Editor’s Take

By MARIA RESSA

When old and new media converge, they empower people and affect our societies in ways we could never have dreamed of

For journalists managing newsrooms today, the challenges are incredible; the potential limitless; and the pressure is coming from everywhere. Technology has changed the way we receive information, the way we’re entertained, the way we communicate.

We’ve moved from what critics call the Age of Information to the Age of Empowerment, and no one quite seems to know what will happen when old and new media collide – or converge. Will it destroy each other or will they complement each other? We have to define it for ourselves as journalists, understand the technology, its effects on what we do – and how all that affects the societies we live in.

I’ve been in a unique situation for most of my career because I am both a local and a foreign journalist in the Philippines. In the late 80’s, I worked for all five Philippine networks before starting an independent production company which produced news & current affairs programs. At the same time, I began working for CNN - starting as a freelancer, becoming a reporter, then starting and running two bureaus in Southeast Asia.

Before I knew it, I worked for CNN for nearly two decades. I tell you this to emphasize that what you’ll hear will be a strange hybrid of an Asian’s view of our global western-media dominated world. I have learned that you cannot put up barriers because the world is now connected – so all our cultures are affected by what happens everywhere else.

I want to first define the relationship between three concepts: convergence, participatory culture and collective intelligence. By convergence, I mean the flow of content across multiple media platforms – in our case – as in the case of CNN, a group of reporters supply content to different platforms: radio, TV, cable, Internet, mobile. That’s on our end, but convergence is also the migratory behavior of media audiences who will go almost anywhere in search of the content and experiences they want.

Most people, particularly telco and broadcasting groups, use convergence to refer only to the technological process which brings together – and makes possible – these multiple media platforms. But convergence also represents a cultural shift as consumers are encouraged to seek out new information and – more importantly – to make connections. We are changing the way we think and interact.

That’s where participatory culture comes in – a stark contrast to the passive way most of us learned to consume media – watching TV or listening to radio, with no way of talking back. Now rather than saying media producers and consumers occupy separate roles, we are starting to see them as participants who interact with each other according to a new set of rules we are all just defining.

Convergence occurs within the brains of individual consumers and through their social interactions with others. Each of us finds our meaning and creates our interpretations, personal myths and world views from the information we consume – all to try to make sense of our daily lives. But none of us can know everything about any given topic, so there is added incentive for us to talk about the media we consume.

Yes, we may fragment and there will be niche markets, but that is why talking to others becomes more important. This conversation creates buzz that is increasingly valued by the media industry.

That is our collective intelligence. None of us can know everything; each of us knows something; and we can put the pieces together if we pool our resources and combine our skills. A great example is Wikipedia – which is really the product of collective intelligence on the Web.

So how can this change politics? Well, in the Philippines, as early as 2004, surveys showed that 90% of Filipinos get their information from television. That was part of the reason I wanted to come home: given our political situation and the unfulfilled promise of our democracy, I thought television journalists can take an active role in nation-building using the power inherent in our medium.

Add to this the Internet, which is changing politics all around the world. In the 2004 elections in the US, a presidential candidate, Howard Dean used the Internet to raise campaign funds, to call for support, to trigger rallies, to create an more intimate relationship with his supporters through blogging.

In Malaysia, the Internet played a crucial role in the past elections – forcing mainstream media groups to go through major soul-searching or face extinction.

Traditional broadcast, or old media, send out a mass message, but new media now give viewers the chance to answer back. That is user-generated content, also known as citizen journalism. Gone are the days of traditional gatekeepers, partly because of a clamor to provide non-mainstream views free of corporate and political vested interests.

It started in the US after the 1988 US presidential elections – a reaction to the loss of trust in the news media and the political process. A decade later, activists in Seattle – disgusted with the broadcast news coverage of the WTO – created the first Independent Media Center. These alone wouldn’t have changed the landscape.

The first major breakthrough happened in Asia. In 2000, South Korean investigative journalist Oh Yeon-ho started OhmyNews.com with the motto "Every Citizen is a Reporter." That Web site is largely credited with changing South Korea’s conservative political landscape. At OhmyNews, about 50 professional reporters and editors screen and edit news articles written by more than 400,000 amateurs – from elementary students to professors. These volunteers submit between 150 and 200 articles a day, which make up more than two-thirds of OhmyNews’s content.

Then Citizen Journalism invaded television. In August 2005, Al Gore launched a new cable news network, Current, to empower the younger generation of news viewers – those who grew up with user-generated content, YouTube, blogs.

In the Philippines, ABS-CBN pioneered Citizen Patrol in 2004 – using the power of primetime news to empower ordinary people to demand their problems are heard and addressed. These are reports done by citizens with immediate problems. Our daily ratings showed Citizen Patrol was highly popular.

Taking the lessons we learned from that, we went one step further in 2007 – to put the idea of citizen journalism together with the vast reach and power of ABS-CBN and the ubiquitous cellphone. You know for many years the Philippines was called the text capital of the world: our people sent nearly 2 million sms or text messages daily.

In this campaign we called Boto Mo, Ipatrol Mo – which roughly translates to Patrol Your Vote, we took the traditional power of broadcast media, cable, and combined it with new media the Internet and mobile phone technology to create the first instance globally where a news media organization called on citizen journalists to rise for a very active, political purpose – to patrol their votes and push for clean elections.

We moved one step ahead of western media organizations because of our unique political situation: a country of 88 million people in a democracy which still used manual voting and counting … where charges of fraud, cheating and violence in elections are constant and consistent.

The idea for Boto Mo, Ipatrol Mo was simple: get the people to care and to take action. If you see something wrong or something good, tell us about it. If you see someone trying to buy the votes, snap a picture on your cellphone and send it to us. If you see a town mayor using public vehicles for his campaign, shoot a video with your cellphone and send it to us. If you see violence, tell us about it, and after a verification process, we will put it to air.

Two months into the four-month campaign, we received reports from the provinces that Boto Mo, Ipatrol Mo helped level the playing field where incumbents were running after we ran a story with the cellphone picture of city resources used for campaigns. So cellphones early on had become effective weapons!

It is an ultimate message of empowerment: we wanted to send the message that vigilance was important, that you should not become part of the problem but provide the solution – and that if you want a better future, you are not alone. We wanted to counter the growing apathy we were seeing, and show why these midterm elections were important to our future.

The response we received was overwhelming because we engaged our people through new and old media: we told them about our idea through mass media – radio, print, tv, cable then asked them to respond in every way possible: text or SMS, 3G, call center, Internet, mobile text center, even a walk-in center. I’m certain this participatory culture – and the collective intelligence it creates - will grow in the coming years, considering that our Internet penetration in the capital is only 15%, while nationwide is a little over 5%. But it’s growing at a fast clip of 200-300% annually.

The sheer volume of messages we received – about 500 a day leading up to elections and 1 a minute on election day – showed us not only the public’s distrust for our institutions and the electoral process, but also more importantly, it highlighted their hunger for change and their own battles for integrity. Their fears – because it is dangerous to fight the powers that be - were balanced by their own clamor to make things work. And when we gave them venues to do something about it, they did. Old and new media gave them hope.

This is what old and new media can do when they converge, empowering people and affecting our societies in ways we could never have dreamed of.

These are excerpts from the author’s speech at the Asia media summit in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia on May 27, 2008.