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Doing journalism at its most basic level is a combination of two essential tasks. The first is reporting — gathering information via research, interviews, etc. The second part is telling your audience what you’ve learned — writing (in the broadest sense, including video, audio, graphics and more) and editing.

The demolition of the professional journalism business model has led to a sharp decline, one I don’t see slowing anytime soon, in traditional media. Many people in the field have been asking an obvious question with a not-so-obvious answer: Who will do the serious journalism we need in the future?

I have another question that will lead us to an answer. Not the answer, but one strong possibility — if we start thinking about, and helping, the “almost-journalists” among us to do actual journalism.

Anyway, here’s the question:

What famous journalism organization has done the best reporting (remember, that’s the gathering process) about the United States government’s Guantanamo Bay prison? That’s the place where the United States holds the people the government has declared to be terrorists, a prison where prisoners have been in many cases tortured and, until recently, held without access to the legal system.

The people who’ve done the best reporting on this scandal have not, for the most part, been working for major media outfits. They’ve been working for that famous journalism organization called the American Civil Liberties Union.

Yes, the ACLU, which has done prodigious work to uncover the truth about America’s actions in creating this extra-legal system, shrouded in secrecy and in general disregard for international law and norms, not to mention America’s traditional respect for human rights. And on the ACLU’s “Rights in Detention” sub-site, you’ll find a huge amount of information — and advocacy — about this topic.

Note the word “advocacy,” because it’s critical here. The ACLU is an advocate, a passionate one, for the Bill of Rights. It is utterly up-front in that advocacy, and is working hard to change our policies in a variety of areas.

Now consider Human Rights Watch, the mission of which is “Defending Human Rights Worldwide.” It’s another advocacy organization that does superb reporting on the issues it cares about and they produces media to spread its message. Take a look, for example, at its report on Saudi Arabian domestic workers to see an exhaustively researched document on some troubling practices.

And then check out the Council on Foreign Relations “Crisis Guides” — see, for example, this one about Darfur - that provide remarkably detailed coverage of global political crises. As the judges of the Knight-Batten Awards said of the council when honoring its work, “This is an institution stepping up and honoring the best of journalism. It’s filling an absolutely articulated need.”

What the council did was journalism, by any standard. It lived up to the vital principles of journalism: thoroughness, accuracy, fairness, independence and transparency.

What the ACLU and Human Rights Watch did was what I’m calling almost-journalism. Their reporting was superb, but what they produced fell just a shade this side of journalism. They didn’t fully apply journalistic principles to their media, and that’s a shame.

Their media? Yes. They are absolutely in the media field now, because they are using the tools of media creation to learn and tell stories, and to make those stories available to a wide audience. These organizations and countless others like them — small and large, local and international — are part of the media ecosystem. With just a little extra effort, they could be part of the journalistic ecosystem too, in ways that go far beyond their traditional roles.

Consider the former public-knowledge trajectory an organization like the ACLU had to follow in the past. It would do painstaking research on topics like Guantanamo, and then it would issue reports. Its public relations people would contact reporters at, say, the New York Times and hope that the newspaper would pick up the story. If the national press ignored the report, no matter how powerful the content, the information would be known to a tiny number of people.

The ACLU still works hard to get its reports covered by the Times and other national media organizations. The traditional media retain a powerful role in helping the public learn about important issues. But advocates have new avenues, which they are learning to use more effectively.

They’d be even more effective, I believe, if they applied the principles of journalism to their work.

They’re falling short today in several areas, notably the one that comes hardest to advocates: fairness. This is a broad and somewhat fuzzy word. But it means, in general, that you a) listen hard to people who disagree with you; b) hunt for facts and data that are contrary to your own stand; and c) reflect disagreements and nuances in what you tell the rest of us.

Advocacy journalism has a long and honorable history. But the best in this arena have always acknowledged the disagreements and nuances, and they’ve been fair in reflecting opposing or orthogonal views and ideas.

By doing so, they can strengthen their own arguments in the end. At the very least they are clearer, if not absolutely clear, on the other sides’ arguments, however weak. (That’s sides, not side; there are almost never only two sides to anything.)

Of course, transparency is essential in this process, and for the most part we get it from advocacy groups. The one we can’t trust are the ones who take positions that echo the views of financial patrons. The think-tank business is known for this kind of thing, and it’s an abysmal practice.

As the traditional journalism business implodes financially, the almost-journalists are going to play an increasingly important role in the ecosystem. As traditional journalism companies are firing reporters and editors right and left, the almost-journalist organizations have both the deep pockets and staffing to fill in some of the gap — if they’ll find a way to apply those old and new journalistic practices to their media, whether it’s designed to inform or advocate.

We in the journalism education business have a special role. We can help the almost-journalists — the ones who want the help — to understand and apply these principles.

If we can get this right, the advocates and think tanks will have more credibility. The public will have more credible information sources. Isn’t that what we all want, and need?

UPDATE: My friend and colleague Ethan Zuckerman pushes back. In a meeting today at Harvard’s Berkman Center he observes that Human Rights Watch gets funding from the same foundations that support his own Global Voices Online project. They’re competing for a limited pool of money, he notes — and, besides, this doesn’t solve the who’ll-pay-for-journalism question but rather shifts it one level away from the reader/viewer/listener.

