For many news and media businesses to survive the recession and thrive after it has ended, they will have to adapt to the economics of abundance. It’s something that I’ve written about before, and Clay Shirky continues to make some of the most cogent comments about the economics of abundance and what many have been calling the attention economy for the last few years. From a keynote at the National Federation of Advanced Information Services, Clay says:

Abundance breaks more things than scarcity does. Society knows how to react to scarcity.

Ann Michael at Scholarly Kitchen blog (which is now in my RSS feeds) for the Society of Scholarly Publishing also quotes Clay as saying:

It’s easy to say “preserve the best of the old and combine it with the best of the new,” but in revolution, the best of the new is incompatible with the best of the old. It’s about doing things a whole new way.

I have struggled with this tension ever since I became a digital journalist in 1996. I knew that the internet would radically disrupt journalism the first time I first used a web browser at a student computer lab at the University of Illinois in August 1993.

However, I have always, always advocated and hoped for a transition that would wed the best of the old with the opportunities provided by the new. As I often say, I’m a very traditional journalist in terms of standards and ethics who uses cutting edge tools. However, it’s clear that many news organisations don’t have the resources anymore even to make strategic decisions about keeping the best of the old and combining it with the best of the new. Tough decisions will need to be made about what they stop doing. It’s sadly, no longer an option to continue doing everything they did in the past.

What is rare in a ‘world of cheap perfect copies’?

As Adam Tinworth said recently, publishers don’t have a great track record of adapting to this disruptive development:

We, as an industry, botched the transition online. We treated the internet as, at best, the poor cousin of the print title, to be filled with the left-overs from the established product and, at worst, a mere marketing device. Then, when the invention of the single most efficient information distribution mechanism mankind has yet come up with transformed our industry and its economics, we descended into panic.

How did print botch the transition online? It wasn’t for lack of trying. Steve Yelvington, someone I consider both a friend and mentor, was one of the few people who can say he was there at the beginning in terms of the internet and print, working on digital projects in the early 1990s. In his post, “Early to the game but late to learn how to play“, he makes a key observation:

The future gets created by individuals full of fire and passion, not institutions.

Clay supports Steve’s view and experience. It wasn’t that print publishers didn’t see this coming. They tried a number of plans. Clay said:

The curious thing about the various plans hatched in the ’90s is that they were, at base, all the same plan: “Here’s how we’re going to preserve the old forms of organization in a world of cheap perfect copies!”

The focus on preserving the legacy institution continues, and if you look at most of the paid content strategies, they are largely based on monetising current activities and content. About the only exception to this is recent attempts to sell iPhone apps and apps and content for the iPad, Kindle and new media slates. However, in terms of the web, most of the talk is about different ways to get people to pay for existing content created using existing forms of organisation and existing methods of newsgathering.

The problem that Clay is pointing out is that the economics of content have shifted. What will people pay for? Journalists will instantly say distinctive writing. Most journalists think their writing distinctive, but let’s be honest and even slightly logical here. If everything is distinctive, it’s no longer distinctive is it? Distinctive writing will only work for a very small group of writers. Thinking we can all be distinctive writers is like every 5-a-side footie player thinking he or she can play in the World Cup.

To pay for great reporting and great writing and the social mission of journalism, we’re going to have to think beyond the story in the digital age. We’re going to have to think about services that deliver value to audiences. In a world of content with “more alternatives than the human brain can process” as Steve puts it, suddenly intelligent, social filters become important and useful. People now pay for ‘filters’ that distill the vast amount of information produced everyday or every week into something human scale, for instance magazines like The Week. Smart, social filters can do better.

As I was writing this, I have found an example of people ready to pay for a deeper connection to those they trust. I grew up west of Chicago, and I grew up watching the At the Movies, hosted by Chicago film critics Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert. They were famous for their thumbs up or thumbs down movie reviews. Roger Ebert has just launched a club in which he offers some extras to his loyal fans, including special private discussions, advance ticket sales to his Ebertfest and a meet-and-greet at the festival with club members. They are only charging $5 a year. Read the comments. For everyone who thinks the web is full of nothing but venom, read those comments. Granted, he is a cancer survivor who lost his voice four years ago and just had an emotional appearance on the Oprah Winfrey show, but here is someone who has created a community.

Distilled insight, intelligence and connection. Content may not be rare in a ‘world of cheap perfect copies’, but these things still are. People will support organisations that deliver this. That’s where I see my future in journalism.

