Chapter 3: Crowd Powered Collaboration

Summary: The way news is gathered and published is moving away from the reporter centered model to the “crowdsourcing model.” This model relies on collaborating with a network of individuals, not necessary journalists, through electronic and internet based media to gather information and provide insight that is not otherwise available to individual journalist.

Terms:

• Crowdsourcing: Focuses on community power on a specific project that demonstrates how a comiited group of ethusiates can outperform a small group of paid journalists.
• Open-source reporting: Referring to a design that provides practical accessibility to a product’s goods and knowledge, the term applies to journalists applying transparancy to their reporting to both apply and recieve benefits from their audience.
• Pro-am journalism: A type of collaborative journalism that allows your audience to publish directly on the same platform as professional journalists.
• Beat-blogging: Achieved by building a social network around a specific topic or “beat.”  This allows the conversation among those in the network to to weave a deeper understanding on a particular subject, and provides an invaluable source of information for journalists and news outlets alike.
• Link journalism: though it may seem counter-intuitive to link to another Website, especially a competitor, link journalism is increasingly being embraced as an efficient way to provide more information to the audience. Effectively utilizing link journalism will not only make it easier for a publisher to post stories, but building a reputation with relevant links will make that Web site the go to place for readers.

Newspapers have been tapping the power of the crowd through their online prescence by publishing stories provided to them by citizen journalists. Although some may think that print is well on its way to becoming obsolete, especially in the realm of breaking news, it still holds a certain level of prestige among readers. While web-based reporting provides instant up-to-date information, print can provide the analysis necessary to give full context on a story.