Making Music In The MENA: Mark LeVine's "Heavy Metal Islam"

One of the more fascinating reads in a long while has been Mark LeVine's "Heavy Metal Islam", an interesting survey of the evolving music scene in the MENA. It's a great, illuminating read,, and well crafted: there 's a very deft blend of narrative, feature profiling, and context/analysis that makes it both compelling and informative.

He surveys music scenes in Morocco, Egypt, Israel/Palestine, Lebanon, Iran, and Pakistan, meeting and performing with metal and hip-hop musicians who are creating their craft in dire environments. But LeVine is also a professor of Middle Eastern history, holding a doctorate in that field and Islamic studies. That kind of strong intellectual foundation enables him to avoid the easy route of 'jam band travelogue' as he puts the musicians' experiences in a broader context, seeking out and probing various other leaders, media figures, bloggers, activists and speakers to round out the complex dimensions of making music in the MENA.

A companion CD has been planned for release, but the web site has some conflicting info; the home page says it will be out as a 'pre-holiday' release, but info on the site's 'album' page still lists the release with a past due date of September. The embedded promo YouTube video on both pages also doesn't play, saying the video has been set to private. Hope they can get that bug fixed.

If he does a revised edition of the book, I hope he considers a mention or look at the Bangladeshi Islamic music scene, if any; while they don't have to operate under anywhere near the oppressive parameters other artists in the book do (at least to my knowledge), a line or graf about any cutting-edge musical Islamic expression going on there would have been interesting to note in context of the Pakistani section. Also, in view of the general media suppression in other countries that Dayem spoke about in the Berkelely conference covered in the previous post, I'm wondering how musicians are faring in Syria, Tunisia, Iraq, and other MENA locales.

The book is a must-read for anyone wanting to understand the powerful range of thought and expression among youth in Islamic countries. Western traditional media puts its own much milder form of information gatekeeping in place by not giving enough due light to these kinds of alternative voices and struggles throughout the Islamic world.

Two quick related postscripts: 1) A good corollary to LeVine's book -- if you're not familiar with it -- is the documentary DVD Heavy Metal In Baghdad , which follows Iraqi metal band Acrassicauda over several years and across three countries. It's an intense, haunting bit of film-making and well worth a view.

2 ) Huma Yusuf -- whose work documenting Pakistani new media is covered in the previous post -- wrote an eloquent blog post last week entitled
"Beyond The Culture War", about the need for art to "propose counter-narratives to the dominant perspective" (elegantly stated).

In her article she frames the question by noting, in part, the following:

...Many have bemoaned the Taliban’s efforts to purge the Frontier province of music and dancing. Outrage was expressed when the music department at Punjab University was forced to relocate off-campus after receiving threats from an Islamic student organisation. These days, many secular-minded Pakistanis are speaking out against rock and pop acts for failing to criticise the Taliban through their music; their disappointment implies a belief that music effects social change. But this September, a different take on the plight of Pakistani music emerged. Multan’s Bahauddin Zakariya University closed down its music department, blaming a ‘public lack of interest.’ The college’s principal claimed that the number of enrolled students had dropped from 30 to two, making it unfeasible to keep the department going.

Riaz’s pessimism and the varsity example quoted above indicate that the significant disagreement about cultural matters is not only between extremists and moderates. Rather, it is between those who believe that art can play a redeeming role in society, and those who just don’t care. Reframing the culture war this way raises the question of whether there is any meaningful connection between artistic practice and the shape of civil society. ...

She goes on to make the case that there is indeed a necessary and meaningful connection. As Moe Hamzeh of the Lebanese group the Kordz says in LeVine's book, "music can't be lazy" (a motto I've tried to uphold in my own musical work as well).

Politics, New Media And The Muslim Word: Seminar At UC Berkeley

This was a great seminar that I ran into on the web on Islam and new media (and fortuitous, as I renew this blog to include this very area). The seminar was held October 15th at UC Berkeley, and the good folks there have posted the seminar in its entirety on youtube here:




The moderator was Wajahat Ali, associate editor of www.altmuslim.com .

