Participatory Journalism

J.D. Lasica has written a three-part series on participatory journalism. He put a lot of emphasis on video netcasting, which I think has a lot of years to go before it's actually important in any sense due to the slow growth of broadband in the U.S., but overall it's a good analysis of trends in interactivity.

Comments

What is participatory journalism?

[mjmalone]

From the article:

But when bloggers comment on and link to news stories, is that journalism? Usually no -- but it depends. When the blogger adds personal commentary that relies on original research, or if it is done by someone considered an authority on the subject, some would consider it journalism.

I think that this is the most interesting thing that has come out of the web. In the past people relied on relatively few sources to form their opinions on politics and world affairs. With the advent of the internet comes the ability to discuss events with people all over the world instantaneously. We no longer have to rely on large organizations to provide us with news that is usually biased due to personal or corporate agendas.

Slashdot is an excellent example. Stories are posted here every day, and for those of you who RTFA you may notice, as I have, that the comments on slashdot often provide far more interesting insight. The article argues that blogging is not really journalism because there is no editor, I would argue that every reader of the blog is, in fact, an editor. If someone writes something in their blog that is obviously biased or not based on fact people will undoubtably pick up on it and reply.

Re:What is participatory journalism?

[Anonymous Coward]

I would argue that every reader of the blog is, in fact, an editor.

Slashdot -- where everyone is an editor with the exception of the editors.

Re:What is participatory journalism?

[chaoscat]

In a way, discussion sites like slashdot are a return to the very old idea of the Socratic Method (ala Socrates), where people learn by asking questions and discussing, rather than being presented with information. I've worked for several years now tutoring college freshmen, and I can say with some confidance that student participation invariably leads to better understanding than when i just stand there and explain stuff. Sites like slashdot bring this same type of experience to the news.

Re:What is participatory journalism?

[Lord_Dweomer]

" Slashdot is an excellent example. Stories are posted here every day, and for those of you who RTFA you may notice, as I have, that the comments on slashdot often provide far more interesting insight."

Interesting observation. It is my belief that the reason why nobody ever RTFA is BECAUSE the comments are more interesting. I know that's why I personally never RTFA. Not to mention that the important facts of the article are usually summed up throughout the course of reading people's comments, as well as seeing additional bit of relevant information attached to those important facts.

Re: What is participatory journalism?

[aaronsorkin]

Hi. I wrote the OJR series, so I'll dive in here and there.

>The article argues that blogging is not really journalism because there is no editor.

Actually, that's a view espoused by an editor at MSNBC.com -- and one that I disagree with. I agree with mjmalone that a lot of blogging is journalism. (My personal views on the subject weren't allowed into the story.) Here are some examples of open-source journalism:

- During the peace demonstrations in February, Lisa Rein took to the streets of San Francisco and Oakland, camcorder in hand, and taped video footage of the marchers and speakers, such as Rep. Barbara Lee, Harry Belafonte and antiwar activist Ron Kovic. She posted the video on her Weblog, complete with color commentary, providing much deeper coverage of the events than a viewer would get by watching the local news.

- At technology and media conferences, such as PopTech, South by Southwest and Digital Hollywood, bloggers in the audience have reported conference events in real time, posting photographs, speaker transcripts, and summaries and analysis of key points a full day before readers could see comparable stories in the daily newspaper.

- On July 16, 2003, blogger Andy Baio reported on the tragedy in which an elderly driver plowed through the Santa Monica Farmers Market just outside Baio's office window. He had been walking down that street 20 minutes before. Baio described "the dead and dying" lying in the street and relayed first-hand reports from office co-workers who were eyewitnesses. He also posted a map of the accident scene, laid out a detailed chronology of events, and pointed to media coverage and photographs of the bloody scene.

- On Super Bowl Sunday, a 22-year-old blogger in Los Angeles named Jessica braved the freezing cold to attend a televised outdoor concert by the British group Coldplay. She came home and blogged it, giving her take on the concert and reporting the band's play list. Like hundreds of others who watched the show and wanted to learn the names of the songs played, I turned to the Internet. I came up empty when I visited abc.com and coldplay.com. But hundreds of us found them (through Google) on Jessica's blog.

