[Cc-webedit] [mediateam] News during camp & website

[Jonathan Leighton]

Hi Jody,

Have a look at the current design: http://dev.climatecamp.org.uk/

The feed would be in the "Climate Campers Online" column. Each one would
probably say "London Indymedia" or "Northern Indymedia" depending on
where it came from. [I've been sent an amendment to include Northern
Indymedia, which I think is reasonable as they will be providing the
equipment at camp so apparently some stuff will go up there.]

I'll try to deal with each of your points:

On Mon, 2009-08-17 at 10:18 +0100, Jody Boehnert wrote:
> Yes, if I understand this correctly I have to say I do have a major
> objection to it as I think it could easily undermine the work the
> media team is doing in developing messaging.

We are going to have the blog, which the media team will have an
involvement in, and will *not* be for open publishing. (I.e. to write a
blog post people have to work with the blog team, who "curate" the
content on there.)

We are also showing recent press releases on the home page, plus a
Twitter feed. So there's quite a lot of "controlled" content there.

> We should not publish opinions from individual campers on our website
> as 'news' - This could potentially be disasterous given the wide range
> of opinions within CC - it could be very off-topic, ill-considered or
> even a little crazy. 

I think it is important to allow people to voice their views. I think
there is a danger of climate camp becoming too controlling, and some
people think this already. I think having this feed could go a long way
towards preventing that. And the feed will be moderated by
London/Northern Indymedia who will ensure that the content meets their
publishing guidelines.

> I would not like to just pull articles from Indemedia either -
> although they do have a bit of moderation set up it is not fast enough
> and their standards are not the same as CC media policy.

We definitely cannot do it faster with our own resources...

> 'News' on our website needs to come from the media team, there is not
> way of opening this up without causing chaos.  Blogs are different -
> but need to be moderated, not presented as news, and not have as high
> a priority on the site.

I think the way we present it will make it clear this is not the
"official" stuff. If it would help we could put in a line which says:

"Individuals' views do not necessarily represent the views of everybody
else."

Also, I would like to say that I don't really feel that this objection
actually relates to the actual proposal. We had already agreed to have a
moderated feed on the front page from an open publishing site - and I
think the media team has discussed this and is happy about it. The
proposal is really only about whether it's our *own* open publishing
site or an Indymedia one.

Please let us know if this relaxes any of your concerns. I am a bit
worried because we really don't have any time to have a big discussion
about this at the moment :(

Jon