Session 3d: How Participatory Journalism Is Being Used Now

Jan Schaffer’s rebuttal

• “Jeff and I have a lot of common ground…I’ve just invited him to be on my board of directors.”
• Jarvis is plagiarizing from the civic journalism playbook by viewing
  news as a conversation — civic journalism has been doing this before
  blogs.
• Just as town hall meetings are now considered passe, blogging will someday be considered passe
• Shouldn’t aspire to add links, but add meaning and context. Otherwise, you’re just making more noise.

Q&A

• Comment from audience: blogs will find their niche and not
  replace other forms of journalism, but complement them and find their
  own place, just as TV did not eliminate radio.
• Rebecca
  MacKinnon: What about the tools, which lower the barrier of entry to
  publishing? Blogging tools make it so you don’t need to know web design.
• Schaffer: The bar is high, for people with no English skills or
  no writing or grammar skills. It’s a niche for people who can write and
  who have the confidence. America is increasingly made up of minorities,
  who will not have the language skills to blog. Plans to teach people
  how to use Dreamweaver and other tools to create interactive content —
  interactive maps, games, web pages and the like

(I call bullshit. It’s much tougher to create web pages without
blogging tools, and interactive maps, media and games take a lot more
effort — I know, I used to be a multimedia developer. As for
immigrants, a good number of them speak much better English than the
local-born.)

• Artvoice.com audience member: How do we incorporate blogging into what we do (indie TV)?
• Lewis Friedland points:
• Remember, public journalism is not about self-expression, but about solving problems.
• Blogs are subject to power laws.
• The structure of the blogosphere as a whole, with some
  important exceptions, is not all that different from the “he said she
  said” horse-race mentality of big media
• Jarvis: “power laws” are the old way of thinking. You have to be big to survive. The mass market is dead, it’s abotu niches now.