Fri, 10 Jan 2003 17:14:09 GMT
From Boing Boing Blog: “Dan Gillmor defines “We Media”. Dan Gillmor's latest piece in the Columbia Journalism Review extends his Journalism 3.0 thesis (“my readers know more than I do”) and talks about “We Media:”
<<Interactive technology — and the mostly young readers and viewers who use and understand it — are the catalysts. We Media augments traditional methods with new and yet-to-be invented collaboration tools ranging from e-mail to Web logs to digital video to peer-to-peer systems. But it boils down to something simple: our readers collectively know more than we do, and they don't have to settle for half-baked coverage when they can come into the kitchen themselves. This is not a threat. It is an opportunity. And the evolution of We Media will oblige us all to adapt.>>
My perspective: Dan's always been way ahead of most others in seeing, from an on-the-ground level, how interactive media changes journalism utterly (thus, he was one of the very first print journos to blog). But most publications are too terrified to do much more than 1) create a website that primarily functions to repost print content, and 2) confine contact between hacks and readers to a mailto (ie no one else gets to read the response except the hack) or within a small discussion forum. Blogs are a new form that encourages (and celebrates) contact (though granted, a problem is keeping the useless flames out of the discussion — and also not allowing criticism to be censored). Blogs make written journalism more like a radio discussion show. At the same time, for reasons I've noted variously in the past, I just don't think that blogs will replace traditional journalism, or even that there is some titanic strugle going on between the two. They are (for the most part) complementary — for the reasons Dan is noting above.
Meanwhile, Dave has this opposing perspective on Dan's piece:
I'm a bit more radical. The idea of “audience” is obsolete. The new medium is read-write. Low-low barrier to entry. Journalism is all about barriers. Today you have to be sure there's lots of value in your barriers, or else you have nothing to offer. That's hard to do.
[[ t e c h n o c u l t u r e ]]
you media, me media, we media….
