What bloggers want in today’s journalism

This first appeared in the June 2007 edition of Newspapers & Technology.

A reporter working for a local newspaper asked me recently if it was OK to quote Wikipedia as a source. It depends on context I thought, but realized that if the reporter did use the site as a source, he really would need to attribute many sources and not just one.

The online encyclopedia is developed by contributor input.

It’s a child of what New Yorker writer James Surowiecki termed the “wisdom of crowds,” or as Howard Rheingold noted in “Smart Mobs: The Next Revolution,” the emerging trend for group behavior based on new technologies like the Internet, wireless devices, PDAs and digital phones.

Simply, they hold that the network-connected group behaves intelligently and in an efficient manner because of the network.

New buzz

Witness the growth in crowd sourcing, citizen journalism and the transfer of power to the blogosphere for hyper-local news.

But is this shift happening because bloggers are doing a better job than traditional journalists?

Northampton, Mass.-based blogger Tish Grier, writing to me about a recent column I wrote on who qualifies as a journalist, says people are not necessarily looking for news reports from bloggers.

“I don’t know where folks in the press get the impression that bloggers are reporting the news — or that bloggers ‘want’ to report the news,” she said.

Grier is the force behind Constant Observer and also writes for Assignment Zero, the latter an attempt to bring journalists and the public together in the fashion of the open-source movement in software development.

“Actually, I think this is something that’s been hyped by folks like Jeff Jarvis and other insider/media pundit types,” her note continued. “It’s the same way that there’s a boatload of hype that ‘people’ are ‘clamoring’ for citizen journalism (not really, they’d just like their local papers to do a better job. but if somebody else gives them a better product, they’ll take it).

“Seriously, when it comes down to it, it’s really insiders in journalism who are trying to upset journalism’s apple cart — not ‘bloggers’ or ‘people’ or ‘citizen journalists.’

“When most bloggers get press creds, we’re simply writing our impressions of a scene, not doing hard-and-fast reporting. We know that, our readers know that. The only people who don’t know that are the press. If most of us wanted to be reporters, we’d become journalists (however that’s accomplished — there seems to be conflicting schools of thought on that one.)”

Taking advantage

Jay Rosen, who is executive editor of Assignment Zero, says the industry should take advantage of the possibilities provided for us by the new technology.

“An outstanding fact of the Net era is that costs for people to find each other, share information, and work together are falling rapidly. This should have consequences for reporting big, moving stories where the truth is distributed around. By pooling their intelligence and dividing up the work, a network of journalists and volunteer users should be able to find out things that the larger public needs to know,” he wrote in a letter to participants of Assignment Zero.

Grier, however, holds that it is really two different things.

“It will never cease to amaze me how the press can’t seem to get with the concept that most blogs — and most bloggers — are having conversations, not reporting. We put stuff out there to get people to talk ‘to’ us or ‘about’ what we said. It’s not about reporting at all. And maybe if we get credentialed to go into the hallowed halls of Congress — well, maybe it’s to provide a little bit of fly-on-the-wall observation and transparency to the whole process.”

Yes, and maybe the whole process can stand to be more open and subject to the give and take of what news consumers want.

I think we are likely to find that out.

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