Working in Movement

You wanna be a journalist? Probably, you already are, or at least you could be fairly easily. In Today, Everyone's a Reporter (Via Wired News.), Lucas Graves talks about how it works, with some spice from Dan Gillmour and his recent We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the Peopl, for the People.

The situation today is different than media guys asking citizens for help. That's been the case for a long time:

But this is different. Rookies are no longer handing their source material to the pros; they're publishing it themselves. Journalists still need Joe Citizen, but he doesn't need them.

Graves warns being your own Citizen Kane is not without risk because "Courts have been reluctant to extend to amateurs the First Amendment protections or shield laws enjoyed by the Fourth Estate."

The one big distinction is resources:

The pros still have one thing most amateurs don't: resources. Grassroots reporting fills the gaps in mainstream coverage, keeps members of the old guard on their toes, and shines when there's a premium on fast facts from the scene. But laypeople can't do much with a story like Watergate or Enron. "Big investigative projects require deep pockets," Gillmor says. "I'm not trying to tell anyone that we don't need paid journalists. I hope for an ecosystem where many forms of information can survive and thrive."

Looks to me like this piece was written before the overwhelmingly terrible events in New Orleans. But Flood Waters Can't Sink Net Link reports on one example of the very thing Graves wrote about. New Orleans web hosting company Zipa, housed in a high rise located in heart of the disaster, and equipped with big diesel generators, continued service in the worst of the flooding and hurricane aftermath. One of the staff of sister company DirectNic has continued updating his Live Journal blog, and reportedly gets 3,000 visitors an hour.