Airwaves & Liberty

This landed in my inbox from Jake Shapiro, jake[at]prx.org.

Hi all,

We’ve got a handful of part-time social media curator positions available immediately for “BallotVox” – part of the Public Media election collaboration project: http://ballotvox.prx.org

We’d love to get some station-based folks, so if you have any savvy YouTube, Flickr, and blogosphere enthusiasts who can dedicate 5-10 hours a week to help us find and promote the best user-generated expression about Campaign ‘08 (the candidates, local & national issues, the scene) please send them our way. We have 4-5 paid positions and are also recruiting volunteers.

More info and a link to the online applications is here: http://ballotvox.prx.org/archives/14/like-to-be-a-co-curator

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More info for the curious:

Working under the direction of Curator Katherine Bidwell, co-curators will help find, select, annotate, and promote citizen media and “user-generated content” from blogs, YouTube, podcasts and other sources. Selected content will be showcased on local and national public media websites.

What’s the point?

Public media has a unique opportunity to cover Campaign 2008 and elevate public engagement around critical issues at stake nationally and locally.

The democratization of the tools for creating and distributing media has resulted in an explosion of conversation, connection and content. This in turn creates a critical need for ways to sift, filter and find value amidst irrelevant or even harmful expression.

One important role is to use public media’s presence and journalistic values to showcase and highlight examples of the diverse range of content and conversation already taking place online.

While the CNN/YouTube debates are the highest profile attempt so far to incorporate participatory media into coverage of Campaign 2008, there are few focused efforts to help audiences navigate the growing ocean of “user-generated content” to find relevant, important and revealing voices and perspectives.

This social media curating project is an experiment to explore approaches to this task, in the context of a critical national moment of a presidential election.

More about the collaboration: http://www.cpb.org/pressroom/release.php?prn=630