When I first heard about Assignment Zero, I was a little skeptical (despite the fact that I think Jay Rosen, the founder of Assignment Zero, is one of the most intelligent, forward-thinking individuals when it comes to journalism and the Web 2.0 world). Professional journalists collaborating with citizen journalists? Sure, you might get a good story or two out of it, but is this really a sustainable model for producing quality news?
Apparently it is. And passive consumers of news are increasingly becoming engaged participants, wanting to contribute to the news landscape in some way. (Rosen actually has a wonderful post about this shift on his blog, PressThink, entitled “The People Formerly Known as the Audience.”) In the Assignment Zero article “News the Crowd Can Use”, Patrick Crawford writes something similar about social news sites like and Digg:
“…the very existence of social editing indicates that a fundamental shift is occurring in [the] way people think about news. Users of social editing sites are no longer passive media consumers. Instead they see media as a live discussion in which the public deserves a voice equal to that of an editor.”
Because of this fundamental shift, many people have asserted that social media will one day overtake traditional journalism. I don’t subscribe to the idea that social news sites or blogs will ever cause traditional journalism to disappear into oblivion. The Assignment Zero team interviewed Michael Tippett, the co-founder of NowPublic.com, “one of the largest aggregators of crowdsourced news in the world.” During the interview, Tippett was asked if the news media industry thinks of outlets like NowPublic.com as competition. He responded by saying that, “…the news organizations are looking at this and thinking, we’ve got to embrace this or it’s going to take over the industry.”
Although social news sites might present a slight threat to traditional news media, the two really complement one another. Citizens need professional journalists to do the legwork for a story (after all, that’s what these journalists get paid to do) and professional journalists need citizens to challenge them, provide feedback or expert knowledge, and ultimately help these journalists create a better product that’s more aligned with the needs of the public. But there are too many people out there – especially in the older generations – that aren’t part of the social news site or citizen journalist phenomenon. This is why we’ll always have the New York Times and 60 Minutes.
The media landscape is shifting, though, and professional journalism is not the “be all, end all” it once was. There are new forces at play here – bloggers, sites like Digg, and so on – and traditional journalism has no choice but to make room for them. It will be interesting, though, to see how all these media sources interact with one another in years to come. Keep watching.
Digital Musings 