News Organizations Forge New Relationships with Communities
A Report from the Center for Citizen Media
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The gates are opening, and it's about time.
News organizations are recognizing that their audiences are more than empty receptacles waiting to be filled with information selected an editorial priesthood -- more than consumers whose only interaction with the media is to buy what is sold, or not. Traditional media companies are beginning to understand that the audience can, and should, become part of the editorial process.
Consider several events in one week in February 2007:
First: Reuters, the global news agency, announced the launch of Reuters Africa, a comprehensive news and information site. One key element, as noted by Rebecca MacKinnon, co-founder of the Global Voices Online blogging community, was the "news agency's commitment to build synergies between the work of Reuters reporters and the work of bloggers from around Africa, who paint a much more diverse and vibrant picture of the continent than mainstream news reporting tends to do.
Second: The New York Times took a baby step, but an important one for that august organization, into participatory journalism. It invited couples with wedding announcements to send in videos describing how they met and decided to make the relationship permanent, and said it would publish those videos as part of its Celebrations coverage.
These moves followed an even more significant corporate decision. Late last year, Gannett, publisher of USA Today and dozens of other American newspapers, revealed plans to re-create its newsrooms in profoundly new ways. As first reported by Wired News, the initiative had four major goals, including the publication of more material created by readers, and use of so-called "crowdsourcing" -- asking the audience to help with the reporting -- to produce watchdog and investigative journalism.
On March 5, 2007, USA Today launched a massive redesign, saying, "Our ambition is to help readers quickly and easily make sense of the world around them by giving them a wider view of the news of the day and connecting them with other readers who can contribute to their understanding of events."
What made all of these moves especially noteworthy was the organizations involved. Their actions were an endorsement of a trend that has been slow to take off, but which can no longer be denied.
Indeed, Reuters and the Times were following in the footsteps of more pioneering news organizations, typically smaller ones for which taking risks came more naturally or at least more easily. (Gannett's shift came about, in part, due to experiments at several of its local newspapers; we profile one of those below.)
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In this report, we look at the first generation of traditional-media innovators in community engagement online. We’ll be talking about what worked, and what didn’t, in this early round of experimentation.
If you’re interested in the movement towards “crowdsourcing,” “citizen journalism,” or “user generated content” by traditional media organizations such as newspapers and television news programs, you'll find information about some of the major efforts underway today.
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This report was written by Lisa Williams, with Dan Gillmor and Jane Mackay.
Special thanks to Craig Newmark for his support for this project.
You can download a printable version of the full report (PDF, 3.2 MB).