FOR HIRE: That was the subject line of an email that I sent to Neil McIntosh, then of the Guardian, in the summer of 2006. I had met Neil at the Web+10 conference at the Poynter Institute in the US in 2005 before I came to London, and the email was a long shot. I wanted to stay in the UK with my then girlfriend, now wife, Suw, and my options were running out at the BBC. I had managed to extend my temporary assignment in London once, but now we were bracing for my return to the US to my old post, Washington correspondent of BBCNews.com. We expected to be separated by an ocean for months. Fortunately, that’s not what happened. A few days later I met with Emily Bell and, after what can be described more as a meeting of the minds than a job interview, I had an offer.

Now, three and a half years later, I’m joining many of my colleagues in accepting another offer from the Guardian, voluntary redundancy. My last day is 31 March. I don’t have a new position confirmed at this point, although Suw and I have a number of exciting possibilities. Like my colleague Bobbie Johnson, I’ve picked up a bit “entrepreneurial zeal” not only from the technology pioneers that I’ve covered, but also from the journalism pioneers that I’ve worked with both at the BBC and the Guardian. Suw and I want to continue to push the boundaries in our fields and we’re both open to new opportunities. If you’ve got a cutting edge journalism or social media project, get in touch.

It’s been a real honour to work at the Guardian and I’m grateful to everyone who helped me. We’ve achieved a lot in the past three and a half years, although it felt like we were always impatient to do more.

Despite the wrenching changes in journalism right now, I’m optimistic. Suw and I are excited about writing the next chapter of our careers. For me, I’m hoping it will be one that helps journalism make the transition to the future. I have almost 15 years of experience in digital, multi-platform journalism, both in strategy, implementation and just doing it, and I’m thrilled by some of the options that Suw and I have before us at the moment. Nothing is settled, though, so I’m still open to offers, as well as being available for short-term writing and freelancing. If you’ve got something exciting in the works and need one of the most experienced hands in digital journalism, get in touch.

Last night, I went to a panel discussion at the Frontline Club here in London looking at the role that the internet and social media might play in the upcoming general election. I wrote a summary of the discussion on the Guardian politics blog. As I said there, the discussion was Twitter heavy, but as Paul Staines aka Guido Fawkes of Order-order.com said, Twitter is sexy right now.

The panel was good. Staines made some excellent points including how the Conservatives were focused on Facebook rather than Twitter for campaigning. Facebook has more reach and was “less inside the politics and media bubble“, Staines said.

Alberto Nardelli of British political Twitter tracker, Tweetminster, said that the election would be decided by candidates and campaigns not things like Twitter. No one on the panel thought the internet or the parties’ social networking strategies would decide the British election. Alberto said that Twitter’s impact would be more indirect. People are sharing news stories using Twitter, which is causing stories to “trickle up” the news agenda.

Chris Condron, head of digital strategy at the Press Association, made an excellent point that so many discussions of social media focus on its impact on journalism and not its impact on people. Facebook and Twitter allow people to organise around issues, which is another form of civic participation. As I said on my blog post at the Guardian, I would have liked for the panel to explore where this organisation around issues might have an impact in marginal constituencies.

Like so many of these discussions, I thought the questions were binary and missed opportunities to explore the nuance of several issues. The moderator, Sky News political correspondent Niall Paterson implied in his questions that if social media didn’t decide the election that it had no relevance. It was an all or nothing argument that I’ve heard before. Change is rarely that absolute. In the US, the role of the internet has been developing in politics for the past decade. Few people remember that John McCain was the first candidate to raise $1m online, not in 2008 but in 2000.

Paterson portrays himself as a social media sceptic, and I can appreciate that. I can appreciate taking a contrarian position for the sake of debate. However, some of his points last night came off as being ill-informed. The panel was good in correcting him, but he often strayed from moderating the discussion to filibustering.

His portrayal of the Obama campaign was simplistic. Alberto said at the Frontline Club that Obama had a campaign of top down and bottom up, grass-roots campaigning, and as British political analyst Anthony Painter pointed out, Obama’s campaign was a highly integrated mix of traditional campaigning, internet campaigning and mobile. (Little coverage focused on Obama’s innovative mobile phone efforts. Most people don’t see the US as a particularly innovative place in terms of mobile, but it was one of the more sophisticated uses of mobile phones in political campaigning I’m aware of.) I love how Anthony puts it, Obama’s operation was “an insurgent campaign that was utterly professional”.

