What’s next?
Citizen journalism is clearly working in a number of arenas: in the blogging community, citizens are contributing their voices to journalism sites, to their own conversations, to specific issues; during events, citizens are adding their own eyewitness accounts and photographs, developing responses, sharing stories; in local communities citizens are organizing and advocating, responding to and developing their own social networks for dealing with community problems.
But what about other types of journalism? Is there a place for citizen journalism in the story of Valerie Plame, Joseph Wilson and Karl Rove? Is there a place for citizen journalism that would respond to the 800 or more civilian deaths in Iraq every month? What can citizen journalism do to respond to global warming?
Discussion boards and blogging sites feel like first steps in developing the types of online citizen discussion and decisionmaking necessary for creating truly new forms of problem solving journalism. What is being developed for the next stages of citizen journalism?
