rested her decision instead on the "fair use" doctrine, commenting that even the federal courts have disagreed as to the proper test under copyright law for determining ownership of software copies.

Current Disputes

The struggle in the federal courts over the issue of ownership can be seen in three cases argued simultaneously in June in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Each case presents the issue of ownership of copies under copyright law in a different context, although all three involve reliance on contractual language to limit the rights of purchasers and recipients of copyrighted content. In an unusual move, the court agreed to the request of the parties to these cases that they be heard simultaneously by the same appellate panel, due to the similarity of the issues they present.

Universal Music Group v. Augusto involved online auctions of promotional CDs distributed by the music company to reviewers, radio stations and others in or associated with the music industry. The CDs were distributed by the company with an included agreement stating that the CD was licensed to the recipient and that resale or transfer of possession was not permitted. Universal argued that the language in the agreement precluded a finding that the recipient was an owner under copyright law. The trial court concluded that, among other things, the transfer of possession of the CDs to the recipients for an indefinite period of time indicated that the recipients were owners of the copies.

Another case, Vernor v. Autodesk, involved packaged software that was resold by the original purchaser to a reseller who posted it for sale in an online auction. Autodesk, the software developer, relied on language in the shrink-wrap license agreement accompanying the software in the original transaction, stating that the distributor granted to the purchaser a "non-exclusive, non-transferable license" and prohibited subsequent transfers of the software without its consent.

Autodesk argued that this language prohibits its original purchaser from disposing of Autodesk software in the secondary market. The trial court disagreed, concluding that because the original transaction allowed the purchaser to retain possession of the copy for a single, up-front payment, the transaction was a sale that transferred ownership of the copy. Significantly, however, the trial court found that rulings in the Ninth Circuit (the federal appellate court which the trial court was bound to follow) were in conflict on the issue and that if the court followed the most recent of those conflicting opinions, it would have ruled in favor of Autodesk on the issue of ownership.

The third case, MDY Industries, LLC v. Blizzard Entertainment, Inc., involved videogame software, and the question of whether the terms of the end user license agreement accompanying the videogame preclude a finding that the purchaser is the owner of a copy under 17 U.S.C. § 117(a). That section affords owners certain rights to use copies of computer programs. In MDY, the issue was not the transfer of the videogame software, but the use of the videogame with a third-party computer program that is not approved by the video game developer. The trial court concluded that purchasers' use of the videogame software with unapproved programs was not protected under Section 117(a) because the end user license agreement had so limited the purchasers' rights that the transaction could not be considered the sale of a copy. Like the court in Vernor v. Autodesk, the court in MDY referenced the conflicting rulings in the Ninth Circuit on the issue of ownership, but chose instead to follow the later rulings that are more favorable to the position of content owners.

Conclusion

What is at stake in these cases is not the ability of copyright owners to limit transfers or certain uses of their copyrighted works at all, but whether they may do so under the Copyright Act. The Copyright Act affords content owners powerful and versatile remedies that are not available if the limitations that content owners place on their works are viewed merely as contract provisions, and the violations of them are treated as breaches of contract.

What is at stake for purchasers of e-books and other electronic publications is whether they will be treated under copyright law as owners of copies of the books and magazines they download, or simply licensees with limited rights.

Jeffrey D. Neuburger is a partner in the New York office of Proskauer Rose LLP, and co-chair of the Technology, Media and Communications Practice Group. His practice focuses on technology and media-related business transactions and counseling of clients in the utilization of new media. He is an adjunct professor at Fordham University School of Law teaching E-Commerce Law and the co-author of two books, "Doing Business on the Internet" and "Emerging Technologies and the Law." He also co-writes the New Media & Technology Law Blog.

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In a previous article I described how self-publishers can easily create, market and sell e-books. In this article we'll discuss the differences and steps required to create more complex enhanced e-books and apps based on books.

In a nutshell, an e-book is a digital snapshot of a book, an enhanced e-book adds multimedia and interactive features as interruptions to the linear story, and a book app is based on a book but acts more like a game with multiple pathways that require the user to interact instead of simply scrolling and clicking.


Enhanced e-books are also referred to as rich media books, book mashups, enriched, hybrid and amplified books. The media and interactivity is provided by you, the self-publisher, who collects and integrates music, audio, video and color photo slideshows, news feeds, illustrations and background materials. You may also provide searchable text, tilt scrolling, internal and external links and Flash animations into the linear story. (Here are some video demos of these features.) To create an enhanced e-book requires the skills of a web developer.



A book app can do everything an enhanced e-book does, but crosses the line from linear storytelling to non-linear storytelling, allowing the user to choose from multiple pathways and select from a potentially huge number of photos, videos, audio files, illustrations, hyperlinks, and interactivity. Apps are third-party software programs requiring a programmer with C++ or Apple's Objective C programming skills.

Much confusion arises from the fact that so many books are simply bundled as apps so they can be sold in an app store. In April 2010 there were twice as many e-books as games in the iPhone App Store, and it's been posited by one pundit that Apple may purge such e-books as they have purged other overly simple apps. There seems to be little point to e-book app-wrapping when compared with more elegant, library-based e-book stores and their e-reader apps (the iBookstore download to the iBook e-reader app, for example), which gives customers a more consistent user experience and keeps the device desktop uncluttered.

What makes a good enhanced e-book?

A few years ago I produced a multimedia e-zine, Ireland: The Sacred and the Profane. It was offered for download directly from the Wild Writing Women website until I recently found it easier to offer it via Scribd. Though most links, audio and video don't work inside their browser-based reader (they tell me they're working on that), they perform nicely when you download the PDF. The magazine was very time-consuming to produce, but incredibly rewarding and the enhancements offered readers extra value.


What's a good enhancement?

"If it's a book about music history, having music people can play at certain points in the book can be useful," says Amazon's Jeff Bezos, in an interview with USA Today. "You're not going to make Hemingway better by adding animations."


"Enhancements should only be in support of the central proposition of the writing rather than a 'I can do it therefore I will do it' approach," says Peter Collingridge of UK-based Enhanced Editions. New Media storyteller J.C. Hutchins also has some good advice, such as avoiding "self-congratulatory 'behind the scenes' content such as author bios, old drafts of your manuscripts."

