Networked Journalism

I wanted to be become a journalist because I wanted to document the world and people around me. I wanted to give a voice to those who don’t have one and make their stories heard. And after learning in more detail about networked journalism, I can see just how web 2.0 can connect us with people and enable us to achieve this.

When first learning about Citizen journalism, it’s easy to see it all as us vs. them: user generated content vs. trained 'expert' content, the public vs. the press, the ‘peasants’ vs. the professionals, as it were. But it doesn’t have to be a conflict. With networked journalism, both can work together to create exciting, relevant stories that converse with the readers rather than lecturing at them.

Jeff Jarvis, a networked journalism enthusiast, describes it as “professionals and amateurs working together to get the real story, linking to each other across brands and old boundaries to share facts, questions, answers, ideas, perspectives. It recognizes the complex relationships that will make news. And it focuses on the process more than the product.” And I think this sounds like a very exciting process to be involved in.

Through blogs, commenting, twitter and other such tools we can interact with the readers, share information with them, involve them in the creative process and get to know them inside out. One of the journalist’s primary functions is to understand and serve its audience, and web 2.0 can help us to achieve this as we engage in conversation with them. And what better way to find stories that really mean something to your readers than to get them involved in the story-making process themselves?

I know many of my fellow students remain sceptical, arguably even technophobic, about what we’ve been learning in this online module. But all this seems to boil down to is a fear of change and the unknown. Having worked in online media for a year before I started this course I am already familiar with much of what we’ve learnt, but I can still see how all these new concepts must be slightly overwhelming at first. But fear of change may blind you to all the potentially great opportunitiesit may hold. Stop running away from it and look at how you can embrace change instead.

The only potential pitfall I can see with networked journalism is if we become too dependent on it. Only 1% of web users interact with media outlets in this way on a regular basis, and we shouldn’t get lazy and just rely on them to fuel our content. There are still another 99% of people out there who we need to cater to and whose stories we can tell; we just have to dig a little deeper to get to them.