How participatory journalism can improve your media company

The Situation

Technorati now watches more than 2 million weblogs. Of course, the majority of them are not very active. However, some like the Daily Kos and the Daily Dish have more than a million unique visitors a month and thousands of visitors each day. It’s not unusual to see more than 200 people write comments to individual posts. OhmyNews, the South Korean online newspaper began publishing four years ago. Today it claims to have some 30,000 citizen reporters writing for it. Wikipedia, an open-content encyclopedia, started in January 2001, now has more than 250,000 articles written by whomever wants to come and contribute. Obviously there are people out, many nonprofessionals, who can and do produce content. However, the news media stills seem intent on being a one-way street with it producing the content and the audiences consuming it. This is true even as “journalism is in the middle of an epochal transformation, as momentous probably as the invention of the telegraph or television,” according to “The State of the News Media Report 2004,” produced by the Project for Excellence in Journalism.

The Challenge

Mainstream journalists want to maintain their objectivity and above all their independence. In the past this meant being the gatekeepers. They see themselves as the professionals who demand firewalls not only internally, but also externally. Indeed, when it comes to the letting the public in, they have almost a fortress mentality. The public journalism reform movement illustrated how deeply entrenched that mindset was and is. However, the public journalists always thought that the public could contribute in positive ways to the journalistic output. Today through self-publishing tools like weblogs, the public is battering away at that fortress and forming its own information portals. As the “State of the News Reports” says the transformation is underway. Chris Waddle of the Anniston Star reminds us the news media have two choices: They can fight this transformation or they can see it as an opportunity. Fighting it will be counterproductive at best and futile at worse. If the news media takes the opportunity route, the central question is: How can the news media cooperate with all the citizen content providers to improve the quality and depth of journalism while maintaining standards of excellence?

The Opportunity

News media can tap into the potential power and resources of all these citizen and nonprofessional content providers, which include:

• Hyperlocal citizen reporters to cover topics and events that are too limited for beat reporters to cover. Could include everything from scholastic sports to zoning meetings.
• Community and organization newsletters
• Press releases
• Bloggers
• Online forums
• Indy news organization
• Ethnic publications
• Instant messaging, Moblogs etc.

The Solutions

Don’t throw it away, recycle all information:

• Today an editor or a reporter gets a press release, he or she reads it quickly and either uses it as a source, culls some information from it or most often tosses it. But guess what, there actually might be readers who find it interesting. Find a category for it and post the release as is.
• Check all information that passes through the newsroom, ask if it could be repackaged or just simply indexed or categorized and displayed for anyone who wants to tap into it. With bloggers and other amplification vehicles it might receive wide notice.
• Community newspapers have established yes editors whose job it is to see yes to anyone who wants to get something in the newspaper. That makes people happy. That’s what we are doing here. More yeses, less no’s mean a lot of happy people and more information for your readers.

Cooperate with universities and set up Citizen Media Centers as outlined by Jeff Jarvis at BuzzMachine to train the corps of potential citizen and hyperlocal journalists.

Learn how to harness the fast, cheap and out of control blogging that equals a sense of chaos for editors, who crave order, and shuns gatekeeping, but which creates wonderful content.

Read the whole We Media report and concentrate on Chapter 7, where much of this is already detailed by Chris Willis and Shayne Bowman.

Help us move from talk to action. Attend the conference Exploring the Fusion Power of Public and Participatory Journalism, August 3, 2004, Toronto. It precedes the AEJMC Convention.

Wake up, the transformation has begun.

Team Change Subgroup:
Leonard Witt
Chris Waddle
Ken Sands

By Team Change members:

Chris Waddle, The Ayers Family Institute for Community Journalism
Leonard Witt, "Len," Robert Fowler Distinguished Chair in Communication, Kennesaw State University

Comments for this piece are being posted at pjnet.org