Citizen Journalists of the World Unite!
An interesting discussion is building: Why should we –the user-generated-content providers –work for free while others profit from what we produce? No one, after all, wants to be a played for a sucker.
Graham Holliday, one of our number, writes:
It’s mainstream, big bucks media and they very clearly want to get their hands on our media, but why exactly is big boy media so interested in our self-generated content?
Of course, the end game’s not about content at all, it’s about cash. Or, in the case of the users generating the content it’s about… err… no cash.
This discussion has grown more intense with the announcement of the Yahoo and Reuters announcement of You Witness News, which could also lead to what blogger Paul Bradshaw calls: The ghettoisation of citizen journalism. He writes:
It would be nice to see user content integrated into the newsgathering process. The danger with these devoted sections and programmes is that citizen journalism becomes trivialised as an “And finally” item, or a “Your Views”-style TV letters page.
The usurping of citizen media by the big money guys has been on bloggers’ radar for some time. Here is a nice little fable by Nick Carr in which he begins:
Once upon a time there was an island named Blogosphere, and at the very center of that island stood a great castle built of stone, and spreading out from that castle for miles in every direction was a vast settlement of peasants who lived in shacks fashioned of tin and cardboard and straw.
Blog utopia contrarian Seth Finkelstein has been all over this for some time, writing in one post:
That feast is starting now, and the main dish is YOU.