The iPad's capabilities quickly made it the enhanced e-book platform of choice. Designers can create endlessly entertaining distractions within a linear story. The "amplified edition" of Ken Follette's Pillars of the Earth promises a huge cache of multimedia, an interactive character tree, video and still images from the Starz television series, the author's multimedia diary with his impressions of bringing the book to the screen, interviews with the actors, director and producers, and music from the series.

How much does this cost in terms of time and money? It took me months to create the Ireland magazine working in InDesign and with my group who painstakingly reviewed and edited every iteration. It would have been a huge project even without the learning curve, so when Collingridge quoted $8,000 to $15,000 for enhanced e-book production, that sounded about right.

Enhanced e-books are not device-specific but it's impossible to optimize for all of them. For example, audio, video and color simply do not work on the Nook or Kindle, and Flash does not run on the Apple iPad. You'll want to format your book for the platforms you think the majority of your audience is using. Popular format choices are:

• Portable Document Format (PDF) is for very highly-formatted publications and can be read on many devices. Readers are forced to view the book exactly as it was designed, which, while it offers design stability, means users cannot reflow the text or change font sizes or colors.

• International Digital Publishing Forum's Open eBook standard (EPUB) is a versatile winner. It's the format used by Apple iPad, Sony's reader, the Nook, and many other vendors. An export feature in the InDesign page layout program (on which your original print book was likely designed) lets you output an EPUB file. The results are not perfect, but they're getting there.

• Microsoft's XPS platform is used by the new Barnes & Noble Blio software platform. They hype their enhanced e-book features and seamless integration with Quark a la the InDesign-to-EPUB export.

• Amazon's Kindle/Mobipocket (mobi/azw) format is great for e-books but not a good choice for enhanced e-books because it does not display color or video.

Yes, the relationship between hardware devices, software platforms and formats is complicated, especially with Google Editions and Copia entering the game this year along with the Blio, and there are rumors that RIM is planning an iPad competitor.

When enhanced is not enough: The book-based app

When you've got so much material that linear is no longer practical, then it might be time to consider an app as an add-on product to your book. (The fuzzy boundary between enhanced e-books and apps are discussed in the Digital Book World webcast eBooks vs Apps: The Pros, Cons and Possibilities).

To start the process, you'll first need to have a deep discussion about multimedia, formats, platforms and devices with the team you hire to do the work. "Book-based apps are more likely to be ancillary products with complex graphics and page layouts that can't be handled in something that auto-flows," says Michel Kripalani, founder of Oceanhouse Media (OM). "That's where you cross the line into the need for custom code." Kripalani assembled a team of former interactive CD-ROM and game developers to start his business, and has built over 100 since the company was founded in January 2009.

"Children's books are especially ripe for apps, and compliment the e-book edition," noted Kripalani in an interview with Book Business Magazine. OM has also created a variety of card decks, calendars, and spoken word apps inspired by books from Hay House and Chronicle Books.


The price tag for a complex, quality book-based app? "In the five-figures," says Kripalini, "and requires a team that "includes C++/Objective C programmers, graphic designers, professional actors and custom narration, music soundtrack and sound effects, interactivity, editors and page layout designers for the different devices."



For the budget-impaired, DIY app builders are emerging. Travel guidebook publishers already know their audience is looking online and to apps instead of to the paper book. For them, Sutro Media has created a browser-based tool to let publishers upload material to a content management system, which then gets ported into Objective C on the back end. Co-founder Kevin Collins says, "these apps do things that books can't possibly do. For example, you can use all the photos you had to leave out in their book versions, and include live maps and hyperlinks, too."



Sutro does not require the author pay any up-front costs, but they carefully evaluate proposed projects. Their payment model is a revenue-sharing agreement with a royalty split of 30% each going to Sutro, Apple, and the author, with the remaining 10% going to their in-house editor.



If you're a technically inclined DIY self-published author, there is a growing list of inexpensive app development options, here are some for the iPhone. And remember, you'll need to decide which devices you want to reach. You can develop for more than one, but that will add to the time and price tag. Today's popular choices are:



* Apple's iBook app for the iPhone and iPad

* The Kindle or Stanza app (both owned by Amazon)

* The B&N eReader, or Kobo (a Borders partner)

* Google's free ebook reader for the iPhone and Android

* The Kobo app for Android

Selling it: The biggest challenge

Once you've created your enhanced e-book or app, how do you get it distributed to e-tailers and to readers? Author Cory Doctorow has long and publicly wrestled with these issues, and has had only spotty success with distribution and sales via the major channels. Digital Rights Management (DRM) has been particularly problematic, as some e-tailers require it.

The enhanced e-book and app space is still all very experimental, but expect industry standards to emerge and the market to adjust to the technical possibilities. Apple is letting self-publishers upload directly to the iPad, as long as they adhere to very strict formatting rules.

Personally, I'm offering enhanced e-books on my own websites and on Scribd, amassing digital assets, paying for InDesign upgrades, studying EPUB, renewing my SPAN membership, and keeping an eye on Mark Coker and Smashwords for an easier enhanced e-book aggregation solution for self-publishers.

Carla King is an author, a publishing and social media strategist, and co-founder of the Self-Publishing Boot Camp program providing books, lectures and workshops for prospective self-publishers. She has self-published non-fiction travel and how-to books since 1994 and has worked in multimedia since 1996. Her series of dispatches from motorcycle misadventures around the world are available as print books, e-books and as diaries on her website.

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Supernova, an annual technology conference, recently convened for the first time on the East Coast, a change that was evident in the composition of the conference attendees and the direction of the overall conversation. Below are the top three major takeaways from the conference.

Policy matters Harold Feld, legal director of Public Knowledge, earned a place as crowd favorite during a panel about the governmental implications of broadband connectivity. Referencing the FCC's apparent hesitance to pursue regulatory policy, Feld said, "This could end up being the best administration for the tech community or the worst administration for the tech community."

Comcast's Cohen, whose company has an obvious stake in issues like net neutrality and reclassification of broadband, made his point by contextualizing an anecdote conference host Kevin Werbach shared during opening ceremonies.

Werbach had explained that the seats in the lecture hall where the conference took place did not have power outlets because Wharton faculty voted to not have them, fearing students would be overly distracted or some other similar supposition. Cohen thought this was an excellent metaphor for unintended consequences of regulation.

"Our concern about governmental regulation in this space drives directly from that story," he said. "Not that our government is ill-intended or that they would try to do something that would impede innovation; but the unintended consequences of legislation that takes a long time to do and a long time to fix could result in actions that retard innovation."

