links for 2007-07-08

• AlterNet: MediaCulture: The Future of Citizen Journalism
  "No one should still wonder about the possibility, much less the efficacy, of 'citizen journalism.' But, more importantly, we should ask if more participation and better information will make us happier."
  (tags: blogging citizenmedia CitizenJournalism journalism media news internet newmedia)

Comments

[doug]

First, I don't understand what being happy has to do with raising up a well-nurtured and sustainable citizen journalism. I've never looked to the news to make me a peaceful and happy person. :)

I heard Oh Yeon-ho speak at the Seoul Digital Forum in Korea about two months before this conference referenced here.

Oh argued that citizen media's most essential aim should be to adapt a kind of tone and demeanor that allows others to take it seriously. He said that blogging could be a powerful instrument in political change and in at the very least the monitoring of elections but that there needed to be a more respectable approach to reporting on such things. He didn't say who did this and who didn't.

But it was ironic, I thought, that the AP, which in this article is cited as having a landmark deal with an independent citizen news outlet, was represented at the SDF by the AP CEO, Tom Curley. Curley seemed to speak for two different audiences. When I asked him in the hall how important citizen participation was in media, he seemed to think it was very important and he pointed out that the famous Oklahoma City bombing photograph of the infant body being carried from the rubble was the work of an amateur photographer.

But in front of the C-Suite executives listening to his keynote about digital media and journalism, he called bloggers just a bunch of people "working in their pajamas."

He was making a polite dig at their amateurism, I thought.