I have hesitated to post, until I had seen and understood everything. But, the realization has finally sank in that I can never catch up with everything. New experiments are being added everyday. So in keeping with my subject of study, please, if you think I am neglecting something (or misinformed), update me.
The quick story:
I'm a graduate student working on a masters project about emerging collaborative news models. This blog will hopefully be interesting and informative along the way.
A longer version of what I just wrote:
There is much confusion over the hype vs. reality of blogs/citizen journalism/interactive technology’s impact. What is out there? How should the emergence of these innovations be analyzed? How do they differ from the communication and knowledge offered by traditional news formats? How do they change the engagement of citizens to each other and to societal issues? And following from any resolution to this confusion, how can they be used to inform and improve news media for the public?
A year ago, many in the news industry were fretting over the emergence of bloggers. Nervous headlines tinted with fear and loathing raised the common question of who qualifies as a legitimate journalist, (the subtext, of course, being would the profession of journalism survive). Since then the criticism has quieted down, but the rapid pace of innovation on the web has not. While some have relegated bloggers to the sidebar (concluding that the old news giants with their resources would continue to reign), bloggers were just the beta version. The next (scableable) generation has emerged and some traditional news media are finally dipping their toes in the waters and paying attention. In the growing mass of voices, the key players who will organize the clutter and engage the voices (now also the eyeballs) are still being determined. In my opinion, those who figure out how to best aggregate and distill the cacophony will win a loyal base. Those who also figure out how to create sustained conversations among the distilled sound will win a potentially powerful base.
The news industry is undergoing a period of transformation. Credit should be given to traditional news organizations for recent initiatives that incorporate blogging and other forms of interaction. While I will provide some description of their recent changes, my study focuses on emerging organizations, where the degree of innovation is most dramatic. Primary examples include OhMyNews, Wikinews, Global Voices, Digg, Now Public, and Slashdot. These models offer a basis for interesting comparisons between new structures and formats. As predominately online entities, they also offer useful inferences about the entry of Internet goliaths such as Yahoo and Google that are increasingly playing in the space of news content. Moreover, unlike Technorati and other alogorithm based news aggregators, these sites offer an interesting view of the human dynamics at play in what is too often seen as a 0s and 1s programmed sphere.
In the past months, I've been attempting to understand the successes and challenges of these site structures in changing the dynamics of participation, collaboration, organizing, and information sharing. In my final paper, focusing on a few key examples, I will attempt to make more concrete the manner and degree to which these emerging models magnify the reach of information, the creation of community, and the role of individuals beyond that of a spectator. In addition to format analysis, data from surveys and interviews is hoped to provide greater texture on why people use and how they value the sites. Time and resource constraints will likely trim the eventual output, but the goal (admittedly ambitious and lofty) is to help diminish confusion and provide tangible insights on how these emerging innovations can improve, work with the news industry, and, most importantly, be leveraged into lessons on the potential to massively highlight and engage others on issues important to us, society.
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