Dan Gillmor says Doc Searls committed an act of journalism, even if he wasn’t a journalist, when he posted his report from Logan Airport . Albert Yee, in Philadelphia, attended a community meeting on violence at Louis Kahn Memorial Park and and reported on the experience and the event itself. A powerful example of the same.
As Dan said of Doc, “He witnessed something and told the rest of us what he was seeing. It’s ordinary, but also extraordinary in the meaning for society in the long run.”. Indeed I believe that to be the case. But there is two ways of reading these acts of journalism. You can look at them as threats to ‘the establishment’, revolutionary examples of why we no longer need paid journalists and editors filtering the news for us. Or you can look at them as opportunities. Opportunities for paid journalists and editors to expand their role as as news gatherers. What if paid journalists and editors opened their horizons and looked outside their newsrooms to look for, discover, and empower those voices that wanted to contribute reports like Doc’s and Albert’s to a paper, or didn’t realize it’s a possibility?
Services like Inform.com and Technorati enable this on one level. Witness how WashingtonPost.com uses Technorati to expand coverage and discussion on their articles. But what if an editor at a paper was proactive in seeking out these acts of journalism? Using toolsets that enabled them to pull together reporting and opinions from across the blogosphere and to connect with those who have already contributed something? What if?
I keep asking this question: What’s so great about being an unpaid freelancer?
What’s so supercool about that? What’s so ultrafantastic?
Doc Searls (and I should say he’s a wonderful person) is getting lionized because he’s an A-lister, not because there was much intrinsic value in hearing that Logan airport is miserable in the middle of a terror alert (a man-bites-dog observation if there ever was one).
The opportunity to do *what*? To write a fluffy human-interest piece that you won’t get paid for, and won’t even get attention for unless you already have a high-attention position in the first place? Why should people be excited about that?
1. People want to be heard.
2. People want to share. (Probably to satisfy 1)
3. People want to connect.
It’s human nature. It’s you. It’s me. It’s why you have a blog. It’s why I do.
Now I’m not suggesting that folks remain unpaid and that those drivers get exploited. Whenever I hear “user content” I want to vomit.
I think, ultimately, there are opportunities here to form *paid* relationships between participants and larger media organzizations.
Calling them freelancers is fair enough. But instead of a media organization having a need and hiring someone, they discover thru their online community (doesn’t need to be hosted – it can be the blogosphere itself), looking to form deeper relationships with writers in their topic space.
Albert’s piece wasn’t a fluffy human interest piece. The subject matter is life and death in our town. He’s not an A-lister.