There was also discussion of how governmental agencies are promoting tech initiatives. Projects in different disciplines, like HealthCare.gov and the FCC's broadband portal, are trying to put data (after it's been properly scrutinized for privacy concerns) online in accessible formats. As Beth Noveck, deputy chief technology officer for the United States, explained it, "open government is a horizontal, not a vertical."

Bottom line: Regulating broadband will continue to be a messy process, but it has to be done.

Social Changes Everything Social media is changing the dynamics of content creation and distribution. That's hardly a surprise to the average MediaShift reader, but the observation's familiarity is a reflection of its veracity.

Social media changed conferences, that's for sure. The Twitter backchannel at #sn10 during the conference was nearly as valuable as the sessions themselves. Conference participants (and certain panelists) would share relevant insights and links while the conference was ongoing, which was perfect for information omnivores such as myself.

It's changing civic life, too. The government's strategy is noted above, but initiatives like ThinkUp are trying to improve the process of governance by tapping the wisdom of the crowd.

It's also changing the media, augmenting new and old media's ability alike to connect with consumers. Comcast's Cohen noted that the company no longer sees it as a cable company, but as a technology provider that increasingly experiments with new media delivery technologies such as a Hulu-like online video service. Cohen said the number one reason for Comcast's acquisition of NBC Universal is to increase its "ability to accelerate the application of innovation and technology for the delivery of what consumer demand is in this space: anytime, anywhere television." In a word, convergence.

SB Nation CEO Jim Bankoff noted that, "Media does not need to be saved and it is not the responsibility of social to save media." He said he thought user generated content was not as interesting as user generated distribution of content, an insight echoed by other panelists who noted that many companies were experimenting with television and movies to create "multi-platform" experiences that span offline and online spaces.

Blip.TV cofounder Dina Kaplan spoke to the economic power of new media when she revealed that her company had recently compensated the creators of Halo-themed web series Red vs. Blue more than $123,000 as part of their commitment to split profit with content producers.

Bottom line: Having a social media strategy is table stakes.

Privacy is hard The most fascinating conversation of the conference, from my perspective, was between danah boyd, a social media researcher at Microsoft Research, and Jeff Jarvis, a journalism professor at CUNY and author of What Would Google Do?. The rapport between these two new media thinkers was evident throughout their discussion of how technology companies and the government are assessing and responding to online privacy concerns.

Though the two had differing opinions about the definition of privacy, they agreed that the root of privacy concerns was inequity between expectations and outcomes regarding how information flows.

"Privacy is about understanding a social situation and how information will flow, and then making a decision that recognizes this. People scream 'privacy fail!' when they've lost control and found that information flows differently than they expected," Boyd said.

Jarvis used Facebook to illustrate a similar point, referencing ongoing concerns the company faces regarding its approach to personal data. "Facebook created a structure for crafting a public," said Jarvis, "but suddenly people were talking to the public," he said.

The pair also agreed that context has been undervalued as it relates to publicly shared information. "The information itself has value, but so does the interpretation," Boyd said. "We can't divorce the two, interpretations depend on context."

Jarvis essentially agreed with the danger of free-form data being accessed without its necessary context, but also seemed worried that over-compensating for this threat could "risk what makes the Internet powerful."

Bottom line: Defining privacy is just as important a task as protecting it.

Related Links Have a look at these links to read more about the conference:

• Five Lessons from Supernova 2010
• Supernova Concludes But the Dialogue Continues
• Videos of Supernova 2010

Davis Shaver is MediaShift's editorial intern. He is also the founder and publisher of Onward State, an online news organization at Penn State. He studies history and the intersection of science, technology, and society.

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Although Saudi Arabia was one of the first countries to have been authorized to register domain names in Arabic, it is still one of the most repressive countries when it comes to the Internet.

For example, since 2009 Internet cafes in the country have been required to install hidden cameras, supply a list of customers and websites accesses, not permit the use of prepaid cards or of unauthorized Internet access via satellite, close at midnight and not admit minors. In the latest development of concern, Sheikh Mekhlef bin Dahham al-Shammari, a writer/blogger, human rights activist and social reformer, is in jail. Why? For "annoying others." He has not yet been formally charged.

Blogger Rhymes With Prisoner

Al-Shammari has often written about poverty and unemployment in the kingdom, accusing the government of ignoring these problems because it is obsessed with public morality and keeping men and women apart. He has also highlighted the government's failure to promote tourism, and its discrimination against the Shiite minority. Although a Sunni, he was critical of the influential Saudi preacher Mohammed al-Arifi for referring to one of Iran's most respected Shiite clerics, Grand Ayatollah Ali al Sistani, as an "obscene atheist."

In an article published in April of last year, "My Dear Christian", al-Shammari contrasted the work of an American Christian who was killed while helping to protect Palestinian Muslim children with the conditions imposed by Saudi Muslim charities that require its recipients exhibit proper Islamic conduct.

Al-Shammari has been arrested several times in recent years, in part because of his defense of Saudi Arabia's Shiite minority. He told Human Rights Watch that prosecutors used his articles to accuse him of spreading discord among Muslims. His articles criticizing the conservative interpretations of Islam promoted by Saudi officials led to his arrest on May 15, after which he was released on bail. His latest arrest took place on June 15 in Jubail. He was transferred to Damman prison at the start of this month.

Al-Shammari is not the first blogger jailed for seemingly arbitrary reasons in Saudi Arabia. For example, Fouad al Farhan, a blogger known for advocating political reforms, was arrested in 2007 in Jeddah. His arrest was reported by other Arab bloggers, and the Saudi authorities also confirmed he was being held in solitary confinement for "interrogation." No official charges were ever cited or laid. He was released from prison on April 26, 2008. Al Farhan, who is in this thirties, was one of the first Saudi bloggers to dispense with a pseudonym on his site. He was also the first cyber-dissident to be jailed in the country -- but he's far from the last.

According to information from the Arabic Network for Human Rights, Munir alJassas, a prominent Internet activist and defender of the rights of Shiites, has been in jail since November 7, 2009. This is apparently because of his comments and articles on websites and online forums such as Tahara and Shabaket AlRames, where he is one of the most prominent writers.

Free Speech in Saudi Arabia

In the kingdom, free speech is under constant threat. In March, the Saudi cleric Sheikh Abdul-Rahman al-Barrak, a professor of religion at the Imam Muhammad bin Saud Islamic University in Riyadh, declared a fatwa against two journalists. Reuters reported that he "was responding to recent articles in al-Riyadh newspaper that questioned the Sunni Muslim view in Saudi Arabia that adherents of other faiths should be considered unbelievers."

