Now part of me is okay with that, because there are still many, many people who have never heard of citizen journalism, so repeating the same story a lot might not be so bad.

Another part of me thinks, sourly, that they’ve already decided what the story is going to be before they left the office, and they’re going to shoot that story pretty much no matter what you say or do.

As a practicioner of citizen journalism, I note that when I talk to many journalists, no surprise, they wanna talk journalism. What are my newsgathering techniques? Do I verify things and if so, how? Do I issue corrections? How can I possibly cover enough, won’t I get bored? Well, OK, I am happy to talk about these things, I’m interested in them too. I’m happy to tell them about RSS and my TiVo slurping up local access cable of city meetings and my police scanner.

But what they don’t understand is that I spend 80% of my time thinking about community management, not writing and publishing stories. To me the big challenge is transmitting “the rules” to the rest of the community that’s gathered around the site — not to restrict them, but to show them the ropes so that they can get in the game and play too. It’s not about Lisa Williams with a bagful of stuff from Best Buy; it’s about all the people on the site who are not me, saying what they have to say about their neighborhood, their organization, their kid’s Little League game without an intermediary to the rest of the “people formerly known as the audience.”

I still get plenty of press releases and I guess what you could call “pitches” from local activist and arts organizations, and the first thing I do is say, you know, you can open an account and talk to everybody directly, you don’t have to go through me, or wait for me to get around to doing it. The self-service line is right over there. Get ye a blog and start posting away and see what happens.

Assuming anyone is listening.

Friday Western Union’s telegrams died. In a few years it will be the internet they’re burying.

The important thing to notice is that the bloggers have picked up on a few carefully worded evasions by Gonzales as to the scope of, and number of, secret surveillance programs. The senators, in their eagerness to get their points across did not notice the nuances.

So not only is the blogosphere doing better than the traditional media, but it is doing better than the congressional staffers. Bloggers have been calling senator’s offices to alert them to discrepancies in the testimony.

Perhaps staffers should be watching the bloggers for insights during the questioning. There is something about the intelligence of crowds which typically yields better results than from a small group of “experts”.

I am sorry to disappoint you: the CBS Evening News is not the shallowest of news. Compare a broadcast produced 2:30 package with the standard fare one would find on any of the cable news networks and you will see that the broadcast networks’ content is more densely sourced, more tightly edited, has more visual variety and is buttressed by more factual data. The Project for Excellence in Journalism’s State of the News Media report has demonstrated these differences conclusively.

However, you are right that the particular segment in which you were featured was below par. The newscast has just acquired a new Executive Producer and has not found its sealegs yet. Last week CBS routinely shortchanged major headline stories, a core responsibility of a half-hour nightly newscast.

To address your general point, there is every evidence that all three broadcast news divisions have learned the lesson you mentioned. ABC, CBS and NBC all no longer think of their half hour newscasts as standing alone and are all developing ways to tie their broadcasts to online content. This is a realization that they have come to late–in the past year or 18 months–yet it is palpable. So far it is still a work in progress.

As for your criticisms of Anthony Mason’s feature, I suggest you are too harsh…

Consider this assertion about the trend towards interactivity: “In e-mail and on the Internet today everyone is a media critic.”

Consider his characterization of Jarvis’ viewpoint: “News is not a lecture any more.”

Consider his closing conclusion: “The era of trust-me journalism has passed. The era of show-me journalism has begun.”

These ideas are, surely, friendly to BuzzMachine’s precepts. They would not belong in a story whose message can be dismissed as “me vs the big guys.”

You could also title the post “Behind the Curtain.” When you pull the curtain aside, you see there is no wizard at all. All you see is small-minded people pulling levers and pushing buttons to make a show they think people will admire and believel

Just think about it, how many years did it take the computer to replace the typewriter in the typical office? Blogs will take a shorter time, mark my words.

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Exactly.

That is the core basis of “media bias” in the MSM.

The highly subjective selection/non-selection of ‘news’ items is the center of that widespread bias.

MSM news-producers also operate from standard, but highly subjective ‘templates’ to ‘frame’ news reports from a biased perspectives — you call it the
‘Sausage Model’…. the subjective Good-Guys/Bad-Guys, Top-Dog/Under-Dog, Hero/Villain, Good/Evil templates can be seen every night on the TV news.

The objective truth of relevant facts is considered much too dull for MSM news.

It’s not an MSM conspiracy or deliberate propagandizing — it’s just the way most people in MSM jobs instinctively see the world. They are so confident in their world-view that they automatically take it for granted as ‘true’ and objective… and are honestly surprised that other reasonable people would discern any bias in their MSM products.

Citizen journalist needs to be recontextualize as “someone with something to say” and ultimately into action.

It’s time to start focusing on the edge and under the radar action rather than “old versus new” or “is print dead”.

What is emerging on the edge is what is compelling. Get high. Okay, time to go to the studio, I’m working on a sculpture at Grad School. Cheers.

They can still go do their interviews, but they can put those interviews online and let us see — and remix — them.

This is what I’m doing with The Echo Chamber Project, but I’m taking it one step further.

Open Source Journalism should be both transparent and collaborative. Remixing is the transparent part, but it doesn’t solve the problem of challenging the strategic framing of the story — in this case “the citizens v. professionals.”

This will only come with the collaborative generation of media, and would require some peer review before the finished product is released. In order to do this, then you have to publish the audio and transcripts of interview material so that you can incorporate the citizen and professional feedback into the generation of the final piece.

Figuring out the mechanisms to optimize the efficiency of this process as well as accomplishing it in a scalable and profitable way is what I’m trying to figure out through this collaborative schema.