I’d respond this way: Yes, GV and HRW compete, and yes, in some ways we’re only shifting the sustainability question. But I still think it’s a good idea to elevate (if that’s the right word) the NGO-almost-journalism? As long as these groups are doing something so close, a small amount of leverage can produce some great new supply — and that’s worthwhile in its own right.

Also, welcome to BoingBoing readers, and a thank you to BoingBoing for the pointer.

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I’m honored to be giving a keynote talk at Highway Africa, which has become the biggest annual gathering of African journalists and has a strong element of how technology is changing journalism. A key theme this year is citizen journalism.

The conference has some scholarships available for working journalists. A link to the application is here.

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Paul Grabowicz, head of new media at the UC-Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, forwards these job listings. Good money for 9 months work a year:

Multimedia Fellow (2), UCB Graduate School of Journalism:

The University of California, Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism seeks two experienced journalists with extensive multimedia skills to help coordinate a new School-based research and educational project to develop digital news and information sites for under-served communities in the San Francisco Bay Area.

The Fellows will work with Journalism School faculty to oversee the creation and management of the sites, collaborate with researchers from the Information School, Business School and other campus departments to assess the sites’ performance and viability, and train students in core journalism and multimedia classes at the graduate level.

A BA degree at minimum is required, along with proficiency in the use of multimedia equipment such as digital video cameras, digital audio recorders and digital photo cameras, and multimedia software applications such as Flash, Final Cut Pro, Soundtrack Pro and Photoshop.

Teaching experience is desirable. At least three years experience as a practicing journalist is strongly preferred.

Salary: $80,000 a year for a 9-month teaching and research appointment, with year-round benefits. Possibility of summer employment opportunities at the School. This is a two-year appointment, beginning August 1, 2008, with the possibility of longer term renewal. The positions will remain open until filled. Applications will be reviewed upon their receipt.

Please send applications to Sage Dilts, Dean’s assistant, UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, 121 North Gate Hall, Berkeley, Ca. 94720, sagedilts@berkeley.edu

The University of California is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action employer. The School is committed to diversity as a professional and educational ideal.

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I had a call last week from a researcher for a big-name journalist, asking a question about the expression “citizen journalist”:

I am primarily interested in finding who coined this term and when it
entered the mainstream media. If you are not sure of the exact timing of
the coinage, I am still interested in when you first heard the term “citizen
journalist” or any other relevant information on this topic. Any insights
you have would be greatly appreciated.

It’s a great question. I don’t have a great answer.

I sent out a Twitter Tweet asking for ideas. One person shot back, Ben Franklin. Certainly Franklin was one of the first to *be* a citizen journalist…

There’s a lot of history, including recent history, to examine. Let’s look, for example, at some newspaper databases — keeping in mind that most newspaper archives went online in this way only in the 1980s. (This has led to the modern journalistic failing, exhibited in this posting, of imagining that the world began roughly in 1980…)

A query on “citizen journalist” in NewsBank turns up a piece by the Minneapolis Star Tribune’s Jim Klobuchar, “Work won’t be as lively without her,” dated October 12, 1988. Writing about a colleague, Barbara Flanagan, he said:

As a newspaperwoman, she been a welcome guest in hundreds of thousands of homes for a quarter of a century and as a citizen-journalist she has been a force for good in her community just as long.

I like that. A “force for good in her community” is a high achievement for any journalist.

Jumping ahead to 1995, NewsBank turns up an AP article about Sarah McClendon, who said:

“I’m a citizen journalist ,” she explained. “It means I am trying to do my journalism with the idea in mind I am seeking to give more information to the people of this country for their own good.”

I like that a great deal, too, even with the eat-your-spinach element, because in the end journalism is about giving each other more information for our collective good.

Some people have conflated “civic journalism” with “citizen journalism.” The expression “civic journalism” (also called “public journalism”) was coined in the late ’80s and early ’90s, by Jay Rosen, Jan Schaffer and several others. It connoted the idea that media organizations would help set community agendas in more explicit ways than in the recent past. In a sense, today’s citizen journalism is the outgrowth of this.

What became known as citizen journalism is the result of the digital era’s democratization of media — wide access to powerful, inexpensive tools of media creation; and wide access to what people created, via digital networks — after a long stretch when manufacturing-like mass media prevailed. Blogging was one of the first major tools in this genre.

As I noted to the researcher who asked, not all citizen media is citizen journalism. Most is not.

As to who coined it first in its current, digital-age meaning, or at least came closest, I’m not sure there either. But I’d start with Oh Yeon Ho, founder of Korea’s OhmyNews, who said back in antiquity (2000) that “Every citizen is a reporter.” Mr. Oh is one of the real pioneers in this arena, as we would all agree.

Again, I suspect someone else was ahead of him, even in this context, because I’ve learned never, ever to say someone was first, at least not when I don’t know for sure.

Of course, there’s a debate about whether “citizen journalism” is an expression we want to use in any case. I strongly believe we do, even though non-citizens of specific places can do journalism and participate in media — and they should — just as much as anyone else. My view of it is citizenship at two levels. I am a citizen of the United States, and proud of that. My journalism will, I hope, help fellow Americans. I am also a global citizen, as in one of the dictionary definitions of the word: “an inhabitant, or denizen” — of planet Earth.

That debate is really a topic for a separate post. The most important thing to remember is the democratization that makes it possible for anyone to be part of the journalistic ecosystem. Increasingly, I believe it’s a civic duty, if such an idea still has meaning.