"Anyone who claims this has refuted Islam and should be tried in order to take it back. If not, he should be killed as an apostate from the religion of Islam," read the fatwa.

In another example, the journalist Rozanna al-Yami was sentenced to 60 lashes by a judge because she worked for the Lebanese Broadcast Corporation (LBC), a satellite TV station that shocked conservative Saudis a year ago by broadcasting an interview with a Saudi man talking openly about his sex life.

There was one encouraging development. In June of last year, Saudi Arabia agreed to have its human rights records reviewed by the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva, and it welcomed Navi Pillay, the UN high Commissioner for human rights last April. Sheikh Mekhlef bin Dahham al-Shammari was among the few activists who met her.

However, the fact that the authorities have jailed him for such a ridiculous and offensive reason ("annoying others") shows that the kingdom is still not committed to changing its approach to free speech. If this charge is taken seriously by authorities, then how many more bloggers will end up behind bars for similar reasons?

Clothilde Le Coz has been working for Reporters Without Borders in Paris since 2007. She is now the Washington director for this organization, helping to promote press freedom and free speech around the world. In Paris, she was in charge of the Internet Freedom desk and worked especially on China, Iran, Egypt and Thailand. During the time she spent in Paris, she was also updating the "Handbook for Bloggers and Cyberdissidents," published in 2005. Her role is now to get the message out for readers and politicians to be aware of the constant threat journalists are submitted to in many countries.

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In an earlier age, we learned new skills as apprentices to master craftspeople, absorbing expertise by working side by side. Today, though, you might be more likely to learn a new craft or skill from a website or through a social media buddy -- or even from a digital magazine.

Traditional print magazines that teach hands-on skills are extending their content and brands into new digital applications that make developing your abilities more like working alongside a pro instead of a static, one-way experience. These digital products present text, audio, video, slideshows and social components of these skills in ways print can't. Yet as these magazines experiment with new products, they also demonstrate all the challenges magazines face as they develop complex multimedia products that are more than just digital copies of print content.

Virtually Hands-On

Interweave Press, publisher of a variety of art and crafting magazines, launched what it calls an "eMag" in June. The eMag, affiliated with its magazine Quilting Arts, is titled Quilting Arts in Stitches, and covers advanced quilting techniques. The eMag is actually a 320-megabyte application that the user downloads and installs. The download costs $14.97, while a print copy of a typical issue of Quilting Arts is $7.99 on the newsstand.

Once installed, the application runs on the Adobe AIR platform. The clean, colorful design, created with Flash and InDesign, offers multiple ways of navigating and viewing the eMag's content.

Significantly, this product is not a digital replica of the Quilting Arts magazine. Instead, it combines a custom-designed interface with some magazine-like features, such as a "cover," an editor's letter, a table of contents in a sidebar, and numbered articles instead of page numbers. Inside the stories, however, embedded audio, video and slideshows bring the topics to life and give users a close-up view of the quilting skills described.

"When someone is working at their sewing machine, they can have the magazine there, but it's still a little bit static," said Pokey Bolton, editorial director of Quilting Arts magazine and for the eMag. "They can't see hands moving, or their sewing machine working,"

With digital, though, the boundaries are diminished, according to Bolton. "You get this intimate hands-on experience watching someone work in their studio, a master quilter at work."

In developing the eMag, Bolton says the staff first considered which topics would be the best fit for more "kinesthetic" multimedia presentations. "As an editor, I had to think about it differently," she said. "This is the deliverable. How am I going to tailor the editorial accordingly? We really wanted to use all the tools, not just make something that was showy just for the sake of having it in digital."

The quilting techniques covered in the eMag are both technical and artistic, and not easily communicated in print, Bolton explained. In print, the story "would have just been a static experience -- some exercises with a caption. But with a video, you see it as a whole. There are certain things you can explore as an editor in a digital format that go above and beyond a printed format."

The eMag also includes a social component, though it's not integrated with the usual online social networks. Instead, it provides instructions for a small project that readers are encouraged to make and then trade with other quilters through a "swap" run through the Quilting Arts office. Bolton said this project created "a sense of community" among eMag readers.

Planning for the Future

Though advertising wasn't included in the first issue, Interweave will offer sponsorship and advertising opportunities in future eMags, and plans to encourage advertisers to create ads that use the unique advantages of the eMag format. The positive feedback on the eMag from the magazine's existing audience will likely help bring in those advertisers. The print magazine has a circulation of about 80,000, and the eMag sold "a few thousand" downloads in its first few weeks on sale, according to Interweave. However, Bolton reported that, along with the magazine industry, the audience is also trying to adapt to new digital formats.

"Our audience too is trying to wrap their heads around a digital product such as this," she said. "People love the print magazine, and they love the eMag, and they want to be able to print aspects of the eMag."

Printing isn't an option in this eMag, though project materials lists can be saved as PDFs and then printed.

The eMag may also relieve some quilters' frustrations by offering a nearly hands-on experience of their craft. "If you go to a quilt show, you're so tempted to touch a quilt, but it's kind of a rule to keep your hands off," Bolton said. "But you want to feel that texture. We can replicate that experience and [let users] see that stitch up close."

Interweave plans to release eMags associated with some of its other print products in the coming year.

Gourmet Live(s)

Another magazine brand to take on a new digital form is Gourmet. Last incarnated in print in November 2009, the legendary magazine will be reborn in fall 2010 as Gourmet Live, an interactive HTML5 application that will offer food-related multimedia with added social features. (I covered the death of the print magazine in a previous MediaShift story.)

Though the Gourmet Live demo video on the web shows the application on an iPad and demonstrates its touch-based interface, the application will work on other platforms as well, according to Juliana Stock, creative marketing director for Condé Nast Consumer Marketing. "We intentionally developed it so we'd be able to proliferate it as quickly as we can across a variety of platforms," Stock said.

The application will include the same kinds of content that Gourmet did in print, including articles and recipes, but will also feature video and photo slideshows. Like the Interweave eMag, the application doesn't resemble a magazine with "pages" that turn, but instead allows the user to touch and swipe photos and icons to operate the application. Some content will be drawn from Gourmet's archives, complemented by new content developed for the application.

