Small World News

We’d like to thank everyone who has donated money thus far, especially those of you who have decided to become ongoing supporters of Alive in Baghdad through subscription payments! We still need to raise $2400 to pay our bills for October, most of which are due by November 1st. At our current rate, we will almost make that!

Please think hard about the money you’re going to spend this month.  Don’t ask yourself how much you can give or donate to Alive in Baghdad. We are not here to be a charity. Please ask yourself what you would pay for on-the-ground news at the grassroots level, of what civilian life is like in Iraq. Can you save $5, $10, or $25 this month and spend it, not only to receive solid information from Iraq, but to support our Iraqi staff who have each been hit hard by the conflict and are desperate for work.

We want everyone to be able to see what is happening in Iraq, whether they can pay or not. However, this work is difficult, dangerous, and not free. If you want to see what is happening on the ground in Iraq, and not just read about it, spend some money to support that work. If you think we are doing a good job depicting life in Iraq, let our staff in Baghdad know by helping to pay their salaries.

If you have comments, criticisms, or stories you’d like to see, please let us know! We welcome the input of our viewers and hope to continue producing a show that is an interesting and enlightening look at daily life in Baghdad.

[UPDATE: It has come to my attention from a number of people that this post has been misconstrued by some as being negative against Next New Networks. I’d like to clarify this. We have nothing but good feelings about Next News’ support for Small World News. We don’t blame Next New for discontinuing the program. Next New Networks has been one of the primary clients for Small World News and we still have hope to work with them in the future. The intent of the previous post was simply to detail some of our travails in trying to locate a sustainable source of funding. I’ve been fairly stressed out lately by our financial situation and I believe some of the post may have come out a bit brash. It is my hope that no one at Next New Networks has been upset by this post, and if they have, I hope they’ll accept my sincere apologies, as no feelings were intended to be hurt. In the internet world three months is a long time, and viewers tend to be fickle on the web. We’ll continue to look for sponsorships, advertising, and investment opportunities and look forward to a future where we might work with Next New again.]

I keep getting asked whether or not I’m going to Podcast and New Media Expo in Ontario California. I guess its time to let the cat out of the bag. Alive in Baghdad and Alive in Mexico, the two entities which are part of Small World News, have been on life support since the end of July, when Next New Networks decided three months was enough time to see if Alive in Baghdad: Uncut could sink or swim. Apparently it couldn’t. We understand that NextNew might not be the best place for AiB, and that the news doesn’t make money, but we’ve been hoping we could find some killer deal that would keep us going.

Really we’ve been on life support longer than that. Although we had a huge windfall when we licensed some of our content to SkyNews, BBC Newsnight, and CurrentTV, we’ve not been able to repeat those deals or bring in anything similar.

We’ve been consistently told that our content is some of the most serious and respectable work being done in web video. We’ve also been consistently told that no one wants to sponsor it or advertise against it, because its too much of a downer, among other reasons. We had one sponsorship, from PNN.com, who wasn’t afraid to be associated with hard journalism in the fun and geeky web video world. This lasted 3 months, and was brought to us with much appreciation from blip.tv.

So we’ve initiated a program of voluntary paid subscriptions, where our viewers can choose to give us 5, 10, or 25 dollars per month, because they felt our work was important, necessary, and worth paying for. Particularly we expected it might be worth paying for in an age where the consumer doesn’t have to pay for the news, because it is already bought and paid for, by advertisers, corporations, and others.

Now its September 25th, and when our bills come due on October 1st, we’ll be out of money. We’ve been paying ourselves a meager salary to get by because we do this full-time, while also paying a fluctuating staff of 5-8 overseas in Iraq and Mexico, between our translator, Baghdad bureau chief, and correspondents. It seems our big failure is that we are ahead of our time. Less flatteringly, neither did we have enough business sense to have a model for making money before we tried to change the quality of video journalism available online. There may be media democracy for the wealthy and privileged of the first world, but they appear unwilling to pay a few dollars to support that democracy in the developing world.

