Wednesday, March 31, 2010

#likeminds , citizen journalism

Found this Idio blog through Twitter and following @scottgould from #likeminds connections.
Citizen Journalism / Crowd-sourcing

With every major international event that occurs, it seems that citizen journalism takes another step into the mainstream. From Twitter reports emerging out of the streets of Iran, to videoblogs during the earthquakes in South America, the world is taking notice of personal voices, as tools such as Twitter and Youtube become a protocol for mass individual reporting. Many publishers have made great strides in this area, but still the vast majority of mainstream news is produced by paid journalists. There are certain areas which are very likely to move towards the crowd-sourcing model in the next years, including sports reports and hyperlocal news. And since a lot of reporting is already been done for free, why shouldn’t publishers take advantage?

This is about fourth in line as an idea to lower the cost of journalism. Thing is, citizen journalism also involves some editorial scope for the citizen. Not just video of the earthquake for the professionals to select. But at least citizen journalism is still on the agenda.

By the way, still no reply from the Guardian as such. Jeff Jarvis has commented on this blog, and returned to Guardian in print. But I would still like to know how to check a fact about the Guardian.

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