Paterson also implied that Twitter would tie journalists to desks. The only thing tying journalists to desks are outdated working methods. I’ve been using mobile data for more than a decade to stay in the field close to stories. During the 2008 election in the US, my Nokia multimedia phone was my main newsgathering tool. It allowed me to aggregate the best stories via Twitter and use Twitpic to upload pictures from my 4000 mile roadtrip and from the celebrations outside the White House on election night. As I said on Twitter during the discussion:

moderator makes assumption that social media chains journalists to desk. Ever use a mobile phone? It’s mobile!

Sigh. Sometimes I feel like a broken record. Technology should be liberating for journalists, and more journalists should be exploring the opportunities provided by mobile phones and services like Twitpic, Qik, Bambuser and AudioBoo.

You can watch the entire discussion from the Frontline Club here, and here is Anthony Painter’s excellent presentation on the state of internet campaigning in the US and the UK:

Steve Yelvington flagged up a comment piece on the New York Times from Dick Brass, a vice president at Microsoft from 1997 until 2004. Brass worked on Microsoft’s tablet PC efforts, something I remember covering at Comdex in 2002. Despite a huge push by Microsoft, they never became mainstream outside of a few niche applications, and Brass blames it in part from in-fighting at Microsoft. Brass wrote:

Internal competition is common at great companies. It can be wisely encouraged to force ideas to compete. The problem comes when the competition becomes uncontrolled and destructive. At Microsoft, it has created a dysfunctional corporate culture in which the big established groups are allowed to prey upon emerging teams, belittle their efforts, compete unfairly against them for resources, and over time hector them out of existence. It’s not an accident that almost all the executives in charge of Microsoft’s music, e-books, phone, online, search and tablet efforts over the past decade have left.

Brass predicted that unless Microsoft was able to overcome this dysfunctional corporate culture and regained “its creative spark” that it might not have much of a future. In highlighting Brass’ piece, Steve wrote in his tweet:

Every behavior that’s killing Microsoft, I’ve seen at a newspaper company. http://bit.ly/9W30W8

As a geek and a journalist who often covers technology, I pay attention to the gigabytes and gigahertz that most people don’t. To be honest, in the era of giga-computing, the average user can’t really tell the different between a dual-core computer running at 2.3Ghz or 3.2Ghz. It does whatever they need it to.

The tech spec arguments have now moved on to netbooks and mobile phones, devices where a beefier processor can mean the difference between a smooth experience and a jerky, frustrating one. The spec counters have come out in force to denounce the Apple iPad: A 1Ghz chip sounds pretty weak. No USB. No expansion slot. 3G as an option.

As they do so often, spec counters and feature fanatics miss the point. There are phones on the market that do more than the iPhone but few do those things so well. When you’ve got a device that doesn’t have the almost limitless power of today’s desktop computers, you have to make choices.

However, with the iPad, that’s actually beside the point. The iPad is first and foremost a consumer electronics device. Do you worry about the processor in your cable box? No. The set-top box is merely an electronic gateway to content, and that’s what Apple is hoping to create with the iPad.

Yes, there are other media slates out there. Just look at the nearly dozen slates that NVidia was plugging at CES. HP will release a tablet later this year, and Amazon is going to beef up the Kindle. However, none of those devices has iBooks or the apps, games, music, movies and television available from the iTunes store. No other device offers this kind of content. I’ll agree with Joshua Benton at the Nieman Lab that the iPad is focused on ‘reinventing content, not tablets‘. iTunes and its effortless integration with the iPod helped differentiate it from the crowded market of MP3 players, and the content is what Apple is hoping will ensure the success of a new type of device, the iPad.

Consumers still have to render their verdict on the iPad, but the stakes for Apple aren’t just about the success of a single device but really about a much broader digital media strategy.

One of the stumbling blocks for media companies looking to create sustainable digital business models is that the economic models differ in fundamental ways from the predominant models of the 20th Century.

Look at the media models of the 20th Century, and they are all based to some extent on scarcity and monopoly. Printing presses are expensive and create an economic limit to the number of newspapers that any given market will support. Satellites are incredibly expensive. Cable television infrastructure is expensive. Scarcity leads to the development of stable, de facto monopolies. Sky dominates satellite television in the UK. Cable television providers are usually granted monopolies in all but the largest of cities. Again, in all but the largest markets, newspapers have come to enjoy a monopoly position. (It is why I find it a bit rich that media monopolies are railing against Google. Monopolists trying to use the law and courts to defend their position against a rising monopolist should be the plot for a farce. Why don’t we create a web television series?)

