Slashdot Mirror
Dan Gillmor Launches Grassroots Journalism
kbahey writes "
Most Slashdotters know Dan Gillmor from his San Jose Mercury days, with lots of article on technology over the years, from the dot-com era down to now. As has been rumored before, Dan has left the SJ Mercury to found a 'grassroots journalism' project. Well, it is here, and called the Bayosphere. The site is powered by Drupal, an open source Content Management System. Jay Campbell, Dan's Technologist, writes about why they chose Drupal. "
You misunderstand. /. is not grassroots journalism. It's an online version of a pub. A bunch of drunken bastards bitching about the news of the day.
I never realized that local california papers had such high readership in Bangalore or Boston or all the many other places /. readers read.
- Speed: the "new" in news.
- Accuracy: avoids all those silly retractions, libel, etc.
- Relevance: Information that is meaningful or interesting or useful to the reader.
- Depth: not popular among the CNN/USAToday set, but much needed.
Does the net help?- Speed: yes! two words: global bandwidth
- Accuracy: Maybe: Distributed information gathering and rapid feedback help jointly edit/discredit stories. But the process can also feed a "tyranny of the majority" group delusion.
- Relevance: Yes: feedback scoring mechanisms (such as
/. moderation system) help good stories bubble-up and bad stories drop to invisibility.
- Depth: Yes: Wiki-like group editing can add depth, although it may be too slow for "news" stories (more appropriate for feature articles and thought pieces).
Overall, I'd say that grassroots journalism could be good journalism if the system can create the self-regulatory structures needed. Something like (but better than)Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
It couldn't be any worse than what the big names in media do already. Newsweek played a major role in spreading a story about a soldier trying to flush part of the Koran down the toilet in gitmo. Just one little problem: Newsweek's "source" was an anonymous phone call from someone alleging to be a government official who paraphrased what they claimed was a report to be issued. They never even read an excerpt of the report to the Newsweek reporter and what did they do? They pounced on this "story" (as in a complete fiction) and now 9 people in Afghanistan are dead because the riot that Newsweek helped start got so out of control that the small fledgling Afghani government had to use a lot of force to stop huge crowds of rioting students and other civilians.
The news media can talk about blogging killing the media, but bloggers haven't contributed to people being killed yet. The mainstream media on the other hand, has. So much for the much vaunted "accountability" that is supposed to separate blogging from "journalism" these days. That's what's always cited by the media as the important difference. While I don't trust bloggers either for objective reporting of the facts, can anyone seriously say that the professional media cares about the truth any more than bloggers do?
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
Fast-forward to 2004 (or 2005 I guess), and we have an internet news/media that does not have to remain persistant (like paper). Despite the valiant efforts of the Wayback Machine, Google Cache, etc., the vision in Orwell's book can actually happen!
Although slightly off-topic, it is food for thought.....