Many, many years ago, humans fought for survival using hunting and gathering techniques. We have evolved. Today, those of us in civilized countries simply hunt for bargains and gather pre-packaged meals into our shopping carts.
Years ago, the hunter-gatherer technique served journalists well. Technology has evolved. Today, journalists need to not only locate the most valuable information, but compile it into useful and understandable segments.
Thankfully, there are many avenues to choose from. And they all rely on the power of the people.
Mark Briggs’ third chapter of “Journalism Next” is devoted to the phenomenon of crowd-powered collaboration. These recent reporting methods are rapidly changing the journalism landscape. Briggs identifies three separate types of collaborative publishing:
- Crowdsourcing
- Open-source reporting
- Pro-am journalism
All of these methods rely on the internet to provide many different sources, which contributes to an overall understanding. However, there are subtle differences between them.
- Crowdsourcing is centralized and can be thought of as an “open call” for information relating to a specific topic. This makes data collection much easier and can result in thousands of contributions. Readers provide tips, and can also be given specific tasks.
- Open-source reporting relies on transparency and involves letting readers into the story from the beginning of the reporting process. This method creates trust in the reporting process, provides new ideas, and strengthens brand identity. Some forms of open-source reporting are beatblogging and linking to other sources and documents.
- Pro-am journalism is essentially when readers provide the news topics themselves. A fundamental example of this phenomenon is CNN’s iReport, which allows the audience to upload videos and stories to share their stories with the rest of the world. It is “citizen journalism” in a pure form.
Briggs establishes that print journalism continues to be a respected and influential tool for news, but any news source that fails to establish online forms of collaborative publishing is selling themselves short. People today want to share their opinions and news that is important to them. Let them.
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