According to The Guardian, Craig Newmark, whose craiglist us blamed for deeply eroding newspaper classified ads sales, will launch his citizen journalism initiative within three months. From the article:
The founder of the free classifieds site – the seventh most popular website in the US in terms of page views – is to launch a major online journalism project within three months that will copy his “wisdom of the masses” approach to advertising and apply it to journalism.
“Things do need to change,” Mr Newmark said. “The big issue in the US is that newspapers are afraid to talk truth to power. The White House press corps don’t speak the truth to power – they are frightened to lose access they don’t have anyway.”
From the article, it’s hard to determine what a “craigsnew” might look like. There’s this…
Mr Newmark would not reveal any specific projects, which will run separately from Craigslist, but implied that they would involve using web technology to let readers decide what the major news stories would be.
From that, it’s hard to tell what Newmark has in mind. Given that he’s been publicly musing about a CJ initiative for more than a year, it would be surprising if all it turned out to be was a rating service for news stories.
On the other hand, I’ll also be surprised if Newmark’s CJ project turns out to be a newspaper-slayer, the way craiglist (admittedly in combination with other services such as e-Bay) has turned out to be a classified-killer. Newspapers have their problems, but given their strength in providing journalism — doing the heavylifting of covering the news — it’s difficult to see any citizen-driven initiative trumping that without the involvement of journalists.
UPDATE: It appears that rating the news is behind Newmark’s plans. At his blog, he writes:
I’m working with some folks on technologies that promise to help people find the most trusted versions of the more important stories… and this is personal, helping out another group not associated with craigslist. This kind of technology is intended to preserve the best of existing journalistic practices, and should help retain newsroom jobs.
~snip~
It’s intended to complement, preserve, and grow existing media.
Remember, existing news infrastructure, including editing and fact-checking, really big deal.
This will be interesting.
SOURCE: MEDIA BISTRO | TAGS: CRAIG NEWMARK, CITIZEN JOURNALISM