The internet is different because media companies don’t have monopoly control over the means of distribution. News International and Gannett don’t own the presses that power the internet. BSkyB doesn’t own the satellites. Comcast owns the last mile of copper, but much of the internet is beyond its control.

The cost of media production has also dramatically decreased allowing people to create media with motivations that are not economic, which seems insane and alien to people who make a living creating media. However, creating media and sharing it with others is key to many communities online. Note, I’m talking about people sharing the media that they create, not sharing media created by people whose motivations are economic. Why the distinction? Sharing is a loaded term to the ‘creative industries’ which they want to redefine as theft. I’m not talking about sharing their content.

For those who don’t understand the “culture of generosity” on the internet, please read Caterina Fake’s moving defence of participatory culture. Caterina was one of the co-founders of photo sharing site Flickr and launched “a collective intelligence decision making system” called Hunch last year. Drawing on examples from her own experience going back to 1994, she explains why:

people do things for reasons other than bolstering their egos and making money

That’s about as foreign as one can think to mass media culture. Not doing something for ego or money? Why bother?

I can tell you why I bother. A global culture of participation has been, for me, key in meeting one of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs: Belonging. Originally participatory culture was something I did in my spare time because their was no place for it in my professional work, but co-creation in journalism has been one of the most richly rewarding aspects of my career.

This is a mental bookmark for a much longer post looking at the economics of post-scarcity media, something I’ve been thinking about after meeting Matt Mason, author of The Pirate’s Dilemma. I first met Matt when I chaired a discussion about his book at the RSA, and I interviewed him for the Guardian’s Tech Weekly podcast about piracy, copyright and remix culture. Matt said that we need more study of “post-scarcity economics”, something  not seen in real-world goods but definitely in the virtual world of digital content.

Patrick Smith, recently of paidcontent.co.uk, has a post about the economics of regional newspapers in the UK and he makes the case (again) that the challenges facing British regional newspapers come down quite simply to economics.

This is not about the quality of journalism – this is about economics: The web is simply more effective for advertisers – Google ads are more effective and have less wastage than an ad in the Oxdown Gazette, no matter how good the editorial quality of the paper is.

In the post, he quotes “Blunt, the pseudonymous author of the Playing the Game: Real Adventures in Journalism blog” who defines a “Web Manager” as:

An expert in cut and paste. Probably a journalist but not necessary.

My issue isn’t with Blunt. Let’s be honest with ourselves, this is a sadly typical comment in the industry regarding digital staff. It’s not even new. I’ve heard comments like this for most of my 16-year career. During this Great Recession, I can understand psychologically and emotionally where they come from: It’s an anxious time for journalists, all journalists, regardless of medium or platform.

The digitally focused staff are working just as hard to preserve professional journalism as those staff still focused on print. I have spent most of my career developing unique digital skills while producing content for broadcast and print. I have often felt that I had to work harder than traditional journalists to prove that I’m not just an ‘expert in cut and paste’. I work very hard to know my beats, work across platforms and produce high quality journalism that meets or exceeds the industry standards of print, broadcast and web journalism. I am not the only digital journalist who puts this sort of effort in. Yet the industry is still rife with the same anti-digital prejudice I witnessed ten years ago.

It’s long past time for senior figures in journalism to publicly state that demeaning digital staff is not acceptable. Here are a few basic facts about digital journalism:

• I use a computer for much of my work. That doesn’t mean I’m a member of the IT staff.
• I know about technology. That doesn’t mean that I’m incapable of writing.
• My primary platform is digital. That doesn’t mean my professional standards are lower.

Prejudice towards digital journalists needs to stop. It sends a message to digital journalists that they are unwanted at a time when their skills are desperately needed by newspapers. Digital staff should not be the convenient whipping women and men for those angry and upset about economic uncertainty in the industry.

There is nothing totemic about print and paper that makes the journalism instantly better or more credible. Quality broadsheets are printed on paper just as sensationalist tabloids are. Let’s measure journalists not by the platform but by their output.

For all the promise of user-generated content and contributions, one of the biggest challenges for journalism organisations is that such projects can quickly become victims of their own success. As contributions increase, there comes a point when you simply can’t evaluate or verify them all.

One of the most interesting projects in 2008 in terms of crowdsourcing was Ushahidi. Meaning “testimony” in Swahili, the platform was first developed to help citizen journalists in Kenya gather reports of violence in the wake of the contested election of late 2007. Out of that first project, it’s now been used to crowdsource information, often during elections or crises, around the world.

