Showing posts with label open journalism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label open journalism. Show all posts

17 July 2007

The State of the Citizen Media Nation

The undisputed doyen of citizen media - aka open journalism - is Dan Gillmor. He's just published a splendid review of the field that is positively stuffed to the gunwales with links to the main sites and stories in this field. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that this is now the single best place to start for those wishing to understand open journalism.

05 December 2006

All the News You Can Trust

Here's an interesting twist on the Digg idea: a site that does not merely vote stories up or down, but which rates them in terms of their reliability - quality, not mere popularity:

In recent years, the consolidation of mainstream media, combined with the rise of opinion news and the explosion of new media outlets, have created a serious problem for democracy: many people feel they can no longer trust the news media to deliver the information they need as citizens.

To address this critical issue, NewsTrust is developing an online news rating service to help people identify quality journalism - or "news you can trust." Our members rate the news online, based on journalistic quality, not just popularity. Our beta website and news feed feature the best and the worst news of the day, picked from hundreds of alternative and mainstream news sources.

This non-profit community effort tracks news media nationwide and helps citizens make informed decisions about democracy. Submitted stories and news sources are carefully researched and rated for balance, fairness and originality by panels of citizen reviewers, students and journalists. Their collective ratings, reviews and tags are then featured in our news feed, for online distribution by our members and partners.

It's a laudable idea, although I'm not sure how it will be funded in the long-term, or whether it will fall victim to people with an agenda putting together a clique to skew the results. (Via OpenBusiness.)

03 October 2006

Open Journalism, Transparently

I wrote about Jay Rosen and his open journalism experiment a few months back. If you're still unconvinced (or just a bit in the dark) do read this Slashdot interview: it's clear that Rosen has put a huge amount of effort into his answers that are clear, illuminating and packed full of great links.

A sample:

People hear phrases like "an experiment in open source reporting" and they see it immediately: What's open to the wisdom of the crowd is vulnerable to the actions of the mob. Wanting to be helpful, the volunteer may slant reports without realizing it. Through the portals marked "citizen," the paid operative can also go. How do you prevent all of that?

To me this is a puzzle with many pieces. It won't have one solution; it will take many overlapping systems working together. I can't tell you--yet--how we're going to build a fact-checking and verification system into NewAssignment.Net. But I can tell you that the site will fail without one, so we'll have to try to figure it out, with help from a lot of people. To simply pass along unchecked reports received from strangers over the Net would be fantastically dumb. To discount the possibility of people trying to game the system would be dumb, too; the more successful the site is, the more probable the gaming is. Not to mention spam, duplication, all kinds of junk.