In a special edition, Ifra's Newspaper Techniques tries to explain Web 2.0 to publishers and does a remarkably good job making a very complex subject accessible to a general audience in only 26 magazine pages.
Howard Owens points to a Media Life story quoting UNC J-prof Frank Fee, raising questions about "citizen journalism:"
“It goes back to the days of country correspondents or stringers. They are limited in what they can do, and newspapers have never been very good about training those people. ... I have seen some horrendous mistakes made by people who don’t know what they are doing."
We tend to think all this Web stuff, especially Web 2.0 stuff, is new, but it's not. Here's an example: Social networking. Online social networks existed long before the Web.
I was just thinking that it's been awhile since I saw a news story that had people talking about how it had legitimized the Internet as a news medium. For years it seemed that every big story stirred that kind of talk. Two early ones that come to mind are the 1997 Heaven's Gate cult suicide (at the Star Tribune we copied the entire Heaven's Gate website as part of online news coverage) and the 1998 Starr report (hundreds of thousands of people downloaded the full text).
The Pulitzer Prize rules have been changed again to open the door a bit wider to online content, although the contest continues to be limited to "newspapers published daily, Sunday, or at least once a week during the calendar year." The contest now will consider "a full array of online material -- such as databases, interactive graphics, and streaming video -- in nearly all of its journalism categories."
Despite the phenomenal growth and dominance of Myspace in social networking, there's still plenty of opportunity -- in the niches.
I think people play different social roles depending on whether they're interacting at work, with their neighbors, or in a Myspace-like global setting.
As a result, there's room for more social networks, and local social networking is an important opportunity that newspapers should be chasing.
In a recent report on Web 2.0, the Pew Internet & American Life project documents the performance of three participatory websites against their more conventional counterparts: Photobucket vs. Kodakgallery, Wikipedia vs. Encarta, Myspace vs. Geocities. The comparisons are compelling. I'll skip the thousand words and just pass along the pictures:
I've been tooling around on Vita.mn, the new youth-focused entertainment website from the Star Tribune in Minneapolis. It's good to see the Star Tribune back in the groove, breaking new ground.
There's a lot to like in this effort -- wiki-like collaborative "guides" authored by the community, a solid foundation of basic listings, calendaring, free tagging and social networking. And it's refreshingly fast. My only immediate complaint is that it doesn't do enough to celebrate its "people" functionality -- some of the cool stuff is quite buried.
Journalism.co.uk has an interview with Bob Cauthorn, who's been traveling and speaking in Europe recently, about the upcoming launch of what it calls a "'social network' for newspapers." And Cauthorn's company, CityTools LLC, has an informational page about the "Rosetta Project." I don't get the social network reference; it sounds like a content and advertising syndication system.
Last year Tom Grubisch examined a number of local "citizen journalism" projects and declared that what he found, "apart from a couple of honorable exceptions, is the Internet equivalent of Potemkin villages -- an elaborate façade with little substance behind it."
A year later he reexamines these projects for OJR.org. He finds some signs of progress, but also has some harsh criticisms.