The first speaker was Mohamed Abdel Dayem, Program Coordinator for the Middle East and North Africa for the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). He detailed the odds bloggers must face in many MENA countries and the scope, extent and tactics of government suppression on both traditional media and particularly bloggers. A good companion piece to his presentation is his report on CPJ , "Middle East Bloggers: The Street Leads Online."


Next up was Huma Yusuf, features editor for dawn.com, the web site of Pakistan's Engligh language news media group. Yusuf detailed how traditional and new media converged in Nov. 2007 when then-president Pervez Musharraf imposed a state of emergency in Pakistan.

Yusuf provides an in-depth report on MIT's Center For Future Civic Media site , entitled "Old and New Media: Converging During the Pakistan Emergency (March 2007-February 2008)"
. Fantastic work and analysis.


Side note: Her blog at MIT's Center For Future Civic Media begins to cite her coverage on what was known as the "second long march" in March of this year, as a similar confluence occurred again in response to President Asif Zardari's activities. That blog teased to her additional coverage on dawn.com but that particular dawn.com page turns up an error message. However, you can see blog coverage on the march by other Dawn correspondents and bloggers if you pull the March 2009 archives on their blog page. Not sure if Yusuf's own coverage got pulled or whether she was unable to cover it logistically.


Muhamad Ali, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the University of California-Riverside, spoke next, discussing contemporary Islam in Indonesia. He posited that new media was being used by various Islamic groups in the region to strengthen their individual identity rather than as a means to help develop bridge-building or consensus.

Haroon Moghul is the Director of Public Relations for the Islamic Center of New York University, and is pursuing a Ph.D. in Middle East Studies at Columbia University. He also maintains a great blog at avari.

Moghul discussed how the reciprocity and exchange possible in new media is changing the structure of Islamic traditional schools of thought, citing among other examples the popularity of podcasts from the Islamic Center Of New York. He gave examples of how the podcasts had created requests for direct counseling from as far away as India and requests for transcripts from as far away as Iran (I suggested to him on his blog that the Center look into some text recognition software such as Dragon's Naturally Speaking.

He touched on how the reach of such exchanges could help the sustainability of marginalized Islamic communities, but warned of a potential downside, where such access could "potentially create an escape valve where you dont have to negotiate with the society around you."

He also referred to Benedict Anderson's work on imagined communities in posing the question, "How will new media change conceptions and fellings of identity among Muslims?" Moghul said one of the mechanisms states use to create a sense of loayalty is through religion, and posited that the ability of states to engender loyalty and strengthen their legitimacy through religion will change as Islamic discourse and the sense of religious belonging can be provided elsewhere through outside new media sources.


The last speaker was Nik Nazmi Nik Ahmad, a Malaysian politician actively involved with Parti Keadilan Rakyat, the Malaysian opposition party. He was elected to the legislature in Selangor state in 2008 as a member of the Pakatan Rakyat coalition -- the youngest candidate to contest a seat in those elections. Ahmad spoke about the role of the new media in Malaysian politics and his recent electoral campaign.

Takeaways: It was a very interesting discussion all the way around. Dayem brought details and insight to a situation I was aware of but not familiar with its scope and intricacies; I also appreciated the Malaysian and Indonesian presentations.

Yusuf's presentation was detailed and gripping (and made me wish that I had kept this blog active during that time period). What struck me most was that under those circumstances, traditional media outlets -- also under the fire -- cooperated with and took up, when possible, where bloggers left off if the bloggers were shut down (Dayem also pointed out examples of this kind of cooperation in the MENA). That's very different from the behavior of traditional media outlets in the West, who are still reluctant to partner with what they perceive as the "cult of the amateur."

Moghul's remarks were, for me, some of the most compelling observations. Matching insight, experience, and historical context, he took on the role of futurist standing at the direct nexus of the future of both Islam and new media developments.