What is Ushahidi? from Ushahidi on Vimeo.

Considering the challenge of gathering information during a chaotic event like the attacks in Mumbai in November 2008, members of the Ushahidi developer community discussed how to meet the challenge of what they called a “hot flash event“.

It was that crisis that started two members of the Ushahidi dev community (Chris Blow and Kaushal Jhalla) thinking about what needs to be done when you have massive amounts of information flying around. We’re at that point where the barriers for any ordinary person sharing valuable tactical and strategic information openly is at hand. How do you ferret the good data from the bad?

They focused on the first three hours of a crisis. Any working journalist knows that often during fast moving news events false information is often reported as fact before being challenged. How do you increase the volume of sources while maintaining accuracy and also sifting through all of that information to find the information that is the most relevant and important?

Enter Swift River. The project is an “attempt to use both machine algorithms and crowdsourcing to verify incoming streams of information”. Scanning the project description, the Swift River application appears to allow people to create a bundle of RSS feeds, whether those feeds are users or hashtags on Twitter, blogs or mainstream media sources. Whoever creates the RSS bundle is the administrator, allowing them to add or delete sources. Users, referred to as sweepers, can then tag information or choose the bits of information in those RSS feeds that they ‘believe’. (I might quibble with the language. Belief isn’t verification.) Analysis is done of the links, and “veracity of links is computed”.

It’s a fascinating idea and a project that I will be watching. While Ushahidi is designed to crowdsource information and reports from people, Swift River is designed to ‘crowdsource the filter’ for reports across the several networks on the internet. For those of you interested, the project code is made available under the open-source MIT Licence.

One of the things that I really like about this project is that it’s drawing on talent and ideas from around the world, including some dynamic people I’ve had the good fortunte to meet. Last year when I was back in the US for the elections, I met Dave Troy of Twittervision fame who helped develop the an application to crowdsource reports of voting problems during the US elections last year, Twitter Vote Report. The project gained a lot of support including MTV’s Rock the Vote and National Public Radio. He has released the code for the Twitter Vote Report application on GitHub.

To help organise the Swift River project for Ushahidi, they have enlisted African tech investor, Jon Gosier of Appfrica Labs in Uganda. They have based Appfrica Labs loosely on Paul Graham’s Y Combinator. I interviewed Jon Gosier at TEDGlobal in Oxford this summer about a mobile phone search service in Uganda. He’s a Senior TED Fellow.

There are a lot of very interesting elements in this project. First off, they have highlighted a major issue with crowdsourced reporting: Current filters and methods of verification struggle as the amount of information increases. The issue is especially problematic in the chaotic hours after an event like the attacks in Mumbai.

I’m curious to see if there is a reputation system built into it. As they say, this works based on the participation of experts and non-experts. How do you gauge the expertise of a sweeper? And I don’t mean to imply as a journalist that I think that journalists are ‘experts’ by default. For instance, I know a lot about US politics but consider myself a novice when it comes to British politics.

It’s great to see people tackling these thorny issues and testing them in real world situations. I wonder if this type of filtering can also be used to surface and filter information for ongoing news stories and not just crises and breaking news. Filters are increasingly important as the volume of information increases. Building better filters is a noble and much needed task.

The Poynter Institute in the US hosted an online discussion asking if journalists are giving up on newspapers after high-profile departures there including Jennifer 8. Lee, who accepted a buy out at the New York Times, and Anthony Moor, who left newspapers to become a local editor for Yahoo. Moor told the US newspaper trade magazine Editor & Publisher – which just announced it is ceasing publication after 125 years:

Part of this is recognition that newspapers have limited resources, they are saddled with legitimate legacy businesses that they have to focus on first. I am a digital guy and the digital world is evolving rapidly. I don’t want to have to wait for the traditional news industry to catch up.

This frustration has been there for a while with digital journalists, but many chose to stay with newspapers or sites tied to other legacy media because of resources, industry reputation and better job security. However, with the newspaper industry in turmoil, now the benefits of staying are less obvious.

Jim Brady, who was the executive editor of WashingtonPost.com but is now heading up a local project in Washington DC for Allbritton Communications, said on Twitter:

A few years ago, the risk of leaping from a newspaper to a digital startup was huge. Now, the risk of staying at a newspaper is also huge.

