Public radio thrives because it is so much cheaper and because we spend so much of our time in cars; indeed, public radio insiders talk of the tent poles where listenership peaks on the drives to and from work. Of course, there is plenty of other radio options, but if you want to hear news there are none. So it thrives. To get  where it is today, public radio, in many cases, had to cut back on its classical or other music programming. It got a younger, news passionate audiences with money to contribute.  

Of course, anyone who watches television knows there is a real news void on television. We are stuck with a bunch of talking heads blabbering away, Sunday morning “Gasbags” as Calvin Trillen calls them. But now it is seven days a week. So why doesn’t PBS turn to producing real news. The kind where a reporter goes out and gathers information. Yes, they do it on local commercial TV, but really it is all about blood and gore with no depth. I am talking about news that will make a difference in people’s lives. 

Of course, television is expensive, if you have all those big trucks and million-dollar editing stations. But what if PBS news turned to the television eqivalent of Cinema Verite, hand-held cameras, no big sets, just people out in the trenches collecting information. A kind of professional journalism YouTube, supplemented by the people’s contributions when needed.

Form a community around saving PBS by helping it create better, more impactful news oriented television.  Use that news to boost audiences and push them to better general programming.

Take chances, one chance might be to kick government financing out of bed and then really do some hard hitting journalism with some of it aimed at the scoundrels in government while praising the good guys. Instead of walking on your knees with hat in hand to collect the government subsidies, stand tall and if you go out, go out with a scream and not a whimper.

 I used to love to watch TV news, now it is a waste of time. Bring on real news and bring me back with my donations in hand. Better yet, find out how I and all the folks with cameras in hand can add to your content. Everyone else is trying it, but you already have the brand as in P-u-b-l-i-c Broadcasting. Watch what is about to take place at the Media General station WNCN-TV in Raleigh, North Carolina, which we hear is hiring 40 community embedded reporters plus teaching citizens how to shoot video, imagine that for our local PBS programming here in Georgia.

Come on PBS, stand up, brush off the dust and charge into the bright new future.  

So rather having an immigrant lift your aging mother from a bed directly, you have a robotic arm controlled via computer by a someone in a far away land do it. Robots are not smart enough to do a lot tasks by themselves, but if they are remotely controlled by a human, they can do thousands of tasks, even delicate ones.

So now that brings us to our citizen journalists as robots controlled by professional journalists or better yet professional journalists controlled by citizens or the true panacea for higher quality journalism is to have it both ways.

Here is the experiment at work. Robert Scoble, whom the BBC calls the blogger and videoblogger extraordinaire, was at the World Economic Forum in Davos interviewing folks for his website, and BBC blogger Tim Weber watched as Scoble interviewed Marc Benioff, a Davos participant:

…not with a big video camera but a small Nokia mobile phone, that sent a live video stream of the interview to his website. So far, so ambitious. Now comes the stunner. While he was doing the interview, Robert saw live on his phone screen the comments and questions posted by his viewers.

Just to illustrate how it works: When Marc pulled me into the conversation, within half a minute Robert had live on his screen a reader’s query about the BBC’s video-on-demand policy. Robert asked me the question straight away, and as we continued talking about the mobile phone industry and video on the web, more BBC-related queries piled up.

Since a citizen journalist shouldn’t be expected to do the delicate task of doing a professional interview and since a professional journalist shouldn’t be expected to do the complicated task of getting citizens involved on the scene when he or she is out on a interview, we now can bring in help from afar via technology, just as we would if we were really talking about robots.

Now this is extremely big — a stunner really — because it can change the equation of how news is gathered and reported, especially for smaller scale equations like with my Representative Journalism idea where groups of a thousand or smaller can hire their own journalists.

Just as Scoble did, if I am a reporter, I would use Twitter to tell my audience that I am on my way to interview Mr. Big. In five minutes, I will be live streaming the interview back to my website or to your iPhone, please jump in with your questions.

Or if you are a citizen journalist reporting on Mr. Big, you Twitter whichever newsrooms might be interested in the interview. The professional editors log on to your livestream at your website or on their cell phones and can do two things: 1) quickly verify that you are in fact interviewing Mr. Big, and 2) can feed you questions.  The mainstream then has a verified, professionally enhanced interview that it can use in its stories. Even when things happen spontaneously.

The citizen journalist gets to do a fun, exciting or interesting interview, maybe with monetary compensation, without worrying about the more complicated stuff that is necessary to finish a full-blown story. The mainstream media expand their reporting resources.  

Of course, the real panacea is that pro and amateur journalists Twitter their editors and citizen bases at the same time. So during an interview  the reporter, the editors and the citizenery all are weighing into the interview. It is putting Jay Rosen’s Beatblogging into real time, any time. It is citizen, civic and public journalism Nirvana.

A video at CyberJournalist.net entitled Citizen Journalism at War provides nice insights on how citizen journalism is changing war coverage, and perhaps helping us all find a more complete truth.