Anthony Edwards of “ER” fame did his first tweet — to raise funds for the first children’s pedi­atric train­ing hos­pi­tal in Africa.

Blog­gers, jour­nal­ism, celebri­ties and what the future holds

There was a lit­tle bit of a SXSW vibe at the just-ended Blog­world Expo in Las Vegas — a com­mu­nal feel­ing where the goings-on in the ses­sions (on the whole, con­sis­tently engag­ing) were over­shad­owed by the face time and first-time encoun­ters between long­time Twit­ter friends. To be sure, Blog­World is a smaller affair than SouthBy — one offi­cial told me 1,500 peo­ple turned out for the Causes/Activism track on Thurs­day, 5,000 for the next two days — but from my van­tage point, it seems that the social media phe­nom­e­non has reju­ve­nated ones of the world’s old­est and largest new media gatherings.

Twit­ter was front and cen­ter through­out the affair, both on screen — where rolling tweets of each session’s hash­tags were dis­played (though not con­sis­tently) — and as a way for conference-goers to fig­ure out evening social plans. And cam­eras and recorders were ever­where — here’s my Flickr set of Blog­World.

Below is a recap of the high­lights in my field of vision (see after the jump). In addi­tion, I just posted 8 tips for rais­ing funds online — a recap of the Tools for Non­prof­its panel that I mod­er­ated at Blog­world — over at our sis­ter site, Socialbrite.org.

Jour­nal­ists vs. blog­gers: Can we please move on?

As reg­u­lar read­ers know, I’ve been blog­ging about jour­nal­ism, blog­ging, and the need for jour­nal­ists and blog­gers to love each other and use the best ele­ments of both worlds since 2001, when I started this blog (then called New Media Mus­ings). http://www.nieman.harvard.edu/reportsitem.aspx?id=101042 See, for exam­ple, Blogs and Jour­nal­ism Need Each Other in Harvard’s Nie­man Reports in Fall 2003.

So it’s now irri­tat­ing, and not merely tire­some, to attend a new media con­fer­ence where too many of the ses­sions veered into hos­til­ity toward tra­di­tional news orga­ni­za­tions. The audi­ence ques­tions to and reac­tion to CNN week­end anchor Don Lemon (below), was a case in point.

Why should blog­gers want to work with CNN? Lemon should have more art­fully worded his reply — “The plain truth is that my plat­form is big­ger than your plat­form” — but, with the excep­tion of a few out­liers like iJus­tine or cross-over Twit­ter celebri­ties, that’s still true. It’s not about CNN, it’s about reach and bring­ing value to more people.

The notion that crowd­sourced ama­teur jour­nal­ism can sup­plant pro­fes­sional jour­nal­ism, and actu­ally do a bet­ter job — which many in the audi­ence truly believe — is not only ludi­crous but poten­tially dan­ger­ous to our demo­c­ra­tic insti­tu­tions. Jour­nal­ism that fer­rets out cor­rup­tion, that takes the pulse of a com­mu­nity, that sheds a light on inter­na­tional events is hard work, some­thing that the crowd tends to avoid. Just ask any­one toil­ing in over­worked, under­staffed inde­pen­dent jour­nal­ism pub­li­ca­tions like Spot.us, Alivein­Bagh­dad, Pro Pub­lica, or the just-launched Oak­land Local.

Sim­i­larly, I’ve finally found a fun­da­men­tal dis­agree­ment with my friend, col­league and fel­low Trav­el­ing Geek Robert Scoble. I tweeted my dis­may at the bottom-line premise of his panel, How Social Media Is Chang­ing the Def­i­n­i­tion of News: that news sites should pass along rumors and second-hand reports with­out fact-checking them. “The old world was i fact-checked before I pub­lished, in this new world i can cor­rect it after the fact,” Scoble said.

Imme­di­ately after the panel, he cited TMZ’s early report on the death of Michael Jack­son and the fact that no one remem­bers who reported it sec­ond. “It’s over. It’s over,” he told me, refer­ring to journalism’s authen­ti­ca­tion function.

Well, no.

A rumor can cir­cle the globe before the truth can put on its pants, and we’ve already seen exam­ples of dis­cred­ited reports cas­cad­ing across our social net­works (Twit­ter, Face­book, email) from peo­ple who should know bet­ter. (Snopes is a good place to start to fact-check rumors.) It’s a trend that will only get pro­gres­sively worse in the years to come, and read­ers need a place to go for sep­a­rat­ing truth from rumor. I’ve long advo­cated that news orga­ni­za­tions imple­ment a widget-like tool to report on what trusted news out­lets have reported, what second-hand sources have reported, and what are flat-out lies, so per­haps Robert and I are on the same page on this. But I’ve seen few imple­men­ta­tions of this approach.

