Jay Rosen talks about citizen journalism
Jay Rosen, the journalism professor who has launched a Web-based citizen journalism site called NewAssignment.net, took questions from Slashdot users in a recent Q & A:
“People hear phrases like “an experiment in open source reporting” and they see it immediately: What’s open to the wisdom of the crowd is vulnerable to the actions of the mob. Wanting to be helpful, the volunteer may slant reports without realizing it. Through the portals marked “citizen,” the paid operative can also go. How do you prevent all of that?
To me this is a puzzle with many pieces. It won’t have one solution; it will take many overlapping systems working together. I can’t tell you–yet–how we’re going to build a fact-checking and verification system into NewAssignment.Net. But I can tell you that the site will fail without one, so we’ll have to try to figure it out, with help from a lot of people.”
And in other citizen-journalism related news, George Brock — Saturday editor of The Times in the UK — has a longish essay about how new media essentially just force journalists to go back to first principles, just as they did when old media was young.
“I may not be in a majority in my line of work, but I like the current technology-driven havoc precisely because journalists have to go back to first principles. ‘Journalism’ came into existence when reliable information was scarce. As newspaper publishing and distribution advanced in the nineteenth century, editors had to supply a demand for accuracy, as well as for speed and entertainment. The collective effort to be trusted came to be the distinguishing mark of journalism.”
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