Meanwhile, if anyone has citations of “citizen journalist” prior to 1985 — surely there are lots of them — post them below or shoot me an email. Let’s try to track down the earliest references.

UPDATE: Jay Rosen is trying to nail down a definition for the expression “citizen journalist” here.

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Engadget, the electronics blog, has a detailed iPhone 3G review today. Good overall, but then, near the top, is this whopper:

And its 3G network compatibility finally makes the iPhone welcome the world over, especially after Cupertino decided to ditch its non-traditional carrier partnerships in favor of dropping the handset price dramatically. $200? We’re still a little stunned.

The 3G makes it mostly world-wide in coverage, but the notion that Apple has dropped the handset price to $200 is absolutely, totally bogus.

Apple did nothing of the kind. The company calling itself AT&T is subsidizing the device. But cheaper? Not on your life. In fact, you’ll pay hundreds of dollarsa minimum of $160 more, and maybe lots more during your subscription period of you buy this thing. (Yes, you’ll get the 3G that the company calling itself AT&T offers as part of the deal, but not many other serious benefits unless you’re desperate for GPS.)

Engadget got suckered by the hype this time. A correction is in order.

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For the past several years I’ve been involved in a variety of projects ranging from education to startups. All have involved collaboration, and in most cases the people involved were not in a single location.

One tool has risen above the others for helping keep projects running smoothly. It’s called Basecamp, an online collaborative-organizing system, and it’s gaining adherents all the time.

Basecamp was created by the team at 37signals, a company that offers a suite of Web-based applications aimed at helping you get things done. 37signals is also the crew behind Ruby on Rails, an open-source Web development framework that has a growing and passionate user base.

The philosophy at 37signals is to do a few things — the ones that users truly want and need most — really well, and skip the rest. Basecamp exemplifies this notion. It’s not nearly as powerful as some other project-management tools, but it’s proved to be indispensible.

I’ve used Basecamp in a number of things ranging from a class project, where we worked on creating a website for the new Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship (alpha site here); planning and operating a nonprofit center; and organizing and operating the development of a for-profit startup.

There’s enough flexibility in the service for lots of different uses. I’ve found the messaging; to-do lists; and milestone planning especially valuable.

You can create RSS feeds of almost everything, and there’s a nifty email method for handling message. Recently, Basecamp added the ability to respond to an emailed (via Basecamp) message in an email reply.

There’s also access to “Writeboards” — where you post documents you’re sharing. This is modestly useful, but doesn’t come close to matching Google’s online document collaboration system; if several people in a small organization are tweaking a spreadsheet, for example, Google or a round-robin email is far superior to the Basecamp method.

The system has its flaws. One that drives me nuts is the inability to add new people to projects in “batch mode” — that is, more than one at a time — forcing me to do each one separately, a time-consuming process. I asked the company in a support email about adding the feature and got the kind of non-committal response that I took to mean, “We’re not interested in doing that, so don’t hold your breath.”

More problematically for me and others who are offline (typically in airplanes) a lot: There’s no offline mode. By this I mean there’s no way to suck down the entire project to your personal computer, make changes and then have them reflected back to the online project when you reconnect. Admittedly, this is difficult, and can cause versioning problems, not to mention oddities in online conversations where the thread can get confused. But it’s not impossible, and I’d be much happier if Basecamp had this capability.

Overall, however, Basecamp has proved to be a great tool for small-team collaboration, and expecially so when people are distant geographically as they are in several of my projects. There’s a free, limited-feature version. Monthly charges for the more extensive features range from $24 to $149; I pay $49 a month for capabilities that include SSL encryption security and as many as 35 active projects at once.

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I’ve been advising a San Francisco startup, Flowgram, where Abhay Parekh and his team have come up with a novel Web 2.0 idea.

It’s a system that lets you guide someone through several websites or pages, showing various items — but where the pages and links stay “live” for the user. Here’s a smart one by a Flowgram developer, Tony Lopez, showing some great blogging tools:

I’ve created several journalism-related Flowgrams with a focus on new media. Keep in mind that I’m still an amateur at this, as will be obvious…

For example, take a look at this brief introduction to the Washington Post’s superb “Faces of the Fallen” project:

Here’s another, a look at how bloggers are becoming some of the best of today’s media critics — in part by pointing directly to errors and sources that show why the original stories are mistaken.

This tool has great possibilities.

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For the past several years I’ve been involved in a variety of projects ranging from education to startups. All have involved collaboration, and in most cases the people involved were not in a single location.

One tool has risen above the others for helping keep projects running smoothly. It’s called Basecamp, an online collaborative-organizing system, and it’s gaining adherents all the time.

Basecamp was created by the team at 37signals, a company that offers a suite of Web-based applications aimed at helping you get things done. 37signals is also the crew behind Ruby on Rails, an open-source Web development framework that has a growing and passionate user base.

The philosophy at 37signals is to do a few things — the ones that users truly want and need most — really well, and skip the rest. Basecamp exemplifies this notion. It’s not nearly as powerful as some other project-management tools, but it’s proved to be indispensible.

I’ve used Basecamp in a number of things ranging from a class project, where we worked on creating a website; planning and operating a nonprofit center; and organizing and operating the development of a for-profit startup.

There’s enough flexibility in the service for lots of different uses. I’ve found the messaging; to-do lists; and milestone planning especially valuable.

