Pretty much every time a new post is published on New Media Mogul it ends up aggregated or referred to on someone else’s blog. Only quite often in surprising places. Like one of my posts from last week mentioned So You Think You Can Dance as an example of how there is a voyeuristic element to media that consumers enjoy. Next thing I knew, my post had been aggregated to a blog about So You Think You Can Dance. Needless to say my post looked very out of place on the site (and now I wonder if this post will end up on the site too).
So it was good when I discovered yesterday that a journalism student, Sherri Powers had spotted my latest posting on collective intelligence and had made a contribution to the J-Talk blog, quoting me. I’m not mentioning this as a means of self promotion, but because I want to take up some of the points that Powers makes in her post.
Powers’ post came after a guest lecture from Dr Dianne Lynch, dean of the Roy Park School of Communications at Ithaca College. Lynch’s main point seems to have been that as collective intelligence enters the field of journalism, journalists are worried about the transformation that is taking place because they are supposed to be the experts on things. They are worried that they will become less credible or not needed if the public decides that they can get the same news from an average Joe on the Internet.
I think journalists will always remain the experts on things. People working as professional journalists have more than likely done an undergraduate degree in the area then spent a further year learning the ropes as a cadet at a media organization. In most cases they have skills in writing, researching and keeping up to date with issues that average Joe does not who spends two hours per week reporting on the news does.
Furthermore, unlike other industries, there are issues of trust involved with media, and particularly with news media. While we might be increasingly flippant about where we go for our news, with so many choices for content, old habits die hard and people stick to the news organizations they’ve grown to respect over time. Even if a citizen media site was to attain the sort of quality in news presentation that is expected from a professional outlet, I believe it would be a while before a substantial audience flocked to it.
This is why I think my analogy to the software industry is a good one for the media, and particularly the news media. Collective intelligence produces open source software that is extremely innovative, but this software isn’t likely to put Microsoft or Apple out of business anytime soon. Probably because the likes of Microsoft and Apple have been in the business for a long time, and consumers have come to know them as producers of quality products.
But like I said in my last post, there are some things that citizen journalists can do better than professional journalists. A famous example is the resignation of Republican Senate majority leader Trent Lott, which was brought about by the efforts of citizen journalists (To read all about it, click here). The point with the Lott story is that the politician made some racially offensive comments that weren’t ‘newsworthy’ enough for the mainstream media to carry. But then citizen journalists decided to look into the issue and found that Lott had made racist comments on numerous comments over a period of time. Their ongoing investigation of the issue caught the attention of the mainstream media and it made its way back into the big time, eventually leading to the resignation of Lott.
This was an important piece of work by citizen journalists, where they devoted their attention to an issue that the mainstream media really couldn’t justify using resources on. This is an example of how the two ‘tiers’ of the media worked together to hold a public figure accountable, and I think this is a model of how the media landscape could function. Instead of being competitors, professional journalists and citizen journalists could work together to make the news.
To return to computer software again, it’s really no different to what some major software companies are doing. For example Sun Microsystems sponsors the open source (and collective) efforts of OpenOffice.org and the innovations trialled in that program eventually make their way into the commercial Star Office. Media organizations are beginning to catch onto this idea with citizen journalism too, although mainly through submissions of photos and videos at this stage. There’s no reason why they couldn’t call for articles too, which would act as an extra source of information for the public, and an extra resource for journalists in their effort to compile the best reports.
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