Jessica probably didn't know it, but she was committing a random act of journalism. And that's the real revolution here: In a world of micro-content delivered to niche audiences, more and more of the small tidbits of news that we encounter each day are being conveyed through personal media -- chiefly blogs.

I've heard it called it participatory journalism, open-source journalism, swarm journalism, distributed journalism, and journalism from the edges. By whatever name, it refers to individuals playing an active role in the process of collecting, reporting, sorting, analyzing and disseminating news and information -- a task once reserved almost exclusively to the traditional news media.

I included Slashdot, Kuro5hin and Metafilter as one of the categories because this, to me, is one of the most successful examples of using readers as creators, editors and fact-checkers.

-- JD Lasica

Journalism 101

[segment]

when business interests and advertising dollars trump the rights of readers to obtain honest, hard-hitting advice that would send a media bean-counter into a stroke.

One of the problems with independent journalists is cognitive dissonance:

Festinger claimed that people avoid information that is likely to increase dissonance. Not only do we tend to select reading material and television programs that are consistent with our existing beliefs, we usually choose to be with people who are like us. By taking care to ''stick with our own kind," we can maintain the relative comfort of the status quo. Like-minded people buffer us from ideas that could cause discomfort. In that sense, the process of making friends is an example of selecting our own propaganda.

We as people tend to stick with familiarity, and with the news agencies, just because it isn't an independent person but rather a slew of ideals thrown together, no matter what you think things will always be slanted one way or the other.

As most newspaper and broadcast journalists can attest, there are some news subjects that are considered generally off-limits to the news side

Everything must be taken with a grain of salt. My pet peeve about news agencies, is they seemed to be reserved in what they will say, and I think too many people are left blind to major issues in life. It's sad to admit it, but there are many people worldwide who don't have the mental capability of understanding what is in front of them. Instead they turn away to fantasy, Jennifer Lopez, Ben Affleck, Oprah, whatever can be used as an escape.

Being that i run a pseudo news site with information that I think is interesting, I too know how to slant things for my own enjoyment or gain. I also know the dangers that most don't when it comes to posting certain information. Sure I've been threatened with suits, been visited by feds, and I'm still debating whether or not I should take down MI6's headquarter pix from my FOIA directory. I think participation is great because it gives another perspective to an issue, yet at the same time I think it is dangerous because common sense would dictate, somewhere along the line information will be misconstrued which could lead to grave danger.

EOF

Re:Journalism 101

[aaronsorkin]

The "media bean-counter" quote comes from another (related) OJR story I wrote, Niches of trust, which looked at three indie one-person news sites.

While I agree that indie news operations would cause dissonance from readers who want to stick to the familiar (if stale) old media brands, the fact that indie sites tend to offer niche news and subjective news might work in their favor over the long term.

Indymedia, for example, offers a subjective slant to political news (just as the increasingly popular Fox News does on the other side of the political spectrum). Whether it's Guerrilla News Network, The Car Place, Theme Park Insider, Consumer World or others, all such indie news sites offer solid personal journalism and community journalism often not found on institutional news sites beholden to commercial interests.

I don't see how user participation is "dangerous because common sense would dictate, somewhere along the line information will be misconstrued." That's where the Internet community's self-correction mechanism comes into play.

A conversation may be noisier, but it's much more fulfilling than a perpetual one-way lecture from the media.

-- JD Lasica

see /.

[lavaface]

I get nearly all of my news from blogs and other news aggrergators. Eschaton and the Progressive Review will point me to articles of interest. /. is also important in this regard. Of course these sites merely link to other publications. However, the context that they place articles and the accompanying comments are often more important than the articles themselves. There are few examples of journalists posting original work, but they do exist. Christopher Allbritton, a former AP reporter raised $10,000 for a trip to Iraq for original reporting on Back to Iraq. Calpundit has a post about the microjournalism efforts of science writer David Appell. In time, a market for independent journalists will emerge. A widespread plan for micropayments will help.

South Korea's Ohmynews(not in english yet) has thousands of contributers whose stories are ranked and polished by seasoned editors. The internet played an important role in electing their progressive president in the last election.

There is a future for independent original news on the web. For now, though, it will remain the province of armchair pundits who sift through dozens, or hundreds, of articles and put them in a context that Google news could never do (maybe with the purchase of Pyra Labs . . . ) They may have other jobs but if they are successful enough to elicit 10,000 people to contribute $5, they are on their way towards financial independence as well.

