On the (Citizen) Media

Saturday, 13 October 2007, 08:48

NPR’s On the Media has an excellent summary of the state of the art in networked journalism in the form of its report from last week’s Networked Journalism summit in New York.

There’s nothing terribly new here, but the nine-minute package is a great introduction to the topic for the uninitiated. Have a listen:

The crowdsourced story in Ft Myers comes up, plus more about the concept of “crowdsourcing” from Wired’s Jeff Howe, who coined the term.

Robin Hamman talks about the flood of material that the BBC receives and how it needs to be careful to specify that it does not want people send in pictures of fluffy kittens.

Also mentioned are local news aggregator, Topix, Jay Rosen on AssignmentZero and why it didn’t work as expected, Mark Potts on why Backfence failed, a discussion of Talking Points Memo’s crowdsourcing of the US attorney documents as an example of a rare networked journalism project not linked in some way with a large news organisation, and and Jeff Jarvis on why experimenting with innovative collaboration between amateurs and professionals is the way forward — and essential for the latter.

Update: On Jeff Jarvis’s Buzzmachine blog and elsewhere, Jay Rosen responds at great length to the reference to AssignmentZero in the OTM package. OTM’s Bob Garfield has replied to Rosen’s criticisms.

Entry Filed under: BBC, Journalism, Networked Journalism, assignmentzero, crowdsourcing, del.icio.us Links, netj, topix