Recent Entries
- Thomas Stewart leaves Harvard Business Review
- Thinking about the future of museums: fourteen key issues
- Announcing the 2008 Top 100 Australian Web 2.0 Applications list – Launch is on 19 June
- Social networks open out – celebrating the last year’s change but “lots more work to be done”
- MySpace embraces “data availability” – a major step forward to the Wide Open Web
- To win in an open world Flash is becoming even more open – the result will be applications that reach every platform
- The next phase of the Internet will be about creating value from the WOW (Wide Open Web)
- Boston Globe covers the Extinction Timeline
- Automated content creation: pushing the boundaries of human value
- The information processing view of humanity
« Previous Entry | Future Exploration Network Blog | Next Entry »
Future Exploration Network Blog
Dissatisfaction with mainstream media drives the rise of citizen journalism
Americans are unhappy with quality of journalism. That will be the key driver of the citizen journalism, or more broadly, new forms of media content creation and distribution. A survey performed in conjunction with the recently held We Media conference in Miami by John Zogby interviewed 5,384 adults nationwide, giving some pretty solid results. The figures below show that, not surprisingly, professionals (in this case the conference goers) are not quite as cynical as the population at large. However conservatives and older people are particularly contemptuous of the standards of journalism. As a result, a significant majority of Americans believe that blogging and citizen journalism will play a vital role in the future of journalism.
Source: WE MEDIA-ZOGBY poll
While I’m a true believer in the power of media creation outside the establishment, I’m still a little surprised by the broad enthusiasm of the respondents for blogging and citizen journalism. What it comes down to is dissatisfaction with the status quo, and having seen the potential for something better. This is certainly not to say that blogging in its current form is a viable alternative to mainstream news media. New models that combine professional expertise with amateur participation will absolutely become alternatives, or at least strongly complementary to existing media. My favorite example is NewAssignment.Net. David Cohn from NewAssignment.Net reviews the idea of “crowdsourcing” in journalism, and points to techPresident, which will include input from contributors across the nation.