Now you can imagine why there is a whole chapter in “Journalism Next” dedicated to collaborative power, because that is exactly what the Internet lives on. Without the constant help of the online community, places like forums, blogs and most of the websites out there that have comment boxes would be useless.
- “Crowdsourcing” is harnessing the sustained power of a community to improve a service or information base. This term distributes reporting to everyday citizens who can log onto their computer. In some cases, crowdsourcing works amazingly, but when your news blog gets spammed with ads for cat food or you get a million comments from religious extremists saying your going to hell, it doesn’t seem to work so well. Opening up the reporting to the community is an on-going experiment, but this helps with open-source reporting, which is a form of transparency.
*Examples of crowdsourcing, or collaborative publishing, are: YouTube, Facebook, and Photobucket.
- Links power the Internet. That is the appeal of the Internet isn’t it? You can click things that take you to a totally different Web page, wherever and whenever you want to. The mentality that people used to use that “if you use links, you’re going to send your readers away and they might never come back,” is the exact opposite of how you should feel. Take Google, Bing or Yahoo for example. All they do is send people away to different Web sites and people can’t stop coming back.
*Link journalism: using editorial judgment to provide links to other sources of information and news, based on the needs and interests of a particular audience. It enriches the story by giving the reader videos, background information and places to learn more about the subject. So go put some links in your blog/forum. Right now.
- PRO-AM Journalism: otherwise known as participatory journalism. Probably the best idea ever for news companies, they give the chance to thousands of people to be a reporter anytime they want, and they don’t have to PAY them. Best example would be CNN’s iReporter.
