Take a look at Steve Yelvington’s post - Continuing the participatory revolution, in which he revisits a theme first offered back in 1999.
News is no longer just a report. It’s a conversation, a broad process in which many people contribute to varying degrees.
In my own experience with reporters and editors, this idea is very slow to sink in, where it sinks in at all.
For example, every time the topic of reader participation arises, discussion quickly diverts to article comment policies, a relatively minor and already ancient piece of the participatory picture. Even this nod toward interactivity is often a sinkhole. For in most cases, journalists don’t actively participate in their own articles’ comments, but instead treat comments as a lowbrid Letters to the Editor section of their Web site. Little wonder that comment feeds can be a race to the bottom of public discourse – if you don’t cultivate the garden it’s going to be weedy.
There remains this sense, prevalent, that newspapers are the authoritative and professional source, the diamond in the internet’s rough. Until this idea is tempered, talk of ‘emerging business models’ among newspaper folk is mostly quaint. Good online journalists will always be needed, but those who camp out under the shelter of the newspaper tradition? Lunch meat.
