What can/should citizen journalists do?…
As I mentioned earlier, Doug McGill, Jeremy Iggers, and I will be wrestling with the question “Who is a journalist?” for the Media Ethics Colloquium to be held in Minneapolis in October, sponsored by the Journal of Mass Media Ethics. So I’ll be especially interested in the BloggerConIV discussion about “Users-Know-More-Than-We-Do Journalism.” Jay Rosen will be the discussion leader.
His preview of the discussion offers some interesting questions regarding method, i.e. what can/should open-source and citizen journalists do in order to break news? The questions:
- What kinds of stories can be usefully investigated using open source and collaborative methods?
- Which user communties are good bets to be interested enough to make it happen?
- What will it take to start running some real world experiments that could yield compelling and publishable work?
- What needs to be invented for this kind of journalism to be flourish?
- What tools already exist, and how can we adapt them?
- What attempts have already been made to do this kind of journalism and what can be learned from them?
- What are the practical problems that will surely arise and what fixes exist for them?
- If we hired you to prove that, properly done, readers-know-more-than-I-do journalism can work, how would you do it?
I’ll be awaiting some interesting answers. But before that happens, I’ll make the attempt myself early next week before the discussion begins. The panels is scheduled for June 23, 10:30-11:45 a.m.
The BloggerConIV people are trying to work out details for streamcasting and/or podcasting. If you’d like to help ($$$), click here.
