Response to “Journalism Next” Chapter 3

The internet and social technologies have enabled readers the convenience of instant information.

The journalism world serves as a way to get reliable, truthful information for these increasingly informed users. Readers can now contribute to these journalism publications through new collaboration tools made available to them.

The three methods outlined in chapter 3 of Brigg’s “Journalism Next” are crowdsourcing, open-source reporting and pro-am joruanlism.

Crowdsourcing is the process of bringing together multiple people under a single topic and compiling that information together for one source.

Open-source reporting is the process by which stories can be written and compiled using the reader for help. This is evident in websites such as Storify.

Finally, pro-am journalism is the process by which readers have the ability to publish and shares stories that have the potential to be used by news pubs. This is being done by big publications such as CNN with the i-Report.

Out of all of these collaborative tools, I find that pro-am journalism does the best. While crowdsourcing allows you to get information from your readers, the readers have the same passion if not more than the journalist on their topic. Though that may be an issue with bias and leaning toward a particular stance on an issue, it’s the best way to generate interest and content.