Journalism and Blogs

[Geartest.com]

We ran an article about blogs, participatory journalism and emerging technology from a panel discussion at this year's annual Canadian Association of Journalists (inter)national conference.

The panelists agreed that blogging and other forms of particpatory journalism don't automatically qualify as journalism, but they did say that it CAN be journalism if journalistic standards and principles are applied.

One of the more interesting comments was from technology journalist David Akin, who said that experiments that enlist blogging citizens with camera phones to send their photos to news sites may be cool and fun and interesting, but it's not news by longshot, mainly because they lack the professional journalistic skills to identify what qualifies as news.

Only partially tongue-in-cheek...

[WildFire42]

I think this is the ultimate form of "interactive" journalism...

The Naked News, The program with nothing to hide.

I mean, really though, those who watch this, are they really paying attention to the latest George W. Bush sound clip?

I mean, I'm all for bewbies, but has our society really gotten to the point where the only way we can get people to be interested in current events is if the ignorant public gets to see primo mammary glandage?

Good grief.

Comments from the fringe

[Platinum Dragon]

For some time, I've participated in a couple parts of a widespread participatory journalism project. Since participatory journalism can be anything from an open publishing system with editor collectives, to someone's soapbox with a comment system, it's a bit hard for anyone to call themself an expert or something. With that said, I'd like to toss in a few thoughts drawn from my own experiences.

First, I haven't read the comments, but I suspect more than a few people will cry "but what about objectivity???" Objectivity does not exist. Everyone, every reporter, every editor, approaches a story from an angle, whether a personal one derived from years of experience, or a collective one that comes from economic or political demands. It is essential that independent writers report and analyse truthful information without exaggeration, but there must be an open acknowledgement that different sources will skew descriptions based on their own opinions. One need only contrast, say, the Toronto Star, the National Post, and Socialist Worker's description of the same events to recognize this reality.

I find that the best articles, in corporate, state, and independent media report the facts, then provide analysis based on the writer's stated or perceivable mental framework. Journalism seems at its best when the writers go beyond reporting, placing events in a greater context. Obviously, context can be selective, which makes the necessity of varied sources even more important. Falsehoods and exaggerations need to be called out and corrected. However, the focus on "objectivity" has become a fetish that very few news services really pay anything more than lip service to. Far too often, objectivity is used as a cover for inserting yet another editorial viewpoint to an article or deleting a disfavoured view (or even an uncomfortable fact). The most obvious example of this that pops into my head is Fox News' "Fair and Balanced" slogan, and you can probably come up with many more.

Second, open-publishing sites will be just as influenced by concerns outside of pure reporting as the New York Times or the Islamic Republic News Agency. Editorial collectives or individual editors will post features based on an overall point of view. I doubt anyone will ever see a feature praising neoconservatives on Ontario Indymedia; likewise, I will never expect to see a headline praising anarchists on Free Republic. If there are forums or open-publishing systems, the collective/editors will likely retain some kind of control over the system. Some kind of editing capability is necessary to deal with spam, flames disguised as news, repeated postings, false info, legally questionable things (some sites will be more anal than others regarding legalities), etc. I've found that comments are best left untouched, since the debate can be useful and enlightening, such as many high-score posts here.

I've participated in two editorial collectives. One tended toward a freewheeling attitude, allowing practically anything that wasn't empty, an advertisement, a repeat, or blatantly inciteful. We almost never hid comments to articles, barring a nasty incident following the Netanya suicide bombing in 2001 and the Israeli military operation that followed it, where some knob decided to post anti-Jewish imagery as comments to every article on the newswire. The jerk, stopped, eventually, and the flood of crap that polluted the newswire helped spark a discussion about reorganizing the site and the abilities of the newswire clerks.

This leads to another point, regarding freedom of speech. Free speech does not mean every nutbar and arsewad can post whatever crap they want and cry "censorship" when it is removed. Even sites operated by anarchist collectives will have rules, since "anarch" translates as "no leaders," not "no rules". However, I've found that the most satisfying sites have an open membership policy. Anyone who is willing to put in the effort can join the edit