Friday, January 16, 2009

You and us: collaboratively reporting the news
My friend Gene, a newspaper reporter in Hawaii, argued yesterday that online news gives people too much information, to the point that it begins to negatively impact mainstream media's traditional monopoly over society's awareness of what's going on in the world.  I won't disagree, and I'm well aware as a TV news anchor that your eyeballs no longer belong exclusively to me in the Digital Age.

But my counterpoint was that this rampant saturation is also the beauty of it all.  We at the web software architectural level need to give all people access to massive amounts of information, coupled with content authoring, search, personalization and filtering tools to both contribute to the ongoing symphony of documenting human history and to (hopefully) make sense of it all.

As an example, here's what I gleaned in about 90 seconds this morning on my mobile phone from tweets posted by my social network:
  • Plane crash.
  • Hudson River. 
  • US  Airways.
  • No one hurt. 
  • Pix available.
Honestly, that's good enough for me.  I'm not a hard news junkie, so the limited depth of information is satisfactory.   It doesn't bother me that the abbreviated nature of these news bytes aren't of Pulitzer caliber.  I'm adequately informed.  If my intrigue leads me to want richer coverage, I'll visit more authoritative sources like my colleagues in CNN, MSNBC, or local New York City affiliates.  

And that, my friends, is the essence of the relationship between citizen journalism and mainstream media today.  Accept it.  Embrace it.  Use it.  Live it.

// posted by Jason Salas @ 9:49 AM
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