What do you call journalism where the people who are written about have their own broadcast medium and are able to write back? My friend J.D. Lasica calls it participatory journalism.
Want to see an example of it in action with press coverage of the Dean campaign? Okay, here goes. A writer at Salon writes this story about the Dean campaign. In the story the writer quotes from this post that my friend Rick Klau wrote on his Howard Dean in 2004 weblog.
Rick is pleased to have been thought highly enough of to be quoted in Salon article, but takes issue with the writer’s story slant (i.e. that he makes it seem like the Dean campaign isn’t doing enough to reach out to minorities, and that Rick supposedly thinks that this is acceptable). Rick also notes that the writer of the article didn’t bother to contact him by E-mail before lifting the quote from Rick’s weblog.
Interestingly, the writer leaves a note in the comments to Rick’s post explaining that he did try to E-mail Rick but that there was a problem with the E-mail going through. My friends we are definitely moving into a new era. And I like the name that J.D. Lasica has given to it: participatory journalism. The one-to-many broadcast model of journalism is eroding, and that is not (to put it sarcastically) an altogether bad thing.
P.S. If you want a practice optimized for remote work & virtual collaboration, get this 24-page guide.
