Innovation in Focus: Inauguration Report 2009

Micael Bogar

On January 20th, we experienced an historic moment in not only politics but in public media 2.0 as well -- Inauguration Report 09.

NPR teamed up with American University's School of Communication and CBS to bring you a cutting edge social media tool that utilizes Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, iPhone and Google Phones, and text messaging to engage the public around this exciting event.

More than 35,000 user contributions detailed what took place in and around DC on Inauguration day. What makes this project "historic" is a straightforward yet multi-layered design that channels multiple forms of social media—tweets, photos, videos, audio—into one subject stream. The result is an online time capsule that allows any interested party to access and pull information for a myriad of uses.

I chatted with one of Inauguration Report '09 creators, David Johnson, a professor at American University's School of Communication, about the implications and takeaways from this project.

"The traditional goals of mass media have always been about competition," he said—that is, the a.m. paper needs to compete with the p.m. paper, X News Show needs to beat out Y News Show. "In addition, high level journalism thinking creates a private elite experience where we find a great deal of preaching to the converted. In order to make projects such as Inauguration Report work, we need to collaborate and accept that people are people, they make typos and say uneducated uninformed and sometimes outrageous things. At what point do we accept citizen content?"

The Inauguration Report project was a chance for journalism outlets to take that step into citizen content—and now, we have a mass archive of on-the-ground reporting. Sifting through the pictures, videos, tweets and voice messages is truly a fascinating way to get your daily news. Rather than look to the New York Times and Washington Post for an authoritative take on what went on in DC on January 20th, this is an amazing opportunity to immerse yourself in the story.

On a personal note, I was lucky enough to spend Inauguration in DC and as I sifted through the Inauguration Report days later I was blown away by the sense of accuracy. It felt as if I were back in the cold and crowds—freezing toes, shoved up against a heavyset man in an Obama T-shirt. The stories are raw, honest and human. It truly is a beautiful journalistic piece --written by thousands of people.

For Johnson, the value of this project really lies in the technological framework. "We need to take this application and give it to others as a tool—like WordPress. It's a great tool for both journalists as well as social marketing. Everything said is attributable. It offers phenomenal power."

Under the Future of Public Media grant, we look forward to working more with Johnson and the Inauguration Report team to further investigate and evaluate the impact of this project and gain insight into the next steps.

Stay tuned!