On the website for last week's Blogging, Journalism & Credibility Conference at Harvard, many articles, comments and links are posted. Here are a few points emphasizing the distinctions between traditional journalism and online news that the Editors' Weblog considers valuable:
- Organic news vs. Investigative reporting: Jimmy Wales, founder and CEO of Wikipedia says of his Wikinews experiment that the news will be "shaped organically" by its community of users and will become what this community needs and wants. Its future will be determined through trial and error and experimentation. This relatively new website could provide some ideas for editors as they decide whether or not to open up their journals to reader influence such as what is happening at the Greensboro News & Record.
- Credibility vs. Interest: As noted by David Weinberger, online participatory media is not necessarily driven by credibility, but by ordinary people's interests. Rebecca MacKinnon says that new credibility standards will evolve and that guidelines could be set, but that it will be a difficult task to achieve. Weinberger also points out that participatory journalism will be shaped only by those who participate, possibly resulting in exclusive and partial "news" depending on the demographics of those participating.
- Objectivity vs. Opinion: Apart from Wikipedia, which strives to maintain a "neutral point of view" (NPOV) by having multiple anonymous authors contribute to each entry, Jon Garfunkel feels that "Objectivity is dead." If people's interests are to begin determining the news, then their various opinions will inherently be included. This could be useful information for editors as they contemplate making their newspapers' editorial more reflective in response to instantaneous online news.
- Blogs vs. Wikis: On PressThink, Ethan Zuckerman and MacKinnon say that they both felt that we were moving towards a world of "blogs vs. wikis," "transparency vs. NPOV," or "personal vs. collective" news or opinion. They felt that NPOV was impossible for citizens' journalism. But both were enlightened at the conference. Zuckerman was surprised to see that bloggers and wikipedians share common ground through their passions. MacKinnon says that NPOV "just might be possible;" "In cyberspace, ideas no longer need clear plans to create something revolutionary. Your community organically takes your idea and runs with it, shaping it into whatever they need that they don't already have."
In a side note, MacKinnon also predicts that blogs and wikis will change the media business: "This kind of approach to media innovation doesn't strike me as very appealing, however, to corporate boards and shareholders of companies that own news organizations. Which is why the future belongs outside of corporate concentrated media."