The application will use readers' individual food and cooking interests to shape their experience. A novel component of Gourmet Live will be its "gameplay" approach of selecting and pushing content to the user. The application features real-time curation, meaning that it will constantly modify its content in response to the user's preferences, information, current location, past experience in the application, and so on.

"Based on a variety of variables, we can serve the user a different experience every time," said Stock, noting that this makes the application feel more game-like to its users, rather than simply a fixed document.

Another unique aspect of Gourmet Live will be its social features, Stock said, which will permit users to share content with their existing networks. Users will sign on using Facebook or Twitter. This social component, according to Stock, is intended to "parallel the social aspects of a meal."

Gourmet Live is also planning to incorporate sponsored content from advertisers into the application that ideally will feel like "part of the experience," Stock said.

Parallel Projects, Same Challenges

Craft and cooking magazines seem to be perfect genres for experimenting with shaping formerly print content into compelling, useful digital products. The Interweave eMag and Gourmet Live projects reveal some of the difficult decisions magazine publishers are having to make as they create innovative digital products.

Those challenges include the choice of platform (for example, Adobe versus HTML5), the selection of the best content for the chosen format, the integration of dynamic and interesting advertising, and the development of social features to maximize readers' desire to interact around the magazine's content. Because there isn't an established path to success in any of these areas yet, publishers have to stay flexible and explore alternative routes.

"I come from a print background, and I'm learning alongside every other editor and publisher in this business who's adjusting to this digital age - to the iPad, to having all kinds of readers, to what people want," said Bolton of Quilting Arts. "It's a paradigm shift in thinking, to really understanding all the things you can do in digital. We're trying to articulate something that really hasn't been done yet."

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4MR is sponsored by Carnegie-Knight News21, an alliance of 12 journalism schools in which top students tell complex stories in inventive ways. See tips for spurring innovation and digital learning at Learn.News21.com.

In this week's 4MR podcast I look at the recent move by U.S. senators to amend a Federal journalist shield bill to exclude Wikileaks. Many lawmakers are angry at the whistle-blower site for sharing thousands of classified documents about the Afghan war. But what does this mean for a possible shield law, which already passed the House and a Senate committee? I talked with MediaShift legal analyst Rob Arcamona about the move by senators and whether the U.S. could really hold Wikileaks and its founder Julian Assange accountable.

Check it out:

4mrbareaudio8610.mp3

>>> Subscribe to 4MR <<<

>>> Subscribe to 4MR via iTunes <<<

Listen to my entire interview with Rob Arcamona:

arcamonaleaks full.mp3

Background music is "What the World Needs" by the The Ukelele Hipster Kings via PodSafe Music Network.

Here are some links to related sites and stories mentioned in the podcast:

After Afghan War Leaks, Revisions in a Shield Bill at NY Times

Wikileaks editor interrogated by US border police at the Independent

WikiLeaks and a journalism shield law at the L.A. Times

Schumer, Feinstein Support Prosecution of WikiLeaks at NRO's The Corner

Latest Attempt To Create Federal Journalism Shield Law May Carve Wikileaks Out Of The Protections at TechDirt

Schumer Aims to Exclude Wikileaks From Media Shield Bill at FoxNews.com

Senate Tweaking Shield Bill In Wake of Wikileaks at Broadcasting & Cable

Also, be sure to vote in our poll about what you think about Wikleaks:

What do you think about Wikileaksonline surveys

Mark Glaser is executive editor of MediaShift and Idea Lab. He also writes the bi-weekly OPA Intelligence Report email newsletter for the Online Publishers Association. He lives in San Francisco with his son Julian. You can follow him on Twitter @mediatwit.

4MR is sponsored by Carnegie-Knight News21, an alliance of 12 journalism schools in which top students tell complex stories in inventive ways. See tips for spurring innovation and digital learning at Learn.News21.com.

This is a summary. Visit our site for the full post ».

Facebook is the alpha dog of social networks, and it's also becoming a top dog when it comes to referring traffic to news sites. That became clear in February when Hitwise found that Facebook was referring more traffic to news and media sites than Google News. But for a long time, Facebook only had intermittent communication with media companies about how they used the social network.

That all changed last month when Facebook launched its new Facebook + Media page, along with a media partnership team headed by Justin Osofsky that's on a "listening tour" of media companies. The goal is to hear what tools publishers want developed by Facebook, and build a stronger relationship with them. So far, tools like the omnipresent "Like" button, the activity box listing most "Liked" stories on sites, and Facebook Connect have created a true symbiotic relationship: Publishers get traffic, and Facebook gets high visibility and more members.

"The nature of our [media] partnerships is mainly as a platform company," Osofsky told me in a recent phone interview. "The Facebook platform gives media companies and other organizations the ability to build social experiences by bringing in people's friends, what they care about and want to recommend. Since we launched social plug-ins back in April, more than 350,000 sites have implemented it, and that's the primary way we work with media companies."

Facebook also did extensive research and issued best practices for media organizations, including best placement for the Like button, what story types did best on Pages, and how to use Facebook Insights, their version of Google Analytics for Facebook Pages.

But one thing that's off the table is sharing revenues with media properties from the ads Facebook serves onto their popular fan pages. For instance, CNN's Facebook Page has more than 1 million fans, but the ads that run on that page only bring in revenues for Facebook. Osofsky says Facebook is happy to drive traffic to publishers but hasn't considered sharing revenues with them.

The following is an edited transcript of my interview with Osofsky, where he discussed how Facebook worked with the New York Times on a World Cup visualization, and how they are considering a page on what stories have been "Liked" the most Facebook-wide.

Q&A

Tell me how you got involved in doing media partnerships at Facebook.

Justin Osofsky: We recently formed a team at Facebook to focus on media companies. We're excited to begin a dialogue on how best we can deliver value. Media companies are great at creating content and delivering it to the right people at the right time. We're excited to think about how those things can have a social dimension. We formed this team a couple months ago, and I'm leading the team.

Why you? What's your interest in working with the media?

Osofsky: I've worked at Facebook for a little over two years in various roles, most recently I led product marketing for Facebook Connect for the Facebook platform and led our platform partnerships. I'm excited about the opportunity to partner with media companies, because there are so many interesting things going on in the industry, and there's also this desire to share content with friends and recommend it to friends. The opportunity to work with media companies to create innovative experiences was one that was personally exciting to me.

Osofsky explains that partnerships with media companies don't involve money, but simply Facebook providing tools for them:

mediaface.mp3

What do you hear from the media companies that they would like to see from Facebook?

