As I’ve been thinking about the continuing post I started Wednesday — about trying to strip citizen journalism from my vocabulary because it is too freighted and too inaccurate to described what’s going on — I came across this. It’s a question and response from Mark Glaser’s interview with Dan Gillmor:
Q: Do we need a new name for citizen media?
We need many names for it, most likely, because it’s about creating, communicating and collaborating. That covers a lot of ground. I mean, look at the differences among things like wikis, solo blogs, podcasts, discussion groups, mashups and the like. Even within those categories, the variety is enormous.
What they all have in common is the idea of a web that’s read-write, though, where we can publish almost as easily as we can read. Citizen media will live, and I believe thrive, in an ecosystem that includes lots and lots of styles and aims.
The first part of that — “We need many names for it…” — captures a lot of what I’m struggling with. As Dan said, it covers a lot of ground.
We have independent, grassroots journalism which only has in common the fact that it is published outside what we’ve traditionally considered media. And within that group we have a full range of people, ranging for “legitimate” journalists (those who have trained for or worked in media) to passionate “amateurs” who bring to it a specific depth of knowledge, or a drive to report.
I don’t think it’s a stretch, either, to apply the term grassroots journalism to what some newspapers are doing both in focussing on the local, and in engaging readers in covering the local, through blogs, comments, invited submissions, and so on. Creating, communicating and collaborating, in Dan’s words. (See also Tim Porter’s latest post, Good Work, Great Journalism, for his latest persuasive argument, at least in part, about the importance of the local.)
I’m one of those who believe the future of media, and in particular newspapers, rests on (stealing from Dan Gillmor) creating, communicating and collaborating with (stealing from Jay Rosen) the people formerly known as audience. So to me, grassroots journalism as a term, makes a lot of sense from both the creating and collaboration side, particularly as more and more newspapers pick up on the middle C — communication (as a two-way process).
But while, personally, the term grassroots journalism makes more sense than the over-used, abused and too-fuzzy citizen journalism, it doesn’t cover all of what’s rehaping media. This needs more thought.
TAGS: GRASSROOTS JOURNALISM, RETHINKING MEDIA