There is, to be sure, a grow­ing ten­dency among the Twit­terati and young peo­ple to embrace all things real-time and dis­miss the hard work involved in actu­ally pick­ing up a phone to find out if some­thing is true or not before pass­ing it along. Pass­ing along a rumor isn’t jour­nal­ism, it’s what Matt Drudge usu­ally does. Vet­ting a sec­ondary report — pick­ing up that phone — isn’t as sexy or easy as tweet­ing “Have no idea if this is true or not but …”

Still, fact check­ing will always remain a fun­da­men­tal part of news report­ing — whether you’re a pro­fes­sional jour­nal­ist or a blog­ger look­ing to main­tain your reputation.

Note: At Friend­feed, Robert says I mis­con­strued his comments.

High­lights from Blog­World Expo

I haven’t had a chance to sort through my three days of note-taking, but here are a few snippets:

• It was great to meet Anthony Edwards, star of “ER,” after his gen­eral ses­sion. (I got sev­eral nice shots of him in my Flickr set.) We talked for a bit about how we might be able to apply social media to advance his new cause: Shoe For Africa. He did his first-ever tweet on stage — @anthonyedwards4 tout­ing the #shoe­forafrica hash­tag. (Nicely done, sir!)

• Wis­dom from Anthony Edwards: “As we com­mu­ni­cate in this medium, let’s do it as if we’re see­ing each other face to face. … Don’t do it with just your thumbs. Do it face to face, per­son to per­son.” That received a round of applause.

• Wis­dom from Chris Bro­gan: “Amaz­ing dif­fer­ence between build­ing an audi­ence and build­ing a com­mu­nity. An audi­ence will watch you fall on a sword, a com­mu­nity will fall on a sword for you.” I may add that to my Face­book favorite quotes.

• More Bro­gan, who spoke a lot about find­ing the heart in social media: “It’s OK to let a blog die. It’s not a kit­ten.” … “Tell sto­ries. Take your ideas and make them small and com­pact and portable.” … “Build armies, make super­friends, equip and embed them.”

• Heard from the folks run­ning the Chicago Tribune’s new net­work of Chicago area blog­gers called ChicagoNow. A praise­wor­thy effort, with 115 local blogs, 10,000 reg­is­tered users and 3.2 mil­lion page views per month. Here’s why the Tri­bune launched ChicagoNow.

• Cameron Sin­clair: “Don’t spend your life run­ning after Ash­ton Kutcher” for a social media cam­paign. Any fleet­ing bump of inter­est in get­ting a celebrity endorse­ment (if it’s not a sus­tained effort) will quickly fade.

• Hugh Hewitt on the jour­nal­ism edu­ca­tion pro­gram at Colum­bia University’s Grad­u­ate School of Jour­nal­ism: “totally irrel­e­vant.” I sus­pect he’s right.

• Ted Mur­phy, founder of Izea (for­merly Pay Per Post): “The FTC is say­ing, Value is value. Whether you’re receiv­ing prod­uct or cash, you have to dis­close it.”

• Tim Sanders was quoted often: “Love is the killer app.” And good to see the #beat­cancer hash­tag so promi­nently fea­tured on Twit­ter and CNN over the weekend.

• I love every­thing about Leo Laporte. But a keynote that says “Pod­cast­ing is dead” and “We are all now the media, con­grat­u­la­tions!” needs some work.

• The Huff­in­g­ton Post sur­passed the Wash­ing­ton Post in traf­fic on Thurs­day, Robert Scoble reported.

• One word for Thurs­day night’s din­ner at the Ital­ian restau­rant Piero with some lumi­nar­ies from the social good move­ment: Wow.

• There were some addi­tional out­stand­ing pre­sen­ta­tions, includ­ing SEO/SEM and by Jere­miah Owyang (@jowyang) on where enter­prise trends and where social media is tak­ing us. I’ll be ref­er­enc­ing and incor­po­rat­ing those into future blog posts here on Socialmedia.biz.

JD Lasica works with major com­pa­nies and non­prof­its on social media strate­gies. See his busi­ness pro­file, con­tact JD or leave a comment.

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