If you have any interest the development of online journalism and "the new media", you'll almost certainly already have discovered New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen.
I confess that Rosen's lengthier blog posts often require more concentration than I can muster in the office, but I had the luxury of four hours to fill on a train to Manchester today and read about the latest project he's initiating. Rosen wants to run twelve beatblogging experiments concurrently, each one based around one reporter with a specific beat and his "social network" of sources and readers.
I am in your newspapurrs, disruptin ur medja.
Photo by dreamcicle19772006 on Flickr. Some rights reserved.
Much of the time the ideas and theories around online journalism and using new sites and tools stay just that - theories. We need far more projects to put these ideas into practice so this has to be a good move.
The basic idea is to join together a network of people with the same interests to communicate, share ideas and information and then work these stories together "through" the journalist. That's pretty much what a lot of journalists do already (and arguably have always done), but social networking tools like Facebook et al allow these relationships and channels of communication to be formalised, and in turn this project formalises that working process.
The contributors, including the editor that oversees the reporter and their beat, will also contribute to a project blog and forum to share their experiences from the project. So although I don't doubt this working process is happening already, it will be interesting to see what the real practicalities are.
"I picture a reporter in the Hampton Roads, VA area who is responsible for covering family life in the military for a sprawling region, with a lot of big bases. The reporter isn't on those bases, or in the military. Getting an overview is hard because there are so many places where the story is happening.
"But there are a lot of people around Hampton Roads with pieces of that story, who have built-up knowledge about it, vital glimpses into it, who might want to connect with other pieces, other glimpses, other people. They're online and connectible. To some degree they're already connected. What's it going to take to get them to join your beat's social network? What kind of contract--trust--emerges between reporter and network? These are some of the first questions participants in the project will have to answer.
"Dan Gillmor, formerly of the San Jose Mercury News, put it as well as it can be put. "My readers know more than I do." "
Source: PressThink
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