Lisa Williams: What if citizen journalism is just a mirage?

Jeff Jarvis: Networked journalism at work

VideoJug. Neat. Check it out.

The same economic drivers that are disrupting the newspaper industry, indeed any industry built on the distribution and packaging of creative acts that can be transmitted digitally, on the Internet, are the same.

I don’t think it’s all that different whether you are talking about newspapers, music, radio, TV, or movies.

Musicians have been the canary in the coal mine for some time now. These past few years they have been finding new ways to fund their art and reach fans and new audiences. God knows the previous arrangement’s math didn’t favor them anyway.

The important thing – from records, to 8-tracks, to cassettes, to CDs, and now to mp3s, it’s the music that survives.

And it is going to thrive. No matter what naysayers may believe. The industry, on the other hand, has been and continues to be transformed. The economics have irrevocably been changed.

This while the news paper industry is still flailing about. In some instances working to produce less of its core product, in pursuit of profit.

Then again, what is the product? Is it the package (CDs in the music industry, the morning paper in the newspaper industry), or what is contained within?

The web presents a true medium to re-invigorate democracy. It’s a participatory architecture, built for collaboration and communication above all else. Every person that is on the web expands its usefulness, and presenting new opportunities to connect, converse and share.

So if you consider the product of the papers news and opinion, you’ll see the monolithic fourth estate crumbling as either a sign for alarm or celebration. With us barbarians at the gates. Unlimited choice, simple to use tools to find and share information and opinion, being the unintentional weapons.

The primary difference between losing the music industry and losing the work of newspapers is that we still need systems to research, filter, and present the news in a way that is beneficial in our lives. For our livelihoods. There are dire consequences to democracy, if we continue down a path of more media, less news and not find systems for people to deal with the ever growing fire house of information we are hit with day in and day out. I think we are already feeling some of the effects.

There is hope. But the choice for the newspaper industry remains as stark as Kent Newsome laid out for the music industry – find new business models or hold on as tight as you can until the well dries up.

Some in the industry know this already and are facing the future with open eyes and open minds. The new, local ownership of Philadelphia’s largest dailies might result in nimbler, more responsive, more participatory media. And conversations are underway exploring new infrastructures to support acts of journalism.

Others? Well hopefully Nick Lemanns of the world learn to recognize that the best way to move reporters to the web is to embrace the web as the participatory media it is. That the web, while offering challenges, presents terrific needs that journalists can fulfill. But it requires building bridges. And fast.

In-depth journalism requires legal, financial and information infrastructure. No one has solved these issues in a way that leverages the participatory nature of the web and has solved the funding equation. That’s why efforts like NewAssignment.Net are so crucial. Its work to put together a path is one to watch, and one to take part in. Tools like Memeorandum and Bloglines, along with plumbing like RSS and Atom, along with participatory news filters like Slashdot, Digg, Newsvine, IndyMedia and Philly Future, early news magazine efforts like Salon, Slate and Suck, and early newspaper efforts, many of which are lost to the nineties dot com crash, provide us with additional lessons to learn from. Not to mention the millions of blogs, and social networking users, many who have participant loyalty, that for some, rivals the relationships newspapers have forged with their readers. And what about Wikipedia?. These early efforts will help lead the way, but that’s no reason to sit on your hands. In this environment, those that wait too long for others to lead, will die.

Other stories of note this weekend:

Washington Post: An Eye for Cool, and Cash: Social news sites paying people to write. Imagine that!

paidContent: Advertisers Will Follow Audiences

NYTimes: What-Ifs of a Media Eclipse: Knight Ridder was ahead of the Internet curve, back in 1996. It even beat a threat from Microsoft (Sidewalk) remember. What happened?

Jay Rosen: “The Era of Networked Journalism Begins”:

Today marks a key moment in the evolution of the Web as a reporting medium. The first left-right-center coalition of bloggers, activists, non-profits, citizens and journalists to investigate a story of national import: Congressional earmarks and those who sponsor and benefit from them.

This is networked jounalism (“professionals and amateurs working together to get the real story”) beginning to come of age, and it’s very much in the spirit in my initiative NewAssignment.Net.

The partners in the Exposing Earmarks Project are the Sunlight Foundation, Citizens Against Government Waste, Porkbusters, and the Examiner Newspapers, along with Club for Growth, Human Events Online, The Heritage Foundation, Tapscott’s Copy Desk— and you, should you choose to be involved.

I’m really excited to see this get launched, so in comments I replied:

Wow this sounds like a great effort. It’s a shame it can’t help but be looked at as political, but to me, what’s important here, is the methodology, the technology, and the participatory nature of it.

Let me say it again – Wow.

Jay, while your title is great, I would argue the era of Networked Journalism began a long long time ago – with the launch of AltaVista perhaps. When tools emerged that those interested could pull from multiple resources of information on the web and the barriers to sharing that information fell down to consisting only of time and knowledge. I tend to see all of this as an evolution of the foundations of the web itself, as a collaboration tool.

This is simply a terrific effort and one that will stand up as an example as what is possible.

I also wanted to highlight a previous effort that that is very, very notable notable, an early mashup that seems forgotten about:

I’d like to remind folks of another interesting effort here – GovTrack.

GovTrack is a mashup that pulls together data from various sources to provide views of information about bills, representatives, and conversations taking place about them them.

The interface is a bit complicated. Maybe that’s why it hasn’t earned the attention it deserves. But it is a powerful tool to look into what those who represent us are doing in Washington.

The service won Technorati’s Developer Contest back in 2005.

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?

Jeff Jarvis makes a point I agree with, but I’m afraid not many look at it this way, at least not yet:

The Times has two good stories today that were both helped by the work of bloggers. I don’t say that at blog triumphalism or as a war cry of bloggers replacing journalists. Quite the contrary, I say that because these are the sorts of examples of networked journalism at work that I hope we’ll be seeing more and more.

…It’s not about them v. us, as Nick Lemann would have it. It’s about them and us. The more we work together, the more informed society will be. It is a good thing for journalism that there are now more people than ever doing journalism and these are just two small illustrations of that.

I replied (paraphrased) in his comments:

Wish the rhetoric from the community that spread word of the doctored photos shared your way of looking at things.

Because they don’t you know. And maybe it’s from their rallying cries that the Lemanns of the world derive their fear and concern from.