On Citizen Journalism ..

From I Have Heard the Mermaids Singing Blog

Open media?
We all bitch, left and right, about the increasingly obviously failure of the media and traditional "journalism" in these contentious, complicated times. This analysis of the issue is as good as any I've seen:

Google's new program is a very rough approximation of what truly open media provides, something the newspapers themselves should be doing.

It seems journalism is the new Catholic Church. Without the savior. smile

IMHO, the pros are right to be worried. It's the last quarter of a game they're losing, and the opposing team is deep in their territory. They need to get the ball back and then connect on a few Hail Marys to even be in the game. Yet all they do is weakly protest that "this isn't journalism." We need information. To say it's not journalism now is like a priest saying it's not Catholic to a bunch of agnostics. You're answering a question no one is asking.

A news story should summarize points of view that are available in full on the newspaper website. The newspapers should try to host the blogs of the people they quote. Instead they cling to the fiction that they have the exclusive wisdom to decide which soundbites and points of view are relevant, and the reader needs nothing more than what they provide. This is wrong, the world is too complicated, and the resources of news organizations are shrinking and our appetite for information is exploding (and the tools for creating and using news are getting better all the time).

If a reader wants to find out what's really going on they have to search thoroughly for many views of the same event and try to piece it together. The first news organization that embraces that view wins. Google is taking first steps to be that news organization.

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I think OpEd News does a great job and will eclipse the others, frankly. Why? It isn't corporately OWNED. Google has its own fish to fry. I've seen more centrist oped sites, such as Political Cortex and realized that thyey will never work as Good Work can go "missing" so easily and the technology tools needed to become a good information gatherer are missing. OpEd has made tremendous strides in helping out those who want to know and those who care to comment, providing acessibility to everyone concerned at whatever "level". Rob Kall's amazing "platform" COULD have been developed by anyone but it wasn't. No one else cared or took steps to do that.

To expect the corporate media to be anything but corporate is a nonstarter in my book. CorporatISM is a religion which is something I work to expose in anything I write,not an easy task. I don't expect ot see a single word I write (and I write plenty) appear in any corporate media in my lifetime. Even google refuses to troll this blog; rather most of my google "hits" are no items I post on other people's blogs on in reponse to corporate media lists! This system of looking for sprols and leaving the bloggers out of the google listings has not gone unnoticed by people other than me either! It's a "topic of conversation".

So as much as media moves forwards; the more overt forms of control become even hard to pinpoint or get exposed.

I really like that synopsis a whole bunch, but just totally disagree with the last sentence. Google did, in fairness, get a better thang in place when it started sending out alerts of blog posts. I watch the CONtrol at the NYT with increasing horror. Even the WaPo does a better job of allowing comment and then commenting on that.

I posted long and hard about the Gates/Buffet charitable giveaway and made particular references to what was wrong with Circuit's editor's analysis with totally changed the outlook on the thread after 96 posts. The next week, a followup was done, as AFTER my remark generated another 200 comments. No where in that followup was a mention of me OR my blog. Their form of orthodoxy still has many hoodwinked. The NYT policy of having people PAY to get information really sucks; how can a "citizen" get the real information they need? And the increasingly reliance they have on using video encyclicals when having people such as the Science Editor (a truly morally reprehensible man, imho) announcing that the melting of the Arctic is a good thing really got me going.

It worries me too as the NAU comes in how a person without "media credentials" issued by corporate news is EVER going to be able to cover events. We've seen the start of the clamp down on "certification" in the upcoming Montebello summit organizing events, where the RCMP checks all the credentials. So The Pope, the corporate media, increasingly has all the right Swiss Guards, paid for by the taxpayer. How neat!!

Virginia