Interesting, you write:

We don’t have as many professional citizen journalists as corporate journalists yet, but that is kind of our design objective. How do we help professionalize citizen journalists without turning them into corporate journalists?

Professional citizen journalists as opposed to professional corporate journalists. Frankly, I have not thought of that paradigm. Maybe I should.

You talk about “our design objective.” Tell me more about that.

Also what would make a citizen professional journalist better or different from a corporate pro?

It all sounds very interesting.

It seems like your main point is that professional journalists - citizen or corporate - could make use of people who want to contribute content, but don’t want to take the time to put it all together. Of course these people could be anyone, including professional journalists.

So instead of making the distinction in terms of monetary gain, we make it based on the production value of the piece.

It would be more accurate to call these people, piece-meal journalists than citizen journalists because citizen journalists, like the corporate professional, could be the ones who put these pieces together in context.

We don’t have as many professional citizen journalists as corporate journalists yet, but that is kind of our design objective. How do we help professionalize citizen journalists without turning them into corporate journalists?

After thinking about the story that DigiDave posted, it seems as though there may be a way to be a very temporary puppet of the people, where the strings are the world wide web, without taking on the loss of interpretative agency that would accompany being a corporate controlled robot journalist.

What is different is who is pulling the strings and pushing the buttons. Prima facie, a puppet journalist connotes a singular master, much like the vision of a robot journalist taking orders from the corporate bosses. But if the strings that pull the puppet are linked to thousands of masters across the Internet, each engaged in a democratic tug-of-war, then we have room for the puppet to take control to adjudicate conflicting commands.

Instead of a puppet journalist, maybe we call it a representative journalist.

I agree in principle with everything you wrote above. And perhaps the robot thing was a little much.

However, I know from working with professional journalists they need all the help they can get. So getting diverse voices into their reporting process early in the game would be ground breaking.

Also doing great journalism is hard, time consuming work. It is not that citizens could not learn to do journalism — it is just that most will only do what they want, when they want and in time increments that suit them.

I love lots of aspects of doing journalism, but I am not going to spend three days doing a story for nothing. Pay me maybe, when I have time and if the pay is enough, maybe.

On the other hand, I like walking up to the Marietta Town Square shooting some video, photos, writing short blog pieces. I would Twitter editors and say here I am. Hey Ron Paul folks are demonstrating against Rudy Giuliani, want some of it.

I would be sharing nicely, having fun, and doing good work. What’s wrong with that?

Just FYI: My Ron Paul, Guiliani video had more than 5,000 views, so it was worth something.

I wrote about the experience beforehand here: http://www.beatblogging.org/blog/2008/01/living-the-netw.html

This guy would literally stream times of his life and would be open for other people to tell him what to do.

Our conversation when he came to SF was streamed live - and he is also editing it to put up on his website. It was a new experience for me - and also tripped me out.

Second, while we want to represent our community, we don’t want to simply be the technological sensors of the public. We are not grips for sound mikes. We have co-equal voices with those we represent. We are people, not machines.

The corporate media is the machine we want to escape.