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. "

Comments

Re:Good luck, Dan

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Can Net journalism be good journalism

[G4from128k]

Desirable journalistic properties:

1. Speed: the "new" in news.
2. Accuracy: avoids all those silly retractions, libel, etc.
3. Relevance: Information that is meaningful or interesting or useful to the reader.
4. Depth: not popular among the CNN/USAToday set, but much needed.

Does the net help?

1. Speed: yes! two words: global bandwidth
2. 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.
3. Relevance: Yes: feedback scoring mechanisms (such as /. moderation system) help good stories bubble-up and bad stories drop to invisibility.
4. 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) /. moderation/metamoderation system would be needed to create distributed control over who posts stories and how they are edited or augmented over time.