Simon Waldman, Director of Digital Publishing for Guardian Newspapers, takes a look at the citizen journalism movement (is it too early to call it a movement?) and suggests three conditions for success.
This first:
I don’t think anyone needs to argue that the whole blogging phenomena has legs. And then some. However, I find the whole concept of communally created projects such as OhMy and NWVoice much more challenging. For a start, there are so few examples. The fact that these two — along with Wikipedia (more of that in a second) — always come up doesn’t take anything away from their achievement, but it does make you wonder whether we are looking at a sustainable phenomena or a few wonderful freak incidents that happened to have worked because they were just the right project in the right place at the right time.
Then Waldman lays out his three hunches:
First: there needs to be a clear vision that people can rally behind. If it’s just come out of a corporate development department saying ‘we want one of those’ I doubt it’ll work. This doesn’t need to be world changing (although I sense OhMy and Wikipedia were), but you need a spark of excitement if you’re going to get things going.
Second: it has to fulfill some missing need — both for those using it, and those creating it. In other words, there has to be a practical reason to ‘Why bother?’ as well as the idealistic one above.
Third: people will not behave the way you want them to. You will have to learn to adapt to them, rather than trying to get them to adapt to you.
The third one really turned a light on for me. We seemed poised on the edge of a new (to steal a phrase) mediascape that is as driven by readers. Anyone can provide a platform/publication/process that has vision and that meets a need, but it is ultimately those who use it who will determine not just whether it “works” but how it works.
This fits with what’s happening at PressThink, launched by Mark Glaser essay, The Media Company I Want to Work For. I’ve been trying to absorb the essay and the substantial reaction to it for a couple of days. More to come on that later, but I suspect it’s going to a piece we look back on as seminal in the remaking of media.