Dr. Singh - Obama State Visit Coverage

As I often cover South Asian media in this blog, I thought it would be interesting to sample a range of takes on the event from various media across the globe. i'll try to get to a few blogs that covered the event in alter post, but for now a quick survey of a few MSM spins:

The AP piece brought up some interesting nuances regarding China and greenhouse emissions , but glosses over Pakistan and did not mention the uncompleted work on nuclear agreements.

The Times Of India picks up the Pakistan issue thread in a bit more detail, including this interesting sound bite, something I haven't seen yet in Western coverage of Thursday's event:

Obama also acknowledged implicitly, probably for the first time by Washington, that the United States historically may have erred in its approach towards Pakistan.

"There were probably times when we were just focused on the (Pakistani) military...instead of (engaging its) civil society," he admitted, when asked about the US policy of arming Pakistan that had allowed it to become a heavily armed adversary of India.

TOI also offered a couple of interesting sidebar articles, including Dr. Singh's remarks on Afghanistan to the Center for Foreign Relations in D.C. on Monday (a separate piece also covered his views on China . TOI in fact has a whole special section on the visit.

Pakistan's English media group Dawn News, of course, focuses on the Pakistan angle more in depth.

The TOI article also covers progress on the nuclear agreement, and it's how IBN Live headlined their coverage: "Nuclear deal will go through, Obama assures PM", states the article. It's the focal point of the news coverage in the article (though you have to get through the narrative of the day's ambience beforehand).

On the lighter side, India's Rediff provided a comprehensive guest list 'who's who', an interesting read to get familiar with the top movers and shakers in the India - America sphere.

Most of the other major American MSM coverage (the networks, CNN, WaPo, NYT) focused their coverage more on the pageantry of the event itself rather than any in depth geopolitical analysis. That's not unexpected or gratuitous -- very deep in the American collective psyche, I think, there's still a yearning for occasional ceremony, symbolism, and ritual in the processes of its political leadership -- but it's interesting to see the harder news dimensions covered in greater detail at the outset of the event by non-American media.

I imagine some of the weekly MSM publications, or perhaps some blogs, will offer more in that realm in days to come. We'll check.

Incidentally, the news station I work for caught a few remarks from our own Gov. Richardson before he left for D.C. to attend the dinner.

Surveying The Ft. Hood Tragedy In The Islamosphere - The Muslim Voice And The Media

(time to dust off the blog, and perhaps extend its scope a little bit).

As both a Muslim and a new media geek, I was interested on a number of levels re the media reaction and response -- both within and and outside the Islamosphere -- to the Ft. Hood shootings.

It's also given me a chance to look at what's happening in the Islamosphere in general, a scene I hadn't surveyed since 2005 in this entry. I'll revisit this topic in a forthcoming post.

but to Ft. Hood:

One of the most diligent and thorough aggregator of responses and counterresponses lies with Sheila Musaji's The American Muslim blog (TAM). A recent discovery for me, she is a tireless defender and chronicler of interfaith issues, and her blog has become in general the first stop I go to to gauge osme of the interfaith dialogue on Ft. Hood.

In one of her first posts on the tragedy, she listed the statements released by most major Muslim organizations, all unequivocally condemning Hasan's actions. This provided a lot of detail and resources for me to explore further.

As I continue to peruse her offerings and links, and as I reflect on the tragedy, two key things have struck me:

1) Is the Muslim response sufficient?

and 2) Are the pressures and circumstances for Muslims in the American military being sufficiently addressed and/or brought to light?

To some extent, the two issues overlap.

While the response from most Muslim organizations was swift and laudable, it hasn't been very *visible*. Apart from CAIR, and a few other 'biggies', not a lot of lasting impact was created that made it into the mainstream of network broadcast news with any degree of lasting retention to the public.

Those of you who read this blog know I stress and study user *behavior* as the critical key to new media developments. As other new media geeks have well pointed out before me, the down side of long-tail distribution of information is the potential of interests microniched to the point of insular self-selection. To some extent, I feel, the Islamosphere runs this very risk of 'talking amongst ourselves'.