You can create RSS feeds of almost everything, and there’s a nifty email method for handling message. Recently, Basecamp added the ability to respond to an emailed (via Basecamp) message in an email reply.

There’s also access to “Writeboards” — where you post documents you’re sharing. This is modestly useful, but doesn’t come close to matching Google’s online document collaboration system; if several people in a small organization are tweaking a spreadsheet, for example, Google or a round-robin email is far superior to the Basecamp method.

The system has its flaws. One that drives me nuts is the inability to add new people to projects in “batch mode” — that is, more than one at a time — forcing me to do each one separately, a time-consuming process. I asked the company in a support email about adding the feature and got the kind of non-committal response that I took to mean, “We’re not interested in doing that, so don’t hold your breath.”

More problematically for me and others who are offline (typically in airplanes) a lot: There’s no offline mode. By this I mean there’s no way to suck down the entire project to your personal computer, make changes and then have them reflected back to the online project when you reconnect. Admittedly, this is difficult, and can cause versioning problems, not to mention oddities in online conversations where the thread can get confused. But it’s not impossible, and I’d be much happier if Basecamp had this capability.

Overall, however, Basecamp has proved to be a great tool for small-team collaboration, and expecially so when people are distant geographically as they are in several of my projects. There’s a free, limited-feature version. Monthly charges for the more extensive features range from $24 to $149; I pay $49 a month for capabilities that include SSL encryption security and as many as 35 active projects at once.

Give it a try…

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The McClatchy Washington bureau series, Guantanamo: Beyond the Law, puts to shame almost all the other reporting by other news organizations. It’s falling through the cracks, because of the NIH syndrome in journalism — institutional unwillingness to talk about other journalists’ great work and what they’ve reported.

One other paper has noticed. The Boston Phoenix asks, Is anybody paying attention to McClatchy’s powerful Guantánamo exposé?

Apparently, no. Another example of Washington journalism at work, or not at work.

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(This is the thirteenth in a series of postings about citizen media business issues. See the introduction here. All of these entries are considered to be in “beta” and will be revised and refined as they find a home on a more permanent area of the Center for Citizen Media web site. To that end, your comments, additional examples, and criticisms are welcome and will be invaluable contributions to this process.)

The last Citizen Media Business Issues post concerned the first step to establishing a website: registering a domain. A domain, however, is nothing more than a name to help people to identify and remember your site. The next step, then, is to make something for that domain to display. These two steps are separate, and treating them as such is advisable (see Registering a Domain for more on why).

Web content is stored on servers, computers with substantial connections to the Internet that map what a user types in their web browser to a file you’ve created. While it’s technically possible-with a bit of know-how-to make almost any computer function as a basic server, using your home PC and broadband connection to host a website is a bad idea. It won’t save you much money (if any), takes a lot of time, poses a security risk, and will be unreliable at best. Even if your ISP is one that doesn’t forbid web hosting (as Comcast does), the connection you have almost certainly isn’t robust enough to serve small amounts of content to more than a handful of people. Considering the cost to get a more reliable connection-such as a “T1″ line-runs at least a few hundred dollars a month, you’ll probably be better off going through a web hosting service.

But where to start? There are thousands of companies who want to sell hosting to you at wildly varying prices. Should you go with a free host because you “have nothing to lose?” Should you use the biggest, most populous company for its reliability?

A good first step is to make a list of what you want in terms of specs and features, starting with the three most important…

Bandwidth, Storage Space, and the Ability to Upgrade

Bandwidth refers to how much data can be sent to or from users. If your bandwidth allocation is 1GB/month and your average page is 100k (rather large), then you will be able to deliver approximately 10,000 pages before service is stopped or you’re hit with a surcharge. Every time a user looks at a piece of text, image, podcast, Flash program, JavaScript, video, or any other file, it is transferred to them and subtracts from your bandwidth allotment (embedded or linked multimedia like YouTube videos don’t count).

Once you’ve started and have a feel for the amount of traffic coming in, a common formula for determining bandwidth needs is to multiply together the average daily visitors, average page views per visitor, and average page size, multiply that by 31 (days in a month), then double your result.

[Web statistics like page views and daily visitors will be more deeply covered in a later post.]

Storage is the amount of hard drive space on the server you will have available for all of your text, media, and programs. How much you need depends on the sort of content you’ll be offering. If you plan to only link to third-party sites for multimedia and won’t be storing large files, you probably don’t have to go overboard, but you also don’t want to be in a position of being forced to delete old content because you’ve run out of space.

The ability to upgrade is key. Launching a new site, it’s hard to know exactly what it’ll look like down the road and even harder to determine how much traffic it will attract. Use your best guess in the beginning (a couple hundred MB of storage and 5GB of bandwidth will usually be fine starting points for most), but be sure that whatever host you pick will allow you to bump these up if necessary without incurring additional set-up fees. When comparing prices, take note of the differences in storage/bandwidth levels above what you’re initially looking for. You might find that some companies offer a basic plan at low cost, but increase prices sharply for upgrades.

Other Features to Think About

Subdomains are what come before your domain name in a URL. They are primarily used for organizational purposes. For example, you may wish to point a user to http://news.yoursite.com for news instead of http://www.yoursite.com/news/.

eCommerce web hosting refers primarily to shopping cart software and on-site credit card processing. Some sites give you the features (like a static IP and appropriate language support) to bring in such software and set it up yourself, but it’s difficult to do so. Getting an eCommerce hosting package usually entails everything being done for you. Having a shopping cart and processing credit cards right on your site certainly feels more professional than redirecting users to third party sites, but if selling a variety of things is not your site’s raison d’être, you probably don’t need this.

