February 9, 2012

Briggs Chapter Three: Crowd-Powered collaboration

This chapter has introduced me to several new terms that I hadn’t heard before. The first being crowdsourcing. The concept of crowdsourcing is one that I was familiar with before. With websites like Tumblr and DeviantArt, it is easy to see how a community can out perform a paid employee. I’ve seen amazing mock posters and other media that vastly surpasses their legitimate counterparts.

In the journalism field it seems to serve as something of a focus group as well. The chapter states that crowdsourcing is often used as a means of answering specific questions via different viewpoints.

It seems to me that open-source journalism was an inevitable circumstance. With websites like Twitter and Facebook it’s hard to simply ignore the feedback of the audience. Consumers will always have opinions and with social media and networking sites it’s foolish to try and deny people their opinions. Hence open-source. Journalism’s way of officially opening the floor to the audience and using their opinions and feedback as a means of creating better and more interesting stories.

We’ve talked about the importance of linking in class. Being able to move seamlessly from one subject to another is an intergal part of online journalism. With links people have access to a deeper wealth of knowledge, whether it be expanding on what they’ve just read or taking them in a completely different direction.

Links are important.

With Pro-Am journalism it’s difficult to essentially tell the “real” from the “fake”. If everyone amateur and professional are allowed to post, how can you tell which has the proper credentials to direct you on a subject? In my own experience, I’d rather have the journalist who actually went out and researched a topic tell me what to do than someone with a laptop and a lot of feelings.