Felicia M. Sullivan, Ph.D.

Blogs to Riches – The Haves and Have-Nots of the Blogging Boom — New York Magazine: “wo years ago, David Hauslaib was a junior at Syracuse University who was, as he confesses, “totally obsessed with who Paris Hilton was sleeping with.” So he did what any college student would do these days: He blogged about it. Hauslaib began scouring the Web for paparazzi photos of Hilton and news items about her, then posting them on his Website, Jossip.com. (Sample headline: PARIS HILTON SPREADS IT IN THE HAMPTONS.) “My friends got a chuckle out of it, but it didn’t get really big or anything—maybe a few hundred visitors a day,” he says.

Then one day Hauslaib took a good look at Gawker, a gossip site owned by the high-tech publisher Nick Denton. Gawker’s founding writer, Elizabeth Spiers, had pioneered a distinctive online literary style and earned a large following in the Manhattan media world. What really got Hauslaib’s attention, though, was Gawker’s advertising-rate sheet. According to Denton, the site received about 200,000 “page views” a day from readers. The site ran roughly two big ads on each page, and Gawker said that it charged advertisers $6 to $10 for every 1,000 page views—almost the same as a midsize newspaper. There was also a smattering of smaller, one-line text ads bringing in a few hundred bucks daily. Doing a quick bit of math, he figured that the income from Gawker’s ads could top $4,000 a day. The upshot? Nick Denton’s revenues from Gawker were probably at least $1 million a year and might well be cracking $2 million. more . . .

“

PJNet Today: What Can We Do to Define Community Journalism?: “ome elements we should be considering in building community journalism:

1. Closeness, intimacy and really getting to understand the community and care about what is happening in the community.
2. Personal connection
3. Have a cultural connection, understanding to the community.
4. Community transcends geography because of shared experience–communities of interest.
5. Not telling a story; we are telling someone’s story.
6. We are mirroring the community, we have to mirror the people within the community,
7. News organizations don’t live in a vacuum; we are interdependent with our neighbors as well as with the traditional sources.
8. Community is a process– a process through which people live their lives.
9. A good community journalist has to care about the community, but also about the people.
10.. Digital technology–using it for conversation
11.. Leadership role. The news media can span community boundaries. Can be the stabilizing magnet to help the communities to work together.
12 Can enhance the conversation to seek the truth.”

This article points to a fact I’ve been thinking about for some time. The openness and flatness of the blogosphere utopia is not as egalitarian as one might think.

The New Gatekeepers: “In a word, we created some new gatekeepers that we now know at the blogging A-list (and, to some extent, an equivalent B-list and C-list). Membership on it is limited and many have said that the way to disprove the power of the A-list is by showing that new members have appeared on it: what few are willing to admit is that the new members are really only allowed as one of these groups if they are vetted by enough existing members. This creates a self-fulfilling cycle where members of the small club of ‘blogs that matter’ get to shape the agenda.”

[more]

Candice%27s%20%20flyer_-1.doc

DailyTech – Wikipedia Now Blocking US Congress From Making Edits

This article begins to discuss the issues around politians editing material on Wikipedia. Seems that when you set up a completely open system this is bound to happen. As the rarified communities of open source and social networking begin to be inundated by the masses, will free and open seems as rosy. Whose community has been broken into? How big can an online community get before those who created it loose control? What is true and real and to whom? Are those who control Wikipedia simply building a new kind of information elite? Or is there really democracy there?

ACMEBoston: Weekly Media Analysis Podcasts

These are useful for media literacy course

Center for Creative Voices in Media Blog: Broadband in Every Pot!: The LA Times editorializes that in the transition to Digital TV, now scheduled for early 2009, DC policymakers should not resell all the old analog spectrum they get back (if they ever do get it back) from broadcasters. Instead, they should reserve a sliver of spectrum for unlicensed wireless broadband access, bringing affordable broadband to many more Americans. This is even more critical now, with the Brand X decision enabling today’s incumbent broadband providers — cable and telcos — to discriminate among content and direct consumers to websites that ‘pay for play. [more]

Last summer, the folks running National Public Radio started to get a clear message from their listeners and member stations: Give us podcasts! They received e-mail requests from listeners for months, and the term “podcast” was one of the most searched terms on NPR.org. The public spoke, and NPR listened, launching podcasts on Aug. 31. [more]

Here is a piece I wrote in the July 2005 issue of inFOCUS

So what does it mean to use the tools of mass
communication (television, radio, and the Internet) within
a community context? What happens when the commercial
push of profit and advertising are not the dictators of
what gets shown? Is community television (or radio)
different than public television (or radio)? How does the
vast openness of the Internet get focused and used so it
serves a common good and not just individual pleasure?
As I enter new work, both at LTC and at the UMass-Lowell,
these are the questions that keep bubbling up in my mind.

Places like LTC are unique. There are very few spaces
in our current landscape where powerful resources are put
into the hands of the average citizen. These resources
are given freely. The use is with no-strings attached. The
only requests are to share and respect the rights and safety
of others. Unlike commercial television (or even public
television), the information and content produced must
serve no other master than the expressive mind of the
creator. Dollars and political agendas do not determine
what gets cablecast. Rather a system of shared use
amongst a range of individual interests prevails. An
electronic commons is the gift we have been given.
Amazing to think that a system where significant funding
comes from a private interest (the cable company) and
sanctioned by the public (the local government), community
television is beholden to neither but exists to serve and
be used by you, the community. It is yours to use as you
see fit and with the hope that you will use it well.

As LTC’s interests in online communities begin to gel
around projects like the DigitalBicycle, it is important for
us to think through how these technologies will serve the
community here and elsewhere. Will local communities
have the ability to determine how these systems will be
used? Is a culture of sharing what is produced rewarded
Will commercialism be resisted? Are all welcome to participate?
These are the questions we must ask to ensure that community
is preserved.

And what a dream it would be if all of our community
information and communication resources were put toward that
ideal of creating an information and communication commons.
If we as a community demanded more from our media than
entertainment as means to sell us more stuff. A community
communication system would enrich us. It would reflect who we
are as a community. It would allow us to discuss and share
important stories. It would tell us where we have been and
where we are going. It would be accountable to us (not the
politicians, not the corporations, not the advertisers) . us, the
community.

Kenyatta Cheese has posted a couple of really useful ways to think about portable video production. One is this diagram about the various developments that are converging. It can be found here:

USC Video Covergence Diagram

The other is a list of short portable videos he used to kick off his Portable Video Production Workshop at USC:

short video festival