You will have to decide which operating system you want to run: Unix or Windows. Whether or not you run Windows at home is, for the most part, irrelevant, and unless you know of a particular reason you have to use Windows (such as being an avid Visual Basic programmer), Unix is the more popular choice-and probably the better choice for citizen journalist types given the much wider array of free software available for it.

Most websites today use more programming languages than just html. For example, if you want to have a forum or blog, you’ll need to use database software like MySQL, which is almost always part of the deal. Language support will in some part depend on which operating system the server is run on, but Java, Perl, PHP, and MySQL compatibility is a good standard.

FrontPage Extensions if you will use Microsoft FrontPage to create your web pages.

Multiple email addresses. Email is a standard feature, but if you want to create addresses for several people (members of an organization, users, contributors, and so on), you’ll need to make sure the limit is high enough.

The level of customer support varies wildly from host to host. Phone support is helpful, but don’t get too excited about 24/7 call centers. It can increase your out-of-pocket cost and many of them are staffed overseas by people who may be better trained at selling additional services than being able to help you without the aid of an administrator who doesn’t work 24/7. Make a call at an odd hour and send an email with specific questions about the services beforehand to see how it’s handled. How long did it take to get a response to the email? Did it answer your questions well? Did a knowledgeable person pick up the phone?

Server Use

When shopping for a host, you will see large price differences between dedicated, virtual, and shared server space. These terms refer to usage of a single machine-you share a server with others, have one dedicated to you, or use a server that has been partitioned into separate “virtual” servers. Dedicated servers are, of course, much faster than shared servers, but if the main reason you want a dedicated server is for the technical control/administrative flexibility it allows, virtual servers will function the same way without the increased bandwidth. The vast majority of web pages are run on shared servers, which is a fine place to start. Very few of you will really need the features of a virtual server, and if you do at some point, you can always switch over. Likewise, a dedicated server is almost definitely overkill, but you can always upgrade if you need to.

Reading Marketing Material

Look for money back guarantees. As with most good business transactions, you should be allowed to cancel and get a refund within a certain timeframe if their services aren’t up to par.

Beware the word “unlimited!” So many bargain hosts advertise “unlimited bandwidth,” but fail to point out that your bandwidth is limited by their bandwidth. If you’re on a crummy server packed to the gills, your “unlimited bandwidth” could be substantially slower than other companies’ “limited” bandwidth. Remember that the people you’re sharing the server with have the same unlimited bandwidth. Should one of them decide to become a popular place to download huge files, with no bandwidth cap you will suffer.

The more a company talks (brags) about its server specs and tells you exactly what to expect, the better. One useful such metric is an uptime percentage, which is literally the percentage of time the host’s sites have been up. Hosts themselves are not typically keen on releasing this (though some do, and deserve credit for it), but there are a number of third party programs that will measure it over time. A common marketing tactic is the “uptime guarantee.” This “guarantee” is not actually a sure thing, but a promise that if the the stated measure is not met, you will be compensated. To what extent you are compensated and how difficult it is to prove, however, are another matter. GoDaddy, for example, has an uptime guarantee of 99.9%, but a look into the GoDaddy Legal Agreement reveals the way it really works:

If Go Daddy fails to maintain this level of service availability, You may contact Go Daddy and request a credit of 5% of Your monthly hosting fee from Go Daddy for that month. The credit may be used only for the purchase of further products and services from Go Daddy, and is exclusive of any applicable taxes.

Cost

While free/bargain hosts sound attractive, there are almost always huge disadvantages. Most will force you to display some sort of advertising, which can make your site look very unprofessional (see, for example, any free Geocities page). They are also typically less reliable, slower, have little or no support, may not be around long, and have far fewer features. You should expect that a good host will cost somewhere in the vicinity of $10-$20/mo.

Blog-Hosting Services

The most notable exceptions to the “avoid free hosts” rule are blog-hosting services. These are, as the name suggests, companies that will host your weblog-usually at little or no cost. The next post will go into more detail as to the pros, cons, and differences between these services, but basically, blogs are a cheap, easy, and fast way to get your content out to the world. They come with a variety of features, but are constrained by the blog format and can’t pack dynamism that a regular website can.

While basic templates and the use of subdomains like http://yourblog.wordpress.com can give off an amateurish vibe, most of these services can be extensively customized visually and subdomains can be rendered somewhat invisible by a forwarding domain name (see post on registering a domain name for more on this). Or, even better than forwarding, some of these sites allow you to treat them like normal little web hosts, “mapping” your domain to their servers and skipping the subdomain altogether (Blogger provides this feature at no cost, but most require an upgrade).

Mega Hosts, Resellers, and Everybody Else

So you have your list of desired features and you know about a few things to look for or avoid, but there are still so many choices. Mega hosts like GoDaddy and 1&1 Internet host millions of sites. They’re good because you know they aren’t going anywhere, will be fairly cheap, and will have giant user bases to draw from for help should customer support not provide what you need. On the other hand, their primary concern is to pump out as many sites as possible, often cramming too many sites on a server. They also are less likely to bend over backwards to help you and less likely to think twice before taking down controversial content.

