The talk or citizen journalism over the past few weeks, and the piece in yesterday’s Media Guardian have prompted a few responses. My attention was drawn to dictionary definitions at ‘Those bastards’ – “a: the collection and editing of news for presentation through the media b : the public press c : an academic study concerned with the collection and editing of news …” – but I’m not sure where looking at historic dictionary definitions takes us.
Clive Davis refers to the article citing Jay Rosen at PressThink who sees the current situation moving towards the hybridisation of blogging and the traditional media.
‘Dawg’ questions how ordinary citizens will get involved if BBC jobs are only advertised in the Guardian – of course the highly successful Guardian online also carries the job ads, and you can find all BBC vacancies at http://www.bbc.co.uk/jobs/ - quite apart from this it’s the job of the producers who are appointed to the new posts to encourage participation from people and empower them to tell their own stories. It’s something BBC local radio has already had some success in doing – BBC Radio Stoke has won awards for its ‘Inside Lives’ project - go have a listen, there are some fantastic stories, and they're well told . Listeners are encouraged to come into the Radio Stoke learning centre and are given the skills in radio writing and production to enable them to record their own stories. These are then broadcast on the radio station. It’s this kind of initiative that I see being extended – enabling ordinary people to tell their own stories.
There are more details of the BBC's ultra local TV news service in today's Media Guardian.
More specifically with regards to blogging, I was talking to Roy Greenslade - former editor of the Daily Mirror, and now Professor of Journalism at City University in London. He suggested that:
“Journalists still have a role, of course, to edit down the huge amount of material into a form that makes it either readable and watchable. They can also provide context, analysis and comment. All of us journalists have to concede that our former claim – to present the first rough draft of history – is no longer valid. More and more, it’s the public themselves who are providing the raw material of news.“Citizen-journalism isn’t replacing journalists – but it is providing people with the tools in order to tell their own stories. It’s nothing new – journalists have always sought eyewitness accounts, case studies, human interest stories and the like. It’s just that the channels and the speed by which these stories can be told are changing.
Matt
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