PJNet

Mark Toner writes an interesting  white paper for the Newspaper Association of America entitled: Citizen Journalism and Newspaper Sites: The Revolution will be Uploaded. It is a fine overview of what is happening, and includes topics like Beatblogging, Citizen Witnesses, Social Media, Crowdsourcing, Teamsourcing and our own Representative Journalism.

Here are a few excerpts:

Steve Yelvington, strategist for Morris DigitalWorks, talking of citizen participation says:

The key to meshing the bubbling social media elements of the site with the print product…is ensuring that the newspaper staff keeps tabs on—and participates in—online conversations. “When it works, the newsroom staff is engaged and comes back with a lot of impressions and leads they didn’t have before,” he says. “To me, that’s the way it fits with journalism. Trying to get people to go out and cover stories like a cub reporter doesn’t work very well.”

Kate Marymont, executive editor of the Fort Myers’ News Press, is quote in this passage:

Both the paper’s crowdsourcing and teamsourcing experiments have one thing in common: “A level of civic engagement I haven’t seen for a while…which is just fabulous.” While that’s a goal shared by many in the citizen journalism movement, it’s one particularly important for newspapers’ long-term survival as well.

And talking about our Locally Grown project in Northfield, Minnesota, in which we will provide the online community a fulltime reporter, I say:

“It’s not just an online newspaper that’s thrown on the online doorstep and the reporter walks away. The reporter is one voice in the bigger community—an informed voice, but one voice. Everyone else can jump in and add a bit of information, providing a higher-quality conversation.”

As I said read the whole white paper, it is an excellent overview of what’s happening.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 8th, 2008 at 10:00 pm and is filed under Citizen journalism, Community Journalism, Crowdsourcing, David Cohn, Gannett, Griff Wigley, Harnisch Family Foundation, Journalism, Journalism Business Models, Locally Grown, Northfield, Reinventing Journalism, Representative Journalism, Social Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.