The Reunification of Journalism
Posted by goodmind on January 28th, 2008
Though we have often alluded to the day when the distinction between bloggers and journalists would at last disappear (and the “citizen” could be dropped from the odious phrase “citizen journalist”), we never thought that it might actually happen in our lifetime.
The approaching collapse of this once powerful divide is being facilitated by the slow but steady increase in websites distributing “hyperlocal” content. EveryBlock and outside.in are just two of the more popular local news aggregators and filters, and while their geographic reach is currently limited to just a few major cities, the success of the concept could have much further reaching implications.
Fred Wilson, author of A VC, owns a stake in outside.in, but makes a compelling case for why the site could drastically increase the role of the local community paper in the national media food chain;
“If a mom (or dad) could blog for two hours every morning between dropping off her kids and going shopping…where are her stories going to get picked up? What if they could get picked up by the big city paper that everyone in her town reads. That’s why I am so excited about Outside.in’s effort to get it’s neighborhood pages and buzzmaps onto newspaper websites all over the country. Here are outside.in’s buzzmaps on the Washington Post website.”
What we find fascinating about this whole idea (and post) is that it genuinely believes and automatically assumes bloggers are capable of producing “stories,” and that these stories are worthy of being “picked up” by a traditional medium. While this sentiment is not uncommon within the blogosphere, supporting what was once a pipe dream with a structural mechanism is, well, news to us.
Outside.in basically aggregates locally produced blogs, analogous to an American Idol for up and coming bloggers by linking worthy posts to newspaper websites. (To see how this differs from the usual life cycle of a blog post, click here). Though Outside.in’s primary competition in this space is EveryBlock, South Korea is also taking steps to legitimize Citizen Journalism through actual academic institutions. Intended to promote best practices among graduates, OhMyNews Citizen Journalism School could steal the show as the NCAA for finding and developing amateur blogging talent.
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