Tuesday 1 March 2011

The mutualisation of news

The Guardian and Observer controlled the delivery of news, comment to the readers and carefully controlled letters page.

The development of the internet, with now the public creating their own media have now made journalists believe they are now equal with the public writers.

"There was a very clear wall, dividing readers and writers" - Things have now changed causing an uproar between professional writers and the public.

"What we are doing is taking down those bricks, lowering the barrier and positively encouraging the relationship between the two. This gets over the tired argument that this is an either/or battle between old media and bloggers.” - Gaining the support of the public, newspapers believe they can build relationships with bloggers to gain the perfect and truest story.

"We can use the community of our readers in ways we would not have been able to in the past."
"It cannot be true that there are only a handful of people worth listening to in the world. Comment is Free is infinitely richer and more diverse and more plural. These bloggers who write for us could have done it very happily on their own, but what we offer them is the influence and the clout and an incredibly interesting audience to commune with."

"By continuing to go down this route, we will be more diverse, and genuinely more plural than other media organizations and create a huge external resource. We need to continue breaking down the perceptions of a remote journalist who is a preacher, living distantly, and newspapers as being in bed with power and on the side of power, rather than the reader.”

Rusbridger believes Twitter make it possible for the public to publish outside the constraints of our newspaper and website and develop direct relationships with communities of readers.
But in the world of Twitter, for example, journalists are now publishing information without any monitoring and outside of the Guardian's own publishing platforms.

"The way we tend to work is that there are always early adopters of these new technologies, and it works best when individual journalists who have a passion for it, use and explore it. If at some point the technology becomes too large in scale, that is the time to build guidelines.”
Any information coming from the public as a primary source that needs to be checked like everything else.

The investigation into the death of Ian Tomlinson at the G20 demonstrations in London was an excellent example of linking traditional journalism with information from the public.

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