We’re still hoping that our viewers will come through and provide monthly support to us on a voluntary basis. Our correspondents want to keep producing their videos, providing the world a window into life in Baghdad. Without a monthly salary however, it will become very difficult for the sons, brothers, and fathers, who bring you Alive in Baghdad each week to continue their work.

Ask yourself, do you want to know what’s going on in Iraq? Do you want to have a way to see inside life in Baghdad? Do you think its important to hear about the war from the civilians affected in Iraq? If you answered yes to any of these, can you afford to skip a beer each month, or a few gallons of gas, or a movie? If you still answered yes, then sign up here for a voluntary subscription donation to Alive in Baghdad. If you can’t do that, in the near future you may need to find another Iraq video blog to subscribe to.

So last Saturday Jeff Jarvis wrote a post that I only just found today. He discusses the Pew Research Center’s study on Americans’ views of their news media.

He discusses the unsurprising and not particularly interesting realization that, shocker, the public is less and less trustworthy of the media. The first graphic that Jeff uses, highlights “Persistent Criticisms of the Press” He goes on to discuss the MSM and the reasons that they are losing the trust of the public and the divide being drawn between the educated and younger media consumers who are going online, and older consumers who are stuck in the world of television and USA Today.

Unfortunately, if you take a closer look at the graphic, you may see what I see. What I see is that across the board, yes all the numbers indicating positive views of the Press are much lower than they were in 1985, but, except for “Protect Democracy,” they’re also 7, 4, 5, and 17 points better than they were in 2002, marking an upward trend over the last 5 years, aka, more than 20% of the time period in question, so I would ask, what is it that has marked this great change in criticisms?

The first and easiest observation to make is that this upward trend coincides with the normalization of blogs on the internet, both blog writing and reading, which really became common in 2002. I would say that this could be a negative trend, as displayed in the large number of comments to Jeff’s post. Why is this negative? Well, unfortunately, rather than contributing to an enlightening, group-educating discussion, they split on right and left dogma and became the general flame-fest of many blog comment sections.

I worry that blogs, particularly left and right blogs like DailyKOS / Talking Points Memo and Little Green Footballs / MichelleMalkin.com /etc contribute to the sectarianization and tribalization of society, and not in a good way ! Not in a healthy, “everyone has their own likes and dislikes and niches” sort of way. But instead in a breakdown of the social fabric and increase in the overall fragmentation of civilization.

So please, let’s try to make blogs good for crowd-educating  as well as crowd-sourcing and crowd-entertaining. It’s for the good of ourselves and our children!

One last note, Jeff expresses ongoing shock at the popularity of the local news… Maybe I’m the only one in the citizen media / networked journalism segment of the blogosphere who comes from a working-class non-intellectual family, but I understand this perfectly. The local news watching segment corresponds with the older segment of news consumers. These are folks who still believe in local community and having ties to their town and neighbors. Sure the “upwardly mobile and attractive” anchors and reporters are not necessarily loyal to the given community, but people like to feel that they are connected, that they understand each other.

That’s why social networking sites are exploding with the fragmented over-worked young professionals, and local television is still strong with the older folks. Let’s be honest, what is really good about MySpace or Facebook or, gasp, even e-mail? Sure they help you stay in touch with your friends and be connected with your family that are far away, but ask yourselves, why don’t you just see your friends in the real world, and no I’m not talking about Second Life.

There is a great opportunity for us to use networked journalism and the benefits of RSS and other new Web 2.0 technologies to greatly increase community and de-fragment our society and civilization beforer its too late. But we have to make the choice and we have to act. Otherwise Web 2.0 will just be fun and interesting for the intellectuals and the hipsters, and the privileged.

That’s not what I want, nor do I want the shitty Local News that’s too focused on crime and weather to continue to be the only option.

I hope you don’t either.

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