For the most part -- though certainly not completely -- interaction on Muslim blogs tend to foster either a good community discussion within the fold (which is very necessary and healthy) or else are targeted by incendiary Islamophobes. Taking an honest dialogue on Muslim issues outside of the Islamosphere and into a more mainstream setting is happening, but it hasn't yet reached a level that acheives a lasting, visible clarity, diversity and accessibility to the American mainstream media.

At a time when Muslims in America are, at best, not fully understood (and at worst feared or hated)-- a stronger, more protracted, ongoing visible set and range of Muslim voices is needed. Reactive press releases, though undoubtedly sincere and certainly necessary, become quickly predictable and short-lived see again Musaji's list of statements. They're not enough.

Part of this may have to do with the reticence among Muslim leaders to develop a lasting relationship with the press.

In a follow-up post on TAM, Sheila Musaji wrote:

In the meantime, I cringe every time someone asks me to explain why Maj. Hasan or any other Muslim criminal has committed some reprehensible act. I don’t know why. ... Actually, I am amazed that intelligent people could possibly believe that it makes sense to ask any random Muslim to explain the actions of any one of the other 1.5 billion Muslims on earth, as if we are connected to each other like the Borg.

Dr. Aref Assaf, president of the American Arab Forum, expressed similar sentiments (among some otherwise excellent points) in his article "Please Do Not Call Me! Being an American Muslim when tragedy strikes": "I'm utterly hurt and profoundly burdened by implications and the frequency of these questions from media outlets whenever some lunatic Muslim decides to commit a random act of violence," he writes.

It's a sentiment I genuinely respect, understand, and often feel as well; but keeping a larger endgame in view of bridge-building to a wider circle could help Muslim voices to push beyond this reaction.

Assaf himself offers a powerful voice towards the end of his post:

Undoubtedly, nothing could ever justify or excuse in any way Hassan's alleged actions. But it ought to broaden the horizon of those in the media who seem infatuated with the need to pin the blame for this perverse tragedy solely on a man's religion and last name, rather than considering the variables of a sad case encompassing some combination of mental state, divided loyalty or conscientious objection.

It is precisely that kind of observation that needed to be brought out more, in a stronger, unified voice throughout the Islamosphere. But Dr. Assaf seems to retreat in frustration. In the next and closing paragraph of his post, Assaf makes another elegant point, but then negates any hope of outreach to get his views disseminated:

We should honestly worry about what makes any citizen hate his country so intensely that he is ready to waste his life to express his anger? Till then, please do not call me. For, like you, I have not the answer.

Interestingly, in another version of his article on NJ voices, the comments seem to bear out what I've been sensing, and I'm encouraged that some non-Muslims are seeking a more accessible Muslim media presence to turn to and are also noticing the lack of it.

Obama 2.0

A lot of analysis on the exemplary Obama campaign is out -- I particularly thought this NY Times article informative, as well as this piece looking at aspirations for the new U.S. presidency from the foreign perspective.

Most Indian press is examining Obama's take on foreign policy issues and whether he will take a tougher stance on U.S. firms outsourcing to Asia (a good survey of experts downplaying those fears can be found here).

The Hindustan Times also tries to paint an optimistic scenario in this article , including such nuggets as

The 47-year-old, elected as the first black President of the US, is said to have a close affinity with things Indian. He carries a miniature figure of Lord Hanuman for luck and had a picture of Mahatma Gandhi placed in his Senate office.

One article from The Economic Times drew some interesting numbers about Obama's massive leveraging of the Internet:

In total, more than 3 million people donated for Obama, twice as many as any other presidential candidate in history. The Democrat has 2.5 million supporters on his page on a social networking site, and more than 1.5 million people signed up at another site created just for the campaign.

As I've said so many times, it's about connecting with your community, establishing trust. From the same article:

“I think the campaign did a great job of making us feel like we were part of a group,” said C J Fonzi, 28, a US consultant living in Hyderabad. Fonzi donated $100 once, and $25 three times.