Osofsky: Media companies are excited to work with us for a few reasons. First, they want Facebook to drive more referral traffic to their sites. And they're interested in using our tools, both the social plug-ins and also pages on Facebook to help drive traffic. The average Facebook user has 130 friends, so when a Facebook user shares a piece of content from a media company site, on average 130 people see it. So Facebook can be a meaningful referrer of traffic.

Also, media companies can make the experience on their site more customized and engaging for each user. For instance, they can surface friends' activity and recommendations on the site itself. A great example of that is CNN. On the home page I can see what articles my friends have recommended and shared with others. There are other examples of that -- CNN, ABC News, the Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe -- they all use the activity panel to show what friends have done.

But I think engagement goes beyond plug-ins. For instance the New York Times recently did a very interesting visualization. They took the public status updates from Facebook users during the World Cup, and created a visualization showing which soccer players were most popular [and mentioned most on Facebook] during specific days during the World Cup.

Osofsky: I thought that was a good way to show how people are expressing themselves on Facebook, and create an engaging, immersive experience on the New York Times.

Were you able to work with the Times on that project?

Osofsky: Yes, the Times used our search API to create the visualization and our team helped them in the process.

So your team will help in an informal role for people like at the Times?

Osofsky: Yeah, the purpose of our team is to work with all sorts of media companies to create engaging experiences. We work with them to develop innovative new ideas and implement our platform tools.

Is there a tool that publishers have asked for from Facebook that you don't offer yet?

Osofsky: We're in an active dialogue, we're on a listening tour, and asking publishers, 'What can we do to meet your needs?' Publishers are constantly giving us feedback on how we can do things better, from improving our Insights product to deliver better stats to them to potential plug-ins we could create. What my team does is bring that back to the product team to meet their needs.

If publishers create a Facebook Page that gets hundreds of thousands or even millions of fans, would it be possible for them to serve their own ads onto that Page or do a revenue split with Facebook for the ads that Facebook serves up?

Osofsky: Within a page, there are monetization opportunities. We don't work with publishers directly around that, there is no revenue share. We encourage publishers to create popular pages which can then drive traffic back to their sites, where they are obviously good at monetizing them.

But if they create a page that has interactions and engagement, shouldn't they deserve some of the ad revenues from that page or serve their own ads? I know it's not something you currently do or offer, but perhaps it's something publishers might want down the line?

Osofsky: We're not currently looking into that model. The value to the publishers out of the fans they acquire is to create a meaningful long-term distribution channel. So when I've liked a page, the publisher can reach me as frequently as they want to reach me with engaging content, and send that traffic back to their site to monetize it there. That's the core value that our pages provide.

Osofsky explains why he attended a recent Hacks and Hackers meetup in San Francisco:

hacksface.mp3

Did the media folks you met feel like they had had problems getting through to people at Facebook in the past?

Osofsky: We do our best to communicate well with developers through our development site and other communication channels. Like any platform, we can always do better. Publishers and media companies appreciate the focus on the media industry and their needs.

I like the way you let people track activity on their sites and you offer plug-ins for publishers to put on their site to rank their own stories that get "Liked" the most, etc. Have you considered doing a page on Facebook that ranked all the stories on all of Facebook that are being shared or "Liked" the most?

Osofsky: That's actually a question that's been raised by a number of companies and organizations we've talked to. I'm currently providing that feedback to the product team to see where that fits into what we're trying to accomplish. Generally, the most effective way to communicate to a Facebook audience is for an individual to communicate with their friends, rather than for us to share information that's occurring across the system as a whole. It's the most social dimension. If we're friends and you see something I shared, it's actually a really cool experience, and that's been our product to date. But I'm providing feedback to the product team based on conversations we're having.

I think it is interesting to understand at a network level what's going on. Part of what we do are these best practices, where we pull out some similarities and commonalities about what works well on Facebook for media organizations. We're open to hearing ideas like this and then we can figure out how well they integrate into our product direction.

In your research, did you find that there are problems with cluttering up the page with Like buttons? Is there a point where you overwhelm someone with too many of those kinds of buttons on a page?

Osofsky: We didn't find that there would be too much clutter with a Like button on a page, but we did find that the way people implement a Like button does have a real effect on driving traffic. We found that if you had a Like button with thumbnails of your friend, and if you let people comment when they are Liking something, and show it next to visually appealing content -- those things combined can increase the use of the Like button by three to five times. Implementation definitely matters with the Like button.

Publishers often grapple with the question of how often to post to their page on Facebook. Have you found any best practices around posting frequency?

Osofsky: We didn't look specifically at the frequency of posts. What we looked at was the nature of the content in the post. Was it a question? A headline? A call to action, such as 'like this article' or 'comment below.' The time of day it was posted. We did see significant differences when it comes to passionate debate or emotional and evocative or interesting breaking sports news like the Blackhawks winning the Stanley Cup. Those tended to have two to three times more engagement. And status updates with calls to action also had more engagement.

We didn't look specifically at the frequency issue, but I think that probably depends site to site. There are some forms of content where more frequent updates are something people are interested in. For instance, I follow the Boston Globe's coverage of sports, and if they sent me the Boston Red Sox score every night just as the game was ending that would be great and useful to know for me. But on the other hand there are things that are lengthy discussions, and at that pace, a high frequency of postings wouldn't be as effective.

What's great about our Insights tool is that it gives you the ability to understand how users are interacting with it. You can understand which posts are most engaging, and also if you're posting too much, users have the ability to hide all posts from a publisher -- which is a good leading indicator to how people are reacting to your frequency of posts.

So you can see how many people are hiding your updates?

Osofsky: Yes, you can see a stat [to find out] after making a post if people are hiding future posts from you. On the flip side, you can see the engagement after each post, how many Likes you got or comments, which can be positively reinforcing.

Osofsky talks about future plans for the Facebook + Media page:

futureface.mp3

*****

What do you think about the new Facebook + Media page? How has Facebook helped drive traffic to your site? Do you think they should share ad revenues with page publishers? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

Mark Glaser is executive editor of MediaShift and Idea Lab. He also writes the bi-weekly OPA Intelligence Report email newsletter for the Online Publishers Association. He lives in San Francisco with his son Julian. You can follow him on Twitter @mediatwit.

This is a summary. Visit our site for the full post ».

Education content on MediaShift is sponsored by Carnegie-Knight News21, an alliance of 12 journalism schools in which top students tell complex stories in inventive ways. See tips for spurring innovation and digital learning at Learn.News21.com.

