Last Thursday, I spoke to my friend Steve Klein’s multimedia journalism class at George Mason University on one of my last days in Washington. I’ve spoken to his classes before, and I usually have highlighted some of my own multimedia projects.

But this time, I wanted to show them some of the stuff that was happening at the grassroots level with third party web tools instead of Flash or big monolithic content management systems that are good at serving up lots of pages but not so flexible. I was really inspired by a post by Argentinean journalism professor Julian Gallo who showed how easy it was to tell multimedia stories using these new tools.

I kinda assume that anyone younger than me eats, sleeps and breathes this stuff, so I was a little surprised that very few of them had heard of sites like Flickr, Odeo, OurMedia, CastPost etc. By using these sites and services, it’s possible to build very compelling multimedia stories.

They hadn’t heard of these sites, but they all knew about MySpace and Facebook. I didn’t think that the class was somehow behind the curve; instead it reinforced a couple of ideas.

1) Don’t be fundamentalist about my tools.
2) The internet isn’t just about information. It is social.
3) My tools for my community. Your tools for your community.

Blogs and Flickr really do help knit my London social network together. When I got back, friends said I must have had a nice break based on my pics in Flickr.

I never got into MySpace because it disturbs my sense of online feng shui. But these kids talked about how their friends were trying to get them onto Facebook or MySpace. And one student wanted to do her project on how other students were passionate about MySpace.

They were doing the same thing I am doing, but their community uses a different site or service.

I shouldn’t gloss over point two. I have a really hard time getting people to understand that using the internet is social, not anti-social.

It’s anti-geek prejudice that just doesn’t square with reality, but that’s another post for another late night.

Suw and I are in Washington DC mainly so that I can get my UK visa for the next year, and for me, it’s also a chance to see old friends. I was based in Washington for six and a half years from the Clinton impeachment through to George Bush’s second inauguration last year.

We landed last Thursday evening to warnings of impending doom. A snowstorm was on its way, more precisely a nor’easter. For those of you not steeped in American meteorological lore, a nor’easter is when a storm comes up the east coast of the US. In layman’s terms, the warmer, wetter air from down south slams into the cold air up the coast and voile, lots and lots of snow.

The last really big one happened in Washington on President’s Day weekend of 2003. It dumped a couple of feet of snow on Washington. My car was buried for a week behind a four-foot wall of snow left by the plows.

Weather weenies

Washington really can’t cope with snow, well, that’s putting it mildly. The town freaks out with even the mere rumour of a threat of inclement weather. I just don’t get it. It’s not like the city doesn’t have wintry weather.

And Washington really doesn’t know how good it’s got it. I grew up west of Chicago, and I have childhood memories of the Blizzard of ’79 when something like four or five feet of snow got dumped on us. My father, who is six feet even, had to go up on the roof in the middle of the storm to shovel off the chest-deep snow to keep it from collapsing.

Unfortunately, he dumped a good chunk of it right by the front door. I was about the only one small enough to squeeze into the front door until sometime in April.

Talking about the weather

Sorry for prattling on about weather. It probably has something to do with my storm chasing days as a cub reporter in western Kansas. Well, that in the fact that talking about the weather was one of the icebreakers I used when interviewing laconic Kansans who viewed me with deep suspicion. As they said, often: “You’re not from around here are ya?”

But weather is a real obsession for people. I almost enrolled my father in a 12-step programme for addiction to the Weather Channel. He had this habit of beginning every phone conversation by telling me the temperature of where I happened to be at that time, whether that was London or Washington. It was useful when planning what to wear for the day, but slightly freaky that my father knew my local forecast better than I did.

Here in Washington, local TV stations had their network of local weather watchers who sent in pictures of how deep the snow was in their back yards. I wonder why newspapers haven’t picked up on this or created spaces for their communities to talk about weather.

Sure, when I go into a weather site I want to know weather, quickly. But I wonder why news and weather sites don’t create more tools, more spaces to bank on this natural talking point.

Oh well, Suw and I survived the Blizzard of ’06. In Washington, it managed to coat the city in a beautiful blanket without really causing that much disruption. Plenty of Flickr pics to follow.

Suw, Paula Le Dieu and I went out for dinner a few days ago to talk about iCommons, a new project that is growing out of Creative Commons.

There is some really interesting stuff being done by people under the CC banner, and I’m curious as to how the BBC might release some of our news content under CC licencing to give back to the community of participatory media. Just a thought right now, but I’m keen that we as a big broadcaster give back to these communities and not just take pictures, audio and video from citizen journalists, bloggers, podcasters and vloggers.

Paula used to work for the Beeb on the Creative Archive project so knows about some of the rights issues that we might run up against. It’s more difficult than it sounds or should be.

But we got to talking about communities and journalism. Paula said that the job of journalists, if you really boil it down, is to tell stories about their communities.

Living in a Bubble

I was at the Web+10 conference at Poynter last year, and I remember we were talking about blogging. Someone said that the world of blogging seemed like an echo chamber.

Well, as the barbian inside the gates, I stuck my hand up and said: “I’ve worked in the Washington for 6 years, and if the Washington Press Corps isn’t a echo chamber, I don’t know what is.” Even in a room full of journalists, applause broke out. If journalists repond like that, what about our readers and our viewers?

Sometimes, it feels like journalists and politicians are just talking to each other, and it frankly doesn’t have much to do with what the average citizen really cares about. Who’s communities are we telling stories about?

You decide. I report

As an American working for the BBC, covering my own country from one step removed, I had an interesting position somewhere both inside and outside. I wrote a blog of sorts during the 2004 election Technically, the blog were just static pages generated by our production system with some user comments, but I tried to behave like a blogger and have a conversation with my readers.

I took the view that the campaigns and the press corps that followed them stuck to their own scripts. Was there something more that people wanted to talk about? You bet. Healthcare. Social Security. Issues. It felt like a community.

I guess that’s why I’m surprised that this whole bloggers versus journalists battle still rages on. Bloggers are only a part of the communities we serve, but I don’t know why more journalists don’t blog. And I don’t mean using a blog as another way to package a column. As Bob Cauthorn wrote, that is just old school journalists “getting snaps from aging publishers for getting jiggy with the youngsters by jumping into that blogging thing”.

No, I mean blogging to actually have a conversation with your readers, your viewers, your communities.
I joked wih readers of the blog: You decide. I report.

I think sometimes our audiences feel like we’ve left them. It’s not surprising that they’re leaving us.