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From “write us a post” to “fill out this form:” Progress in pro-am journalism.

June 7th, 2011 by Jay Rosen

“We’re not as far along as we should be. I’d give us a C-minus.” My talk to the Personal Democracy Forum, June 7, 2011. You can watch it here. I address you today in a mood of frustration. For in the development of pro-am journalism, we are not as far along as we should be. [...]

Highlights

Audience Atomization Overcome: Why the Internet Weakens the Authority of the Press "

In the age of mass media, the press was able to define the sphere of legitimate debate with relative ease because the people on the receiving end were atomized– connected “up” to Big Media but not across to each other. And now that authority is eroding. I will try to explain why. It’s easily the [...]

“You don’t own the eyeballs. You don’t own the press, which is now divided into pro and amateur zones. You don’t control production on the new platform, which isn’t one-way. There’s a new balance of power between you and us.”

“Like reluctant migrants everywhere, the people in the news tribe have to decide what to take with them. When to leave. Where to land. They have to figure out what is essential to their way of life. They have to ask if what they know is portable.”

“Here is one advantage bloggers have in the struggle for reputation– for the user’s trust. They are closer to the transaction where trust gets built up on the Web. There’s a big difference between tapping a built-up asset, like the St. Pete Times ‘brand,’ and creating it from scratch.”

“It’s remarkable to me how many accomplished producers of those goods the future production of which is in doubt are still at the stage of asking other people, “How are we going to pay our reporters if you guys don’t want to pay for our news?’”

Read more National Explainer: A Job for Journalists on the Demand Side of News This American Life’s great mortgage crisis explainer, The Giant Pool of Money, suggests that “information” and “explanation” ought to be reversed in our order of thought. Especially as we contemplate new news systems. Read more The Beast Without a Brain: Why Horse Race Journalism Works for Journalists and Fails Us.

“Just so you know, ‘the media’ has no mind. It cannot make decisions. Which means it does not ‘get behind’ candidates. It does not decide to oppose your guy… or gal. It is a beast without a brain. Most of the time, it doesn’t know what it’s doing..”

“I’m just advising Newsroom Joe and Jill: make room for FDL in your own ideas about what’s coming on, news-wise. Don’t let your own formula (blog=opinion) fake you out. A conspiracy of the like minded to find out what happened when the national news media isn’t inclined to tell us might be way more practical than you think.”

“We’re at the twilight of the curmudgeon class in newsrooms and J-schools. (Though they can still do a lot of damage.) You know they’re giving up when they no longer bother to inform themselves about what they themselves say is happening.”

“The important thing is to show integrity– not to be a neuter, politically. And having good facts that hold up is a bigger advantage than claiming to reflect all sides equally well.”

“It’s mine, but it should be yours. Can we take the quote marks off now? Can we remove the ‘so-called’ from in front? With video!.”

“Were ‘winning’ to somehow be removed or retired as the operating system for news, campaign reporting would immediately become harder to do, not because there would be no news, but rather no common, repeatable instructions for deciding what is a key development in the story, a turning point, a surprise, a trend. Master narratives are thus harder to alter than they are to apprehend. For how do you keep the story running while a switch is made?”

“Any good blogger, competing journalist or alert press critic can spot and publicize false balance and the lame acceptance of fact-free spin. Do users really want to be left helpless in sorting out who’s faking it more? The he said, she said form says they do, but I say decline has set in.”

“It’s a “put up or shut up” moment for open source methods in public interest reporting. Can we take good ideas like… distributed knowledge, social networks, collaborative editing, the wisdom of crowds, citizen journalism, pro-am reporting… and put them to work to break news?”Read more Introducing NewAssignment.Net:

“Enterprise reporting goes pro-am. Assignments are open sourced. They begin online. Reporters working with smart users and blogging editors get the story the pack wouldn’t, couldn’t or didn’t.”Read more What I Learned from Assignment Zero

“Here are my coordinates for the territory we need to be searching. I got them from doing a distributed trend story with Wired.com and thinking through the results.”

“Those in journalism who want to bring ethics to blogging ought to start with why people trust (some) bloggers, not with an ethics template made for a prior platform operating as a closed system in a one-to-many world.”Read more The View From Nowhere:

“Occupy the reasonable middle between two markers for ‘vocal critic,’ and critics look ridiculous charging you with bias. Their symmetrical existence feels like proof of an underlying hysteria. Their mutually incompatible charges seem to cancel each other out. The minute evidence they marshall even shows a touch of fanaticism.”