Ric: Absolutely. We need experimentation and we need failures. I like pilot tests but I also have seen cases of death by a thousand little steps. See the post about fear: I think this all needs to be scary to be right.

Thanks for giving us a second chance to define the new media. I am leaning toward no benefit of the dought for new style news. After all that has come about and come to light in 2005 alone proves that the MSM is not about helping democracy in this country. They just can’t be trusted. I dont need to list the problems,lies and omissions in the media and press that has enabled this administration to attempt to destroy our freedoms. All Blog readers know about them. For me from now on It’s Blog news or no news.

The blogosphere screws up fairly often. When that happens, commenters and other bloggers point it out (sometimes scathingly), and (as a rule) the original blogger(s) make prominent note of it. That was hard with print, and cost a lot of money — correcting a story as prominently as it was originally presented bumped new stories off the page, and editors rightly considered that more a loss than a gain. Video producers were (are) in an even tougher spot in that respect. But once it’s all in bits at 0.000000000001 cent per, corrections are easy and worthwhile.

Call it transparent editing.

And it really ought to work. After all, the existing media are the ones who are out there digging up stuff; the blogosphere as it exists today just parasites off that. The newspapers’ reporters have a lot of interesting things to post if they’re allowed to do it. But the combination of “once-a-day” and “fitting between the bra ads” squeezes all the juice out, and it’s the bloggers who take advantage.

So the model looks like this: tell the reporters that if they have something interesting, getting it out quickly takes precedence over “editing” and “fact checking” if the reporter also pays attention to the feedback and issues corrections as necessary. In many cases, “how did we get it wrong?” can become a metastory that’s more interesting than the original stuff. It’s a staple of the blogs.

It would probably be good to add one step: copyediting and what engineers call “air checking” — get the spelling and grammar right, and eliminate the gross, obvious errors before they get out. But you’ll never get all the mistakes; you’ll never even get all the typos and misspellings. Don’t try all that hard. Depend on the feedback. It won’t fail you.

The role of the editor or producer then becomes that of Chief Feedback Monitor. His job is to keep abreast of the comments on stories, both direct (comments to the “paper”) and indirect (other Internet posters, including blogs and other news organizations), and chivvy reporters to issue corrections as necessary. And there’s the rub in the whole thing. In the present system, the editor or producer is a high-status figure. In the new one he’s basically a collector and collator of responses, a less “important” job than herd-managing, and he’s going to resist the loss of status. That resistance may hold the change off for too long, and we all lose. Who’s going to go out and dig up stuff?

Regards,
Ric

But some of this misses the entire point. Look at the top post here right now, about Craigslist and how Newsday didn’t have a popular ride board. Craiglist is not a news organization that produces journalism. It’s a bulletin board with bells and whistles. It’s a shame that newspapers didn’t manage to hang on to the bulletin boards, but that’s not the same as upending a newsroom.

Let’s suppose we shut down the Morristown Daily Record (my alma mater) and spend the entire day teaching the reporters have to blog, and editors too. Then the next day we open the newspaper up again and everyone goes back to work. What would they do differently? How would their work change? What would their product be? How would the other departments work with them? Or would the other departments be eliminated and those folks retrained to do something else?

I don’t think that this is some kind of organic “Let them teach themselves” thing. IN fact, most educational strategies that rely on students to teach themselves fail miserably. Why? Because students are novices, not experts, and you don’t become expert by teaching yourself using the novice knowledge you have.

Your model runs on this sense that if you just bring everyone together and put them in front of a computer, that suddenly scathing investigations into municipal will pop onto the internet accompanied by citizen dialogue. I think there’s a missing link here.

I push you on this because I believe you can make this stronger.

OK, but, hey, you know me, I’m your loudmouth critic: Why don’t YOU google more about the background of a topic before posting? Your columns would be much better! And, imho, they would be terrific if you had an editor. No, really, I mean it. Some of your posts read like they’ve been written in anger. I think, a second opinion would help you to get rid of many questionable jokes and wordings. I know editors are of bad repute today (NYT, WaPo), but I think there’s a reason that the job survived through the centuries.

The study goes on to point out how this new citizen-media force has come about. ”In the last two years, citizen media has grown from a promise to a legitimate presence in today’s media sphere. Armed with easy-to-use Web publishing tools, always-on connections and increasingly powerful digital and mobile devices, citizen journalists are contributing many varieties of information and news: first-person, grassroots reporting, not-only in text but with photos, audio and video; commentary and analysis; fact-checking and watchdogging; and filtering and editing the ever-growing mass of information online.“

And Jeff, just from your most recent post alone you seem to think along the same lines. ”I would invite people from the community to come into the newsroom — or go out to them — to teach them whatever they might want to learn from you. I’m not sure what that is. So find out. Ask. Terry Heaton, who has done more to innovate in newsrooms than anyone I know, helped the folks at WKRN-TV in Nashville invite bloggers and vloggers to the station to learn how to shoot better video. It doesn’t much matter what the curriculum is, for the real lesson here is about sharing. We shouldn’t act as if we have the keys to the kingdom. But if people want to learn how to file a FOIA or create a news graphic or select fonts, then let them in on the knowledge.“

But I don’t see ”citizens everywhere getting together“ doing all these wonderful things to democratize the assimilation and dissemination of information. And how can you teach those without all the leveling technology to become citizen journos, to get them to participate and be a part of the process? Because the ever-widening technology gap in our country alone, much less the rest of the globe, makes possible not a democratization of info, but a second set of gatekeepers, a high-tech priesthood of the press to replace/augment the low-tech priesthood of the press. I’m sure you’ve seen the statistics, read the various reports and encountered the commentaries explaining these discrepancies much better than I’m doing here.

Also, my first hand (though limited) experience with this whole ”citizen this“ and ”citizen that“ and hyper-local, grassroots whatever-you-call-it, is that we are going to be dealing not with citizen journalists, but little Citizen Kanes, who have solely self-serving agendas that only pay lip service to helping the community at large. So what I’d like to hear (and I’m trying to do my part in my community) is how we truly democratize information, how we truly allow citizens everywhere to participate. Any suggestions?

Unfortunate if true.

Someone tell Walcott that Alter has cancer and lost his hair due to Chemo.

Infidel!