A New Role Of Journalists? Teaching Everyone How To Do Journalism

Culture

from the trends-to-watch dept

Whatever your opinion of the concept of “citizen journalism” might be, you can bet pretty good money that it won’t be going away anytime too soon. However, the bigger question may be how traditional journalism and citizen journalism work together (or, perhaps, how they don’t work together). Ernest Miller points to what appears to be a two part experiment by a local TV station in Nashville. Part one of the experiment involves turning all of their existing news crews into video journalists who do all of the work themselves. That is, rather than going out with a camera person and a reporter, everyone will be on their own and will have their own camera setup and will have to record their own reports. While an interesting move (and one that follows on a similar move at a local San Francisco station, as well as efforts by Al Gore’s new network and, apparently, many news stations in Europe), what’s much more interesting is that the station is also apparently going to be working with local bloggers to teach them to be better photographers. The station will also release raw video footage online for anyone to use. This is a step towards recognizing that traditional journalists and citizen journalists can and should be working together — and that each have different areas of expertise they can bring to the table. What may be most surprising (and encouraging) is that the station isn’t just jumping on a bandwagon with the idea of letting everyone else do the work (you hear that Michael Kinsley?), but recognizing they can teach others how to be better journalists as well.