Users-Know-More-Than-We-Do" Journalism

 
Friday, July 14, 2006 Posted by Amy Gahran 1:15:22 PM Doing "Users-Know-More-Than-We-Do" Journalism

I just got around to listening to the podcast of the Bloggercon IV session on citizen journalism, held June 23 in San Francisco. Wow! If you want your mind blown in a "what is journalism" way, definitely give this MP3 file a listen. (33 MB, 1 hour 12 minutes)

The great thing about Bloggercon is that it's run on the "unconference" format, where each session has a discussion leader and the attendees speak up and provide the content. NYU professor Jay Rosen led this session, and he warmed it up with a brief chat and a posting in his blog PressThink about Users-Know-More-Than-We-Do Journalism.

That specific type of citizen journalism is especially revolutionary because, as the session discussion revealed, it dispenses with some very basic aspects of the form and practice of journalism. Also called open source journalism, the idea is to enlist large numbers of people in gathering similar types of information to create a collaborative mosaic of news and views.

What's so cool about that? This appproach might yield considerable potential to break news, not just amplify or analyze it.

That session was a fusion generator of brainpower. Almost everyone who spoke up was an online-media luminary. Here are just a couple of quotes I thought traditional journalists might find especially challenging:

Lisa Williams (H2Otown): "We're essentially [talking about] turning journalism into an industrial product. Journalism is still largely in a pre-industrial phase. They have guilds. They can't split tasks up into little pieces like an assembly line. You don't send 100 reporters out and each of them write one sentence of the story, and you put it together at the end. It doesn't work that way. But that's exactly what's going to happen to these stories. So you need to find particular stories that can be broken into uniform [reporting tasks] that can be performed in a small, repetitive way by lots and lots of people."

Terry Heaton (Donata Communications): "I think the use of the word 'story' is counterproductive in users-know-more-than-we-do journalism. Story is a narrative, it's the way we've passed information along for many years. But it presupposes that the storyteller has information that everyone else doesn't. If you turn the pyramid upside down and assume that everyone's got more knowledge than [you] do, then you've got a problem telling a story. I think whatever we come up with ...will be much more rejecting of narratives. ...The filtering process will take place at the individual level, not at the storyteller level."

What do you think about users-know-more-than-we-do journalism? Can it actually play a valid journalistic role? Is it anarchy? Please comment below.

E-mail this item | Add Your Comments | QuickLink this item