"We are not going to make it with uninspired and uninspiring teachers!" Archbishop Desmond Tutu challenged delegates in his closing address to the second World Journalism Education Congress (WJEC2) in South Africa last month.

The anti-Apartheid warrior and Nobel Laureate described journalism as a "noble calling" and recounted his country's hard-fought struggle for media freedom. During the event he also signed the Table Mountain Declaration, an initiative of the World Association of Newspapers that calls for an end to insult and criminal defamation laws used to censor African media.

This inspiring end to the Congress left delegates hopeful about the future of journalism education, even as the future of journalism itself remains uncertain.

With the theme "Journalism Education in an Age of Radical Change," WJEC2 was staged in July at the high-tech Africa Media Matrix, home of Rhodes University's School of Journalism and Media Studies, a UNESCO Centre of Excellence.

Remarkably, what is arguably the most technologically advanced journalism school on the African continent is situated in the remote town of Grahamstown, in the poorest province of South Africa, the Eastern Cape. Attracting, transporting and accommodating over 350 J-educators, many with First World expectations, to this J-school at the bottom of Africa proved logistically challenging. But they pulled it off in spite of the doubters.

Joe Foote, the head of the World Journalism Education Council and dean of Oklahoma University's Gaylord College of Journalism and Mass Communication, ultimately described the Congress as the coming out party of journalism education.

According to Auckland University journalism professor Martin Hirst, the Congress was "the best thing to happen to journalism education in the 15 years I've been involved with it." It was certainly an important milestone in global journalism education, and it came during a turbulent period in industry history, in the context of the astounding rise of social media.

The Congress was staged at the height of the World Cup, and in conjunction with the biggest annual gathering of African journalists on the continent, the ICT conference, Highway Africa. The event blended practice with theory -- there were 90 academic papers presented alongside six expert panels and 11 deliberative forums -- and networking with cultural exchange of rare depth.

For me, one of the key outcomes was the impact of immersion in African journalism education. This meant being exposed to African journalism teachers, some of whom have to daily confront the ravages of war and genocide in their classrooms, not to mention government censorship, the realities of poverty, and the extreme challenges of limited access to technology. But equally, it meant being inspired by the innovative practices these hardships have inspired; the media rights activism by academics that they necessitate; and the reaffirmation of the central role of journalism education globally in an era of professional upheaval and transformation.

Social Media no longer discretionary

According to the Congress convener, the indefatigable Prof. Guy Berger, the head of Rhodes' journalism school and winner of a Knight News Challenge grant for an innovative mobile journalism project, one of the key lessons from WJEC2 is the need for journalism education to avoid taking itself for granted.

"It needs to demonstrate its contemporary relevance in both its profile and its practice," he said. "That means playing in public space, including internationally, and ensuring continuous innovation in what gets taught, how it's taught, and to whom it's taught."

By this Berger means that journalism schools need to broaden their range of training topics to include social media, for example, as well as to expand their definitions of prospective students to include professional journalists seeking to upgrade their qualifications and obtain new skills. "They should also extend to topical courses for citizen journalists and to news literacy for the general public," he said.

These are pertinent points, and they highlight the second key conclusion I drew from the Congress: Social media literacy is now an essential element of journalism education and training.

"[Social media] isn't just a kind of fad from someone who's an enthusiast of technology," the BBC's director of global news, Peter Horrocks, told reporters earlier this year. "I'm afraid you're not doing your job if you can't do those things. It's not discretionary."

Social media sites, including blogs, are now essential items in journalists' kitbags. They are tools for newsgathering and dissemination; for investigation and crowdsourced fact-checking. Perhaps most importantly, though, they are platforms for engagement with what NYU's Jay Rosen famously dubbed "the people formerly known as the audience" -- each one of whom is a potential source.

Certainly, YouTube, Twitter and Facebook may ultimately be replaced by new, hybrid sites, but the concept of an unmediated, interactive, audience-engaged and activated real-time web platform for journalism is here to stay. And that means social media theory and practice must be embraced by journalism teachers and embedded in journalism training.

Rules of Engagement

There are rules of engagement for journalists -- including student journalists and those who train them -- operating in these spaces. Rules which require more than mere technical knowledge of how to tweet or post a Facebook status update. They also demand reflective practice and critical thinking in reference to ethics and professionalism.

So, while individual journalists are now expected to swim with the social media tide, rather than resist it, it's incumbent upon their employers, industry trainers and educators to provide the training necessary to equip the practitioners. This means journalism teachers need to be facilitating both technical training and critical engagement with these new technologies and their impacts. They should also be researching and practicing in the field themselves.

Six Recommendations on Social Media

It was this reality that concentrated minds in a deliberative forum at WJEC2 on the role of social media in journalism training. I chaired the forum, while world-renowned online journalism pioneer and media trainer Mindy McAdams provided expert input. Twenty-five journalism educators representing every continent debated the issues, from the inevitable "But who _is _a journalist?" to the ethical challenges of verification and the importance of authentic engagement in the social media sphere.

Ironically, we debated the role of social media in journalism education in the midst of a week-long South African Internet outage caused by damage to an undersea cable between Mombasa and Mumbai. Frustrating as this was at times, it created a unique opportunity to reflect on the changes the real-time social web has wrought. And we ultimately made six recommendations on the role of social media in journalism education to the Congress. These will form the basis of a detailed report to be posted at the WJEC2 website and published academically in the coming months. The recommendations are:

1. Social media exposure and competency is now an essential component of journalism training globally. Even in areas where Internet access is limited or absent, mobile access is leveling the technological playing field and crossing cultural boundaries.
2. Journalism educators and trainers need to be at the cusp of radically changing journalism training. Definitions of journalism, journalists, and journalism practice are in flux. Rather than trying to "pin jelly to the wall," journalism educators should facilitate open discussions about the ways in which journalism is changing, focusing on descriptions and predictions, not definitions and limits.
3. Creativity is necessary to embed social media practice into traditional journalism training and integrate with theory, as opposed to teaching it in isolation. Specific platforms (such as Twitter) need not be taught as stand-alone tools; rather, the key is to demonstrate/train people in changing journalistic practices.
4. Ethics and professionalism are part of teaching social media. Themes include: Authenticity, verification, transparency vs. objectivity, managing the personal/professional divide, sourcing.
5. Teach students to select and curate diverse sources of information and professional contacts to build networks and new audiences -- and expand beyond friends and official local news sources.
6. Explore using social media to excite students about topics that interest them (e.g. social justice or environmentalism) and engage and collaborate with local communities.

