Tish was involved in the Media Giraffe summit (http://newshare.typepad.com/mgp2006 and go here http://mediagiraffe.org/ for the ongoing Media Giraffe project), which she refers to. I wanted to attend but just wasn’t in the position to travel to the US when it was on. But the ethos of it was a lot more collaborative than other conferences that I’ve been to or heard of. Some of the discussions that were spawned by the conference inform this series of posts that I’ve been writing. As a matter of fact, if memory serves, Jeff Jarvis wrote his networked journalism post after sharing a ride with Jay Rosen after the Media Giraffe summit. Lots of good thoughts came out of that.

As for how to broaden the discussion, I’m very much of the ‘just do it’ attitude. And Steve, you’re probably doing more than most.

best,
k

Thanks for your thoughts. How do you suggest to widen the discussion about citizen journalism? Do we create a “astro turf” (think grassroots) viral marketing campaign on MySpace, YouTube, and digg?

As much as “citizen journalism” is something of a misnomer, the idea that what is done by “the people” as a “wisdom of crowds” thing in citizen journalism is a misperception perpetuated, I think, by people who spend more time writing theories about citizen journalism than they do researching and reading citizen journalism cites.

Many citizen journalism projects/sites are maintaned by smart folks who are passionate about something and who are no less qualified or brilliant than any j-school grad. Many simply aren’t willing to leave behind their current money-earning professions to write official professional journalism (the definition of which, I might add, varies) Consider the ph.d’d biologist who writes “citizen” articles on politics.

Further, many of cit. j. projects involve former or current journalists. So Jeff’s idea of networked journalism is already occuring on a number of citizen journalism sites. (Interesting that Jeff came to his idea after 2 days at the U.Mass Media Giraffe Project conference. wonder if he’d managed to talk to some of the citizen journalists who were there…)

Some fine examples of this are The New Haven Independent or the Chi-Town Daily News or ePluribus Media (which is a combined effort of journal/timelines/community, etc.)

This is just a small citizen journalism, guys. If more folks would take the time to investigate the genre, they might have better, more productive conversations about it.

Best,
Tish

You hit on a really critical point which is to look at all of these connections and networks outside of media sites. One of the things I bang away at all the time is how we in the media tend to think of user generated content only as something that comes through our web sites. Send us your pics, your comments, and such. But there is so much more going on outside of our sites. Again, that kind of collaboration is another opportunity that most media organisations are missing.

I also agree. This is just journalism, just adapted to new realities and new tools. The power of it is so obvious to those of us who do it. As Steve pointed out on his blog last week, it’s really powerful. We managed to speak with someone in Mumbai over Skype last week when all of the phone networks were struggling. And people in India are sending us audio messages using Odeo.

best,
k

Anyway, Kevin, let’s not forget that “networked journalism” can apply equally to the relationships between (former) audience members and not just between the (former) audience and the (former) producer. Sharing of information between people can create the kind of jigsaw effect that can *build* a story - plug professional journalists into that as well (often after much of the grassroots muckraking has been done nowdays, to be honest) and you have something powerful. One would hate to cite Rathergate or Trent Lott as an example again… so I’ll remind ourselves who broke the story - the *correct* story - about John Edwards’ VP candidature.

Wisdom-of-crowds journalism. Connections are wonderful things.
“Crowd-sourcing”’s already gone - but journalists can certainly use the crowd’s efforts as their source.

Sadly I would say that attention-deficit journalism seems accurate…