Note: If free speech protection is important to you, the Citizen Media Law Project has a great section on free speech in its Legal Issues to Consider When Getting Online section and Dedicated Hosting Guide has a list of “11 Web Hosts that Won’t Dump You at the First Sign of Controversy.” GoDaddy has a problematic reputation in this regard.

On the other end of the spectrum are resellers. Similar to the reselling practice in domain registration, hosting resellers are people or companies who buy space from hosts wholesale, then market and sell it to you. The upside to doing business with a reseller is that it’s cheaper and they tend to have decent interfaces. However, they don’t have physical access to the server and you will frequently have to rely on them to act as middleman (and you’ll have to rely on the host they work with). Reselling is an easy business to get into, so they can be unreliable and many are just there to make a quick buck or as a hobbyist project. While there are, of course, many reputable and reliable resellers out there, the cost of web hosting has come down so much over the years that deals you get through a reseller are probably not worth the risk.

Your best bet may be to find something in between-a mid-sized host that offers the features you want, the ability to upgrade, and that you’ve properly checked out. Finding a host is kind of a big deal; you don’t have to do it often (hopefully never again), and picking the wrong one could cost you readers and a great deal of time, so put a little effort into it. A great forum for finding reviews (not to mention deals, advice, and technical how-tos) is WebHostingTalk.com. Avoid what looks too good to be true, do your homework, leave some options open, and read the fine print.

(Ryan McGrady is a new media graduate student at Emerson College where he is studying knowledge, identity, and ideas in the information age.)

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(This is the twelfth in a series of postings about citizen media business issues. See the introduction here. All of these entries are considered to be in “beta” and will be revised and refined as they find a home on a more permanent area of the Center for Citizen Media web site. To that end, your comments, additional examples, and criticisms are welcome and will be invaluable contributions to this process.)

The first step to establishing a website is registering a domain name. This will be your address-and to some extent, your identity-on the Internet.

Technical Overview

A domain name’s function is to neatly label a computer on the web, so that someone looking for a website doesn’t have to remember a string of numbers (the IP address) in order to find it. To make this process work without conflicts, domains are registered for periods of 1-10 years at a time. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers manages this structure, known as the Domain Name System (DNS), and keeps it stable, overseeing registries (directories) and accrediting registrars (those with access to registries). In effect, the registrar acts as an agent between you and the registry and will generally collect a fee for doing so.

Naming Your Domain

Though there some exceptions, an ideal domain name is short, catchy, and intuitive. It looks good written down and sounds good when vocalized. It also helps if it is the same as the name of the site itself. If there is a business, product, print newspaper, or other specific entity that the website will be supporting, it probably makes sense to pick a similarly named domain.

Beyond the basic name, you also have to pick a Top Level Domain, the most popular of which are .com, .net, .org, and .info. In most cases, .com is best. If someone tells you to visit a website called “CityNews,” odds are good that the first thing you enter into your browser will be “CityNews.com.” It’s so popular that the term “dot com” has become synonymous with “website.” An exception to the preference of .com may be the use of .org when you want to put emphasis on the public service nature of your work (nonprofits, community organization, and so on).

If the domain you want is available, grab it ASAP, but be prepared for many or all of the first names you think of to be taken-especially if you’re looking for a .com. Along with this bad news, most registrars will show you whether or not other Top Level Domains with the same name are available. For example, if CityNews.com isn’t available, it might offer you CityNews.info. If you end up going with an alternative like this, make sure to visit the existing .com of the same name first. You wouldn’t want a misdirected potential reader going to the wrong place and finding something unrelated and offensive.

If you’re stuck and looking for name ideas, you could do what the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship did: enlist the help of a name generator like MakeWords or NameBoy. These tools don’t just rearrange the keywords you feed them, but provide all sorts of new ideas and allow for a bit of flexibility, allowing you to specify how you want the domain to start or end, whether or not it can use hyphens, etc. The generated ideas are accompanied by charts that give you a pretty good idea what’s currently available to buy. When I go to NameBoy and enter “news” as my primary keyword and “city” as my secondary, it returns, among hundreds of other available options, newscitycenter.com, updatecity.org, newsmetropolis.com, newsandcity.com, and infocitiez.com.

Choosing a Registrar

A key informational website, InterNIC, is home to the accredited registrar directory, which lists hundreds upon hundreds of places to get your domain name. Beyond these, you can get a domain through a reseller-a company that has partnered with a registrar in a sort of affiliate program so that it can sell registrations to its customers. So how does one choose from these thousands of possibilities?

As it turns out, there aren’t a whole lot of differences.

Although there are plenty of reputable resellers out there, it’s probably best to go straight through a registrar. Sometimes you’ll be able to get discounts through resellers, but the cost to register a domain name has dropped so much that these deals are pretty insubstantial unless you’re buying domains in bulk (saving a few dollars a year in most cases, with domains direct from a registrar going for about $7-$18). Those discounts might also be accompanied by a different kind of expense: you may be required to buy hosting from the reseller, you may have to display advertisements, or support may be lacking. A registrar is also more likely than a reseller to be around years from now. If nothing else, you’re paying a couple bucks for peace of mind and to do away with the extra layer of paperwork and additional terms of use.

Even though ICANN has set up some strict rules for ownership, registration, and transfer of domains, you should still read all terms of use thoroughly before signing up. There are stories all over the web of illegal or unfavorable terms of use, required additional services, and hidden “transfer-out fees,” among other gotchas.

