Stringer a freelance journalist, who is paid for each piece of published or broadcast work, rather than receiving a regular salary. (From the Wikipedia entry for stringer)
I’ve been thinking lately about the idea of bloggers and others as news sources. There was a time when newspapers and radio networks had stringers all over the world feeding them stories. This was how we knew what was going on and it worked well. Stringers were good reporters and they knew the areas that they were in. But that doesn’t work as well as it used to, because it’s expensive to fly people around the world and get them to where the stories are.
So I was thinking the other day, what if we used bloggers and podcasters from around the world as stringers. The benefit here is that there are already folks producing news worthy content just about everywhere in the world. People are reading blogs about the war in Iraq, written by people there everyday. Then the tsunami hit it was bloggers that got more news out faster than any of the major news sources. All that needs to happen is that we need to collect, organize and sort the incoming information so folks can find what they are looking for.
There are already a number of folks doing this kind of blog aggregation: BoingBoing, Synaptic Junction and Alternet Peek. And we now have keyword based searching thanks to the fine folks at Tecnorati. But even all of this doesn’t complete the picture.
The reason that newspapers like the New York Times were such important voices was that not only did they collect information from around the world they also edited it for content and then categorized it so that folks could find it. But how do we do that with blogs and podcasts? You could spend lots of time googling for things that you wanted to read, but then you have to wade through lots of garbage to find the good bits. What we need are editors.
What we can do now that we couldn’t do before is automate some of the categorizing of information. Since we can include meta data with things like podcasts and blog entries can have categories and tags assigned to them, we can sort with that. If we add on top of that some people to preview at least some of the content to make sure that it is what it says it is and tweak the categories we could have a fairly good news service.
Anyway, this is just an idea. I’d love to know of anyone doing this kind of work. Or what folks think about the idea.
Implementation is left as an exercise for the reader.
I do realize that this model doesn’t include a way for the content creators to be paid for their work. Ultimately, any model that was to work long time would have to find a way to reward creators for their work.
Comment by colinj — April 22, 2005 @ 3:15 pm
Yes. This is an interesting way to distribute the labor — or, rather, tapping into labor that already exists. But the distribution of finances is an innovation that few may be eager to explore.
I don’t use meta-data, per se, but I do use Gooogle Alerts to keep up on story “beats” that I don’t want to miss. (Even in in this case, most of the stories I reject, often because they are more opinion than news or they come from terrible sources like uruknet or Indian Times.)
The evaluation aspect, the job of the editor, is the most important.
Most blogs do not offer original news reporting, they simply amplify stories that professional reporters have already written.
The editors in the major media are the ones who choose the priorities of the stories and thus the national diaogue.
Today, many seem to believe that Paris Hilton’s missing dog and a missing fingertip in a Taco Bell meal are more important than depleted uranium munitions poisoning troops and Iraqis.
Having done Synaptic Junction for over a year now, I see my job as more of an editor than a reporter (editing’s a better job for me, by the way, though in my case they both presently pay zip).
Colin, you my want to post this idea to some news outlets — just offer the spark of the idea — because they are scrambling to re-deine themselves and their relationship to bloggers. Blogs are one of their top epistemological priorities.
Sadly, some outlets look to “appealing to a younger audience” which is often marketing-speak for “dumbing-down even more.” I can see a scenerio where an ill-conceived attempt at using blogs fails and the big guys resort to trying to squelch on-line news a la RIAA. I hope dearly that does not happen.
Honestly, there is a great opportunity for mainstream news and online news to work for one another’s mutual advantage.
In some ways that may already be happening.
As for a DIY news service the Wired News story about WikiNews:
http://www.wired.com/news/ebiz/0,1272,67286,00.html?tw=wn_tophead_1
is illustrative.
BTW, Colin, thanks for the shoutout on Synaptic Junction. I don’t think I yet deserve ranking with BoingBoing nor Alternet… but I won’t argue about it.
Cheers
– McLir
Comment by McLir — April 22, 2005 @ 5:43 pm
Grassroots Journalism
I love the idea of grassroots journalism. That’s what I was trying to talk about in a previous post about bloggers as stringers.
Today I discovered Dan Gillmor’s blog. Dan does a much better job of talking about grassroots journalism than I can ri…
Trackback by Digital Detritus — May 9, 2005 @ 8:45 am
[...] Here’s a nifty example of what I was talking about in a past post about bloggers and podcasters as stringers. Doug Kaye has a great idea abo [...]
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