We the media listen to Gillmor

We were most chuffed to get the opportunity to meet Dan Gillmor - visionary, former San Jose Mercury News tech economy columnist and patron saint of citizen journalists everywhere. He is now in a somewhat entrepreneurial role behind Internet startup Bayosphere, a grassroots journalism website "by and for the people of the San Francisco Bay Area".

Gillmor, a former Knight Wallace Fellow, delivered this year's Graham Hovey lecture to many members of the university faculty in the grounds of Wallace House. In his introduction to Gillmor's address, KWF director, Charles Eisendrath, pronounced Gillmor's recent book, We the Media, required reading for any media professional: high praise before a potentially hostile crowd (I was probably the only representative from new media in the entire marquee).

He began with a lovely possibility of New Orleans newspaper the Times-Picayune winning a Pulitzer for exposing the corruption behind the post-Katrina rebuilding of New Orleans - thanks, in large part, to their citizen journalists. Big media, he says, must open up communication, must have 'conversations' with their readers/consumers if they are to remain (or regain?) relevant.

Create transparency. Give your best reporters blogs. If you don't have any of your own, point to the best ones in your community. And news websites, citizen journalists and blogs are not the enemy of circulation - eBay and Craigslist are.

We didn't get answers, we didn't get a blueprint... rather Gillmor threw out a lot of ideas and challenges. Have a read for yourself at his blog.

The shindig at the house gave us plenty of time to chat with Gillmor - and he revealed he still has not been paid by a national Australian newspaper for a column he wrote for them last time he visited. He is refreshingly genial and humble - no swagger, no ego, no bullshit.

Speaking of Katrina, on Friday some of us returned to Wallace House to have lunch and chat with Greg Button of the University's School of Public Health, back from gathering first-hand accounts from evacuees at the Houston Astrodome. Heartbreaking stuff on the shocking way the evacuees were treated in the militarised refuge: guns pointed at them, the sick and feeble made to stand in lines for hours in the sun to fill out forms or see doctors, made to leave all belongings behind when boarding buses for their new homes interstate, refused re-entry to the refuge if they'd lost their plastic ID bracelets, forced to sleep under bright lights with loudspeakers blaring through the night - some of these announcements giving them only one hour to decide if they'd like to board a bus for another part of the country. People were forcibly removed from one arena to another at 3:30am, no reason given. And then there were the stories of difficulties in getting certain products into the compound, with workers deciding, in the case of a donation of laptop computers, that the evacuees wouldn't know how to use them anyway, so they didn't get distributed. Where are they now? Dr Button spoke to Michigan Radio about his interviews.