Received Fellowship for We Media Conference

I got an awesome surprise for my 29th birthday today -- I was awarded with a fellowship to attend the We Media Conference in New York City!

This is really great news for me and The Echo Chamber Project.

Not only does it does is waive the $695 fee, but more importantly the American Press Institute's Media Center will be publishing a statement from me about my project on their website as one of the 15 fellowship recipients.

UPDATE: He is the We Media announcement about the 15 fellowship recipients.
(More info below)

The We Media Conference is bringing together some of the biggest thought leaders from old big media to the innovators of the new media movement "for a series of conversations and collaborations on participatory media."

It features a lot of the usual suspects from the New Media world like Jeff Jarvis, Dan Gillmor, Jay Rosen, Rebecca MacKinnon, and Susan Mernit mixed with influential people from the old media world like the President of the Associated Press, Presidents of CBS News & CBS Digital Media, Director of the BBC Global News Division, a New York Times columnist, the VP for Yahoo!, and the Former Vice President of the United States / Chairman of Current.tv

There are also notable appearances from popular bloggers like Wonkette's Ana Marie Cox, Gawker's Jessica Coen, Weblogs, Inc. founder Jason Calacanis, Criagslist founder Craig Newmark, and representatives from Citizen Journalism efforts like the Greensboro News-Record and Backfence.com.

Throw in some more analysts and other institutional representatives and you've got a pretty impressive group of movers and shakers when it comes to the blending old school professional media with the emerging paradigms for participatory citizen journalism.

Needless to say, I'm pretty excited about attending this conference on October 5th.

The only bad part is that the schedule for this one-day conference is packed so tight that it'll be impossible to talk to everyone that I'd like to.

I haven't decided on my conference strategy just yet, but I'm sure that it will involve getting in touch with as many of the participants before the conference as possible.

Listed below is the letter from the Media Center announcing my fellowship...

Kent,

We received almost 140 fellowship applications, and it was very difficult to select just 15 out of so many terrific applicants. It is our pleasure to be able to offer you a fellowship to the We Media conference on Oct. 5, 2005, at The Associated Press.

To remind you, you are responsible for your own travel and lodging expenses.

To accept the fellowship,

1) Please respond to this note with “I accept the fellowship” in the subject line.

2) We will publish your statement on the We Media Web site, so in your email please give us your name, title and organization that you want us to use.

3) In your email, please send us your application statement again, with any editing changes you want to make. This, also, will be published on the We Media site.

Your statement [edited]:

The Echo Chamber Project is an open source, collaborative documentary about the failures of the broadcast television news media leading up to the war in Iraq, and how I produce the film will provide some innovative solutions to large-scale, decentralized citizen journalism.

Collaborative editing of this film will be accomplished with an open source, Internet-based infrastructure and analytical methodologies that will provide a proof-of-concept for how complex investigative journalism projects could be facilitated with a diverse ecosystem of citizen journalists.

This collaborative process includes the distributed transcription of interviews by volunteers, open sourcing the text and audio of interviews with nearly 70 journalists, media critics, new media leaders and other scholars, and then using the social software of Drupal to add folksonomy tags to sound bites, stringing together sound bite sequences within Drupal, and then generating valid XML to interface with the Final Cut Pro editing software.

I am documenting this process with a video blog, and provide a number of links with more details here: http://www.echochamberproject.com/WeMediaConference

I look forward to attending the We Media Conference to gather more insights and institutional support for The Echo Chamber Project.

See you at We Media!

Regards,

Gloria Pan
Communications Director, The Media Center at API
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