DomainTools has compiled a size-based ranking of all registrars with at least 1,000 domains as of the end of 2007. This may be useful if you want the to compare the established big-name services.

One other factor to consider is how various registrars deal with matters of free speech. The world’s two largest registrars, GoDaddy and eNom, have both been in the news in the last year or so for suspending accounts based on content (see here, here, here, and here). News.com surveyed 12 large registrars as to their suspension policies and found the “most extensive guarantees against unnecessary domain name suspension” with Gandi and DirectNIC. You can find the completed surveys (only 4 of the 12 actually responded), at the bottom of the News.com story.

Registrars, Hosting, and Ownership

A Web host is where the data of your site is actually stored. Hosting will be covered more thoroughly in the next Business Issues post, but I mention it here to make the point that registering your domain name and finding a host are two distinct steps. Some registrars offer hosting in order to sell a complete website package.

Having both in the same place may make things a little easier for you in terms of setup and getting support, but in the long-term it’s advisable to separate the two. Some companies will register the domain in their name, giving it to you as a “feature” of their web hosting or as a package deal. This could mean that you have no rights to the domain should you want hosting elsewhere or if the company goes under.

If you do decide to use one company for both domain registration and hosting, be sure to get in writing a guarantee that you will be able to transfer your domain without fees should you choose to go elsewhere. You can follow up on this by doing a WHOIS query through InterNIC or EasyWhois, which publicly display who a domain is registered to.

On a related note, some registrars offer a feature known as Private Registration for those who don’t want their personal information available through a WHOIS. This can shield you from spam and other unwanted contact and can help to prevent people from knowing your online activities (for example, business competitors who might be interested in the domains you register). To do this, the registrar completes registration under its own name and sets up a written agreement with you to ensure you retain ownership rights. While this is normal practice and there is always some sort of legal agreement involved, it’s a good rule of thumb to retain as much direct control as possible (like having your name on ownership documents).

Domain Forwarding

Domain forwarding is the simple act of pointing your domain name to another location on the Web. There are generally two reasons to do this. First, many people don’t want to bother finding hosting and designing their own website, content to instead use a simpler service like Blogger, Geocities, or LiveJournal. Addresses for sites like these usually look something like http://yoursitename.blogspot.com or http://www.geocities.com/yoursitename. This sort of URL is harder to remember than a dedicated domain name and can make it harder to separate yourself from the crowd. People often have preconceived notions of cookie-cutter designs and content based on which of these popular sites you use. There is an air of credibility and professionalism that you get with your own domain name that is lost when you’re piggybacked on someone else’s.

With domain name forwarding, people visiting it might not even realize they were sent somewhere else. This is especially true if your registrar has a service called “masking,” which keeps your domain name in the user’s browser address bar even after forwarding. This, however, only works for the main page. So if, for example, a user were to click an “archives” link, the true URL will be revealed.

The second reason for domain forwarding is to direct traffic to your site from alternative spellings, incorrect top-level domains, and typos. For example, Google.com has also registered Google.biz, Google.net, Gogle.com, and Gogole.com. These are not independent sites, but rather redirect you to the main site. Even still, Internet marketers have made millions registering misspelled domain names like Giigle.com, Goggle.com, and Guugle.com. The same is true for alternative spellings. Rhode Island newspaper the Providence Journal made sure to forward providencejournal.com to their online presence, projo.com, but they missed theprovidencejournal.com, which has been exploited via ads and news-themed affiliate links.

This practice of registering alternative spellings, called cybersquatting, used to be a much bigger business. In 1999 it was made illegal in cases that met the following three criteria: the trademark owner’s mark is distinct or famous, the domain owner acted in bad faith to profit from it, and the domain name and trademark are either identical or confusingly similar. Unfortunately, since these three criteria all have to be satisfied, cybersquatting can be a tough case to make, so do register as many alternatives as you can.

Miscellaneous Tips

*Keep your whois data up-to-date. You don’t want a notification that your domain is about to expire or was suspended sent to the wrong address.

*Register the domain under your name, not an employee’s, not the registrar’s, and not a pseudonym. The name on the page owns it.

*Do a WHOIS query through InterNIC or EasyWhois when you register and after each renewal to make sure the information is correct. In particular, look for your name and the expiration date. Some registrars have conducted transactions through which you pay them for an extended period, but they only register you for one year at a time, keeping the rest effectively like a loan. This makes for a big problem if you stop doing business with them and they stop renewing.

*Keep your login information secure. This is obvious, but your domain could potentially be your livelihood.

*Unless you’re in the middle of transferring it, “lock” your domain. This prevents you from accidentally falling prey to one of a multitude of transfer scams (a fake notice to renew actually transfers it to someone else).

Additional Resources

The Citizen Media Law Project’s Legal Guide has a wealth of information pertaining to these matters, including sections on trademark law, anonymity, and evaluating terms of service.

(Ryan McGrady is a new media graduate student at Emerson College where he is studying knowledge, identity, and ideas in the information age.)

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Free Press and Public Knowledge have put out a report claiming that “NebuAd Wiretaps Consumers and Hijacks Web Sites.” Quote:

Consumers are having their Web browsing intercepted and Web sites are having their computer code altered by NebuAd, a company that provides targeted advertising for Internet Service Providers (ISPs), according to a technical investigation by Free Press and Public Knowledge.