Here's whats most interesting to me -- how will he use this immense social networking base during his term as President? How will he capitalize on and extend the connective power he's established? The potential and possibilities are enormous as he transitions from a Facebook campaign to the first Facebook Presidency.

What will Obama 2.0 be like?

On The Relevance Of Main Stream Media News Sites

(been sitting on this post for along time, but here it is. Its good to get back in the swing of things!)

Well, by and large, they're just not.

Most MSM news sites across the board in current practice are simply less and less relevant. There seems to be a lack of understanding industry wide of what information people want (and more importantly what people want to *do* with that information), and how they get that information.

The type of content MSM offers and how we offer it (repurposed broadcast material, lack of web 2.0 and reader engagement) matters less and less to an audience that seems to have rediscovered an appetite for news (at least for now) -- but whose pattern of information use is very different than what current MSM is tooled for, both editorially and technologically.

An interesting article that made some new media journalism rounds in the spring was this from the NYT:

Some highlights (bolds mine):

According to interviews and recent surveys, younger voters tend to be not just consumers of news and current events but conduits as well - sending out e-mailed links and videos to friends and their social networks. And in turn, they rely on friends and online connections for news to come to them. In essence, they are replacing the professional filter - reading The Washington Post, clicking on CNN.com - with a social one.

Lauren Wolfe, 25, the president of College Democrats of America: "I'd rather read an e-mail from a friend with an attached story than search through a newspaper to find the story."

Pew Research Center survey: half of respondents over the age of 50 and 39 percent of 30- to 49-year-olds reported watching local television news regularly for campaign news, while only 25 percent of people under 30 said they did.

Fully two-thirds of Web users under 30 say they use social networking sites, while fewer than 20 percent of older users do.

On The New York Times's Web site, the transcript of Obama's speech on race ranked consistently higher on the most e-mailed list than the articles written about the speech.

That last one's very interesting to me, as it echoes earlier experiences of user behavior I capitalized on -- go through the archives on this site to see material on the "fire blog."

I'm speculating that the dip in MSM web traffic may correspond to a spike in news interest by a demographic that uses the web differently. I.E., the total number of web users looking for news has increased - but by a group that doesn't find us useful, so we're a much smaller piece of the pie.

If true, then that's a change from just a few years ago, when studies and a book or two was out touting that no one under 40 was interested in *any* kind of news from any source, web or not.

What's needed is to address a MSM site's potential audience as *every* web user -- we need to have THAT degree of vitality, of usefulness. Look at the bolded NYT bullet points above; I don't think we can afford to ignore that.

Some months ago, Mindy McAdams posed a question about the NYT article on her blog : Where do the journalists fit in?, she asked.

My response was:

By understanding we provide a service of connectivity and engagement and not a product of static content, by understanding our community that we purport to serve (but are so disconnected from) is one of users and not readers, by operating more as a hub and less of a destination, by helping users in their exchange of information.


That's where I'd start, at least.

The web by its nature is a task oriented experience: people want to go to the web to *do* something,as I've posted here before. Its in the doing. As Odza put it on a NAA thread:

My current understanding of what people want: solutions. Try solving a problem for your readers. A big problem. Corrosive politics. Ineffective government. Water scarcity. Over-development. Education. What to buy and what not to. (Your ad sales people will love that one.) Of course, you should solve small problems too, because that’s how you build trust and credibility, but I believe people really will be motivated to participate and stay involved if they can see signs of progress and true caring on your part. The big problems don’t get solved easily. You’ll have plenty of opportunity to build a conversation among your audience members, and the bigger the problem, the more people affected by it — addressing the scale issue.

So we should help them find *solutions* that we can help them *do*, whether its on a host of large scale issues or simply a more basic problem: directions, to alleveiate boredom, to find information they need to do something else, to share, etc.


