Response: Mainstream News Online

Bloggers are people. Generally untrained, everyday, non-writer-type people using a pretty, pre-wrapped content management system (Blogger, Wordpress, perhaps even Livejournal) to send whatever message they deem fit to the general online population. Do they need technical know-how, or to have mastered the art of HTML and CSS? No. Do they need a college education or degree? Certainly not. Do they even need $5? No, this world is free. And within lies the power of the blog.

Above is a screenshot of my newly-started personal blog. It's somewhat interactive with comments enabled. I also link widely and will take suggestions from readers for future posts.

Mainstream news organizations are massive money-making (or, they used to be...), professional havens for trained journalists functioning on the idea that the pubic generally need information and trained journalists are the best conduit through which to communicate said information. The power of the mainstream news media? General trust in a brand, trust in professionalism, and trust in timeliness.

The Denver Post online, offering timely professional editorial content with high multimedia content (video, slideshows) but little real interactivity outside of commenting.

The current model? Journalists and mainstream news agents generally look down upon the blogosphere as a mish-mash of diary-like stream of consciousness thoughts projected by people with some serious time on their hands. Rosen spoke of this idea when he said that bloggers have to establish trust from the ground up, whereas noteworthy mainstream news has already established trust through their brand.

Bloggers, on the other hand - or, at least the bloggers who consider themselves journalists - generally look to each other for information they can really trust, especially in a time when, as Stacey mentioned, a 2004 survey showed that only 38% of people thought that the news held no bias.

The obvious solution? Integration. Deuze looks at the practice of online journalism from its onset in 1992 with the Chicago Online paper's inception on AOL to the date of the article's publication in September 2001, and Stacey asks whether or not sites incorporating Deuze's strategies - annotative reporting, open source journalism, and hyperadaptive news sites - have already been created.

Certainly we've moved forward from 2001, with coverage like CNN's interactive, multimedia-laced coverage of the Grim Sleeper serial killer, which allows users to do everything from navigate through a map of locations and victims to listen to the original 911 recording of victims to the ability to comment on the story, offer input or advice, or even try to puzzle through the clues to solve the crime. But does this neat, interactive coverage really allow the web users to generate or modify content (open source journalism), especially when compared with the infinite power blogs bestow on users to generate, modify, and link to information?

Take www.yourhub.com, for example. Journalists and users upload content specific to a neighborhood locale, and then journalists from each Hub review the postings and choose "the best," which used to be published by the Rocky Mountain News in a special section (anyone know if the print version is still being produced after the Rocky's demise?).

Open source journalism? Not quite, since journalists employed by yourhub.com choose their favorite stories for print, but it's definitely one example of user-generated news. Others? Users can rate content on Digg, create or edit entries on Wikipedia, or write and rate user-generated content on Kuro5hin, whose articles are either published or deleted based on user feedback. Bloggers can also participate in the Global Voices Online project as volunteer authors (if their work is up to snuff, of course), where their blogs can be featured as the best or most accurate news coming out of the blogger's respective country.

Screenshot of yourhub.com, where the first thing you see promotes you to "get published." Below this offer is the user-generated content selected by yourhub employees.

The core question, perhaps, is how mainstream news can thus use these sites as examples for a more open, participatory type of journalism, while still maintaining the credibility and brand trust of a mainstream news organization.

Some models tried so far:

• User blogs featured on mainstream news sites, like Chicago's Best Blogs, powered by and featured on the Chicago Tribune site's front page
  
• Enabling rating systems or comments on mainstream news articles
• More engaging, multimedia efforts like CNN's coverage of the Grim Sleeper
• Videocasts, audiocasts, or supplementary story material available only online
• Use of Twitter accounts for mainstream news sites
• Polls and other ranking systems for stories or ideas

Why don't we get a bit more interactive? Comment and share your ideas and links.

Also - for more information on bloggers, what they do, and how they do it, as well as blogging ethics and information on the importance of blogging internationally and in locations where blogging is censored or is against the law, check out a PDF book of the Blogger's Handbook.