This is remarkably sleazy behavior, if it’s happening the way the report suggests — and the technical ability of the researcher wins him high credibility.

If this is happening, and if it doesn’t violate some federal and/or state laws, then it’s long overdue for Congress to deal with it.

This kind of stuff gives digital media entrepreneurship a bad name.

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Take a look at the great “Video speech matching” project at TheyWorkForYou.com. They’re combining BBC video of the British House of Commons and official text transcripts, and asking people to match keywords and phrases with the videos, to create a time-stamped archive of important debates.

Tom Steinberg, one of the organizers, says the community has responded in force, and people keep signing up to help. There’s no way to do this (at least not yet) with machines, he says, because machine speech recognition can’t (yet) handle all the different accents and dialects in one bite.

This is reminiscent of NASA’s wonderful ClickWorkers project, which relies on human perception to handle what machines can’t do as well. I love it.

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At a “Future of Journalism” conference at Harvard, where median age is surely >50. Uh oh…

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Others have said this better already, but the Associated Press is on a fool’s errand with its new program in which it aims to charge others — including some bloggers — for making what is blatantly fair use of AP stories. (See the wire’s (unintentionally hilarious) rate details.)

Issuing take-down notices to the Drudge Retort (a community driven site) is obnoxious, plain and simple. Also wrong.

Not only won’t this fly, but it’s a remarkable demonstration of how not to play well on the Web. I know some of the AP folks involved, and I have to assume they’ve been told what to do by their bosses, because they aren’t nearly this clueless.

Meanwhile I’m taking a breather from linking to AP content, at least until sensible people prevail. Good grief.

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(This is the eleventh in a series of postings about citizen media business issues. See the introduction here. All of these entries are considered to be in “beta” and will be revised and refined as they find a home on a more permanent area of the Center for Citizen Media web site. To that end, your comments, additional examples, and criticisms are welcome and will be invaluable contributions to this process.)

So far the Citizen Media Business Issues series has concerned itself with business models and sources of revenue. While this information is probably most interesting to those of you who already have some sort of web presence, it may also be a good idea for someone in the planning stages of a website to have some semblance of a business plan in mind at the start. With the next several postings, we’ll look at some slightly more technical issues related to creating your product or service.

How you approach things, including the question of whether you are trying to make money or not, comes into play when picking a web host, registering a domain name, deciding what type of site to use, and designing the layout. Web hosts do not all have the same stance on matters of free speech. Some don’t allow advertising. Others may limit your ability to customize the appearance of your site. In addition, what happens to your readers and what recourse do you have if your host goes down repeatedly or your domain name is snatched from under you on the day it expires? The decisions you make early on can have significant impacts on your success-both financial and in terms of readership.

In addition to those topics, we’ll also be looking a bit deeper at how you might want to develop your new site (such as a good place to learn the basics of HTML). It’s often difficult to tackle even a small design issue (like tastefully inserting a banner ad) with no knowledge of the technical side of the web.

If there is a particular issue you would like to see answered, feel free to email it to Ryan or leave it in a comment here. The next post on domain names should be appearing in about a week.

(Ryan McGrady is a new media graduate student at Emerson College where he is studying knowledge, identity, and ideas in the information age.)

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On the All Things Digital site I have a piece today about tools that will help transform journalism. This one’s called “iPhone 2.0–Good, Fast, Cheap: Pick Two” — and the debate is still on.

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Bill Moyers is headlining the National Conference on Media Reform in Minneapolis, and just gave a powerful pitch for network neutrality and why journalism’s future is key to the future of democracy. There’s a live stream, worth watching.

The conference is a gathering of mostly left-of-center media activists. That’s too bad in a way, because there are plenty of people on the political right who want media reform, too. They may want a different kind, and for different purposes. But there’s enough common ground that it would be valuable to have a more diverse community here.

Back to Moyers: “The press remains in denial of their role,” he accurately says. The big problem is not allowing competing narratives to emerge.

On Iraq, he again approvingly cites my former Knight Ridder (now McClatchy) colleagues who were the singular journalistic heroes in the Iraq war run-up. For the most part, “the Fourth Estate has become a Fifth Column” for the government, he says — a bit over the top but not enormously so, given what we saw during the media’s shabby recent performance.

He speaks powerfully of democracy’s reliance taming the grossest extremes of poverty and wealth, of not allowing the wealthy to control the law and the lawmakers. In this room he’s preaching — and he’s a former preacher, which is evident in his cadences — to a like-minded choir.

“It’s up to you to tell the truth about this country that we love,” he says.

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From the New York Times homepage a few minutes ago:

Sigh…

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The Knight Ridder, now McClatchy, Washington Bureau was a singular hero among journalists who value great reporting and honor back during the run-up to the Iraq war and its disastrous prosecution. I was, and remain, honored to have been employed by the same company during that period when so many other journalists abandoned their duties.

Now, in the aftermath of the Scott McClellan book, the bureau goes after the continuing unwillingness of those same media people to own up to their failures. In the Nukes & Spooks blog, McClatchy’s Warren P. Strobel and Jonathan S. Landay write, among other things:

The news media have been, if anything, even more craven than the administration has been in defending its failure to investigate Bush’s case for war in Iraq before the war.

Read the piece, which has voluminous documentation of the bureau’s great work. And you’ll understand why I was proud to be associated with these journalists — and why I, like so many others who care desperately about the vital craft, fear for our republic in the wake of the ongoing scandal.

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