The dilemma is twofold:

1) Content MSM Content is less relevant. I'm not convinced that a content diet that's currently so rich in rewritten broadcast scripts and 90 second vid packages straight from broadcasts meets the full scope of digital information behavior patterns. Some of it might -- if it's a resonant subject -- but the mix of this kind of content is far too high, and we're not bringing other modes of information into the picture.

2) Platform Even if we broadened and sharpened the content mix, most MSMs don't have an adequate platform for the user to *do* much with it, to engage with it, to morph it, to share it, to find users of the article with common interest, to create groups around interests or stories, etc.

1) Is more of an editorial and news gathering problem, itself in two parts:

a) the current model of TV news gathering as it applies to web is IMO completely broke; see the post below and the lost remote.com discussion it points to).

b) As I've often posted here, it's also about what matters to whom and why, and MSM doesn't provide enough of that -- or a way for them to make it matter more -- for users to stay repeatedly engaged with. Bobble heads and pet photos are popular and entertaining and certainly have their place (alleviating boredom, fulfilling diversion) but what's popular to people and what's important to people are not the same thing, and we need to provide both. They'll come back again for a game, but are they part of your community? I want to be the indispensable, vital hub.

MSM web editors/content managers need to be thinking along these lines:

What do people want to galvanize and converse around? What raw data can we provide to help them do that? What's their passion, their concern?

What *matters* to them? Given current behaviors as spelled out in the NYT article, then what can we offer worthy enough for them to pass on through their social networks?

Once we've carefully identified what solutions users are looking for, what they're trying to *do*, only then can we devise the right content and social networking technologies to help them do it.

I.E., quit trying to make the user do something useful for our traffic, and instead give the user something they want to do for themselves and their networks.

Newspapers are quick to extinction and the newspaper websites that are surviving are doing so because they're adapting, somewhat, out of desperation. Those that aren't didn't make a sufficient leap to the fundamentally different type of content that is more coherent and useful for a digital user.

TV needs to make its own leap to that fundamentally different mode of content. We need to rely less on the TV operation for web content and develop other independent arenas of discussion, information, utility, sources, and engagement. We should be thinking of the web sites more and more as an independent affiliated information and news source that should stand on its own as a fully functional web presence with its own vitality, with access to TV reporting and video as a partnered source -- and less as the afterthought or pixelated extension of the TV operation.

That's a radical shift, I know. But IMO, anything less than a fundamental paradigm shift is a blueprint for extinction, much like the current "adapt or die" crisis in newspapers.

Lost Remote on TVs and papers

I initially missed this great post on Lost Remote.com comparing TV and newspaper web sites. Having been in both fields, its spot on, and the comments that follow are a great discussion and certainly echo my experiences past and present.

Sotuth Asian PJ and SMS update

In my survey/update on Indian PJ last month, I made mention of the seemingly vanished citzenxpress.com. I did hear back from Dr. Dinesh Sawat Singh in comment to that post:

I am dr. Dinesh Singh Rawat a leader of an Indian Young researchers who had started Citizenxpress.com in 2006.
We had off line our dream venture in july 2007 for economical crisis because in India we could not able to get successful business model for CJ Venture.
As all other Citizen media ventures
subsidiaries of traditional media groups thus majority depend money from others resources.where we were lacking.
So we have deiced to generate money by knowledge as researchers(Citizen Research Foundation)
along with building Citizens' media strong in India.
We are in this month coming with our citizen media venture under
domain name www.citizensxpress.com
This our fully self sustain business model based Citizen Media initiative.

The CRF page has a couple of recent posts and feels like its ready to launch with some more detailed news; the new domain Dr. Singh mentions isn't loading in as of March 30, but I'll keep checking. Very much looking forward to seeing what comes of this new version of the citizenxpress efforts.

Meanwhile, calcuttacentral.com now gives a page saying the domain has been suspended.

I do see a fair amount of initiatives come and go, and the viability for these ventures to remain afloat -- what particular difficulties are encountered in sustaining or creating an Indian business model for PJ -- is something to explore in detail.