Aside from risk, Jim echoed Moor’s comments in an interview with paidContent:

Being on the digital side is where my heart is. Secondly, I think doing something that was not associated with a legacy product was important.

In speaking with other long-time digital journalists, I hear this comment frequently. Many are yearning to see what is possible in terms of digital journalism without having to think of a legacy product – radio, TV or print. There is also the sense from some digital journalists that when print and digital newsrooms merged that it was the digital journalists and editors who lost out. In a special report on the integration of print and online newsrooms for Editor & Publisher, Joe Strupp writes:

Yet the convergence is happening. And as newsrooms combine online and print operations into single entities, power struggles are brewing among many in charge. More and more as these unifications occur, it’s the online side that’s losing authority.

It’s naive to think that these power struggles won’t happen, but they are a distraction that the industry can ill afford during this recession. In the Editor & Publisher report, Kinsey Wilson, former executive editor of USA Today and editor of its Web site from 2000-2005, said that during the convergence at USA Today and the New York Times:

We both had a period of a year or two when our capacity to innovate on the Web stopped, or was even set back a bit

Digital models are emerging that are successful. Most are focused and lean such as paidContent (although it has cut back during the recession, I’d consider its acquisition by The Guardian, my employer, as a mark of success) and expanding US political site Talking Points Memo. There are opportunities in the US for journalists who want to focus on the internet as their platform.

Back to the Poynter discussion, Kelly McBride of Poynter said during the live discussion:

I talk to a lot of journalists around the country. I don’t think they are giving up journalism at all. I do think some of them have been let down by newspapers. But a lot are holding out. They are committed to staying in newspapers as long as they can, because they are doing good work.

It’s well worth reading through the discussion. I am sure that many journalists have some of the same questions.

What was the verdict?

As Charlie Beckett, the director of the politics and journalism think tank POLIS at LSE, points out, the Daily Mail is getting a lot of grief for using pictures, mainly from photo-sharing site Flickr, without the permission of the users or in violation of the licencing on those pictures. Charlie’s post is worth reading in full, but here are some of the questions he poses:

At what point does material in the public domain become copyright? the people who published these images didn’t do so for financial gain. There is a genuine, if very slight, news story here which feels worthy of reporting. If I link to those photos am I also infringing people’s copyright? Might it be possible that they will actually enjoy seeing their work on the Mail’s website where it will be connected to millions of other people?

I don’t want to dwell on the copyright issue too much, apart from saying that if the newspaper industry is fuzzy on copyright on the internet, it undermines their arguments with respect aggregators, ‘parasites’ and ‘thieves‘ online. I’d rather make the case that there is a benefit to news organisations in not only respecting the copyright of others but also in being good participants in online communities like Flickr. Here’s part of the comment that I left on Charlie’s post:

Leaving (the copyright) issue aside, this is another example of the news industry missing an opportunity to build community around what they do. When I use Creative Commons photos from sites like Flickr, firstly, I honour the terms of the licence. Secondly, I drop the Flickr user a note letting them know that I’ve used a photo on our site. It’s not only a way to use nice photos, but it’s also a way to build goodwill to what we’re doing and do a little soft touch promotion of our coverage. It takes a minutes out of my day to create that email, but instead of a backlash, I often get a thank you. They let their friends know that the Guardian has used their picture. It’s brilliant for everyone. Their are benefits to being good neighbours online, rather than viewing the internet as a vast repository of free content. As a journalist, I wouldn’t use a photo on Facebook without permission. Besides, the photos on Flickr are very high quality, and with the common use of Creative Commons, I know exactly what the terms of use are. As a user of Flickr who licences most of my photos under Creative Commons licence, I also feel that whatever photos I use, I’m also giving back to the community. It’s a much more honest relationship.

Last year during the elections, I found an amazing picture of Democratic candidate John Edwards on Flickr under a Creative Commons Attribution licence that allows commercial use and used it on a blog post on the Guardian when he dropped out of the race. I let the photographer, Alex de Carvalho, know that I used his photo, and he responded:

Thank you, Kevin, for using this picture; I’m honored it’s in The Guardian.

Result:

• Great picture.
• Credit where credit is due.
• Mutual respect for copyright. Creative Commons clearly states the rights wishes of the photographer.
• Light touch outreach to promote our work at the Guardian.
• Building community both on our site and on the broader internet.

That’s what we mean at the Guardian about being of the internet not just on it, and this is why I believe that social media is about creating great journalism and building an audience to support it.