Journalists, make way for the…average citizen?

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.

Just like we learned in preschool…

…sharing is good.  Yes, it’s as simple as that, and it applies to more than just divvying up the Crayolas or the action figures.  In chapters 5 through 8 of Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams’ Wikinomics, the authors stress the importance of companies embracing their customers as co-innovators.  Of course, when it comes to sharing the “secret sauce”, many corporations have a hard time understanding how they can do this and remain profitable.  It’s definitely a valid concern, and I don’t think we have all the answers to this yet…but many of the examples cited in Wikinomics show that we’re at least heading in the right direction. 

Tapscott and Williams introduce a new term for these customers turned innovators: the prosumers.  “Prosumption,” they write, “is becoming one of the most powerful engines of change and innovation that the business world has ever seen.  Cocreating with customers is like tapping the most uniquely qualified pool of intellectual capital ever assembled, a reservoir of talent that is as keenly and uniquely enthusiastic about creating a great product or service as you are.”

Amazon is a great example of a company that’s embraced its prosumers.  Those who participate on Amazon.com have the opportunity to earn referral fees from products they imbed on their Web site or news feed, rate the products they buy, and so on.  Jeff Barr of Amazon’s Web services says that Amazon wouldn’t be able to make such great innovative strides if they didn’t open up their tools and data to the public: 

“The more data that we’re able to put in the hands of developers, the more interesting tools, sites, applications will be built, and the more of those that exist, the greater the return to Amazon.  We’re going to see more traffic, more clicks, and ultimately we’ll see more purchases.”

Another great example of a company that loves its prosumers is Threadless, a Chicago-based t-shirt company.  Their design team?  Anyone on the Web.  Users submit their designs to Threadless, and then the community votes on the ones they’d like to see printed on shirts.  The designs with the most votes win, and the creators of those designs are paid anywhere from $500-2,000.  Apparently the business model is working, because Jake Nickell and Jacob DeHart, creators of Threadless, pull in an annual revenue of about $15 million.

All companies who want to be successful in the future need to embrace their customers as co-creators.  It’s certainly easier said than it is done, and coming up with a way to allow collaboration while still making a profit is definitely challenging.  But in order to remain relevant in a Web 2.0 world, this is a must for corporations everywhere.

The world of “Wikinomics” (aka collaboration)

The first four chapters of Dan Tapscott and Anthony Williams’ Wikinomics can essentially be summed up with one sentence that appears on page 37: “Whether people are creating, sharing, or socializing, the new Web is principally about participating rather than about passively receiving information.”

The numerous examples used in the book demonstrate not only the fact that anyone can create content, but that individuals can now collaborate across platforms that were once thought to be barriers, such as regions and corporations. Participation is, for the most part, simple. Whether it’s the Goldcorp Challenge that turned a $100 million company into a $9 billion one or the tale of Linux, IBM, and the beginnings of open-source software, Tapscott and Williams’ stories illustrate that the opportunities for participation on the Web are constantly increasing because of the variety of Web-based tools available. (For more great examples of collaboration, check out the Web site for Howard Rheingold’s Smart Mobs. His book – which I think does a better job of explaining the phenomenon of how technology eases collaboration than Wikinomics – is a must read too.)

I think there are three big reasons people like participating in the online space and will continue to do so:

• The technical side of things, for the most part, is pretty easy. You don’t have to be an HTML expert to have a MySpace page or post your photos on Flickr. A lot of the technology is such that anyone – whether you’re incredibly tech-savvy or don’t have the slightest clue how to do anything on a computer besides type – can create material online.

• It’s inexpensive. There are numerous sites, such as Blogger and WordPress, that will host your blog for free. There’s no membership fee to be part of social networks like Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn. Sites like YouTube and Flickr don’t charge for posting multimedia, either. (Well, unless you have a pro account on Flickr, but the free accounts are more than sufficient.)

• Information is updated constantly. Instead of waiting for the 2008 edition of Encyclopedia Britannica to be released, visit Wikipedia. (Granted, the information in Wikipedia is not always guaranteed to be accurate – take this story about Kenneth Lay’s Wikipedia entry, for example – but it’s often corrected pretty quickly.) If you want to read the latest news stories, read a blog or an online news source instead of waiting for tomorrow’s Washington Post.

There are so many ways that people can, as Tapscott and Williams put it, “enhance the Web.” And the biggest advantage to all these social media and collaboration tools is that anyone can use them.