The SMS dialogue continues over at the ICT4Peace site with Sanjana's very nice response to some thoughts I posted here.


Miscellany: still thinking on what will constitute good SMS journalism, organizing bookmarks and updating/restructuring my RSS reader feeds to blog more efficiently and frequently.

on EveryBlock

Kudos to EveryBlock, the initiative from Holovaty and his team using geocoded civic data, news info and other information to give very localized information.

I like this. While theres not a UGC component, Holovaty has an interesting answer to this in an interview on Fimoculous:

In time, Rex. In time. :-)

If we'd launched with awesome reader-contributed content features, that's all that people would be talking about. "EveryBlock: a user-generated news site!" People are very quick to make judgments about a Web site, pigeonholing it into some generic "user-generated" or "Web 2.0" bucket. I wanted to send the message that our focus is on providing a newspaper for your block. The tone was set. Any subsequent features that we add -- whether they involve local voices or not -- are in support of that core goal.

I understand and respect the idea of keeping it focused - it is what it is - but at least I'd like to see more of a commitment in collecting and inviting user-supplied data. There is a link offering to submit info:

Have you found any news nearby that we don't know about? Please submit it.

But this doesn't appear on every page (I had to go back several pages to find it again when trolling through New York neighborhoods, for example.

Not every type of Everyblock information is the kind of data Id want a cell phone alert for, but theres some that I would, so SMS alerts might be something they could look into.

I think its greatest innovation is geocoding all kinds of data and information, specifically getting geocoding on unstructured data ( regular news articles). Seems that some interesting relationships and partnerships are developing with Everyblock as more news organizations add that kind of info to their stories.

Everyblock might not need to add a UGC component itself, as other media outlets and social networks can use this info to build their own conversations and dialogues around the data, letting Everyblock continue to develop in its own trajectory. On the other hand, there's no theoretical reason why they can't develop that dialogue themselves.

Wondering why there is no public school data. Almost every single school has its own web site, sometimes rudimentary, sometimes updated or not, but they are there -- often with calendars of events, etc. Surprised thats not an element, and am curious on the reason for its exclusion.

More on SMS and Sri Lankan news

I got a couple of nice comments on the post about JNW's SMS service for Sri Lankan news.

Sanjana Hattotuwa launched a citizen journalism intitative in SriLanka thats doing well at http://www.groundviews.org/. I'll explore this effort fully in a post of its own soon.

Sanjana also keeps a blog at ICT for Peacebuilding (ICT4Peace), where he offered this more detailed overview of JNW. Its a great, accurate read, Im inclined to agree with his assessment re some lack of clarity surrounding JNW's web presentation. He also tipped me to Rasasa, an app that will send your favorite RSS feeds to your IM messenger, email, or cell.

As Sanjana put it, "JNW's great, but is still just scratching the surface of what's really possible using SMS and the web." Sanjana has written several articles on JNW's effort throughout his blog ( links to other posts are at the end of his article I linked to).

The editor of JNW himself, Chamath Ariyadasa, chimed in on my earlier post:

Yes, its an interesting exploration, and after 23 months of dire financial issues, I am happy to say that we are now lifting our heads out of the water.

With agreements with five telecom operators and a possible sixth, we may pass 100,000 subscriber mark fairly quickly.

I am keen to get outside perspective on what we are doing, and would appreciate your opinion on the following:

I think a key benefit of SMS is empowerment, and I don't see any downside to SMS except varying degrees of choice that can be offered to the public.

What I mean is that, if I wasn't a journalist and I had a reuters terminal at home I would feel fairly confident that I was in on the news, and that the news came to me rather than the other way around. Ofcourse I would be paying $1,000 per month for the dish version.

We are offering a similar service for Rs30 per month ($0.30). I am sure our subscriber base is now islandwide, which means almost anyone with a phone can now afford it.

Incidentally, Sri Lanka reached 8 million mobile subscribers out of a population of 19 million recently.

