Are political junkies and party insiders further upsetting journalism’s apple cart? Dennis Dunleavy thinks that’s one of the possibilities arising from Techpresident.com, a website tracking the U.S. presidential candidates. He’s particularly intrigued by the impact that Techpresident’s integration of Flickr may have on the way voters see campaigns.
The reach of the media spotlight on candidates is now expanding exponentially with the possibilities of the Internet and the social web. Anyone with a camera phone is potentially a “votojournalist”, looking to catch that one decisive “tell-all” moment that may influence a candidate’s chances to become president.
Dennis has some concerns — the redactive nature of the single image, for one; the potential for much spinning — and writes that mainstream media may be at a disadvantaged.
In fact, we can assume the coming reality will be that a “votojournalist” or anyone on the campaign staff or close to a candidate will actually have much better access than many of their professional counterparts in the mainstream media. The level of access afforded a votojournalist, with the camera and the Internet, may actually have the advantage of scooping accredited news sources.
I’d suggest there are a couple of lessons here for legacy media. One is that the combination of a few cheap tools (content management systems and, in this case, Flickr) make it possible to greatly extend the coverage. Another is that there are any number of people out there who are starting to pull these tools together to cover areas of interest, and that these people, too, are your new competitors. We can rail all we like about the lack of “standards” and “control,” but these things aren’t going away.
TAGS: PHOTOJOURNALISM, CITIZEN MEDIA, VOTOJOURNALIST
