Month: November 2007

Citizen or Journalist – the evidence remains the same.

It’s become a journalistic cliche – the crew or photographer who film police misbehaving and then have to hide the evidence or have it destroyed. Curiously enough that now appears to have become an ‘occupational’ hazard for citizen journalists.

Kimberley Michaelson writes how witnesses to an alleged police beating in Chicago were told to delete their mobile phone pics and footage or face the same treatment.

It helps me edge toward another element of a definition of a journalist (whether citizen or not) as someone who has evidence and shares it. Of course that would rule out loads of columnists and other writers and rule in a bunch of legal professionals. No probs there.

Hat tip and much more to Geoff Dougherty who is the Editor supporting Kimberley and other online citizen journalists in Cjicago.

Highbury 2.0

In the 1989’s Birmingham’s leaders gathered at Highbury Hall in Moseley for a summit meeting. It was the second time such a gathering had happened and Highbury 2 spawned the idea to break the concrete collar which was stranggling the growth of the city centre.

With the ring road down it is 2007 and Stef Lewandowski is now proposing a crowdsourced future for the city centre, using us and a wiki to shape where next. Highbury 2.0 has my support, how about you?

Online Fundraising Tears of Joy the Private Eye Way.

I used to find the back pages of Private Eye puzzling. Rows of personal ads asking for money to help people “travel” “pay my mums nursing fees” or “finish university”. Why would you bother to send a cheque?

I think I understood them a little better when a year ago I threw a few dollars at Volunteer Evolution because I wanted to trust the idea behind her ambitions and it wasn’t a big deal for me financially.

This all came to mind when Jon Bounds alerted me to I Am Not A Drain on Society. A week ago this anonymous medical student added a donate button and eloquently explained:

This is sheer desperation. I mean it. I’m financially crippled, and unless I manage to magic up some cash at warp speed, there is a distinct chance I may get suspended from medical school.

Earlier today they wrote:

I want to say a huge massive thank you to all of you! Between all of you who have either donated, or sent messages of support, you have all reduced me to tears of joy. Basically, I needed £1000 up front to the university to allow me to register as a 2nd year student and get my loan for this academic year. On top of this £1000 I owed them a further £1600. So courtesy of you wonderfully generous individuals, I have now raised £1700 in donations.

So how does this work? I have some ideas:

In the same ways as the Private Eye personals which appeal to people for whom a donation is small fry and the subject has some personal resonance.
Trust built up over a period of blogging to establish a real relationships.
Good writing and entertainment are rewarded (like Radiohead making money from trying to give away their music, but the again possibly not).
The ease of the mechanism. Push button donations are simpler than going to a post box.

It certainly doesn’t appear to be the blogosphere buzzing. Technorati reckons the blog has barely received any links in the last week and Google blog search was telling the same story. It is interesting that only two people I could find who sympathies are other blogging public servants Walking the Streets, Random acts of reality and The Thin Blue Line.

So what have I missed?