A big constraint though is user friendly vernacular fonts for mobiles, but I hope that changes soon.

If I'm reading the remarks correctly, I think the issue of varying degrees of choice can easily be met, and has Sanjana has pointed out throughout his various pieces, JNW could offer specific feeds based on interest:

JNW, in trying to be all things to everyone (which may have worked as a new startup) will soon begin to frustrate its subscribers with an overload of information that is mass produced and sent to everyone, with no real emphasis on the sectors they each work in.

While the quote was in relation to a podcast app from JNW, the principal is the same.

While location isn't always a factor in news relevance as Ive posted before, it can be, especially in a breaking news /alerts environment -- so feeds by region may be a feature to add. Question is if there are enough journalists for adequate geographical coverage, which is where teaming up with an initiative like Groundviews could be fruitful.

Question for techno developers ( I am not one):Can GPS data be encoded in SMS? As cell phones become more and more capable, I can envision a service where if Im driving through the countryside or across regions i can be alerted to news or info relevant to whatever location Im in at the moment. I know this is possible via other web data, - i.e., you can set up a similar service on your Blackberry or on web access from your phone -- but for phones or areas without mobile web - i.e., just SMS technology - can this be done?

JNW faces some competition from Ada Derana and Reuters arrangements with other mobile service operators as evidenced by reading through this thread , which to me opens up a whole new world of 2.0 journalism: what factors define quality in this mode? What makes good SMS journalism? what do people want to do with news received on their mobile?

Its a whole new question worth thinking about.

Newspapers, community, relevance

Interesting discussion on journo prof's Mindy McAdams' blog about audience and community.

Mindy posts the following after reading a Clay Shirky post:

Newspapers used to be centered in communities. Now they are mostly not. People in much of North America don’t even live in communities.

Is this why newspapers are dying? Because there are no communities?

I heard about someone asking a speaker how we could get young people to read newspapers. Reportedly, the speaker took rather a long pause before replying. When she did speak, her answer was essentially, "We can’t."

This makes a lot of people feel sad. Others feel angry.

But this is not about newspapers.

It's about what Shirky said: Audiences are not the same as communities, and communities are made up of people talking to one another.

What does a community need? How should journalists supply what communities need?

A lot of responses to her question echoed a consensus that communities haven't gone, but they've changed -- and newspapers aren't catching up.

In one of my first ever blog posts here I was examining why newspapers were unaware of the very own disconnect with their geographic community.

In that post I defined news simply as events that matter. Part of the function for journalism and bloggers alike, then, is to answer: what is it that matters, to whom does it matter, how much does it matter, and why.

Note that nowhere in that equation is "location" a factor: relevance is not geographically dependent. (this is why Im also very passionate about including international news on your local site and making it relevant).

As others have posted , communities increasingly gather around issues or interests. Even your neighborhood association or city council district is driven by issues and problems for that location, rather than some perceived inherent birthright magically bestowed by virtue of its GPS coordinates alone.

So the what and where are a lot less important now than the why and to whom and how much. Newspapers dont -- and wont -- get that.

Again, traditional journalism utterly fails in an evolving social structure, and Im not sure if J schools are correcting it.

The traditional 5Ws and H of journalism - who, what, where, when, why, and how - always focus on the event: who did something, what happened, where and when did it happen, why and how did it happen etc. It doesn't fully take into account the relevance, the degree of shared interest.

Sure the regular 5W and H is necessary, but its nuts and bolts,its surface. In this day and age, thats your start point, not the end game.

Do it again, but for each of those Ws and H, make a substitution of relevance for occurrence, and see how your view of it changes:

What matters in this story? why does it matter? and to whom does it matter? ( and why does it matter to them, which is different than why it may be relevant in a larger sense). Once you identify that "whom", then ask how is it relevant to them, which in turn poses the questions of a) what else may be important to that group and/or b) what other groups may find that issue important. i.e., what diversity surrounds the identified community or the identified issue?

Always ask who else, what else, look for the connective tissues.