WORKING THE PROS

A legitimate beef from a legitimate reporter: what's happening in Blog Land is making the jobs of professional journalists harder. William Raspberry of the Washington Post writes:

The explosion of the Internet leaves us, in effect, with no gatekeeper. Sometimes important information gains currency that way. The problem is that anyone with Web access can run any cockamamie story up the flagpole -- and if enough people salute, prompt the mainstream press to deploy its resources.

It's that bad -- and it isn't likely to get better any time soon.

Of course, it could be that the media has to work harder because suddenly there are a whole lot of conversations going on that don't necessarily fit with conventional wisdom or the narrative arc that mainstream media has agreed on.

Or it could be somewhere in between. Whatever. It's a new age. Things may calm down after the bitterly contested U.S. presidential election, but don't think we're going back to the olden days. The gatekeeper is, if not dying, at least wobbly.

SOURCE: Steve Rubel at Micro Persuasion.
9:43:58 PM  LINK TO THIS POST  

WIKI DOES NEWS?

The folks behind the open-source, collaborative Wikipedia are laying out the ground rules for a potential new offspring: Wikinews.

We seek to create a free source of news, where every human being is invited to contribute reports about events large and small, either from direct experience, or summarized from elsewhere.... It is founded on the belief that we can, together, build a great and unique resource which will enrich the media landscape.

While Wikinews aims to be a useful resource of its own, it will also provide an alternative to proprietary news agencies like the Associated Press or Reuters; that is, it will allow independent media outfits to get a high quality feed of news free of charge to complement their own reporting.

Those are big goals, but then again so was the initial idea behind Wikipedia.

There's some interesting stuff in the outline for the proposal, spelling out such things as the controls that would ensure the accuracy of reporting. The project would rely entirely on "citizen journalists" some of whom would be, in the words of Wikinews Think Tank, accredited.

Wikinews would take projects like OhmyNews a step further, by taking the professional journalists out of the mix. I don't necessarily see this as the future of news, but it's definitely worth keeping an eye on.
9:17:51 PM  LINK TO THIS POST  

MORE SIGNS OF CHANGE

Yesterday I wrote: "More than enough things have happened this year in mainstream media, politics and on the internet to mark a watershed of some sort."

More evidence today. The Institute for Interactive Journalism has announced it will provide seed money for 20 community-based news projects in the U.S. over the next two years.

Over the next two years, the "New Voices" project will help fund the start-up of 20 micro-local, news projects; support them with an educational Web site, in collaboration with the Poynter Institute's News University; and help foster their sustainability through small second-year grants.

Under the grant, J-Lab, a center of the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland, will call for proposals from nonprofit and education institutions with new ideas for distributing news and information. A national Advisory Board will award seed grants of $12,000 to $17,000 to help create new types of self-sustaining community media projects.

New media. New funding. Things are happening.
8:50:47 PM  LINK TO THIS POST