These recommendations will feed a broader assessment of the state of global journalism education and its future functions that will flow from the WJEC2 forums on a range of essential themes.

Firing on All Cylinders

For future journalism education to perform at optimum levels, it will need to be firing fully on three cylinders, according to Berger.

"It will require excellence in terms of teaching facilities and faculty for full-time learners; it will mean accessible offerings for part-timers, media professionals, ordinary citizens and community-based groups; and it will need journalism educators to perform as public intellectuals through interventions about the key information society debates of the day," he said.

And I would suggest journalism education needs to fire up a fourth cylinder, one which involves schools and educators activating social media to ensure they remain globally interconnected, while also interacting publicly with their broadening constituencies. This is in the interest of both the future of journalism education and the profession Desmond Tutu describes evocatively as a "calling."

Photo by Tim Anger

Julie Posetti is an award winning journalist and journalism academic who lectures in radio and television reporting at the University of Canberra, Australia. She's been a national political correspondent, a regional news editor, a TV documentary reporter and presenter on radio and television with the Australian national broadcaster, the ABC. Her academic research centers on talk radio, public broadcasting, political reporting and broadcast coverage of Muslims post-9/11. She blogs at J-Scribe and you can follow her on Twitter.

Education content on MediaShift is sponsored by Carnegie-Knight News21, an alliance of 12 journalism schools in which top students tell complex stories in inventive ways. See tips for spurring innovation and digital learning at Learn.News21.com.

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When I finally purchased my first smartphone, Google's Nexus One, last March, I quickly declared myself a satisfied customer. I was easy to impress. Anything was a step up from a five-year-old Samsung with a pull-up antenna.

Like many, I dreamt of an iPhone, but was turned off by what I heard about AT&T's service. I waited in vain for the iPhone to be offered on a different network, and finally realized that day would not come anytime soon.

After reading the buzz about Android phones, particularly the Nexus One, I rationalized that holding out -- not joining the "Apple cult," as some call it -- was a smart move. I liked that Google and Nexus One attempted to change the system by offering an unlocked phone that enabled me to switch out SIM cards when traveling overseas with no annoying fees or wait times.

The one factor I neglected to put into the equation was customer service. Not until a few months later during a hit-and-run car accident would I realize its value.

Nexus One Envy

When friends with the iPhone 3GS watched my Nexus One snap beautiful photos with a flash, multi-task and miraculously take dictated texts and emails from the sound of my voice, they whined that they had "Nexus One envy." When I told them about T-Mobile's lower prices and good coverage, they cursed that they were locked into a network they despised. I felt like the wise, slow turtle that beat the hare by waiting for the right phone, the right philosophy and the right network.

Fast-forward four months. As I tweeted away while watching the World Cup final, my Nexus One's on/off button stopped working. I had dropped it before its failure, so it was probably my fault. Since I didn't purchase the phone at a store, I couldn't simply march in and have it repaired. I patiently navigated to HTC's Nexus One site and called the company from a friend's phone to ask how to proceed.

The HTC worker told me to send in the phone. They would look at it and email me to tell me how much the repair would cost. The whole process would take five to seven business days. They emailed a shipping label, and I was off.

I thought it would be an adjustment, yet a worthwhile social experiment, to be phone-less for a week. Maybe it would help me get back to basics, increase productivity and finally finish the book I'd been reading.

A few days later while driving, a drunk driver crashed into me in a hit-and-run. The social experiment was no longer fun. I found myself in the awkward position of not being able to give out my phone number to police, insurance companies or witnesses.

As if a technological curse had been cast on me, my brand-new 16-day-old MacBook Pro began acting funny, turning off for no reason. I brought it to the Apple Genius Bar, where they ran a diagnostic on it. They didn't find anything wrong with the computer.

"What do you want me to do?" asked the Apple employee I told him I would feel better if they exchanged it for a new one. With no further questions, that's exactly what he did, happily and promptly. He said, "We want to make you happy."

I couldn't believe it.

Apple vs. HTC Service: No Contest

My laptop problem was solved in a day, but my phone issue was still simmering. Over 12 days, I hotly pursued HTC for an update on my phone. After multiple phone calls with an average 30 minute wait time, they gave me conflicting reports. One representative said they mailed it back to me already; another told me they were moving locations so things were backed up. A call center supervisor tried to make me feel better: "The good news is that your phone has been scanned as received by the repair center."

Four times, they let me know that my case had been "escalated," meaning that within 24 hours, they would call me back and tell me what was going on. They never did. I saw myself getting worked up and angry, utterly frustrated.

Meanwhile, the Phoenix police department located the drunk driver who crashed into me in a fraction of the time it took HTC to find my phone. After five consecutive days of calling HTC (nearly two weeks after it left my possession), HTC sent my phone back to me, minus the back cover and with the on/off button still physically broken. At least it works now, even if it's cracked.

I can't imagine Apple mailing back a phone in such condition, leaving their customer to hold their product together with tape, as I now do with my HTC phone. And now that the Nexus One has been discontinued by Google, I am sure HTC's customer service will get worse -- if that's even possible. I'm already in the market for a new phone. Full circle, I'm back to waiting for the iPhone to be offered on a different network.

Nexus One was a great idea in theory, but if you have no one reliable place to go to when it breaks, you are stuck with an expensive paperweight.

After these experiences, I realize that customer care is nearly as important as the device itself. As my friends who have updated to the new iPhone belly-up to the Genius Bar to get their free "bumpers," I'm the one with phone envy now. Call it a cult if it makes you feel better, but sign me up.

UPDATE (8/6/2010): The day that this article originally ran I received a phone call from a very friendly representative at Nexus One. I had left their corporate office a message about my experience 10 days prior, but honestly never expected to hear back from them. The representative apologized profusely and said that what happened to me was unacceptable and not the norm. He wanted to know if it was okay to send me a brand new phone. I just received the new device via FedEx. You are probably wondering -- will I shun this new phone and move forward on an iPhone? No. I'm going to give HTC another chance. Maybe I am a glutton for punishment but I really do think the Nexus One is great -- when it is working, and when I do not need repair or service. Those are big ifs and whens. Fingers crossed.

Michelle May is a San Francisco-based travel writer. She blogs here.

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