@NMK: Dan Gillmor: New genres of journalism online
Posted by
Martin Stabe
on 13 June 2007 at 14:13
Tags: Blogs, Mashups, NMK
Dan Gillmor asks “who’s a journalist?” in a media space where all sorts of people — like academics, corporations, and NGOs can — publish instantly on the Internet.
“One of my personal clichés”, Gillmor says, is that “journalism is moving from a lecture to a conversation”. But the first rule of conversation is to listen. Journalists tend only to be good at listening to sources, but need also do better at listening to feedback from their audience. While this is happening more and more, it is still “freaking out” many traditional journalists.
Recent developments in online story-telling show that there are plenty of new things that are fundamentally journalism, even if they are not the type of things that conventional reporters might recognise as a typical story.
Database journalism, like that practiced by Adrian Holovaty at WashingtonPost.com, is a new way of telling stories. Journalism.
He points out a mashup, built by an American estate agent to point out properties sold for less than their assessed value (a sign of house-price inflation). Is this journalism? Yes, and why aren’t news organisations doing this instead? Journalism.
Is a map tracking the location of potholes in local streets, generated by reports from people in the community, journalism? Yes. It tells a story about local road maintainance. Journalism.
Is a satirical mashup of Tony Blair singing “should I stay or should I go” a form of journalism? It’s certainly comment of some sort.
Gillmor also raises his concerns about user-submitted photographs. It’s now routine for news organisations to call for readers’ pictures, but this can risk encouraging people to put themselves in harm’s way. The German tabloid Bild has called for people to send in paparazzi-style pictures, which raises serious privacy issues. However, random acts of journalism, like putting up pictures of newsworthy events on Flickr, is now a routine part of the news stream.
Citizen media is not a new phenomenon, he says, pointing out the Zapruder film of the Kennedy assassination. But today there is a new equality and a quantitative difference. If that event had happen today, or at most within a few years, there would be dozens of high-definition cameras, all of them linked to digitial networks along the street in Dallas. But what if the people on the 9/11 airplanes, who were making voice calls on their mobiles, had been sending us real-time footage of what was happening, he wonders.
He quotes Clay Shirky saying that the cost of failure in experimentation in new media is approaching zero, allowing all sorts of people to come up with new projects.
Organisations need to allow people to fail in attempting to innovate, he concludes.
In the question and answer session, he points out that today’s culture of online openess means that in an election within 20 years, a person will stand for President of the United States despite having made online disclosures about him- or herself that would easily disqualify them today.
More: Gillmor gave a similar presentation at the BBC yesterday, which Robin Hamman blogged.
